Confessions of a Struggling Mormon

Wow... it has been a crazy week. I've made some real progress however and am optimistic about the future. I went out clubbing last Friday and had a blast. However, one of my friends who has always been there when I go decided not to. This was fine. I honestly had a great time, got a little drunk, and just enjoyed the night. Well, the friends who did go with me lived quite a ways from me and I had driven to the club. I needed someone who could drive me the short distance to drop them off and back to my apartment complex.

I am a very self-aware person. When I drink, I am still very self-aware. I'm sure many of you scoff at that comment... but it is true. I was engaged in pretty deep conversation on the way home and have only actually got wasted once. Anyway, the friend I asked to drive me was the same one who normally goes with me. To make a very long story short this friend didn't react how I would have expected and it made for a terrible night where I felt I was being forced to decide between keeping friends and living how I choose.

Saturday night another good friend got me to go to his house and talk, which we did all through the night and into Sunday afternoon. It was extremely benificial. During the conversation I told him everything about me. My past, my present, even what I thought about my future. It was a little difficult to release all personal information to someone, but I felt more comfortable then than ever. He is someone who thinks a lot like I do. He has struggled with some of the same issues. Recently he had very real and personal experiences that helped him believe. We talked about how I could find answers. We concluded that the answer was active faith.

My whole life I have been very passive in my faith. I did things because they were expected of me, because they were just how things were, because its what everyone I knew did, etc. I never really had a reason to question. When you are born into a room where there is a party going on and everyone around you is dancing and having a good time, why would you ever need to question if the music is any good? Well, I found out that there are other rooms with different music and now I can look at this one objectively.

Things that I never questioned all the sudden became hard. I didn't understand it, so why would I do it? Well, this was the key that led me to progress. After talking with my friend about what active faith would look like for me, he pointed out that although I had gone to church in the past, it was never really difficult. Now, however, I didn't see the point. Plus I had been awake for over 24 hours and it would make it that much more difficult. I didn't want to do it, but I knew he was right. So I went to his branch (it was only his second time and it was his first time going for all 3 hours in years).

I got my answer at church. It was so strange. In this little branch of about 25 people, those who shared their testimony were SO specific to me. It was undeniable. Person after person, it kept happening. I wanted to stand up and proclaim that I believed! I didn't, but I felt that way. I actually finally learned what "burning in your bosom" felt like. It actually felt similar to the warm feeling you sometimes get when you drink haha... except it was more powerful and accompanied by extreme happiness and gratefulness. It may sound really lame, and I hope you know that I am not one to find ways to manipulate things into becoming answers for me. This was real. I received my answer.

I believe in a God who knows me personally and is aware of me and my situation. There is more depth to why I believe it, but this will have to do for now.

So it has been asked how it was that I ended up being in the position I find myself in. It is not an easy question to answer. 2 Nephi 28:21 says, referring to Satan, "and others will he pacify, and lull them away into carnal security... and thus the devil cheateth their souls, and leadeth them carefully down to hell." Well, that might be the best way to describe it. It is a bit more involved and complicated, I will do my best to explain.

The transition between mission life and normal life was hard for me. I went from being a major force in the wards I served to being just another face in the crowd who people liked to ask whether or not I was dating. I went from super spiritually focused me, to being set free into a world of little structure. Although I went mostly out of expectation (of others and of myself) I was a good missionary, and I had a testimony. However, visions of continuing to spend an hour on daily scripture study quickly vanished and my life became a lot like it was before my mission. The problem with that was my perfectionism. I always felt like I was worse than I was and that it was impossible to be as good as I was as a missionary.

I went to BYU after a couple months of working and was thrown into a whole new environment. It was good for me. As I got busy with school however, my priorities shifted. School has always been very important to me. It came before everything. I also worked. When push came to shove, religion was the first thing to go. First, it was prayers and scripture study, then it was church attendance. For a long time I kept up my activity despite my lack of spirituality. As I let the good things leave my life, the bad things took their place. I will go into these "bad things" later as I feel like discussing them (I've already mentioned one).

Eventually I began a second temporary job on Sundays and I became completely inactive even when that job was done. I didn't like going to church because I felt uncomfortable. I felt like a hypocrite. Sitting through lessons made me so angry. I was bitter and critical when a Sunday School teacher would ask questions like "why is prayer good?" It just wasn't for me.

Eventually I felt more and more the need to change direction. It was never my intention to go so far. I had to choose. Either I reject the church and it's teachings to pursue the life I was leading or I needed to change my life to align with the beliefs I had accepted as a child. That fork in the road scared me, and choosing the latter is proving to be much more difficult than I imagined it would be. Not only are the addictions and sins I let into my life extremely hard to overcome, but I am starting from scratch in building my testimony.

Building a testimony as an informed intellectual is much different than building one as a child. I've learned a lot of unsettling things I never knew about the church and some of its leaders. They are not discussed. You cannot find information about them on church websites. There are very few resources if any that are provided to help answer questions. At the same time, these facts obliterate the foundation of the childhood testimony I once had. While this is very difficult to deal with, if I can come out conqueror, I feel it will lead to a testimony stronger than I've ever had before because it will be based on the whole truth and on the struggle, study, and contemplation necessary to gain it.

I didn't go to church on Sunday. Instead, I stayed up talking to a friend about some of my own issues into the early hours of the morning which I felt was more beneficial than church would be. Don't get me wrong- I know that attending church is important and that it is necessary if I am ever to recover. I do feel, however,  that church is pretty impersonal. I'm not saying all wards are, but many student wards seem to be. People are always moving in and out of the ward, church is held in classrooms, and most members are students who spend lots of their time in a structured environment. I think it all seems to make church a lot like school. There is a teacher and a lesson.

I think church is meant to be more informal. Wards and quorums and other groups in the church are supposed to be places of support. Why is everyone so afraid to talk about what they struggle with? Why do we avoid difficult questions? Don't tell me that the answer to my problem of not feeling like praying is to "pray until [I] feel like praying" because whether a prophet said it or not, it doesn't make sense to me- nor does it work. I know, I know- how DARE I challenge a quote from a prophet. My point is, we often don't really talk about things that strengthen my faith or help my understanding because no one wants to veer too far from the lesson.

We also like to tip-toe around difficult topics. We talk hypothetically because no one wants to be judged if they actually have a problem or weakness. There is this huge fear of bringing some issues into the open because it is considered taboo to do so. The result is that we don't really get needed support from a community of men and women who share our beliefs. We just go on pretending "all is well."