This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

By now it's no secret that I wasn't selected to fill one of the three vacancies in the LDS Quorum of the Twelve. When the calls were announced in General Conference, I was conspicuously absent from the red seats.

I was at a completely different church with my wife. I normally treat General Conference as a free Sunday and wait to read the conference reports.

Plus, there was no point in me driving all the way downtown just to get snubbed by the Brethren and cuffed in the head (again) by church security, whose ranks include several former police colleagues and my roommate from the academy.

I was already over not being given at least an interview for the job. Then someone brought the subject up again and forced me to consider what might have been. If a miracle had happened.

The occasion was a Tuesday night podcast gab with Bill Reel, owner and operator of the "Mormon Discussion: Leading With Faith" website, http://www.mormondiscussionpodcast.org.

Bill directed our conversation to the subject of my failed apostleship, asking what I would have hoped to accomplish had I actually made it.

It caught me off guard. I hadn't considered the possibility of achieving anything other than maybe a discount on some new suits and a comfortable seat at conference.

If I thought about it at all, I probably assumed that my entire job as an apostle would have consisted of me doing whatever I was told.

They would have been nice about it. Someone would have welcomed me to the Quorum of the Twelve, showed me my locker and where to sit at the table. Additional instruction would have followed.

Them: "We love you, Elder Kirby. We really do. But truthfully, we're flabbergasted as to why Heavenly Father made us pick you."

Me: "It's probably because—."

Them: "You're never to say anything in this room. In fact, feel free to go to sleep."

Bill obviously hadn't considered any of this. He pressed me for a real answer. What would I hope to accomplish if I had a seat at the big table and was not wearing a muzzle?

I mumbled some stuff about changing the classroom curriculum to better accommodate the modern family construct. I don't imagine it would have gotten very far.

Me: "We'd call it 'Partial Families Are Also Forever.' "

Them: "Actually, we have an emergency speaking assignment for you at McMurdo Station, Antarctica."

Now that I've had time to think about it, I might have proposed changing the three-hour worship block to something like 14 minutes to better address the shorter attention spans of millennials.

Another contribution would be the forcible baptism program, where we stop waiting for people to die to baptize them by proxy. Just imagine the joy people would feel if we dragged them off the street and baptized them while they were still alive.

The best idea (as of 10 minutes ago) would require the addition of another degree of glory in heaven. Currently, we have Celestial Kingdom, Terrestrial Kingdom, and Telestial Kingdom levels of reward for our behavior on Earth.

My plan would include a Timeshare Kingdom, or a temporary degree of glory wherein people in different kingdoms could temporarily — based on availability — visit friends and family members in other levels.

I think it's a great idea. It probably goes a long way toward explaining why I'm still working in the ward nursery.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.