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Hi RoadLessTravelled, Thanks for “venting” lol. I used to be a tbm at one time. I encountered a bad social environment at church and became inactive. I did reactivate but again I was in the throes of disappointment relating to marriage problems and became inactive again.
As time passes, it seems, becoming involved with the LDS church seems less important. I consider it a part of my journey with life and no doubt I have had spiritual experiences i will never forget. I don’t feel I can trust members in my geographical area and me becoming active could only happen in a completely different province where I have relatives around who are going as well.
I have read a lot here from people who post here. I relate to a lot of it.
I guess what seems to be the thing that sticks out the most to me is how dependent people become on the church for their salvation. If they don’t do this or don’t do that they will lose out on eternal life, so there is a lot of pressure from LDS culture to make church attendance so central. Even at one point the Holy Spirit spoke to me and said “Don’t make the church your entire social life.”
The question to ask is what do you do when something happens to you where you feel you have to stop going ? I had a bad social situation in my ward happen to me where I felt I was an object of gossip. I felt my privacy was raped. I no longer liked the people I was going to church with. Yet I got to a point where I felt awful because I felt I would lose out on my salvation if I didn’t attend church anymore. I did become inactive and just reasoned that you have to do what’s important for the here and now and forget about worrying about the hereafter. I felt I had to do what was best for me at the time.
I even lived outside the church’s standards for a while (and still do). It was hard at the beginning because I felt I was on a path that wasn’t leading to the celestial kingdom. As the years have gone by I have let myself psychologically relax as it relates to church standards and the fear of losing out on eternal life. I’ve reasoned that sometimes you have to just cope with what goes on in the here and now and to stop worrying about the here-after.
I do attend church but not the LDS church. I attend with my girlfriend and overall it has been a positive experience for me. Socially i’m accepted and it’s great, a real blessing.
BeLikeChrist
Katzpur, Your first post here about your daughter brought up a memory of something I remember that had happened to me roughly half a lifetime ago.
I got married young (almost 20 at the time) and ended up being very unhappy in my marriage. I had resolved to stay in this unhappy marriage because I felt I had deserved it for making poor choices in my teenage past. The Holy Spirit spoke to me about a month later while I was at a local shopping mall and said basically: ” do not hold yourself hostage because of your past transgressions. if you leave your wife your children will be looked after. ”
Because of what the Spirit said I no longer felt obliged to stay with my wife. The Lord understood my situation and gave me His wish to leave the unhappy marriage situation and months later I did.
Katzpur, I feel for the great love you feel for your daughter. It really sounds she really needs to hear how special she is in spite of “messing up”. God still loves us in spite of our “bad” choices. I pray your daughter will someday come to realize that she is special in God’s eyes, and she has nothing to feel lowly about – in spite of her bad choices. Reminds me of Billy Joel’s song “Only Human”. We are here on earth to gain experiences and learn and sometimes some of us make real doozies when it comes to “mistakes” but we are “only human” (as Billy Joel says).
With all love and sincerity,
BeLikeChrist
have you ever thought, Katzpur, of going to a different church to see how other Christians worship ? i attend church in another denomination with my girlfriend and it really is refreshing to see people attend church in a totally different setting. at first it was difficult because i was use to the very quiet way mormons worship. this denomination i attend with my girlfriend is quite an eye-opener for me. it is nice to see people worship God in a very different way from the usual LDS perspective of worship. that said, I do miss attending LDS services and attending another denomination does make me realize how much i learned as a formerly active LDS member. the main thing i have learned since going to a different church is how important it is to focus on Christ, His teachings and His mission as the Savior. Amen, Katzpur ! Amen ! I went through a lot of guilt myself when I was younger. The church as a culture, you could say, almost makes people “super-sensitive” to sexual sins when in the rest of society (outside of mainstream mormonism) certain “behaviors”(sins) are quite common place (e.g. living together common law, masturbation, viewing pornography, etc.)
Honestly, i think the church has good standards but the approach to “serious” sexual sins may be a bit over done by church leaders. I think it’s good to aim high for common sense reasons but to not forget we are human beings too. The church was made for man, man was not made for the church (similar to Christ’s admonition of “the sabbath was made for man, man was not made for the sabbath”).
wow ! some interesting discussion here ! and what has been said needed to be said. that is one problem with being an active member – that you can’t have open discussions about things like this, it seems, anywhere at church. a number of years ago i decided to go into a yahoo chat room. it was anti-mormon, but i was interested to see what the nature of the language was going to be. i may have been active at the time. there was a group in there talking and someone said something about “the collective”. i knew the individual who brought it up was using the
Star Trek: The New Generationanalogy of the “Cyborg” or “the collective”. as i listened i felt very demeaned and left. but as the years have gone by i have thought of this reference to “the collective” and in a very real sense we, as active members, are plugged into a “collective”, a form of collective consciousness of a system or society of religious worship and it doesn’t necessarily just happen to Mormons but other religious societies as well (Catholics, Jehovah Witnesses, Scientologists, Wiccans etc.). In a smaller sense you could say a “clique” at work(or at church, or school) is a form of “collective”. i bring this up because how some active members who view the LoC, may be part of that collective thinking I mentioned above, who wholeheartedly accept the LoC lock, stock and barrel, or any other “cultural practice” related to church (e.g. importance of a mission for mission-age men, only date return missionary, the wrongness of masturbation, etc). I’m not preaching against the church per say but that we need to be aware of that aspect of our Mormon culture. A good case in point was Brigham Young’s teachings about blacks and the priesthood. General membership just went along with it at the time and no one opposed or challenged Young at the time, but as the years have gone by, common sense ruled and the church finally changed it’s policy on allowing blacks to have the priesthood (many, many years later).
what do you think of church leaders counselling youth (or anyone else) not to masturbate ? is that considering the brethren going too far in their interpretation of “law of chastity” ? Cwald: they seriously took out the reference to masturbation from the “for the strength of youth” pamphlet ? wow !! Welcome Andrew, good to have you here. Sounds like you have gone through a lot. I can understand the difficulties of dealing with the cultural aspects of the church because I have had to deal with that myself. It seems we are stuck between a rock and a hard place because the ordinances seem divine but then the church culturally seems to contradict Christ’s teachings regarding social justice. There are other cultural issues too and I definitely am a liberal Mormon.
Other church denominations seem to have a more Christ-like culture than Mormons do, some maybe less so.
Where I am at is at a stage in life of wanting to become active again and realizing that if I want eternal life I have to be submissive to the powers that be, especially in terms of living standards(commandments). There are things, though, about the LDS church that I do have a hard time accepting culturally which I wish would be different. Namely, the church culture’s stand on masturbation being considered part of the Law of Chastity (too strict in my opinion) and how the church could improve on how they treat gay members.
My approach to reactivating will be not so much working to get a recommend right away but to work at going on a regular basis and first and gradually submitting to the powers that be before getting a recommend. I just want to go and feel good about going before i consider a temple recommend. My first goal would be to go to take the sacrament worthily on a regular basis and progress from that point on.
BeLikeChrist
Hi Piper, I listened to Pres. Monson’s priesthood conference talk – the one that you referred to. I am glad I listened to it. I felt peace as he talked. It’s nice feeling that.
I hardly live the lds lifestyle anymore. I hardly ever go to lds church meetings. I drink alcohol on occasion and definitely don’t live the lds standards regarding sexual morality.
In spite of what I don’t do I still manage to be happy. Being mormon is just something that I just don’t seem to be good at. I find I have a hard time fitting into mainstream mormon culture.
After listening to Pres. Monson’s talk above I wish I could be a mormon regular in that community. He is so normal and common-sensical, and to boot, a great sense of humour.
However, like you and others here at the forum, amidst the great GA talks, are us individuals who are disaffected or unhappy or unfulfilled. Why does that happen ?
My theory: the church it maybe too central to our lives ? Or we are too focused on being immersed in LDS culture ?
We keep being reminded to do this and that. We keep being reminded in our association with church members what the expectations are. Do we really need to pray and read scripture all the time to stay active ? Just be a mormon on your terms. Don’t worry about if you are doing all the right things. Just be you.
And as an answer to your question: how do you just not be a “anything goes” person while letting go of church stuff ? (paraphrased obviously). answer: try to remember your spiritual experiences.
remembering my spiritual experiences have helped me to keep a testimony in spite of my lack of obedience lol !
And after hearing Pres. Monson’s talk it makes me want to become a part of the active lds community again.
BeLikeChrist
Dear Brown, Just do what’s right for you and don’t worry about what other people are going to think. Just make a decision to take a few months or a few weeks off from attending for a while. If anyone bothers you just say “i’m having a crisis of faith and need time away from the society to sort things out in my own mind”. If anyone pushes you to elaborate just say ” sorry, I’m just not ready to talk about this yet. like i said, i just need time away from the society for a while to sort things out in my own mind.”
I hope this helps.
BeLikeChrist
Hi Piper, Piper said:
Quote:How do you find peace and let go of things in the church and still not slip into a “anything goes and therefore nothing matters” approach to life?
i spent a lot of time as an active member living the letter of the law. after my crisis of faith and fell into inactivity i just relaxed my standards. i reasoned out that i wasn’t going to church anyway so i didn’t need to be so “anal” about keeping standards lol !
Peace didn’t happen immediately after i became inactive. I still needed time to sort things out as an inactive member. I still needed to find out who I was after deciding not to make the church so central to my life. One thing I learned after I became inactive was how much I allowed guilt to control my life. When one is active one strives to live a “temple recommend” life and you try to live to strict obedience to church standards so you can fit into the church culture.
after becoming inactive i took the weight of “church expectation” off my shoulders and just tried to do what i wanted for a change. it was part of finding out who i was without the church being so central to my life.
there is a lot of guilt when you initially become inactive because you are taught that “obedience” is the key to eternal life. i definitely wasn’t being obedient ! I wasn’t attending church, going to the temple, paying tithing, etc. , however, I was still striving to be a decent human being.
anyone who becomes inactive all have their personal paths to take to decide how to live and how to believe. some people just find it easiest to believe the church isn’t true so they can live outside church cultural norms. i tried to live that way but time and time again I had to face up to very real spiritual experiences I had when I was active. i just decided that “yes the church is true ..” but i took the approach that “you can still believe it as true” but you don’t necessarily have to live a strict LDS life. That is how I found peace. Hope this helps.
BeLikeChrist
Hi PiperAlpha, there would be times when I was active where I was just tired of the same old things – read your scriptures, pray, keep attending, but then i had a crisis of faith. i went through that crisis and still believe and though I don’t attend all that often (a few times a year) i am happy with my life.
my big fear was what if i don’t attend will i lose my chance at eternal life ? i have read a few comments of people here who feel that they are going through the motions and aren’t getting much of a benefit when it comes to church. why does it happen ? even when I didn’t have a crisis of faith I still had my moments of being bored with scripture study, praying, and attending meetings.
my crisis of faith happened when I felt I had become an object of gossip in my ward. i was beginning to feel that i didn’t like the people i was attending church with and socially i was unhappy and maybe even angry. then i thought a few times “if i stop attending will i lose out on eternal life ?” and I thought “hogwash !!!”. I couldn’t put my happiness online for a church organization anymore. i made the decision to stop attending. it was hard at first but i managed. i began to deprogram myself from being an institutional mormon. I wanted to know who i was without the church because there were times i felt stifled and felt a lack of identity as a church member because, as I concluded, that i had made the church too central to my life. my decision to stop attending helped. it took the pressure off to always do what’s right. i wanted to be who i wanted to be without being dictated to by the church culture. i felt free and i feel free now. i wasn’t sure what i believed anymore and i have tried to bury what i learned as an active member and at times i was successful at burying my testimony but then i would remember my spiritual experiences and say “wait a minute ! there is something about the church ” … etc. etc..
it’s been about 12 years since my crisis of faith and i still have a testimony in spite of being inactive. i intend to go back someday but when I’m ready and when I go back i’m not sure how active i will be. i may just attend once a month or once every two months. but all in all i am happy – even if i am not active. i took that leap and still i am surviving just fine as an inactive church member.
BeLikeChrist
i read over your first post. thanks for sharing. no matter what we do in our lives “believing in what we do” is so important. Case in point is the simple act of going to church. Are you going because you believe in it ? Or are you going for other reasons ?
I rent a room from a landlord and I have had a few problems since moving in. One was bedbugs (the bed was included with the room) and the other was a heating problem. Both were very frustrating issues. Yet I reasoned that for me to feel good about being here was that I had to believe that living here was a good thing. I had to look after the bedbug problem myself (landlord reimbursed me) and I had to hassle the landlord about the heating problem too. The bedbugs are gone and the heating problem is partially fixed but manageable but all in all i believe it’s a good place to live. The roommates I have are great (though imperfect) but for the most part i’m fairly happy here.
Same principles apply to church. Go because you believe in it or that you benefit. Misery happens when you do something you don’t believe in. Happiness comes from believing in things you do in your life that you feel good about. I hope what I shared with you helps.
BLC
