My oldest daughter reminded me this week that it has been exactly one year since we had our first missionary discussions with missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It touched my heart that she remembered the date, as I had been thinking about it as well. We weren’t always Mormon. I was a convert to the church when I had just turned twenty years old, working at Yellowstone National Park one summer. I met my husband working at the Old Faithful Inn that season, and we were married in the Salt Lake City Temple a year later. We had a beautiful life as very active members of the church, and raised our family living in a various areas of the country. My husband served in the Army, and my faith helped me endure his deployments and challenges during that time. We were blessed with five sweet children, and I was content.
When I had been a member of the Mormon Church for almost thirteen years, I was bothered that I was the only member on my side of the family. I began to doubt my faith, and I started to wonder if I would have felt that same closeness to Heavenly Father if I had joined another religion. I could not deny the feelings and spiritual experiences I had over the years, but I imagined that maybe I would have felt these things in any religion. The night before my husband was to deploy to the Middle East, we were talking about my doubts. As I verbalized how I felt, I made a decision and told my sweet husband that I was leaving the Mormon Church. He was shocked, and didn’t know how to respond. My husband’s family has roots that run deep in the Pioneer stock of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The idea of leaving the church was never something he had considered. My husband grew up with his faith, and served a two year mission at the age of 19. These experiences had given him a testimony of the truth he found there. He knew I was serious though, and I had always been stubborn. I think he knew this was a path I was going to take regardless of his protests. He deployed the next day to Iraq. The timing was terrible. We communicated by email and letters, and an occasional phone call home. My doubts put cracks in his faith, and although he never came to the conclusions I did at the time, he became content to follow me in exploring other religions. We were never baptized in the other churches we went to over the years, as we never felt a genuine belief in any of them. That didn’t stop us from searching though.
When I first left the Mormon Church, I was determined to find the same spiritual fulfillment elsewhere. I tried to take on the other traditions, and pondered other beliefs within Christianity. It seemed to me that it was simply a matter of adapting, and then I would feel those promptings of the Spirit that had affected me so often before. We went to beautiful churches, and heard inspiring messages at each one. I felt uplifted many times, but not moved in the way I had been within the Mormon faith. I did as much as I could to distance myself from our Mormon background. I even became a Starbucks Barista during the kid’s school hours, while waiting for my turn to get into my college RN program to become a nurse. I made sure to steer clear of the Mormon mothers on the PTA at school, and made sure the kids knew those Mormon children in their classes would only try to convert them. We were fairly successful at creating a barrier between us and any contact with the LDS Church besides family. And our family was fantastic over time, as they were convinced we would never return to the church. They showed us love and respect, and tried not to offend us with their beliefs. My husband’s sweet parents allowed me to tell them how I felt about the church, and about them leaving on their third couple’s mission to be MTC presidents in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I was less than supportive to be sure, and let them know it. Grace would be a good description of how they handled my opinions.
As time passed, I basically stopped looking for answers, and assumed nobody had them. I started to doubt Christianity as a whole. I felt distant from my Heavenly Father, and like a bit of a fraud when I prayed. So in time, I stopped praying as frequently, and at times didn’t pray at all. During these years, I was determined that my decision to leave the Mormon church had been right. I did not doubt that at all. Eventually I stopped wondering why I didn’t feel the Spiritual witness of truth in other churches and distance from my Heavenly Father. Somewhere along the way, I forgot what that even felt like.
These were not sad years for our family, as we didn’t consider what we were missing. We found joy in the closeness of our family, and touched daily by the love we have for each other. We focused on our family traditions, and our time together. I became a Registered Nurse, and my husband continued to work in his field. Our main focus was time with the family, and we spent countless hours hiking and camping together. My husband and I would talk about how maybe we would never find answers to our religious questions. There were times when we wondered how our children would find answers someday, or spouses that shared their moral values. It never crossed my mind that these morals had been shaped by the LDS faith that formed me as a mother to them. I was too busy convincing myself I had been right to leave the church to admit that I was still teaching my children the same values the Mormon faith teaches. And this is where I was at spiritually when everything changed for me.
A year ago this month, I had a spiritual prompting that I was wrong about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. These feelings came over me right after the presidential election. I had been telling everyone I knew that we certainly did not want a Mormon president, so I was expecting to feel relief when Romney lost. Instead I felt sickness and guilt for my blind judgements of the faith. I found myself feeling pulled towards the church and at first I tried to deny it. I had no desire to return to the Mormon church, and my mind was content to remain where we were in life. I could not put off the promptings for long though, and was moved to pray about it. I can not put into words the witness of the Spirit that I received. It changed my heart towards this faith in a moment. I received feelings of my testimony that first converted me to the faith years before, and was enhanced by a stronger conversion of truths that I had learned since. Leaving the church showed me how to discern the spirit clearly, and how to recognize truth. I suddenly realized a clearer picture of what my journey outside the church was, and what I had actually learned along the way. There is a difference in having a good life, and being uplifted, than when you feel a fullness of the gospel. I am grateful for Heavenly Father’s patience with me, and for moving me so deeply to find answers I had stopped looking for. There is goodness in many places and ways to live, but there is a fullness of joy in being enveloped in His Gospel.
Our family had the missionary discussions with Elder Durrant and Elder Steadman of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. We invited them to our home, living on Fidalgo Island in Washington State at the time. The miracle was the way that our entire family received the message. We had left the church entirely, and removed our names from the rolls of the LDS church. So when we were all ready, we were baptized as a family by my wonderful brother-in-law. Happiness does not begin to describe the feelings of that day.
No comments:
Post a Comment