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Heber13 wrote:
RDS – As you evaluate your life, do you see certain areas you can work on one at a time? I wonder if you have appropriate relationships (family, church, kids, friends) that you can develop that can help you. We certainly can try to support from our posts, but real life face-to-face can be really important.
Just a thought.
Thanks for the thought. I agree with all you said. They are all very good coping mechanisms. But sadly some of those areas have been compromised for me in recent years; and, as far as support system- you guys are it!
I am married to a man with Borderline Personality Disorder with strong Narcissistic Personality Disorder tendencies. (They usually go together to some degree anyway.) It is one of the most difficult personality disorders that exist and many therapists won’t even treat them. Anyway, the first thing BPDs do is split you off from anything and everyone not on their “approved list” and they approve of almost no one. So family, friends, hobbies, time for myself… all gone. My family I didn’t have a supportive relationship with anyway for the most part. I did have friends, but after I disappeared into the highest room of the tallest tower they moved away. It’s pretty impossible to make new ones in the current situation I am in… especially after having been now ostracized from the Mormon community. My husband would be my only support system except when the problem is related to him, his disorder, the consequences from his actions OR anything not on the approved list: There is no one to go to. Also as far as spiritual things he cannot process anything that I think or feel, and anything I say that is not orthodox is completely unacceptable. (Even though he can openly curse God. That’s OK!) So in short– no support system. Just you! I am very glad I found this forum. While it is no substitute for live interaction, it really is helping me sort out my feelings and beliefs.
Goals- I am always one for continuing to grow in all areas. I feel like anyone who quits growing is missing the point! So yes, at any given time I am generally working on something. For instance, I taught myself Brazilian Portuguese in the last couple of years. That makes me happy. However, I am sad I allowed myself to be so limited in recent years with other goals I had for fear of destructive temper tantrums. For example, I always exercised my whole life. But in recent years that was on the “not approved” list so I sadly quit. I in fact was not even in charge of what I would eat, or how much, or when. Now that I am semi-separated from my husband I have set new goals and renewed old ones so that I am getting back to that. Yay!
You brought up an excellent reminder of encouragement that I do need to get back to these things, so thanks for thinking of me.
I applaud you for being semi separated and starting to reclaim your life. I have unfortunately had some experience with borderline personality disorder sufferers too. I know you have done enough research to know that you need to set boundaries and stop walking on the eggshells. I also know it’s easier said than done, but you do that person with this disorder no favors when you allow him to control you. I am keeping you in my prayers. I do think God does care about us. My own life has shown me that. You are part of my support system as well. I enjoy coming here and thinking of things. Keep looking for balance in multiple areas of your life. When I hit a wall with one thing, sometimes another area of my life opens up. I find answers outside the church as well as inside, but no longer try to fit everything through a church peghole. Some things in life are just not related to the gospel, IMO. Anyway..glad you’re here and hope we can support!
:thumbup: RagDollSallyUT, if I understand your posts correctly, it seems that you and I are fighting the same inner battle in that we want to believe in a personal God who knows our name and answers our prayers and cares about the little details of our lives, but the evidence we have based on our experience, observations, and logic clearly tells us that this view of God is at best unsupported. I find myself going back and for with, “I want to believe..but the evidence contradicts belief…but I want to believe…but the evidence contradicts belief…but I want to believe…but the evidence contradicts belief…” And so I find myself fighting the battle of my feelings wanting the Church to be true and wanting to hold a traditional view of God and the clear evidence that indicates that there is are no good reasons to believe in a personal God or a one true church. The fact that God seems only to answer the prayers of a select elite favored few while ignoring the prayers of the less fortunate is one piece of evidence that you and I have seen that does not support the personal God hypothesis, as it could be called. I’m not sure which one will win out for me- my desire to believe or the strength of the evidence (and the disappointment of unanswered prayers.) I suspect that in the end I’ll just have to follow the evidence, wherever that leads me, because the internal dissonance I have when I believe something that I know is probably wrong is hard for me to deal with. Some people can ignore the evidence- that’s a notable part of Fowler’s Stage 3 Faith. But I can’t ignore good evidence anymore. And I can tell that you can’t either, which is why you seem to be fighting the “feelings vs. evidence” battle. Quote:Some people can ignore the evidence- that’s a notable part of Fowler’s Stage 3 Faith. But I can’t ignore good evidence anymore.
and other people simply have seen / experienced / felt / perceived evidence differently than others.
That’s what is the hardest part of faith, imo – the fact that “spiritual / religious evidence” is so subjective and, as you said, InquiringMind, apparently distributed so randomly.
I don’t have a great answer to why that is. I openly admit it’s illogical and unexplainable to me, but I also openly admit that I personally have “seen” evidence that works for me – if for nothing more specific than that there is someone / something out there beyond and “above” (inside and within) us that I choose to accept as “God”.
Quote:That’s what is the hardest part of faith, imo – the fact that “spiritual / religious evidence” is so subjective and, as you said, InquiringMind, apparently distributed so randomly.
This is particularly interesting to me. I recall hearing that C.S. Lewis said that he “resisted the approach of him who he so desperately did not want to meet,” meaning God. Another person I was talking to said their son didn’t want to go on a mission, then was shocked by God while in the shower one day and was told he needed to go. Then there is the story of Alma the younger in the BofM who had an angel sent to him to reclaim him, and there is Saul’s conversion story in the NT. It’s curious to me that God seems to proactively pursue certain people and clearly shows his existence to them while letting others pursue their agnostic course; God also sometimes (often?) ignores the prayers of others who plead and pound on his door who ask if he exists. This distribution of individuals to whom God asserts his presence and power seems to be as you say: random. There seems to be no good reason why God chooses to give a powerful spiritual experience to one atheist to reclaim him from his disbelief while leaving another atheist to go on his merry unbelieving way.
A curious part of significant spiritual experiences seems to be that they are unplanned: they are not within the individual’s conscious control. I spent a long time waiting for Moroni’s promise to be fulfilled for me, thinking that if I kept on the path, the witness would come to me. It didn’t (as it doesn’t come to many people.) The ability to receive spiritual experiences does seem to be randomly distributed and not related to good moral behavior.
Yes, inquiring mind. You nailed it. It is so relieving to hear someone else say the exact same things I have been thinking. Thank you. I have even toyed with so many different ideas trying to find a way to get my head around it. For instance I thought of the concept of heavenly mothers. I thought of how things here are supposed to be an imperfect reflection of what is there. I thought of the proclamation to the family and how it states that mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of the children. I thought of how some claims are that God has many wives. I thought perhaps many of us have different mothers and some mothers intervene more for children then others. I thought maybe it’s my heavenly mother who is not being there for me. Crazy? Maybe. (I don’t really believe this– it was just a thought I was toying with.) It’s just there are such cavernous differences between people’s lives and the ways at which people’s prayers seem to be answered. There really does seem to be favorites! And it is not based on righteousness! Some of the most blessed are really bad people. (They don’t always seem to know that though but that’s another story!) I acknowledge these theories to be maybe silly. But so very much of our faith that we have been taught for so long is centralized around this; in fact, I think 90% of what it talked about in church is about a personal god who loves and and intervenes for us. How can we just walk away from that?
And it’s not that I lost faith. I believed, and believed and believed even when all “proof” pointed to the opposite. I believed as as I was sentenced to burn that I would be saved. I believed as I was tied to the stake. I believed as the fire was lit. I believed as the flames licked my toes. But now I am enveloped and all I see now are flames. How can I yet believe?
Fox Mulder had a poster in his office that said “I want to believe.” In these last few years, this has become my mantra.
Thanks for listening.
I have come to believe that God intervenes dramatically only when there is a point at which He needs to do so in order to change the course of history. Otherwise, even in the case of the future missionary in the shower, it’s much more subjective and “questionable” to others. I’ve also come to believe strongly that there is a “faith orientation”, if you will, that operates within individuals. Iow, “to some is given to know . . . to some is given to believe” – and to some is given neither to know nor believe. For that last group, the choice is to have faith (hope in the unseen) or not – meaning to move forward with neither knowledge nor belief (evidence that is not at the level of knowledge-producing).
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