Seeking Fruit: My Spiritual Journey So Far

I think it is important to share my story, in case anyone has the same struggles in the church that I have had and is seeking understanding or answers.

I in no way claim to be special. There are many who are mightier than I, who are closer to God. I am on my journey. I seek God with a fervent desire. My journey is just beginning. Here is how it came about.

I was born into the church and my name put on its records in 1987. My parents are kind, generous folk who follow the church very faithfully. My father has had visions. He is a good man. He has served as a bishop. He did not enjoy it, and asked to be released early, which he was. My mother has often complained that the words in the church seem to be dead. Despite these things, they have not yet realized that the reason they feel this way is because the church is dead. I have not yet revealed to them my own position regarding the church, or that I am done with it.

Here are some experiences in the church which sum up its affect on my life, as opposed to true experiences from God:

1. The first lasting fruit the church has had on me is shame. People make mistakes. In the church, those mistakes are not between the individual and God, they are supposed to be somebody's business. That "somebody" is a bishop. Growing up as a teenager, I would confess my (very common) mistakes, and I would be told things like "you are not a worthy member of the church" and "you are disgusting, never do that again." I took them seriously and pursued repentance, but I hated myself. My self-hatred convinced me many times not to pray when I needed God more than anything. I now regret being so influenced by the uninspired words of men. It influenced me to waste so much of my mortal time that could have been spent with God, who is the one who has power to forgive sin and change a man's heart. I do not justify my sin in the least degree, but there is a right way to pursue repentance and there is a wrong way. The church's way, which is to be accountable to man and made to feel less than other men, is the wrong way.

2. The other fruit of the church in my life was stress. Living the way the church wanted me to live did not bring me any measure of peace, but rather its opposite: stress, or even fear. Being a priesthood holder in the church meant sucking up to other men, giving endless amounts of time up to callings that are never mentioned in scripture and have nothing to do with coming closer to God, and losing meaningful time with family and God.

I had some unique experiences with discomfort and stress in the church. On multiple occasions, while participating in church rituals, I experience deep, distressing feelings that what I was doing was wrong. It is hard to describe. What I felt was a deep emptiness, like I was cut off. This happened while passing the sacrament. The most recent experience in that regard was so distressing to me that I immediately left the chapel after the sacrament had finished being passed and did not go back for the rest of the week. I wish I had been more well-versed in scripture at the time. I believe this all happened because the church's ordinances make a mockery of God, for all of the ordinances in the church, including the sacrament, have been changed by man. I was not aware of this at the time. I never had any desire to make a mockery of God, but he was merciful enough to give me a sense of there not being peace or meaning in what I was doing.

I felt the exact same feelings of emptiness at very powerful moments on my mission. Spreading the Book of Mormon isn't a bad thing, but I knew that something about the missionary program and the church wasn't adding up as it should. Very few realizations in my life have been as stressful to me as that realization was on my mission.

These experiences in the church are in direct conflict with spiritual experiences I have had independent of the church.

When I was fourteen and was dismayed by some of the darkness I had encountered in the world, and felt I might not be able to overcome that darkness, I prayed before bed. I told God I was sad and afraid. I asked him to help me. Then I went to bed. He gave me an experience that has become something I have held onto ever since, and which has become the bedrock for important themes in my life. The experience was this:

I dreamed there was a great conflict in the United States that had not yet occurred and still hasn't occurred at the time of writing this. In my dream there were men who were trying to do the right thing by protecting their worldly goods and what they believed was the correct cause in the conflict. They were armed and defending a secret hideout in the wilderness, which came under an attack by their enemy. All of the men who were defending their goods and their hideout died. Immediately after seeing those men die, I was under the impression that I myself was dying. My vision went black, and the veil began to open. My conscience was free, and I was freed of my mortal body. The spirit world began to open before me, which included a beautiful light and a feeling of perfect purity. I had never felt such joy in my life; I was witnessing, and feeling, what it was like to pass beyond this mortal life having a clear conscience before God, which the Book of Mormon promises is a blissful feeling (as opposed to the horror experienced by those who die with a guilty conscience). Once I was immersed in joy for a brief time, my eyes opened and I was back in my bedroom, sitting upright upon my bed and staring above me, where the light beyond the veil had come from.

I knew I had been given a vision. The feeling of joy and peace was still awash over me, and lingered for a couple days. Immediately after awaking, I got out of bed and thanked God for showing me what he had shown me. I had no idea why he had shown it to me, but I felt so at peace, and I felt a confidence I had never felt before. It took, as I said, a couple of days for the apparent power of having seen something holy to wear off. I was foolish and did not seek further answers or visions; I for some reason did not have any idea I could seek such experiences. The experience seemed to me to be an anomalous one-off occurrence and I just lived my life wondering if anything like that would ever happen again.

One thing that never escaped my understanding is that the United States would come under a crisis and many would die. I hadn't yet made a thorough study of Isaiah, so for many years I did not understand as I do now that "many would die" is actually "nearly everyone will die". The dream didn't convey that. It revealed only that being in hiding and being armed would be insufficient protection from the coming enemy. This didn't scare me, though. I felt peace regarding the coming conflict, because I witnessed what dying with a clear conscious is. So I knew that if I lived as God wanted me to live, dying would be a blessing.

This experience was completely disconnected from the church or anything it teaches. The dream didn't come in the church. It didn't come from a church leader. It came as I brought my personal fears before God. It's also completely disconnected from the church in that the church doesn't understand what is coming in the future. This destruction that is coming to our country is knowledge that is available in scripture (primarily Isaiah, the Book of Revelation, and the Book of Mormon), but which the church's leadership apparently does not have any understanding of. They have preached that the future is one of prosperity and that there is nothing to worry about. If I were to explain this dream to Mormon leadership or an LDS congregation, they would probably discount it. "All is well in Zion", they say.

The next experience was also completely disconnected from the LDS church and its teachings. I was going through the hardest time of my life: separation from my wife and children, and then divorce. I had been married to an abusive woman. Her abuse, plus our shortcomings and disagreements, came to a head and the rest is history. But one thing became clear in the last couple of years of our marriage: my attempts to draw nearer to God and follow his will were offensive to her. Not because she was irreligious (she put on very strict Mormon airs) but because she was adamant that she was the sole power in our home. My obedience to God was disobedience to her, and she would have none of it (our bishop even told me that if my wife was abusing me, it was because I was not an obedient enough husband and it was on me, not her, to repent by aligning my will with hers-- she had the right to abuse me -- I never spoke to that bishop again). I dealt with this situation for years, trying to appease both God and woman, which was an impossibility. Trying to please to masters as I was, I just ended up disappointing both of them. When I finally realized that this path would lead nowhere in either direction, I yielded myself up to God and asked him if I should follow him at the expense of my marriage (I knew that if I decided not to obey my wife on certain points because they were wrong, she would divorce me). After praying, I went to bed. In a dream, two angels came to me and told me I could not reach my potential with a woman like my wife. They gave me an analogy: Being married to my wife was like being a kite will no wind. The string was loose and I was falling. Being free from her would allow the wind to tighten the string and send me. This was a poetic way to describe a couple of biblical scriptures on the very topic.

Luke 14:26: "If any man come unto me and hate not his...wife...he cannot be my disciple."

Proverbs 21:19: "It is better to dwell in the wilderness, than with a contentious and an angry woman."

These scriptures are not saying, "Hey, women are bad so don't be with them." God is in favor of marriage, and that is abundantly clear in the Bible. What the scriptures are saying is that if a woman puts up barriers between you and God in favor of her own desires or feelings, you will be damned unless you get away from her. You cannot obtain salvation and operate in a marriage that doesn't allow for freedom to approach God and, first and foremost above anything, fulfill his desires and commandments (those given both generally in scripture and those given to you personally).

Again, the feelings of peace and assurance that pervaded during that vision lasted for a couple of days.

So I told my wife I would not be obeying her anymore, but would instead follow God's instructions. She filed for divorce immediately.

This experience is in opposition to church teachings. The church teaches that marriage saves a man and he must do anything to preserve it, else he lose his exaltation among the upper echelons of Celestial beings.

Shortly after the divorce process began, I did have a tearful discussion with my parents about the apparent lack of fruit in the church. I told them that I had always striven to follow the counsel of the church and that nothing had ever gone how it was  supposed to, according to the words of the church leaders. I told them I was confused because I had faithfully been active in the church all my life and had never seen any of the promised fruits of peace, happiness, progress, or salvation made manifest. I told them I was certain that happiness could not be obtained by following the church, for I had done so for 30 years and yielded nothing of the sort. My parents assured me that if I had faith, I would be able to endure passed these inconveniences. According to them, I was wrongfully associating the lack of positive fruit in my life with the teachings of the church, and suggested that I must not have actually been following the teachings of the church. I couldn't reconcile what they were saying with what the words of God said clearly, but I tried once again to immerse myself in the Mormon church and their doctrine to rescue myself from the tragedies I had experienced (there were many other disappointments over the years, but the divorce was the biggest and most destructive of all, or so I thought at the time).

Of course, it didn't yield different results than it always had (which were none, besides frustration and emptiness) to re-immerse myself in the church. I attended church with my parents each week, and the emptiness was as strong as ever, with an added sense of awareness that the church was misguided somehow, though I could not pinpoint how, beyond the apparent lack of good fruits. I had read the scriptures my entire life and could not think of how to reconcile that with my experiences. I did not yet realize that the scriptures validated my experiences.

The reason I had not yet been able to reconcile scripture with my experiences was because I interpreted the scriptures not how they are, but with the lens provided by the church. The church very specifically re-interprets scriptures that damn their practices so as to avoid correcting its many problems and false doctrines and erroneous claims.

What happened over the two years following my divorce is nothing short of miraculous, though it may not seem so to others.

What happened first is that I was plunged into a deep, deep sense of depression. I had lost my wife and children after all. I experienced great injustices at the hands of the government during the divorce, and would be experiencing some additional troubling treatment by the church.

The depression was, I supposed, worse than a torturous death. Not only had the church never provided me with any happiness or spiritual security, but I had lost the people in my life who I loved more than life itself (yes, I deeply loved my wife, despite her terrible behavior). I viewed the world through the teachings of the church which I had been raised with and cherished all my life. What did this mean? It meant that because of divorce, my existence was meaningless and my shots at salvation dubious at best. In every way I could think of, I was both temporally and spiritually destroyed. I couldn't believe God would let that happen. It all felt so out of my control. Why was personal agency such a big deal to him if these events, which were beyond my control, could cause my misery and eventual damnation? It all broke me so much. I did not believe I could ever recover.

I hate to admit that I grew very angry at God. Not only was I broken-hearted in the extreme, but I gained the pathetic "Why me?" mentality and blamed God. I did not believe that he had ever really done me any favors. Despite the revelation to accept divorce, the pain of its consequences was too great for me at the time and I did not handle it well.

For months, I thought the only way I could regain any sense of meaning in my life would be to find a new girlfriend and hopefully, a future wife. Salvation and spiritual progress were, according to the church, dependent upon a romantic relationship, after all. So I pursued many LDS women in my dating pool, but was disturbed that every single one of them just wanted sex, which I was not willing to engage in with anyone. I shut them out of my life and eventually came to the conclusion that pursuing a woman was not a good idea unless I wanted to be damned. All of them were idols unto themselves. They wanted to be worshiped by men, as my ex-wife had done. I understood that I was in my most vulnerable state of my entire life so far, and these immoral women could potentially undermine me. I knew that for some reason, women were being influenced by Satan to knock me off course, even though I didn't know what that course was or why Satan would be threatened by a man who had been so utterly destroyed by misfortune already.

After what seemed like an eternity of putting up with loneliness and disappointment in dating, as well as attending church on and off with the attitude of regaining my trust in the LDS church, a light turned on.

I met with an old friend I hadn't seen in years who I believed would be one of the last sources of light in my life. He's a really nice guy, and an active LDS member. He's also a Marxist, and I deeply associate the philosophies of Marx with the organization and method of Satan's kingdom. This friend had also in the past expressed skepticism of some of the church's claims and its leadership. This had always turned me off. I couldn't fathom why a member of the LDS church would simultaneously discount its leadership. I discounted him as an unfaithful member and didn't take his opinions on serious topics with much consideration at all.

During this meeting with him, I felt the need to express my recent misgivings about the church. I told him there seemed to be nothing positive as a result of following the church or its leaders. I think I caught him off guard, since I had always been such an adamant and outspoken defender of the church. But he didn't say anything acusatury or snide about it, but responded by asking me if I had ever read this article. I hadn't. He said I ought to, and that I also ought to look into the history of the church's correlation program.

I looked up the article and read it. To summarize it briefly, it outlines scriptural examples of prophets, seers and revelators and comes to the conclusion that the LDS claim that priesthood offices grant the role of prophet are false and that church leadership is not equal to or related to the role Joseph Smith fulfilled in his own calling as a prophet.

This realization was like getting a little breath of air after having been held under water my entire life. It added a spark of animation to my gospel study that I hadn't experienced in years. Why? Because I was suddenly partially free to pursue my own salvation rather than have a bunch of guys in Salt Lake City pursue it for me, which had had no positive effect on my life ever.

After this experience, I was blessed with one of the scriptural promises regarding the Holy Ghost, namely, that it would bring things to my remembrance.

Suddenly, instances from years ago of random people sharing tidbits of truth with me came back to my mind. I still doubted them, but I was now open to investigating their claims. Before, random people, even people I had never seen or heard of before, and haven't seen or heard of since, mysteriously came into my life to tell me something that was wrong with church doctrine, or that had been altered by liars to hide shameful aspects of church history. In every instance, I had told those people I would not listen to them because I believed LDS leaders were inspired.

Well, after all this deathly depression and confusion regarding LDS doctrine, those people and what they had told me came to mind again, and I began to study it out for myself. I looked for sources that would confirm one position or another. Having been an ardent student of history for most of my life, I was familiar with the process of uncovering obscure facts, and recognizing honest scholarship versus dubious opinions. For the first time ever, I was now applying that skill and experience with the gospel and the church. I was no longer looking to mortal "prophets" for the answers. I was looking for pure, unadulterated truth, regardless of where it came from, even if it came from someone I would previously regarded as an "apostate". I then looked for personal confirmation from God as to the truth or falsehood of what I was learning.

What has happened as a result has been the most animating, living experience with the gospel I have ever encountered. Truth flooded into my life like the waters pouring over the New Orleans dikes during Hurricane Katrina. The doctrines and commandments of men were buried under a sea of truth. My purpose as a fallen man in a fallen world became apparent for the first time, and the path to Jesus Christ was exposed before me by the scriptures and true servants of God who spread his gospel. These men and women are the humble of the earth. They have been excommunicated by the church, simply for pointing out the way to Christ in the scriptures and clarifying that the church contradicts those scriptures. They are called apostates by the church. The word is now dirty to me. "Apostate". I pray that all LDS people will cease to accuse individuals who look for God's truth as apostates and reserve it for the institution that banishes those men and women.

I know that may sound harsh, but this blog will continue to explore where the church has gone wrong that caused so much emptiness and confusion in my life.

Thanks to those who were messengers of God in my life, who shared little tidbits of truth, though I doubted and dismissed them, I am now back on the path to God. I am seeking further visions, and seeking greater ones than the ones I described above. I don't need the church to hand me salvation in exchange for money. That is Satan's work. I need direct experiences with God. I want everyone to join me. I welcome any and all. Heaven knows I would be grateful to have others to converse with on the topic of salvation.