I made some poor girl cry on Christmas Eve - she hid in her bedroom from me.

I live in the South. We had a nice, elderly convert couple who suddenly introduced the mishies to a whole group of their young, extended relatives (mostly evangelical Christians). The entire clan was baptized, including one devout holy roller who never entirely bought into the Mormon thang . . . but her DH *DID*!! OMG, can you say, "Trouble in Paradise??!" And did I mention they all lived in trailer parks?

Yeesh.

So, because this woman was so adamant about "no contact," almost the week after she joined the church (her pastor honestly had her convinced we were Satanic), I was assigned as her visiting teacher. I was a Southern convert myself and sooooo nice and sweet and patient.

Since I couldn't acutally go over to the trailer to visit this sister, I sent her letters, bearing my testimony EVERY MONTH. The husband encouraged my contact. He came to church every single Sunday without his wife and kids.

One Christmas, hubby actually invited me to the trailer to do a real-life visit. I had written such outstanding, heart-felt letters, he was sure I could touch his wife's heart and bring to pass a real live Christmas miracle.

I took the RS Prez with me for back-up and we left our own families on Christmas Eve to show up on her doorstep and give her baked Christmas goodies with a message. The husband opened the door and welcomed us, but said he couldn't let us in.

He said his wife was hiding and crying in the back bedroom. He kept relaying messages back and forth between us. I could hear raised voices and wailing. ("Crap, it's only cupcakes!" I thought.) Finally, after about 45 minutes of lingering in the trailer park yard we finally left, the RS Prez and I reassuring ourselves that we "had planted some seeds" and the next time around would be different.

You?



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 03/19/2013 09:37PM by shannon.

I once hounded a poor woman to try and get my Visiting Teaching done. She was living with her boyfriend and kept saying she was fine with me coming to visit teach her but then she would hide or not answer the door. I was such a jerk practically stalking her and showing up at her job ! OMG Was that really me? Religion can make us do crazy things. BUT if she had said not to come I would have left her alone.

As a district leader at twenty I had to give baptismal interviews. So this twenty year old American virgin man had to ask Japanese women in their 50s questions about the law of chastity, including if they'd ever had an abortion.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/19/2013 10:05PM by peregrine.

I heard stories from district leaders all the time, asking 9-year-olds about masturbation, and how difficult and embarrassing that was.

I cringe to think of what a pathetic ass I was sometimes. So, so very sorry about it now.

Once I lectured a girl about the modesty of the dress she was wearing to church while at BYU HC - seriously, makes me sick to even think about it. Hopefully my horrible, judgmental and hypocritical behavior (I regularly wore a bikini, strapless tops and short shorts, back in the day when I actually looked good in them - just not to church!), helped her to find the truth and leave TSCC. I still feel really bad about what a jerk I was to her. If I could remember her name, I would track her down and apologize.

I probably did other stuff many other times too, but that is the incident that sticks in my mind, not in a good way, either.

Kelly (I think?!), if by any chance you are on here - my very deepest, most abject apologies and I hope you are having a wonderful life!!

If her name is Kelli Ann (omitting last name for privacy) and she would be 31 now, that would be my wife. :) I can assure you that she's out of the church too. If it wasn't Kelly Ann, well, that's alright too yeah? :)

EDIT: Ahh! Misspelled my own wife's name!!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/20/2013 01:34AM by notsurewhattothink.

Me, one thing I never understood that missionaries always seem to do is show up unannounced. I don't know why it didn't bother me but now when I see missionaries just dropping by (still have a lot of Mormon's in my neighborhood) it kind of makes me mad as it's really disrespectful. Shame on me though, I was that obnoxious self righteous Elder not too long ago.

EDIT: Sorry, tried to reply to the topic and not my last post.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/20/2013 01:28AM by notsurewhattothink.

Seriously, why do mormon missionaries and mormon "leaders" show up unannounced to members' homes? The telephone was invented in the late 1800s. It should be understood that showing up at a member's door without checking first to see if they are available for visitors is rude. There are ward lists that have members' telephone numbers available. What's the point of that if they aren't going to use it?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/21/2013 01:24PM by iris.

I always figured it was easier for Satan to tempt people during any exchange that wasn't face-to-face. If they bodily show up, then the Spirit they carry with them is more present.

Honestly, there seems to be no end to how foolish I feel for having ever thought this way, and for allowing these thoughts to lead to such embarrassingly stupid actions. "Who wouldn't want my lovely spitirual influence?" God Almighty.

I am putting it down to brainwashing and TSCC's horribly pathetic and bizarre fixation with what everyone else is doing!

After all, we were supposed to be "the light on the hill" right? Too bad we (I at least) were such self-righteous twits.

Ok, I think you win, Sizter H. I never talked about masturbation with a boyfriend and I think my mom would have had a nervous breakdown!

When I was 16 I dated this never mo boy and somehow the subject of masturbation came up. I pulled out Bruce R. McConkie's "Mormon Doctrine" to show him it was wrong. Then later I discussed the conversation with my mom.

Went on a mission and bugged people at their homes.

when I was serving as a YW counselor we collected money to give to a poor family for Christmas. It ended up being a family from Latin America living in a small 2 bedroom house. It was the parents and 4 children. We bought them a car load of presents and we gathered together and took it over one night. I felt sick to my stomach when we did it because I'm sure it was embarrassing to them for us to show up without notice. I'm glad their kids got presents, but us showing up and actually inviting ourselves into their home without warning was just sick and disgusting. They were caught completely off guard. I don't know, it just left a bad taste in my mouth and it's something I'll never forget. It wasn't true charity, it was us trying to convert innocent ppl that just happened to be in a bad financial situation. We were so busy patting ourselves on the back, I don't think we even learned their names.

When I was 15 I turned down a date. I told him I couldn't date him because he wasn't mormon and couldn't go to the temple. He was pretty upset and his mom called my dad and chewed him out. My dad pretended that mormons didn't encourage not dating outside the church and I got a talking to when I got home for hurting the boy's feelings. Well, I wanted to go out with him, but the church and YW says to date only members! I couldn't believe I got in trouble for that, I thought I was doing what the church told me is right.

I ended up being friends with the guy, and I even asked him to go with me to his favorite football team (not a date, just friends).

Dad still didn't let me date boys outside of church. Seems he just wanted to look normal in front of other adult non-members, but secretly I couldn't date non- mormons... "Oh, no, our church doesn't teach that! My daughter is just confused...."

After that, I never said no to a mormon boy when I was asked out or asked to dance. If I did, I would be guilted by Dad/church/ect, he said I shouldn't say no to a "worthy" boy if he asks me for a date. I thought I would get in trouble! That ended up getting me in a lot of trouble spots when I was dating and when I had my first boy friend.

I learned that boys' feelings were more important than my own... Thanks dad/church!

But, yeah... I can't believe I weeded out some really nice guys just because they weren't mormon.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/20/2013 11:45PM by ness.

that's such a shame! He could have been your soul mate! ugh, I hate Mormon dads

Wow, Tupperware, I had a similar experience one of the times I was in YW. I was the 1st counselor and actually got in a major argument with the YW & YM pres and the Bishop about it. We had all this stuff, including a tree, to give this less active hispanic family (who had NOT asked for help, btw). They wanted to have this huge group of YW and YM show up to give it to the family.

I was desperate and pulled out scriptures about how you should give without expectation of rewards, etc. I argued until I was blue in the face that if we had to take the stuff we should just leave everything on the porch, ring the doorbell and run, because I thought it was a really, really bad idea. The YW, YM pres & Bishop were positive this was going to be a great spiritual experience for the youth and for the family. It seemed to me that because the family was Hispanic, the YW, YM pres & Bish were sure they were desitute and needed charity. Nothing I said coud convince them otherwise.

It wasn't. The house was kind of small, but nice and well kept. They had normal furniture, everything was very nice. The family was obviously horrified when we showed up. There was a Grandmother and the Mom there and although they were polite, it was obvious they were mortified. They already had a tree. Decorated, with presents.

Only two of the family kids (probably about 10 - 11) were there and they were obviously mortified that we were there as well. You could tell is was taking every ounce of self control and fear of getting in trouble later to keep them from slinking away in embarrassment.

I apologized to the Mom while we were there for just showing up and treating them like charity cases. She and her mother and her children were obviously insulted and nonplussed, they just didn't quite know how to respond. I didn't either and I was with the offending team. I felt so horrible and just didn't know what to do.

The Mom I talked to was very nice about it, although obviously just hoping we would leave soon. I didn't know what to do other than try to hurry things along and apologize profusely for being there.

It was so insulting to them. If people ask for help, that's one thing, but just arbitrarily deciding that you (the ward leadership) think a family isn't living up to their (again, the ward leaderships') standards and that they deserve charity? Totally insulting, especially if they don't even know the people or anything about their lives!

The damn TSCC group stayed forever, even though there were far too many people for a relatively small living room and it was very obvious the family wanted us to leave but were too polite to say so. Then, the YW president INSISTED on setting up the tree the church group had brought, which was bigger, instead of the one the family already had up AND DECORATED.

That involved moving all their presents out of the way, taking ornaments and lights off and taking down their tree before putting the new one up. Without re-doing all the lights and ornaments, of course. Make more work for them, it's a charitable cause.

It was so clear that the Mom and Grandmother and kids were upset about it and too polite to say anything. I have rarely felt more horrible about a situation I was in. It was awful, one of my very worst experiences in TSCC ever and it still burns in my memory.

I felt at the time how wrong it was but other than apologizing and refusing to participate, I just didn't know what else to do. Now, I look back and think at least I could have called and warned them, maybe they could have refused to open the door!

This family never, ever again showed up at church and I was relieved of my calling shortly thereafter (I hit it off with the YW really well and when I asked why I was being released I was told that there were "leadership issues." Basically, the YW pres & I were polar opposites.

I thought the YW pres was an incredibly insensitive bitch, basically - which she was, couldn't stand the woman, especially after the above experience and didn't hide it very well. Shortly afterwards I was put in the RS presidency. Oh, the good times.

very similar to my experience. But TSCC just couldn't see how damaging it was. The people we visited also had a X-mas tree already. I'm sure they were confused as hell as to why we even showed up. I have always regretted participating in that sham. I'm glad you can relate though, it makes me feel better :)

Oh, I so relate! It's one of the things that still haunts me, not that I obsess about it but I still feel bad that I participated in it. I wish I could have done something different, it was such a horrible, horrible experience, for me and obviously for the family involved.

I have to wonder as well, how many of the youth involved picked up on the situation but were too afraid to say or do anything. I know of at least five personally who are no longer in TSCC - I hadn't thought of that before but I wonder if it contributed?

Tupperwhere, I think we have lead parallel lives in some instances - if we hadn't already established that we weren't in the same place I'd be sure it was the same experiences a few times!

Well, you know what they say about the church being the same everywhere! Apparently so - including the insensitivity!

If someone came in and took my tree down, I think I might go ballistic. Geez.

I agree. I also had the exact same experiences of turning up at people's houses unannounced and inviting ourselves in (as I mention in my post below).

For me though, I didn't feel like I was doing a bad thing at the time. It's only now looking back that I realize how horrible it is. People are entitled to be offended in those situations imo.

The thing is, most people normally wouldn't let you in, but when you turn up with loads of gifts and food which you clearly spent loads of time preparing, people always feel like they can't say no.

I did loads of intrusive things now that I think about it. The most common being turning up and the houses of investigators and less-active members, and basically inviting myself in. Sometimes it was a fairly large group of us as well (although we would've gone away if people did say "no", but I think most people felt guilty because we'd usually bring them food and stuff).

I think one was when I was in Young Mens, I was one of the assistants in the Priest quorum, and in one of our meetings with the Bishop, he told us about one of the other guys in the quorum, who had a girlfriend he'd been with for a couple of years (so obviously they were very close), and he was telling us that we need to try and tell the guy to split up with his girlfriend because he had to prepare for a mission and the Bishop was worried that the guy wouldn't want to go on a mission because he didn't want to leave his girlfriend.

Generally in the callings I had that involved being in meetings, we'd be discussing quite private things about other people, which I'm sure those people wouldn't not want us to be discussing. Seemed a lot like gossiping to me. Although I think the people felt like they had good intentions sharing those pieces of information. But really it's horrible, since after you've been in those meeting, you realize that they'll be gossiping about you one day too.

but I did a few times. I really hated when teaching primary and being in YWs that they expected us to contact inactives. I must have handled it well because one of the inactive girls requested me as her VT after she had a baby in high school. I was the only one she would allow to come to see her.

BUT I did date nonmormons. My parents weren't too TBM. They often wondered why I didn't marry one of the nonmormons because mormon guys were such a problem for me. When I rejected who I considered the love of my life 0ver 30 years ago and he moved away, I sent the missionaries. He was living at his parents' for a short time and his dad was the one who talked to the missionaries. He kept them from talking to his son.

Lo and behold I finally met the man 18 months ago.

As terrible as it is to tear down someone's Christmas tree, I think the guilt I feel tops that.

I had a roommate at BYU who was sleeping with girls. I left him a note that if I noticed once more that a girl had stayed the night, I would essentially force him to go and see the bishop. I caught him again (Boy did he have a libido. I sat in amazement as he directly and emphatically hit on a girl once.) and literally walked him to his appointment with the bishop.

What makes me feel the worst about it is that it wasn't done for his welfare. Not really. It was mainly because I wanted the freedom to walk around the apartment in a towel or garments and not be worried about some strange female being in my private area.

I really wish I could apologize to him. Like most other posters here say about the people they hurt: I hope he's out now.

I was asked to play the piano for a YW program once. I asked one of my nevermo friends to come and turn the pages for me because it was a really long piece. She declined. I remember saying to her "I'm not trying to convert you, I just need some help" but she was like "No thanks, I don't ever want to step foot into a Mormon church" lol

She is still one of my best friends. We both grew up in a heavily Mormon town so I congratulate her for doing so well as a nevermo. She had a massive crush on a TBM guy when we were in hs that never went anywhere. He ended up going on a mission and marrying in the temple which totally crushed her because he had lead her on for many years. They are friends now, but it was torture when we were young. I was dating his brother who was anything but "clean" and his older brother turned out to be gay. My friend is a very successful woman in the tech industry living on the west coast. She gets paid to travel the world. It's just funny how things turn out.

While I was in Alabama, after I had mentally left the church, but was still pretending for my husband, I was called as a leader for Girls Camp. Because the ward budget was so tight, we were sent to the local food shelter with a note from the bishop saying that we had poor people we were trying to feed. We would load up pallets of donated food and pay the food bank one cent per pound. There were NO POOR CHILDREN that attended the camp and everyone knew that. I mentioned that I was uncomfortable to the woman that was the stake leader for the girl's camp. She agreed that it felt wrong, but we wouldn't have had any food for the camp in a few weeks and they had been doing it for years so it was ok(!!). I went along with it instead of speaking up against this theft by the Mormons of the food bank - I will be ashamed of doing that for the rest of my life. When the bishop changed I told the new bishop how wrong it was, and I officially left the church since I never wanted to be associated with something that immoral again. But now I realize that I am a lot like those people in that famous old college experiment who, when they are told to shock a person for an experiment, will do it just because they are instructed by someone in power against their own judgement. I HATE myself for that. And now I have trust issues with all food bank donation drives, because I realize how easy it is for churches to use it for recreation purposes, and that poor people may never see it.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 03/21/2013 10:54AM by daughterofperdition.

I hate to say it, but that doesn't surprise me at all. I'm sorry you had to associate yourself with that though. This is the stuff the general public needs to know about Mormons. They are liars and cheats. They are not "good" people at all.

DaughterofPerdition, maybe I'm dense here . . . but why didn't the Mormons raid their own Bishop's storehouse?

;o)

D of P, the study you are referencing is the famous one by Stanley Milgram, and is available in book form. It is well worth reading.

I was the Relief Society president in my single's ward and the bishop called me in to tell me about an 18-year-old girl in our ward who was pregnant. She was a freshman at the university and lived in the dorms, and was trying to hide the pregnancy until school got out the next month, at which point she was going to move in with a "foster family" in the stake who had offered to sponsor her through LDS social services. She was going to live with this family until the baby was born and she could give the child up to LDS social services, to be adopted by a Mormon family. She was keeping the pregnancy hushed up from her roommates and the ward because she was half Native American and had been raised on a reservation. If anyone in her tribe had heard she was pregnant, they could insist that she give the baby up to be adopted by a member of the tribe, who would almost certainly not be LDS. This 18-year-old wanted her baby to go to an LDS family and nobody but her mom and the bishop could be told. It was a big secret.

So of course, the bishop told me. He asked me to take one of my counselors and go see if she was OK, if she needed anything etc. I was in my mid-20s, an RM, college- graduate and must have looked as old and hard to relate to as some middle-aged woman to this poor teenager. She was nice enough, invited us into her bedroom to talk, hiding her pregnancy under an oversized sweater. She assured us she was OK and didn't need anything, while warning us to keep our voices down and how important it was to her that no one find out she was pregnant. She talked for a bit - she probably needed someone to talk to but she didn't need a couple of women she barely knew butting into her life. The next Sunday the bishop came to me, very shamefaced because this girl had come back to him and flipped out, screaming because he had betrayed her trust. The bishop told me it would probably be better if we just let her work it out with LDS Social Services from then on. Once in a while I think about her and hope everything turned out OK for her and the baby, so sorry we caused added stress and grief to this child at an extremely difficult time in her life. We didn't mean to make things worse but we obviously did.

Hanging head.

When my neighbor's child rode his tricycle into the swimming pool and drowned, I suggested to her that if she converted to Mormonism, she would be guaranteed to see him again in eternity.

My Catholic neighbor beside me immediately said "I am sure you will be together again in heaven with Jesus."

I grew a dick and said, "Your religion doesn't say anything about families being together-- you are all going to be separate, like angels....etc."

It is now one of my painful memories and I almost could not bring myself to post this. I am crying now.

I bring you this shame because it helps us to understand the effect that a cult can have on normal compassion. I can't explain why I did that other than to say that a good person can be turned into a tool by a cult.

Anagrammy

Thanks for posting this. I've said some things with respect to the afterlife that still haunt me.

Ana, let me give you a quote from theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg: "Good people will do good things and evil people will do evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

Went on a mission.