To the Relief Society President Who Is Quietly Drowning

You know things about this ward that nobody else knows. Whose marriage is in trouble. Who is not eating properly. Which family is one bad month from losing the house. You carry all of it, and you carry it silently, because confidentiality means the weight has nowhere to go. And the people who ask how you are doing are usually asking so they can tell you something else.

The Structural Problem

The person everyone brings burdens to is structurally the least likely person to have anywhere to bring their own. That is not a personal failing. It is the shape of the calling.

A bishop at least has a stake president and counsellors who know the same names. A Relief Society president often has less. Your counsellors may be as stretched as you are. Your husband, if you have one, cannot be told most of it. Your friends are in the ward, which means they are also the subject of half of what you are holding.

So it accumulates. Not dramatically — that is the thing people misunderstand about this kind of exhaustion. There is no crisis. There is just a slow silt of other people’s crises, and one day you find you cannot face compassionate service assignments and you cannot explain why.

The Question That Prevents Most of It

Here is the single most useful thing I know for people in your position, and it is one question.

Is this mine to carry?

Not: is this important. Not: does this person need help. Both of those may be plainly true and the answer to the actual question may still be no.

Some burdens are assignments. You are responsible to organise relief, to minister, to counsel, to see that needs are met. Many burdens are not assignments — they are things you absorbed because you were present when they were described, and because you are the kind of person who feels things.

Absorbing is not the same as serving. It feels like devotion. It is actually a slow transfer of someone else’s ball onto your own.

You Are a Witness, Not the Savior

This is the trap that catches every good leader I have ever known, and it caught me when I was a bishop.

Someone sits across from you in real pain. You counsel. You care. You love. And then, without deciding to, you begin to carry it — you take their outcome as your responsibility, and their lack of progress as your failure.

But you are not the Savior. You are a witness. You can testify, guide, invite, organise, feed, and sit with someone in the worst week of their life. You cannot repent for them, believe for them, or surrender on their behalf. Surrender has to be personal or it is not surrender.

When leaders attempt to carry what Christ already paid for, two things happen. They build their own rubber band ball. And they become less useful to the person, not more — because a frantic leader is harder to be honest with than a steady one.

“You are a witness. Not the Savior. The Savior already came.”

The Guilt About Not Feeling Enough

There is a second, quieter problem that arrives later.

At some point you notice you are not moved by things that used to move you. Someone tells you something hard and you are already thinking about logistics. And you conclude you have become cold, or that you are doing this for the wrong reasons now.

That is not usually coldness. It is saturation. Compassion is not infinite in a finite body, and a person carrying forty situations does not have the same emotional bandwidth as a person carrying two. The numbness is a symptom of load, not of character.

Treating it as a character problem is what makes it worse, because then you add shame to exhaustion and try to fix the exhaustion by caring harder.

What to Do This Week

Practical, in order:

1. Write the list. Every situation you are currently carrying. Names or initials. Get it out of your head and onto paper — you are almost certainly carrying more items than you can hold in mind at once, which is part of why it feels formless.
2. Mark each one: assignment or absorbed. Be honest. Most lists come out roughly half and half.
3. Release the absorbed ones deliberately. Not “stop caring” — give them over. The five surrenders, written. The process page has them.
4. For the assignments, ask what is actually required. Often the requirement is one phone call or one delegation, and the rest is worry you added.
5. Delegate something real this week. Not a token. Something you have been holding because it was faster to do it yourself.

That last one is where people resist hardest, and it is usually where the most relief is available.

On Being Released

One day this calling will end, and I want to say something about that now rather than later.

Many leaders experience release as a small grief mixed with relief and then, unexpectedly, guilt — as though feeling relieved proves they resented it.

It does not. You can love a calling and be tired. Both can be entirely true. And the ward will carry on, which is not a comment on your value; it is the design. Callings rotate specifically so that no one person becomes structurally necessary.

What you do not want is to walk out of this calling still carrying every situation you carried during it. That is what unwinds people years later — the bishop who is still, at seventy, carrying a family from 1994.

Put it down as you go. Not all at once at the end. The Rubber Band Ball sets out how, and the leaders page has resources written for exactly this.

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