Feb 20 2009
Rainfeather’s Conversion Story and Life in the LDS Church
Note: This is Part One to Rainfeather’s story.
I was born to a Catholic mother and a United Church father. As an infant, I was christened in the Catholic Church, but my parents had married in an Anglican Church. I guess that was thought of as a compromise.
I’ve never been to a Catholic service in my life, but my Dad took me to the Anglican Church when I was about three, where I remember enjoying Sunday School, but hating the main service. I cried when the choir began to sing and my Dad would always end up taking me back home. After a while, he gave up trying and stopped taking me there. That was the end of any religion upbringing that I had.
When I was about thirteen, for some reason a friend and I had a dream about the Second Coming of Christ at about the same time. I’ve no idea how I even knew about the Second Coming, but anyway, we discussed it and decided to talk to a girl in school who was known to carry one of those mini-New Testaments in her back jeans pocket. She invited us to her Bible Study class in the Baptist Church, where we attended for a year or two.
One Sunday in his sermon, the Pastor started naming other churches and saying, “Don’t you pat them on the back and say, ‘God bless you.’” That really upset me. He’d included Mormons and Catholics in that warning. I didn’t even know what a Mormon was, but I didn’t think it was very Christ-like of him to say that. It upset me enough that I left the Baptist Church after that Sunday. My friend soon left soon after I did.
I also found out at that time that they believed that Jesus and God were one and the same being, when a lady phoned me to ask why I wasn’t attending church anymore. Even at the tender age of 14, this made no sense to me whatsoever. I hadn’t known they believed that.
“Well, that makes no sense,” I said. “When a voice came out of Heaven saying, ‘This is my beloved son,’ was Jesus being a ventriloquist? Was he always talking to himself? Praying to himself? When he said he was sent by his father, who the heck was he talking about? Why not just say, ‘When you pray to me, say this?’
“When Jesus said that we should be in him as he is in the father, does that mean that he was saying that we’re God? Because if he’s God and we’re to be in him in the same way that he’s in the Father, then that would make us God as well.”
I’m no longer sure what I believe in, but I’m pretty sure that I don’t believe in the Trinity. That never made any sense to me whatsoever.
About six weeks after my friend had left, she announced that she had something she needed to tell me. She told me about a couple of missionaries that had been teaching her about the Mormon Church and said that I should really take the discussions with her. I reminded her that the Pastor had called them a cult. I hadn’t liked what he said, but I’d never heard of this Mormon group, so was unsure about becoming involved with them.
After a while, I relented and began taking the discussions as well. I guess I was about fifteen by this time. I don’t know why we don’t listen to our first instinct sometimes, but I wish I’d listened to mine at that time.
The first time the missionaries told me about the First Vision story, I remember raising my eyebrows and thinking, “Uh huh? Okay, right.” I thought they were nuts. But after a while, I guess I figured that adults wouldn’t lie to me, so they must be telling me the truth. By that time, I was taking the discussions in a Mormon couple’s home.
I’m extremely shy and hate being the centre of attention, so it took five sets of missionaries about a year and a half to finally get me into the water to be baptized. One smart missionary just said, “Well, we’ve got the font booked for January 30th. Are you gonna be there?” I agreed and was finally baptized.
They’d put me into a dress which was so huge on me that I had to wrap it completely around and between my legs in order to keep it from floating to the surface. I squeezed my legs so tightly. There was no way that I was going to be dunked twice. This was a few weeks after my seventeenth birthday in 1976.
After about a year and half of church attendance, I went inactive for about three years. I realized that I never enjoyed church. Because I was so shy, I spent all of my time trying to hide behind people in order to avoid being called upon to say a prayer, or to read a scripture.
At the birthday party of the same friend who had brought me to the missionaries, a rather arrogant young man challenged me to go back to church. He gave me the old, “I dare you to,” challenge, so I just had to prove to him that I could do it and went back.
When I served in the Nursery, I enjoyed that. I loved playing with the little ones and soothing those who were upset and missing their Mommies. But I was quite burned out on that calling after seven years and I asked to be released. I guess I’m pretty good at not calling attention to myself, because they were shocked to discover how long I’d been serving in that calling. They were barely aware of me.
I avoided taking out my Endowments until I’d been a member for thirteen years, and it was fourteen years before I ever gave a talk or bore my testimony. When I tried to teach the 8-year-olds for one summer, I discovered that I’m not good with the older children. I couldn’t maintain any semblance of control, so decided that being a teacher was definitely not my calling.
The most interesting calling that I had was being a Secretary to the Patriarch and typing Patriarchal Blessings. I also did the Relief Society bulletin for a time. It was in putting my typing skills to use which served me best in my callings. I served in the Genealogy Library as an assistant, and also had a Stake calling inputting cards into the system for the IGI.
Check back tomorrow for Part Two of Rainfeather’s story: The Cracks Started to Appear.
Rainfeather, I cannot even tell you how much I’m right there with you when it comes to the Trinity. When I left the Church, I spent some time looking at other religions, trying to see if any of them “rang true” with me. I tried to understand the born-again Christian religion, but have finally given it up as not happening for me.
One of my bigger problems with them is the insistence on the Trinity. Why, pray tell, did Jesus pray to God, if he was God? That’s like me sitting on the bed and saying, “Lyoness, please help me to be good today.” If anyone walking by heard that, they’d think I was crazy. The whole Trinity thing never made a lick of sense to me.
The one of the other big problems that I have with born-again Christians is their insistence on who is and is not going to heaven. I met up with an old friend in the grocery store a couple of weeks back, and I told him that I’d left the Church. Do you know what the first thing was out of his mouth, literally?
“Which church are you going to now? I’m glad to hear that you’ve left, so that now you can go to heaven.” I just thought, “Seriously? That’s the very first thing you have to say to me, is that before as a Mormon, you knew I was going to burn in hell for all of eternity?”
I don’t know - there’s just such a judgmental attitude there that they almost surpass the Mormons in that aspect.
The other part of your story that jumped out at me was the whole Nursery calling/nobody noticed you part. When I read that, my stomach dropped - I could see that happening so easily. I know that must have been nice to know how much you’re appreciated, right? ::roll eyes::
Thanks again for taking the time to write up your story - you have been through a lot, and I’m proud of you!!!
~The Lyoness
Thanks, Lyoness. Not to mention that it was Constantine, a pagan, who ordered the church leaders to get together and decide once and for all what the nature of God was. This was 325 years after Christ was born! And they held a vote on it. Majority vote ruled. Because some guys got together and voted on the nature of God, I’m supposed to accept that? When it makes no sense to me?
I watched an amazing show on the origins on the Bible, called Testament, and they actually changed the scriptures to make sure that they were worded properly, in order to reflect what they’d voted on. I’m always surprised by all the different versions of the Bible which are out there.
It really is interesting that so many Mormons, once they leave the Church, feel they have nowhere else to go. Once we’ve been devastated by the loss of trust in the faith we’ve following all or most of our lives, we’re not willing to just trust the next guy who comes along and says, “Now you can listen to me, because I’m the one with the truth.”
You realize that if the church you followed was wrong and was man-made, then probably all of them are. You begin to study other religious documents and realize this is likely the case.
Any time someone tried to tell me that I was going to Hell because I was Mormon, my response was always, “Well thank goodness God didn’t die and appoint you my judge.” I hated that. How arrogant is that?
I think that I will remain a spiritual person, even though I’m not sure of anything concerning the existence of God right now. My beliefs seem to be in a constant state of flux at the moment.
But I’m pretty sure that I don’t want anything to do with any of man’s religions anymore. I will always continue to pray, but go to church? No.
Anyway, as for my Nursery calling, I guess I was content there, so didn’t want to be released, but yeah, it is sort of weird that they didn’t even realize I was still in there 7 years later. LOL
I talked to a born-again Christian about the whole voting thing and how that just didn’t strike me as being the most inspired way to decide on something as unprovable as the nature of God. Why didn’t they just flip a coin or something? It would have been just as inspired, in my ever so humble opinion.
Her answer was that God directed the vote so that the right answer was the one that was decided upon. To which I have to ask: If God can control that, then why didn’t he just have EVERYONE want to agree on it? Because it was actually a pretty close vote if I remember right.
So if God can make people vote the way he wanted them to vote so that the vote came out correctly, he should have just saved them the trouble of later looking questionable, and making everyone vote the same way. That way, it would have been unanimous and would have looked a lot more official and believable.
This god, he’s a trixy fellow who apparently doesn’t ever want anything to look like he has a hand in it.
About the Bible, I learned quite a bit about that while at BYU-Jerusalem. The first part of the semester was spent studying how the Bible came into being, and it wasn’t pretty. I do have to say that I have a hard time believing anything I learned at BYU-J because I don’t know how much of it was true, and how much of it was slanted by Mormon doctrine, so I try not to rely on my knowledge from there too much. But if that class was correct, then there were a whole lot of changes made to the Bible between back then and now.
My questioning sister has been searching other churches because she doesn’t want to be without a church. So she looks at other churches, runs into strange doctrine like the Trinity, and decides that the Mormon Church is just as strange as the other churches, so she might as well just stay with the Mormon Church and not rock the boat.
She says that she needs a church because they’re a good influence on her children, and she wants her kids to have that in their lives. To me, the devastating effects of being raised in a church that is built on nothing but lies far outweighs any benefits, but then again, those are not my children, and I cannot decide for her. If I could, they’d never attend church again. :-/
~Lyoness
I think my sister is doing a pretty good job raising her children to have values with no church. My nephew is about to turn 7 and he’s a very sweet, polite and considerate little fellow. He’s been raised with a lot of love, respect and understanding on his parents’ part, which seems to have rubbed off well on him. He’s good to his little sister and even gently chastised her when she called me fat, whispering to her that that wasn’t very nice. LOL I thought it was sweet.
LOL! That was sweet. I know that when I was a kid, I honestly did not understand how I could hurt someone by saying whatever the heck came to my mind. I once sat on the lap of an old family friend who was mostly bald and told him that I wanted to count all of the hairs on his head because I was sure he only had one or two left. The poor guy! He didn’t stop me - he just let me count. I gave up when I got up into the high double digits and told him that he had more hairs on his head than I thought he did.
Wow, what a sweetie I was. ::roll eyes::
I’m proud of your sister for raising her kids without a religion. I keep trying to tell my sister, “Just think of how angry you were when you found out that the Church had been lying to you about the Book of Abraham. They taught it as scripture when they knew full well that it was nothing but a pagan funerary text. Now think of your children - how are you going to explain to them that you knew it was all a lie but you taught them it anyway?”
It just doesn’t make sense to me. Especially if you think of her paying for temple weddings and missionary expenses for her five children - are you serious? I would NOT shell out tens of thousands of dollars to support a cause I knew was a farce.
Everyone’s free to choose how they want to, though. That’s the beauty of America.
~Lyoness