Crying at Weddings

by Alison Ficklin

Four years ago my daughter and I attended her second grade

teacher’s wedding. As we were seated and waiting for the ceremony to start, my daughter asked me if I was going to cry. “People cry at weddings because they are so happy, are you going to cry mom?” “Maybe,” I told her, but I remember thinking that I knew I would cry, but not for the same reasons that others in attendance would be crying.

I would cry because her guest list was only limited by how many people would fit in the venue. I had to choose based on who had temple recommends, which meant many close friends and family, including three of my siblings, were not able to attend. One of my brothers would have been able to attend, but he was on a mission at the time. The guest list was mostly older relatives and friends of my mother’s.

I would cry because her sister officiated the wedding. There’s a lot to cry about right there in that sentence. The fact that she had such an intimate connection to the bride added a special touch that you just rarely get in a temple sealing. And to be able to choose anyone? Even a woman? I couldn’t even tell you the name of the person who sealed me and my husband. And well, he was obviously a man.

I would cry because her dress was gorgeous. I imagine she made her choice based on what made her feel beautiful. The biggest deciding factor for my dress was if it would cover my garments or not.

I would cry because she had a photographer taking pictures of the ceremony and I knew there would be pictures of her getting ready as well. Because there always are. I have no such physical reminders of my temple sealing or getting ready in the bride’s room because it wasn’t allowed.

But it wasn’t all tears of sadness and regret. I would also cry because I knew if my daughter were to get married, she would have more options than I did. Even if she did opt for a temple sealing, she could have the civil ceremony of her dreams with no waiting period. Thanks to sleeveless garments (that were not even a thing when we attended this wedding) her dress options will be greater than mine were. She could choose female witnesses. And probably other changes could affect her day that I couldn’t even imagine right now. I’m grateful for the changes that she can potentially benefit from, but I mourn what I didn’t have.

So yes, my sweet girl, I will cry.

What Stopped Me

by Xenial Mormon Mom

He didn't pin me down
So what held me there?
Frozen

He didn't pin me down
My body isn't bruised
So what stopped me
From stopping him?

I didn't want to cause a scene
I thought I could get us out of this situation without...
embarrassing him



In fiction, women have their wits about them
They use their cunning and time freezes for them to think of a trick

I freeze - not time
No trick, no cunning, no wit
It's too late

He didn't pin me down
I didn't kick him away
I covered my face and repeated,
"I said no, I said no,
I said no."

"Ladies, please stop dressing so provocatively."
"We need you to help the poor boys with their thoughts."
"It's the woman's job to hold the moral line.
"Men can't help themselves."
"We just need you to dress modestly."
"Don't be so pushy."
"Assertiveness is not attractive."
"Boys don't want a controlling woman."
"He has so much of his life ahead of him."
"It would be a shame to cause him any trouble."
"You don't want to ruin his life, now do you?"
"Think of the man's needs first."
"Honor and obey him."
"What were you wearing?"
"She was asking for it."
"Steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action."
“If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Polygamy Doesn’t Make Sense to Me

by KC Bramer

As I was weeding the garden, I had a thought.

In the book of Genesis, God created Adam and Eve. The idea that one man and one woman were created is reinforced in the temple. I wondered why God didn’t create Adam, Eve, Juanita, Olga, Greta and Jane? If the purpose was to be fruitful and multiply, wouldn’t it be easier to do so if Adam had multiple partners? After all, if God could create one woman, He could create several. If polygamy is important to God, then why wasn’t it created from the start? It doesn’t make sense. Polygamy never made sense to me.

We are told to judge things by their fruit. I don’t see much good fruit when I look at the Old Testament families. I see women abusing other women. I see handmaids being handed over to men to produce children for their mistresses. I see a man sending his wife/concubine and son into the desert with a skin of water and a loaf of bread. I see infertile women being taunted for something outside their control. I see women unsuccessfully trying to gain the love of their husbands. I see men selling one of their brothers as a slave to a passing caravan and telling their father that the boy was killed by a wild beast. I see cousins at war using the word shibboleth to identify the cousins they want to capture and kill. I see descendants of a family who to this day are in conflict.

I suppose there was some good fruit. Isaac and Ishmael did have families and the prophecy that Abraham would have numberless descendants came true. Leah was the mother of Judah from whom King David and Jesus descend. Joseph was in Egypt in a position to store grain and save the lives of his family members and others during a famine. Hannah eventually had a son who became the prophet Samuel.

This isn’t good fruit stemming from polygamy. To me this is God’s way of turning bad human behavior into something good. A God that can bring resurrection out of crucifixion can surely do these lesser things.

I contrast these stories from the Old Testament with a story from the New Testament. It starts with a young woman named Mary receiving a visit from an angel. Mary was betrothed to a man named Joseph. At no time during this story does it ever say that Joseph had multiple wives. (Although some believe that Joseph was a widower with children when he took Mary as his wife.) Mary never had to compete with another wife for the affection and attention of her husband. Joseph did not have to placate angry wives upset about other wives’ children. Jesus was raised in a home with one mother and one father. If polygamy was ordained of God, wouldn’t He want His only begotten son to live in that kind of family?

What are the fruits of Jesus’ family? He was kind and considerate. He had respect for all kinds of people. He must have had good relations with his siblings as some of them were his disciples. He healed people and forgave them. At the worst hour of his life, he saw to the care of his mother and comforted a criminal who was crucified with him. This is definitely good fruit.

Polygamy doesn’t make sense. It was not present with Eve and Adam. No good fruit comes of it. Jesus was not raised in a polygamous family. The only conclusion I can come to is that polygamy is a practice of men, not of God.

I Awaken

by Sarah Lewis

Each time I hear the word “polygamy”
something inside me aches.
A small, burning fury rises
from my stomach into my chest.
Bury it. Suppress it.
There’s no space for my feelings here.
Add it to the shelf alongside all the others—
My wonderings, my instincts, my fears.

Occasionally the fire of courage ignites
and I allow the hurt to settle, but
don’t tread those waters. “Doubt your doubts
before you doubt your faith.”
And so again, deep down inside
I smash those embers down
under the weight of patriarchy’s heavy bricks,
while a tear drips down my face.

Years pass by while I press on
fulfilling nature’s role.
No time, no space for flickers here;
a wife and mother in Zion I must be.
I strive every day to be righteous,
to perform most perfectly.
I’ve become so good at doing it all
at the cost of being me.

One day I begin to wonder,

Who am I?
What do I need?

My role has stripped it all from me;
am I anything underneath?
The smoldering inside me still remains;
The smoke seeps into my bones.
It’s heavy.
I hurt.
What’s wrong with me?
I’m weak.
I’m not enough.

Each day I try anew
to be patient, kind, and strong,
but the boulders of burden pound me until I crack
breaking out of nowhere an inner rage.

Shame is ugly and pervasive
Breeding dark thoughts in my mind.

I tell myself,
“Go to the temple, pray and read more. Do it right.”
(The given recipe to feel the light.)
I’m a good and righteous Mormon girl
so I follow the prescription:
Attend all meetings, study general conference, fulfill your calling,
pray and read your scriptures.

I can’t stay awake in the temple.
Reading scriptures puts me to sleep.
Do I even know my Savior?
Too much is blocking His reach.
Slowly I begin to realize
there is only one of me.
How can I ever do all of these things?

Must I admit defeat?

All of my time is given to others.
I ignore my body’s whispers
to “Back off, slow down, you’re nearing the edge.”

Continuously I persevere.
I only know one gear:
Full throttle toward perfection.
I reallocate my time to more pressing needs
but never lessen my pressure against the pedal.
Now my body starts to scream,
“Too much! Too fast! No more!”
Depression chips away my hope
and exhaustion overtakes me.
I feel helpless and burned out.
My own kids won’t even respond to me.
How can I keep pressing on
when every expectation overwhelms me?
The burning, expanding anxiety I feel
almost incapacitates me.
Full panic is just around the corner
if I don’t get a handle on things!

And then,

One simple invitation
opens the door for me
to look inside, behind, beyond—
Permission to discover what this hurt could mean.

And so I grab a match.

Then with courage and equal fear,
I strike and it becomes the spark
to ignite my long-suppressed embers.
With welcoming, yet timid arms
I reach out to embrace
the questions of my woman soul
my performance of expectations always hid.

The burn and sting of shame pervade.
Fear fights to hold me down.
“Don’t listen to your inner self” it says,
“For then you won’t be good and worthy.”
Countless expectations rule over me.
Is this what Christ wants from me?
Finding Him eludes me still;
how did I never learn how?

Why have I needed permission
to consider spirituality another way?
Strong women inspire me to take that for myself.
My faith journey is mine to make.

An ache resides within my soul
from the feeling of dismissal
of my Mother God, divine and infinite
and how manhood takes her place.
How could you men tuck her neatly away,
so ignorant of the harm it brings me?
You reason this is to respect and reverence her,
while maintaining your power to reign supreme.
How often have men been silenced
and put back in their place?
I don’t believe most understand,
for their voice has a stage.
Men at the helm to lead us
at every level in the church.
Patriarchy, priesthood, and preside
are tasting more bitter every day.

And we circle back to polygamy,
a dark stain on our church’s history.

That burning fury still quakes my heart.
This could be my eternity?!

When I vulnerably shared my honest pain with him,
he countered and questioned me:
“Since you’d have your children and family in heaven,
what would plural marriage actually take from you?”

I can’t put together an answer
into words that properly convey
the arrow piercing through my heart
as patriarchy once again aims to douse my flame.

Still struggling to articulate
how that question punishes me…
dismissal,
no power,
no equal leadership role,
sharing my husband,
a concubine to my “King”?
Or is it something still deeper?
The devaluing of feminine traits,
downplaying our heavy emotional labor,
our low self-worth,
our concerns,
our strengths?

My personal experience must influence
my past, my present, and my future.
Only God knows my inner heart.
His grace attends my interpretations.
My Gods’ gift of agency to me
demonstrates Their confidence and Their Plan.
Inside me lives Their light and Their power
to converge with my intuition.

The opening of my heart,
my yearning toward heaven,
my veneration of nature’s beauty,
my pleading, hoping, thanking.
These are my ways of prayer these days to
my Mother,
my Father,
my Jesus.
All Gods to me,
separately,
I seek to know each one.

The greatest gift I can offer to God
is to be wholly and only me,
to step into my God-given capacities—
love, goodness, strength, learning, growth, empathy.

And yet, despite my longings, sometimes
a certain sadness visits me.
I feel lonely, worn, unknowing.
What do I want?
What do I need?
I seek to know and comprehend
what has been dampened down.

With each stumbling step toward my Christ
my understanding broadens.
Immense feelings once brushed aside,
my gleaming fire now invites in.
Slowly I come to know Him
through His love, His kind teaching, His suffering.
His adoration and respect for women was evident
In his every interaction.
Surely this Brother of ours,
so perfect and benevolent,
knew His Mother in Heaven above,
and now aches while we, seeking Her, are starving.

This feminine awakening stirred my slumber;
I join my sisters, strong.
O, Mother God of women, Divine,
guide and embolden me along.
Help me to find my buried voice
and the courage to share it wide,
To awaken the fire in others’ souls
where true love and knowing reside.

From a listener:

I am a mom of a young woman. She’s 14. Every path that she’s been told will lead to success is probably not there. Nursing, education, computer science, science at all—these are paths that are traditionally held out. Doctors. Lawyers. But the costs of education are so high. She’s an athlete. She’s trusting in her athletics to cover her schooling so that she can get a degree in the first place.

She’s getting the same messages her aunts got. I was never a YW. I’m a convert. And I always grew up with the idea that I will work and have a career. Being a mother was never ever on my radar. And being a mother isn’t on her radar. She pushed back in seminary when they said the equivalent of priesthood for women is motherhood. She asked what happens if she can’t physically have kids? Or if she can’t afford them. What happens if things don’t work out. Is she less? And why is her spirituality tied to something about her body? Isn’t she worth more than that. And I guess she inspired a revolt because I got the joy of meeting with the seminary teachers.

I’m shocked at how resilient these girls are. And how willing they are to take their friendships from seminary and all into the real world and rely on those. They have hope. They have amazing ideas. And they do not let adults squash on them at all. But the messages they’re getting are still the same ones her aunts got. It is just not the same world, but it is the same messages.

At some point the church is going to have to adapt or they will lose all the young women. She knows several gay young women who are in seminary because they believe, but who have plans to leave the church because the church can’t accept them. She’s decided that she won’t continue when she’s on her own either because the church lacks the flexibility or general desire to change with and support the youth as they are experiencing the world, and relies on the “older” times instead of leaning into what they are going through now.

-Natasha

Contributors:

Alison Ficklin

Alison is an elementary school teacher who lives in the Midwest with her husband and four three two children. She has four kids, but the oldest two are adults and she is clearly still trying to figure out how to navigate that and determine where it is exactly that they live. She enjoys reading, playing the piano, wasting time on her phone, traveling, and training in karate.

Xenial Mormon Mom

KC Bramer

KC lives in St. Paul Minnesota with her husband of 20 years and their two young cats. She works as a pharmacist. Her hobbies are reading, writing, biking hiking and knitting. She also likes baking cookies and banana bread. Raised in a two faith family, she is interested in the practices in other Christian faiths.

Sarah Lewis

Sarah loves being active and outdoors, appreciating nature's beauty. She is passionate about connecting with others, always learning, and finding her voice. Her faith journey has led her to being open to questions, letting go of guilt and shame, coming to trust her inner knowing, redefining God, and curating her own life. She is actively choosing what remains and what or who doesn't support or uplift her. She is the newly single mother of six children. Excited for her future, she believes we all have the power and capacity to determine what that looks like for ourselves.

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by Susan Hinckley

I don’t know where or when I learned that I would need to do things to earn love.

I can’t pin it down—it seems like knowledge I was born with. In this kind of paradigm, Being Better = More Love, so from a young age I started trying to be the best at everything.

I tried to please teachers, parents, friends. I tried to be popular (not much success there), win awards (more there, but spoiler: awards don’t make you feel loved, they just make you worry about how you’ll top it next time). I got voted “best dressed” one year in school, “best smile” another. Sure I’m still secretly riding high from those Jr. High titles—let’s be honest—but I didn’t really believe either one of them. Still don’t. “Awkward” and “not quite fill-in-the-blank enough” are the designations I assigned myself in school, and those are the ones that stuck.

Religion made sense to me, because it was a scheme to earn God’s love by becoming very very good, and hopefully even perfect. Religion also taught me I was not naturally good, not inherently worthy, not a beloved child in any way I could feel or believe. It was confusing—church told me God loved me out of one side of its mouth while insisting God couldn’t stand me the way I am out of the other.

I honestly thought that the point of Christianity was transcending my humanity, that the ‘good news’ was we don’t have to be what we are—and what we are is fundamentally not okay—because Jesus can fix it! It was based on someone who was better than anyone else who ever lived on this planet: who resisted all temptation, performed miracles, walked on water, then punctuated his example with the heretofore unimaginable trick of resurrection, literally transcending his mortality.

I certainly didn’t absorb the idea that my humanness was one of the essential things about me. That it was key to connection, or the pathway to love.

It would never have occurred to me that humanness was the mirror in which I could glimpse Divinity.1

The day I met God—and let me explain what that means: it means one day I met the understanding that I actually am okay, beloved even, and always have been, as is—was like going around a corner and finding myself in a completely different world. A world I was not only allowed but meant to love, full of humans like me who were also beloved. Once I turned that corner, it disappeared. There could be no going back.

The Rev. Jacqui Lewis writes, “What if the goal of our lives of faith is to have this revelation: The only way to love God is to love yourself so you can love the world?”2 The first 50 years of my life, I wouldn’t have known what to do with that sentence. It would have sounded nice, but love of self simply wasn’t in my wheelhouse.

Loving the world came very naturally, but was mostly something I kept quiet around other Latter-day Saints. The idea that I had sensed God’s presence much more regularly in places other than church would have required some explanation. An ongoing negative narrative about it left me conflicted and confused by my private affection for the world, quietly confirming a deep fear: that for some reason I could neither understand nor control, my faith must be faulty or deficient.

I’d always secretly been on the side of people. I loved the things we did and invented and said and wrote and made. I remember coming home from a movie once, overwhelmed by the beauty of its complex portrayal of relationships between deeply flawed characters—something about their interactions had pulled up a chair for me, assured me it was okay to sit down in my own life, that I deserved to be comfortable. I said something about this to my father-in-law—so often a reassuring light in my church life—and he responded a bit disapprovingly that for him, the movie was too humanistic.

Well, yes … exactly.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher teaches that, “Being spiritual is much easier than being human.” This simple framing stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard her say it. Rarely has anything explained myself to me in such a simple and profound way. For me, being a Latter-day Saint made being human feel like a tricky proposition. It set up an adversarial relationship between me and myself, between me and God, and as I think about it now, between me and every other human. It made me jump hurdles for love, placed rules around the love I was allowed to feel myself and express for others. This fueled a deep-rooted loneliness and distrust of all of it, setting me up for a true crisis when the wheels of my religious life suddenly flew off.

If religion could no longer be my conduit for seeking connection with God, would I have to just give up on the whole relationship? Even though church hadn’t really gotten me the feelings or insights I was seeking, I’d dug in hopefully, because I didn’t know there could be any legit god-connection outside it.

Christianity has not rewarded a fully-embodied spirituality. If people can know The Source in their bones, why do they need the church? So the church is invested in keeping us separated from the truth of our own bones and hearts and humanity.

Reimagining Christianity for me would involve beginning with the full acceptance of the human experience. Jesus was, after all, a person—no matter what else he may have been. But it’s not for his humanness that we are taught to emulate him—it is for having been better than we are. No wonder I learned to show up at church with only small portions of myself visible. No wonder I was taught that the natural Susan was an enemy to God. No wonder I internalized shame for my own most human parts, even though it is through that common thread that I am connected to all my siblings. How could I love the thing I had not been taught to reverence? How could I believe God loved me if I had not been taught to love myself?

So one of the biggest things that happened for me the day I suddenly realized I was beloved was that I no longer needed an intervention. Not an atonement, at least not in the way I’d been taught to think about it.3 Not a card to certify my worthiness, nor a priesthood holder who could do essential things that filled requirements I couldn’t fill myself.

For the first time in my life, nothing at all between me and love.

It was a slippery slope, too. One minute after being granted Divine permission to love myself as I am, I realized it put my neighbor in a new light as well. I felt suddenly equipped with compassion, understanding, desire, acceptance, willingness, patience—a whole lot of things I’d never known exactly how or when to use. Love had been obscured by layers of fine print, prerequisites and conditions. As they fell away, I could see the thing underneath was actually easy to pick up and light to carry.

This also meant that rather than a conduit for connection to a god out there somewhere, church might become a conduit for connection with other people. A love lab, where I could grow in self-knowledge and understanding while I learn what it means to live the great commandment, to internalize the one thing we were sent here to really know.

Jesus didn’t come to teach us how to get out of being human, but to show us how to love while we are.

An idea expressed by Rabbi Donniel Hartman4 describes the Jesus I think of when I read his teachings and experiences: “A life of faith isn’t just about walking with God, but how one walks with humanity.” I think that’s about how I walk with my own humanity, in addition to how I walk with everyone else.

“My deepest me is God!” declared St. Catherine of Genoa.5 This means the thing at my center can’t be sin, or shortcoming. In such a view, there can be no deficiency in being human, only divinity. Feeling God’s love is just—feeling love.

I become the pebble in the pond from which all the circles radiate. God’s love originates in me. I never need to be instructed in it, or go someplace holy to experience it, or put myself in the right mindset or soul-set to receive it. The concept of qualifying for it feels as nonsensical as earning my breath.

I talk a lot about a God of relationship, and as I check in with myself about what that phrase means or looks or feels like for me today, the first word that bubbles up is simply connection: humans and all creation, with and within each other, one living whole. I’m trying to learn to stay awake to this world as much as I can: aware of each moment and my place in it, fully inhabiting—committed to and content with—my part.

“Love yourself,” explains Jacqui Lewis. If that sounds simple, the rest of her sentence blows it out to engulf everything else I know now or may ever learn: “—so you can love the other, so you can love the world.” I may have gotten a late start, but I’m willing to work on this for the rest of my life.

Susan Hinckley

As the self-proclaimed Grace Peddlers1, we always love getting feedback from our listeners about podcast topics. We received an email from a podcast listener named Carol who spotted grace out in the wild, okay she actually spotted it in academia, and we wanted to share a bit of it with you all—

How amazing is it that the data from a Brigham Young University study2 is supporting grace? I don’t love the phrase ‘healthy perfectionism’, but I can appreciate the distinction the researcher is trying to make.

After receiving Carol’s email, I read the article she sent in BYU Studies. Basically, researchers found that religion itself is not the primary cause of toxic perfectionism; rather, it is the manner in which we engage with religious standards. The harmful effects of perfectionism can be mitigated if our teachers, parents, and church leaders can foster in us an intrinsic motivation and a grace-based understanding of faith.

Yikes! That seems like a really tall order, especially in a church that struggled to teach me anything about grace. And I’m not alone! I remember years ago reading a BYU Magazine article by Sheri Dew about grace3. She admits grace wasn’t fostered in her or a friend either—

“Her e-mail led me to ask another friend what she wished she understood about grace. ‘To tell you the truth,’ she said, ‘TV evangelists have wrecked that word for me. I almost feel disloyal to the restored gospel even talking about grace. I mean, do we believe in grace?’”

I had to go on my own Grace Journey. And after that long and painful search, I am determined to continue to peddle grace to anyone who will listen. Maybe someday we will believe our own Jesus-y stuff about grace.

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As part of our 250th anniversary observance, U.S. Latter-day Saints are invited to participate in a unified fast on July 5th “to express gratitude for religious liberty and to pray that it be strengthened throughout the world."1

Our 11th Article of Faith says:

I believe in religious freedom and wonder why our leaders don’t get a little more specific about what they’re thinking of when they use that phrase. The fact that they don’t leaves room for me to engage with it for myself, and I’m going to take full advantage of that precious mental space.

First, I’m going to call out the fact that when Joseph Smith penned this article, he should have said “people,” but I’ll overlook that and just remind us all that “men” doesn’t really mean “everyone,” and words matter. In 2026, I think we could consider updating language where it would be easy to do so, to reflect current usage and culture.

Secondly, I hope all church members recognize that in order to be real, any religious liberty you publicly proclaim being devoted to must exist for YOU as a Latter-day Saint—inside the Church—as well as for everyone outside it.

Need to change the way you think or talk about God? A She perhaps? A They?

Need to pray using different words? Maybe even completely different practices?

Need to start coming at scriptural interpretation a bit more broadly, and a bit less literally?

Need to ask big questions about stuff, and maybe stop focusing so much on having the answers?

Need to talk about whatever you struggle with…out loud?

Not a comprehensive list of possibilities of course, but I hope you’ll feel at liberty to change, adapt, and grow in your religious and spiritual life in any way your relationships and experiences may call you to do so. Why wouldn’t we take Joseph at his word, secure in the idea that being LDS need not prohibit us from worshiping how, where, or what we may, and according to the dictates of our own conscience?

There are things in our culture and history that make religious liberty a naturally resonant topic for Latter-day Saints. I think we’re generally pretty insistent on it for ourselves as a church, and therefore invested in defending it for others.

Allowing all people to find meaning and connection however and wherever they may is a worthwhile goal. Can you love people enough to give them space to express what matters to them, and why it does? Can you get out of the way to let them figure that out for themselves?

What about in a Relief Society lesson?

I wish I’d felt more freedom to think, reason, feel, believe differently, and ask questions throughout my life as a Latter-day Saint—you know, the things humans need to grow and develop spiritually. I’ve been in these pews and classrooms for well over half a century, and if we’re going to make noise about religious liberty as a church, from here on out my noise as a member is going to focus on defending our diversity of thoughts, ideas, spiritual needs and practices from the tyranny of ourselves.

It’s an interesting focus for a fast—I think we generally reach for a fast when we’re hoping to get God’s attention, and in this case we really only need to get the attention of ourselves and the people around us. After all, God doesn’t vote. God also doesn’t keep people in boxes, but some of us are prone to keeping ourselves and everyone else—including Them—in one.

Wishing you a happy July 4th, however, wherever, or whatever you may be celebrating.

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I was watching the news last night with sadness and a deeply unsettled feeling as they continued to pull people—some still alive!—from the rubble in Venezuela following last week’s earthquakes. The coverage highlighted the story of a man buried under the rubble of two buildings, apparently protected by the small parking booth where he was working in an underground garage when the world came down. But it’s rescue-Jenga—they can’t figure out how they can get to him when any piece they pull might lead to further collapse. His wife watches nearby, taking small comfort in the fact that, 6 days in, the rescuers have finally been able to get water to him.

As I tried to put myself in her shoes—and couldn’t, really—I thought about the many thousands of collapses happening every minute of every day on this precarious earth of ours. We’re forced to walk a bridge, and there’s no getting off it. But it’s an unreliable bridge: every now and then, often without warning, it just…collapses. We try to avoid looking down, distracting ourselves in every way we can from the chasm. But there it is.

Learning to embrace that reality has become key to my peace and well-being. If that sounds nonsensical, let me explain. I’m not perfect—I over-scroll and over-eat and over-spend to distract myself all day every day. I take too many pills, probably exercise more than I need to, hoping to stave off the inevitable. I’m definitely still learning and will need more practice.

But the peace-giving shift for me is that I finally understand: if no one deserves a tragedy, how can anyone deserve a blessing? I can't deserve a blessing any more than I can deserve a mountain or a baby or a giraffe or the tree growing outside my window.

I can ask for blessing, love for it, live for it, try to stay present to it in my own life and help the people around me feel and find it too. Asking for blessing is really just begging a little reassurance from God, a glimpse of divine love, and Jesus showed me how to manifest that love in the world. I have a choice whether to make this unreliable place a little easier for everyone I meet, or not.

But I will never be more deserving than every person in Venezuela, or anywhere else. May I never forget it.

On the day this bridge gives way beneath my feet—it will, I’ve been watching other people fly off the edge my entire life—it is only love that will sustain me. Only the portion of grace I am willing to give as freely as I hope to receive it that can make me okay, when everything in the world is not. For as long as it took me to write this, anyway, it is enough.

Note: More from James Finley here.

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We posted this snarky bingo card on social media but I had a few more things to say about women and priesthood.

Way back on Episode 97, Christ Chose Women, we talked about David Bednar’s 2022 comments at the National Press Club Luncheon. (Watch his body language as he answers the questions….nervous much?) When asked about whether we would ever have a woman prophet he said:

“We follow the pattern of the ancient church. … The pattern anciently was that the apostles were men.”

We had plenty to say about his response on the episode, but let’s just accept for now that it is true, that at the highest levels of governance Jesus wants only men to be apostles in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Fine. But why can’t we be bishops? If the reporter had asked him that question instead, what scripture—or “pattern”—from Jesus’s life and ministry would Bednar quote to support the Church’s ban on women clergy at the local level? What do you think? Because I can find nothing. Nada.

Cynthia Winward

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A Wrinkle In Time and How NOT to Build Zion

by Mara

In this essay I will address the building of Zion, how we may

be thinking about it in a flawed way, and how we can think about it instead. I will focus on the qualification “of one heart and one mind”—the principle of unity.

The scripture I just quoted in Moses is a description of the city of Enoch, and it could be argued that the description is unique to just that city. It is commonly used as a description in the church, however, as the kind of society we should be working for, since prophecies claim that Zion, the New Jerusalem, will be built in the last days, and we are also members of Zion inasmuch as we are members of stakes of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In addition, the scripture says the people were called Zion “because they were of one heart and one mind,” implying that Zion is a title bestowed on people who meet those qualifications and not just the people of Enoch. I feel it is therefore appropriate here to discuss the building of Zion as something that we can all work towards.

At this point you might be wondering about why I called this piece “How NOT to build Zion.” In addition to being an attention-grabber, this title shows that most of this essay will focus on how this scripture can be misinterpreted and how we can read it instead.

The idea of being “of one heart and one mind” can be interpreted in more than one way, and I would like to discuss one way this could be interpreted that I am going to argue is incorrect—that everyone feels, thinks, and acts exactly the same.

This is not a completely unreasonable way to understand the scripture, since other scriptures tell us,

“I say unto you, be one; and if ye are not one, ye are not mine.” (D&C 38:27)

and

“I beseech you that there be no divisions among you, but that ye be perfectly joined together.” (1 Corinthians 1:10)

However, if the idea of “one heart and one mind” is applied irresponsibly, it may be interpreted to mean that we give up our agency and individuality and all become exactly the same. I argue that sameness is undesirable as a quality in Zion, while unity can be built another way.

In the well-known book “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle, the characters Meg and Charles Wallace visit a planet called Camazotz where everyone behaves exactly the same because they are controlled by a totalitarian mind called IT that does not tolerate any deviation. When they first enter the town, they view a residential neighborhood that seems to be like a pleasant place at first but they soon discover there is a difference from what they are used to.

Meg and Charles Wallace continue into town and discover that these children and mothers, along with other inhabitants of the town, are under the strict control of the being IT, which uses fear and intimidation to make everything perfect. The effect is absolutely chilling: everything on the planet works perfectly because IT wills it so. IT tells the children:

The effect is quite chilling. IT’s words remind me of the arguments made by Lucifer during the council in heaven:

“Behold, here am I, send me, I will be they son, and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor.” (Moses 4: 1)

We might often feel that the Church is teaching that everyone must be exactly the same; we certainly do have a lot of commandments and “rules” that we expect people to follow in order to be considered a “good” member. But in fact the scriptures have taught us that it is only in diversity, not sameness, that we will be able to build things properly.

Consider the teachings in 1 Corinthians 12, which compares the followers of Christ to a human body:

“If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling? But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him. And if they were all one member, where were the body? But now they are many members, yet one body. And the eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.” (1 Corinthians 12: 17-21)

The author explains clearly here why sameness is not only not unifying but also not useful. “And if they were one member, where were the body?” In other words, if all the people of Christ were hands, exactly as the same as each other, we would not have a unified body, but only a collection of disembodied hands. And since each of the hands was exactly the same, the body would receive no additional functionality by joining two or more of the hands together. So they are separated and each hand has only the functionality it brought to the situation.

When the people of Christ are different types of body parts, however, the body is able to be unified: “But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body.” The parts make a body together and complement each other as members of the body. In addition, each part in this diverse body has access to the utility of the other parts of the body: the eye cannot hear, and the ear cannot smell. But by being part of a great body with the other members, each body part has access to the functionality of the whole body and contributes to that greater functionality.

Discussions of spiritual gifts in the scriptures also point out that diversity is needed for increased functionality as a unified church:

“And again, I exhort you, my brethren, that ye deny not the gifts of God… And there are different ways that these gifts are administered; but it is the same God who worketh all in all; and they are given by the manifestations of the Spirit of God unto men, to profit them.” (Moroni 10: 8)

They are given by the Spirit to profit them as a whole, not just one particular member. Therefore, the collective, unified body has access to all of the spiritual gifts, increasing its abilities in comparison to one member.

In short, Zion is not Zion in spite of diversity, but because of diversity. Those members of the church who feel they are different are just what the church needs, and the church as a whole suffers when they choose not to be part of us.

What does it mean then to be “of one heart and one mind?” How can we then understand these scriptures without understanding them to be talking about complete sameness? Consider these descriptions of the kind of mind and heart we should have:

“...Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all they heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” (Matthew 22:37)

“...that ye stand fast in one spirit, with one mind striving together for the faith of the gospel;” (Phillipians 1:27)

“For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people:” (Hebrews 8:10)

“And ye will not have a mind to injure one another, but to live peaceably…” (Mosiah 4:13)

“Behold, the Lord requireth the heart and a willing mind;” (D&C 64:34)

“Blessed are the pure in heart…” (Matthew 5:8)

“And ye shall offer for a sacrifice… a broken heart and a contrite spirit…” (3 Nephi 9:20)

We can bring minds that are full of love, striving, peaceful, and willing to make covenants with the Lord, and hearts that are loving, contrite and pure. These are the characteristics that will unify us in a way that we are not all the same like servants of a controlling IT-like mind, but that we can benefit from each other’s differences.

Checking Boxes

by Marlee Bedke

Letting the Fields Lie Fallow

by Brooke RaNae Palmer

I live in Southeastern Idaho, just over the Utah border in

the first Idaho community settled by Mormon pioneers. When they arrived, the land was thick with sagebrush—wild, dry, and unpromising. What transformed it into farmland was not just effort, but an irrigation system.

To catch the spring snowmelt, they excavated reservoirs with horse teams and cast iron implements, carved canals and ditches with hand tools, and relied on gravity to carry water across hundreds of acres. It was a carefully planned feat of engineering.

Presently there are 5 canal companies and 13 reservoirs in Franklin County, and many of the ditches and canals have been encased in pipe and buried in the ground, and by-and-large, it is still gravity that sends the water where it needs to go. For more than a century, water has moved because it has been guided to move, again and again, in a carefully maintained system.

This irrigation infrastructure has shaped the land, and it shaped the people who lived on it—teaching them to produce, to maximize, to make the desert yield. Over time, farming became the dominant industry here, and with it came a rhythm: plow, sew, water, grow, harvest, repeat.

Despite improving the rate of crop production, on-demand irrigation isn’t always positive. Constant farming also depletes the ground of minerals and nutrients, which then are usually replaced with another man-made innovation: chemical fertilizers. (But that’s a subject for another day.)

As you travel north, there are “dry farm,” areas where irrigation is not able to reach. The land is too far from the reservoirs, or it is too hilly for the gravity flow to be able to work. So, these farmers have learned to farm in a different way. Some years these fields lie fallow. To a passerby, they look abandoned: overgrown with weeds, marked by washouts where snowmelt has pooled and receded. They do not appear productive. They do not appear tended.

And yet, this too is a deliberate practice because through this period of rest, the soil is able to gather moisture deep into the ground. The weeds, when eventually turned under, become nourishment. When the field is planted again—often with hardy wheat—it draws on what has been quietly stored below the surface. The crop is able to grow without being dependent on a man-made watering system. It can even grow through a summer that gets very little rain because the moisture has been allowed to accumulate in the earth. It may yield less than irrigated land, but it yields enough. It survives.

I can guarantee that over the past 165 years, these stewards of the land have tried to come up with a way to get onto an irrigated system. It’s not for lack of ingenuity, or money, or will power. It would take a seismic shift in the landscape for something like that to happen.

On the other hand, there are thousands of acres watered by man-made irrigation, and so they’re able to produce more varied and abundant crops. They are not as limited by the amount of water that is provided by rainfall. On irrigated land, a farmer can sometimes get up to four cuttings of hay, compared to two on a dry farm.

Growing up in the church, in a community that was predominately LDS, I was part of a man-made irrigated system. I was watered consistently and thoroughly. As a child I grew both homemaking and leadership skills. As a young woman I produced a temple marriage and raised 4 wonderful children. As a member of my ward, I was a steward of Primary children, YW and YM, and Relief Society sisters. And like the irrigated fields around me, I was taught—implicitly and explicitly—to produce, produce, produce.

But then the unthinkable happened, I experienced a huge seismic shift, one that had been building up for years. There had been tremors, but I ignored them in favor of producing. This shift threw me off of the irrigation system that had been the framework of my life.

All of a sudden, the pipes that led out of my reservoir were fractured, the flow disrupted, and I learned that systems, even sustaining ones, can break if they become too rigid and confining.

I tried to limp along, doing the same things I’d always done, tried to grow the same crops, followed the same patterns, expected the same results, but without the constant water, my output shriveled up. I found myself exhausted, unable to sustain what once felt natural. I tried to get back on the system, but returning to the old system was not an option; it no longer felt like nourishment. It felt contaminated.

What I did not realize, at first, was that I was being invited into a different method of growing—the kind practiced by dry farmers, a season of fallowness, completely reliant on mother nature.

Having observed many fallow fields over the years, I knew during this phase of fallow-ness the field would be ugly. There would be weeds growing in it. There would be washouts from melt-off and rain. My neighbors might drive by and wonder what happened to my beautifully cultivated field and why I was letting it run to ruin now.

I am learning how to let a field lie fallow. I know my field doesn’t have to look perfect, or even pretty.

However, I don’t have to rely solely on my own observations as I employ this technique. This, too, has roots in my inheritance, I have dry farming in my genetic code. Not only do I have Mormon pioneers on one side of the family, but I also come from Volga German stock. In 1762 Catherine the Great invited immigrants to settle in Russia. Many Hessian Germans formed a community on the banks of the Volga River and there they developed agricultural practices shaped by scarcity and resilience: crop rotation, soil stewardship, and the intentional leaving of land unplanted. They became some of the most important wheat growers in the empire.

However, their history, too, is marked by disruption. By the late 19^th century there had been many seismic shifts in Russian politics and eventually many of the Volga Germans emigrated to the United States. Carrying their knowledge with them to the mid-west and western states, they grew a variety of crops: rye, potatoes, sunflowers, sugar beets and the red wheat with which we are all familiar. Adaptation was not optional; it was survival. Long before any Mormon Utahans were farming, the Volga Germans had been using innovative farming techniques, including allowing a field to lay fallow. They understood that in order to get the best production out a piece of ground, they needed to let it rest, to gather moisture and nutrients.

If the Mormon pioneers taught me how to build systems, the Volga Germans remind me how to live when those systems fail. If you Google “Volga Germans” you will see that they are known for their tenacious work ethic. If you read between the lines, you will also notice that they are farmers who understood the necessity of rest and were remarkably versatile. And while I applaud my Mormon ancestors for their tenacity and work ethic, I feel like those of us in the Mormon belt may have lost the versatility that we once had. Instead, we are relying too much on man-made irrigation to produce, produce, produce.

Now after this seismic shift in my own life, I am going to hearken back to my German roots, where a season of fallowness isn’t a liability, it isn’t unacceptable, but is counted as necessary. I am learning how to let a field lie fallow. I know my field doesn’t have to look perfect, or even pretty. It’s okay that it’s filled with weeds—unanswered questions, unfinished thoughts, grief that surfaces unpredictably. There are washouts, places where old structures have collapsed under the weight of change. From the outside, it might appear neglected, as though I have stepped away from responsibility or purpose. To be fallow is to remain present without forcing growth. It is to trust that something is happening beneath the surface, even when it cannot be measured or displayed.

This season is sustaining me in ways I could not have anticipated. It has loosened my dependence on constant production. It has reconnected me to something more elemental—something like the slow accumulation of moisture in the soil, unseen but essential. At some point, in a season when I’m strong enough, or feel good enough, or when I’ve finally figure something out, I’ll just plow everything under and those weeds will be part of the nourishment of the soil. I do not know yet what I will plant when this season ends. I suspect it will be something different from what I grew before—something that can reach deeper, something less dependent on carefully controlled systems, one that isn’t common in this LDS soil. A crop that doesn’t leave me burned-out or reliant on anything man-made.

For now, it is enough to tend this field as it is. To let the field lie fallow. To trust the work of rest. To believe that meaning, like water, does not always arrive on command—but can still be gathered, held, and, in time, made to nourish what comes next.

Women Who Understand

by Lisa Fluckiger

A Vision of Living Thread

by Jessie Santa Maria Whittaker

And it came to pass that I beheld a land covered in mist, and many

voices were heard within it, speaking commandments and judgments to the travelers who walked there.

And the mist was thick at times, heavy with the weight of words and expectations, pressing upon the shoulders of those who passed. And at other times it parted, letting light spill gently upon the path of the traveler.

And I saw a rod of iron stretching across the land, straight and unbending, and many did cling unto it with great effort. And the rod did ascend upward unto a great building that stood high above the earth.

And the building was filled with people who looked down from lofty windows and balconies. They spoke with certainty and mocked the travelers in the mist. And though the building appeared magnificent, I perceived that it had no foundation beneath it.

And near the rod I beheld a young girl who had just loosed her hands from the iron. She looked upon the building with troubled eyes, for she knew it was not her home, yet she feared to depart from the path she had been taught.

And as I watched, a thread of gold came gently into my hands. It was soft and living, and it moved with me as I walked.

And I perceived that the thread grew brighter when I walked in compassion, and dimmed when I walked in fear, yet it did not depart from me.

And I beheld that there were many such threads moving through the mist in every direction. Some crossed and some parted, yet all were woven together into a great tapestry that stretched across the earth.

And I saw that the tapestry was not yet complete, for new threads were continually being woven into it by the lives of those who walked the earth.

And following the thread, I came unto a tree whose beauty was beyond all that I had known. And the fruit thereof filled my soul with a great and quiet love, sweet and comforting to taste.

And I beheld that the roots of the tree reached deep into the earth and drew life from hidden waters beneath the world, even from living springs that did not fail.

And the branches spread wide as though to gather all who hungered for its fruit.

And I saw that the trunk of the tree opened as a doorway, and beyond it was a garden where light and shadow dwelt together, and the light made the shadows gentle.

And I turned again and saw the young girl standing in the mist, and I went unto her and held her with compassion, for I knew her burdens and her longing for goodness.

And as we stood beneath the tree, I perceived that the light which shone there had also been within us from the beginning, a spark of the divine entrusted to our care.

And the golden threads continued to move through the world, weaving the journeys of many souls together.

And I knew then that the journey toward God was not a single road to be followed, but a living weaving of souls learning, stumbling, and shining together.

And I bore record that the love which grew from that tree was the true guide of the soul; and whosoever walked in that love need not fear the mist, for the light within them would ever lead them onward.

Contributors:

Mara

Marlee Bedke

Marlee is a “stretchy saint” that’s doing her best to find her place and voice at church. She’s become the girl that shocks her southern Utah ward by holding her daughter during her baby blessing, wearing a rainbow bracelet, finding God outside the normal Primary answers, and sharing “liberal” things on social media. She’s lucky to be married to her best friend, and they lead their home and 2 young kids as equal partners. She’s a mindful yoga teacher, a daycare supervisor, an amateur gardener, a proud firefighter wife, a sourdough baker, a hiker, a Krispy Kreme fanatic and an avid reader.

Brooke RaNae Palmer

Brooke is a big thinker, voracious reader, stained glass enthusiast, and heavy metal headbanger, in addition to being a loving nana, mother of 4, happy farm wife and badass homemaker.

Lisa Fluckiger

Lisa is a second year grad student in Chadron State College's Clinical Mental Health Counseling MAE program. Her most recent work has been providing SEL education and support for middle school students. Long ago at BYU, Lisa earned a BA degree in chemistry and then a master's degree in Curriculum and Instruction, with an emphasis in the inclusive classroom. Her family owns a small artisan bakery in the small town where they live, and it is a place where their daughter, Eleanor, can have meaningful work and continue to participate in the community. Totally her husband's dream, and she is all for it! In addition to studying mental health, Lisa is loving life beyond church, running with her dogs, yoga, and writing. Also Netflix.

Jessie Santa Maria Whittaker

Therapist, writer, professional meaning-maker, wife, and momma. Jessie sits with big feelings, sacred questions, and nervous systems that have had a rough day—or life. She is a lover of Christmas magic, messy faith, honest stories, and the brave work of becoming fully human.

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Author’s note

I am a cisgender, heterosexual female with privilege and bias. In this essay I am speaking through my heteronormative lens which is inherently flawed. I am trying to cultivate a space of love, acceptance and safety, but I am not part of the queer community. As much as I try to understand, their experiences are not my experiences. The only way to truly learn about queer experiences is to talk to queer individuals. Hearing their lived experience is essential to the work of allyship. Please, do the work to create a safe space for your LGBTQ+ loved ones.

by Blakelee Ellis

TW: homophobia, suicide

In October 2019 President Dallin H. Oaks addressed the

women of the church during the women’s session of general conference. I was at a stake center with several of my sisters-in-law and my mother-in-law and I just couldn’t stop crying. President Oaks greeted the sisters as a “divinely assigned guardian of the eternal family,” and talked about the implications the doctrine of eternal marriage has for LGBTQ+ individuals. He said,

The work of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is ultimately concerned with preparing the children of God for the celestial kingdom, and most particularly for its highest glory, exaltation or eternal life. That highest destiny is possible only through marriage for eternity…

…That is the destiny we desire for all we love. Because of that love, we cannot let our love supersede the commandments and the plan and work of God, which we know will bring those we love their greatest happiness.

But there are many we love, including some who have the restored gospel, who do not believe in or choose not to follow God’s commandments about marriage and the law of chastity. What about them?

God’s doctrine shows that all of us are His children and that He has created us to have joy. Modern revelation teaches that God has provided a plan for a mortal experience in which all can choose obedience to seek His highest blessings or make choices that lead to one of the less glorious kingdoms.

I went home after the session and sobbed to my husband. He was admittedly confused because these topics had never generated such angst in me before. In the decade we had been married, I had always accepted my siblings, but “known” that they were not living the way God wanted them to and there would be eternal consequences. So this meltdown over what President Oaks had said was very uncharacteristic for me. As I cried, I distinctly remember asking my husband, “You believe all this is true, right? This church. You think it’s true, right? Because my heart is broken and it doesn’t feel true.”

President Oaks hadn’t said anything new about the LGBTQ+ community or eternal marriage or the law of chastity. Nothing about the doctrine had changed, but my heart had.

I had just been a part of my sister’s wedding to her wife a few weeks earlier. I stood by while they pledged to love and care for each other and it didn’t seem any less godly or sacred just because it was two women. How could someone as loving, as kind, as caring as my sister receive less of God’s glory simply because she loved a woman instead of a man? Did I really believe in a Heavenly Father that would withhold love, the greatest of happiness, all his glory because two women loved each other?

The metaphorical shelf that held all of my questions about the church and it’s teachings broke and my soul was left agonizing in the rubble. It marked the beginning of so many hours examining my beliefs about the nature of God and everything I thought I knew. I had let church leaders and doctrine form my opinions about God’s plan for LGBTQ+ individuals. I listened while these white, cisgender, heterosexual men told me about the queer community and how God felt about them. Just like I listened while they told me what it meant to be a woman of God.

Everything changed for me when I stopped being told ABOUT the queer community and started actually listening TO the queer community.

I listened while brave individuals talked about reconciling their sexuality with their own beliefs in God and what it meant to be queer. It changed me. Rather than try to tell you ABOUT what some of the queer community has said, I’d encourage you to listen TO the queer community.

Looking for a place to start? Check out our own episodes with Meghan Decker and Colette Dalton. Don’t miss all the additional resources listed at the end of the essay.

June is Pride month for the LGBTQ+ community and many wonder why the queer community needs a month dedicated to celebration and pride. Ben Schilaty, my friend and openly gay Latter-day Saint, recently said this:

Even though I am not queer, I’ve had my own pride awakening.

Pride that I have a gay brother and gay sister.

Pride that I know that God loves them as they are.

Pride that I am an ally.

Pride that I will navigate the uncomfortable space that being a member and being an ally creates.

Since my faith deconstruction, one of the main reasons I continue to go to church is my pride and queer allyship. I wear rainbow pins so the closeted adults in my ward know I’m a safe space. I carry a rainbow bag every week so the youth know there is someone at church that supports them just as they are. I wear a rainbow dress to church to let everyone know that we have to fight for and with our queer loved ones to dismantle systems of oppression. Queer folks are tired! They need allies to help share this load, but not steal the microphone.

I believe allyship is a divine calling and in the current political climate, it is important to be vocal about our support for the LGBTQ+ community, especially at our places of worship. This past Sunday, in his weekly email, Into The Gray, Reverend Benjamin Cremer wrote:

I believe the nature of God is one of deep love and grace. Listening to the queer community helped me, in part, form that belief. That is the image of God I believe we, as Latter-day Saint allies, need to reflect to the world and specifically to our fellow church members. Current church doctrine and policies continue to alienate and wound our queer church members, particularly those in the transgender community.

In Jeremiah 23, there is a sobering echo of how the church treats its queer members:

1 Woe to the shepherds who are destroying and scattering the sheep of my pasture!” declares the Lord.

2 Therefore this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says to the shepherds who tend my people: “Because you have scattered my flock and driven them away and have not bestowed care on them, I will bestow punishment on you for the evil you have done,” declares the Lord.

In 2016, “Dialogue Journal” published research that suggested that suicide rates among Utah teens doubled corresponding to an increased rhetoric by the LDS church against same sex marriage. The church’s increased media focus against same sex marriage came after policy changes were released in November 2015. The same article says that there are protective effects against suicide when people belong to a religious community and it’s no secret that LGBTQ+ people leave the church or are invited to leave at very high rates.

“It can thus be inferred that LGBTQ people are placed at higher risk when they feel unwelcome in their religious communities and end up losing the protection of religious involvement…it may seem counterintuitive that when individuals chose to leave their religion in order to experience more self-acceptance that they inadvertently experience more risk for suicide.”

I will acknowledge that individual views of the members and church culture are ever changing. This research is a decade old and perhaps the research would show something different now.

We are failing the LGBTQ+ community. They are leaving. They are dying. In a moment of tender vulnerability, queer member Charlie Bird said, “You are killing us.” We must do better. Christ is asking us to do better. Christ reached out to the marginalized and misunderstood. He gave them safety and community. Again, in Jeremiah:

3 I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them and will bring them back to their pasture, where they will be fruitful and increase in number.

4 I will place shepherds over them who will tend them, and they will no longer be afraid or terrified, nor will any be missing,” declares the Lord.

I believe God—through us, through allyship—is the answer. Our queer members have much they can teach us about Christ-like love, acceptance, and patience. They are forced to cultivate these things within themselves simply because of who they are and the world they live in. The queer community has so much to teach us and we are missing out on their unique understanding of divine love. Jess Payne, creator and owner of Terra and Sage, once told me:

We will be tempted to ask, “How can I keep my queer loved ones in the church?” However, I think a more loving and appropriate question to ask is, “Is it safe for my queer loved ones to stay in the church?” For the queer loved ones in my life, the current church environment is not safe for them. I am being my best as an ally when I understand and help them enforce their boundaries. We miss the mark in forcing our loved ones OR ourselves into emotionally, and sometimes physically, unsafe places. Church is not for everyone.

While not all queer members will stay in the church, I believe Christ is asking us to cultivate safe places of worship for everyone. We do this best when we are a loving witness to one another’s stories. We do not need to fix or rescue anything or anyone. We do not need to judge or control or coerce anything. If you are unsure of how to create a safe space in your own church, Ben wrote a recent blog post with great advice:

If you really want to be an ally, go learn about LGBTQ+ members and talk to THEM. Ask your loved ones, “Can you tell me a bit more about what that has been like for you?” You’ll be amazed at what you can learn and how you can grow.

You’ll be amazed at the safety you can provide.

In Memoriam

This issue is dedicated to my friend, Care Hansen, who died by suicide in 2023.

Care, thank you for your example of boundless love and tenacity.

Want to learn more? Here are some of the author’s favorite resources to start (or continue) on your allyship journey:

1- Tender Leaves of Hope: Finding Belonging as LGBTQ Latter Day Saint Women by Meghan Decker

2- Queer Mormon Theology by Blaire Ostler

3- A Walk in My Shoes: Questions I’m Often Asked as a Gay Latter Day Saint by Ben Schilaty

4- Without the Mask: Coming Out and Coming into God’s Light by Charlie Bird

5- Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism by Taylor Petrey

6- Gay Rights and the Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences by Greg Prince

7- Listen, Learn, and Love: Embracing LGBTQ Latter Day Saints by Richard Ostler

8- That We May Be One: A Gay Mormon’s Perspective on Faith and Family by Thomas Christofferson

Need an audio format? These podcasts are great:

1- All Out In the Open (formally Questions from the Closet) by Ben Schilaty and Charlie Bird

2- Lift and Love by Allison Dayton

3- Listen, Learn and Love by Richard Ostler

4- Called to Queer by Collene Dalton and Kate Mower

Want to lend support? Here are some great organizations that are mostly Utah based:

1- Raynbow Collective

2- Color the Campus

3- Cougar Pride Center

4- Encircle

5- Equality Utah

6- The OUT Foundation

7- The Trevor Project

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Spiritual Blocks

by Mary Cox

the audio included with this piece is a direct audio recording from when the talk was given

The last time I spoke in church, I talked about how

I was rebuilding my spiritual tower. Some might call that deconstruction. Some might call that faith expansion. Some might call is a faith journey or a faith crisis. Whatever you want to call it is up to you. I call it my spiritual tower. Since then, I have been listening to my heart and depending not on certainty, but on agency and trust in my own relationship with my God Parents. I’ve had the gift of using doubt as a guide and defining faith as flexible. The process of rebuilding my spiritual tower is a journey that is messy, complicated, frustrating, but it’s also so, so beautiful. I want to talk about 4 of my 5 foundational blocks in my spiritual tower: mercy, grace, love, and Jesus. It’s all I really have, and it’s enough.

Because music means something to me and because it’s how I feel the God power inside of me, I’m going to use it today as I talk.

Bryan Stevenson, author of “Just Mercy” states that, “Mercy is not earned. Mercy is not passive. Mercy is necessary. Mercy begins with recognizing a shared humanity with every human on the earth.” That is the difficult part, isn’t it?

But mercy is only mercy without judgment attached to it in any way. As Bryan Stevenson says, “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” Let mercy guide us as we strive to be with our fellow humans in “our one wild and precious life.”

I think we often misunderstand grace. Some might not even really believe that grace has the power to heal, the power to save. Grace is so powerful. Grace is an amazing gift from our God Parents that to me says, “We love you. We know this is complicated. We trust your path.” Like the song says, Grace is amazing. It covers our self-inflicted pain, when others hurt us, when we are burdened, and when our patterns of behavior harm others. Grace will lead us to a place where we can find ourselves, settle into presence, and breathe knowing we can keep moving forward. Grace tells us we are enough.

I could sing a thousand songs about love, but instead, I used my voice to write a poem…

In Jesus’ own words: “Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart… AND Love your neighbor as yourself.”

This scripture really has three parts. The first is to love our God Parents—they don’t require our love to be ok—they don’t NEED us to do that. This makes it so much easier to practice love by loving them and it’s such a gift. Figure it out on us, they said—we can take the messiness and the complicated parts. We won’t be hurt by any love you can or can’t show. Try on love. Give love. Practice love. In my mind, the practice of this love is to teach us how to do the next part of the commandment—love your neighbor.

Honestly, we aren’t really doing this well as a whole of society. We just aren’t. I think it’s because we truly fail to SEE our neighbor. But if we, as members of this church, believe our own stuff, it shouldn’t be that tricky. It’s pretty clear, “ALL are alike unto God—black and white, bond and free, male and female; Jew and Gentile.” There is nothing I can say here today that can persuade you to look at that scripture, “ALL are alike unto God,” add the “love your neighbor” part, and simply—do better. Love for your neighbor, whomever that may be, has to come from YOUR soul, YOUR heart.

The third part is “as yourself.” We never talk about this part. We skip over it as though it’s not a vital part of the commandment. WHY? You matter to our God Parents. You need to matter to yourself. I have myself as part of the 5 blocks of my spiritual tower. How can we really build the types of relationships we need here on earth without first recognizing the importance of ourselves? I choose to love myself as messy, complicated, doubtful, uncertain, worthy, and enough. I believe it might be too difficult to love your God Parents and your neighbors if you don’t love yourself first.

I just don’t think Jesus asks us to hustle for our worth or hustle for love. “Come unto me. Learn of me. Rest in me,” He said. That’s His request—without hustle. He also doesn’t require perfection of any sort, nor is there a demand to be happy. Weary, worn, and sad, it says—Jesus wants us that way too. It’s enough for Him.

Here are a couple of questions to ponder: Does your spiritual tower have enough blocks? What might be missing? Does your tower have too many blocks? Are there blocks that don’t really belong to you—that might have been borrowed from your childhood or a parent? What if you gave yourself permission to use your full agency and truly listen to your heart—could you remove a block or two that was no longer part of your belief system or might actually be harming you? If you looked at faith as flexible and at certainty as not necessary, could you move a few of the blocks around, rename a few, and rebuild a foundation that felt more sure and sturdy for you?

I believe that building your spiritual tower is not something that is ever a finished product. We don’t have that kind of control over our lives. And honestly, the gift of agency tells us that we will have the privilege of continuing to shift, change, and grow for eternity. Of course we will. Plants adapt to the weather. Animals rebuild homes in new habitats. Adult development in physical, psychological, and faith-based ways have stages that we will continue to move through for the rest of our lives. Change is natural. Growth is good.

I choose the block of mercy because mercy is how to truly see others. I choose to believe wholeheartedly in a grace that tells me I am enough. I choose love, because love is the answer. In love—I choose myself because I matter most. The block of Jesus is my example of how I actually do mercy, grace, and love in “my one wild and precious life.”**

**Editor’s note: Mary introduced us to her concept of a spiritual block tower in ALSSI Ep. 180, and those insightful words found their way into our permanent lexicon. If you missed this conversation, here’s a reminder to check it out. Thanks again, Mary! —S.

Different Paths

by Amy Call

Finding The Divine Outdoors in Nature

by Maddie Victoria

I had an experience on a trip to the Middle East

a few years ago. I often revisit that experience as I go through my faith journey and deconstruction. My experience is as follows.

I was in the Wadi Rum Desert in the country of Jordan with the warmth of the sun beating down on me, riding a camel as I was looking around and taking in the beauty of red sand and red peaks and cliffs that arose up around me. I felt that the same being that created these red rock cliffs, peaks and red sand is the same being that made me and took the time to provide me a world that I can explore and learn and grow in, and thrive in as the woman that I am. Even if it took me 20+ years to find myself as a woman. I learned that every experience, thought and question I have had shown me that I am enough and that I am worth it even if the world around me doesn’t think I am worth it because of who I am and the past life that I have lived.

Knowing that being in nature and outside is my sanctuary where I can commune with my Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father is so healing to me. I see my Heavenly Parents more outside and in nature than I do in a brick-and-mortar building.

Nature and being outdoors ground me and connect me to the earth and the love that I have experienced time and time again as I open myself up to seek answers and guidance from my Heavenly Parents. They are patient with me when I don’t get it the first, second, third time, or however many times it takes me to realize what They are trying to tell me or show me. Sometimes all I need to do is look up and notice the beautiful world that is around me. Sometimes it is as simple as seeing the Northern Lights with my own eyes in the middle of the Salt Lake Valley.

Proverbs 3:5-6 is a verse of scripture that I hold near and dear to my heart:

I am more at peace with where I am as a person, and with my faith. I feel like my deconstruction from the Church will be an ongoing process since it is intertwined with me because of where I live in the world and that I was an all-in member for so long. It isn’t easy being a member of the church who is in a marginalized community. To be honest, it can be scary but all I have to do is look up and be willing to open myself to hear what I need to hear when I need to hear it.

Creativity and Worship—A Cancer Survivor’s Story

by Ruby Harris

When I was twelve, my parents woke me in the middle of the night

and told me through tears that my lab results were back: I had leukemia. We had to go to Primary Children’s hospital right away. My life turned upside down in an instant. My upcoming math test and band concert didn’t matter anymore. Now my only goal was to survive.

I was thrown into a world of procedures, pills, and waiting rooms. Chemotherapy was effective, but at a high cost. It took three years of my life and gave me a bone condition that made my ankle joints collapse. The year after I finished treatment I had four reparative ankle surgeries.

I’m 17 now and cancer free!! The effects of the chemo are long term, so I use a wheelchair when I’m out and about to minimize my chronic pain. I’m really happy with where I’m at now! I’m able to devote more energy to my art and spend more time with my loved ones, which has been a huge blessing. Over the years, I’ve turned to art again and again to find peace and healing from my struggles.

One of my spiritual gifts is visualization. In some of the darkest times in my life, comforting spiritual images came into my mind: me leaning on Christ to walk; Jesus washing my swollen scarred feet with His scarred hands. I treasured these revelations because they felt so personal and tailored to me. It was one of my favorite ways to “Hear Him.”

It wasn’t until this year that I understood them, however. I had just experienced some traumatic religious experiences and deep spiritual manipulation. The pain was excruciating and all consuming. I had numbed my spiritual intuition to “keep the peace” and I didn’t know how to get it back. I felt powerless and forgotten.

Then, I listened to a podcast episode about the Divine Feminine (by the In Her Image podcast, I highly recommend it). It changed my life. The world opened up to me and I finally felt free. Embracing Heavenly Mother helped me reclaim my agency. The day after I learned about Her, I started having beautiful images come to my mind multiple times a day, and they were all depicting Heavenly Mother. I realized that they weren’t how I “Hear Him” but actually how I “Hear Her.” I was so touched that even before I knew who She was, She was reaching out and comforting me. Now that I was aware of Her presence, I felt like She was calling me to create—so, I did.

It changed my life and how I worship. Art helped me to heal the deep spiritual wounds inflicted upon me. I drew Heavenly Mother’s comfort and support, and depicted Her in a variety of ways so that everyone could see themselves in Her. I try to push past beauty standards by showing the glory and divinity of an unfiltered body. Through this journey, I felt more of Her love and influence in my life. As I grow into a more independent phase of my life, I look forward to depicting that She is more than just someone to take care of children for eternity. She is a goddess.

Our Heavenly Parents are the ultimate creators. If we are truly to become like Them, then we must also learn to create. Parenthood is a beautiful way the gospel celebrates creation, but it can be so much broader than that. For those who aren’t in a parenting stage of their lives and for those who never will be, creation is still an option for them. I personally lean into this through painting, sketching, and singing, but there is no “right” way to be creative. You could garden, you could host events, you could write, you could fix cars, you could bake, you could sew, you could serve, you could connect, you could heal. Creativity is accessible to everyone. It is literally in our DNA.

I believe that all of those examples could bring someone closer to God. Intentionality in creation is what makes it a spiritual process, not the finished product. I incorporate this into my art practice through ritual. Every time I sit down to draw or paint something, I say a prayer that They will guide my hands. Then I put on my favorite lotion and my playlist of songs that remind me of the Divine Feminine. This has turned art-making into my favorite form of worship. Even the interests that we view as secular can be expanded and magnified if we invite God in.

I think that agency is a concept more similar to creativity than we realize. If we truly believe that our agency increases as we become more like our Heavenly Parents, then it has to be more than just choosing between the covenant path and the adversary. Creativity has been my favorite way to expand my agency. I get to make decisions that shape how my art comes into the world. It is incredibly empowering and has deepened confidence in myself and God.

Creativity is a beautiful form of expression, release, and growth. I know it can be intimidating at first, but I invite you to try out some form of spiritual creativity and just see how it goes. The quality of the finished product doesn’t matter nearly as much as how you feel making it. You could start out with coloring in a coloring book and your experience can be just as profound.

Heaven’s Lost and Found

by Carly Carter

The Powerful Influence of My Heavenly Mother

by Stephanie Snell Povey

One evening in the fall of 1996, I returned home

from the hospital having had another dilation and curettage (D&C) after losing my third baby in five years. Bravely I tried to resign myself to be happy and content with the two beautiful daughters my husband and I had been blessed with. Yet, I felt a constant sense there was one more child for us. Many doubts and negative thoughts ran through my mind during this period of time.

“I must not understand how to receive inspiration from God.”

“The spirit of my unborn child must not want to come to our family.”

And the most destructive of all,

“God is withholding this blessing because He doesn’t trust me with any more children!”

One particularly discouraging day after reading a conference talk about how Heavenly Father knows every burden and trial we will have to endure, I found myself saying right out loud, “How can Heavenly Father really understand what I’m going through? He is a man and has never gone through this!” My sharpness shocked me! Did those blasphemous words really come out of my mouth? I felt guilty about my thoughts and unworthy to pray.

A few days later a friend and her husband came to see me and bring a meal. We visited for a while, then as they prepared to leave, they asked if I would like a blessing?

I don’t recall everything that was said in that blessing, but a powerful promise was given that changed my life. “Rest assured your Heavenly Parents are aware of you and your Heavenly Mother understands what you are going through.” Immediately I knew this was exactly what I needed to hear, and the spirit witnessed to me, “I have a Heavenly Mother and I am created in Her image. She understands everything I will ever go through!”

The veil thinned that day and my mind expanded. “Could it be,” I pondered, “that throughout the course of my many life experiences—as a confused nine year old girl, a discouraged teenage young woman, a homesick sister missionary, and a sometimes overwhelmed wife and mother—that the strength, inspiration and comfort came from both of my Heavenly Parents?”

The answer is YES!

The fact that we do not pray to Mother in Heaven in no way discredits Her position. Just as adoring and appreciating Her is in no way diminishing the love and appreciation I feel for my Father in Heaven.

As I have studied and prayed, I can only conclude that God consists of an exalted man and an exalted woman.

We have learned things about God our Eternal Mother, but there is still so much to know.

Questions such as:

• Why don’t we hear more about Mother in Heaven from our current leaders?

• Am I alone in my yearning for more understanding of the Divine Feminine?

President Russell M. Nelson has stated that the restoration has only begun and that it is our responsibility to receive revelation and guidance for our lives. This leads me to believe that as we long to know more of our glorious Mother in Heaven, ancient knowledge will be returned and restored to us.

Great peace comes to me when I pray daily, always addressing God the Father, yet visualizing both of my Heavenly Parents listening to me as I kneel before Them and pour out my heart. These are among the most insightful conversations imaginable.

I must not let feelings of doubt, inferiority or inequality discourage me. Great hope and encouragement come when I remember who I am and where I came from. Heavenly Mother is a goddess and a priestess. She is a perfect, glorified being and I am Her apprentice. My greatest aspiration is to become like Her someday.

I was correct in sensing there was one more child to join our family. In 1999 in a miraculous way, I gave birth to our youngest daughter. My earthly parents were serving a mission in the Philippines at the time and were not able to be with me, but I felt the presence of my Heavenly Parents and especially my Mother in Heaven.

I know my Heavenly Mother lives. What comfort this knowledge gives.

Say More: At Last She Writes It is thrilled to continue a series called, “Faith in Focus: ADHD and the Mormon Mind,” by Brittney Walker.

This series explores how ADHD shapes the faith experience for women raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, from the early moralization of difference, to the exhaustion of trying to measure up, to the courage of rebuilding identity after leaving. Each essay stands alone but together they trace the arc from misunderstanding to self-understanding.

The goal isn’t to critique the church, but to name what so many women feel but can’t articulate: that our struggles aren’t spiritual defects. They are neurological differences met with impossible expectations.

The following essay, “Rebuilding with a Different Brain” is the fourth and final installment of the series. Many thanks to Brittney for her time and generosity in allowing ALSSI to publish this series

Rebuilding with a Different Brain

by Brittney Walker

For a while, I was living two lives at the same time.

I wasn’t intending to deceive. I had started building a new life while the old life was still running in the background … fully operational, demanding everything it had always demanded. New job, new thinking, ideas I had been quietly circling for years. Coexisting with the old.

I didn’t notice it at first. I was too busy. New versions of myself I was tentatively trying on. The way you try on something in a dressing room and keep the tags on, just in case.

But underneath all of that, I was aiming for Perfect Mormon Mother. Perfect Wife. Supportive Friend. Still showing up to every obligation. Managing every expectation. Performing every role that had been assigned to me before I ever asked myself whether I wanted any of it. Nobody asked me to keep doing it. I just kept doing it. Dropping it would mean something. If I couldn’t do it all, there was a ready explanation waiting. I didn’t have the Spirit anymore. I was being led away. I had turned my back on God. The dropped ball. The exhaustion. The dinner I failed to make. Those would be the evidence.

So I didn’t drop anything.

I just ran faster.

Always out of breath. Always behind. Standing in front of a wall of arrows pointing in every direction at once. Knowing I needed to move but unable to choose because I needed to do all of them simultaneously. I performed my way through the days and collapsed at night. Performed. Collapsed. Performed. Collapsed.

It took me a long time to understand what was actually happening. Not a faith crisis. Not even an ADHD crisis.

A cognitive load crisis.

Here is something nobody tells you when you start loosening your grip on belief, whether you leave the church entirely or simply begin doing the quiet internal work of separating what’s yours from what was handed to you:

The structure was doing more work than you knew.

Not just the Wednesday night activities, or the Sunday schedule. Or the calling that filled your calendar and gave you a clear answer for what a good person does with her time. All of that, yes. But also something more fundamental. Something that was running so deep you couldn’t see it until it started to disappear.

The church was running your executive function.

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) handles those when the church doesn’t. Decisions. Direction. Identity. It answers the questions that feel small but aren’t: what do I do next, what matters here, who am I in this moment, what does a good life look like. Every human gets a limited amount of juice to their PFC each day. We spend it and then it’s gone, and the next day we start again.

Inside a high-demand religious system, enormous amounts of that work are already done for you before you wake up. Your identity is handed to you. Your schedule. Your values have been ranked. Your future is mapped out. The decisions that remain are small, because the architecture of your life has already been decided.

This isn’t a small thing. It’s an enormous cognitive gift, even when it comes wrapped in control.

When that system loosens, when you start questioning, leaving, or simply deciding to take what works and release what doesn’t, all of that outsourced cognitive work suddenly comes home. The decisions that were already made are now unmade. The schedule that had a shape has to be rebuilt from scratch.

And most of us have no idea that this transfer is happening.

We just know we’re exhausted. Frozen. Unable to move forward in ways that feel disproportionate to what’s actually in front of us. We stare at an ordinary decision and feel paralyzed. We have more freedom than we’ve ever had and less ability to use it than we expected.

We think something is wrong with us.

Nothing is wrong with us.

We are simply running a cognitive load we were never trained to carry. For the first time. Without warning.

For those of us with ADHD, this hits harder.

ADHD is, at its core, an executive function condition. It affects initiation, prioritization, working memory, follow-through. All the systems that generate structure from the inside. The systems that build direction out of nothing. When you have ADHD and you also grew up inside a religious structure that was doing all of this work for you, you probably made it to adulthood without ever fully developing those muscles. The external structure compensated. You showed up. You performed. You even thrived. Because the scaffolding was already there.

And then the scaffolding was gone.

This is the part that goes unnamed in almost every conversation about leaving. The grief, yes. People talk about the grief. The community, the future you thought you were building. That loss is real and it deserves the space it takes up. But underneath it, quieter and more confusing, is this:

You’re the one running it now. You’ve never done it before.

And you don’t know how yet.

That’s not failure. It’s not evidence that leaving was wrong, or that you should go back. It’s a skills gap. A structural one. It has a name and it has a solution and it is not a reflection of your character or your potential.

The scaffolding can be rebuilt.

Not the old scaffolding. Not the borrowed structure that belonged to a system. The version of yourself you were handed before you knew you got a choice.

New scaffolding. Built around you.

When I started learning about this, really learning, not just trying harder, I understood for the first time why every productivity system I had ever tried eventually fell apart. The Franklin Covey binder. The hour-by-hour planner. The Notion dashboard I built with color-coded categories and sub-pages and a view for everything. I would set them up with enormous relief, that feeling of finally having it together, and then stop using them within two weeks (*ahem,* hours).

I thought the problem was discipline. It wasn’t.

The problem was that those systems were designed for a different nervous system. They assumed consistent energy. Linear motivation. The ability to hold a routine steady across days that don’t feel the same. Bodies that don’t feel the same. Circumstances that shift.

My brain doesn’t work that way. Maybe yours doesn’t either.

What actually works, what I have watched work in my own life and in the lives of people I work with, is scaffolding that starts with the body instead of the calendar. Small structures. Sensory cues. Short time containers that reduce ambiguity without requiring endurance. Environmental reminders instead of memory. Relational support instead of isolation and willpower.

The specifics matter less than the principle. Scaffolding is external support that carries cognitive load so your brain doesn’t have to. And this time, unlike the last time, you get to decide what it looks like.

You get to build it around the brain you actually have. The actual, specific brain that’s in your head. Not the one someone else says you should have.

There will be grief in this process. Sometimes people expect the practical part to feel purely practical, and then the grief shows up and it’s disorienting.

You are allowed to grieve the community. The version of yourself who knew who she was without having to figure it out. You are allowed to grieve the simplicity. Even when the simplicity was coercive. Both things are true simultaneously, the harm and the loss, and you don’t have to choose which one to feel.

But grief is not the end of the story.

After the grief, there is something most people didn’t expect: a life that actually fits. Relationships that don’t require you to be smaller. Time that belongs to you. A structure built around your actual values and your actual brain. Not inherited. Not imposed. Not conditional on whether you show up correctly.

That’s not nothing.

For a lot of us, it’s the first time.

Contributors:

Mary Cox

I wear so many hats! My favorite one is the Mary Hat where I get to spend my time relearning about my Self without the lens of systemic expectation and obligation warping my view. I am a musician. I love that my music can be a bridge builder between human souls. I am the mother of four queer children whom I wholly love and I have learned so much from them. I just completed a Bachelor degree in Behavioral Health Sciences at 56, and I am so proud of myself. I live in Mesa, AZ with my amazing husband who is learning and shifting alongside me.

Amy Call

Maddie Victoria

I am an amateur wildlife photographer and I love outdoor activities.

Ruby Harris

I am a Christian artist and cancer survivor.

Carly Carter

I am a paraeducator, mother, and writer who has spent years navigating the tension between deep love for my LDS faith and the feeling of not fully belonging within it. My writing explores faith, identity, longing, and the pull to remain connected even while wrestling with difficult questions.

Stephanie Snell Povey

I am a firm believer that women and girls, men and boys should, without ridicule and shame, have the same rights and opportunities to learn, expand their talents and follow their passions. My best friend and partner for 42 years is husband Reed. Together we have three incredible daughters that have taught us so many things and brought us great joy. I am a lover of many activities, mostly of the outdoor nature, that involve moving my body and enjoying the sun.

I am a retired educator and author of the book, “You Can’t Play, You’re a Girl.” A memoir of my younger years before the passing of Title IX in 1972.

Above all, I am trying my best to be a disciple of Jesus and an apprentice to Divine Parents whom I aspire to become like some day.

Brittney Walker

I am an ADHD coach and writer living in Arizona with my husband and a lively household including six sons, a daughter-in-law, and a grandson. I spent many years trying to be reverent, organized, and less distracting, and now I write about executive function, faith, deconstruction, and rebuilding identity with a different kind of brain. My work explores neurodivergence, belonging, and the slow process of learning to trust yourself. You can find more of my writing at exmoadhdcoach.substack.com

Isn’t this a great space? We hope you’ll share ALSSI with anyone you think might benefit from our community. More voices, please!

Share At Last She Said It

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Last fall two seemingly innocuous events occurred in my life.

The first was having my own DNA tested. The second was reading Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality by Matthew Harris. The entire priesthood and temple ban on those with African ancestry is a horrific part of Mormonism. To read in such detail about the racist teachings and policies crafted by LDS church leaders was enlightening and saddening, such as Brigham Young saying that any man who mingles with the ‘seed of Cain’ is “to come forward & have his head cut off & spill his Blood upon the ground”.1 Yikes!

One of those shocking bits of history talked about at great length in the book is the “one-drop rule.” The “one-drop rule” stipulated that any person with even a ‘drop’ of African blood was considered ‘negro’ and thus ineligible for priesthood ordination (if male) and temple rites (if female). I had known about the ‘one-drop rule’ before reading the book, but reading all the awful details about it broke my heart in ways I hadn’t expected.

While knee-deep in Second-Class Saints, I was thrilled to get my DNA results. I texted my kids the above graphic and said, “Look at me, I am a product of humanity!” I was so proud to learn that I am 20% Indigenous Mexican. (Thanks Mom!) I was equally proud to learn I was 26% Celtic/Gaelic (Thanks Dad!) Smaller parts of my DNA showed me to also be Spanish, Portuguese, Jewish, and African—4% African to be exact. Love it…thanks Mom!

Knowing that I had ‘four drops’ of African blood, I realized that my own parents’ temple marriage was against Church policy as my parents were married in 1971, seven years before the priesthood and temple ban ended.

Harris writes:

“But there was another fundamental flaw with the one-drop rule…you couldn’t tell whether someone had African ancestry simply by looking at them. In the nineteenth century, when Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders defined a “negro” as anyone having one drop of African lineage, there were no reliable ways to identify bloodlines. DNA tracing through the Human Genome Project was decades in the future, which made determining lineage imprecise and often wrong. All of this is to say that the one-drop rule underscored a brutal reality that neither Mormon leaders nor Americans in general could grasp. The racial boundaries they sought to enforce were built on fiction.”2

I had ‘four drops’ because my mother had ‘eight drops.’ Obviously my parents were married before DNA tests, but it left me wondering, would The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have scrapped the ‘one-drop rule’ had DNA tests been a possibility? Or would they have leaned harder into the rule had science made it easier to discriminate? So many questions!

At the time, some people (mainly in South Africa and Brazil) were required by the Church to trace their genealogy to prove they had no African ancestry. Or worse, some potential converts were assessed by a white missionary or other white church leader just by looking at them to see how dark they were. I have curly brown hair, brown eyes, and olive skin. But one of my sisters—sharing all the same DNA as my parents—has blonde hair, blue eyes, and light skin. I truly can’t imagine the humiliation of some white man staring at any of us to decide if we ‘pass’ as white.

Harris documents loads of stories about LDS members discovering they had African ancestry, but who ‘passed’ as white. Some looked like me, some like my sister. Sometimes church leaders looked the other way when they knew someone had African ancestry and sometimes they didn’t. Harris writes–

Over the years, [Church leaders] fielded numerous queries from Latter-day Saints who looked White but were classified as Black by the church….These sensitive cases always frustrated the Brethren because the individuals in question wanted to serve missions, marry in the temple, and hold the priesthood, but the church’s restrictive racial boundary made this difficult. The simplest answer was to get rid of the one-drop rule and cut through the bureaucratic gauze that prohibited full church participation. But the Brethren couldn’t see themselves changing decades of tradition. On at least three occasions in their council meetings the apostles discussed—and reaffirmed—that they would keep the one-drop rule.3

My mother and her family experienced plenty of racism as Mexican Latter-day Saints even though they were not required to prove their lineage upon baptism. In Mexico my family was specifically told by the missionaries that they were ‘Lamanite’, a group of people written about in the Book of Mormon, but also a cursed people according to scripture.

One of my mother’s sisters, Herlinda Briones Bowen, served a mission shortly after her baptism in the 1960s in western Mexico. She writes in her memoir about numerous racist experiences, things she overheard while working in the mission home in Hermosillo, Sonora. The mission president’s wife was having a conversation with a young male missionary who had finished his service and was going to be heading home to Arizona—

“While I was sorting some papers, the missionary casually stands by the Mission President’s wife seated at her desk, engaging her in lighthearted conversation. This being the last day of his mission, all smiles and cheerful demeanor, she turns towards him inquiring about his plans after completing such an important milestone in his life. Without preamble, the missionary launches on his number one goal…he intends to marry Sister T., a recently released Mexican lady missionary!...My emotional radar in full alert by now, I managed to keep my eyes on my work; the discussion was none of my concern and the conversation being in English, further removed me from any involvement. [Not everyone in the mission home knew Herlinda understood English]. Her smiling face and cheerful demeanor gone; the Mission President’s wife’s tone of voice changes accordingly in a mean-spirited lecture about the “disadvantages” of marrying a Mexican!” 4

The above encounter doesn’t even surprise me. I’ve heard and seen plenty of racism from Latter-day Saints towards Mexicans (and other Latinos) my entire life. In fact, I probably have witnessed more than my fair share because as a ‘white presenting’ woman (with an English last name, first Harrington, now Winward) other white Latter-day Saints feel safe in expressing their racist thoughts to me. Never having been one to stay silent, I always call them out on their racist comments and then witness a lot of back-peddling.

One last story from my family. In the late 1970s my dad was a deputy sheriff for San Bernardino county in California. He had an opportunity to work for the sheriff’s office in Springville, Utah. Before uprooting our family, my dad had the wherewithal to ask his future employer what the racism was like towards Latinos in a small town. The man was honest with my father and told him the racism would be significant in Utah. My dad, not wanting to subject his wife, my mother, to much more racism than she already had to bear, turned down the job and raised our family in southern California.

I grew up in the safety of that choice, ‘passing’ as white while the Church’s complicated racial past hummed quietly in my DNA. The history of racism—official and cultural—is a dark stain on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is a history that once relied on the fiction of racial purity to determine eternal blessings. Today, as I look at my DNA results and my family photos, I am struck by the irony that the very thing the prophets and apostles once feared—the ‘mingling of races’—is exactly what makes me, well, me.

The ‘bureaucratic gauze’ may be gone, but the social scars for so many still remain. Whether on this side of 1978 or the other, my ‘four drops’ of African blood never made me or my family second-class saints, but a beautiful product of humanity and a child of God.

Cynthia Winward

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Last week, ALSSI released a “Ragecast Potpourri” episode covering a few recent headlines and explored some questions raised by recent changes. For fun, we challenged you all to share your best rage haiku with us. As always, we were BLOWN AWAY with the responses and just had to compile all the amazing poems in one place. This issue includes some of the haiku that were submitted on Facebook, Instagram and Substack. They have been grouped based on a loose theme to help fully absorb the impact of communal voices coming together to speak on one topic.

Haiku on The Nature of God

“The Lord loves effort!”
I’m confused because I thought
The Lord would love me.
Candice Clark Stevens

God was never small
only what you built around
I found Them outside
Kim G Bohne Landeen

The church claims Jesus.
Jesus claims no church on earth.
Who do they follow?
Valerie Atkinson

Is God asking us
To reach higher than a church
To really know Him?
Erin O’Dell Garrard

Please hear my prayers
I want answers to suff’ring
Not to find car keys
_louise_e

Do not blame Jesus,
Grasping tightly to dead things
And never growing
kjkj6363

Haiku on The Divine Feminine

I’ve needed so long
to know Her I can’t just stop
reaching for Her now
Mara Haslam

Dear Heav’nly Mother,
The boys are gaslighting us.
They need a time out.
Carol Colvin

I know no Goddess
Who claims my autonomy.
This reveals their lies.
Hannah H

“We need our Mother”
Jingle jangle go the keys
“You have a FATHER”
Shelli.Elle

Behind these shut doors,
I speak to Her as I please,
You can’t stop my prayers.
times.of.faith

Haiku on Purity Culture

“Modesty?” -humbug
avert your eyes if my thighs
offend your male gaze
Kajsa Kaufusi

Holy cloth clings tight
Texas sun turns faith to fire
I choose bare skin now
Julia Baldwin

Purity Culture
The seed of shame incarnate
Don’t yoke us with it.
Pat Catherall

They see us simply
Jezebels and Gilgolos
Unworthy of trust
Lisa Fluckiger

Storms rage in our hearts
One garment wedgie away
Mormon laundry sucks
Heidi C.

“Women are equal”
But men give us approval
On our worthiness
Laynie.markisich

You’d approach our girls
If a Prophet said to prey.
Blind trust is your God.
Annika Evelyn

Trans friends chaperoned
Sexual predators not
I’m out of here, Bye!
Sarah Porter Otter

Temple wedding day
Sorry you can’t come in
You did not comply
Kyra Dunshee

Purity, shame, guilt.
We cast our pearls before swine.
Not for God: for men.
Hannah H

Haiku on The Patriarchy

You win a crouton!
Oh, and YOU win a crouton!
Why aren’t you grateful?
Rebecca Bigelow

“Trust us, don’t murmur.”
Say, “All is well in Zion.”
Just bow and say, “Yes.”
Jessica Mitchell

For Eve’s transgression:
All women shall be punished
Ruled over by men
Nicole Slater

“Defend the BRETHREN.”
“What about the SISTREN, Jim?!”
Eyes flash. Heresy.
Kajsa Kaufusi

I am told to not
Get ahead of the brethren
But they do not move
Amy Sego Shumway

Leaders LOVE women
But we must scream to be heard
Silenced is not loved
Elizabeth Ludwig

A sister speaks up
Shhhh! Stop. The men are speaking.
We love the sisters!
Madwoman_c

“You don’t understand”
They tell me when I speak up.
They don’t understand
Elisabethbingham1

Trapped in spirit pris’n
Stunted in a male domain.
No progression here.
Mama_gale

By their fruits ye shall
Know them. Why are so many
Fruits then so rotten?
Eleanor Clark

“Stay off the damn stand”
“Not on the front row, either”
“Go make me donuts!”
Carol Colvin

Dear Patriarchy,
We have a Heavenly Mother
and no women leaders?
Nicci Cameron Lovell

Truth should not fear light
Questions were never the sin
Silence was the cost
Erica N.

Old men lead the way.
What will we do without them?
Shout hallelujah!
Pat Cathall

Waiting and hoping
Maybe things are improving?
Then disappointment
Whitney Webster Pack

Teach what men preach.
Personal revelation?
Keep it to yourself
Allison.deibel

I am not enough
To pass bread to the people
But twelve year olds can
Aerynnec

I am the witness!
But then a man from the back
Does my job for me
Ajsjonm4

Haiku on Feminism

“Feminist” was taught
To me as a bad word. Oops.
I’m one, anyway.
Kaylee.a.skinner

Perimenopause
Meets ongoing faith crisis
No wonder they’re scared
Jilleneladle

I am not enough?
I throw away the men’s words.
I find I am strong.
cristallharper

They buried our names—
wild seeds under heavy stone.
Still we rose up green.
Melanee Green Evans

I bent till I broke
now I rise without your name
whole, and not afraid
Kim G Bohne Landeen

Please, tell me again
what I can and cannot do.
I know my power.
Annisija Wallin Hunter

You shudder at my
“wokeness”, yet holy words call:
Awake and arise
Sarah Hale

Women, we breathe life
Heart listeners-who lead
With healing and hope.
Ananda Isaken

Coercive marriage
Taught to absorb all the harm
Rage feels like freedom
Unschmuck

Please less “explaining”
Just don’t care much anymore
Your view from up here
Christiehp

Notice me I said
I did everything right here
I want to be seen
Heathermimib

Haiku on Spiritual Autonomy

Words are powerful.
Screaming out in defiance.
No, no, no, no, NO!
Jessica Mitchell

Lie to me today
To gaslight me tomorrow
Watch me walk away
Stephanie G.

I don’t like meetings.
“Where will you go?” they ask
I go home and nap.
Su_lott

Not Naive, not blind.
Eyes clear, arms weak, willing heart.
I plant my feet here.
The.vision.beautiful

Smile, serve, and be still.
Questions bloom like contraband.
I walked out in bloom.
Becky Sanchez

Foundation anew,
I choose my own bricks this time:
Spiritual freedom!
Andrea Meecham Neahusan

I must leave to love
The tender heart who receives
Careless musket fire
Jenny Garrard

I bent till I broke
now I rise without your name
whole, and not afraid
Kim G Bohne Landeen

Don’t rush connection
Covenant path instruction
Can not satisfy
Brooke

I asked honest things
They called it a slippery slope
Yep. Slid on out
Erica N.

We take our lives back
Joyful, adventurous, and
Our own to direct
Lisa Fluckiger

I see the forest
And the trees. I know
I am not alone
Kcampbella

When Faith Loses Focus: For every woman whose questions were treated as a spiritual problem

by Brittney Walker

The night my brother came out to me, I got off the phone

and went straight to my knees.

I had questions and I knew where I’d been taught to take them.

I prayed for a long time. And what I felt was peace. Clearly, unmistakably, the way I had been taught to recognize revelation. Not the complicated kind. The simple kind. My brother was right just as he was. He didn’t need fixing.

I stood up from that prayer believing something true.

And then my brain, the one that has never once in its life left a loose thread alone, started pulling.

The thread you cannot stop pulling

If my brother was right, and the feeling was real, then the disconnect was somewhere else.

So I went looking for it.

I didn’t choose to go looking. I want to be clear about that. The search wasn’t an act of rebellion or spiritual carelessness. It was compulsion. My brain identified a problem it could not resolve and it went to work on it the way it always had—relentlessly, around the clock, whether I invited it to or not.

In the middle of sacrament meeting. At 2 a.m. On the drive to pick up kids from school. The questions kept arriving.

If the feeling was right, was the teaching wrong? If the teaching was wrong, who taught it? If he taught it, was he—the prophet—wrong? And if he could be wrong about this, what else? And if that, then what about …

The dominoes fell all the way down.

To the prophet. Then further. Then to God.

And then there was nothing left to land on.

What they called it

There is a word the Church uses for what I was experiencing: doubt. Sometimes faithlessness. The cure prescribed is almost always the same: pray more, study more, serve more, trust more. Do not let your intellect get ahead of your faith. So I did.

What no one told me was that I have a brain with a specific, documented, neurological inability to leave a question unresolved.

I have ADHD. I also have scrupulosity, an anxiety pattern that hijacks the religious framework and turns it into an engine of obsessive moral accounting. My brain doesn’t just notice inconsistency. It cannot rest until inconsistency is resolved. It needs certainty the way other people need sleep.

Put that brain inside a faith system that asks you to hold unanswered questions peacefully, to sit with not-knowing, to “doubt your doubts,” and you don’t get a crisis of faith.

You get a machine that cannot stop running.

I wasn’t falling away from God. My brain was doing exactly what it was built to do. It was following the evidence. It was refusing to look away. It was doing, in the language of faith, what it had always done in every other area of my life: working the problem until it either resolved or broke open entirely.

That’s not weakness. That’s not wickedness.

That is an ADHD brain, functioning precisely as designed, inside a system that had no category for it.

The year of falling

What followed was a solid year of grief.

The only image I have ever found that fits is this: falling through space. A bottomless black hole. Nothing to grab onto. Nowhere to land.

I had built my identity inside this structure. My calendar, my community, my sense of what I was for—all of it organized around something that was coming apart faster than I could process. And the falling felt endless because there was no floor. Every answer I found opened into another question. Every certainty I tested failed.

I want to say something to the women who are in that falling right now, or who have been, or who are watching someone they love go through it:

The falling was not a punishment. It was not evidence that I had been faithless or careless or spiritually reckless.

It was what happens when a brain built for pattern recognition finally finds a pattern it cannot reconcile.

The grief was real. The loss was real. I am not going to tell you it wasn’t.

But the falling was not my fault.

What the Church called sin

Here is what I have come to understand, years out from that night:

Every trait that made my deconstruction feel so total, so unstoppable, so consuming—the relentless question-following, the inability to unknow something once I knew it, the need for coherence, the refusal to hold contradiction in peaceful suspension—those are not spiritual defects.

They are ADHD.

The same brain that got sent into the hall for asking too many questions in Primary. The same brain that couldn’t stop mentally arguing with myself over what was said in sacrament meeting. The same brain that needed the pieces to fit, always, desperately, at the cost of everything.

That brain didn’t destroy my faith.

It followed my faith all the way to the edges and kept going when the edges ran out.

There is a version of my story the Church would tell where I was deceived, or weak, or led astray, or just didn’t try hard enough. In that version, the problem was always me.

But here is the version I know to be true:

I went to my knees the night my brother came out to me. I sought God in the way I had been taught. I received an answer that felt true and real and certain. And then my brain—my beautiful, relentless, impossible, truth-seeking brain—refused to stop at the edge of what that answer meant.

That is not a failure of faith.

That is faith, taken seriously by a mind that could not do it any other way.

What I wish someone had said

Your questions were not a spiritual problem.

Your inability to sit with uncertainty was not a character flaw.

Your brain’s relentless need for coherence was not the enemy of your faith.

It was just a mind doing what minds like ours do: following every thread, refusing to look away, insisting that the truth, whatever it turned out to be, was worth finding.

The Church didn’t have a category for that kind of mind.

But that doesn’t mean the mind was wrong.

Contributor

Brittney Walker

I am an ADHD coach and writer living in Arizona with my husband and a lively household including six sons, a daughter-in-law, and a grandson. I spent many years trying to be reverent, organized, and less distracting, and now I write about executive function, faith, deconstruction, and rebuilding identity with a different kind of brain. My work explores neurodivergence, belonging, and the slow process of learning to trust yourself. You can find more of my writing at exmoadhdcoach.substack.com

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Eager to Hope

by Susan Hinckley

Last weekend I participated in our local protest,

because I think protests are public hope and I needed to both give and receive. Despite this being the reddest of small towns, there were hundreds of us—5x as many people as I expected. The crowd was anchored by a few full-size US flags, confidently riding the morning wind. Those flags understood the assignment; something in me quickened as I parked. A small marching band trumpeted hope up and down the sidewalk.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben was once asked, "What's the best thing I can do as an individual?" He said, "Stop being an individual.”1 I showed up needing to feel less alone, and got all the right medicine. Most of the passing drivers honked, waved, and gave us a thumbs-up.

Of course there were a few whose sneers and gestures made clear their contempt. As I stood fighting to keep my poster upright in the wind, a red car approached and slowed to a stop in front of me. The window slid down. A woman leaned out, looked right at me and said, “You know, he is YOUR president. He is the president of every single one of you.” She drove away.

As if that should end the protest. As if anyone could so smugly close the lid on hope.

I haven’t stopped thinking about the woman in the red car, and about all the things I didn’t say in response.

There are a few lessons I’ve always thought God made particularly obvious. Diversity is one—look around—and creativity is another. A third I see writ large in the natural world is hope. Morning was the first advertisement for this concept, but because it comes every day we tend to stop noticing. Maybe God knew we’d have a hard time paying attention to a thing that happened so often. Maybe that’s why they also came up with spring.

Of course God put winter first to really get our attention—to bring us right to the edge of giving up—before adding spring to the calendar. In ink. Not often enough that we’d quit noticing either, surprised by joy every time a weeping cherry drapes itself sky-to-ground in pink ribbons.

The thing about spring is, it always comes. It doesn’t matter how hard the winter is, or how evil the king. It doesn’t matter if there’s a huge snowstorm in April that pushes us to the brink of really not being okay. Spring prevails every time.

American theologian Walter Brueggemann said, “Hope arises from memory.”

Rebecca Solnit explains, “You can turn that inside out to say that despair arises from forgetting. If you forget that every good thing we have came about as the result of a heroic struggle, of course you will despair.” She says that optimism and pessimism “assume we know the future, and therefore nothing is required from us. I think the future is radically uncertain, and therefore much is required of us.”2

But is hope too much to expect in the face of radical uncertainty?

Well, what else is there? Gripping everything tighter isn’t going to give us any guarantees, but engaging with hope means we’re showing up for the future no matter what heroic struggle it brings, because there is no way to get where we want to go next except through whatever is happening now.

I remember exactly where I was sitting in an AP English classroom about 100 years ago when the teacher ridiculed a student for using the word anxious when they actually meant eager, and I realized for the first time with a spark that those words aren’t interchangeable. No matter how often they get swapped in casual speech, eager is about positive anticipation and anxious is about worry. As that came into focus for me, the very next second I thought, “Pretty sure Joseph Smith made a mistake.” In D&C 58, being “anxiously engaged in a good cause” was surely meant to be about eagerness to do good. I don’t think he meant to suggest we should feel nervous about the uncertainty of our actions or outcomes while we engage in that goodness.

But I’ve been anxiously engaged my whole life as a Latter-day Saint. I took the words to heart just the way Joseph wrote them.

I’m not sure exactly how this worked, but all that anxious engagement over many decades seems to have resulted in some serious hope muscle. As I enter my later years, I find my core is all made of hope. Maybe it came from so many years showing up and doing all the church things while thinking, “I’m really not very good at this. I’m not sure I’m doing it right. I have no idea whether it will be enough.” Maybe when you feel a little doomed from the start, but you press on anyway, you get in the habit of grasping anything you can find that might make up the difference. You hope.

And I don’t mean feeling hopeful. I don’t mean a grin that comes back no matter how often reality turns its power-washer on you. I mean hope as a verb. As a thing you decide to do. As a perspective you have, because you bring it. Hope is not something that arises spontaneously and promises to work everything out. Anxious or eager, the work is the same. But I’ve come to prefer eager: Hope is a way I can choose to engage.

I wish I’d known I didn’t need to feel so worried all those years. I wish I could go back and tell my young self, “See those flowers? They probably aren’t worried at all—yes, winter knocks ‘em out, in fact, it straight-up kills some. But there’s always spring, and flowers don’t have to earn it—all they have to do is wait for it.”

“Consider the lilies,” Jesus said. “They seem to remember something you don’t.”

Flipping from anxious to eager in my spiritual life has mostly been a function of embracing my own hope. “God is always present in reality as it is. Not as it should be,” says Richard Rohr.3 I think this is one of the reasons Jesus showed up on earth, getting everyone’s hopes up, but then surprised even the people closest to him by becoming victorious only after an unimaginable defeat. It was a lesson so bewildering, even people who desperately wanted the miracle had a hard time accepting the truth of what they were seeing in real time. How could something so awful be the doorway to lasting hope?

Thomas had his doubts; unfortunately he’s remembered for them. But do you know what he did next? He took Christianity to India and beyond, converting many to the very idea he had such a hard time getting his head around. He may have needed to touch for himself, but that experience powered a lifetime of ministry. It’s fair to say reality transmuted the moment of doubt into something truly sustaining.

But God’s love was in the world before Jesus ever got here. “It is good, in fact, it is very good,” God says, the punchline of the whole opening monologue. A few minutes later, we find out “good” may be more complicated than we thought—no one was going to be allowed to stick around, basking in the very-good-ness of a garden. I think everything God says and does after that is trying to teach us about hope—even in the face of the bleakest reality—and I can see why the best object lesson to do that would probably be our own screw ups.

“We’ve met the enemy, and he is us,” says the famous Walt Kelly comic strip.4 The practice of hope must be a principle through which God thought humans could remind ourselves of divine love no matter what else is going on.

I’ve decided another idea articulated by Richard Rohr could be repurposed into a good definition of hope: “the ability to flourish inside of paradox.” We know what has happened, and we know what’s happening now, but I don’t think we can be at all certain what it means in real time, and we never know what’s going to happen next, even when we think we do. We can be sure it will be bad and good and then bad again and then sometimes better, but there’s no guarantee. A yes for every no, and a no for each yes. Life will be loss and abundance, joy and sorrow tossed together. “Reality’s conjunction is always and,” writes Christian Wiman.5

That’s where I think hope lives. Hope is in the and.

So what do we do when we’re really not feeling it? Hope, faith, and love show up together in the Bible. Sharon Salzberg teaches6 that the word translated there as faith is actually a verb—it’s not a thing we have so much as a thing we do. Hope and love already operate as verbs in modern English; moving faith into the verb column makes sense, if these foundational principles walk hand in hand. A quote from Rabbi Abraham Heschel says, “Faith is mostly faithfulness to the times when we had faith.”7 I understand this as, “Faith is a thing we keep doing because we once felt it.”

Anyone who’s been in a long term relationship knows love operates the same way. We fall in love with someone, then we keep loving them on the days it’s hard to do so, because love is no longer a feeling so much as an action.

The emotion of hope is also less useful than the action. When hope-the-noun becomes hope-the-verb, we go to the protest whether or not we think it will change anything. We’re eagerly engaged, smack in the middle of not knowing. We follow hope instinctively because it’s all there is to do in the face of such radical uncertainty. It’s the thing we can control.

The woman in the red car—and everyone else who flipped us off that day—thought she could impact my hope by insisting the situation was hopeless. She (and all the efforts I’ve seen since to minimize that hopeful act or dismiss it outright) is missing the point of hope. The only thing hope insists is that, eventually, things will change. That’s based in reality—a measure of calm certainty can reside in the uneasiness of it. Hope-seeds arrive buried in the same dirt we’re standing in. It’s because reality is often objectionable that I choose to orient myself this way. I engage eagerly because of what it does for me today, not because I think it will ensure any future outcome. Hope—and faith and love—don’t operate in the future. They’re how we survive the now.

Trying to stomp out a protest by throwing reality on it is a bit like telling me it’s winter, and I may as well accept that as final. But I spent many years living in the upper Midwest. I know a thing or two about winter. And I know a lot about hope.

Susan Hinckley

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Something I see differently today than I did 10 years ago is the idea that a savior needed to die…and the whole concept of the atonement.

Ever since I became a parent, my perspective has gradually shifted. The idea of “I sent my son to die for you” feels very different to me now. It doesn’t align with what I would expect from a loving, all-knowing, supreme being.

As an imperfect human, I would never require one of my children to die for anyone else. And if I had created all of this, I wouldn’t make the people I love inherently unworthy in the first place.

Feels so strange to me now.
—Jamee Andelin

I have shifted the way I view trials. I no longer believe that “everything happens for a reason” and God had some master plan that involves giving me my trials. I currently view the hard times as just part of the condition of being mortal. Sometimes good can come from them. They’re not pointless. But God didn’t handpick them to prove me.
—Jessica Mitchell

How about in the last 6 months? I think about God differently. Instead of a God who is a gatekeeper, demanding, and to be feared and obeyed or else, I know believe He is ALL loving and no matter my choices or how I get things wrong I will always be loved and welcomed to live with Him and my loved ones.
—Kathy C.

That putting my family over policy is extremely important. To Think that I was trying to keep a family eternal with rules that strained relationships is now laughable. People come first now, and if that send me to hell, so be it.
—Jillian Tueller

Personal revelation over obedience to church leadership. Wow what a difference! I am using the gift of agency instead of blindly following man’s interpretation of God’s laws and it feels so good.
—Dee Adams

A couple of my favorites are that I am God and God is in me. There was never, and could never be, a separation. And, closely related, that we and all of God’s creations are connected. When one is harmed, we are all harmed. Conversely, when one is healed, we are all healed.
—Marley Orton

My connection to God has no gatekeepers.
—Leslie Boyce

I don’t believe in God anymore. But I am happy to see women reclaiming their power and autonomy when it comes to their religion.
—Erin Pfleger

I have claimed my spiritual authority, I don’t need a man of anybody else’s authority to have a relationship with God. I also believe in a God who is not legalistic, but is love.
—Gaynor-Marie Glass

Many things, but mostly how we have been saved by grace, and that we will all return to our Father in Heaven. I think our temple visits place us on perhaps a higher plane of righteousness when making promises to the Lord and showing our respect and submissiveness in following the gospel and doing His will, but I don’t know in my heart that some things performed in the temple will need to be done when we pass by the sentinels in Heaven.
—Holly Christensen

Mainly, my vision of eternity has transformed. I believe God is more than a body of flesh and blood. God is more that 3 degrees of glory and God is more than gender. My beliefs are so radically different they seem unrecognizable to some, but I think they fit seamlessly into what my heart and head have always felt. We are still an eternal family, each of us still aspires to become like God once was. Love is forever the foundation and being like Jesus means focusing on that love and helping people to grow. What’s really changed is I have lost fear. I follow myself and my inner soul. I can’t believe the relief I feel and I think my “fruits” speak for themselves. Less judgment and service that is heartfelt, not forced. I’m happier and more self confident. Losing myself really has led to finding myself. I found this podcast at the beginning of my journey and I feel like I have walked this path with many of your listeners. Thank you for allowing what I believe to be the echoes of eternity brought forth into light.
—Pamela Kennedy

My own personhood and autonomy. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but here goes: I was relieved when my husband chose me when I was 20 because it took the pressure off me having to make risky choices like trying to get into law school. This was the mid-80s, and my Mormon bubble didn’t have many examples of career women. Being someone’s wife was safe, known, preached from the pulpit. So I made the sacrifice, squelching any desire to develop myself and following the known quantity of temple marriage, stay-at-home motherhood, all with relief that “at least someone chose you!” I willingly, albeit blindly, chose not to develop a ME.
—Becca T.

I have 2: paying tithing on gross, off the top, for 30 years when I should have been putting that money in retirement. And also starting having babies at 20 and not finishing my education because I hadn’t self-actualized. I had so many interests but didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. So I tripped into SAHMhood.
—Brooke

Wearing garments for over 35 years. Being out of touch with my body. Disliking my body. Living with the fear that if I didn’t have them on, something bad would surely happen to me.
—Nancy

I sacrificed my dreams. LDS culture said “if you are a woman, your dream is motherhood, and that’s it.”

And I love being a mom, but I didn’t realize until much later that I hadn’t even allowed myself to have any other dreams.

Another one I regret less is that in high school I gave up a trip to Europe for Girls Camp. I had signed up to travel to Europe for two weeks with a group of high school musicians from all over the state. Since I had turned 12, Girls Camp had ALWAYS been the second week of July. I was scheduled to return from Europe at the end of the first week of July. We had already put down over $1000 towards the trip when the dates for Girls Camp that year were announced. It would be the first week of July. I was devastated. I loved camp and this was going to be my last year. After a few weeks of agonizing I decided to pull out of the Europe trip. We lost the $1000. Most expensive year of Camp ever. I’ve still never been to Europe.
—Zinah B.

Putting LITERALLY everyone else’s needs ahead of my own. Trying so hard to be that selfless woman that’s spouted about in church.

Thinking that the natural woman is an enemy to Godde. ( yes I changed it on purpose ).

Those beliefs led me down so many roads that led to intense personal decisions that impact me to this day.
—Genna

I can completely relate to the sacrifice of my true self, getting an education, having my own career, and the tithing.

Which brings me to the answer that came to my mind when I read the question. The biggest sacrifice I’ve made in my life was going to work (two jobs!) at age 45 when my youngest was six-years-old so we could avoid bankruptcy (mostly medical bills) because it was WRONG to go bankrupt if we could avoid it, and of course paying such a generous tithe guaranteed God would give me strength to work 50-60 hours a week (half of those just to pay the generous tithe). At a low-wage jobs because I had no education. But can I call it MY sacrifice if it was my children who suffered the most? Yes, it was rough on my brain and body for those eleven years and yes, it battered my marriage beyond repair, but my kids are the ones who paid the price of having an absent or cranky/exhausted mother. I can’t begin to express my anger and grief. How can we claim the family to be the most important unit when our teachings so often cause harm to families?
—Katy O’Barr Smith

Giving up on becoming a medical doctor because I thought having a family took priority. I did have the satisfaction of working in the medical field for 25 years after the youngest was in school, where I was able to make a difference for good. But I often wonder if there were greater opportunities to make a difference had I chosen differently. I don’t regret having 8 children. Not at all. They are wonderful people and each of them and theirs are making a difference for good in the world.
—Pat Catherall

I alienated my entire family because they were not members of the church and could not enter the temple for my wedding to my husband.

That was emotionally and spiritually devastating - but demanded [by a] religion that prizes obedience and worthiness above all else.

Putting the church’s demands over what my own conscience told me was wrong will be part of my deconstruction for the rest of my life. The harm from that one event has echoed through our relationships for years - and still does in the distance it caused in the lives of my children relative to their grandparents.
—Jessica Mertz

A mission, while the mission itself was a great experience, I felt very alone when I returned. As a person on a visa, I had to enroll in school full time a month after. I had no family close, very little money, ate little, it was winter and it was one of the hardest times in my life. I was very poor.
—Carolina Bell

One thing is serving a mission to Idaho. It was probably at least twenty years or a little more before I admit, it’s anyone publicly that I have been disappointed in that mission call. Even now, I did learn to love the people of Idaho, and I had tears when I left, i had wanted to go to either a Spanish- speaking mission or a welfare mission. I feel it is something that I do or rather did to show love for Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father.

Another one is perhaps not really a sacrifice, by just being single and not having children. I’m at a point in life for reviewing my life, and knowing those dreams and hopes will never ever happen. It is a devastating kind of feeling. And there’s a part of me that wonders what my life would have been like, perhaps without the influence of the church on dating and what type of people to look for.. For instance, I’m sure church culture and church teachings probably influence some guys to not like me.

Another one is unfortunately due to my job. I have a job that basically requires homework in terms of paperwork and such. So I have sacrificed personally due to the kind of job that can impact one’s life balance. I feel like i’ve given a lot to my job. Trying to help patients yet in hindsight, even though I did what needed to be done, I wish I had been better with boundaries than life balance in some aspects of my work.
—Nita

My personal autonomy. It was 2003 when I got married at age 20. I knew plenty of women that had an education/career, but no one, not even my parents, ever actually talked to me about having hobbies or interests, going to college, or any sort of personal development (except Personal Progress, of course. My mom once told me Satan had his hands on me because I didn’t want to do it.) So I never had any plans for life except get married. So now I’m an empty-nester at 43 and trying to figure out who I want to be and what I want to do.
—Kayla

No one “chose me” until it was too late for the motherhood part so I was left with education choices that put me near poverty because they were good degrees for a mom.
—Heather G.

Men’s opinions on women’s issues.
—Haley Mann

ANYTHING a man says. I’m serious. I was taught that anything and everything a man said was literally smarter and wiser than any woman, especially myself. No more. Done with that. That is not true in the slightest.
—Mary Cox

Every damn thing! Swearing, what I wear, what anyone says I’m supposed to believe or do, counsel from ward, stake, and SLC leaders, the Word of Wisdom, the importance of meetings, shopping on Sunday, the temple, the afterlife, and, again, SWEARING!
—Carol Colvin

My children’s salvation looking like church activity and a “covenant path” lifestyle. Now that I don’t take that seriously, I’m so happy, relaxed and can and enjoy my adult kids 100%!

Boy, do I ever love them.
—Nancy

The afterlife. I now choose to focus on finding joy in this life.
—Jodi Gale

As I recover and heal from scrupulosity, I've taken a break from attending my rather prescriptive LDS Ward. In so doing, I felt like Alice in Wonderland for a while last year. I didn't know which way was up, what was real or false, or right or wrong. Instead of enjoying the adventurous ride, I stressed and cried almost every day for months as my spiritual foundation crumbled.

After a few months, finding a bit of stability and soft landing in a local, progressive Methodist community, I found myself crying and stressing less. I still relapsed at times with tsunamis of guilt or shame. During one of these relapses, I distinctly heard in a loving, almost joking tone, "You've got to stop taking Me so seriously!"

I've been enjoying this spiritual adventure so much more since that moment.

So, long story short: GOD.

I’ve learned to take God less seriously, in all the good, wholesome, healing, playful ways that God wants for our relationship.
—Andrea Neahusan

The opinion of anyone regarding my “worthiness”.
—Laura Balmaceda

What we are “supposed to” do and feel and be.
—Joy Wil

Everything that is not about secure attachment. If it doesn’t affect secure attachment relationships, it’s not serious.
—Paula White

That 15 old white men were the mouthpieces for God and that their words were what should guide all my actions.
—Meadow Petersen

Sadly, the belief that I could bring about any kind of change in my ward.
—Rebecca Bigelow

A transactional God. I actually think that God CANT intervene in our lives. They are God in that they love and care for us and the ultimate form of worship is to have a relationship with them. That thought makes them seem more loving to me. Otherwise, it means that they pick and choose when and who and how to help...or not help. And that just doesn’t make sense to me.
—Tara Northcutt

That there were good reasons for all the things the church encourged or discouraged. Now I know that many of those reasons are just inherited cultural baggage.
—Laura Glasglow

I think patriarchy/hierarchy has been a hard but freeing belief to let go of. I still believe that some version of the gospel according to the LDS church is true. There are a lot of things where I’m like “yeah, maybe something kind of like that is true, but probably not in the way we’ve learned it.” But the whole idea of patriarchy, even though it’s so central to the way the church is run and supposedly continues into the eternities.... No. I can’t keep trying to believe that an oppressive system comes from God.
—Kristine Napper

I have let go of so many things but the biggest is that my religion (Jehovah’s Witness) is THE TRUTH.
—Melinda Kopilow

I’ve let go of believing the church has all the answers. And that what the church did was “God’s Will” and there must be a reason for the things that didn’t seem quite “right.” Like denying priesthood to groups of people. Or polygamy.
—Maria Krieser

The belief the Church has all the answers. They don’t and wanting them to was hurting me.
—M. Alva

Learning to let go of the Mormon “I have the answers to everything and I am right and you are wrong and ‘playing church’” (cough, cough Brad Wilcox) has been SO FREEING!! For a long time after deconstruction, I felt like my beliefs might be wrong or right, but it didn’t matter because I was learning, thinking, and growing! Now I realize I was close, but just barely missing the point = there IS NO RIGHT/WRONG in spiritual growth and learning!
—Sage

As an enneagram 8 - being wrong is one of my LEAST favorite things -- BUT - allowing the vulnerability of being wrong is also the gift of a healthy enneagram 8 (I’m not quite there yet, don’t fret) -- it’s where I learn about myself -- and that’s when the growth happens. I also think that the more I’m wrong about some of the little things, I trust myself to be RIGHT about the bigger things.
—Mary

I’m never comfortable with being wrong. But I’m also learning to lean into the discomfort for “productive discomfort”.

That said, there’s still plenty of times I don’t wanna lean in, but instead get unproductive discomfort and just be sassy or lean away/walk away from it to not be so uncomfortable.
—Nikki Nelson

I didn’t even know feeling comfort was a thing. Been feeling uncomfortable since birth. Adventures ahead.
—Evelyn Galbraith

I’m not comfortable with being wrong (mostly because I am a recovering perfectionist, considered the smart one in my family and was usually right) but I’m much more comfortable with not knowing all the answers. I’m okay with saying “I don’t know, but I’m sure everything will be fine.”
—Carol

What was a woman’s role at church and in heaven, other than supporting other people’s dreams and lives? Luckily I had faith that once I went to the temple, god’s true plan for women would be revealed. And…we all know how that turned out.
—Jodi Gale

I was taught “No necking and petting,” and no one could/would answer what that meant! I’m still not sure.
I think most of what I learned was ambiguously taught, hence still so much is ambiguous to me.
And - all those handshakes to determine evil spirits and resurrected spirits, etc. How on earth was I supposed to remember all of this? Still confounds me; I see no relevance.
—Ronda Weaver

How will we get to heaven? Like will it be on a rocket ship to Kolob? Or will we dematerializing into energy and transported like on Star Trek. I spent way too much time thinking about this. Not one Sunday school teacher had a satisfactory answer.
—Ginger Hanson

If EVERYONE gets a body, when does the Holy Ghost get a body? I assume he would be the last spirit to be born, so there is an end. Also, after he gets his body, does that mean we no longer have “The Gift of the Holy Ghost” here on Earth? How does that work? I did ask the question once. The poor Bishop had no idea how to answer. Or that it was even a possible question to have. I got some version of “God will work it out in the end” The greatest non-answer answer the church has.
—Christina Beal

Are women only there to raise boys who will go and do cool things and girls to raise more boys and so on down the line ...
—Amanda Funai

I remember the day I learned about Polygamy. 14 years old in Seminary, Church History year. I asked my mom about it after school that day and she confirmed what I’d heard. I sobbed in my room in utter disbelief and despair. The first jar on my shelf. I tucked it away because it physically hurt to think about. Honestly, it still does.
—Farrah Nordquist

The 3 degrees of glory: where is the “cutoff” line?

If God know what decisions we will make, why bother with a thousand years of peace and judgement day, etc.

Why cant I play with non-morons? When I moved to Utah this was the first thing they TRIED to instill in me. Segregation of Mormons from non.
—Ricci Giles

Two big questions for me in my teens:
1. Why would God disallow black men from receiving the priesthood (6th grade when that started)
2. Why was Emma not worshipped for all she did!! Members didn’t even want to talk about her when I was a youth.
—Janene Goubert


My mother joined the LDS church when I was 5, my father was already a member. She was raised as a devout Catholic, parochial school too. My maternal grandparents were my favorite people! They were kind, loving, loved Christ, served in their church and so much nicer than my paternal, LDS, grandparents. I am old enough to remember when the “Great and Abominable Church” was directly identified as the Catholic Church. That didn’t sir well with me. I always wondered if they got that wrong, what else did they get wrong??
—Theresa Nowling

When I got a little older I read the scriptures a lot. I was focused on the idea of univocality in the scriptures and thought that if I could just study hard enough I would be able to find the true answers to all my questions.
—Mara Haslam

I obviously didn’t get the repentance message prior to baptism and soon after got into a physical fight with a friend at school and thought I would go to hell. That worried me for a long time.
—Diana Kell

Sacred Space, Loud Mind: Creating Room for Neurodivergence in the Church

by Brittney Walker

In church, stillness is a virtue.

Fold your arms.

Close your eyes.

Sit quietly.

Reverence. It’s how we show respect and love for God in His house.

For many people, those instructions are simple. For some of us, they are an impossible puzzle.

We weren’t trying to be irreverent or disobedient. But our brains don’t experience stillness the same way.

ADHD doesn’t turn off when sacrament meeting begins. Thoughts still move quickly. Bodies still carry energy. Attention still searches for stimulation the way other people breathe.

And when a faith tradition teaches that spiritual sincerity looks like stillness, children who cannot sit quietly will start to assume something is wrong with them.

The girl trying to listen

Every few minutes I would snap back into focus.

Wait. What are they talking about?

I would sit up straighter and resolve to listen this time. Sometimes it worked for a few minutes. But then my mind would jump ahead to a scripture reference the speaker mentioned, or a question I wanted to ask, or the sudden realization that the woman in front of me had the exact same purse my mom owned in 1992.

Eventually I developed strategies.

I drew pictures in the margins of the sacrament program. I counted the ceiling lights. I peeled the foil off gum wrappers and pressed them onto the program. I split the ends of my hair and lined them up along the edge of the bench.

Sometimes my mom and I played the dot game on the program. We would draw a grid of dots and take turns connecting them, trying to capture squares and write our initials inside before the other person could block us.

Other weeks we played the “I love you” hand squeeze game during the talks.

It looked like fidgeting. But it was actually concentration. Keeping my hands busy was the only way to keep my mind in the room.

Eventually I learned an even better trick: taking notes. If my hand was moving, my brain stayed anchored.

The effort no one could see

From the outside, ADHD rarely looks dramatic. Especially in girls.

We are not usually the ones climbing the chapel furniture. We are the ones whispering.

A question about something the speaker said. A connection to a church magazine story. A thought that arrived so quickly it came out of our mouths before we had time to decide whether it should stay there.

Participation felt natural to me. Stillness did not.

The early lessons

Sometimes my parents had to take me out of the chapel. I remember sitting on a parent’s lap in the foyer, trying very hard to hold my body still long enough to prove I could go back inside.

As I got older, my job became escorting younger siblings out for water or bathroom breaks. Everyone knew that those trips often turned into a few minutes of running around the church building before returning reverently to the pew.

The sacrament itself was one of those moments. The moment the bread and water reached our row. The small sensory shift of participating.

Afterward, we unfolded the accordion-folded paper cups and formed them into flowers.

It wasn’t irreverence. It was stimulation in a room that offered very little.

When difference becomes shame

Many women with ADHD grow up believing their brain is a spiritual problem. Nobody says those words directly. But the traits that come with ADHD are easily and often interpreted through a moral lens.

For girls especially, the message often becomes: be quieter, calmer, smaller.

What belonging could look like

The hopeful part of this story is that inclusion doesn’t require sweeping changes to doctrine or worship. Often it simply requires widening our understanding of what spiritual engagement can look like.

A Primary teacher who welcomes questions instead of shutting them down. Even if the lesson veers around a bit.

A youth leader who understands that a girl whispering excitedly about a thought from the lesson is not being disrespectful. She is processing out loud. And when someone finally receives her that way, when a leader leans in instead of shushing her, something shifts. The story she tells herself changes. Not overnight, but it changes.

A calling where someone who struggles with administrative details receives structure and support instead of quiet frustration.

Small moments like these can change the story a child tells herself. Instead of I am bad at reverence, the story becomes my brain works differently. And that difference can belong.

A wider kind of reverence

Looking back now, I see that my ADHD didn’t separate me from spiritual life. If anything, it drew me toward it.

Curiosity made me ask questions.

Energy made me volunteer.

Intensity made me care deeply.

Some people experience God in stillness. Others encounter the sacred through curiosity, conversation, movement, and connection. Both can be forms of devotion.

The child whispering questions may be deeply engaged. The teenager who cannot sit still may be thinking harder than anyone in the room. The woman whose mind moves quickly may be offering gifts the community doesn’t yet know how to recognize.

Sacred space doesn’t always have to be silent. Sometimes it just has to be large enough for every kind of mind.

Brittney Walker

I am an ADHD coach and writer living in Arizona with my husband and a lively household including six sons, a daughter-in-law, and a grandson. I spent many years trying to be reverent, organized, and less distracting, and now I write about executive function, faith, deconstruction, and rebuilding identity with a different kind of brain. My work explores neurodivergence, belonging, and the slow process of learning to trust yourself. You can find more of my writing at exmoadhdcoach.substack.com

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Along for the Ride

by Blakelee Ellis

From the time I started thinking about getting married,

I understood that there were complexities about joining two lives together. Gender, family dynamics, finances, personality differences, expectations were all complexities that I knew would have to be navigated. The complexity I didn’t anticipate was deciding how to raise kids. There are those famous movie moments when a couple of different faiths decides to get married or have kids and someone always asks them, “But how will you raise the children?” I naively assumed that was the major difference of opinion between adults raising children, and because we were both LDS, that wouldn’t be a problem for my husband and me. All of you who are reading this who are raising or have raised children are laughing hysterically. I am too. It’s quite the kick in the pants to glance back at our past selves, when we had so little experience or knowledge, and truly begin to understand how stupid we were.

My husband and I were raised very differently. Which might be hard to believe considering we were both raised by white, heterosexual, middleclass, LDS parents who were also born and raised in Utah. We both have so many privileges. So really, how different could our childhoods be? Perhaps you are laughing again. Because you know as well as I do now, that parenting can not be boiled down solely to race, sexuality, socioeconomic status or faith. Because the type of parents we become is shaped by the type of parents we come FROM. I’ve frequently said that there were things my parents did when I was growing up that I was NEVER going to do. And I stuck by that. The cruel irony I know now (I hear you laughing again) is that besides those very clear things I wanted to do differently from my parents, the rest of me continues to grow into them. We all become our parents. Don’t misunderstand me: I love my parents. I respect my parents, but I didn’t really want to morph into them. I’m exaggerating, of course, because I am still my own person with my unique personality and experiences. But much of who I have become and so much of how I raise my children is a result of how many parents raised me. Of course, the same is true with my husband. Trying to merge our personalities, our own backgrounds, our own opinions on how to raise our kids has been, for me, the most complicated part of our married life. I thought that BEFORE my faith shifted several years ago. Now, some days it seems nearly impossible to come to a unified decision about how to be a parent.

Without going into great detail of how we were both raised, I’ll just tell you that I am the “fun” parent and my husband is the “mean” parent. We each had different expectations placed on us as children and so, naturally, the expectations we have for our own kids are very different from each other. Parenting is an amalgamation of so many decisions; some important, but mostly little day to day decisions that eventually build up to make an entire picture of a life. Will I let the kids jump on the couch today? Do I have the energy to allow a giant crafting mess? Will I yell during my son’s temper tantrum or will I be the calm in the storm? Will I apologize for the mistake I just made? Will I make dinner or will we go out to eat? Will I make the kids get off screens and go play outside? Will I react with compassion when my daughter admits she lied? Will I make my son come hang up his backpack or hang it up for him? Will I make my kids eat the recommended serving of vegetables today? There is no way to list all the minute decisions we make during the day. But now, as my spiritual life is complicated, many of the decisions I make about my kids also become extremely complicated.

One of the biggest personal musings continues to be: how much do I share with my kids? How do I inform them, while allowing them to keep their hearts and minds open to the LDS church? How do I bring up my qualms, without overly influencing their decisions? How do I inform them, but allow them to experience things for themselves? I have a deep desire to help foster my kids’ relationships with the divine alongside an even deeper desire to raise critical thinkers. In a church system that doesn’t want us to put question marks after the words of a prophet, it seems nearly impossible to raise children who are “all in” but know how to challenge the injustices of the system. My conscience will not allow me to sit back and watch their spiritual growth dampen and take on LDS rhetoric. If there is anything I can do to prevent my children from going through a mid-life faith crisis, I’m determined to do it. I will not have them fall apart as an adult because their spiritual life no longer works for them. It’s too damn painful. So I ache and think and debrief and deconstruct and reconstruct with them as often as I can. I will walk that tightrope to save them future spiritual pain. I guess I’m the second side of the same coin—LDS mothers everywhere feel a deep responsibility to usher their children down the covenant path so that they have the best chance at eternal life. On the flip side—I feel it is my responsibility to usher my children down their own path to have the best chance at happiness. I trust them to make the best decisions for themselves.

I’m helping my son clean out his room and I notice a, “For the Strength of Youth,” in the garbage. I pull it out.

“You’re getting rid of this?,” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Oh. I don’t really care, but can I ask why?”

“The section on chastity says that marriage is only between a man and a woman. I don’t think that’s true. I’m pissed about it so I’m throwing it away.”

How do I keep him from throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Do I really care if he does?

“Are there other teachings in here that you feel might apply to your life? Do you want to keep it for other reasons? Or you still just want to throw it away?”

“Throw it away.”

So I do.

Several months ago, my son had an appointment to renew his temple recommend. My husband had made the appointment for him without consulting my son. In my husband’s world, you go get your temple recommend renewed regardless of what is happening in your life. To him, it is a commandment and if you truly love God, you obey commandments. Even if you don’t see the point, or don’t understand the need for the commandment. I completely understand his point of view because I used to think the same thing.

It’s a reality that we are inherently lazy creatures. That if given the option, we will all stay comfortable and content, never being pushed, never doing anything hard or uncomfortable. Especially as a kid. So much of what we do as parents is teaching our kids that hard things are not only necessary, but are good. That discomfort pushes you and boring, pointless things, actually have a purpose and can help mold you into the best version of yourself. Also, that those hard, boring things are a necessary part of life that will ALWAYS exist. Hard, boring things are never going away and you have to learn how to handle them.

Brushing your teeth, learning math, going to bed on time, showering, cleaning your room, being kind to rude people, tolerating your siblings, practicing physical skills, just to name a few. I know we as humans learn the value of doing hard, boring, things we initially dislike by being forced to do them. I can’t say I now love to pull weeds since I had to as a kid, but I know it’s something that has to be done to have a beautiful yard.

What I’m having a difficult time with is deciding how much of my children’s spiritual lives is a necessary evil they have to get through to see the value in later? Yes, church is boring and mundane and it takes a lot of work to get anything spiritual out of meetings. I no longer believe that my family’s salvation relies on us attending church every Sunday, but I do know that it’s where I first learned to have a relationship with God. But I now believe there are so many other ways and places to build a relationship with God. Church is not the only place to do it.

My son was getting ready for his appointment and asked which parent was taking him. I asked if he had a preference and he asked if I would take him. I said I would and was determined to do so without unloading all my thoughts about temple recommends and temple recommend interviews on my son. We got in the car and I just knew I was going to internally implode if I didn’t speak my mind about some things.

“Listen,” I said.

“You know one of the interview questions is about the law of chastity. Sometimes, bishops ask additional questions about masturbation and pornography use if they feel inclined. I don’t think that is any of the bishop’s business. I don’t think he has the right to ask you those questions, but I want you to be prepared if he does ask. Are you uncomfortable answering those questions in front of me? Because I am not sending you into that interview alone so if we need to have your dad go, instead of me, then dad can go with you.”

My son said he had no objection to me taking him.

I sat through the interview with my son and everything seemed fine. But then he surprised me as we pulled into the garage.

I asked, “Do you have any questions or concerns about the interview that you want to talk to me about?”

He yelled out, “It’s bullshit” and yes, he yelled.

I said, “What’s bullshit?”

“The fact that we believe that a prophet is so much better than anyone else and can hear God better than anyone else. He is just a man like anyone else. So why should he have all the answers? It’s bullshit.”

As I listened to him rant all I could think was, “I am so glad that I’ve deconstructed my faith because if I was still the person I used to be I would be FREAKING out at the things my son was saying. Instead, I can give him a safe place to question and think through things without thinking he is being led away by the devil.”

I’m not afraid of making mistakes like I used to be. I always knew I could repent, but I still felt like things were going on my permanent divine record. That ultimately, they would be held against me. Now, mistakes truly are just a learning process. My GPS never says, “made a mistake.” It just says, “recalculating route.” That’s life. If I make a mistake, oh well. I’ll course correct as necessary. And so if my kids make what turn out to be monumental spiritual mistakes, I hold no fear about their eternal salvation. It takes a lot of pressure off.

At the beginning of this year my husband approached me and shared his feeling that we need to make fasting each fast Sunday more of a priority for the family, including the kids. I bristled and there was no hiding my immediate trepidation from my husband. Such a seemingly simple request brings up so many problematic feelings for me and a barrage of questions.

Has God really COMMANDED us to fast?
What’s a commandment anyway?
Are modern day revelations from authority figures commandments? Or guidelines?
Why do we have to fast if there are other ways to build a relationship with God?
Does God truly care about how we connect with divinity? Or is the relationship enough?
Why do we have to force the kids to have a connection with divinity?
Is it not enough to demonstrate our own relationship with divinity to the kids?
What if they don’t want a relationship with God right now?

There are some youth that love going to church and find such belonging, fulfillment and spiritual connection there. But I feel confident in saying that the majority of children, mine absolutely included, would never choose to go to church if given the option.

Because my ideas about God, obedience and grace have all changed so much during my journey, it’s changed my parenting style in many ways. The spiritual “requirements” I used to expect of my kids are now basically non-existent. Kids don’t want to say nightly family prayers? Cool with me. Church feels like a drag? I agree, let’s skip it. You don’t want to waste time going to the temple? All your friends are going and that might have social consequences, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to. You don’t want to read the scriptures? Okay, not everyone connects to God by reading their scriptures. Maybe you’ll find a different way. You don’t want to go to Young Men’s camp? I don’t care.
By having almost no spiritual expectations for my children, am I damaging them? Am I stunting their growth by never pushing them to do something difficult or boring or seemingly pointless or mundane?

We all start with a stage one faith (if you’ve never heard of stages of faith, here is a quick run down on one of the models).

If I never make them develop a stage one faith, can they even ever progress to later stages? Am I crippling their ability to differentiate because I’m not helping them build enough of a foundation?

How do I help my kids understand the potential for spiritual awakening when I no longer feel awakened there myself? How can I make them sit through two hours of church when I don’t want to go either? How can I make them fast when I hate fasting and don’t think God cares much? I think God is interested in a personal relationship with me, but how I best enter into that relationship is immaterial to God. God just wants to know me. And I believe I’m a better person when I daily come to know God. But if I never force my kids into situations with the potential to know God, how will they ever know if they themselves want to know God? How will they understand that the relationship can get them through hard times? How will they find a path that can lead them to existential love and generosity?

While expressing my heartaches of motherhood, some of my current struggles and loneliness, Susan sent me this message (yes, I’m so lucky that I get to have regular correspondence with Susan and Cynthia):

“Everyone can relate! I’ll admit, I’m laughing at the thought of you being able to ward off the dark night of the soul later for your kids by not indoctrinating them now. I don’t think the spiritual life works that way. One thing the Living School is teaching me is that this deconstruction stuff is really just doing the work of living well. Whether you’re religious or not, something is going to kick your ass good in this life, and you’ll be knocked to the ground by it. But the journey that sets you on is THE journey, so going through the hell is worthwhile. I didn’t say worth it, and absolutely no one would choose it, but it is the most worthwhile work I’ve done in my personal life, in my opinion. There’s my two-cents you didn’t ask for.”

My jaw dropped. Susan articulated in one sentence what my struggles really are all about: the need for control. It’s layered under love and good intentions, but it’s still there. The maternal need to protect my kids from pain and control how they move through this world. It’s parenting 101: you truly have no control over your children and the sooner you realize that, the happier you’ll be. I literally just said (in paragraph four to be exact) that I trust my kids to make the best decisions for themselves. I don’t intend for that to just be lip service, but rather a guiding force for how I parent. So in this moment I’m reminded that all I can do is offer love and support, but ultimately, just be along for the ride.

Blakelee Ellis

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My Journey With Grief

by Emily Richards

It’s hard to know where to start. If I’m being honest,

my faith has been unraveling for years, I just wasn’t paying attention. We were busy with raising three boys, moving abroad, and getting my husband to a point in his career when we could finally slow down a little and reap the benefits of sticking with an intense career path. That point finally came almost two years ago when he became a partner at one of the world’s largest accounting firms. We were relieved to finally reach this stage in our lives, to get back to traveling again, and to feel like we “made it.” But something was gnawing at me. I was unsettled and chalked it up to perimenopause anxiety. Then it happened. My husband was diagnosed with Stage IV colorectal cancer at the age of 41.

My world fell apart. It felt like everything had been taken from us without our consent and certainly without any reason. We had worked hard our whole lives, gone to church, paid tithing, served in our callings, gone to the temple and the list goes on. There was no history of cancer, he’s the youngest in his family and in great physical shape. The idea that we chose this trial in the pre-mortal world didn’t make any sense. I don’t think my 41-year-old husband chose before he came to this earth to get cancer and leave three teenage boys with one of them having significant disabilities. Can you even imagine such a thing? Or that God gave us this trial like he’s up in heaven hand picking who gets what and looked at us and said, “You know what, you’re strong people—I bet you can handle this one.”

What has happened in the last 16 months since his diagnosis has been a complete transformation. I shouldn’t say “complete” because I know I’ll continue to evolve and grow through this experience. But I’m not the same person I was before his diagnosis and I never will be. And when he dies and leaves this world, I know I’ll continue to change and have transformations. That’s a whole other side to this grief, that my person won’t get to see the woman I’m going to become.

I know I’m not the first woman to lose her husband in her 40’s, but can I just say it’s different for those of us who are on the younger side and I don’t think anyone would argue with that. It’s called “widow math,” which is essentially the longer I can keep him here (as if I have any control over this), the less time I have to do this life without him. Either way, I’m looking at the next 30-40 years without my person and it’s an unbearable thought. We met at BYU when we were 18, we grew up together and built a family. Our youngest son was born with Down syndrome 12 years ago, which was another transformative experience and if I’m being honest, I thought that was the BIG event of our lives. Little did we know.

This experience has clarified so many things for me. Spaces I had occupied before became impossible. It felt like everything and everyone was out to get me from seeing a middle-aged man playing pickleball (something my husband and I love to do together), watching older people (including our parents) go about their lives with little health issues, to seeing other families on Instagram traveling, or simply being asked by a grocery store clerk how my day was going.

Church was the ultimate test. I can do small talk for about five minutes and then it’s time to go. But seeing the throngs of people every Sunday chatting and laughing in between meetings and after reminds me that we are in a completely different world than everyone else. I wish I could be light again, I wish I didn’t know how quickly life can turn upside down. They all seem to be living in a world where that can happen (because we are the proof of that) but not to them.

One of the things I’ve felt so strongly in our home since my husband’s diagnosis is the love of the Divine. I know He sees me, heaven is crying with us, and is giving our family all the support they can right now.

The mantra I had to learn at the beginning when all I wanted to do was scream in the middle of sacrament meeting was “not everyone gets a front row seat to my grief.” Most of the time I have to completely disassociate at church, especially when topics like “hope” and “trials” and “miracles” come up. We talk a good game in the church, but until you’re faced with something completely out of your control, all of your former lines of thinking no longer apply. All bets are off as they like to say.

I’m not exactly sure how to wrap this up in a nice bow that’s easily acceptable to the masses. I’m very aware that my story can spark a lot of fear and anxiety in people, which makes me somewhat of an outcast. Luckily, I have some incredible women in my life who will see me through this—and are. Thank God for these women.

I’ve had to rethink everything these past 16 months. From logistics like where will I live and how will I provide for my son and myself after supporting my husband in a big career for the past 20 years, to what will I do about church after he’s gone. Church is hard now and I can only assume it will get harder. We also have a very specific situation with our youngest—he tolerates church and the only way we can get him through the first hour is by giving him goldfish and letting him watch Youtube. He’s non-speaking and has significant hearing loss so he gets nothing out of being there. He’s also overwhelmed by crowds and closed doors (aka the chapel). I can’t wrestle an 80 pound child who’s asking for his dad each Sunday just so I can be sitting in the pews. I don’t think anyone would argue with this, or certainly not with me.

Another scenario I’ll be facing is that I will no longer have a priesthood holder in my home when my husband dies and my two older boys leave home in the next three years. I was taught to marry a worthy priesthood holder (check) and yes, I still have the letter to my future husband I wrote as a Beehive. How will this work?

All of this brings me to THE question, what does it mean to “live the Gospel” when our traditional ways of doing so are no longer possible or cause pain? I have to believe God understands my situation. One of the things I’ve felt so strongly in our home since my husband’s diagnosis is the love of the Divine. I know He sees me, heaven is crying with us, and is giving our family all the support they can right now. I can feel I’m being prepared for a life without my partner. So many miracles have happened and will continue to happen, just not the one we want the most. And no, He’s not taking attendance and He certainly isn’t going to withhold His love and protection from my home because a man no longer lives in it. Someday, I’ll be a widow raising a son with serious disabilities, and who do we think God is more likely to give His power to, me or a man?

Someday, my time will finally come and let me just say that I have no fear of death now. It will be a happy day when it’s my turn. I have nothing to fear in death. I’ll finally be back with my person. And when that day comes I imagine my Heavenly parents will pull me into their arms (after my husband of course, he gets first dibs) and tell me how sorry they are that this happened.

Note from the author: I wrote this a couple of months ago when I thought we still had at least a year left with my husband. Just five weeks ago, his cancer took a turn and we are now on hospice and in his final days. Everything I wrote then is still true, but there have definitely been some new struggles and feelings that have come up now that we are at the end. When my brain can put sentences together someday, I’ll write again.

Kneeling

By Nicole Slater

Temple Recommend Questions and My Heart

by Ellen Hawkins

When I first went to the temple I was 21 years old.

I was WAY too young to get married and WAY too young to make temple covenants. I was just doing what I thought was “right” even though it was not right for me then, and sadly isn’t now. Although some of these rituals have changed recently, it was already too late for me. It felt unsettling covenanting to obey my husband, veiling my face, changing all those robes multiple times, and forgetting the answers at the veil. I was always mildly scolded by the gray-haired, well-meaning sisters who wanted me to be fully ready to enter God’s presence. At the beginning of the ceremony, when asked if I wanted to withdraw rather than take on sacred covenants, I didn’t know if I did! I didn’t know what they were until after the ceremony. I was not witness couple or prayer circle material. It seemed I was the last person getting robed or disrobed, and I would panic that I wasn’t more adept at tying bows under pressure.

My ADHD was undiagnosed at the time and sitting through a two hour, repetitive ceremony was excruciating. I wondered why I felt little joy. One was supposed to feel joy at the temple according to every Relief Society lesson given since 1842. No one talked about not feeling joy. Was it something I was doing or not doing that prevented me from feeling the spirit that I was promised? The celestial room was a lovely, peaceful place and definitely a conduit to God’s love. But it was not transformative in the way I expected or hoped. Where was Jesus? I wanted to learn about Jesus—not about Peter, James, and John, Adam and Eve, or Satan. Why were they front and center?

But I really tried and went occasionally as much as my mental health would allow. I found some satisfaction in participating in sealings and initiatories. I enjoyed seeing the names and ages of the sisters I was proxy for. I wondered if they knew what was happening from the other side, and did they want to have temple ordinances performed for them? I attended when two of my children went on missions. I attended when my son got married. I answered the temple recommend questions half-heartedly in order to be there for these special occasions. I am prone to feeling intense guilt about everything, and so feeling unworthy (whether I was or not) to go to the temple weighed heavily on me. I knew I was disappointing my husband. I was certain Jesus was disappointed in me. I now realize that he wasn’t then and isn’t now, and this knowledge has lessened some of the pain. It’s sad to think how many years I wasted thinking that Jesus’ love for me was dependent on my relationship with the temple.

When or if my daughters decide to get sealed in the temple, I have been wondering about my course of action. Will I choose to sit in the waiting room? What will more “righteous” family members think when the mother of the bride is waiting with others who chose not to sit through a worthiness interview? Who chose not to answer invasive questions that don’t measure our desire to follow Christ and the good things we’re trying to do?

These questions require us to look higher and broader. They require us to think about all of God’s children, the goodness to be found in all religions, and the potential to find Christ through service. Above all, they are Christ-based.

The temple recommend questions do not reflect a person’s heart. They don’t reflect my heart. Since they lack depth and insight into my commitment to follow Jesus, I decided to rewrite them in a way that just might make me want to attend the temple again. If they were written this way, I could reflect on whether I was a true disciple of Christ, and not just adept at answering questions about sex, underwear, coffee, and money.

I know that we will never see these revised questions in the handbook, but I hope that Jesus will be in charge of temple “worthiness” someday instead of church leaders. These questions do not ask about exact obedience to LDS prophets or their infallibility. They don’t make LDS prophets the only ones who can speak for God. They don’t ask us to avow that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has more truth than any other religion that provides comfort and joy to God’s children. These questions require us to look higher and broader. They require us to think about all of God’s children, the goodness to be found in all religions, and the potential to find Christ through service. Above all, they are Christ-based.

Here is how I would rewrite the questions:

Do you believe in God the Eternal Father, Heavenly Mother, in their Son Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost?

Do you believe that Christ is our brother, Savior, and friend, and that through His grace and atonement we can be forgiven of wrongdoing?

Do you believe that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints contains truth, can strengthen family relationships, and provide support and community for members and non-members?

Do you obey Jesus’ commandment to love God and your neighbor?

Do you strive to provide service to those in need in your family, church, employment, and neighborhood?

Are you willing to financially assist people, worthy organizations, and the church when possible?

Do you accept all people regardless of sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, social status, and religion as children of God? Do you believe that they can be worthy to participate in all church activities and attend the temple?

Do you believe that men and women are created equally?

Are you faithful to your spouse?

Are you a faithful partner in raising your children?

Do you strive to take care of your body by eating healthy foods, exercise, getting adequate sleep, and avoiding harmful substances?

Do you seek to build a relationship with God and Jesus Christ through church attendance and creating a loving and supportive community with other members and friends?

Do you seek answers to your questions through scripture and other enlightening books or music or nature?

I can only hope. Until then, there is still a lot of work required to be a disciple of Christ despite these revised questions. Maybe even more.

The Nervous System and The Body Of Christ

by Sarah Maxwell Neipp

In May 2004 I returned from my first semester away

for college and went for a bike ride as a reunion with a best friend along the foothills of the Salt Lake valley. I was grateful my dear friend let me borrow a bike since I did not have one of my own. A short while into our bike ride, my upper body began feeling quite sore—I was not an experienced biker and assumed I was paying the price in muscle fatigue. The soreness continued to intensify even after our ride, but I thought nothing of it. I was elated when later that evening the soreness and aches suddenly disappeared. We had met up with more friends to reunite and reconnect after months apart.

We decided to get in cars to gather at a different home, moving in the herd-like fashion from high school. I walked over to my friend’s car and when I went to open the door, my hand simply would not do it. I chuckled at my malfunction and attempted again, but was still unable to open the door—I could not even grip the handle between my fingers. We all had a good laugh—I think my friends imagined I was clowning around to entertain. Eventually a friend opened the door, and I got in. I went home shortly after to quiet since my family had gone to sleep—they did not hear me awkwardly trying to change into pajamas to go to bed with hands that were incapable of gripping anything. I thought that sleep would fix everything—I would wake up with normal capacity and an entertaining story to tell in the morning.

I was wrong. I woke with numbness in both of my hands, some of my arms, and a new band of numbness around my stomach. I told my parents, rested most of the day (it was Sunday after all), and Monday morning we called my physician.

That summer I was diagnosed at age 19 with Multiple Sclerosis. I had MRIs, CAT scans, cortizone injections, and began betainterfuron treatments. I gradually gained most of the feeling back in my hands and stomach, but the strength in my hands—particularly my thumbs—is to this day ever-so-slightly less than it was before this incident.

The nervous system is remarkable! Its complexities and intricacies continue to marvel me as I learn more about its functions in bodies. The nervous system is intended to operate as a bi-directional feedback loop—motor signals go out from the brain to different areas of the body and sensory input sends data back to the brain. The sensory input provides information for the brain about touch, pressure, pain, temperature, and positioning of the body through space. This allows the brain to process the information and modify future messaging. Sometimes this feedback loop is interrupted in both directions, as it was when my hands, arms, and stomach went numb. Alternatively, sensory neuropathy occurs when the brain can send motor commands to areas of the body but that area of the body cannot communicate back sensory information—ultimately injuries can occur, balance and coordination often suffer, and generally the individual will begin to over-compensate in a certain area (often visually) because they cannot rely on sensory input from their body. My father, who has neuropathy in his feet, broke his toe and was unaware for months—ultimately he needed reconstructive surgery on three toes to repair the damage from walking on his injured toe for more than a year.

If our desire is to be one—to value each member—then we must improve both our systems and willingness to hear feedback from each part of the body.

The hierarchical structure of the church is one of a disrupted feedback loop. One direction of information flows normally—from the “brain” or leadership of the church to the rest of the body—but the return signal is lost. In addition to this top-down-only flow of information, at a more local level we hear all too often of a similar failure of communication where the true feelings of individuals are reprimanded, shut down, or withheld for fear of the many consequences of pointing out flaws in a system we declare to be inspired, but that we also infer is without a need of adjustment. This disconnection is regularly evident as individuals who defend the church talk past those who point out the pressure, discomfort, and pain created by the church in lives of other members.

When we dismiss the experiences of individuals, we are telling another area (person) of the body of Christ, “I have no need of your sensory data.” We are rejecting Paul’s injunction that, “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it.” (1 Cor. 12:26) Many individuals who have left the church have done so because their cries of discomfort, pain, and position are ultimately unheard, unwelcome, or shut down, and the data they are trying to share does not make it back up into the brain to synthesize information from the external world into the commands sent to the body.

If our desire is to be one—to value each member—then we must improve both our systems and willingness to hear feedback from each part of the body. If the general leaders send unread letters and emails back to local leaders, then we are preventing the sensory feedback of the members from reaching the brain. The pain and damage happening to the members will continue right in front of us when it could be addressed and prevented in the future if we would facilitate a bi-directional feedback loop between leaders and members. When we are selective about which members of the body of Christ we listen to, we create a veritable echo chamber of validation. Unless we prioritize listening to the diversity of experiences throughout the body of Christ, we lose awareness of and connection to data that should be so valuable to us in our efforts to follow Christ’s injunction to “be one” so that we can be his.

The Girl Who Talked Too Much

by Brittney Walker

I don’t remember squirming in Primary so much.

But I remember talking.
And being sent to the hall. Again and again.

It wasn’t rebellion. I just always had something to say: an idea, a joke, a connection, a question. It popped into my brain and was out of my mouth before I could stop it. I was the first to memorize every scripture, the first to raise my hand, the first to volunteer. I wanted so badly to be good. But somehow, good was always quieter than me.

I was told I talked too much.
That I interrupted.
That I should learn to “reverence my voice.”

No one said I might have a brain that moves faster than my mouth can keep up.
No one said my excitement wasn’t sin.

Reverence and other impossible virtues

In the church, being “reverent” isn’t just about noise. It’s an outward manifestation of your relationship to the divine. The “good girls” are soft-spoken and graceful. They fold their arms and cross their legs, sing in the right key, and sit through sacrament meeting like angels carved from stone.

I tried to be one of them.
I memorized all the Articles of Faith before anyone else.
I bore my testimony as soon as I could toddle to the pulpit (and to anyone who would listen).
I smiled so hard my cheeks hurt.

But reverence never came naturally. My voice was too loud, my laugh too big, my feelings too close to the surface. I wasn’t defiant. I was enthusiastic. I wanted to participate in everything, and I didn’t understand why that made grown-ups sigh.

What I learned early was that being “too much” was just as bad as being “not enough.”

The unseen kind of wrong

ADHD in girls doesn’t usually look like the Primary boy balancing a chair on his head. It looks like a girl who blurts answers, over-explains, talks fast, laughs loud, volunteers for everything. And still gets labeled “distracting.”

It’s the invisible kind of wrong. Earnest, high-energy, rule-following, and somehow still failing.

We weren’t the kids skipping Seminary; we were the ones teaching the lesson when the teacher didn’t show. But our report cards came back with “bright girl, talks too much.” Church leaders praised our testimonies and then reminded us to tone it down.

You learn, after a while, that the best way to please people is to shrink yourself.

Obedience as personality

ADHD girls are masters at overcompensating.
I became the kind of obedient that could win awards for it.

Color-coded scripture tabs, perfect Visiting Teaching records, Relief Society lessons that would bring a tear to your eye. My effort level was Olympic. My nervous system was fried.

The church rewards that kind of over-functioning. Especially in women. We call it diligence. We call it faith. But it’s often the coping mechanism of someone trying to prove she isn’t defective.

When you have ADHD, chaos is always humming beneath the surface. So you build structure out of guilt and glitter. You keep saying yes to every calling, every committee, every meal train, hoping the doing will finally quiet the noise inside.

It never does.

The gospel of repentance

If obedience became my personality, repentance became my reflex.

The harder I tried to live up to every expectation, the more proof I found that I couldn’t. I lacked consistency. The kind of daily steadiness that was praised from every pulpit. Scripture study, morning and night prayer, timely preparation for callings or meetings. I meant to do them all, but my follow-through never matched my intentions.

And yet, I never forgot to repent.

Every skipped morning prayer, every missed journal entry, every talk prepared last-minute went on the invisible list of things to be sorry for. I carried a prayer in my heart … of apology. I was always confessing, always resolving, always promising that next time I’d be better.

What I didn’t know then was that inconsistency wasn’t a moral flaw. It was my ADHD showing up exactly as it does for everyone else, just in the language of faith. But back then, inconsistency felt like sin.

So while other girls were building testimonies, I was building a case against myself.

The burnout prophecy

By adulthood, I was exactly who the system had trained me to be: responsible, spiritual, dependable—and exhausted.

Every late bill, every missed appointment, every Sunday morning meltdown felt like moral failure. I’d think, If I just tried harder, prayed harder, planned better…

People would say, “You’re amazing! I don’t know how you do it all.”
And I’d smile and think, Me neither. Because I can’t.

Burnout, for me, wasn’t a slow fade. It was the moment my mind said, No more pretending. The checklists that once gave me safety now felt like cages. The structure that once kept me safe now made me suffocate.

That’s the problem with trying to earn your peace. You can’t keep up forever.

When the name finally fits

Getting diagnosed with ADHD as an adult was like reading my patriarchal blessing and realizing it had been misfiled under someone else’s name all along.

Suddenly, everything made sense.
The noise in my head, the bursts of energy, the forgotten forms, the half-finished projects, the guilt. The GUILT. The big emotions. All of it.

It wasn’t a lack of faith or discipline.
It was a different kind of brain, living inside a system that didn’t know what to do with difference.

That realization didn’t make me bitter; it made me merciful.
Merciful toward that little girl in the hall.
Merciful toward the woman who kept saying yes.
Merciful toward everyone who tried to make sense of me with the language they had.

What I wish she knew

If I could whisper through time to that chatty Primary kid, I’d tell her:

You weren’t bad.
You weren’t unruly.
You were curious, alive, and trying to connect in a place that prized quiet over authenticity.

You memorized every scripture because your brain loves stimulation.
You volunteered because you craved connection.
You talked because silence felt like being erased.

None of that was wrong.

Your voice was never the problem. It was proof you were here, thinking, feeling, learning, trying.

The church told you to be still and know God.
But maybe God was never in the stillness for you.
Maybe God was in the conversation.

The girl who talked too much was never broken.
She was just early to the truth.

Contributors:

Emily Richards

At the moment I am a heartbroken caretaker. My husband Todd is in the final weeks of his life after 20 months of battling cancer. I am also a mom to three boys ages 17, 15, and 12. Our youngest son, Ben, has Down syndrome so I also consider myself an advocate for not only my son, but all those with disabilities. I spent 15 years in the PR field and plan to take those skills I developed to build a new life for Ben and myself by starting a day center for adults with disabilities near the ocean (Ben’s favorite place).

Nicole Slater

I am a creator, a wife, and a mother of three who lives in New Mexico. I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Communications and freelance occasionally in Graphic Design and Photography. My free time is almost always spent reading.

Ellen Hawkins

I am a junior high reading and writing teacher and spend much of my day repeating instructions and answering questions I've already answered. Sometimes teaching happens. I am amused by 12-13 year old students, and I love watching all the real life that is being navigated in the halls and classrooms of the public schools. There is no better place to learn about what it means to be human in a complicated, stressful world. Reading is my true joy along with fires, cozy clothes, lunch with friends, Sunday night dinners, movies, walks, flowers, and Pilates. I am trying to phase into girl dinners, writing more, and meaningful conversations with people I love. I have four grown children, and two granddaughters who live way too far away. I try to visit them as much as possible. My husband and I live in Utah.

Sarah Maxwell Neipp

I grew up in Salt Lake City and have lived in Virginia, California, and Washington D.C. (where I served an LDS mission). I received two degrees in vocal performance and currently teach and perform locally. I love my husband and two children along with our dog and two cats. I’m an Enneagram type Nine.

Brittney Walker

I am an ADHD coach and writer living in Arizona with my husband and a lively household including six sons, a daughter-in-law, and a grandson. I spent many years trying to be reverent, organized, and less distracting, and now I write about executive function, faith, deconstruction, and rebuilding identity with a different kind of brain. My work explores neurodivergence, belonging, and the slow process of learning to trust yourself. You can find more of my writing at exmoadhdcoach.substack.com

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We Have A Mean Streak In Mormonism

by Cynthia Winward

I once overheard a family member— whom I love dearly—

several decades ago say that girls who have premarital sex deserve to get pregnant as a punishment for their sins.

I witnessed this convo between a male family member who was in a heated discussion with other female family members. They were trying to convince him his attitude was cruel. Why would anyone ever want a difficult life for a young girl? I had at least five cousins who became teenage mothers so this was a big topic in my big Mormon family growing up. The adults probably had no idea I had listened to this convo. (I was one of those kids who preferred to sit and listen to the grown-ups rather than go play with my cousins.)

Just revisiting this experience in my thoughts makes me want to write a whole ‘nother essay about the strictness of the law of chastity. Does it do more harm than good? Maybe I’ll write that another day. (Also, stay tuned for a podcast episode in March with therapist C.A. Larson about purity culture/law of chastity….can we ever talk about that enough?) But today I just want to focus on the mean streak that I see in Mormonism—in my childhood and sadly still now.

Perhaps a mean culture exists because in high-demand religions we often sacrifice so much (sometimes happily, sometimes reluctantly) that we need there to be Big Consequences for these sacrifices? We want the blessings of sacrifice, but maybe more so, we also want to make sure there is a punishment for those who break the rules? We religious types have a lot of feelings about the idea of anybody ‘getting away’ with ‘sin’.

I know all this because—as embarrassed as I am to admit it—I used to be one of those people that loved to conjure up the mental scoreboard when the consequences of ‘sin’ became evident to me. I learned it best from my religious community—to mentally ‘finger wag’ at sinners. That’s not an excuse for my mean thoughts, just an explanation that I did learn this behavior somewhere, from someone. In particular, I learned it from my own leaders.

Teachings such as these—

“If a person hasn’t suffered, he hasn’t repented. . . . He has got to go through a change in his system whereby he suffers and then forgiveness is a possibility.”
–Dallin Oaks quoting Spencer Kimball

“You cannot commit a little sin without being subject to the consequences.”
–Russell M. Nelson

“This clearly sets forth the ultimate banquet of consequences and the cumulative impact of choices not in accordance with the Father’s plan of happiness.”
- Quentin L. Cook

“Therefore I command you to repent… otherwise you shall suffer… how sore you know not, how exquisite you know not.”
–Doctrine & Covenants 19:15–18

The language of these teachings is vivid, threatening, and physical—suffering is framed as deserved. Not only do we preach about the judgment of others’ sins, but we also have teachings that turn that mean voice of condemnation inward—

“For our words will condemn us, yea, all our works will condemn us; we shall not be found spotless; and our thoughts will also condemn us;”
(Alma 12:14)

This internal judgment then becomes our own prosecutor. And prosecutors of self naturally become prosecutors of others. Or maybe we prosecute others first and then turn that judgment inward? Whichever comes first, in my observation, we have developed a culture of meanness. We flog others and we flog ourselves. If there is any breaking of a law, or a commandment, we demand—and revel in—swift justice. For example, how often during the current warrant-less immigration raids occurring in the US have I heard Mormons say, ‘well they broke the law.’ Why is that what gets typed out on social media thousands of times a day? Like here—

As followers of Jesus (who was once a refugee displaced in a foreign land!) why isn’t mercy always our default? Why doesn’t kindness and respect, which are the actual core teachings of Jesus, come before (or instead of) Article of Faith 12 in that social media comment? Why are we okay with people in windowless detention centers, being separated from their families? Why do we favor laws—even unjust laws—over kindness, compassion, and mercy? Why hasn’t my church joined the many other churches decrying the current inhumane treatment of immigrants? The most current statement from January 2025 says, first and foremost, that “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints obeys the law.”

I remember an experience I had as a teen. A couple of my friends had submitted their mission papers—only there was a problem. They didn’t have legal status in the US. Our stake president wrestled with this dilemma and ultimately he decided (with leaders at the top, I assume) that mercy would guide his decision. My friends were allowed to serve missions stateside where their legal status wouldn’t be an issue. Mercy over law. Bless him. I am sure stories like this are still happening today, quietly at the local level, but why haven’t leaders at the top made another statement clarifying where they stand on current events today?

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A world of hurt and harm has happened since the last immigration statement, yet Church leaders remain silent. Jesus, however, was not silent. In the Bible we repeatedly see Him choosing mercy over law—

What about the woman caught in adultery? (Or as I like to call it, the men caught in hypocrisy.) She is brought to Jesus, but he refuses to condemn her even though the punishment for adultery (well, for adulterous women) was death. He doesn’t deny the law, but he refuses to weaponize it. Jesus chose dignity and compassion over judgment. (John 8)

What about healing on the sabbath? Jesus says, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?” (Mark 3:4) Jesus breaks a law to relieve suffering. In this example He directly challenges any theology that treats rule-keeping as morally superior to human care.

What about the parable of the good Samaritan? In this parable it’s the people most obedient to religious law that fail morally, while the heretical Samaritan succeeds. “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” (Luke 10:37-38) To Jesus it is mercy, not correctness, that defines righteousness.

Those are just three examples! I could list many more examples where Jesus chose mercy over the law, over and over. As Richard Rohr writes in Dancing Standing Still,

“Jesus is always on the side of the crucified ones. He changes sides in the twinkling of an eye to go wherever the pain is. He is not loyal to one religion, to this or that group, or to the worthy; Jesus is always loyal to suffering.”

May we check any meanness in our hearts.
May we bury our lust for justice and consequences.
May we choose the better way of mercy, as Jesus perfectly modeled for each of us.

Cynthia Winward

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The Beauty of Agency

by Jillian Scott

I want to speak to those who have experienced,

or are experiencing, a loved one—be it a spouse, child, family member, or friend—who has left your faith, or has taken a different path in their faith journey than you hoped for them. I also want to speak to those who feel they are currently in their own faith crisis, deconstruction, reconstruction, journey. Between these two, this should include just about everyone. From my own personal experience, going through a faith crisis/deconstruction, and having someone you love dearly leave your faith and take a different path, feels very uncertain, lonely, fearful, worrisome for your salvation or your loved ones, and even very dark. So much weight is on your mind and shoulders. I remember feeling like I just wanted all of the uncertainty to end, to have all my beliefs and relationships back to normal. But that just can’t be, and we are left during these dark times of struggle with doubt, discouragement, and deep questions that often feel unanswerable.

Maybe we feel something has gone wrong, or we have done something wrong, to have these questions or uncertainty come into our lives. But during this time for me, which felt so dark and uncertain, I came to know my Heavenly Parents and my Savior at a deeper level than I ever thought I could have. I came to learn so much about Their grace and love. I came to learn a beautifully different perspective about our eternal plan and purpose that I feel is often overlooked by many of us, and I want to offer this perspective today. I hope it will bring peace and assurance to your hearts during what may be a dark and uncertain time in your life.

I’ll start with a question. What is the purpose of our mortal experience? Is it A: to believe the truth and be righteous, and always do the right thing and never waver? Or B: to exercise our agency and grow and change, make mistakes along the way but learn from them? I think we would say of course it’s to grow and change and learn. But it seems we more often than not expect ourselves and others to live option A.

When we adjust our perspective to align with B and realize it is God’s plan for our experience here, it changes the way we see the mortal experience. We gain peace and assurance when we realize God is with us in our whole journey on earth vs. that He leaves us when we take a wrong turn. We gain peace in this perspective by knowing that we’re safe to exercise our agency, knowing that the whole learning and growing process was part of the plan vs. something went wrong in our journey when we made a mistake, or are faced with doubts and uncertainty. We learn in 2nd Nephi 2:16,21:

16 Wherefore, the Lord God gave unto man that he should act for himself. Wherefore, man could not act for himself save it should be that he was enticed by the one or the other.

21 And the days of the children of men were prolonged according to the will of God, that they might repent while in the flesh; wherefore, their state became a state of probation, and their time was lengthened, according to the commandments which the Lord God gave unto the children of men.

I think it is very significant that in this chapter we learn the transgression of Adam and Eve was a part of God’s plan, that it wasn’t a mistake. Verse 23 says:

23 And they would have had no children; wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin.

24 But behold, all things have been done in the wisdom of him who knoweth all things.

25 Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.

This is all possible through the atonement. It is beautiful, and it wasn’t just a backup plan for the fall of Adam and Eve. It was the plan.

With this, we can have peace knowing that all the conditions of mortality are acceptable in God’s plan for us vs. any wrong turn or choice is detrimental to our eternal salvation. If the point of this mortal experience was simply to just believe the truth and be righteous or our eternal salvation would be at stake; if sinning, making mistakes, deconstructing parts of our faith, and taking different paths in our faith were truly such a detrimental thing on the grand scale of person’s eternal progression, then life would likely look a lot different. God could have made this world very differently.

1) The veil wouldn’t be over our eyes, to cause us to wonder and ask questions.

2) We would not be allowed to be agents unto ourselves. To make our own choices according to our limited understanding.

3) Church history wouldn’t be so messy and cause so many of us to really search and ask questions.

4) The picture could have been a lot more clear for us to be able to live the “right” way. The conditions for mortality are acceptable to God. And He knew this mortal experience was the best way to accomplish His purpose and plan for us.

Embracing this perspective gives us peace by allowing us to focus less on what we fear the outcome to be and focus more on God’s ability to help us, teach us, and lead us to where we need to go and what we need to learn, not fearing the process. The Lord tells us many times in the scriptures to not fear this mortal experience. We learn in John 16:33:

I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.

2nd Timothy 1:7:

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

Isaiah 41:10,13:

Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God; I will strengthen thee; yea I will help thee; yea I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness. For I am the Lord thy God. I will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, fear not; I will help thee.

Rev. 1:17:

...Fear not; I am the first and the last.

We need not fear when we trust in God.

This perspective brings us peace by allowing us to be more honest and patient with ourselves about what we really believe, what we know, and what we understand. We can only really grow when we can be truly be honest with ourselves, and not pretend we know or believe, or force ourselves to know. If we are seeking truth and wanting to do what’s right, God is in that. We don’t need to be ashamed of our questions, doubts, struggles, dark times. It’s the process. He is teaching us, and guiding us through. Trust Him in your journey.

In this perspective, we will judge, assume, and fear less for others in their own journey, and have more respect for their choices. I love what President Uchtdorf taught:

I also love this quote by Hank Smith:

We can know that God is just as much with them as He is with us in our journey. Everyone’s path and understanding is different. None look the same. We need not fear.

This perspective can help us choose goodness, and gain spiritual strength and knowledge because of sheer conversion and change in our hearts, if it happens. I love how Elder Renlund puts it:

Exercising our agency allows us to become, and choose for ourselves. I remember during the depths of what I felt was a faith crisis, I realized that much of the reason why I stayed in the church, and did the right things, was mostly based out of fear and guilt. I didn’t feel safe to step back and actually be honest with how I really felt, and what I really believed. I just did it because it was what I was told I should do, and not question. But I realized, even though the things I was trying to do were all good, I was not doing them out of love or for the right reasons. It was not out of a converted heart. It seems that some of us do use fear or guilt to motivate ourselves and others to do and believe the right things. But is this what real change and conversion is about? Is this respecting the process of agency? Is this healthy for our souls? President Uchtdorf said:

I love this. I believe that to allow ourselves to be truly honest in our hearts and thoughts with God, even if those thoughts and beliefs seem terrifying, contrary to what we think they should be, this allows Him to work in us. If our desire is to understand and find the truth and do what is right, we are safe to acknowledge these thoughts and feelings. God is not disappointed in our process of learning and changing. He is in it. When we allow ourselves to be open to Him, without fear, He will teach us, and change us into who we need be, and those we love. Our desires to follow Christ will naturally come as our hearts and understanding change. We can’t force conversion and change. We must let God change us and teach us naturally. This is the whole point of mortality. We must not use fear, guilt or shame to motivate ourselves or others to do the right things or believe the right things. The Atonement made it possible for us to exercise our agency. To be allowed to be honest, learn, and change naturally, and safely.

Please understand that I am not saying we are shielded from the natural consequences of this mortal life, nor should we be negligent in our actions. But I am saying we don’t need to fear the process of change and becoming for ourselves and others. Let’s trust that God is doing His perfect work. He knows what each of us needs. He’s got this. I want to close with President Uchdorf’s words:

I love my Savior, I love my Heavenly parents. I am grateful for the hard times in my life that have brought me to know God better, and to feel more of His love and mercy in my life. I know His power is real and working. I love how the gospel works.

Hiding (Sanctuary)

by Shanna Davis

My Molting

by Joleene Watabe

As I walked down the trail, the vibrant colors

of the earth surrounded me. On one side, the lake shimmered a deep, soul-stilling blue. Beneath my feet, the dirt path curled forward in warm brown ribbons. On the other side, the hill rose like a living embrace—lush with grass and speckled with wildflowers, as if joy itself had taken root and blossomed. It felt like walking through a love letter from heaven, each breeze a reminder that beauty was all around me.

An outcropping of rocks caught my eye as I sensed movement. On top sat two bespeckled lizards, basking in the open—fearless and unapologetically receiving the light. I stopped and admired their boldness. Every time I see a lizard, I think of my late husband. He used to spend hours with our kids hunting and catching them—once even smuggling a couple onto an airplane because our daughter, a daddy’s girl, couldn’t bear to leave them behind. I smiled. I paused with my hiking companions to share the story, feeling a quiet connection through the act of revealing a piece of myself.

We resumed our hike, and I took the lead. Just a few steps in, the tall grass beside me erupted with sound—a sharp, unmistakable rattle. My heart leapt into my throat. I screamed and instinctively jumped off the rocky trail to the dirt below, adrenaline surging. I had startled a rattlesnake. It coiled, its tail buzzing a clear warning: stay back. We froze, breathless. Then, in stunned silence followed by nervous chatter, we watched as the snake uncoiled and slithered up the hill, disappearing into the grass.

Though we continued on, the moment lingered. Something in me had shifted. My eyes stayed fixed on the trail, scanning the ground and the brush, alert for hidden danger. The beauty of the world around me remained, but now I saw it through the lens of vigilance.

It wasn’t until we returned to the car that I could exhale. Later, I soaked in a hot bath and afterwards I retold the story—what felt like a brush with death—to my family. For weeks I flinched at the sound of rustling leaves. It took time, conscious effort, and repeated safe encounters with nature for my body to unlearn the fear.

I realize now that I startled the rattlesnake as much as it startled me. I doubt it gave me another thought as it slithered away. It just went back to its life—shedding its skin when needed, growing, and doing what snakes do.

And still—I think about that snake. As a human, I assign meaning to things. Was it a warning? A symbol? A test? A sign from a God? Were the lizards a message from my husband—or heaven itself—telling me that if I pay attention, I’ll be protected? I don’t know. But one thing is clear: my nervous system responded exactly as it was designed to. It pulled me into protection mode—into fear, vigilance, and survival. Into scanning the world for threat.

The rattlesnake moment wasn’t just in the grass—it lives in me. Beautiful lessons about love, faith and becoming whole taught me that life is about more than just existing. For most of my life those lessons have been entangled with messages rooted in fear, pressure and shame. Obey or face consequences. Know your place, study and listen, help others willingly—or feel the weight of disapproval. Those words cause my body to go into survival mode—all I can feel is the buzz of danger beneath the surface of beauty.  Over and over, I was told that if I walk in faith, I’ll be protected—but I did not feel protected when the life that I knew fell off the cliff.

When my husband died while serving as a leader in our church, something in me shifted. His death occurred on a church outing which has made my relationship to church and to God complicated. He was serving as Bishop for our church congregation in Ohio. He met the Boy Scouts at Hocking Hills State Park because he believed in helping them learn to do hard things. He was the only one certified in rappelling safety. While setting up the ropes, he fell over the edge. No one saw what caused him to slip. The rope wasn’t tied correctly, so it didn’t catch him.

That loss—so personal, so devastating—opened my eyes in ways I hadn’t expected.

Growing up, I was taught to keep my eyes fixed on heaven’s rewards. Somewhere in that, I missed the memo about experiencing the divine here and now.

Before his death I did not realize how programmed I was to view the world through the lens of safety. Most of my prayers and even my day-to-day thoughts revolved around keeping myself and my family safe. Maybe that mindset elevated my life by pushing me to do and be better—but even that is a form of survival. 

After my husband’s death, I began to understand that while staying safe and surviving is pretty important, it’s not the same as truly living. I don’t want to miss the picturesque wildflowers or the soul stilling lake. We talk about being stuck in survival mode because we know deep down, we want more from life. When I began searching for what I truly wanted, I found that happiness, peace and joy come from connection—connecting to others, to myself, to the world around me. And true, deep connection does not happen when my focus is on staying safe. 

Recently I should have celebrated my thirty-fourth wedding anniversary—my eighth since Tim died. Life keeps moving forward without him, which feels both amazing and devastating. I almost forgot about the anniversary until a friend texted me that morning to send extra love. I’m not sure if forgetting is good or bad—maybe it’s just … a thing.

Part of the forgetting is weariness. I’m tired of anniversaries without him. Part of it is because life is still happening here—my youngest just started high school, and that’s been my focus. And part of it is acceptance. I’ve settled into life as a single mom. Most days I feel at peace.

Life is good. Life also stinks. I could name a hundred reasons for both. Maybe learning to live in that tension is the point of mortality—finding balance so my body isn’t always on alert, so I can enjoy what I have now.

Growing up, I was taught to keep my eyes fixed on heaven’s rewards. Somewhere in that, I missed the memo about experiencing the divine here and now. Learning to do that has changed everything. Losing Tim too soon taught me that God and Love are found right here, in the messy middle—not just in some future reward.

Today I came across one of Tim’s notes on a Bible verse in Luke, where Christ suffers in agony. He wrote: “At some point in our lives we will receive a glimpse into that suffering.” I’ve had my glimpse. And what I’ve learned is this: pain is not punishment. Pain is a sacred space. It’s often the very place where God’s love is found most deeply—if I can let go of fear and stay open to it.

Finding my way back to the sacredness of life is my healing journey. I’ve had to ask some big questions: 

How can I trust in a world that is so full of pain and suffering?

How can I find peace in spaces where my nervous system flares with warning?

How can I feel joy, or clarity in a world that mistakes control for holiness?

And so, I molt. Not to abandon what is sacred—but to shed what is not.

I shed the skin that told me to fear my own instincts if they differed from the current narrative. The skin that taught me to distrust my direct connection to the divine. The skin that contorted itself to survive inside systems not built for growth and flourishing—unless it was the kind of growth approved by those in power.

What I’ve found is that love and truth are still here—just not where I was looking. I’m not walking away from what I was taught. I’m walking away from the version of myself who thought she had to stay hidden to belong. I am shedding shame. Shedding obedience rooted in fear. Shedding spiritual smallness. Whether others accept me or not in my new skin is yet to be seen, but I know whatever is divine and good in this world already does.

And with each layer I release, I move toward something deeper: toward the Divine, as Love. Toward beauty, unguarded. Toward sacredness that does not rattle—but welcomes.

Like the snake, I move forward—quietly, deliberately.

Like the lizards, I receive the light when it finds me.

And like the earth itself, I remember:

it’s okay to be both soft and strong.

To be bold and tender.

To shed and still belong.

This is my molting.

It’s messy.

It’s holy.

And it’s mine.

The List

by Stephenie Glissmeyer

Contributors:

Jillian Scott

Jillian currently live in Kaysville, Utah. She is married and has three amazing children and loves being their mom. Jillian loves learning new things. She loves talking about deep and meaningful subjects with others, and learning things from their perspective. Jillian loves nature, and finds that there are so many valuable lessons to learn there and from all creation.

Shanna Davis

Midlife wanderer finding joy in looking back, living in the present, and dreaming forward. Proud mama of 3 amazing humans who inspire me even when they call me out (why did I teach them that?) Lucky friend of beautiful souls, convinced the Divine sent them to me. Woman who is getting to know a new version of herself or was it always there and it simply wasn’t time to discover?

Joleene Watabe

Joleene is known for her warmth, steadiness, and ability to hold space for difficult emotions. Her life has taught her the power of presence, empathy, and making space for both pain and hope. She values family, authenticity, and the quiet work of healing.

Stephenie Glissmeyer

Stephenie is a middle-aged woman with lots of dreams that are finally come to fruition, even though she wasn't expecting them to happen in a body this old. She's a nurse, a teacher, a wife, and mother of six kids ages 14 to 30. She loves her job, yoga, hiking, paddleboarding, reading, and writing on Substack

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The Long Game

by Susan Hinckley

Little Nancy Etticoat
In a white petticoat,
And a red nose;
The longer she stands
The shorter she grows.

My grandma died when I was 8,

and when they cleaned out her house I inherited a very old book of Mother Goose rhymes that my mother and her sisters had grown up with. It had wonderful illustrations for many verses, but there was no illustration of Little Nancy, who was a riddle as well as a rhyme. I hadn’t the faintest idea what it was talking about. Maybe I wasn’t that smart, but in my defense, candles were a familiar household staple when the nursery rhyme came to be, but mostly absent from my 1970s world. We didn’t use them at home or church.

I forgot this verse until I bought my first child her own Mother Goose book. It had this classic illustration, and I had a big moment of Duh.

As I heard Jim Finley describe it recently, “We’re all melting like candles.”

Yes we are, and at this phase of my life, I don’t know much but I’m beginning to know how Nancy felt—I’ve been standing quite a long time. I’ve never been tall, but now when I look in the mirror, my older face tells a hard truth: I’m short.

Most of the time I successfully ignore the facts, but as the years twirl by it’s getting harder. I’ve reached a stage where the body and the story can’t quite hold themselves together.

This may be why Presence has begun to beat an insistent drum. In the past decade, someone or something has been trying to get my attention, to convince me that no matter how hard I run, I can’t run away from what’s real, so I may as well stop trying. I’d approached life persuaded that there was always something better around the next corner, and my religion didn’t help; from church, the main idea I picked up was that the point of this life was actually to focus on the next.

The shorter I grow, the more I understand that The Here and Now has been the gift all along—a gift I’ve been trying to exchange for as long as I can remember.

A dear friend used to quip, “The older we get, the more like ourselves we become.” I was in my 20s when she started saying that, and it always made me laugh but inside I was thinking, “Oh no! Please tell me there’s a Me coming that’s better than this.” I didn’t know how to love or value myself—either it wasn’t in the nature, or it wasn’t in the nurture, and after a point it didn’t really matter which.

A big part of growing older has been coming to accept my humanness. It’s a lesson my body is getting obvious with—if younger me had been paying any real attention, I’d have noticed a suspicious amount of old people. That should have been a clue that there’s a human path, we’re all on it, and I would not turn out to be the lone exception.

But for most of my life, in my heart I believed my humanity was not the important part of it. “Human” might do for other people; I had a perfection mandate, a thing just out of reach that I assumed I must chase until I die.

Onward and upward, always always always. Anywhere but here.

Presence, letting myself BE right here in the right now—noticing it, allowing it, breathing it, steeping in it, letting it be what it is without needing to find any shiny parts to make it (or myself) more lovable, staying open to what it has to teach me—has come with some truly gut-wrenching lessons. I thought getting perfect was hard, but it turns out getting human is the real work.

Or as Carmen Acevedo Butcher says, “Being human is harder than being spiritual.”

Do Mormons want to do this particular hard work though? We’re a worker-bee church, anxiously engaged in doing all the things all the time, right? And it hasn’t ever felt easy to me, like I could just coast. I never felt like I was avoiding all the dirty work like growing or grubbing around with the messy people, getting covered in stains. But as I think about it, I must admit that might have been my goal with everything I was doing—scriptures, meetings, lessons, temple work, and keeping my kids in a straight line behind me—do this work to avoid having to do that. Of course perfection could never be here or now, and its hamster wheel only distracted me because I was running.

Getting knocked off the wheel felt confusing at first—I kept trying to climb back on because I thought it was the only way to get where I wanted to go. But about the same time I noticed myself thrown off the wheel and lying face down in life’s dirt, I noticed for the first time that the Jesus in the Bible had more to do with the mess of being a person than with the perfection of not being one. I realized that all the spirituality in the world wouldn’t teach me how to be like Jesus because doing the Jesus-work required me to get hands on with my own—and everyone else’s—humanity.

“God is about presence,” a Christian friend (with whom I sometimes disagree theologically) recently announced to me via Marco Polo on his morning commute. “When I was small, I thought God was about rules. And then, for most of my life, I thought about God as Law Giver and Provider … somewhere out there. Now I realize God is about presence, right now, whether you’re ready or not, and it’s probably best not to try to be ‘ready,’ for a bunch of reasons. Which is interesting, because if God is about presence, that actually comes back to how I thought about God when I was really little, up to about age 7. Then I didn’t question it, I just liked it. It’s so cool being human—you start to realize what human means, and it’s cosmic.”

I paused to look up cosmic: Limitless. Universal.

Yes.

He continued, “The real problem, ontologically, is that I’d rather go to McDonald’s, but I like to look in on the folks behind the counter at Wendy’s—they’re my pals. A few of them are going through really hard stuff. And already, from clear up the street here, I can see there may be a person sitting on the Wendy’s corner who needs to be fed.”

Spirituality + Jesus—humanness as somehow both cosmic and at Wendy’s—was the perfect New Year’s message. His ramble arrived as a small tap on the shoulder from the Universe, pulling my attention back to that place I mean to stay but can’t seem to stop wandering away from: Presence. When you meditate and you get distracted by thoughts, you redirect, bringing yourself back again and again to your practice—my life is one long distraction. I redirect.

Christianity has not rewarded a fully-embodied spirituality though. If a 7 year old can recognize God as presence—if we can know the Source in our bones—why do we need the church?

This means at least on some level, churches are probably invested in keeping us separated from the truth of our own bones and hearts and humanity. I get it—a middleman will naturally defend his position.

For me, reimagining my faith began with the full acceptance of my human experience. Jesus was, after all, a human—in addition to whatever else he is. For now, this life is the point at which his experience and mine intersect. But it’s not for his humanness that we are taught to worship him, it is for having transcended it.

No wonder I learned to show up at church with only the shiniest parts of myself showing. No wonder I was taught that the natural man was an enemy to God (and if the man was, I could only wonder how that god might feel about the even-more-earthy woman?) No wonder I internalized that progress must include casting aside my most human parts: my failings, wants, hungers, needs, and desires—the common thread by which I’m connected to all my human siblings.

All of which runs completely counter to Presence.

How could I love the thing I had not been taught to reverence? And why would I believe God loves me if I had not been taught to love myself?

Returning church members to ourselves—and to our lives—is the missionary work I want to do now.

I’ve been reading a book called Give Me a Word: The Promise of an Ancient Practice to Guide Your Year, by Christine Valters Paintner. She describes how people would come to the desert fathers and mothers—"elders who, in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, went to the deserts of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine to cultivate a life of radical simplicity and ongoing devotion to the presence of the divine in their lives”—and say, “Give me a word.”

“This tradition of asking for a word was a way of seeking something on which to ponder for many days, weeks, months, sometimes a whole lifetime. A ‘word’ was often a short phrase to nourish and challenge the receiver. A word was meant to be wrestled with and slowly grown into.”

The point the book makes is, you’re not supposed to choose your own word—the word is supposed to choose you. I’m not the kind of person who picks a word every year, but sometimes ideas have presented themselves to me that have felt important. And this kind of thing—right up at the edge of woo-woo—has kinda been my shtick for a long time. One thing any kid growing up in my house could count on is that at some point during the day, I was going to read her horoscope from the newspaper on the kitchen counter. If her friends came over, they were going to have to endure hearing theirs, too.

So while I’ve been wandering around waiting for a word to choose me the past few weeks (and I’m not yet sure it has, or will), I’ve been paying extra attention to random stuff. One of my own horoscopes this week said this:

“You’re playing a long game.”

As I picked up those words they settled into a familiar groove, like they’d only just now fallen out of my head after living there forever.

“It is said that all you are seeking is also seeking you. That is, if you lie still, sit still, it will find you. It has been waiting for you for a long time. Once it is here, don’t move away. Rest. See what happens next.”
—Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Whether or not this phrase has chosen me remains to be seen, but it means something to me right now and I will continue to sit with it and see what happens next.

Though it exists in moments, presence is actually the long game, the thing that never ends. Paradoxically, my human life and this body with which I have grown so familiar are not permanent. I’m a very short woman to be trying to learn to play such a game—at 62 my white petticoat has grown longer than what’s left of me. But the tension between these two ideas—never ending presence within a life that will—has just the right feel. I take hold of them together; I will try not to move away.

Richard Rohr writes, “There must be, and, if we are honest, there always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain, change, or even understand.”

Just one? Sometimes that feels like a description of life, and some patches can be pretty rough. But isn’t this place he’s describing—where we encounter what’s real, then choose to sit there with it—the place we find the potential for growth? Doesn’t what feels like we might not survive it also bring us one step closer to our true selves, and therefore to God?

Richard Rohr reminds me, “I can live and work with all of it, because apparently God can. Everything belongs.”

Come to think of it, “everything belongs” is a phrase that chose me several years ago. Those words came into my life and changed the way I thought about so much—about church and Jesus and faith and every spiritual thing I was struggling with at the time, but more importantly about myself. Somehow that phrase “showed me to my seat” in my own life, introducing me to the practice of sitting with my humanness, allowing myself to just be—and be enough—in every moment and circumstance.

Author Maeve Binchy said, “I’m getting better, happier, and nicer as I grow older, so I would be terrific in a couple of hundred years’ time.”

Me too, and I’m not talking about some kind of eternal progression toward my own perfection. I mean I love myself and my life right now in ways I never knew how to before.

Thank goodness it’s a long game—I’m only now beginning to practice it.

Susan Hinckley

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When I Began to Know Mary

by Francesca Georgi

At Christmastime, we often focus primarily on the story in Luke 2,

the birth of Christ. It’s a wonderful story, and its familiarity is comforting. I love the yearly reminder of the story of the beginning of redemption. Its words are peaceful and passive, like watching beautiful scenery. But this year as Christmas has come closer, I’ve been unable to stop thinking of Mary. We know so much about her compared to many women in the Bible, and yet I feel like I know almost nothing. We often see her portrayal as a beautiful dark-haired young woman, very humble and willing to serve the Lord. We think of her as a vessel to bring the Son of God, and we predominantly focus on the story of how things happened, rather than the people who lived the story.

My last pregnancy was an incredibly difficult one, and I was so sick around Christmas last year. I was a little under the halfway point of my due date, and I just felt like I couldn’t do this. There were too many balls in the air, and something had to drop, but there were no plastic balls, only glass. There was no option but to go on. I was trying to settle in after our move, continue being a mom and wife, make Christmas happen, attempt to have a healthy pregnancy, and work for a good school semester in an area where I felt very out of place. Many times as I was lying on the couch, too sick to make it to bed, I found myself thinking, “Is this how Mary’s pregnancy felt?” I found myself praying, hoping that would somehow affect the past, that her pregnancy had not been this way. I thought of her so frequently that I began to imagine her spirit being alongside me when my pain became too intense to bear alone with no way to share the pain with someone else. I began to feel for Mary in a way that I never had before, as I suffered in a way that I never had before. The Christmas story became far more personal. I imagined myself in the situation as Mary, and I began to realize there was so much complexity beyond a few verses in scripture.

I realized Mary prepared somewhat to feel as the Savior did in the Atonement; by her long journey to Bethlehem, not being welcomed or helped by anyone, a long labor without the benefit of pain relief, a life changing event in a lowly place, the postpartum bleeding rendering her unclean according to Jewish law, the inability to really rest after her ordeal, the cluster feeding and needing to keep giving of herself after she’d given everything she could. She was ordained to be the Mother of the Beloved Son, but to prepare Him for what He needed to do in his mortal life, she needed to have an idea of what He would feel. She could never experience His pain the same way He did, but she could develop empathy alongside the fear that comes with being a mother. She had to learn to experience these emotions, so that she could understand how to let Jesus continue His tasks, instead of following a motherly instinct to protect Him.

She had to teach her child to want to save everyone, as God is no respecter of persons. He needed to understand the importance of literally every individual. Maybe part of the reason Christ reached out to those on the perimeter was because his own mother, the Mother of God, was an unwed mother. We talk so much about her faith, but we don’t mention her hardships beyond the actual birth. People tend to reach out to those who are different from them, or different from what society deems acceptable, when they’ve experienced some of the grief and ache that comes from ridicule and exclusion. Maybe the reason He went to be with people termed sinners was not just because of His mission, but also a learned empathy as the son of an unwed mother. He felt as many of those on the fringe felt because He was one of them. Similarly, we find the people with the greatest humility are the highest of the high and the lowest of the low. Somehow, He managed to fit both categories. We know He loved Mary so much, and as much as He would have struggled with how society treated Him knowing He was conceived outside of marriage, I believe part of it was that He didn’t want anyone to suffer as His mother did. He is the Beloved Son. She was His beloved mother. The gospel is a very personal experience turned into outward expression.

The entire story is about love, and looking beyond those that are easy for us to love.

Near the end of His mortal life, Jesus went to Mary where she was serving a wedding banquet. When there was no wine left, Jesus spoke with Mary. According to the JST version of John 2:4, Jesus said, “Woman, what wilt thou have me to do for thee? That will I do; for mine hour is not yet come.” When I think of that interaction in our modern day speech, I imagine that would have sounded something like Mary insisting He didn’t need to do anything, that she would figure it out or accept the embarrassment that would come with not having enough wine. I imagine Jesus would have pulled His mom aside and said, “Mom, you know I love you. I want to help you. I know you’re worried that I have things to do, but I wouldn’t offer to help right now if I couldn’t. Let me help you while I’m here with you.” The following verse, John 2:5, says, “His mother saith unto the servants, whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.” She accepted His help with incredible faith. She didn’t need to ask how this was going to work, she didn’t need Him to explain every step of the process, and she didn’t continue to shun help. She accepted His offering for peace. The Prince of Peace was sent for just that, to bring us peace. There is no matter too small for Him, just as there is no matter too great for Him. When He says His love is sufficient, it’s because it is designed to fit us perfectly, individually. Following this interaction in Cana of Galilee, Christ and His disciples went to Capernaum. Mary went with Him. I don’t really understand the significance of why it was recorded that she went with Him. There are so many reasons that could be. What I do know is that the feeling of peace it brings me to know that His mother was near in the final part of His mortal life, is palpable. The love she had for her Son probably helped the Messiah in His transformation to the Christ.

After Jesus died on the cross, we came full circle. His body was wrapped in linen, similar to His swaddling clothes. His body was anointed with spices, similar to the gifts of the Wise Men. Mary was still alone, still going through immense pain, still possibly questioning her role and her worthiness. Both times, Jesus lived. Both times, love was abundant and unceasing. Both times, the Savior was glorious. Mary was given her Son. He was her Prince of Peace, and He was called Wonderful.

We often think and talk about Christ as a step above us all, and rightfully so. But the story of Mary gives me hope. If Jesus could love and adore someone who experienced normal mortality, including mistakes, fear, sin, and sorrow, then He might love and adore me just as I love and adore Him. As our Counsellor and our Advocate with the Father, Christ is definitely on a pedestal higher than we are. But there was a reason He was born in a stable and died on a cross. His humility makes Him accessible to us, although sometimes it’s hard to imagine because of His perfection. The story and concept of Mary helped make the Savior more accessible to me, because I could find a new angle from which to learn. As Mary loved Jesus in a more personal way than only as her Savior, we are invited to love Him so personally. He genuinely wants us to come to Him, He wants to be our Savior and Redeemer; but He also wants us to have the type of relationship He did with Mary. More than just knowing our name and us knowing His, He wants our stories to mesh and become more beautiful as they entwine. He doesn’t want us on the perimeter alone, He’s already sitting with us if only we will see it. He was born on that lonely night so we never have to be lonely. He has offered His help, just as He did with Mary and the wine. He’s telling us that of course He has time for us. He’s asking us to go with Him, as Mary went to Capernaum. He walked a lonely path so that we will never have to, and it all started with a sweet baby and a lonely, tired mother.

The entire story is about love, and looking beyond those that are easy for us to love. We need to look to the perimeters and the lonely outskirts for those that feel they don’t belong. Maybe sometimes even we as individuals don’t think they belong. But I remind myself, and all of you, that the Savior was one of those who we as a society wouldn’t have thought belonged. We never know the influence of those we would dismiss. I’m so grateful for Mary showing me a new way to see this story, and reminding me that my capacity for love is unlimited, and it’s my divine instruction to love everyone, just as I strive to love Christ.

This Christmas, as we remember Christ, I invite you to think of the love He has for you individually, even knowing about the things you think would move you to the perimeter. He loves you anyway. What better way to celebrate the birth of our Savior than spreading love with no respect of persons.

Onward

by Lisa Fluckiger

When God Delights in the Chastity of Women

by Jessie Santa Maria Whittaker

I read Jacob chapter 2 in preparation for the lessons on

plural marriage. And I think it might be one of my favorite chapters in all of scripture. It’s raw and emotional and deeply human. Jacob doesn’t want to give this sermon. In fact, he says it “grieveth” him to speak so boldly. But he does it anyway because love sometimes means saying hard things.

The chapter begins with Jacob calling out pride. Which includes the Nephites’ obsession with wealth, appearance, and hierarchy. They had started to believe that prosperity made them righteous. That being better off made them better than. Jacob warns them that this mindset is corroding their souls.

When I was a kid, my family used to read passages like this during scripture study. And the focus always landed elsewhere. Pride got redefined as anything that drew attention: piercings, “worldly” hairstyles, bright clothing, or self-expression of any kind. I learned that humility meant blending in: being small, modest, deferential. That faithfulness equaled disappearing.

And maybe because of that, I also internalized something deeper and more dangerous. It was my job to prevent harm from happening to me. If a man looked at me wrong or crossed a line then I had failed at being modest enough, humble enough, safe enough…

The responsibility for other people’s choices, and for my own protection, landed squarely on my shoulders.

Reading Jacob 2 as a teenager only confirmed what I’d already absorbed. “For I, the Lord, delight in the chastity of women,” meant that God’s love depended on my ability to keep others pure. That holiness was a fragile thing. It was easily lost and it was my duty to guard it at all costs.

Reading this chapter now, as an adult and as a social worker, I see something entirely different.

Jacob isn’t chastising women; he’s defending them. He’s speaking to men who have justified exploitation and harm under the guise of divine approval. He calls them to accountability for “breaking the hearts of tender wives” and “losing the confidence of their children.” He’s naming not just individual sin, but systemic harm, the misuse of spiritual power that leaves women and children in emotional ruins.

This is the part of scripture that resonates most with my values as a social worker. Our code of ethics begins with the belief in the inherent dignity and worth of every person. It calls us to challenge injustice, to protect the vulnerable, and to hold power accountable. Jacob is doing that. And he does it courageously. He’s centering the voices of the wounded and insisting that their suffering matters.

So when I read that God “delights in the chastity of women,” I don’t hear a demand for purity. I hear a declaration of dignity. I hear a God—both Father and Mother—saying, “I delight in your wholeness. I delight when you are safe, when your body and spirit are honored, when your relationships are mutual and kind.”

That interpretation feels even more powerful in contrast to the Come, Follow Me reading of Doctrine and Covenants 132, a section that has long been painful for me and countless others. It’s the one used to justify polygamy as “God’s higher law.” [Insert barfing emoji here]…

Chastity, in its truest form, isn’t about repression at all. It’s about reverence.

But I can’t see it that way. I don’t believe a higher law could ever justify a practice that causes so much suffering, silences women, and fractures families. Jacob 2 feels like a direct rebuttal to that idea. A reminder that when religion excuses harm, it ceases to reflect the divine.

If there is a higher law, I believe it is love expressed through justice.

If there is a divine pattern, I believe it is equality, compassion, and mutual respect.

And if there is a God who delights, I believe They delight in the healing of what patriarchy has broken.

As I read Jacob’s words, I can’t help but see him as an early advocate for trauma-informed ministry. He is someone who understands the ripple effects of betrayal and exploitation. He doesn’t shame the wounded. He mourns with them. He names the grief and calls the community to repair.

And as someone who has struggled with sex for a variety of reasons (be it shame, condition, pain, fear, etc.) I find something deeply liberating in reimagining chastity as sexual integrity.

For so long, I believed that taking control of my own sexual experiences was a sin. That pleasure, agency, and exploration somehow contradicted holiness. But now I wonder if the opposite might be true.

Maybe the Law of Chastity is more about self-mastery. It’s about respect for one’s own body and others’ bodies. About knowing your body, your boundaries, your desires. About saying yes and no from a place of awareness rather than fear. About embracing the divine drive to create, connect, and experience joy. About integrating sexuality into one’s overall being in a healthy and moral way.

Chastity, in its truest form, isn’t about repression at all. It’s about reverence. For yourself. For your partner. For the life force within you. It’s about being the ultimate authority on what feels safe, sacred, and right for you.

I think this is what it means for God to delight in chastity. Not delighting in our restraint, but in our integrity. In our wholeness. In our courage to reclaim what has been taken, distorted, and hidden in shame.

The more I study Jacob 2, the more I see that the heart of the message isn’t about restriction. It’s about repair and remembering that holiness and humanity were never meant to be opposites. They were meant to hold hands.

God delights in dignity.

God delights in truth spoken in love.

God delights when we choose integrity over image, compassion over compliance, and healing over hierarchy.

That’s how I want to obey the Law of Chastity. Living in the right relationship with myself, with others, and with the Divine.

Come to Me

by Eliza Dosch

Contributors:

Francesca Georgi

Francesca is a wife and a mom of three daughters. She lives in Utah County and will receive a bachelors degree in Spring 2026. Francesca is also the author of Unlocked from The Exponent II winter edition of 2025.

Lisa Fluckiger

Lisa is a second year grad student in Chadron State College’s Clinical Mental Health Counseling MAE program. Her most recent work has been providing SEL education and support for middle school students. Long ago at BYU, Lisa earned a BA degree in chemistry and then a master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction, with an emphasis in the inclusive classroom. Her family owns a small artisan bakery in the small town where they live, and it is a place where her daughter, Eleanor, can have meaningful work and continue to participate in the community. Totally her husband’s dream, and she is all for it! In addition to studying mental health, Lisa is loving life beyond church, running with her dogs, yoga, and writing. Also Netflix.

Jessie Santa Maria Whittaker

Therapist, writer, professional meaning-maker, wife, and momma. Jessie sits with big feelings, sacred questions, and nervous systems that have had a rough day—or life. She is a lover of Christmas magic, messy faith, honest stories, and the brave work of becoming fully human.

Eliza Dosch

Eliza is a non traditional student finishing a bachelors degree in Music Education. She is a single mom of 2, and has been navigating her faith journey for about 5 years.

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Finding God

by Blakelee Ellis

It feels like from my very beginning,

I was camping, hiking, fishing, star gazing and singing around the campfire. Both of my parents spent so much of their own formative years doing those same things so when it came to raising my siblings and I they decided to pass on their love of the outdoors.

It was always very clear to me that nature is where my dad best connected with deity. The stress of his daily life, including his career as an emergency medicine physician, wore him thin. But no matter how busy he was, he took us camping almost every weekend in the summer. There I could see the stress melt away from him. He relaxed. He laughed and he was contemplative as he reset his heart and mind. He always expressed gratitude and awe at the natural beauty that God had created. To this day I can still recall EXACTLY what his voice sounds like when he looks around and says, “It’s beauuuutiful.” He never questioned that something greater than himself had crafted this beautiful world.

I have always connected with God through nature and leaving my everyday life behind, but it took on a new meaning and a new reverence in the past few years. When I suddenly couldn’t find God at church, at the temple, or even my own home, I felt completely lost. I didn’t know where I could connect with the spirit at all anymore. I felt totally alone.

I wish I could say I remembered my pull to nature and went looking for God there of my own volition, but I’m not nearly that clever. When I could no longer find God, God reached out to me through nature. I was smack dab in the middle of my faith deconstruction. I was broken, alone, constantly heartsick and spiritually adrift. After church one Sunday, my sister-in-law suggested that we should take our families on a short hike to see a waterfall. It wasn’t a “normal” Sunday activity that we engaged in, but we decided to give it a try. We made it to the waterfall and let the kids splash around in the water. I was so devastated by my lack of connection with God during church that day. I was desperate for any feeling of God in my life. I planted myself at the base of the waterfall, closed my eyes, breathed deep and reached out my entire being to God. And out there, without expecting it, I collided with God more forcefully than I had in months of longing. I didn’t hear a voice or have any words come to mind. I just felt a breeze, heard the rushing water and felt seen and heard and known. I had experienced God simply by being, by breathing and by yearning. By turning in on myself and crying out with my soul. It was a type of prayer I had never tried before. Less formality, fewer words, much more contemplative, much more visceral. I felt like I had been thrown a lifeline. That afternoon I decided that I would develop a new ritual to try to find God.

In comparison to the complex worship rituals I had experienced up until then, especially in the temple, my new ritual was extremely simple. Many people would just call it “meditating.” While that may be true, for me it was more significant. This was one of the first times I truly took ownership of my spirituality. Church was no longer working for me. I longed to make something work and I got to decide what that was. For someone who has had a lifelong struggle with self-confidence this was a huge area of growth for me. It was the beginning of a new me. Every evening I would take my dog on a walk and stop at the field attached to an elementary school. I would unleash my dog to run free and intentionally start my practice. I didn’t have much to offer God. I didn’t know anything anymore. But God says all we need is a broken heart.

3 Nephi 9:20

And ye shall offer for a sacrifice unto me a broken heart and a contrite spirit. And whoso cometh unto me with a broken heart … , him will I baptize with fire and with the Holy Ghost

On those nights I would close my eyes, tip my head to the sky, breath deep and imagine my physical heart opening wide. As my heart cracked open so too would my entire self. I would lay myself bare to the universe in hopes that God would see me open wide and decide to step in.

It’s February 26, 2024 at 9:23 AM. I don’t remember all the details of the day, but some situation left me feeling desperate. I only have the specific date and time because of my handy phone. I wish I could remember what set me off, but for the life of me, I have no recollection of the specific circumstances. I only know that in my desperation I stomped out of my house, turned north and walked until I was at the top of a nearby hill. It was maybe 200 yards from my house and “hill” is a generous term. It was a slight incline. But it gave me the space to breath and calm. I rage dictated into my phone everything that I was feeling and this is what came out:

My family and I were on vacation in St. George, Utah. We had heard that the shores of the Virgin River were a fun place to take the kids. In the heat of the summer the shallow waters get as warm as a bathtub and kids are free to skip rocks, make sand castles and bask in the warm water. Again, I was feeling so disconnected from the God I once knew. The one I found at church and with my community didn’t exist anymore. I was still in the deep trudge of unlearning and relearning everything about my spirituality. In his book, The Universal Christ, Richard Rohr calls it our “inner journey.”

Once the real inner journey begins—once you come to know that in Christ, God is forever overcoming the gap between human and divine—the Christian path becomes less about climbing and performance, and more about descending, letting go, and unlearning. Knowing and loving Jesus is largely about becoming fully human, wounds and all, instead of ascending spiritually or thinking we can remain unwounded. (The ego does not like this fundamental switch at all, so we keep returning to some kind of performance principle, trying to climb out of this messy incarnation instead of learning from it.)

I was having a difficult time wanting to take my kids to church at all and longed for something different. I was so pleased when my husband suggested a Sunday afternoon river visit. I sat in the sand and watched my kids play. I marveled at the tall reeds, the warm water and the sun warming my skin. I felt such joy and wholeness in that moment. My kids were joyful and so was I. I paused and thought, “God, are you here? You are more present in the river and reeds than you have been in a church building in years. I’m so grateful to encounter you today. Thank you for making your presence known.” After a few hours we jumped back in the car to head home. Before we could even pull away I turned and I said to my kids, “I felt God today. I felt God out there in the water and the wind and the sun. I’m so happy I found God today with you.”

Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. I call that kind of deep and calm seeing “contemplation.”

—Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ

This definition of contemplation teaches us that location is not a determining factor for finding God. In fact, the scriptures are full of stories illustrating that God will meet us where we are, as we are. Haggar is cast out into the barren wilderness. She cries out to God and receives a blessing that lasts for generations. Jacob wrestles with an angel on a river bank. God appears to Moses through a burning bush. After much fear and exhaustion, Elijah flees into the wilderness where he finally stills and hears God. Deborah, a prophetess and judge of Israel, lives under a tree and receives God’s blessing to help destroy the Canaanites. Ruth believes God called her to follow her mother in law into her home land. Priscilla constantly travels through her ministry. Jesus himself fasts and prays in the wilderness for 40 days.

In John 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus did not wait for her to come to Him. He went out of his way to meet her where she was. She was shunned and broken. She was desperate enough to break all societal conventions and journey to the well midday. Jesus showed up for her in a desert place where society and religion had left her parched. Jesus not only met her there, but changed her life.

19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.

20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.”

21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.

22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.

23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.

24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

This woman is lamenting the fact that she cannot worship God in the place she has been told is THE ONLY PLACE to worship. She is literally banned from the temple. She believes she has been exiled from God. But Jesus gives her hope. Jesus basically introduced her to an entirely new way of thinking. It isn’t about location at all. It’s about spirit and truth. It’s about coming to understand that every encounter in our lives can be an encounter with the divine. Because we can take spirit and truth with us WHEREVER we go.

In his podcast episode, Jesus H. Christ: Part 4 - The Whole Thing Is A Temple, Rob Bell says:

This is a new understanding in human history about what it means to be human because what this story keeps insisting is that a human is where the divine dwells… Now his first followers took this and went with it because…in the letter to the Corinthians, Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s spirit dwells in your midst? [Jesus] comes to show you that the whole thing is a temple, that you are a temple.

The more I learned about grace, about my true divinity as human, the more I understood that we are all divine. I mean, I had always heard that, but I began to internalize it on a different level. I began to REALLY understand that. We are all divine. The rubber really met the road and I put that into action. I surmised that if I really am divine, if I really have God within me, then I encounter God by being my highest self. By putting aside my ego, my pain, my selfishness and looking for God within myself. To quote Richard Rohr AGAIN (sorry, y’all. He is just the best):

You see, we do not earn or find God. We just get ourselves in the way. We let go of illusion and the preoccupations of the false self. As the cheap scaffolding falls away, the soul stands revealed. The soul, or true self, cannot be created or worked for. It is awakened. It is, and it is already. The soul is God’s ‘I AM’ continued in me. That part of me already knows, desires, and truly seeks God. Here ‘I’ and God seem to be one ‘I.’

Maybe nature really just gives me the opportunity to get out of my own way. To connect with the divine that is inside me. It gives space, time and quiet for the spirit in me to connect with the spirit everywhere. If God is within me then a major part of encountering God is becoming my highest self. Nature facilitates that for me. So the question isn’t, “WHERE do I find God,” or “HOW do I find God,” but “Where do I find ME? How do I find ME? Where and how am I most connected with myself?”

At the beginning of October my dad and I decided to summit the Pfeifferhorn, a peak near the Salt Lake Valley. The peak stands at an elevation of 11,326 ft. For context, the Salt Lake Valley has an average elevation of 4,327 feet. We would nearly triple our elevation in this climb. Our schedules only allowed us to summit on a Sunday. So instead of going to church with my family, I went on the 12 mile summit climb with my dad.

I was physically exhausted at the end of the day, but my heart was full. Even though I had left my family for the day, I had done something that brings me true joy as a form of worship. My worship was savoring this beautiful world that God created, being centered in my body, pushing myself to my physical limit and silencing my mind enough to let my spirit reach out to the God within me and the presence all around me. I stood in awe of the world around me. And I experienced all of this with someone who has shaped my life and spirituality, someone I love so deeply.

In this moment I felt gratitude, I felt connection. I felt God.

As I hiked I listened to another episode of The Rob Cast, and almost on cue, almost as if God orchestrated it to be so, Rob says:

…This life that you and I have in this house, it flows from something, it flows from somewhere, it flows from someone.

It is a gift that we receive. When you took your first breath, that is a gift. The breath you just took, a gift.

You are the recipient of this extraordinary gift of life itself. The universe has been generous with you. Before anything else can be said about any one of us, we are the recipients of an overabundant, overflowing act of generosity, which I think is all of the people I have interacted with over the years who have gone through tremendous trauma, tragedy, suffering.

It’s like you have to, you absorb that, you feel it, you grieve, you weep, you are angry, you shake your fists at the heavens. You give it all its proper expression, because you are human and you need to, otherwise it is stuffed down in there. But what I have observed is how many people at some point, after working through all of the very real human emotions of difficulty, suffering, it’s so interesting to me how many times people will tell some version of the story in which, and then one day they got up and thought, but I am here, I survived, I am still breathing.

It’s like the gift keeps giving. So in spite of all the ways that the world feels unfair, all of the betrayal, loss, injustice, every reason any one of us have to say, come on, house, goodness, seriously, there is this truth that is the truth that undergirds everything else. The first word about any of us is not everything that’s gone wrong.

The first word about any of us is that before anything, we received this extraordinary, generous gift of life itself…In some ways, …you begin the prayer by acknowledging source.”

I’m here. This is before anything else a gift. And I begin by returning to that primal, original impulse of gratitude for the gift.

The RobCast, Ep. 210, Jesus H. Christ: Part 2 - 66 Words

Blakelee Ellis

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