Growing up, I think I basically imagined God as being somewhat akin to a General Authority. In my mind, he (male, of course) was a generally benevolent older man. He wasn’t mean, necessarily, but he did have very clear expectations of how people should act, and would be disappointed if you didn’t meet those expectations. He would lecture when necessary, if he felt like you needed it. He would be patient, sure, but he also had a clearly defined plan for you, and wasn’t very interested in your opinions or ideas about how things were going, because you needed to get on board and follow the plan. God didn’t particularly care about your feelings, for heaven’s sake; he cared about accomplishing his grand purposes. I mean, he might listen politely and maybe even acknowledge what you said, but ultimately he wanted you to get with the program and get over yourself.
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Trying to Quit God
The year that I was 23 years old, I wrote in my journal that I had made some progress on a particular goal. I had managed to go for a month without praying. (I admitted that I had actually slipped once, but I wasn’t counting that because it was short, and not actual conversation.) It was an incredibly challenging thing to do, but I had done it. Another step toward getting to where I wanted to be. Maybe I could finally give up on this whole believing in God thing, I thought optimistically, and move on with my life.
That right there should tell you a little bit about my 23-year-old self. I was intensely obsessed with matters of religion and faith and God, but they caused me such profound ambivalence that I constantly dreamed of letting them go. After graduating from BYU, I had decided that I was done with the LDS church, done with the patriarchy and the authoritarianism, done with what I saw as religious brainwashing. But simply quitting church, it turned out, wasn’t enough. I needed to quit God as well. And I was determined to do it. I actually thought through five general situations which tempted me to pray, and tried to come up with alternate things to do when those came up. I was going to find my way out.
Finding God Again, Except Not Really; An Overly Long Narrative of My Recent Spiritual Journey
It was about two years ago that I decided I was done, that I was giving up on religion. This wasn’t just another predictable development in my on-again, off-again angsty relationship with Mormonism, which for a long time I half-heartedly claimed I was going to leave at least a dozen times a year. This was bigger than that. I felt done with religion altogether. After spending a huge chunk of my life absolutely obsessed with it, to the point of getting a PhD in the subject, I found myself thinking that maybe it was time to move on. I’ll find a new hobby, I told myself. This is over.
The Reckless Love of God
I suspect that a message that most human beings absorb growing up is that we should exercise some caution in our love. That love is always a risk, that it opens you up to being vulnerable, that you can get deeply wounded if you get too drawn in by love’s currents and run into troubled waters. That the people whom you love the most are also the ones who can hurt you the most. So we learn to hesitate, to look before we leap, to take care, to think in advance about what might go wrong. Sometimes we may let ourselves get swept up in it despite all this, an experience which can be both giddy and terrifying. But we also often build walls, sometimes as thick as we can make them, in hopes of protecting ourselves from getting too invested, from caring too much.
Toward a Less Micromanaging God
I grew up with two related beliefs about making decisions. The first was that in most cases, there was a right decision, a choice that you were supposed to make. “There’s the right and the wrong to ev’ry question,” asserts the hymn. The other was that with enough asking, God would reveal to you what that correct choice was. I heard again and again what a wonderful blessing this was, that God had a clear plan for your life and would guide you along that path, that you wouldn’t ever be left on your own to figure out what you were supposed to do. In fact, figuring out and then following God’s will for you was the entire point of this life. “And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them,” explains the book of Abraham. Read More
Dona Nobis Aequalitatem
In May of 2010, I was standing alone in my new room after having just started a new job for the summer working the dorms at BYU. I had just finished completely unpacking, and everything was in place and orderly. And it was at that moment, when all seemed settled, that I decided I had to leave.
There I was, just done with my first year at BYU. The past year and a half of my life had been spent fighting against a thought that started as a small flicker but overtime became impossible to push back. That struggle had been spent with what seemed like virtually constant prayer, and I was feeling very close to God at that time in my life—closer than I had ever felt before.
And so, I sat down at the end of my bed and said a simple, to the point prayer. . It wasn’t a prayer of asking—I am much too decisive a person for that. I said something like “Hey. I know I just unpacked and everything. But I can take it no more, and I have decided to leave the church. No one understands my struggle better than you—you’ve been with me through it all. But I can’t do it anymore. I do not feel welcome, and I do not feel that this is my home. I’m starving slowly and I am finding no nourishment in this church. I am scared if I stay much longer, the damage will not be reversible and I’ll never recover. So, I have decided to leave. I’ll transfer to a new school. I’ll move on from this.” Read More
Are gospel doctrines more vague when they are applied to women?
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is built upon the idea that we can seek answers to fundamental questions about ourselves and our relationship with God. Many celebrate the peace they find in the church through having answers to life’s deepest questions. However, I would contend, that many of the essential doctrines of the church are much more clear when they are applied to men than when they are applied to women. Subsequently, among members of the church, there appears to be a wider variety of opinions about how these doctrines apply to women, while the application of these doctrines for men is much less contended. Below, I have listed three essential areas of doctrine in which I think this is the case. Read More
God is Watching Us–Can We Stop Him?
A couple of nights ago, I was working on my laptop when a bug innocently wandered across the keyboard. I grabbed a tissue and smooshed it. Then I started thinking about what it meant about my character that I would so glibly snuff out a small life simply because it inconvenienced me. And then I wondered whether God was aware of the bug’s experience.