And so it goes… July 1, 2008

One thing I liked to do, during my spiritually inactive time, was log on to the Mormon chat room (ldschat.com) and harass people. Not in an anti-Mormon way, just in annoying, ridiculous way. One night I came home late from whatever I was out doing, and I logged on to ldschat.com. After a few minutes, I noticed someone online using the name of a band that I liked as a handle, so I messaged the person and started chatting. I found out I was chatting with a guy who was a year or two older than me and was preparing to go on a mission. We talked about mostly secular things. He told me to download some of his band’s music off Napster. And that was that.

The next night I came home from that evening’s escapades slightly inebriated. I logged onto ldschat.com to goof around, and I ended up talking to the person I had spoken with the night before. The conversation started off casually; however, the topic of my feelings towards the church soon came up. I explained my issues with various points of doctrine. The young man with whom I was speaking began to tell me that sometimes we need to have faith to overcome these things and wouldn’t I want to know if it were true? He asked me if I would pray about it, and I said I would. And so I knelt and offered a prayer and felt that familiar warmth come over me. I went up to my bedroom that night and dug my scriptures out from under the bed. I flipped open my triple combination to D&C and landed on section 76:

5 For thus saith the Lord—I, the Lord, am merciful and gracious unto those who fear me, and delight to honor those who serve me in righteousness and in truth unto the end.
6 Great shall be their reward and eternal shall be their glory.
7 And to them will I reveal all mysteries, yea, all the hidden mysteries of my kingdom from days of old, and for ages to come, will I make known unto them the good pleasure of my will concerning all things pertaining to my kingdom.
8 Yea, even the wonders of eternity shall they know, and things to come will I show them, even the things of many generations.
9 And their wisdom shall be great, and their understanding reach to heaven; and before them the wisdom of the wise shall perish, and the understanding of the prudent shall come to naught.
10 For by my Spirit will I enlighten them, and by my power will I make known unto them the secrets of my will—yea, even those things which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor yet entered into the heart of man.

Reading these verses was an answer to my prayer that I could not deny. I had issues with not understanding the will of God, and here was a response: I just needed to accept that I could not understand everything, and one day all things would be revealed. When I told my mother what had happened, she was thrilled.

When I told my boyfriend about my experience, he was not thrilled. His mother was quite anti-Mormon, despite the fact that she was not all that devout in her own religion. He always seemed to think she was rather silly, but when I came to him with this, it seemed that some of her ideas had influenced him after all. We ended up breaking up over it, about two weeks before our two year dating anniversary. I spent the next few months trying to repress my feelings of hurt. My newfound devotion to the gospel didn’t seem to help. I found myself falling into depression and I didn’t know how to deal with it. At some point I decided to self-medicate, turning to substances to distract myself from time to time. I became casually involved with someone who was exactly the opposite of everything that I am (think dumb jock).

Then one day it came to a point where I felt bad about the way things were going and I decided I need recommit myself to living the gospel. The next day at church, my branch president asked to meet with me for the first time ever, and I confessed all my sins. The timing couldn’t have been better.

On New Year’s Eve, shortly after the break-up, I was at a party and spoke with a former classmate. She was going to go to Europe to work as an au pair. As I listened to her talk about it, I said, “I wish I could do something like that…” She replied, “Why don’t you?” Up until that point I had never considered taking time off from school; but there was no reason why I couldn’t. A little while later I found an agency and began making arrangements to spend the next year in France. The agency found a family for me to work for in the suburbs of Paris.

I spent 10 months in France, and I attended church nearly every week. I had to take a bus, then a train, and then the metro to get to the meetinghouse in the Parisian ghetto, but I attended faithfully. The ward was not at all what I was used to. It was noisy during sacrament meeting and there was only one counselor in the bishopric; but I enjoyed the diversity. There was certainly no lack of character.

I experienced a lot of loneliness in France. It was hard to be away from my family for so long. I’m fairly certain that I become mildly depressed during that time, and by the end of my time there I was counting down the days.

Despite the difficulties, I think I was fairly comfortable spiritually during that time. I was happily reading the Book of Mormon in French, convinced that this would aid me in my acquisition of the language. It took me a while before I realized that le Livre de Mormon is mostly written in a really useless literary tense that is barely used now, even in literature.

When I came home after 10 months away, I initially attended my parents’ ward. But after awhile I started going to the YSA branch again. There was a young man attending the branch who was investigating the church. He looked familiar but I couldn’t place him. I finally realized that I had met him before. He was a friend of a friend of my ex-boyfriend. I met him at a Propagandhi concert right before I left for France. He didn’t really make an impression.

I saw him at the YSA dance at Halloween, and I decided to ask him to dance. I was like, hey, you’re so-and-so’s friend… He told me that he was getting baptized the next day. Shortly after that, I started dating a much older guy who I later deemed to be too apostate for my liking and stopped seeing. The following March I was at work when convert guy came in with a non-member friend. We exchanged pleasantries and then a little while later he returned to my counter to try to convince me to come to the YSA dance the next evening. Less than two weeks later we were a couple, and seven months later we were married. We had to wait for his one year membership anniversary so we could go to the temple.

A beginning. June 30, 2008

How far back do you have to go to get the whole story? My father’s parents became members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints before he was born. They had two children at the time, but upon joining the church, they decided they’d better have two more. My mother was raised mostly without religion in a rather unstable environment. She was introduced to the church as an 18 year-old when she left home to go to university. She was baptized soon after.

Some of my earliest memories revolve around church and church-related activities. I remember going to Primary and wearing a bumblebee name tag. Apparently I could sing “I Am A Child of God” when I was 18 months-old. I was taught religion as fact and I don’t remember questioning it as a child. When I turned 8, I was excited to be baptized (aside from the fact that I didn’t like the kid who was getting baptized at the same time as me). Naturally child-like faith does not last forever, and as I approached adolescence, I began to rebel in some small ways against the religion in which I was raised.

In grade seven, a male friend asked me out. I wasn’t especially attracted to this boy, but he asked, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I said yes. In grade seven, when you asked someone out, you weren’t actually asking them to go on a date, but rather, you were asking them to be your boyfriend or girlfriend and for the most part that just meant that you held hands at lunch. As innocent as it was, it was still a rebellion because of the church’s stance that people should not date at all until age sixteen. I soon grew tired of the boy, and had another girl break up with him for me, but that was not the end of my rebellion.

When I got to high school, another boy “asked me out” during the first week of school and said yes, because it could be fun to hold hands at lunch. That year I spent many of my lunch hours in “the smoke pit” because that’s where my friends went. At the beginning of the year I would often take puffs of my friends’ cigarettes. It gave me quite a head rush, and I sort of liked the taste. Then the youth temple trip rolled around and I found myself in the bishop’s office, being interviewed. I wanted to go on the trip, so I confessed that I had tried smoking, but said I wasn’t going to do it anymore. That was satisfactory to my bishop, and I was allowed to go to the temple to perform baptisms for the dead. After that I did stop.

The next year I found a new group of friends, mostly people who were in honours classes with me, and there was significantly less opportunity for these sorts of small rebellions. I am trying to recall what my inner environment was like during these few years. Since I find that events and actions are easier to recall than thoughts or feelings, to some degree I can only speculate about my own orientation. I remember that I was always told about find out for myself if the church was true. And I remember kneeling by my futon and praying about it, and feeling rather empty inside. I knew what I was supposed to feel, because I had felt “the spirit” at certain times in my life, but I didn’t feel it then. Thus I was left unsatisfied.

As a youth, I bristled against the Young Women’s program. I barely touched Personal Progress after age 14, and I disliked the things I was being taught. I sat through lesson after lesson about being a wife and mother. I took pleasure in telling my leaders that I would never marry and would just have a bunch of cats. I became furious with the homophobic comments of a Sunday School teacher and stormed out of class. These generally accepted attitudes in the church were offensive to my soul.

I remember reading 1984 the summer I turned sixteen and it had quite an effect on me. It pushed me to think about society and religion in a new way. That year I was introduced to punk music by my boyfriend and I then went on to discover “Riot Grrrl” on my own. The music of bands like Bad Religion captured many of the ideas that had been going through my head since reading 1984. “Riot Grrrl” was a music scene that started in the pacific northwest during the grunge era, and consisted of angry, feminist, queer-positive, mostly female bands. These things were significant to my developing world view.

During this period of my life, I attended church pretty much every week to appease my parents. I graduated from high school at the same time my stake created a YSA branch. I attended there because I liked the later meeting times. I finished reading War and Peace during sacrament meetings, and I could slip out quietly once that was over.

To be continued…