Confessions of a Struggling Mormon

A reader sent me a link to this video. It is NOT anti-mormon. The man who put it together has callings in the church and is a fully active member. However, the video does bring up facts about the church that you may not know. If you think your testimony can be compromised by hearing things that are hard to accept, I would advise you not to watch it. However, this guy does an amazing job at outlining how I feel and the issues I struggle with. He assures you that none of these things mean that the church is not true.

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 was doing really very well. I was optimistic about the future. I was making progress. Then one day I was hit full force by discouragement and depression. I didn't go to school. I stayed in bed most of the day. Why is it that the smallest steps toward self-improvement are met with mountains of opposition? I often wonder why Satan would care so much. If he is so smart how could he not know he will loose in the end? Why would one person matter so much to him?

Do you ever have those days that you would just rather feel nothing? That is sort of how my week was. It is also why I liked drinking. Alcohol was never something that interested me. But the longer I went without feeding my spirit and doing the church thing, the more the undesirable became desirable. Parties, dance clubs, drinking... it was all so fun. No worries or cares about the crap in life- just plain fun.

Well, that was the trick. Have enough fun and you can mask how unhappy you are. Fill your life with enough temporary highs and you can forget that deep down you feel like crap. I eventually got to the point where I knew that I was unhappy. Those moments when you realize something like that are so lonely. You could be surrounded by hundreds of people and still feel utter despair. I spent Christmas night getting sick off tequila. It was pathetic. I've stopped drinking since then.

Point is, I don't have anything to mask the pain anymore. I have to deal with it head on. It's a hard thing to do. It was a hard week.

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."