Dont Know Where to Go From Here

First: welcome. You are at a tough age under any circumstance, adding a faith crush doesn’t help. I hesitate to guide you very much as I do believe you should talk to your parents about your feelings. It would not be appropriate for me to power too much guidance out opinion here.

That being said, God is never angry wtih you. Shame and guilt are the adversaries tools, not Gods. You are born with the spirit of God as a part of you so he can never feel anything but live for you. To question is not evil. Just keep an open mind and seek Gods will in your life and trust what he tells you.

Hang in there and talk to your parents openly honestly and respectfully, pay and mediate and listen for peace and answers.

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Thank you all so much for your kind replies; I look forward to joining this community and get my testimony back on track.

blue_bird

Welcome.

Go slowly at your age, and don’t accept what ANYBODY says “just because”. We all have our individual biases that color our views – at the extremes, both traditionally focused, “fundamentalist” (but not polygamous) members and staunch anti-Mormons.

I don’t want my children to adopt my views; I want them to develop and own their own views, even if those views are different in some ways than mine.

Also, I’ve known I think differently than others since at least age 7. In many ways, recognizing this early was a great blessing for me. It can be for you, if you can see it that way.

blue_bird –

I feel that this is “middle of the road” type thinking is not accepted

Only by those people who are extremists and haven’t examined their own faith. Chin up, you are becoming an adult of God, not just a child of God. It’s a lifelong journey, but it is the road less traveled. Get used to many people not identifying with you. That’s inevitable.

One caution I will give you is that everything you read or are told, in the church or outside the church, absolutely everything is written from a biased perspective. Whoever wrote it or said it had a point of view and a point to make. There’s no such thing as objective history or objectivity about human emotions. That’s why it says in Corinthians that we see through a glass darkly.

Welcome to the site!

I consider myself to have a very strong testimony (up to this point), and now I feel like I have all of a sudden fallen into a deep hole where I can no longer feel the Spirit or find answers to my questions. I also feel that God is very angry with me, and I feel like I cannot communicate with Him the way I used to. Frankly I am very scared, and I dont know where to turn. I figured this would be a good place to start. blue_bird

Hi, blue_bird – I wrote something earlier, but I guess it didn’t go. I hope you find help here. I certainly have! I also felt that God was angry with me – how else to explain the spiritual numbness that came over me so suddenly? But then I realized that there is no sin in thinking. I had been sort of calculating my “worthiness” to feel the Spirit based on how mainstream or accepted my thoughts and opinions are in the church. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. . . .unless we let it.

blue_bird,

Welcome. I hope you find this site to be helpful, but as others have said, I encourage you to talk to your folks. It’s never a good idea to have family secrets. It took me four decades to figure it out, and it was a watershed moment for me.

I want to be completely honest here, but please don’t take this the wrong way; I am merely expressing my own angst about this situation… I’ve started a couple of replies to you and not finished them, because of the uniqueness of your situation. So here it is… I must admit that I feel sheepish about even addressing you on these forums because you are someone else’s child and no matter how nice and wise and caring we might all seem, nobody cares about you like your own family. It’s not really our place to give you advice or counsel outside of earshot of your parents. I have a son that is about your same age, and I would be very unhappy and discouraged if I learned that he was receiving life-affecting advice from adults online that conflicted with our family’s lifestyle. Everyone here has been very careful in that regard, but it won’t always be so.

That said, let me offer some encouragement that I would give to any young person struggling with guilt in any religion brought on by a feeling of inadequacy against expectations… I’d say this same thing to all of the people in your Laurel class, or any Laurel class… I believe that a lot of times, our feeling of not measuring up, and therefore experiencing guilt, has a lot to do with our categorizing expectations as external factors. When we internalize expectations, we seem both able to achieve beyond what we think, and to be able to accept better that we don’t always live up to them. Let me give you an example… You probably know a lot of people in school that think that their parents are totally unreasonable in the amount of time they expect their kids to spend doing homework. For them it is an external expectation, and so they dislike it, complain, fight against it, and feel like failures when they don’t get the grades their parents expected. Yet, those same kids will someday go to college where they will work even harder on school, even though their parents are 500 miles away. That’s the beginning of internalization. That’s exactly what happened to me. When I was responsible for myself, I stepped up, worked hard, when it wasn’t enough, and I knew I could improve, then I worked even harder, because it was what I wanted. When it wasn’t enough and I knew that was the best I could do, I was at peace with it.

Now, turn that to the church… As I’ve said on these forums before, I used to say, “I can’t drink”. I was simply parroting somebody else’s concept of morality. Eventually, I realized that that was a very shallow way to view it. I learned to say “I don’t drink”. Later, I came to believe that drinking in itself is not a “sin”… that perfectly good and wonderful people have an occasional beer. But even after coming to that realization, I continue not to drink. It’s internalized. I don’t care if anyone else drinks, but I myself don’t. I have no problem being at a table with someone that drinks. Internalizing it made it mine, not the church’s, not a judgment of others… mine alone. I’m one of the most disconnected from the church among all the contributors there, but I still maintain this as part of who I am. So, I would encourage you to seek out the best aspects of the church and try to make them a part of who you are… not a checkbox item from someone else’s list, but something about you. Easy experiment: think of going to church not as a requirement to enter the Celestial Kingdom, or as a Pharisaical devotion, but think of it as an opportunity to worship Jesus, the Messiah, the Great Teacher, who gave his life to offer a “new life” to all of us. Concentrate on worship through the music. Make your taking of the Sacrament the crowning moment of the day. Think of being there as a way to share with others, to lift them up, and to be lifted up by them. When you see others that you don’t agree with, or that you think are falling short, let your heart be filled with compassion, understanding, and at least a little respect that they are trying their best… even if they don’t quite measure up. Try that a few Sundays and you might find that your guilt will begin to abate, because you will be in the process of internalizing the important elements of the church.