Hello

Welcome and I am glad you joined and made the post. I would encourage others that are lurking to join in the conversation!

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Welcome to the forum and posting your intro. I enjoy hearing the short background of people’s stories.

I have also been through divorce so I share that in common with you.

Faith in church evolves as we go through life, I think. Like the political rhetoric I hear this time of year, some can use fear and doom and gloom to try to talk about issues and the extreme opposing views, and people at church get like that at times about leaving church, or getting divorced, or other issues.

But I have found there to be many possible options if we open our minds to them, to find right vs wrong on many paths. If we seek love and growth, not fear and obedience.

I’m happy. I’m remarried. My kids are doing great. There is no doom and gloom. Just life, filled with lots of experiences.

Glad you joined us. I look forward to learning more from your posts.

Great to meet you! I love to hear the stories of people’s lives. Sorry about your diagnosis–I imagine that gives one perspective. We look forward to hearing your wisdom!

The Wonder Years!

Welcome to StayLDS. It sounds like you’ve got invaluable life experiences to share. I hope to hear and learn from them.

Thank you for your welcome and many kind words. I hope to be able to contribute something more than just a lot of questions. I have navigated some challenges successfully, but still have some issues with things that are disturbing and hard to accept. I want to see what you think, but don’t want to unload in one big blast – if I even could. Better I think to comment about some of the topics already posted, and then maybe do a post or two of my own.

@Minyan Man,

Until I received a testimony on my own, I had a very, rudimentary faith based on believing in those I trusted. So first it was based on what my parents told me, and what I learned from those they put their trust in. Even though they divorced, they both followed strongly in the church, so I was able to mostly find agreement in their words on the church, if not on their opinions about each other. I went with my mother physically, and also on who was to blame in the divorce, and I gave her primary credence when there seemed to be a difference in church opinions. This was unfortunate in some ways, because as I later found, my father was better grounded in the church, and was not guilty of many of the charges put on him by my mom, even if he was awfully strict!

But I got off topic. I grew up with what Nibley might call a very Primary version of the Gospel. So I believed things like all the native inhabitants of the Americas when Columbus arrived here were descendants of the nephites and lamanites, and other simplistic and just plain wrong explanations like that of scripture, history & biography. Many of these “Primary” versions have not held up to new inputs from both friends and foes of the church.

One of the biggest shocks was around “Mormon Doctrine” by Bruce R. McConkie. My households believed it to be solid church doctrine. We had a first edition, so we were pretty sure the Catholic Church was the Great and Abominable. So when I brought it up later in seminary, only to have it refuted, it shook me a bit when I could only find a later edition. Sure enough, whoops!, it didn’t equate the Catholic Church with the Great and Abominable! Well, until I accepted my current belief, I still had it wrong – I believed it was still really so and that they just softened the language so the Catholics wouldn’t feel so bad.

So, my life has been a series of these paradigm shifts. So far, I have been able to assimilate them, but I haven’t even begun to tackle things like Joseph Smith and Polyandry? And when my son tells me how much of the Book of Mormon and Bible history he doesn’t have to believe and still keep his testimony and is very persuasive, I see a deep hole coming up in front of me and wonder how much you can throw out without ditching the whole boat and then might as well become a Unitarian.

Seriously, I don’t think I should ditch the boat, but you may get a sense of my unease from these few examples. I do look forward to discussing some of these and like subjects in the forum.

And when my son tells me how much of the Book of Mormon and Bible history he doesn’t have to believe and still keep his testimony and is very persuasive, I see a deep hole coming up in front of me and wonder how much you can throw out without ditching the whole boat and then might as well become a Unitarian.

I think it is good advice to go slow, peel things back like an onion one layer at a time.

As I studied things, I would try to stay balanced. I would read things that were anti-mormon, and also read general conference talks and get both sides…see how both are being presented…see how both views have some things that speak to me…and try to decide what to hold on to, and what just doesn’t really matter to me.

There are many good things about the church. Try to hold on to those if you can.

I really love how people serve each other in the church. They try to practice the savior’s love. There is something to the church that helps people try to be good.

THanks for posting your thoughts as you go.