Joseph Smith said, “it is the first principle of the Gospel to know for a certainty the Character of God” (TPJS p. 345). Article of faith four teaches us that faith in the Lord Jesus Christ is the foundation for everything else. Unfortunately for me, having faith in God and having a correct idea of His character have been huge obstacles I’ve wrestled with my entire life. I feel kind of like Enos when he said, “I will tell you of the wrestle I had before God…” (Enos 1:2) and then describes the hunger of his soul and the length of his pleadings. You will definitely get to know me better by listening to my talk, that’s for sure, but I hope the Holy Ghost will teach you what to take from my journey that can help you on your own.
I was born in sunny, secular southern California to two religiously devout, service-minded, duty-driven parents. From them I learned to love cleaning the church on Saturdays, to see the beauty of visiting teaching, and that “pure religion and undefiled before God... is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction...” (James 1:27).
One of the paradoxes in my life is that I am drawn to spiritual things, yet I find it very difficult to feel connected with deity. I am consistently pulled by this desire to connect with God and have spent most of my life frustrated that I didn’t feel it.
I’ve been a thinker as long as I can remember. And as a kid, I never shared my thoughts with anybody. I literally pondered the length of eternity while riding my bicycle in circles around my driveway. One particular day I was thinking about faith and decided there was no reason to believe in God—no evidence. In my child brain, I realized the implications of there being no God—then life has no purpose and there is nothing after death. Considering a belief in God to be preferable to oblivion, and considering that if there were a God, our church would make the most sense out of all of them, I adopted the perspective of our faith. I put on our mythology like an astronaut helmet, and it colored everything I saw.
You would think that since I was quite the pragmatist in deciding to believe in God, that I would have chosen to believe in a loving Heavenly Father like I was taught. Instead, I became traumatized by certain scriptures that made me think God was more like a kid with a magnifying glass burning ants. The words of King Benjamin felt like a horror movie…You better “watch yourselves and your thoughts and your words and your deeds” (Mos. 4:30), “And finally, I cannot tell you all the things whereby ye may commit sin; for there are diverse ways and means, even so many that I cannot number them” (Mos. 4:29). Combine that with Alma saying “God cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance” (Alma 45:8), and I got a sin complex. I felt guilty for leaving a cupboard door open. I would pray for forgiveness for the sins I didn’t remember committing. I was worried that I would get to the Judgment Day, and my soul would be like a white dress with one speck of dust on it, and I would be cast out.
When I was 15, I went to EFY for the first time. One night our counselor gave us each a 3x5 card and told us to write our feelings about Jesus. Our feelings about Jesus? I was stumped. I could tell you a bunch of facts. I could fill way more than a 3x5 card with facts. I was the annoying kid in Sunday School who had all the answers to the teacher’s questions, but for whose questions the teachers never had answers. But feelings? I had none. That made me feel super ashamed.
So, I tried to manufacture feelings. I imagined my older brother, whom I loved, on the cross, and how I would feel about that. Then I mentally tried to lift those feelings and transpose them on Jesus. I would listen to stories about seminary kids doing pushups for donuts or filing cabinets full of sins with Jesus’s signature in blood to try to make myself feel something. But they weren’t genuine feelings and I later discounted every feeling borne of manipulation.
When I decided to go on a mission, I felt 100% certain of the gospel’s truthfulness. When I was in the MTC in Brazil, a priesthood leader said that facts wouldn’t touch the Brazilian people’s hearts--only feelings would. I suddenly became acutely aware of the fact that I had a testimony based on reason and not confirmed by the Spirit. One night after bursting into tears during class, I spent 2.5 hours on my knees crying to the Lord to feel something. Anything. And at the end, I got a glimmer of happiness at the thought of the First Vision. That was it. I spent much of my mission trying to feel, and when it got too hard, I told myself that because I was a missionary, I must be feeling the Spirit, so however I felt must be the right way.
I continued for several more years on logic and reason, guilt and shame, and glimmers of the Spirit here and there. My skewed views of God, the fake feelings I tried to manufacture, plus the fact that this whole house of cards was built on an assumption I chose when I was a kid combined to create quite a pavilion between me and God (“Where Is the Pavilion?” Eyring 2012). And the whole thing was surprisingly easily torn down in 2015.
It was a few years coming. For two years I had been pained by gender differences in the Church and in the temple. Once I saw them, I couldn’t unsee them, and I didn’t have any way to explain them. 2015 was also when the landmark Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges was decided, and my LGBTQ friends were often on my mind. I had long, deep conversations with my gay friends who were members of the Church, felt their pain, and felt the insufficiency of the answers to their lived experience. I was frustrated by the lack of answers in those two deeply personal areas. I think the cause of my spiritual discontent was not feeling close to God--neither when I prayed nor when I read the scriptures. Based on years of experience, I had no confidence that God would answer my prayers, though I dutifully sent up wishlists into the sky.
This came to a head when I had one long conversation with another good friend who left the church. It was July 2015. He came in from out of town and we caught up over kids’ meals at BYU Creamery. He confided in me that he and his wife had left the Church. That he went from being a tithe-paying, calling-holding, home teaching member one Sunday to being completely inactive the next. His bottom line came down to this—it’s not reasonable to believe in God.
Though I didn’t feel the impact for a couple days, he brought me back to my base assumption as a child and questioned it. The words “it’s not reasonable to believe in God” resonated in the echo chamber of my mind and worked to destroy my faith that such a Being could even exist. Although I called it a “faith crisis” at the time, I now see it as part of normal, healthy adult development. According Fowler’s Stages of Faith Development my stage 3 certainty had given way to devastating stage 4 wrestling, but it paved the way to the calmness of a stage 5 faith.
At the time, however, it was devastating. I felt like the ground didn’t just shake under my feet, there was no ground! All of my assumptions were ripped away. I didn’t know which way was up and which was down. I analyzed what I knew and what I believed every two seconds and felt like I needed to resolve this right away. I had this expectation that I should be at a certain place in my life. If I was certain of the truth before, I should be more certain now, not less. I wished I could just believe like I used to, and have it not be complicated. I wanted to believe, but I couldn’t see a way to.
I had a weekly scripture memorizing club with my nieces and nephews at the time, and I felt like a fake helping them memorize scriptures about a God I didn’t even know was real. I was a temple worker. The next month I was in an endowment session during my shift and was wracked with how ridiculous the Creation and Fall stories seemed. I graduated in August and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and fell into a depression. Depression is awesome because it makes it nearly impossible to feel the Spirit, and trying to figure out if God is real while you’re depressed is futile. My stake president advised me not to make any big decisions until I was in a better state, so I kept the habits I had developed and tried to survive. I started reading scriptures twice a day. I read about Mother Teresa’s “dark night of the soul” and felt comforted and validated. I kept praying even though I didn’t think anyone was out there, often sounding like King Lamoni saying --O God, if there is a God and if thou art God…” (Alma 22:18). I stopped going to the temple, since it was hurting rather than helping my testimony at the time.
I was very cautious about who I confided in, and found many people whose reactions were not helpful. I found a few key friends, however, that could hold space for me to struggle and yet feel peaceful and confident in their faith at the same time. They expressed confidence that I would figure it out, and when I asked for it, gave me new ways to think about things.
One friend suggested that I first needed to figure out if God was real, then if Jesus was real, and then if this was His church. She explained the legal requirement of “reasonable doubt” and said I just needed to believe beyond reasonable doubt.
Another friend validated that “belief” was a gift of the Spirit--it doesn’t have to be knowledge.
Another friend assured me that I would find my way. She read a quote from The Screwtape Letters to me which was very reassuring. In this chapter, an experienced devil is advising a younger devil on how to work on someone that was in my position. The older devil posits that although it seems like a win, they don’t have me yet, by cautioning:
Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
My scientist father gave me several logical arguments that assuaged my need for this to make sense. A book chapter gave me another way to look at the gender differences in the temple.
And strangely enough, I hit a breakthrough in a Postmodernism and Film class, where I was re-exposed to the idea that we can’t actually know anything. Everything we “know” is a choice. And since it’s not sustainable to live in a postmodernist mindset, everyone has to choose what they’re going to accept as true and go back to a modernist mindset. While some might say that’s ridiculous or would destroy my faith more, I thought it was liberating. It’s all a choice! Everything I accept as true is a choice made with imperfect information! Suddenly I wasn’t choosing between the questionable view of my religious upbringing and the default of a secular humanist perspective--both of them were mythologies! Both of them were astronaut’s helmets. There was no default. I could doubt them both equally. And either one was a choice.
And I wanted to believe in God. When my mind doubted, something inside me still wanted it to be real. My soul craved it. I needed the logical arguments to free me, but really it just came down to desire.
So, I became comfortable with my new normal. The old certainty was gone. The ground was shakey. But I knew what I wanted. I came to accept that I would probably struggle with my faith throughout my life, that this wasn’t a one-and-done experience, but that I would get through it again, and I was ok with that.
When I joined this ward, I became aware that the false beliefs about God from my childhood were still forming a pavilion between me and God.
Joseph Smith said this in Lecture on Faith 3 about the importance of having a “correct” idea of God’s character:
“Let us here observe that three things are necessary for any rational and intelligent being to exercise faith in God unto life and salvation.
First, the idea that he actually exists;
Secondly, a correct idea of his character, perfections, and attributes;
Thirdly, an actual knowledge that the course of life which one is pursuing is according to His will.”
My idea of God’s character was still way more like the kid with a magnifying glass than someone to trust and worship.
I analyzed my faith by writing this list in my journal a year and a half ago:
“What I unconsciously think about God:
· I have to convince Him
· I never measure up to His standards
· He’s far
“What I consciously think about God:
· He’s merciful
· He’s generous
· He trusts me to make my own decisions
· He’s patient with my growth
“When I react, it’s the unconscious version of God that I am responding to. I have to stop and question and think in order to call upon the second version.”
I wasn’t sure how to root out the false beliefs I had about God. That’s the point--you actually believe them. So I met with bishop, and he talked to me about planting and nourishing seeds. A year ago November, I met with President Hanson. Surprisingly, he wasn’t worried about my struggle with God. He said that coming to know and love God is the work of a lifetime. He said the struggling I was doing was good work, and to keep doing it. That decreased my anxiety a ton and normalized what I was going through.
I’m not really sure how my false beliefs about God lessened their hold on me over this year. I think part of it is seeing Him keep His promises to me. Part of it is keeping a revelation record that has helped me realize how much God talks to me, and part of it is finding God’s character in the scriptures.
If you think of a coordinate plane (be nerdy with me for a second) with justice vs mercy being the x-axis, and transactional vs relational being the y-axis, I used to believe in a transactional just God who was about technicalities of the law and whose goal was our exact obedience. Now I believe in a merciful relational God, who cares more about our motivation and who we’re becoming.
My theme scripture for this year is Jeremiah 29:13 “And ye shall seek me and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.” I didn’t have much faith that it would work, but it did! I’m finding Him.
An apostle said: God is known only by revelation; he stands revealed or remains forever unknown.” [Bruce R McConkie MD, s.v. “God,” 318]
This is what God has revealed to me about his character so far:
Though I would still love to feel more connected to God, I do feel something: admiration. This is a God whom I can worship. His character is one that I actually do want to emulate.
Brothers and sisters, I don’t “know” anything. But I choose to believe a lot, and the fruits of that belief is great peace and contentment. I believe in God the Father who is benevolent, wise, and kind. I believe in God the Christ who is all-loving and all-patient and mighty to save. He is utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you have. I believe in God the Holy Spirit who is teaching me more the more I listen and respond. I believe in God my Heavenly Mother who is my example. I sustain Russell M Nelson as a prophet, seer, and revelator. His words excite my soul. I believe that God works through everyday men and women to bring to pass his glorious purposes. I believe that when we seek (God), we shall find (Him), if (we) search for him with all our hearts (Jeremiah 29:13). In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
And strangely enough, I hit a breakthrough in a Postmodernism and Film class, where I was re-exposed to the idea that we can’t actually know anything. Everything we “know” is a choice. And since it’s not sustainable to live in a postmodernist mindset, everyone has to choose what they’re going to accept as true and go back to a modernist mindset. While some might say that’s ridiculous or would destroy my faith more, I thought it was liberating. It’s all a choice! Everything I accept as true is a choice made with imperfect information! Suddenly I wasn’t choosing between the questionable view of my religious upbringing and the default of a secular humanist perspective--both of them were mythologies! Both of them were astronaut’s helmets. There was no default. I could doubt them both equally. And either one was a choice.
And I wanted to believe in God. When my mind doubted, something inside me still wanted it to be real. My soul craved it. I needed the logical arguments to free me, but really it just came down to desire.
So, I became comfortable with my new normal. The old certainty was gone. The ground was shakey. But I knew what I wanted. I came to accept that I would probably struggle with my faith throughout my life, that this wasn’t a one-and-done experience, but that I would get through it again, and I was ok with that.
When I joined this ward, I became aware that the false beliefs about God from my childhood were still forming a pavilion between me and God.
Joseph Smith said this in Lecture on Faith 3 about the importance of having a “correct” idea of God’s character:
“Let us here observe that three things are necessary for any rational and intelligent being to exercise faith in God unto life and salvation.
First, the idea that he actually exists;
Secondly, a correct idea of his character, perfections, and attributes;
Thirdly, an actual knowledge that the course of life which one is pursuing is according to His will.”
My idea of God’s character was still way more like the kid with a magnifying glass than someone to trust and worship.
I analyzed my faith by writing this list in my journal a year and a half ago:
“What I unconsciously think about God:
· I have to convince Him
· I never measure up to His standards
· He’s far
“What I consciously think about God:
· He’s merciful
· He’s generous
· He trusts me to make my own decisions
· He’s patient with my growth
“When I react, it’s the unconscious version of God that I am responding to. I have to stop and question and think in order to call upon the second version.”
I wasn’t sure how to root out the false beliefs I had about God. That’s the point--you actually believe them. So I met with bishop, and he talked to me about planting and nourishing seeds. A year ago November, I met with President Hanson. Surprisingly, he wasn’t worried about my struggle with God. He said that coming to know and love God is the work of a lifetime. He said the struggling I was doing was good work, and to keep doing it. That decreased my anxiety a ton and normalized what I was going through.
I’m not really sure how my false beliefs about God lessened their hold on me over this year. I think part of it is seeing Him keep His promises to me. Part of it is keeping a revelation record that has helped me realize how much God talks to me, and part of it is finding God’s character in the scriptures.
If you think of a coordinate plane (be nerdy with me for a second) with justice vs mercy being the x-axis, and transactional vs relational being the y-axis, I used to believe in a transactional just God who was about technicalities of the law and whose goal was our exact obedience. Now I believe in a merciful relational God, who cares more about our motivation and who we’re becoming.
My theme scripture for this year is Jeremiah 29:13 “And ye shall seek me and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.” I didn’t have much faith that it would work, but it did! I’m finding Him.
An apostle said: God is known only by revelation; he stands revealed or remains forever unknown.” [Bruce R McConkie MD, s.v. “God,” 318]
This is what God has revealed to me about his character so far:
- My God does not want to automate obedient robots, but rather to shepherd agentic beings toward greater peace and happiness
- My God is not staring at me, waiting for me to mess up; He walks at my side and isn’t stressed out when I sin.
- My God has infinite mercy, ready to forgive the moment I turn to Him
- My God is a mentor and a guide, or as we say in my field, a “more knowledgeable Other” who thus can show me how to get to where he is (Vygotsky, zone of proximal development)
- My God gives beauty for ashes (Isa. 61:3)
- He takes the stony heart out of my chest and gives me an heart of flesh (Ezek 36:26)
- My God is a God of deliverance and a God of miracles
- My God heals my soul-sickness (“Believe, Love, Do” Elder Uchtdorf)
- My God is more concerned about my pain than his own (“The Character of Christ” Elder Bednar)
- My God goes about doing good, walks among the poor, the outcast, the sick, and the ashamed. He ministers to the powerless, the weak, and the friendless. He spends time with them; He speaks to them, and he heals them all (“Believe, Love, Do” Elder Uchtdorf)
- My God “reaches out to you, desiring to heal you, to lift you up, and to replace the emptiness in your heart with an abiding joy. He desires to sweep away any darkness that clouds your life and fill it with the sacred and brilliant light of His unending glory” (same)
- My God stands for hours placing people’s hands on his scars to help them believe that He is the Christ. (3 Nephi 11)
Though I would still love to feel more connected to God, I do feel something: admiration. This is a God whom I can worship. His character is one that I actually do want to emulate.
Brothers and sisters, I don’t “know” anything. But I choose to believe a lot, and the fruits of that belief is great peace and contentment. I believe in God the Father who is benevolent, wise, and kind. I believe in God the Christ who is all-loving and all-patient and mighty to save. He is utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you have. I believe in God the Holy Spirit who is teaching me more the more I listen and respond. I believe in God my Heavenly Mother who is my example. I sustain Russell M Nelson as a prophet, seer, and revelator. His words excite my soul. I believe that God works through everyday men and women to bring to pass his glorious purposes. I believe that when we seek (God), we shall find (Him), if (we) search for him with all our hearts (Jeremiah 29:13). In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
