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Hi everyone. Just a quick intro about myself. I’ve been a member my whole life, my whole family is very devoted to the Church. I served a mission state-side, have held many stake and ward priesthood callings, and have had many spiritual experiences thoughout my life. I’ve had a crisis to deal with over the past 3 years (or more…but most intense the past 3 years and it is ongoing), and as I dealt with it, I found prayers and blessings and spiritual things were not sufficient. It has shaken my faith, when I feel like the church constantly teaches “obedience brings blessings” or General Conference is filled with inspirational stories of people who have God intervene in their lives, and yet I feel left alone in the time of greatest crisis in my life. Makes me wonder if God even hears prayers. Makes me wonder if God is even there.
I want to believe in God, and see the good in the church. So I am finding perhaps a new phase to go through. Change is hard to accept, but sometimes inevitable. It reminded me of a news story, for which I adopted my login name after this. You may be familiar with this…
Quote:Piper Alpha was a North Sea oil production platform operated by Occidental Petroleum (Caledonia) Ltd. The platform began production in 1976, first as an oil platform and then later converted to gas production. An explosion and resulting fire destroyed it on July 6, 1988, killing 167 men, with only 59 survivors. Total insured loss was about US$ 3.4 billion. To date it is the world’s worst offshore oil disaster in terms both of lives lost and impact to industry. At the time of the disaster the platform accounted for around 10% of the oil and gas production from the North Sea.
A survivor was interviewed on Ted Koppel’s Nightline. The fellow told about how he’d woken up to the fire alarm, ran out on deck, saw the flames, and jumped 10 stories into the North Sea. Koppel asked him to go through it again with more detail.
“How far is 10 stories?” 100 ft. “What do we know about the North Sea?” It’s really cold. “And what happens to us in really cold water?” We get hypothermia and die in 5-10 minutes.
Koppel then asked “What possessed you to jump into the freezing water?”
He replied, “I knew if I stayed where I was I was going to fry.”
This is the situation we sometimes find ourselves in during mortality – that if we do nothing, or just keep doing the same thing over and over expecting different results, we will “fry”. And that the urgency can either be “running from” a crisis, or a “running to” and opportunity. But we can’t just do nothing and hope we stay safe like we used to think we were when we were children.I believe the Lord knows my situation and my crisis, and there is not necessarily a “right” or a “wrong” way to deal with it. Sometimes there are good, better, best ways…but sometimes there aren’t…there are just experiences to go through, and how we go through it is all that is important. Can we keep love in our hearts as we go through it?
I truly want to stay in the Church. After a lot of study, I am now aware of things that contradict what I have been taught throughout my life about the Church, things that just don’t hold up to experience anymore.
And so I need to jump (take a leap of faith), because I have no option to stay where I was at with my faith that truly did sustain me in times past, but will burn me if I stay where I’m at now…I must now look at redefining my faith and look at this as a great learning opportunity for me going forward. I’m on a new journey.
I hope this forum is helpful as I work through things, doubt things, and learn new things as I choose to stay mormon. Thanks for reading my story.
Welcome! Good to have you here. I look forward to hearing more from you! WElcome — I feel like you gave me just enough to wonder exactly what the situation is that you’re facing. However, how personal you want to be in a forum like this is your choice, and I respect that. sorry if that was a teaser…I’m just not ready to open on a public board like this the personal situation. I hope that’s ok to participate anyway. Bottom line, we all go through trials, my details may be different, but the point is that faith was impacted. Maybe in a good way??? But thanks for the welcome.
Yes, welcome, PA. I hope we all get to know you better over time. Come on in PiperAlpha! The water is just fine. It actually just lookscold and choppy from 10 stories up. Except for the initial pain of the belly flop, it isn’t really bad at all… 
PiperAlpha, I love what you said here,
“And so I need to jump (take a leap of faith), because I have no option to stay where I was at with my faith that truly did sustain me in times past, but will burn me if I stay where I’m at now…I must now look at redefining my faith and look at this as a great learning opportunity for me going forward. I’m on a new journey.”
What a great way to describe what a lot of us are going through, myself included. Sometimes I’ve mourned my new outlook but mostly I’ve rejoiced to be learning new and exciting ways of seeing life and growing into my divine self.
I’ve felt that this is a very safe place to find support on the journey.
Be Blessed,
CG
What a story, PA! I feel like it was precisely the extreme trials that opened me up to accept the real truth. And I hope I may open and open and open until the day I die. Hi PiperAlpha, there would be times when I was active where I was just tired of the same old things – read your scriptures, pray, keep attending, but then i had a crisis of faith. i went through that crisis and still believe and though I don’t attend all that often (a few times a year) i am happy with my life.
my big fear was what if i don’t attend will i lose my chance at eternal life ? i have read a few comments of people here who feel that they are going through the motions and aren’t getting much of a benefit when it comes to church. why does it happen ? even when I didn’t have a crisis of faith I still had my moments of being bored with scripture study, praying, and attending meetings.
my crisis of faith happened when I felt I had become an object of gossip in my ward. i was beginning to feel that i didn’t like the people i was attending church with and socially i was unhappy and maybe even angry. then i thought a few times “if i stop attending will i lose out on eternal life ?” and I thought “hogwash !!!”. I couldn’t put my happiness online for a church organization anymore. i made the decision to stop attending. it was hard at first but i managed. i began to deprogram myself from being an institutional mormon. I wanted to know who i was without the church because there were times i felt stifled and felt a lack of identity as a church member because, as I concluded, that i had made the church too central to my life. my decision to stop attending helped. it took the pressure off to always do what’s right. i wanted to be who i wanted to be without being dictated to by the church culture. i felt free and i feel free now. i wasn’t sure what i believed anymore and i have tried to bury what i learned as an active member and at times i was successful at burying my testimony but then i would remember my spiritual experiences and say “wait a minute ! there is something about the church ” … etc. etc..
it’s been about 12 years since my crisis of faith and i still have a testimony in spite of being inactive. i intend to go back someday but when I’m ready and when I go back i’m not sure how active i will be. i may just attend once a month or once every two months. but all in all i am happy – even if i am not active. i took that leap and still i am surviving just fine as an inactive church member.
BeLikeChrist
So many great responses! What a friendly group! This is the way church should be. CanadianGirl, the things you find divine about your new place you are in, do you find them just as fulfilling, or do u think we just have to settle or compromise because it’s less stressful that way?
Tom, I like your approach. Keep learning, huh? There is plenty of truth out there to find.
BeLikeChrist, Thank you for sharing your experience. You seem at peace with yourself.
In the last conference priesthood session, which I had to go back and reread after some things bothered me when delivered, but afterwards see maybe speakers didn’t really say things the way I initially took it, Pres Monson said our society continues to slip further from the standards of the church. He said it has become more of a society of “anything goes”.
How do you find peace and let go of things in the church and still not slip into a “anything goes and therefore nothing matters” approach to life?Hi Piper, Piper said:
Quote:How do you find peace and let go of things in the church and still not slip into a “anything goes and therefore nothing matters” approach to life?
i spent a lot of time as an active member living the letter of the law. after my crisis of faith and fell into inactivity i just relaxed my standards. i reasoned out that i wasn’t going to church anyway so i didn’t need to be so “anal” about keeping standards lol !
Peace didn’t happen immediately after i became inactive. I still needed time to sort things out as an inactive member. I still needed to find out who I was after deciding not to make the church so central to my life. One thing I learned after I became inactive was how much I allowed guilt to control my life. When one is active one strives to live a “temple recommend” life and you try to live to strict obedience to church standards so you can fit into the church culture.
after becoming inactive i took the weight of “church expectation” off my shoulders and just tried to do what i wanted for a change. it was part of finding out who i was without the church being so central to my life.
there is a lot of guilt when you initially become inactive because you are taught that “obedience” is the key to eternal life. i definitely wasn’t being obedient ! I wasn’t attending church, going to the temple, paying tithing, etc. , however, I was still striving to be a decent human being.
anyone who becomes inactive all have their personal paths to take to decide how to live and how to believe. some people just find it easiest to believe the church isn’t true so they can live outside church cultural norms. i tried to live that way but time and time again I had to face up to very real spiritual experiences I had when I was active. i just decided that “yes the church is true ..” but i took the approach that “you can still believe it as true” but you don’t necessarily have to live a strict LDS life. That is how I found peace. Hope this helps.
BeLikeChrist
PiperAlpha wrote:I’ve had a crisis to deal with over the past 3 years (or more…but most intense the past 3 years and it is ongoing), and as I dealt with it, I found prayers and blessings and spiritual things were not sufficient. It has shaken my faith, when I feel like the church constantly teaches “obedience brings blessings” or General Conference is filled with inspirational stories of people who have God intervene in their lives, and yet I feel left alone in the time of greatest crisis in my life. Makes me wonder if God even hears prayers. Makes me wonder if God is even there.
I hope this forum is helpful as I work through things, doubt things, and learn new things as I choose to stay mormon. Thanks for reading my story.
Piper Alpha-Read my Intro
http://forum.staylds.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=204&p=1692&hilit=God+Works+In+Mysterious+Ways#p1692 PiperAlpha wrote:How do you find peace and let go of things in the church and still not slip into a “anything goes and therefore nothing matters” approach to life?I like reading, so for me, a big part of the answer is to keep adding sacred texts to my personal canon and keep reading them. Some of the beloved classics of mine and of this group include:
The Sermon on the Mount and Luke’s parables
- The Didache
- Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth
- The Bhagavad Gita Arnold translation (esp. chapters 12 and 16)
- The Tao Te Ching Mitchell version (only 81 verses long)
- Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth” and “The Power of Now”
I think you will find deep joy in those texts. There is holiness all around. Love matters.
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