A Crisis of Faith

Not too many years later, my temple marriage ended in divorce. I began to doubt everything I had been taught. I did not call myself a Mormon. Sometimes I looked for the God I knew existed in the services and routines of other churches.

We are taught in Moroni 7 that everything that leads us to believe in Christ is good, and I saw the good in the other churches. But, I could not deny my experience in the temple. I finally concluded that in my years of study I had somehow misunderstood something critical. I could not deny my experience in the temple. That was real. That was correct. And no other church had it. While not calling myself “Mormon,” I called myself a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

I sang the music. I sang the Primary songs I had learned every night to my six small children, as they fell asleep. I sang them to myself when I was lonely. I knew the songs had the right of it, the music spoke to me, comforted me. “I’m Trying to Be Like Jesus,” “I Wonder When He Comes Again,” “Tell Me the Stories of Jesus,” “Jesus Once Was a Little Child,” “A Child’s Prayer,” “Love is Spoken Here,” “I Am a Child of God,” “Baptism,” and many others.

I listened to President Benson in conference tell us again the promise of the Book of Mormon. I thought to myself, “Yeah, right. Lehi and his family crossing the ocean really has nothing to do with me.” But, I was obedient, and I read it to my children on the steps of Lexington House. Once again, as when I was a child, the “magic” of that book swept over me. I can still remember sitting at the top of the steps feeling so hopeless and discouraged, reading those first words, “I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents…” and the wave of Love that rippled around me. Lehi’s story still didn’t seem relevant, but I continued reading. The principals of self-governance taught by King Mosiah that carried through the Reign of the Judges changed my life.

I concluded: If temples are true, and the Book of Mormon is true, then Joseph Smith must have truly been a prophet. I determined that if the LDS people were imperfect, they were no more so than any other congregation and I would endeavor in the future to gain a clearer understanding of the doctrine as taught in the scriptures and by modern prophets and rely more on my own prayerful discernment for the best course of action than on the expectations afforded by what is clearly the Mormon sub-culture.