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I have been lurking for a while and thought it about time I posted an introduction. I’ve been a member all my life, married in the temple and am now a divorced mother of 4.
I’m about 7 months into my faith crisis. It’s been a rough few months, my experience has been similar to many who have been through a faith crisis. Passed through the stages of feeling my world had fallen apart, anger, betrayal, immense grief at the loss of my testimony, anxiety, confusion, a period of real darkness and trying to work out whether I should stay or go.
I’ve stayed mainly active still doing my calling as primary president but skipping sacrament meeting many weeks.
I’ve recently decided that I don’t know anything anymore and don’t need to know anything just yet. This has allowed me to let go of much of the anxiety and confusion.
I’ve discovered that a couple of old friends I grew up in the church with aswell as my older brother have also gone through a faith crisis and are managing to remain in the church. This as well as participation on other boards and Facebook groups has allowed me to see I’m not alone. I’ve decided I’m going to try and stay LDS for now and so thought now is the time to post my intro.
I feel I am probably at the tail end of my crisis or at least hope So and am ready to embark on My faith journey. I’m just going to go real slow, have no expectation of myself and see where it takes me. Having established everything I don’t believe it’s time to discover what I do believe. The world suddenly seems a much larger place with so much new knowledge to acquire now that I’m not tied only to the Mormon way of thinking. My journey suddenly seems quite exciting.
awesomeness Welcome! It sounds like you have tasted some of the “forbidden” fruit. Isn’t it funny how the more you learn the less you know! As far as I’m concerned that is the right track – learn more and know less — nurture love, intelligence and humility and neglect pride. :thumbup: Hi, and welcome to the forum. I’m interested to follow you on what you discover and decide you believe. I’ve still not worked out what I don’t believe yet… it’s a long, long bell curve for me. An initial slide down… and a long stay at the bottom.
littlelostsheep wrote:Having established everything I don’t believe it’s time to discover what I do believe. The world suddenly seems a much larger place with so much new knowledge to acquire now that I’m not tied only to the Mormon way of thinking. My journey suddenly seems quite exciting.
I’m so glad I checked in today and read your post. I feel your sadness, but even more, I feel your excitement. It
isan exciting journey and you have a whole lot of us traveling with you. Now go rent Baraka! I’m now out of time to comment, but I want to welcome before I dash out the door. mackay11 wrote:I’ve still not worked out what I don’t believe yet… it’s a long, long bell curve for me. An initial slide down… and a long stay at the bottom.
Everything came crashing down quite quickly for me as soon as the question ‘could the church be not true?’ Entered my mind.
I spent a while trying to reclaim the testimony of the restoration I used to have and got discouraged for not being able to do so. The more I searched for answers the more I realised I know nothing.
Coming to terms with the fact I don’t ‘know’ anything and probably never will ‘know’ anything was a turning point for me I think.
Every time I start to get really discouraged my Bishop reminds me its OK to doubt, to have questions, concerns and frustrations. I’m lucky to have a good Bishop who I confided in very early on in my crisis who explained faith was not about knowing and could even be just wanting to believe or wanting to have a hope of believing.
I think I went from theist to atheist to agnostic to possibly, hopefully theist in the space of 6 months.
Last week was the 34th anniversary of my baptism and I was thinking over my testimony in that time and realised I went from an 8 year olds innocent I hope god exists, to absolutely knowing the church was true back to my 8 year old testimony now of I hope there is a God.
Hello! Bit weird me welcoming you when it was you who told me about this board!
I think you pretty much know my thoughts on this one but what you said below is one of the things exercising my mind at the moment.
littlelostsheep wrote:
faith was not about knowing and could even be just wanting to believe or wanting to have a hope of believing.
I`d always had this concept that faith was an enhanced form of belief. We believed something was true and then once we let it compel us into action it bacame faith. I`m begining to turn this on its head and its becoming quite enlightening. what if at one level faith is unrelated to belief? I have very little belief, but I have a lot of hope. Hope compels me to act.
I`m starting to appreciate that faith is a choice. I think I have been waiting, weighing up the evidence and expecting, after all my analysis, for the correct route I should take to fall out of the equation. That hasn`t happened and I no longer feel thats the way it works. There are compelling data points on both sides of the argument. Like you I quickly realised I knew nothing and that was empowering, really quite intoxicating too. My opportunity, now I have cast aside all the baggage and the things I no longer require, is to start at the ground floor and actively choose those concepts that I am going to build my faith upon. As Alma directs I will experiment on them and, if they feel good, they stay.
You`ve studied enough to know about our propensity for self deception, confirmation bias, etc and these are pitfalls that will catch us over and over. Hopefully having broken the old paradigm though we can be honest enough with ourselves now to be on the look out for these and have a fighting chance of making something of value.
Forget belief for now. I`m all for faith, hope and lots of charity.
I think it was Wayfarer, possibly on this board or NOM who said something along these lines very recently and it really resonated with me.
As an aside, its an interesting exercise to not cast aside the things you once felt were true but to pick them up and turn them on their head. Revisit them from a new angle. It may just be that much of what I had based my testimony on is actually true but I was just looking at it wrong. Humility forces me to conceed that I may be wrong about a great many things.
Hi, and welcome. I think you’re the person I’ve been talking to on FB, and it’s nice yet heartbreaking to read your story. Looking forward to your input on here.
Yes Kristmace that’s me. This is my more thoughtful intro.
My more stressed out bang in the middle of crisis story can be seen under the same name on newordermormon.
I think I’ve made some progress.
It’s not an easy journey.
Good to know others are on the same journey with me. Who knows where it will lead us
Welcome sheep!
rich wrote:
I`m starting to appreciate that faith is a choice. I think I have been waiting, weighing up the evidence and expecting, after all my analysis, for the correct route I should take to fall out of the equation. That hasn`t happened and I no longer feel thats the way it works. There are compelling data points on both sides of the argument. Like you I quickly realised I knew nothing and that was empowering, really quite intoxicating too. My opportunity, now I have cast aside all the baggage and the things I no longer require, is to start at the ground floor and actively choose those concepts that I am going to build my faith upon. As Alma directs I will experiment on them and, if they feel good, they stay.
I could have written that. Had to check twice to make sure I didn’t🙂 This is where I am in my journey. Until 3-4 months ago I was at rock bottom. I believed only in God and was agnostic about everything else. Heck our very own DBMormon played a key role in my change of direction! Somehow I came across his interview on MormonStories. It was one of the first (if not the first) podcast I listened to. From there I was introduced to the middle way. I learned that what I was going through had a label “faith crisis” and that it didn’t have to end with disbelief. Shortly there after I found stayLds and started to learn about the concept of faith as a choice. I:thumbup:
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