I went to my Bishop for a temple recommend interview. When he asked me how my testimony was doing, I had to answer honestly that it’s been struggling.
There're some things about the LDS Church that just aren’t adding up. But when I tried to discuss it with my Bishop… in the hopes that he could help resolve some of my doubts, he shut me down.
“If you’ve had these doubts for a while, then why would you even come to BYU? You know there are tons of people who actually want to be here and who deserve to be here. If you can’t find your testimony by the time ecclesiastical endorsements roll around, I don’t feel comfortable endorsing you.”
Translation: get your crap together in a month or I’ll kick you out of BYU.
It wasn’t just unhelpful, it was damaging. The first person I reached out to was…
You guessed it. Ian.
He’s been through Church stuff with me before. I was hoping for a steady opinion and someone who knows me. But when he didn’t respond to my text within a day or so, I got a little worried. I looked him up on FB, but his name didn’t come up. Confused, I logged into my mom’s account and searched for him there. He came up.
So he frikkin' blocked me, which is great. After all we’ve been through, after all he’s put me through, he is the one blocking me?? Besides that though, he’s engaged. I have so many stupid and mixed emotions about that. My immediate reaction was jealousy and disappointment. Which is beyond crazy. My second reaction was a little saner, just an intense worry and fear for his fiancée. Who knows if he’s really changed.
The next person I reached out to was Daniel. He’s my best friend and has strong opinions on the church, so I should’ve known better. His first reaction was “Great! Now we can be together!”
It’s weird to realize that I don’t love him like that anymore. He’s been mean on purpose, been degrading and disrespectful, too many times. I see him differently. He’s still my best friend, a crazy mermaid genius, and I rely on him. But I don’t want anything romantic with him.
So the last person I felt comfortable reaching out to was Madeleine. We met when we were eleven and we've always been pretty close. She left the church several years ago. She’s been through all of this and she’s been an incredible help to me. She tries really hard to just give me feedback and keep her strongest opinions out of it. But she’s helped me to find a lot of information and to consider things a little more openly. I have a lot of crap in my head and she just helped me sort it and calm it down and figure it out a little bit. She’s a safe place.
I have a lot of information now and I’ve just been comparing and thinking a lot.
But it’s not gonna help me figure out my crap in a month.
So that’s why I sat in my Bishop’s office last week and gave all the answers that he wanted to hear, bore a testimony that I don’t have, smiled a lot. He gave me my ecclesiastical endorsement and renewed my temple recommend. At the end of the interview he shook my hand for like a minute and said “I can usually tell how a person is doing based on their countenance. And your countenance is so much brighter than it was when you first came to see me. You have come so far.”
It was shocking to hear. I’ve never doubted the authority of bishops, but there he was buying my cheap lines and telling me how much I’d improved. If I have improved, it’s not for the reasons he thinks or in the direction he wants. The whole interview just seemed like a joke.
It’s been a painful past month or so. I’m nowhere close to making decisions or acting or anything, but some of these realizations… I’m realizing that Church authority doesn’t give out facts and information that puts the church in the bad light. Like the whole “Joseph Smith didn’t write the first vision down until 10+ years after it happened and then he wrote a ton different versions. Some of these included him seeing only one person, seeing two people, seeing no specific people just a multitude of singing angels..” I don’t know. Some of the evidence is overwhelming. And to me, withholding evidence is a lot more suspicious than just being open about the facts, which the church just is not.
It's especially painful because I’ve built my entire identity around the church, around being Mormon. Not to mention my family and expectations for you.
Mostly I’m just really really scared and not ready to share or talk about this with anyone.
Please be patient with me as I figure things out and know that I love you.
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