"It Just Wasn't Right for You"

How many former members have heard a version of the following sentiment expressed by one of their LDS friends? "I'm so glad you've found something that makes you happy, because clearly the Gospel just wasn't right for you."

I've heard it from a couple of my more liberal LDS friends, one a convert, the other a younger-generation lifer...even though they both know that I haven't "found something that makes me happy". (I've instead discovered what WON'T make me happy, and that, it turns out, is living according to the lies someone else has dictated to me.)

I appreciate their kindness and respect...but they exhibit just one more example of the flawed thinking of church members.

Howso?

Good members of the church with their heads on straight KNOW that the LDS church is the ONE and ONLY TRUE CHURCH. You want to get back to live with (a violent, sick, twisted, exclusive) God? You MUST be a faithful member of the church who has married in the temple and is enduring (in the faith) to the end.

But I'm done enduring...in more ways than one.

Which means I'm not going to be hanging out with them in the presence of God. Instead, if I'm lucky and my parents live sinlessly from this point forward, having been baptized in the faith at age 8, I might get to be dragged along by my parents faithfulness into the Celestial Kingdom...but I'll only inhabit the first of the three levels of the kingdom, ostensibly as a genderless ministering angel...to my friends and their spouses, forever breeding to people their created worlds alongside their husbands (and, if they're willing to admit it, their sister-wives who, unlike me, did NOT turn from the true gospel; they just never received an offer of marriage from a worthy temple-attending returned missionary and have been waiting 'til they died to claim a husband as a second/third/tenth wife).

WOOHOO!!!

..................(What rhyme with "woo-hoo", starts with an f, and ends with "you"?)

And yet my friends have concluded that the gospel "wasn't right for me."

It's supposed to be right for EVERYONE, isn't it? In fact, it's SO right for everyone, Adolf Hitler (and a million + Jews executed by his regime) have been baptized to enable them to inherit the Celestial Kingdom! So if it's right for Hitler, why isn't it right for me?

Am I worth less than a mass murderer to them, or for that matter? Are they content to see me drink coffee in this life when deep down they know that my coffee drinking - and, you know, denial of the one and only truth - will cause the abolishing of my heavenly genitals, but ultimately I'll still be saved to wait on them hand and foot? Do they believe that certain people are just plain incapable of living the gospel, and God put the gospel on the earth to weed us out, so as much as they "love" me here, they know I can't hang, and they've already dismissed me from the afterlife?

HAVE THEY EVEN CONSIDERED ANY OF THIS?

In all likelihood, probably not. It feels good to say "I'm so glad you've found something that makes you happy, because clearly the gospel just wasn't right for you." It feels terrible to say "I'll miss you in the Celestial Kingdom, but there's still a chance you'll be a genderless servant to me, my husband, and our wives." But it feels "worst-est" to say "I refuse to consider that you might be right, and I'm only fooling myself based on the emotional and psychological comfort provided me by the Pineal gland in my brain - and pressures of my friends/family/acquaintances - in 'confirming' the truthfulness of the gospel."

Yeah, acknowledging that one would suck.

So they make THEMSELVES feel better by confirming MY decision to be the best one...for ME.

How horribly sad and deluded. And cultist.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand...I'm so glad I'm done. And facing reality. And living life to its fullest, my conscience and strength of character dictating how I live and who I become, instead of relying on human directives couched in fairy tale and supernatural terms and credited to a mystical God on whose form and personality no one can agree.

So maybe they're right after all. That crap? It just wasn't right for me, and I'm finally happy. Hallelujah!

"It's True."

Chatting with some former members over lunch, one gent disclosed that on his last Sunday attending church - once there was already a rumor going around that he was struggling with his testimony - a guy in his ward patted him on the shoulder in passing and leaned over, whispering, "It's true."

As my new friend relates the tale, he grabbed the man's hand on his shoulder (definitely surprising the guy) and stopped him. "Okay, but hypothetically speaking, if it wasn't true, would you want to know?"

"But it is true."

(I confess: at this point every single one of us around the table rolled our eyes.)

"Okay, but again, we're dealing in hypotheticals here, if it was NOT true, would you want to know?"

After thinking for a moment, the guy shook his head "no." "Probably not. After all, it's what I believe, and what I'm doing with my life."

Now, that's all well and good, of course, but I gave up Santa Claus a looooooooooong time ago. I prefer to deal in reality. I prefer to think in terms of fact and fiction, discarding fiction in favor of fact where leading my life is concerned. I prefer to discover TRUTH.

But apparently, no matter how members protest that they seek after truth, they find some truths irrelevant. Such is the case with a few of my convert-friends, who have openly stated that they lack a testimony of Joseph Smith as a prophet (one even went so far as to say that he was martyred because he was leading the people astray, and God couldn't allow that!!!), or even a testimony of the Book of Mormon as the word of God. They're not interested in truth. Their testimonies, instead, are based on the "feeling" that THIS is what they're meant to do with their lives.

That disappoints me. It's a cop-out, first of all, but more importantly, it's actively choosing to live in a fantasy world.

I've heard members argue that that fantasy world gives people hope...that, even if they're wrong, they had something to hope for in the next life while living this one.

But frankly, I find that a bit sick and childish. If you're hoping for impossible things, particularly at the expense of the actual life you lead, what sort of hope do you really have? Take my husband. He hates his job. He wishes every day that he'd gone into something else and would love to go back and get a different degree, because every day he sits at his desk, he is truly miserable. Now that he understands the idea of the Celestial Kingdom is bunk, and that there is very little chance of a post-existence, let alone the opportunity to create his own world and people it, he's looking at the here and now as potentially all there is.

Mormons would say, "How sad." I heartily disagree. I think, "HOW WONDERFUL!!! That means that he's going to finally rethink how he's going to spend the next 30 years of his career, and maybe he'll be motivated to make a change!!!" After all, spending the next 30 years - the prime of your life - doing something you hate isn't that big a deal when you believe you have all eternity to do something you'll enjoy...but wasting the next 30 years doing something you hate when that's likely all you'll get is absolutely asinine.

I - we - choose to live in reality. We want to know the truth, we seek after it, we are (more or less) comfortable in the realization that there are things we don't, can't, and will likely never know, and we're determined to make the most of the life that we have.

I can't say the same for the brother who whispered "It's true" to my new friend. He's busy enjoying the fairy tale, growing old and living by someone else's rules in the meantime. While that's his prerogative, frankly, I pity him. I pity all those who prefer fantasy to reality, because they're missing out on reality.

But at least it reminds me to enjoy what I have, what I know, and who I am. May you all do the same.