Why I stuck with the LDS Church- Adult

OK with this posting I could go off on so many tangents.  But I have tired to keep the story on task.

Well, I floated on my parents testimony and friends willingness to go to church for quite a while.  I felt guilty if I skipped Sunday church all together, but I still did not like going.  For the sacrament meeting I stopped sitting with my family and played with friends in the back row.  Finally I stopped sitting in the chapel all together.  I would hang out in the Foyer.  It had a sofa and nice armchairs for the parents who had to take screaming children out of the main meeting.  No nice mother's room anymore.  I liked it in the Foyer.  I liked the kids being dragged out.  They would calm down and I would play with them.  I felt like the meetings in church was a bunch of droning.  I was not interested.

I graduated High School and as I said before my Mother forced me to go to the local Community College.  I had a unique experience there I believe.  The overt taunting ended.  I would still hear a group of guys making derogatory remarks within their circle, but they kept it to themselves.  I could live with that.  I ate alone.  I studied alone,  I went to class and bowed my head trying to become as small as possible.  I had no idea how to do "small talk" with another person.  I knew I had to listen to the other persons thoughts, but really they hardly ever talked about anything I was interested in.  How do you become closer to a person when you don't agree with them?  I was in constant fear that I would say something to upset them and the hounds would be released.  So I was fine with being alone. 

But in Community College the caliber of people were different,  They had to want to be there.  Huge difference to anything I had experienced before.  The class size would shrink by the end of the semester as my peers motivation would dry up.  This was also the first time that I heard B.S. said as if it were the truth.  Not only was it crap, but people were very passionate about the crap, which confused me.  It was my first real world realization that not everyone thought the way I was taught,  How shocking!  The problem was I would express my opinion and it would be met with the same face people get when they smell a stinky diaper.  Could I be wrong?  What a new and incredible idea.

On the campus of almost all Colleges the LDS church has a space for the students to hang out, meet and take classes. It is known as Institute.  My Mother talked about loving her Institute at Yale University.  Elder Jeffery Holland was her teacher and she has many stories about her time with him.  Elder Holland in now an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a major leader.  I, on the other hand, I never went.  Finally, the leader I told you about in the last post who was still my friend, invited me to an Institute class.  I hem and hawed, but she said she would come and pick me up.  This leader was notorious for being late and I figured it would become to much for her and she would quit so I said yes with this in mind.  Well, dang it!  She was on time and dragged me to class on my day off from school. 

The class was on the history of the church.  I had heard most of it on and off most of my life.  I didn't know the whys or the who's and that was what the class was for.  I was not in a class with my peers., they mostly went at night.  I went during the day with the mother's who home schooled and grandma's.  The conversation did not interest me.  The most exciting class was when a fight erupted over Home schooling vs Public school.  I thought there was going to be some bloodshed, but no.

My friend was off talking to someone as I wandered around the building.  I knew I would not be comfortable in that space, no matter the pool table or how many puzzles were set out.  I felt like an invader in a place that was meant to feel like home.  I made a choice at that moment.  I made a choice to decide if I wanted to continue in this religion.  I was acting like all those hypocrites that I had hated in my teen years.  I knew my parents would be heart broken if I decided to end my association with the church, but I was twenty by this time and I needed to grow up.

I told my friend of my decision on the way back home.  "Oh," she said in response. "They have a religion class you could go to."  "Are you crazy?" was my reply.  "I don't want to learn about the church from a bunch of Mormons."  I thought that they would tend to be a bit too bias. I figured hearing it from members I would get a skewed view.   I wanted to hear the bad stuff that other people had always said about us.  I wanted to face the black hole of conflicting opinions.

At the time I was in a Theology class.  My teacher believed in God(but not the devil) which was quite a rarity for professors teaching that subject.  I would talk to him after class about the lessons.  In one of these talks I admitted that I grew up Mormon.  He jumped on me like a starving southern fat man seeing his mother's homemade pickled pigs feet.  "I teach a Religion of the World class.  In all my years I have never had a Mormon in my class.  If you give a talk about your religion it will count for half your grade and you won't have to take the final."  It sounded like a good deal,  so the next semester I found myself, the only Mormon, in a room full of outsiders.

I don't know about other Churches, but ours has a whole culture and language behind it.  It can be very confusing to try and explain a simple word because it has so much meaning behind it that everyone already knows.  It is very easy to pick out the person that doesn't belong.

The course was very illuminating, but not for the reasons I had intended.  I had come to the class wanting the teacher to tell me what I believed.  He said nothing about the Mormon church.  He talked about the Eastern religions. He covered Islam and the prophet Muhammad.  The Jews were represented along with Catholicism.  Nothing about the church that I had spent my whole life in. 

But an unexpected by-product happened from the class.  Each week my brain would be spinning with the beliefs of others and I wasn't sure how to make it jive with what I felt to be right.  For some reason my Mother would pick me up from that class.  I would ask her question after question on the ride home.  I trusted her.  She is a very intelligent woman with a Masters in Zoo-ology.  She had background in the sciences and she was blunt in her answers to me.  I could not bear those pat answers I heard in Sunday School every week.  I wanted to know how to work the teachings to my benefit.  She also believed and tried to live her religion.  She studied and knew what she was talking about in a way that I needed.  Sometimes I would get upset with what she told me on the ride home.  Sometimes I would feel an explosive excitement at what I had figured out.

I wanted the gritty dirt on the church.  I had wanted the scandals and I never heard about any of it.  I was getting introduced to the gospel, the actual teachings and beliefs..  I was being introduced to what many religions taught and I was being allowed to shift through all of them.  I did a paper on the religions that believed in reincarnation.  I study books and struggled to figure out the whys.  I wasn't finding the answers I needed.  Nothing I read in the literature soothed my soul.  I did not feel peace.

Want to know what made me the most upset?  What was the hardest idea for me to swallow?  I could not stand the thought that God was the Heavenly Father of all the people who had lived on earth, all the people who now live on the earth and all the people that would live on the earth.  If that were true then that meant that I was a little tiny insignificant speck in a sea of humanity.  That thought paralysed me.  I had felt like a branded number while in school.  The lack of my needs being met was rampant and I believed that God would treat me the same way.  In my mind there was no evidence that God loved me(I was wrong of course.  I had been born into a wonderful family) and if I was just another person among many then I would be lost.  I wanted to be special.

Now here is what tipped me over to remaining in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  They were the only ones I knew about that believed that God had restored his gospel and gave personal revelation.  I was promised that I could have my question answer by the source, not by a Priest that knew better than me, but by God himself.  That is a huge promise and I decided to put it to the test.  No one was going to tell me what was right,  I was going to find it out for myself.  And that choice put me on the road to change.  I trusted my feelings over anyone else's already and I did the same with my religion. 

The time came for me to give my talk to the class.  I wanted to back out so much because I realized that I didn't know anything.  I was clueless about my own religion.  I felt like the one eyed leading the blind. 

I ask everyone for help in giving that presentation.  I had a professional artist in the Ward draw me some visual aids.  I didn't care about the grade, I felt pure terror at giving wrong info to 30 other students.  I begged the missionaries to give the talk for me or at lest hand over the teaching material they had.  I was given a no to that plead.  Finally I decided to talk about the Plan of Happiness(what the church teaches about life and death) and talk about what made us different from other christian Church's i.e. We believe the president of the church is a Prophet, seer and revelator, who is supported by 12 apostle.  I brought my Mother to class for back up.  I felt she could clear up anything that I could say that wasn't quite right.  I opened my presentation up to questions.  I had participation and felt like it had gone very well.

I did not covert anyone that day, but a woman came up to me after class and said that her son had started to date a Mormon girl.  She had been worried that he was getting sucked into a cult and had come to the class to learn about the Mormons.  She was very grateful for my presentation and felt that every thing would be alright with her son.  She thanked me again and never showed up to class  after that day.

It is now over 15 years later.  I have gone forward with the teaching and promises with great fever.  I do not take any ones word for it, but seek to find my own answers.  I still don't like to go to church because I think it is boring, but it is a commandment and I follow those.  I want to talk about the nitty-gritty of what it takes to follow the Commandments, to express my spiritual experiences and to feel the love of Christ, but that is difficult for the average person.  It takes a huge amount of work to choose spiritual over physical.  It is very hard and I have become more compassionate to my fellow man if they are willing to give up hours of their life in service to the church.  I just believe it should be in the service of their God.  That is where a lot of my motivations differ even with fellow church members, let alone the world.  My loyalty is set.  I will try to choose my relationship with Jesus Christ over anything else on earth and while I wished many times that I could be free of the harm that is innate in a world with choice.  I have found that I have the prospective to see where it fits in the grand picture.