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April 2022 - We told some friends

 After we got back from New Zealand, we caught up with some friends of our who had already decided to step away from church. If I was to go back to my believing Mormon brain, I would have said they yoyo’ed in their activity and faith. I now see that they were just making realtime decisions based on their situation at he the time. There was at first a surprise reaction, because I guess we came across as the types of members that were “strong” in the gospel, and to flip around to not believing in it that much to the point where we would stop attending really surprised them. 

As we continued to talk about it, we agreed on a few things that we found problematic. What is interesting is that these issues existed but in a shelf capacity, meaning we did not give them space in our mind, so we put them over on our “We don’t know the answers to these questions yet” shelf. Most if not all Mormons know about this shelf concept as taught by Spencer Kimball’s wife. 

Here were two points we discussed:

- There seems to be this emotional hold through the use of guilt and shame that is used in church through lessons, bishop interviews, and general attitudes by some members, usually with regards to concepts of exact obedience.

- The church doctrine promotes that they hold the monopoly of truth over others that the LDS church is the only place that has all truth, to at least the most truth. Others have truth, but only here is all or most of the truth found because of the Restoration, a teaching where God restored his authority on the Earth never again to be removed. 

We felt validated in our feelings as to why we started to question the church and its teachings, which I will later learn is extremely hard to come by. Unless people were in the same situation as us, being in the stage of leaving or questioning, those still believing or those who have never been Mormon just don’t quite seem to understand the nuance and thus are unable to validate what it feels like. But more on that later. It felt good to tell someone else who was going though or who had been through something similar.






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