I wrote this testimony and read it at my baptismal service, right after I was baptized:
This day, January 28th, 2006, I am reborn through baptism by the authority of God through the Melchizedek Priesthood. I grew up most of my life as an Evangelical Christian. My parents divorced when I was five-years-old. My mom soon after found Jesus Christ as her Savior and Redeemer and began praying for my dad to come home a changed man and reunite our family. She enrolled my brothers, sister, and me to all believe in and pray for this for five years. After the fifth year my father indeed came home a changed man and remarried my mom. It was like a fairytale. I came home to my mom’s house after school one day and saw my dad there with my mom at the kitchen table. I wasn’t sure what to think as my parents did not get along and would never spend time together. I hesitantly went near them and my dad gestured for me to come to him. I sat on his lap and he asked me if I could have just one wish, what it would be. A surge of emotion came to me and as I cried I told him that I would want him to come home and make our family whole again. Through his tears, he hugged me and told me my wish was coming true. The miracle my mom prayed for and taught us to believe in was taking place.
I learned my greatest lesson in faith from my mother, who steadfastly prayed for and believed in reconciliation with my dad; and my greatest lesson in obedience from my father, who had also relinquished his life to Christ just before he felt God telling him to reunite his family. At 10-years-old I had a very strong testimony of Jesus Christ. I was quite the little missionary growing up; often teaching my friends about Christ and leading them through a prayer to acknowledge Him as their Lord and Savior and to invite Him into their hearts.
In Junior High School I was very active in my church youth group, being responsible for bringing many of the attendees at our weekly meetings. I can safely say that at least 10-20% of my junior high class went with me at least once, with many of them attending regularly. My brother, who was older than me and could drive, would leave with me an hour or two before our meetings started so we could pick up my friends. We would take out the seats in my parent’s minivan, so we could all pile in on the floor. Life was great and I felt on top of the world, doing what Christ commissioned us to do.
I stopped going to church around the age of 17. I was getting disenchanted with the idea of it. Unfortunately, I chose to focus on the judgment and hypocrisy I saw around me; instead of focusing on the Creator, I let the imperfection in His creation bother me. I lost my testimony of why I needed to go to church as I began to feel like I wasn’t being spiritually fed there anymore and something seemed to be missing.
While I stopped going to church, I did not stop studying the Bible and keeping Christ close to my heart. But as the years went by I slowly felt further and further away from Him and I lost the feeling that His Spirit was with me. The Bible eventually also lost its allure for me and my prayers were inconsistent and more out of duty than sincerity.
Over the next ten years I suffered with severe bouts of depression and had more questions than answers about the Gospel. I wondered about and sought answers to questions like what happened to those who died without the privilege of hearing about Christ. The best answer I got was that we just don’t understand how God’s mercy may work in those circumstances. While I knew I didn’t understand God’s mercy, I also knew that the Bible said that no one could come unto the Father except through His Son, Jesus Christ. The only alternative that I knew of was eternal damnation. This and other issues created even more distance between God and me, as I felt I didn’t really know Him or like what I knew of His plan very much. While I still believed in Redemption and Salvation through Jesus Christ I lost my strong convictions and could not find it in me to share what I knew of the Gospel like I once had.
Some time ago, my business partner and I began discussing the Scriptures. I knew he was a Mormon and I wondered how this highly intelligent man could be so lost spiritually and duped by Mormonism! Unfortunately, in the Christian community there is a lot of time and energy put into trying to disprove the Mormon Church. I spent time reading many anti-Mormon books, developing strong opinions about the fallacy of the Church, and even entered into several debates against it. I began asking my partner questions about his beliefs – which I felt I knew already through my anti studies. I wanted to open a dialogue with him so I could show him how lost he was. I sincerely cared about the state of his soul.
Over the next two years we spent countless hours discussing our beliefs and kindly showing each other the others fallible thinking. One night about six-months into these discussions, I realized that this Mormon thing could actually be true and I lay in bed wailing. I knew if I found it was, it would shake up my whole world as everyone close to me in my life at the time was a Born Again Christian, and grossly misunderstands “Mormonism”, as did I. Although I was very thick-headed and stubborn, God was slowly opening my heart.
Now that I was finally sincere in our discussions, I told my friend that I wanted him to show me why the Church was true by only referring to the New Testament. He advised me to read the Book of Mormon and pray about it. I countered that I wasn’t interested in relying on some fluffy feeling that perhaps I could not trust, and said that what I really needed was an intellectual conversion. I could see him roll his eyes through the phone as he sighed and said, “okay”.
We spent the next 18-months or so going through the New Testament showing me all the points of the True Church as Christ had established. Some of his most memorable outbursts to my objections were “you can’t be anything but Mormon after reading the New Testament!” and “why do we call Him Father if he is not our father?” In reference to the trinity, the best was “God is not a three-headed monster!” I deserved every sarcastic outburst and more as we word-picked our way through the New Testament. Every couple of months he would explode, “Would you just read the Book of Mormon and pray about it!” But no, I would not. However, I was gaining many small witnesses of truth through our discussions and by reading the New Testament in a whole new light.
Even though I was sincere in my search for the truth, whatever it was, I was still not ready to hear the answer I knew (yes, I knew) I would get. I needed a bullet proof conviction and testimony composed of intellect and spiritual witness because I knew what I would be up against and my house had to be built on a solid foundation so it would not blow away when the rains came down. For me, the bad weather would come in the form of my concerned family and friends, expressing shock and grief, and trying to talk me out of my new understanding of the Gospel.
By May of 2005 I had only read tidbits of the Book of Mormon, but from my new understanding of what the Church believed and having re-read the New Testament in its light, I felt ready to pray and ask God to confirm what I now thought to be true. I asked my friend to kneel down with me while I prayed and after a few sarcastic “Hallelujahs!” from him, we knelt down together. Since he was with me through my journey, I figured it appropriate for him to be with me when I took the counsel of Moroni and asked our Father in heaven if the Restored Gospel was true. I received the confirmation I sought as the Spirit came strongly upon me.
I was still not ready to face the opposition I knew I would receive. I continued to learn more and more until I was finally baptized some eight-months later. A few months before my baptism, I finally told my family that I had been investigating the Church and gave them a bunch of intellectual reasons of why I thought it was true. While I figured it wouldn’t accomplish much, at least I felt like they would know that this was not some rash decision and that I had clearly studied it out. What it did, unfortunately, was create a frenzy of Church bashing and mutual personal attacks. My family loved me enough to get so emotionally distraught over what they couldn’t possibly understand, and I couldn’t expect them to. I was absolutely torn by what I knew our Father in heaven was showing me and the love I had for my family. We were very tight, and this kind of wedge was such a foreign and uncomfortable dynamic for us. Over time, I think we all realized our relationship was more important than any of us being right and proving our righteous positions. I am again grateful for a loving and respectful parental family dynamic.
One has to be ready to hear truth before they can humble themselves enough to even be open to possibilities outside of their current belief system. It truly is possibly the hardest thing I have ever done in my life – that is to let go of all my filters, known as a belief system, that I’ve subscribed to most of my life and allow a foreign, and even forbidden, belief penetrate as a possibility. This process took years of baby steps for me, so I can’t ask for more from anyone else.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has answers mainstream Christianity begs for (or at least, should!). My experiences of the people in this Church exemplify Christ-like qualities more than any other people I know. I hope you all know what you have. I hope you don’t take it for granted. I hope you see the plain and precious truths the Restoration of the Gospel really does have to offer. Here we have order, structure, practicality, and great sensibility.
I pray that if you have doubts about the Restoration that you would consult with members who have a strong testimony and not search on Google for your doubts to be supported by ex or non-members. I know from experience in talking to people that most ex-members use their victim story about how someone in the Church did them wrong as their justification for leaving. These stories do not change Truth. They only remind us of the humanity of those who strive to follow the truth, despite whether they do it poorly or well. The foundation of our testimonies cannot lie on anything but Jesus Christ, the only thing strong enough to support them. Man will always fail us, no matter where we go.
Some say Joseph Smith’s story is too outrageous, too unbelievable! To that I ask, really? And Noah preparing an ark large enough for at least two of every creature on earth isn’t? Moses hearing the voice of God through a burning bush isn’t? Elijah being taken up into heaven in a chariot of fire isn’t? But oh, then they’ll attack Joseph Smith’s character and by his flaws try to prove he therefore cannot be called a Prophet of God. They conveniently forget about the flaws and sins depicted in the Old Testament of the ancient Prophets they so readily and easily accept. They forget that Peter the Apostle denied Christ three times. How they would love to read an account of Joseph Smith denying Christ even once. They forget that Paul tried to destroy Christ’s church before he was called, and jailed several times after. Were these men of the New Testament unworthy because of their reputation and/or character? Or did Christ call them because they were willing, and not perfect?
Stop allowing the world to create doubt in your life about the Prophetic calling of Joseph Smith. No man is perfect. Joseph wasn’t, but neither was Adam, Noah, Moses, or Abraham. Some of the ancient prophets committed sins worse than Joseph has ever been accused of and it’s all right there in the Bible. Perfection is not required to be called of God in the work of His Kingdom. It is a willing spirit that is required. Stop allowing the rest of the world to get away with judging Joseph Smith with a higher set of standards than they judge the prophets and apostles of old. Stop allowing them to get away with investigating the flaws of Mormonism when they are not willing to investigate or see the flaws in early Christianity that they so easily subscribe to with more lenient standards. Stop allowing these inconsistent standards negatively affect your testimony. I am embarrassed to say that it is so easy for the Christian faith to throw rocks when we all seem to live in glass houses. Please continue to pray for softened hearts and understanding by those in the Evangelical Communities.
No man, or group of men, could have written the Book of Mormon in five years let alone 90-days. If it were an angel of light, which is to say the devil, which appeared to Joseph Smith, he wouldn’t have written the book to be in agreement with the Bible and say, “Yes! Worship Christ, He is our Redeemer!” He would have tried to steer us away from Christ and possibly ask us to worship him. At the end of the day, amidst all of the anti-Mormon propaganda, we must ask ourselves, where did this book come from, and who is the author?
The late Elder Orson F. Whitney related the following:
“Many years ago a learned man, a member of the Roman Catholic Church, came to Utah and spoke from the stand of the Salt Lake Tabernacle. I became well-acquainted with him, and we conversed freely and frankly. A great scholar, with perhaps a dozen languages at his tongue’s end, he seemed to know all about theology, law, literature, science and philosophy. One day he said to me: ‘You Mormons are all ignoramuses. You don’t even know the strength of your own position. It is so strong that there is only one other tenable in the whole Christian world, and that is the position of the Catholic Church. The issue is between Catholicism and Mormonism. If we are right, you are wrong: if you are right, we are wrong; and that’s all there is to it. The Protestants haven’t a leg to stand on. For, if we are wrong, they are wrong with us, since they were a part of us and went out from us; while if we are right, they are apostates whom we cut off long ago. If we have the apostolic succession from St. Peter, as we claim, there is no need for Joseph Smith and Mormonism; but if we have not that succession, then such a man as Joseph Smith was necessary, and Mormonism’s attitude is the only consistent one. It is either the perpetuation of the gospel from ancient times, or the restoration of the gospel in latter days.’” (LeGrand Richards, A Marvelous Work and a Wonder, rev. ed. [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1970] pp. 3-4)
As a new convert who has read just about every popular anti-Mormon book out there and is well versed in many of the anti-Mormon websites and other literature, I would like to invite any of you who secretly struggle with doubt to seek answers to your questions. There should be no shame in having questions; rather it is a shame not to seek answers or peace about your questions. Avoiding our questions will weaken our testimonies. Truth stands all scrutiny. Do you get that? Truth stands all scrutiny. So walk through the scrutiny, lean into it, fear it not; because the truth, whatever it may be in any circumstance, will always be waiting on the other side of the door. We all want to get to the truth and sincerely asking questions can only lead us closer to it.
May we all experience the joy of our Redemption and a strong testimony of Christ and the Restoration of the Gospel.
