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I think it depends on the person. Some people are very happy with the responsibilities the church assigns them and feel very fulfilled by what they feel the church expects of them. I personally, though, have been wondering if I am cut out to be a stay at home mom. I find that my child stresses me out quite a bit and sometimes wonder if having a small job would be a nice break. But I also know that working is stressful too so I haven’t taken that leap in attempting a small career on the side. I do need something else though, because just being a stay at home mom is not enough for me, that’s for sure. I am trying to find times to myself and times to do my own hobbies that I’ve lost since becoming a mom. Hopefully, I’ll eventually figure out a good system. As for us being happier compared to other religions, I have no idea. I think it’s hard to tell since I’ve noticed part of our religion is being happy. People kind of expect you to be happy and get uncomfortable if you’re unhappy for an extended amount of time. Or they at least want you to be optimistic in your sadness. I think people usually expect the outlook of ‘this time is hard, but I’m so thankful because I’m growing so much!’ So if someone is genuinely unhappy, people at church have a hard time understanding them. That may be most people though, I think most people in society don’t seem to really know how to let people be sad. It just seems like in the church people think you’ll be happy because you have the gospel
I find that the social pressures to go to church make me want to stop going even more. I was able to skip church for 3 months while I was pregnant because I kept getting sick or being exhausted and after those 3 months, I wanted to go back. I started to miss the people, mainly. It’s hard to enjoy church when it feels like a chore that you have to do. However, that pressure to go is building again so I may have to take a break again. I find that being active on here and listening to mormonstories podcasts helps me feel like I am not alone and there are many people like us out there. Idk how to solve all of your complications with your husband and family, as my family doesn’t know about my faith crisis yet and my husband is already slightly unorthodox so he understands my struggles. I just wanted to let you know that I understand that social pressure that builds and builds and going to church begins to feel like a chore that you’re being forced to attend rather than a faith-promoting escape from ‘the world’ that you actually enjoy attending. I like how one of the stories goes into the issues of the chastity lessons for women who have been molested or raped. I was glad to see that in the stories since that is another issue in the church. They seemed more raw than mormon stories usually are. They weren’t super raw, obviously, but they weren’t ‘flowery’ either, if that makes sense. It wasn’t just a ‘I had a hard time but all I had to do was talk to my bishop and pray and things were better’ kind of thing, it actually went into how they truly didn’t have a choice in their feelings and they tried to be attracted to the other gender but it just wasn’t possible. And how some of them were suicidal. I hope it helps more lds people understand the gay community a bit better, and also understand that some people truly want to be mormon but are also gay. I know a year ago when the policy came out, I was mentioning to my uncle how parents who are married and in the church may want their kids to stay in the church and he said ‘why would gay people want to be in the church if we preach against them? That doesn’t make sense.’ I’m excited to hear what he thinks of these stories, so he can better understand how you can have faith in the gospel even if you are attracted to your own gender and the church preaches against it. Welcome, Vincent! It’s always great to see new viewpoints! I’d never heard about Richard R Lyman either until your post and then I had to look him up. I was surprised the church is hiding why he was excommunicated. Sometimes I’m still surprised by the things they hide. It’s hard to think of why they would hide it other than the fact that it makes it look like the apostles can do something awful. So the only reason I can see for them to hide it is to keep up the impression that they’re perfect men. I just wish I could think of another reason they would hide it. Anyways… Welcome! [SMILING FACE WITH SMILING EYES]
When Uchtdorf gave that quote at conference, I remember thinking, anyone can become accustomed to wonderful things if they have them all the time. There’s no possible way to constantly be super excited about church for your entire life. Eventually, it becomes normal and not uber exciting. I can’t imagine being constantly amazed at the gospel. Even when I was a TBM I wasn’t constantly amazed by church. I had waves where I was truly bored and only went to church to see my friends, then waves where I was truly inspired and loved going to feel the spirit. A thought I had recently was ‘not everyone will get a good feeling at church. Not because it’s a bad place, but because people have different backgrounds and personalities. Even though Christmas is a great and lovely holiday, some people don’t enjoy it. Some people may have bad memories of past Christmases. Some people think Christmas has become too commercialized. Some people may have had tragedies happen, and Christmas may remind them of those tragedies, so Christmas may make them sad. Not everyone will feel the same way about church either.’ I really liked this article. It was wonderful. Though, I did chuckle a bit at the part where it said Job’s friends sat with him and didn’t say anything. That was definitely not the case with at least some of his friends. Some of his friends were absolutely horrible to him
@SD I’m actually a woman [emoji14] but my husband actually is very understanding of my faith crisis. I felt comfortable telling him because while on the outside he is a very firm believer, he’s also very open to new ideas and thinks of many things at church differently than others. Plus it was just a process that happened over time and so he saw it unfold and so he gets it and understands why I’m struggling. So it helps me feel comfortable telling him what things I’m struggling with because he’s open to listening and understanding things even things people at church wouldn’t want to hear. Which I am VERY thankful for, because I would have a very hard time not at least having him to talk to. I tend to process things better when I can bounce my ideas off of someone so I’m glad I at least have him for now. I still long to be able to come clean though eventually to other people close to me I personally love the story of the crippled man at the Pool of Bethesda. It’s just so sad how he’d been that way for 38 years and no one had helped him down to the pool so he could be healed. I think if this is how she dealt with her faith crisis, that’s great for her. I think it’s best to stay away from sounding like she knows the answers just because she went through a faith crisis. I find that a lot of people who have made it through faith crises, do it a way that worked for them. I often find things they advise, won’t work for me at all, or maybe a few things would work, but not all of them. Faith is a very complicated thing to rebuild from doubt and I think everyone will find their way back (or not) in a way that works best for them. Every faith crisis is so different and individual. I think it’s better to be sure to mention what helped her as ideas and not as a ‘this is how you do it’ type of advice. As for me personally, nothing really struck me as anything that would help me with my own situation. Especially prayer, seeing as that’s the core of my faith crisis. I could pray about help finding answers, but I won’t be able to believe anything that feels like an answer to a prayer at the moment because my trust in prayer answers has been broken. Therefore, I break one of her rules of not going by our own truths, because at the moment, everything based on prayer answers is now up in the air, and I feel like I have to re-learn every part of my faith, while not basing it on prayers. Or the scriptures or the prophets since my testimony of the scriptures never truly formed and prophets aren’t always right. Thanks for that! Do you have a link for the talk where Uchtdorf talks about people not leaving over being offended? I can’t seem to find that This was also shared on facebook recently by two members and really bothered me 
[img]http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20160826/6e6c863f418096dc9f22e08422170181.jpg [/img] The people posting this were making comments like ‘maybe this will be a comfort to some of my friends and family’ and the people who were liking the picture were lots of strong members, from the people I recognized. I don’t see how this would be a comforting picture to people struggling with the church. I see what they’re trying to say, but at the same time, it doesn’t empathize with the things that person struggles with. And if someones job or a family member was causing these types of difficulties to someone, they may leave. Family members and jobs are not the same things as church. Church is supposed to be a nice place and it’s an extracurricular activity so obviously if you aren’t feeling fulfilled from it or just don’t believe what is being taught, why would you stay? Idk, I just wanted to share that as an example too for the way members talk about people who leave church
My husband taught this lesson and he mainly focused on the two sacrament prayers and analyzed them like puzzles with the class. They went into the differences between the two prayers (for example: how the wine prayer mainly focuses on doing things and the bread prayer mainly focuses on us being willing to do things). It was fun stuff to think about while he was giving me his practice lesson the night before. He also went into what taking Christ’s name upon ourselves could mean. He went into other ideas rather than the typical ones. He looked up the original meaning of Christ’s name and it meant something along the lines of salvation, a saving grace, my help etc. So he was brainstorming that maybe it meant something like when we take Christ’s name upon ourselves, we can become a saving grace for other people or ourselves. Whenever we pray we say ‘in the name of Jesus Christ’. So his thought was maybe that’s a way for us to be other’s saving graces, or even our own if we pray for help for ourselves, through his name. We can only help others and ourselves to a certain extent so maybe by taking upon ourselves Christ’s name, we can help others and ourselves, through him. Hopefully that made sense. He explained it much better than I am. But yeah, it was interesting to hear his ideas. I was thinking along the same lines as Loursat about how it doesn’t really make sense that their virtue could be stolen from them since virtue is behavior showing high moral standards. Maybe it’s a mistranslation, though. Did the other women on here have this lesson? Because I saw this post last week and was interested to see how the lesson went because I figured it depended on who was teaching. It turned out the person who was teaching instead taught about the attitude of gratitude and never interjected anything about womanhood into it, just gratitude in general. The woman who taught the lesson is from the south and has some sass so I wonder if she saw the lesson plan and said ‘screw that’ and taught something else haha so was anyone else not given this lesson? DJ, I think you and your son are spot on. My husband saw the same thing on his mission. Missionaries who broke rules would get many baptisms, while the missionaries who followed the rules very strictly, would get none, or very few. He said he saw it break a lot of the missionaries who were rule followers because they had been told rule following would bring people to Christ, but then would very clearly see the opposite happening. One of my husband’s companions was well known in the mission field at the time for being a bad companion. He would break a lot of rules and he was a gross roommate to live with. But they were sent to an area that either had never had a baptism, or hadn’t had one in a very very long time (can’t remember which), and this unwanted companion who broke rules, got multiple baptisms in that area.
