How I Got Here, Part I April 17, 2008
It seems like whenever some finds out I’m an investigating the LDS church, their first question is, “So how did you hear about us? Why are you interested?” I always want to say something about how those questions make the LDS church sound like some kind of secret group. No, I did not have a missionary knock on my door. No, I was not handed a pamphlet as I walked across town. No, I did not see some cheesy infomercial on the church. I went looking for the church and it spoke to me.
I grew up in very old Presbyterian church. I think it had its 350th birthday a few years back. I loved that church. By the time we left I knew every inch of it. We weren’t very involved when I was younger. We occasionally went to church, but not often. In middle school, I started dealing with seasonal affective disorder (a type of depression), but I didn’t realize why I was feeling so bad. I found myself investigating Wicca. It wasn’t something I really believed in. I was looking for something to make me feel better. Obviously God had failed, so perhaps another type of religion had the answer. My mom found out about it (Wicca, not the depression) and flipped out. She told me that until I was 18, I was to attend the church that they wanted me to go to. Within a year I stopped looking into Wicca, but the depression made me feel like God had left me.
My family became more involved in church life as I entered my teenage years. I sang in the choir, did church musicals, attended middle school and high school youth group, and got confirmed. My last two years at the church were the best. In our “Sunday school class” we talked about all sorts of issues - sex, drinking, drugs, homosexuality, gay marriage, ordination of gay pastors, the death penalty, evolution, our crazy parents, et cetera. Sometimes we had guest speakers like the woman whose child was murdered and made a plea in court for the killer’s life to be spared. The pastor’s son came out to us before anyone else. I heard that he and his partner had a commitment ceremony earlier this year. And the best part about the senior high group was that we had Dunkin Donuts, orange juice, and milk every week. I still believed that God was out there somewhere, but I didn’t feel connected to him.
When we moved to the Midwest we had to leave our church behind. We tried attending another church here but the people weren’t very nice. When I was 17 and the war in Iraq was brewing I got in an argument with my pastor about the war. He basically wanted to go over there and beat the crap out of those darn Iraqis. First of all, that is no way for a pastor to speak. What happened to “love thy neighbor?” I wanted him to realize that as a country we would be killing many innocent people. He told me he didn’t care about civilians. He seemed to think that it was their own fault for living under such a dictator. What kind of pastor endorses the killing of innocent men, women and children?
So after that I stopped going to church. I told my parents what happened and they didn’t push the issue. I think they stayed with the church so that my brother and sister could get confirmed. At 18, my parents told me that I had religious freedom. I could go to any church I wanted to. I decided to try out the Society of Friends (aka Quaker) meetings. They didn’t seem right for me. Too much quiet and a little too…weird. I liked them as people though. Over the next four years I’d sporadically visit a new church - Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, Unitarian Universalist. I’d go once or twice and then stop.
Then I got really sick this year and no one knew what was wrong. I started freaking out and thinking that I had some weird fatal illness. My entire world perspective shifted. I stopped getting upset about little things. I rang up my ex-boyfriend and we met for coffee and talked politics because I wanted to see him before I left town. Luckily, the physicians found out that one of my endocrine glands was malfunctioning and secreting too much hormone, which isn’t fatal. It’s just annoying and I get to put up with it until I get the gland out in May. Anyhow, this experience jump-started my search for faith. Exactly HOW did I find the LDS church? Well I had been researching faiths but nothing caught my eye. One night I watched this show called, “Secret Lives of Women.” The episode was about polygamy and plural marriages. While the show made the point that the LDS does not condone plural marriage, I still thought to myself, “Wow, these people are weird. I bet regular Mormons are weird too. What’s the history behind Mormons and plural marriages?” To confirm my belief, I pulled up the info on LDS beliefs. And as I read I thought, “huh. Some of this makes sense. Some of this matches what I believe.” So I found the LDS church by trying to validate my opinion that Mormon beliefs are weird. Instead I ended up finding a church that touched my soul and brought God back into my life. (Ok, don’t flip out now. I’ll explain more in the next post. I promise.)
Of course I don’t tell this story to the missionaries. I don’t tell anyone exactly what happened. I just smile and say, “Oh, I’m just looking at different churches and this one seems to interest me.”
