On Sunday we got to dive into the first lesson of the new Lorenzo Snow-inspired lesson manual, and our teacher provided us this quote on the lesson’s PowerPoint:
“From an eternal point of view it is also important to distinguish between the things of God and the things of man. As an example, formal education degrees—things of man—are relatively unimportant from the eternal point of view. The personal qualities that the education process enhances are not. In the eternities, no one will likely remember—or even care- about the presence or absence of letters following our names. While the earthly medical degree I worked so long and hard to attain has permitted me to render a very special type of service, perhaps even more important are the qualities of compassion, intellectual discipline, decision-making, analytical skills and faith that were honed and enriched by that rigorous professional training. These are portable, eternal qualities that can and will rise with us in the resurrection. Compassion is always employable. Unlike technological skills, faith and intellectual discipline do not become obsolete.”
When our teacher asked us to discuss the quote and comment on what the author had written, a couple of the girls in the class started their responses with “I think what he’s saying is . . .” when in fact, the PowerPoint clearly stated that this was a quote by Anne Osborne Poehlman, a medical doctor working at the University of Utah.
I know the girls in the class who made these comments were not trying to be rude or to imply that a women could not be capable of the same educational achievements that Poehlman had experienced. Even when I was reading the quote to myself, I had assumed the author was male. So when I saw Sister Poehlman’s name, I blushed. Did I think a woman was incapable of a medical degree? No, not at all. But I did assume that the author was a man, which bothered me slightly. On the opposite side of the spectrum, would I have assumed that an anonymous quote talking about how they read bedtime stories to their children every night would automatically have been a woman?
It just kind of made me wonder why we feel this natural urge to sort God’s children into very restricting and limiting categories. This tendency to overgeneralize the human experience is so detrimental to the way we view other people. For example, differences in gender are real and divine and affect each of us individually, but these differences do not dictate the course each individual life is going to take or prove inequality.
For the sake of my favorite holiday coming up, let’s say you wanted to bake a batch of heart-shaped cookies for Valentine’s Day. So you grab the mold and shape that delicious cookie dough into adorable little hearts. But when you bake the cookies, remarkably, none of them look exactly the same. Maybe some don’t even look like hearts! Does that mean that one cookie is more delicious than the other? Not a chance - they all come from the same dough.
ADSENSE HERE