Jesus, Take the Wheel
I didn't mean for my first real post to be about religion.
I wanted to be able to post my measurements and say, "I've already lost five pounds!" Wouldn't that have been cool? Just one week of actually writing down what I'm eating and, poof! Oops!
I am a Mormon--a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints--and I have been my whole life. There was a period during high school where I dabbled. I read the Quran, attended a couple different religious services, practiced solitary witchcraft (that's a whole other blog post), but Mormonism was what I always came back to.
Like all good Mormon boys do when they reach their late teens, I chose to give up two years of my life for church service and ended up being sent to Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Although I was supposed to be gone for two years, I was sent home after 14 months of service for reasons that I won't get into.
This rocked my world. For the first time in my life, the Church no longer felt like home. That's a big deal. Once Mormonism becomes apart of your life, it metastasizes, infiltrating everything until you can't go a minute without thinking about it, so I began to feel like a shell of a person. I've tried to eke by, but by the end of last year, I had come to a crossroads: either I recommit to Mormonism and figure out how to navigate that life, or I renounce it and move on.
One of my favorite scriptures in the New Testament is John 7:17, "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself." Because of this scripture, I knew that if I wanted to know if the Church was true, specifically if the current prophet Russell M. Nelson (RMN) was indeed called of God and his administration was inspired, I'd have to live it before I could pray about it. I had a whole schedule worked out wherein I'd read RMN's teachings, study from the Church's new curriculum for Sunday School, attend the temple, and do everything that a good member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should do. My plan was to live like this until April, when I have to renew my recommendation to be able to worship in the temple. If I didn't have a witness by then, I wouldn't be able to renew my recommend, and so I could just move on with my life.
This plan started off great. I started the year off with daily scripture reading, daily and nightly prayers, I wasn't cursing as much. Then, on January 2nd, I got news that the church had revised sections of the ceremonies in the temple that were especially sexist to appear more egalitarian. I couldn't help but laugh for joy. I'd been praying for these changes since my feminist awakening after my mission. My Mormon feminist foremothers had prayed for these changes for generations, and now they'd finally come. Then, on Saturday, January 5th, my wife and I decided to crack open the new Sunday school curriculum and give it a spin.
When we started going through the lesson, it was just the same old same old. Scriptures taken out of context, stories that didn't seem to apply, but then we came to a section which refers to a talk by Elder David A. Bednar called "Seek Learning by Faith." I'm not a big Bednar fan. He and I are about as opposite as can be on the spectrum of what it is to be a Mormon, but he visited my mission while I was there, and tasked us with studying this talk before he came. Reading it again flooded my memory with the extraordinary things he taught and with the feeling that I knew that he was an apostle.
We kept reading, and came to the suggestion of reading Alma 32:27 in the Book of Mormon to find a response to the question: What does it mean to take responsibility for your own learning?
But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words.
God spoke to us in that moment. We wanted, more than anything to believe. The flame of our faith was barely a spark, but we were experimenting to know. Our hearts began to burn, and we started sobbing. For the first time in what seemed like forever, God was letting us know that They were aware of us. For the first time in forever, the still, small voice wasn't whispering to me confirming righteous indignation or comforting me when mourning, but to tell me that I was on the right path, and that God had called RMN as prophet. It again whispered that truth during sacrament meeting the next day, and then for a third time in Sunday School, where I couldn't help but be vulnerable and share the truths that I had learned.
In less than a week, I had accomplished what I meant to in four months. I hadn't planned for that, and I certainly hadn't planned for what being a committed Mormon again would look like.
I've come so far from where and who I was when I returned from Brazil seven years ago. I've learned about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Joseph Smith's polygamy, the priesthood/temple ban, the Church's actions with Proposition 8, the Policy of Exclusion, sexual abuse coverups with President Bishop, missionaries, and the Indian Placement Program. How can I justify believing that the Church is divinely inspired when all of these things are so evil and corrupt?
I don't know how. I don't know what to do with all these conflicting feelings. I don't know how to approach sustaining leaders who are complicit in these scandals. The fact that the leaders of the Church are human and prone to failure is not comforting, nor does it address these concerns. They should live to and be held to a higher standard.
What I do know is that I feel something. I dipped my toe back into Mormonism, and there is something in me that needs to see this path through.
Jesus, take the wheel, because I think I'm in for a bumpy ride.
I wanted to be able to post my measurements and say, "I've already lost five pounds!" Wouldn't that have been cool? Just one week of actually writing down what I'm eating and, poof! Oops!
I am a Mormon--a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints--and I have been my whole life. There was a period during high school where I dabbled. I read the Quran, attended a couple different religious services, practiced solitary witchcraft (that's a whole other blog post), but Mormonism was what I always came back to.
This rocked my world. For the first time in my life, the Church no longer felt like home. That's a big deal. Once Mormonism becomes apart of your life, it metastasizes, infiltrating everything until you can't go a minute without thinking about it, so I began to feel like a shell of a person. I've tried to eke by, but by the end of last year, I had come to a crossroads: either I recommit to Mormonism and figure out how to navigate that life, or I renounce it and move on.
One of my favorite scriptures in the New Testament is John 7:17, "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself." Because of this scripture, I knew that if I wanted to know if the Church was true, specifically if the current prophet Russell M. Nelson (RMN) was indeed called of God and his administration was inspired, I'd have to live it before I could pray about it. I had a whole schedule worked out wherein I'd read RMN's teachings, study from the Church's new curriculum for Sunday School, attend the temple, and do everything that a good member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should do. My plan was to live like this until April, when I have to renew my recommendation to be able to worship in the temple. If I didn't have a witness by then, I wouldn't be able to renew my recommend, and so I could just move on with my life.
This plan started off great. I started the year off with daily scripture reading, daily and nightly prayers, I wasn't cursing as much. Then, on January 2nd, I got news that the church had revised sections of the ceremonies in the temple that were especially sexist to appear more egalitarian. I couldn't help but laugh for joy. I'd been praying for these changes since my feminist awakening after my mission. My Mormon feminist foremothers had prayed for these changes for generations, and now they'd finally come. Then, on Saturday, January 5th, my wife and I decided to crack open the new Sunday school curriculum and give it a spin.
When we started going through the lesson, it was just the same old same old. Scriptures taken out of context, stories that didn't seem to apply, but then we came to a section which refers to a talk by Elder David A. Bednar called "Seek Learning by Faith." I'm not a big Bednar fan. He and I are about as opposite as can be on the spectrum of what it is to be a Mormon, but he visited my mission while I was there, and tasked us with studying this talk before he came. Reading it again flooded my memory with the extraordinary things he taught and with the feeling that I knew that he was an apostle.
We kept reading, and came to the suggestion of reading Alma 32:27 in the Book of Mormon to find a response to the question: What does it mean to take responsibility for your own learning?
But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words.
God spoke to us in that moment. We wanted, more than anything to believe. The flame of our faith was barely a spark, but we were experimenting to know. Our hearts began to burn, and we started sobbing. For the first time in what seemed like forever, God was letting us know that They were aware of us. For the first time in forever, the still, small voice wasn't whispering to me confirming righteous indignation or comforting me when mourning, but to tell me that I was on the right path, and that God had called RMN as prophet. It again whispered that truth during sacrament meeting the next day, and then for a third time in Sunday School, where I couldn't help but be vulnerable and share the truths that I had learned.
In less than a week, I had accomplished what I meant to in four months. I hadn't planned for that, and I certainly hadn't planned for what being a committed Mormon again would look like.
I've come so far from where and who I was when I returned from Brazil seven years ago. I've learned about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Joseph Smith's polygamy, the priesthood/temple ban, the Church's actions with Proposition 8, the Policy of Exclusion, sexual abuse coverups with President Bishop, missionaries, and the Indian Placement Program. How can I justify believing that the Church is divinely inspired when all of these things are so evil and corrupt?
I don't know how. I don't know what to do with all these conflicting feelings. I don't know how to approach sustaining leaders who are complicit in these scandals. The fact that the leaders of the Church are human and prone to failure is not comforting, nor does it address these concerns. They should live to and be held to a higher standard.
What I do know is that I feel something. I dipped my toe back into Mormonism, and there is something in me that needs to see this path through.
Jesus, take the wheel, because I think I'm in for a bumpy ride.
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