kind of lost these days.

Welcome to the forum! Your story is familiar to all of us who have been around here for a while and there are many who have the exact same experiences and questions (not everyone has the same experience, I’m speaking collectively). For example, church was my life too and all of my friends were Mormons, and my four children are more or less inactive (some more than others).

I haven’t had the opportunity to give this advice in a long time, but here it is, my “trademarked” advice:

Take it slow, focus on what you do believe, and don’t dump all at once. The last one has two meanings and could be two things but I like it the way it is. It can mean “don’t throw out the baby with the bath water” or it could mean don’t dump all of your questions/doubts/unbeliefs on your loved ones (or church leaders) at once.

During that time I studied the scriptures for the very first time in my life.

It’s amazing what you can learn when you actually do feast upon the words of Christ without someone else telling you what the words mean. If you really want to feast, study the four gospels using something like the Oxford Annotated Bible (and I’ll note here that the four gospels are where the words of Christ actually are – there are relatively few of them elsewhere).

And THEN I came across the 132nd section.

Welcome to the club. I’m not a fan of D&C either and actually for myself do not consider it scripture. And there is no way I believe God sanctioned Mormon polygamy (or Mormon racism).

Actually, I’ve always had some big question, but tried to put them away far enough not to reach

This is commonly referred to as putting the stuff on a shelf. The problem is that many times the shelf breaks. Yours did (and so did mine).

Now, I am wondering what’s real. Is any of it real? I am lost these days.

I know that lost feeling. It can be very discouraging. Is any of it real? Honestly I don’t know. I hope some of it is. You seem to be in faith crisis mode, as many of us here are or were at one time. I’m in faith transition mode (my crisis mode lasted years and I expect my transition will probably take the rest of my life). I do strongly believe God wants us to be nice to each other because that’s repeated over and over in the Bible (and the BoM). I hope Jesus is what the Bible says he is. Other than that, I’m not sure what’s real.

I hope you find the peace you seek. Don’t be a stranger – we hear you.

Hi “is it real?”

My faith crisis was brought on by the stillbirth of our third child. In the midst of my grieving, I discovered that church doctrine about whether or not stillborn children “count” is murky. They are not listed on church or temple records but there has been some opinion expressed by church leaders that we will have them back to us and raise them in the millennium.

This lack of certainty was VERY disorienting for me. I was accustomed to black and white answers. A family was either sealed together by the holy priesthood and ratified by the holy spirit of promise or … it wasn’t. I had even thought that the temple records themselves were the Lord’s book of life spoken of in scripture. Now, I was able to decide for myself if someone “belonged” to my family in the eternity or not.

I find in my experience a model for losing a sense of certainty that was once provided by the LDS teachings.

Also, to make things a little more complicated, I am divorced and still sealed to my ex who is remarried (in the temple) and I am now married to a man who is divorced and is still sealed to his first wife. I don’t ever want to die if I have to be sealed to my ex and his new wife or my husband and his ex wife.

You get to decide what the afterlife will look like for you. It has taken me a long time to grow comfortable with that idea. What do you want your afterlife to look like? Who is in it?

Now, I am wondering what’s real. Is any of it real? I am lost these days. Some days I just want to walk away from it all and other days I think I need to stay but knowing what I know now, I just can’t un-know it. And sitting through RS and Sunday School is very painful these days because of all the pat answeres and dogma. I can’t handle it any more!

You also get to decide what is real. Perhaps you have a bedrock of faith in priesthood or Jesus or karma or progress and growth or love. That is real. Just because other people draw the line differently than you doesn’t make your faith any less real.

You may want to distract yourself in these church meeting or go elsewhere (like the foyer). Those meetings are meant to confirm and validate the beliefs of the traditional believer. Non-traditional answers may not be welcome and casting doubt on traditional beliefs is not nice. It’s sort of like a pep-rally for the favorite sports team. “We are the best and going all the way to the championship!!!” Everyone is there to feel good about themselves and the team. More realistic assessments of the team’s chance of winning the big game are not helpful for the spirit and purpose of the meeting.

It would be wonderful if you could go to those meetings and derive the same sort of upliftment that the more traditional believers receive but that ship may have sailed for you. However, that doesn’t mean that the church and its community have nothing to offer you. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater (like DJ mentioned earlier).

Perhaps the best “silver lining” of your current challenge is that it presents an opportunity to take a second look at your relationships with your inactive children. Maybe you expressed disappointment in their choices in the past based on your previous understandings. Maybe you can reach out to them to express admiration at the young adults that they are and how amazed you are by them. You could let them know that you support and cheer their individual walk of faith/spirituality and that, whatever happens, you are a family.

I hope you come back and share more as you go. Remember that this process is a marathon and not a sprint. Pace yourself.