Want to return to the Church, but…

I am grateful for StayLDS.com. I’ve been lurking for several months and reading most of the posts from 2012, and they have given me the courage to post.

I am a single middle-aged man. I’m thinking about returning to the Church, but I don’t know if I am a member or not. I think I am, but I’m not sure. It’s a truly bizarre story, so here we go…

I was born and raised outside the Church, but my first contact with the Church in high school was very positive and had a lasting effect on me. I never knew my father, and my mother tried to commit suicide in front of me when I was 16. A Mormon neighbor showed great kindness to me during that difficult time. I ran away and joined the Air Force as a teenager, which probably was the best thing I could have done. My mother eventually healed, remarried, and today she’s still alive and we have a great relationship.

Fast-forward to my 30th birthday. I am dating and deeply in love with a Mormon woman. We discuss marriage, but she brings up the temple marriage thing so I agree to investigate the LDS church. All the information I found was by the Tanners, who wrote some really interesting stuff that made me shrug off the Church as a goofy cult. The Mormon woman I was dating refused to leave the church, and I could not accept the Book of Mormon as true, so we parted company over many, many tears. I recently Googled her name and discovered that she eventually did marry someone else and had children, so I’m happy that her life moved on to something successful. (And later I found some criticism of the Tanners’ work that I really wished I had seen when I first began reading them.)

Fast-forward to my 35th birthday. Still single. I moved far away, had a good job in the software field, and one day some Mormon missionaries come banging on my door. To make a very long story short, I became an investigator and eventually converted and was baptized. I still didn’t understand a lot of things about the Book of Mormon or polygamy or various other doctrines (like the Adam-God theory), but I was spending a lot of time with TBMs who put Jesus at the center of everything they did. I could tell you dozens of anecdotes about how wonderful they were. I finally concluded that the LDS Church might be imperfect, but that God was moving among the people and that the real test of a religion was how it transformed you as a person, not how it added to your belief system. I remember I asked one of the men at church if he would ever consider leaving the Church. He said no, because it would be inconceivable for him to live apart from God and the Spirit. And I must say, after my baptism I did feel like I was living on a higher plane. I suddenly felt new energy to overcome evil with good, to look for the best in everything and everyone, to see other humans as children of God, and to approach all things in a spirit of kindness and humility and compassion. I loved the people in my ward and sought to become like them. I still think of them often.

And then… disaster! One of the missionaries who played a part in my conversion finished her mission. For reasons that are still unclear to me, she didn’t return to her home but stayed in the area and continued contact with me. I felt sorry for her because she had a difficult family situation and was going through some job troubles. In retrospect now I realize that she was attracted to me even though we were 15 years apart in age, but at the time I was blind to this. I need to omit most of the details because I want to protect her privacy (she is probably still LDS), but she became very persistent about seeing me. There was no physical contact of any kind. I finally decided to terminate the relationship, and the next thing I know she’s at my door asking for a loan to get her out of some legal trouble. My first instinct was to help, but all my friends warned me and said that she was trying to entangle herself financially with me so she could still be in my life. After a lot of thought, I decided to simply give her the money (thousands of dollars) with specific instructions: she was not to repay me, but she was to slowly save up money until she had an amount that matched the amount of my gift. I told her that someday someone would need help from her, and that if she gave the money to that person, whoever it was, even in the distant future, then her debt to me would be repaid in full. I figured this would be the cleanest solution.

She was grateful but a few weeks later came back with a request for even more money, but this time as a true loan. And here I need to start omitting more details to protect her privacy, but things got ugly very quickly. I felt sorry for her, but she interpreted my acts of kindness as romantic intentions, and she was hurt very, very badly when I finally pulled the plug on our friendship. It was a horrible experience that at one point involved her father and the police and more. I still feel terrible that I accidentally hurt another person.

This whole experience seriously damaged my attitude toward the Church. Around that time some of the men in my ward, acting with kindly intentions, began thinking about me and marriage. Tragically, I was too old for the singles wards in my city (I was in a major U.S. metropolitan area), and more and more I began to feel like the ugly stepchild of the ward because I was still single and now too old to have any hope. Within a year my enthusiasm for the Church had cooled into hard apathy, and a few months after that I decided to give up completely. I had moved to a new part of town and made one last visit to the ward there (my first visit to this ward) in hope that something would happen to give me a reason to stay LDS. I sat down and within five minutes felt the urge to get up and leave, so I did. I haven’t been in an LDS church since.

A week later I sent a letter to the stake requesting that my name be removed as a member of the LDS Church. I didn’t send my letter to a bishop, because I had moved around and wasn’t really sure what ward I was assigned to. I never got back any response at all: no calls, no letters, nothing. Zero. I’m tempted to think that my original letter was lost in the mail or that the stake accidentally misplaced or discarded it. Anyway, this was about 15 years ago. I have reason to believe that I am still a member, because six years ago I crossed paths with an old friend from my first ward. He noted my new contact information (I had moved again and was then and am now living in San Francisco) and I think he may have “turned me in.” The missionaries from the local ward have called me now and then, and they showed up at my door unexpectedly one day and asked me questions that you’d ask an inactive member, so that’s why I think I am still a member. I was polite to the missionaries. They asked if they could come back and visit me, and for some reason I said “sure.” They never returned. But in truth they may have been uncomfortable visiting me in my neighborhood. I live on the edge of a very gay section of town, and LDS missionaries would be fiercely mocked and abused if they walked across it to get to my house. So I don’t blame them for never returning.

So here’s the strange twist to my story: about 4 months ago I started feeling this urge to return to the LDS church. And I don’t mean just a fleeting thought or a toying with the idea, but a strong urge that feels like a spiritual prompting. I still have complex opinions and thoughts about the truth of the Church, but maybe I should save them for a separate post. I went to the Oakland temple last night (to see the Christmas lights, not to go into the temple, obviously) and was blown away by the sense of belonging that I had. I find myself contemplating the Church and thinking that its members behave exactly as Christ’s church would behave. Of course, you’ve always got some screwball members, but it’s important to distinguish the exception from the rule. Anyway, when I shake myself awake from my contemplations and realize that I am not in fellowship with the Church, I feel genuine sadness.

My problem is that I would like to “re-investigate” the Church because I am drawn to the commitment and culture. And by the way, I don’t think “cultural Mormon” is a bad term. I suppose it’s not nice if you stay in a church because they throw great parties or have glitzy dances, but to participate in a Christian culture of seeking God and following Jesus in everything you do is pretty much the same thing as the religion itself. As you might have guessed, Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats is the pinnacle of Christianity to me. Maybe that’s why the debates over the historicity of the Book of Mormon don’t bother me so much.

Are there any other inactives like me who have experienced a powerful pull to return to the Church? I’d be very interested in hearing your story. thank you.