How can I sum up a lifetime of change in one post?

I'm a direct descendant of Heber C. Kimball, Asael Smith twice over, and the founders of St. George. Mormonism defines my family, and nobody had ever questioned its veracity. As a result it defined me as well. I grew up in California where I was the only mormon in my age group at school, and half the mormons within 5 years of my age group were my cousins. This definition would grow to be very important to me in my first 18 years.

I remember being shocked at a very early age to learn that my best friend drank Dr. Pepper. To me Dr. Pepper was an absolute evil, like beer. Learning to accept that it was okay for kids to drink Dr. Pepper would be my first paradigm change.

I first challenged the truth of the church when I was 11 or 12. I was aware enough of the world to realize that my world-view wasn't the only one, and that I needed something conclusive if I were to truly believe that mine was better than anyone else's. The church was right there to help me figure it out, and taught me all about the spirit. Being new to the youth program I was able to attend spiritually engaging events like Bishop's Youth Firesides, where I could see the light in his eyes as he talked about his communication with the spirit.

I wanted the same knowledge as he had and aspired to be just like him.

I’ve always had a thing for logic and reasoning, as far back as I can remember. I taught myself how to write when I was 3 and math was second nature. As I grew, turning my intellectual power towards religion seemed the obvious and best application of my mind.

I tried the church's method of determining truth and got an answer. Whenever I prayed with a sincere and profound desire to know the truth I felt a burning in my bosom. The more my soul ached for understanding, the stronger the burning feeling was. The church correctly predicted my feelings every time. It was easy to reason out the truth of the church at that point. If this life really was a test given by God, it was reasonable that he would expect us to have faith and give us spiritual clues to guide us. The intellectual understanding would follow.

This was when I was 12.

For the next two years I had a very spiritual pair of Sunday School teachers who managed to invite the spirit into the classroom in a powerful way every week. I was ready for the intellectual understanding to start pouring in.

When I was 14, ironically the age of Joseph Smith during the first vision, I was aching for an intellectual understanding of the church. It was during one evening of poignant soul-searching that I opened my scriptures randomly and found the verse "learn wisdom in thy youth... to keep the commandments of God."

God had spoken to me and given me the very wisdom that I was searching for, and there’s no question I felt the spirit when I learned it. This experience would become the basis of my testimony for years to come.

High school, then, was the hook. I never missed a day of seminary. I gobbled that stuff up. I learned the joys of serving and helping others in the gospel. I kept myself as honest and chaste as humanly possible. I went to EFY every year and had the most spiritual experiences I could have ever possibly fathomed. How on earth could I keep this stuff to myself?

One thing I prayed for was to have a friend my age in the church. All the other people in school were having sex, smoking pot, drinking and cussing. I could see how miserable they were and wanted to show them God's way which would lead towards the ridiculous happiness that I felt.

My prayer was answered when I was able to help convert a guy to the gospel who was near my age. He had a learning disadvantage, took special classes, but that only made us the perfect pair. We were best friends instantly. His enthusiasm for the gospel was contagious.

Eventually he had to go his own way, which was different from my BYU-driven path. I left high school having gained a strength of character, and realizing, particularly my senior year when I was really alone, that I was capable of taking care of all my own emotional needs (with the help of the Lord).

My first 2 or 3 days at BYU were hard, since I didn't know anybody and was in a completely new world. However, soon I made great friends, I received an important-sounding calling in my student ward, and BYU was unbelievable after that.

Coming from an environment of absolute profanity and pervasive drug use, where pregnant girls dropped out of school every week and gangs ruled the streets, to BYU, was something I can’t describe. Everywhere I looked were uplifting and positive, motivated people. For the first time in my life I felt like I belonged. My best friend, as well as a handful of other guys with whom I am still strong friends (11 years later) were just what I needed. I discovered that I was a nerd and that it was not only okay to indulge it, but encouraged. For the first time in my life I was around other people who fueled my nerdiness, and also who fueled my resolve in the gospel. I was on top of the world - never would I be higher.

One of the saddest days of my life was walking down the dorm hallway with every room empty. The semester was at its absolute end, all the guys were gone, and I wouldn't see any of them again for two years. Worse, I had to go back to my stifling home town. Why did the first presidency give me a mission start date 2 months after the one I requested?

I took out my endowments one day in that two month period, summer of 2001. I had just learned what garments were two years prior. I knew that most grown-ups I knew wore funny looking underwear, but I thought that was just because they were old-fashioned. I didn't know their underwear was religious. Discovering that secret from an Orson Scott Card book where one of the characters, who is mormon, has a struggle with showing his garments. It was a real eye-opener, and suddenly all this old-fashioned underwear made sense. I thought back on a Sunday School lesson when I was around 12 where we were laughing and joking about all the myths of mormonism. "Did you know non-mormons think we have horns?" "Some people think we play volleyball naked in the temple." "Many people seriously think we wear magic underwear!" That last line was the funniest one of all at the time. I couldn't believe people really believed that we did that stuff. Oh, the ignorance of the world...

Anyway, I took great pleasure in contemplating the mysteries and subtle lessons in the temple ceremony. The strangeness was quickly forgotten and the profoundness was foremost.

I spent my last non-mission night at my grandma's condo in Salt Lake City, en route to the MTC. My uncle came to see me while I was there, and I was to have one of the most profound experiences of my life.

I hate to gloss-over my uncle's incredible life, but just know that he had gone through 3 failed marriages, wayward children, falling into inactivity in the church, alcohol abuse, drugs, suicide and back. He was a big man with a big heart, big personality, and big life.

He told me his story that night, about how his life had taken turn after turn for the worst. One day he had decided to end it all, so he left a note for his children, and drove up into the mountains in the dead of winter. He was going to just go out walking in the snow, and hopefully they would find his body when Spring came.

So there he was, walking out in the snow, when Jesus Christ himself appeared to him, clear as day. I realized how serious this was. It had only happened to a few people throughout history. I was standing in the presence of a man who had talked to God face to face.

Jesus told my uncle that he was there to take him, if he wanted it. However, if he decided to go then he would not fulfill the purpose of his life.

My uncle nearly leapt out of his skin. "I have a purpose in life!?" He left Jesus stranded in the snow and went running back down the mountain.

He was a new man after that. He told me that he had thousands of stories in the ensuing years of times when he would receive a prompting in the middle of the night, go out to a random person's house, and provide something that they absolutely needed in that moment. He and the spirit were completely intertwined, and he was doing incredible things to help his fellow man. He told me that someday I too would reach rock bottom, and once there was nowhere to go but up, I would truly get to know the Savior. I had no idea that that prophecy would be fulfilled very soon.

The next day I galloped off to the MTC, within sight of Deseret Towers, my old dorm home. I spent 9 weeks in the MTC learning Italian and how to be a good, spiritual missionary, and preparing to go to Italy. I went to the temple and learned more mysteries every week. I saw countless general authorities and apostles, and ran into someone I knew from BYU daily. I became so fired up for the gospel that I was fully expecting to baptize the Pope, or at least do something on the same level. With faith and the spirit literally anything was possible. My grandpa Heber C. Kimball proved that by converting thousands in his missions to England, and I felt very close to him.

I knew that there was a stigma about European missions, that they had very few baptisms. It wasn't going to be a road-block for me. And thus I was thrust upon the world.

My mission was not what I expected. I prayed and prayed for direction from the spirit on where to go, what to do, and yet when I walked out onto the street I didn't have a clue what the next step was. My companion and I would walk the streets aimlessly, and he would stop people in their tracks and start talking about the gospel. I didn't know what he was saying because I only had 2 months of language training at this point, but I knew we weren't having much success.

We taught a couple of discussions to one couple, but the discussions soon ended when we realized that they were both married to other people. Because they were foreigners it was literally impossible for them to get a divorce from their other spouses, and yet because they had their only baby together and loved each other they needed to stay together. There was no loophole for them to join the church, and when they realized that they soon ended communication with us.

We taught a couple of crazy guys. One of them was obsessed with outer-body experiences and told us about the things he had learned about them. Teaching him about body and spirit was easy.

The other guy came close to baptism. He had lost his wife a few years earlier. One day he closed a notebook, opened it again, and there was a bunch of writing that wasn't there the moment before. It was in his wife's handwriting and her language. He even pulled out the notebook and showed it to us. I was slightly skeptical, but nothing in my belief system said that such a thing was impossible, and I figured the guy for a golden contact.

We knew that things were coming to a head with this guy. We went to visit him for an appointment at his apartment one day. The spirit told me in no uncertain terms that this was going to be an important meeting. We rang and got no answer. I was distraught! I knew that he needed to see us right now. We turned and walked away.

But the spirit was nagging at my heart. I knew that God intended for us to see this guy, and that through faith we can do anything. I knew that if I believed hard enough I would turn around and see him waving out his window for us to come back.

I turned around timidly, and there he was, waving at us out his window, exactly as I saw it in my mind's eye!

We went in to his apartment and found out that he was having laryngitis and was taking a shower, so he couldn't call out to us. This was it. This was the moment my life was building up towards.

He told us that he wanted to put an end to our meetings. We never saw him again.

Then there was a young man who was a perfect golden contact. My companion and I relished our meetings with him. He was so humble, truth-seeking, and ready for the gospel in every conceivable way. His lifestyle, thought process, it was perfect. He was making all of our challenges worth it. Then for some reason we had a hard time getting ahold of him for a 5th discussion. I was in the area for 4 months after that, and he never answered another phone call. I’ll never know why he stopped our meetings.

The night before my first companion transferred out he knew I was having a rough time. He encouraged me to talk about it, and I told him my mission was not what I expected. We finally became really close as companions, and he was gone.

I spoke Italian better than my second companion, and I didn't speak it very well. It was a small detail, of course, when having faith is the most important thing, and my second companion had a heap of it.

We set high weekly goals, and worked hard to achieve them. I remember ringing doorbells with him in the pouring rain, and he was so sick he could barely breathe. He was overweight, ate chocolate by the bucket-load, and was completely undaunted in his work ethic. I was disgusted by him, and entirely inspired.

When we failed to reach our goals, we decided that it would be a failure of faith to reduce them for the next week. So we would raise them. I prayed intensely, and analyzed myself thoroughly to make sure I was worthy of the spirit. If there was any slight task I could do better, I'd do it. I had to be willing to sacrifice all in the service of the Lord, and after each week of failure I'd find something new that I could change or improve. Stop taking naps, wake up earlier to exercise and study more, study the rules and follow them to the letter. Speak Italian at all times. You name it. I was on a path of self-perfection.

And self-destruction.

Each week the goals would increase, and each week our results would decrease. Each spiral downward was the Lord trying my faith, and by proving that my faith was unshakable the Lord would open the way for me to baptize the entire nation. He was clearly preparing amazing things for me, if I could just get through it.

One week our goals were easily the highest in the mission, and the numbers that we reported to the zone leaders were zeros across the board. We had a district meeting with the sisters, and one sister who was native italian and didn't speak English complained about our usage of English in our meetings (keep in mind 95% of the missionaries in the mission were Americans).

My Italian had gotten much better by then, so I knew what she was saying, but I had already prepared an activity that required the use of English, and so without any backup plan I apologized and went with it.

As soon as I explained the activity she flipped and ran out the room in tears. Perhaps it was the timing and the other things I was going through, but this was a traumatic moment for me. The other missionaries in the district looked at me like I was the worst person in the world. I asked them if I needed to apologize to her, and they said yes. I didn’t know what else I could have done, but I went and found her anyway, and apologized. Her response – harsh criticism.

I could almost envision my world burning around me. I couldn't stand the city I was in, I was a complete failure, I was making everything around me worse, and the harder I tried the worse things got. The pain became unbearable, and suddenly, on the walk home from district conference, something clicked in my brain, as if an off-switch protecting me from implosion.

I've never been the same.

My mission actually got significantly better after that. I was shortly transferred out and left the city consuming in fire behind me forever. My new companion was very feminine, and thus very nice, and the people in the city were strangely normal. In fact there was an American Air Force base in my new area, so we interacted with Americans as much as Italians. Teaching the gospel to Americans was an enormous breath of fresh air. When they committed to read the Book of Mormon, they actually did it. When they prayed they actually got answers. When they committed to change their lifestyles they did their darndest to do it. This was how teaching the gospel was supposed to go.

I was with the feminine companion for 6 months. The fact that the pen in his pocket had to always match his tie color didn't bother me. I didn't think too hard about it when he insisted I show him my butt. He was a good missionary, and we had a lot of success together. And the greatest part about it - we didn't work hardly at all. We never stopped people on the street, and only went door-to-door tracting for a couple hours per week. The rest of our time was spent prettying up the area book and making visits with the members. We were so much lazier than how I was before, and our success was through the roof. At one point we had as many as 5 people committed for baptism, a dizzying number for Italy.

One of the 5 was an American pilot in his early 20's, who wanted to know everything about the church before he joined. We encouraged him in his search, and made sure he knew that the spirit was paramount. His father was nervous and gave him a bunch of literature that I had no idea even existed. One that caused him some concern was "No Man Knows My History" by Fawn Brodie. He told us about how her sources were solid, and mentioned strange things to me like death penalties in the temple and the Adam-God theory. I had no answers except that the spirit is the best avenue towards truth, and he seemed to agree. He got within 2 days of baptism before immorality and his Italian girlfriend put it on hold. His research wasn't evil to us, clearly studying the facts used by the enemies of the church with the spirit in mind is an acceptable way to achieve truth, and he had determined that the criticisms against the church were unfounded. His girlfriend, however, was the devil incarnated and robbed us of our golden contact. He moved away before he was baptized, and she went with him.

Earlier in his investigation process we brought up some of his concerns with the branch president. When I mentioned the temple death penalties the last thing I expected was for his wife to say "oh yeah, I was glad when they took those out." How much else was there about the church that I didn't know? I couldn't study any of it while I was a missionary, since I wanted to be as obedient as possible to the rules. So I tucked it away. Besides, there couldn't be much. After all, our investigator didn't seem to have any problems moving along towards baptism after reading it all.

We ended up only having 2 baptisms result from our work in that area, but that was already way above mission average. I was kind of dejected, though, because one was a carry-over from before I got there and the other was baptized after I left, and he didn't speak English or Italian.

I was transferred to Venice (or at least the area that encompasses Venice). It was tough going back to teaching strictly Italians, to an area where I needed to stop people on the street and knock on doors all the time again. I was also given a companion who was having serious doubts about his testimony and on the verge of going home. However, I had learned much from my experiences, and I dealt with the problems with stoicism. I like to think of this as my "gadget" area. I had just crossed the half-way point of my mission, and was concerned about fulfilling a prophecy my dad gave to me during a father's blessing before I left, that I would take people (plural) into the waters of baptism and lay my hands on their head for the gift of the holy ghost. I had fulfilled the holy ghost portion by standing in two circles, that was easy enough. However, I still had yet to get my baptism pants wet to fulfill the other portion.

I had learned that there are alternate methods of having success than simple hard work. Hard work had only given me a mental breakdown. Smart and spirit-driven work had much better effects. So I tried every trick I could fathom. I made posters, fliers to spread around a neighborhood before we tracted it, English class, newspaper articles/ads, town meetings, you name it. Once I spent 2 weeks doing nothing but advertise a week-long open house at the church, calling every phone number on every scrap of paper in an old book we had in the apartment, making flyers to advertise it, talking to thousands of people on the street individually inviting them to go.

The result? 6 months of nothing. But Venice was beautiful, and the companion decided not to go home, so I figured it for a success.

My 4th and last area was just as hard and disturbing as my first area, only now I had the fortitude to endure it. One of my neighbors told me, while I was on splits with a zone leader, that he saw my regular companion smoking on the balcony at night. I also once found a heavy metal CD in his CD-player. We found a beyond-golden contact who we knew was destined to be the next bishop, only to find him one day disappeared with one of the young women in the ward, and realized that getting to her was his only purpose in meeting with us.

I expressed my concerns, largely about my companion, with my mission president, and he never addressed them. In fact, a few months earlier he had promised to send me a greenie (I had never served with a brand new companion before and really wanted the experience). He hadn't addressed that either. He seemed skeptical about my claims about my companion.

After 3 months my companion was transferred to the mission office so that the mission president could monitor him more closely and assess my claims. Out of concern for my waning work ethic my mission president gave me the hardest working missionary in the mission to help me finish strong.

The mission president’s opinion of me was evident in the fact that for these final three months of my mission he made me junior companion, while every other missionary I had come out with from the MTC had become a zone leader. While they were interacting regularly with the mission president, I had only seen the mission home once and was finishing in shame.

He was my second "normal" companion, and I was committed to finish strong. We had one week where we worked 100 hours. That's over 14 hours of missionary work per day, not including study and meals. And we had a lot in common and a lot to talk about. It was spiritually blissful, and I no longer cared too much about results.

One day we got a third elder added to our companionship from the mission office. He was there to open a new companionship in our area, and needed to get established in the area first. He told me about how well my previous companion was doing in the mission office, how hard he was working. He would constantly include phrases like "all he needed was a push" and such. It became clearer to me how I was being perceived by the mission president.

Then there were my zone leaders. My companion and I were working incredibly hard, as I've mentioned, but our "golden question" rate was low. In other words, we weren’t inviting enough people to hear the discussions. Our method was more of a respectful teaching and encouragement.

Our zone leaders constantly did splits with us to get us on track. I watched in agony as my zone leader rammed the gospel down as many throats as possible. Person after person would give every clue that they didn't want to hear about the gospel, and my zone leader would insist it upon them until they walked away. His golden question count was through the roof, and he expected mine to rise as well.

My companion, of course, got the same treatment. We would always discuss our misfortunes when we got back together at the end of those days. One day my companion was terribly sick while doing splits, and on the way back from an appointment decided to sit down on the bus because he had a headache. His zone leader immediately berated him in front of all the people on the bus for being lazy and not opening his mouth to all of them. I can only imagine what my mission president thought when they gave him reports on me.

One day my zone leaders asked me to give a little lesson about member missionary work during our zone meeting. They knew about my success in my second area with the Americans, and how it was driven largely by my work with the members. I knew exactly what to teach, and gave a lesson about how we need to build relationships with members for them to trust us, and ensure that they know we're humans and not just gospel robots, and will treat their investigators like humans.

I didn't get a single nod from my zone leaders throughout the entire lesson. In fact, they looked strangely uncomfortable. When my lesson ended I immediately learned why.

The purpose of our zone meeting was to lay out a new rule that had come down not just from the mission president, or area presidency, but from an actual apostle who was visiting the area. The rule had come down the chain of command, and would later be reiterated by my mission president and required as a dictated command from a special witness of Jesus Christ.

The rule was that we were not to spend longer than 1 hour in the homes of members, and while there we were not to talk about anything besides the gospel, because gospel-centered relationships are the most meaningful. The lesson was long and it smacked of criticism.

I was fully embarrassed. Not only that, I was troubled. I went home and prayed earnestly to know whether or not I should follow this new rule. The spirit told me in no uncertain terms, no.

But it wasn't that simple. The zone leaders called me every day to ask if I was following the apostle's rule and how many throats I had rammed the gospel down, and chided me severely and with holy wrath whenever I said I wasn't doing it. In a meeting with the mission president I also sensed his displeasure in how I was approaching things.

It was a troubling time for me. Some days I would wake up, ready to follow the spirit and to hell with my priesthood leaders. Those days always ended positively for me, feeling I had done good work. Other days I couldn't bear the scorn and decided to follow their rules. At the end of those days I was always miserable and depressed. After a couple of weeks of that I knew which was the right course of action.

I went renegade.

With only a month left on my mission I was still concerned that I hadn't fulfilled my dad's prophecy with even a single baptism, and I didn't have any prospects. I reflected over my mission and all the different things I had tried and how pervasive my failure was across the board. Then my thoughts went deeper. I reflected on how much success I had observed from the highest of missionaries - those who would become assistants to the president - and I saw a bad track record. Then I thought about the most rebellious missionary in the mission - the one that the mission president openly hated - who watched PG-13 movies and went swimming with young women in the wards, and I realized that he had, by far, the highest baptizing rate in the whole mission.

The only thing I could think of that I hadn't tried yet was rebellion.

With one month left on my mission I openly rebelled against my zone leaders, and an 8-year old baptism fell into my lap. We had just reactivated a family, and they had an 8-year-old girl and no priesthood holder in the family. I had shown them so much that I cared about them on a personal level, often spending 3 or 4 hours in their home crying and laughing, that they had me take her down into the waters of baptism.

Their non-member cousin attended the baptism with her non-member parents. After the baptism my zone leaders (who were there) came up to me and told me "look at all these non-members. This is a perfect time to teach them discussions." They then proceeded to ram the gospel down the throats of her parents. I was thoroughly disgusted.

I went and socialized with the family I had reactivated, and their cousin joined us. We just laughed and had a good time. Their cousin was so impressed with us (even though we didn't mention the gospel once) that she decided to investigate the church. Despite her parents threatening to disown her, she had me take her down into the water of baptism two weeks before I went home. The prophecy was fulfilled.

One of the first things my father talked about when I got home was local church leaders he had had problems with in the past, and how it's our responsibility to follow their counsel even if they're wrong, simply because they're the priesthood authorities authorized by God. He had no idea that I had just had an experience that proved to me how false this was. I knew that obedience to the spirit trumped obedience to men.

I went back to BYU and got an apartment with my old friends from my freshman year, but I was a completely different person. My friends often commented on how I used to be such a straight arrow, but now was such a rebel. They liked it though, because I was still firm as a rock in the gospel. I witnessed with pleasure my thoughts rubbing off on them, and I saw them become less and less judgmental, more fun-loving, and more caring as we lived together.

Over time BYU became a heaven on earth again. I had learned to see the good in people, not judge them, and not think inside the box if an outside idea was better. I studied engineering, which had little to no overlap with the church, and didn't really think about much besides engineering, having fun with my friends, and dating girls.

One friend and I once went on a double-date to a hypnotist show. I had gone to it before as a freshman and had a fun experience, so I was willing to try it again. I jokingly asked my friend if he would volunteer to go up on stage, and he vehemently declined. There was no way I was getting him on that stage.

As it turns out he was hypnotized while in the audience, and when the hypnotist asked him to come up he went without hesitation. I was floored.

I then watched delightedly as my friend drummed his butt for all to see and danced with a broomstick like it was the most beautiful girl in the world. He was told to hug an employee before he left the building, and even though he had long since broken his trance, he hugged one of the workers on his way out – a complete stranger.

I riddled him with questions that night. Particularly I wanted to know about the broomstick. Did he actually see a girl? What color hair did she have? etc...

His answer was incredibly interesting. He didn't see anything besides a broomstick. There was no hallucination. He just "knew" it was a girl. His brain registered "girl" and he treated it accordingly. In retrospect he knew that it wasn't a girl because he knew he had been hypnotized, but without that knowledge he may never have known that it was actually a broom.

I had relationship issues in my remaining BYU years, but that's another story altogether. One thing that stood out, though, was the constant push by the prophet and apostles at the time to avoid "hanging out" with girls and to pair off exclusively with them in dating environments. I prayed about it and once again received the spiritual knowledge that the prophets were wrong.

So I hung out with a beautiful girl for nearly two years. Over time our friendship became firmly established, and after two years of friendship and a short courtship we were married in the temple.

I graduated in 2008 and moved out of state the next year for work. Unfortunately, because of the economic crisis sweeping the world, I was unable to find work near my family, her family, or BYU. So we moved about 1000 miles away to begin a new adventure together. We had a baby girl, my job was awesome, and we were making new friends in our new location.

I also found myself in a new environment. No longer was I expected to follow the rules, such as keeping the honor code to stay enrolled in school, obeying mission rules, etc... I had been cut loose by the church upon the world to become an independent light on a hill. I no longer had school, friends and relationships to occupy all of my thoughts.

So I began to independently study science. I became a fanatic for astronomy, archaeology, etc…. I soon realized that the story of the flood covering the whole earth was bogus. No biggie, the church even taught me that the bible had flaws. Then there was the problem of Joshua commanding the Israelites to murder men, women and children. Again, the bible got it wrong - thank goodness for modern prophets! Was Adam the first man? Or was he just the first man in an evolutionary series who had a certain level of intelligence granted him from God? And did God's jurisdiction cover the whole galaxy? The Big Bang seemed to encourage the idea "as man is, God once was" since it indicates a finite beginning of the universe.

My wife and I discussed polygamy one day. I knew she had a problem with it, and she said she would never want me to take other wives. I told her honestly that I would never take one without her permission, regardless of the spiritual consequences. She seemed pleased with that.

But the idea gnawed at me. I realized that I knew very little about polygamy, despite a lifetime of church study. I didn't even know the names of any of Joseph Smith's wives! I couldn't find any names in the church literature I had, so I decided to consult the internet.

By the end of the day my world had literally turned upside-down.

I glued myself to the Fanny Alger incident. I looked at it from every angle possible. What is the evidence for marriage? What did the church require for marriage at the time? What does the church require for marriage now? What was the purpose of the marriage? What did people say about it? Every angle I took pointed at one thing - adultery. I had believed my whole life that adultery was the third most grievous sin, and here was the prophet of the restoration being guilty of it, and nobody said or did anything about it.

Could it possibly be that the church isn't true? Certainly not, there was plenty of other evidence supporting it as God’s true gospel.

I thought back on the investigator on my mission, and decided to buy a copy of "No Man Knows My History" to see how and if the enemies of the church explained all the many evidences of its veracity.

One by one the arguments in favor of the church fell apart before my eyes. I was shocked and amazed at how thoroughly the historical events could be deconstructed. There wasn't definitive proof that the church was false, but the proof that it was true was slipping away, and I knew that if it disappeared entirely then the evidence suggested that the church was most likely a fraud.

At last the proof of the church's veracity was whittled down to one remaining issue. I had received countless witnesses from the spirit that the church was true. The spirit had guided me straight and true throughout the years, so I knew I could trust it. If, then, I could find reasonable doubt in the spirit, then the church would come crashing down and I would have to admit openly that it was almost certainly false.

While studying Fawn Brodie's explanation of the witnesses of the Book of Mormon, my thoughts went back to my friend dancing on the stage with a broomstick. I studied the account of Whitmer and Harris and realized that they hadn't actually seen an angel. They were only convinced that they did. I then realized that I was only convinced that I had felt the spirit, and that my personal psychology was perfectly capable of and likely to generate the sensations I experienced under the particular conditions.

I gave the church one last grasp. Just because there was doubt about the spirit doesn't mean it isn't real. I realized there was a way to prove the spirit once and for all. I would pray about two opposing ideas, and keeping all other variables constant, such as how much thought and consideration I put into them, and how much I wanted one or the other to be true, I would see if the spirit would contradict itself. I prayed about whether the Lord wanted me to pay tithing, and whether the Lord didn't want me to pay tithing.

Controlling the variables, I got the affirmative on both answers.

My wife was pregnant with our second child, and had no idea that I doubted the church. I knew I had to tell her.

And that's where my real story begins...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/06/2013 08:40PM by Susan I/S.