My long journey

I have been a pretty religious or spiritual person for most of my life. When I was a little kid, I had many experiences where my prayers were answered immediately. I felt like Heavenly Father was my friend and I could talk to him like I could any other person. Then I grew up and there were many times where I felt that relationship strain, and it was going through my stage 4 that helped me to build that relationship again closer to what it was when I was younger.

It wasn’t until around 3 or 4 years after my mission that I had my first real challenge to my testimony. I loved to study gospel topics and and considered myself pretty knowledgeable. I thought to myself that there must be some reason why other faithful religious people couldn’t see the obvioius truthfulness of the LDS church and our doctrine and if I had the chance to talk with them, I would either convince them otherwise or I could figure out why thy thought what thy thought. Either way, I didn’t want to feel like I was living in a state of ignorance. I found a an ex-Jehovah’s Witness site where I felt at home and could discuss some of the topics that I wanted to talk about. I loved it and it became an addiction to me. I was not trying to preach to ex JW’s, but instead just wanted to talk about religion with anyone who wanted to talk about it. Some of the Evangelical Preachers on the site, who were trying to preach to the ex JW’s, were happy to oblige me.

It wasn’t long before one of them, in specific, emailed me some information that I had never seen before. What was worse was that it was backed up by church references that I was able to check on. I was startled and scared. So I tried to talk with my wife and friends about this and was surprised to find out that they didn’t want to talk to me about it but instead became pretty hostile when I would try to talk to them about it. This angered me a lot. Here I was in a state of crisis with my testimony, and because I was having a crisis of testimony, no one wanted to talk to me until I was overcame it. I guess I couldn’t really blame them because it was something that made them uncomfortable. I was forced to go to only one place and that was God. I prayed a lot and after a few days of intense prayer, I got an answer that gave me a lot of peace. The answer came in the form that, I did not have the full picture at this point but only some pieces of information that were in existence, and was I willing to throw away everything that I knew about the church, and all of the spiritual experiences that I had because of this one thing that didn’t make any sense? That would be like building a really nice car, and then finding out that the gas cap is too small and saying, I guess the car is a piece of junk right now and throw it away. How stupid would I feel if I threw away my testimony and then got to the other side where all of the information was revealed and then I would say “Oh… that makes sense”…. I guess I shouldn’t have thrown everything away because of that one thing.

That answer was awesome to me for a number of reasons. First, it gave me the peace I needed at the time, but also a perspective that I could use in my further studies of church history and doctrine. I no longer needed to know all of the answers right now in order to feel comfortable being a member of the church. This was the beginning of my journey. It wasn’t too long after that that I was able to find an answer that suited me for the questions that I had. So it was a confirmation of what my answer had told me, that in time, all things would be revealed. The second most important part was that it taught me that what I could comprehend with my mind had nothing to do with the reality of the existence of God or the truthfulness of the church. It was no longer about who could win a debate, but instead more about what is actually true and what is not!. My trust had to be placed more in God and less in logic of the moment.

From that point on, I fearlessly went forward learning more and more about the Bible, it’s history, the translation of the Book of Mormon, history of the church, polygamy, etc. In fact I got to the point where, for the last 5 or 6 years I haven’t heard or seen anything new that is typically used as ammunition against the church. There was a lot that I learned from these experiences. First of all, I would say that I felt the church was true, but that my perception of how it was true had changed drastically. When I would say that I agreed that it was the only true and living church upon the face of the earth, I would mean that I believe that it is the only church that Christ himself came down and organized himself and gave His priesthood, that it is living because it’s the only church that has true Prophet at its head guiding it’s affairs. What had changed? My perception of the church. I no longer believed that everyone who heard about the church or had the physical opportunity to accept it was suppose to. I believed that just like I was called to come down upon the earth and be a Mormon and accomplish certain things on this earth to propel Gods plan, others were called to other churches, or even to be in a situation of atheism where they would be propelling gods plan. In other words, God was in our church at it’s head, but not all of his work was meant to be conducted within the church, nor even most of it, but only a small and very important part. He was also at work within other religions, ideals, political parties, etc bringing to pass his work.

I also came to the realization that once you were called to be a member of the quorum of the twelve or an apostle, that you did not suddenly start living some mystical life on the other side of the veil, only coming over to visit us mortals for general conference or other small moments. Instead they were mortal men who struggled with weaknesses, prejudices and biases etc. Just like God was trying to accomplish his work, very imperfectly through me, he was also trying to accomplish the same thing through those imperfect men. There were no doubt many Apostles who did not really like other Apostles personally, nor did they agree with all of their personal opinions, or the way that they communicated their messages. I liked the way some leaders expressed their opinions better than others. Another very critical thing that I learned, but never realized that I didn’t know, was that my connection to God was direct and did not go through the Prophet, Bishop or any leader. In fact, I came to realize that their role was to teach us to come unto Christ, and that they were not trying to be in the way of that. So I began to really more on my spiritual promptings from the spirit to understand teachings from church leaders, rather than to jump on the band wagon of what might be the common consent of others on what was thought was meant. This opened my mind to all sorts of instructions because I was no longer relying on the arm of flesh. I’ve heard some people in the church say that a ‘Primary source’ is one that comes from a Prophet, and a secondary source was one that came from other church leaders. I changed my opinion to be that a primary source was anything that was confirmed by the Spirit. And a secondary source was anything else, regardless of who said it!

There was a long period of time where I felt very isolated in the church and angry at others inside the church because they were such hypocrites. Of course, in the next breath, I had to realize that I was the biggest hypocrite of them all. I stayed in the church though because I knew I did not have the guts to leave it. I knew what it would do to my wife and kids and I could see no reason to make all of that happen. Secondly, When I lost my testimony of the church and simply didn’t know if it was true or not, I could still feel, in my prayers, God saying that it did not matter for me to know if the church was true or not right now, just that I should know that it was the place that I should be in right now.

On many occasions, I made a conscious decision not to be critical anymore. My rationalization for this was that it wasn’t making me happy, but instead made me miserable. I remembered the story of one of the early church leaders who left the church and didn’t come back. On his death bed, he said that he wished that he could come back and just believe because his life had been miserable since he left. But he said that because of his beliefs, he did not have that privilege anymore. It was at that point that I realized what Eternal Truth was. Eternal Truth is ‘anything that brings us ‘TRUE’ Happiness. I realized that I would rather be happy and ignorant than miserable and delving in truth.

Let me clarify, if you’re even still reading at this point, that I do not feel ignorant. I’ve learned so much that it is impossible for me to share all of it in this post. Each one of sees and experiences life through the perspectives of our own experiences. The more you understand this, the more you see that it is impossible to believe that any person can understand truth in the same way that others see it. Each one of us sees life so drastically different than those around us that it amazes me. The only person who understands the way we see things is God. All He cares about is that we are truly happy and only He knows the way. Therefore no other person can possibly teach us anything. Only the spirit can teach us and interpret to us what is being taught. So it truly is up to us.

I hope some of this makes sense and I hope to have more chances to share more about myself as we talk in the future.