For when it feels like everyone is leaving
We are all going to be OK!!
Just weeks before I was going to leave on my mission in 2017, President Nelson asked the young adults of the Church to do something—something that felt like such a big assignment that I kind of ignored it until I eventually forgot all about it.
Whoops.
But gratefully, invitations from prophets don’t expire, and this one would become my spiritual life line about four years later when I finally took President Nelson up on His promise.
He summed up his challenge to me (and all the other young adults) like this:
“I asked the young adults of the Church to consecrate a portion of their time each week to study everything Jesus said and did as recorded in the standard works. I invited them to let the scriptural citations about Jesus Christ in the Topical Guide become their personal core curriculum.”
Do you see why I was a bit intimidated by that request? The main entry in the Topical Guide for Jesus Christ is lengthy on its own, but then there are 57 subtitles about Him, each with their own list of scriptures to study.
That would take months to read! Surely a challenge like that was for the scriptorians and most studious among us.
But a few years later I found that the challenge was also for the most shaky among us—it was for me when friends’ questions and strangers’ voices about the Church made me desperate to feel confident in my discipleship again.
I’m sure most of you can relate (or one day will) to the experience of either a friend or voices in the media telling you things that are hurtful and sometimes anxiety-inducing about the Church. It could be an unsettling aspect of the Church’s past, or a negative experience someone had in a Church setting recently, or frustrations with how an aspect of the Church functions.
Or maybe rather than external voices, you’ve had a negative experience, or feel like you don’t belong, or you’ve had a really difficult time that has you genuinely wondering if all this talk about God’s love is just fluff.
The bottom line? The older you get, the more complicated faith can sometimes feel.
But can I let you in on a little secret? That’s actually a good thing. When we are pushed to work our way through complexity, we come out the other side with a more personal, genuine faith in and relationship with God. And there is really nothing better than that.
About two years after my mission, I felt like I was getting sucked into a spiritual tailspin that left me feeling confused and disoriented. A close friend of mine repeatedly shared some of her feelings of bitterness and confusion related to the Church, and her words scared me. I am confident that she wasn't trying to do me any harm, these were just pressing issues in her life and she wanted to confide in me.
And it wasn’t just her. I heard plenty of other people from family members to people on Facebook talk about their concerns related to faith.
I often felt sick to my stomach and just flat out nervous. Was all of this spirituality a big hoax? Was the Church doing more harm than good? Why hadn’t I considered these issues before? What did I know about being a good person? Did I even know anything?
I still loved the gospel and the Church, but I felt like I was being so crowded in by hard topics and hurt feelings and unanswered questions that I couldn’t seem to feel the warm light of the gospel anymore.
But I wanted that warmth back. I needed that warmth back. And that’s when the Holy Ghost came into my mind and basically gently said, “Hey, remember that invitation from a prophet that you forgot about? Now might be a good time to give it a try.” Because I craved a sense of peace and solid ground under my spiritual feet, I was ready and willing to listen.
So I did it—I read all of the verses in the Topical Guide under Jesus Christ.
Thank you, I will hold for my well-earned applause.
Just kidding. But I do count that study as one of the great spiritual accomplishments of my life. It took me almost a year, but I read those verses and took notes on what I learned and what I felt. Now, I am not trying to sound like a story from the Liahona when I say that I gradually felt so much better. In ways I’m not sure how to describe, I didn’t feel so shaky anymore. The promise President Nelson had given along with his invitation to study materialized for me:
“This may seem like a large assignment, but I encourage you to accept it. If you proceed to learn all you can about Jesus Christ, I promise you that your love for Him, and for God’s laws, will grow beyond what you currently imagine. I promise you also that your ability to turn away from sin will increase. Your desire to keep the commandments will soar. You will find yourself better able to walk away from the entertainment and entanglements of those who mock the followers of Jesus Christ.”
Focusing on Jesus makes everything easier, friends. Learning about Him calms your heart, clears your vision, and sharpens your senses to tell what is true and what is not.
I think the biggest thing we need to realize is that you are the only person who can learn about Jesus for you. You have to be in charge of this one.
Of course, we all support each other and go to church to learn and all of that is wonderful and needed—but it’s not enough. I learned again in those years after my mission (and no doubt will keep learning), that the greatest feelings of spiritual security come when it’s just me and God in my bedroom; evening after evening (or morning after morning) spent getting to know each other.
I love what Elder David A. Bednar said at a devotional I attended at the University of Utah: “If all you know about the gospel of Jesus Christ is what others have told you, you’ll never know enough.”
Take Lehi’s dream of the tree of life in the Book of Mormon. Lehi walks through darkness until he reaches a tree with fruit that he says is “sweet, above all that I ever before tasted.” Fruit that “filled [his] soul with exceedingly great joy.”
After eating something so delicious, Lehi wants his family to get some too. So he looks around and when he sees his family, the scriptures say he “beckons” to them and calls out with a “loud voice” that they should come get some fruit too.
But have you ever noticed what Lehi didn’t do?
He didn’t reach up, grab a piece of fruit, and throw it to his family members. Neither did he gather up a big basketful and walk it over to them. His family had to come and get it. I’m sure Lehi was doing all he could to encourage his family to get moving, but each of them had to make the choice to take the perhaps long walk up to the tree and taste that sweetness for themselves.
This gospel has a lot of sweetness and joy to offer you, friends, but you’ve got to take charge of your faith and come and taste it. Please don’t rely on what others who have tasted the fruit have said—whether they are still currently eating or have put the fruit down to try something else. You need to know for yourself how delicious it is.
People who are still partaking won’t do the sweetness justice, and those who have walked away will inevitably forget the flavor. Memories fade and new experiences take over. People may even tell you the journey to the tree wasn’t worth it or that the taste isn’t all everyone else hypes it up to be. Their feelings and experiences are valid, but we need to be in control of our own. President Nelson said,
“I plead with you to take charge of your testimony. Work for it. Own it. Care for it. Nurture it so that it will grow. Feed it truth. Don’t pollute it with the false philosophies of unbelieving men and women and then wonder why your testimony is waning.”
I found President Nelson’s use of the word “pollute” interesting.
When I think about pollution, my mind goes to air pollution, which can be a real problem in the Salt Lake Valley where I live. One car’s exhaust alone doesn’t cause poor air quality, but when millions of us are driving around and sending pollutants into the sky we begin to have a problem. Then the sky gets dim, it’s harder to see the mountains, the smog we all dread here in the Salt Lake Valley descends, and my life takes on the hue of a melodramatic boy band music video every time I step outside.
Our faith is just as susceptible to pollutants: a casual misguided or mocking comment here or there may not cloud up our spiritual sky, but when the stream of voices challenging gospel living is constantly coming at us, then we might start to have a problem. Then it becomes hard to see.
And do you know where I noticed the majority of those pollutants coming from in my life during that time I felt so spiritually shaky? Instagram. One caption here, one 10 second clip there, one well-designed graphic there, and the pollution started to add up.
Now before I go any further with this story, I want you all to know that I do not believe social media to be inherently bad. Not at all. Of course it can be used in powerful, beautiful, uplifting ways. But I also think it is also far more spiritually dangerous than we give it credit for, especially if we are on it as consistently as I was (I know I’m not the only one that had a habit of checking my feed just about every time I had a free two seconds).
This isn’t going to be true for all of you, but it was very clear to me that my Instagram account was no longer enriching my life. But it had been such a natural part of my routine for almost eight years that I had a hard time cutting down. I finally resolved that the best thing I could do was delete my account. . . it just took me a while to act on that resolve. I was afraid of potential social consequences or if I’d regret my decision.
My best friend Jess and I often talked about the woes of Instagram and had often considered deleting our accounts. I went to visit her in Logan, Utah, once on a beautiful fall day, and we took a long walk through a gorgeous park with vibrant orange, yellow, and red trees and a perfectly quaint stream running through the middle.
Our conversation again turned to Instagram and I mentioned that I was really serious about deleting my account, which honestly felt like a radical decision. But it turns out that she was serious about it too. And the more we talked about it while walking those trails, the more I felt that warm glow of the Spirit start to spread in my chest. My heart started beating faster. I could feel so keenly in the crisp autumn air that this was the right choice.
So we did it. Jess and I went home and sat next to each other on her couch and went through the long process of permanently deleting an account. Not disabling, but deleting. We giggled, we laughed, we cheered! The whole afternoon felt so liberating!
It felt like I was taking charge. Taking charge of my time. Taking charge of what voices I let fill my head. Taking charge of the experiences that build my beliefs. Taking charge of my testimony. It’s been over three years since that day, and I’ve never regretted deleting my account, nor have I started a new one.
I’ve just listed two examples from my life, but there are many ways you can take charge of your testimony. All it takes is desire and determination to do so. I love, love these words from author Michael S. Wilcox, and even had them as the lock screen on my phone for a while:
“Of all the accomplishments of life, to find God is the greatest.”
Learning about God and Jesus and seeking out experiences with Them is an accomplishment—the greatest accomplishment that sometimes feels hard but will ripple out and make every other aspect of our life richer and deeper. In the October 2022 conference President Nelson read a quote from President Ezra Taft Benson that he called profound and is like music to my ears:
“Men and women who turn their lives over to God will discover that He can make a lot more out of their lives than they can. He will deepen their joys, expand their vision, quicken their minds, … lift their spirits, multiply their blessings, increase their opportunities, comfort their souls, raise up friends, and pour out peace.”
Who doesn’t want all of those things? I know I do. And I know that the path to them is intentional discipleship. Friends, we can and must love and respect people wherever they are on their faith journey. We also must be true to what we have felt and experienced—and continue to seek ways to refresh our relationship with Christ.
“If we remove ourselves from the light of the gospel, our own light begins to dim—not in a day or a week but gradually over time—until we look back and can’t quite understand why we had ever believed the gospel was true. Our previous knowledge might even seem foolish to us because what once was so clear has again become blurred, hazy, and distant.”
Life doesn’t need to feel blurred or hazy; it can be crisp and clear like it was for me that fall day in a small park in a small town making the right choice. God wants you to know Him and be close to His light.
“This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3, emphasis added).
Whoever you are, wherever you are, wherever you’ve been, you can take charge and know Them too. Now that is a cause for applause. A cause that I deeply, truly believe will all be worth it. I want to share one final quote from President Nelson that I printed out and kept in my scriptures for months; often pulling it out to read and usually cry over during sacrament meeting because it is so beautiful to me. I hope you feel its beauty too.
“In a coming day, you will present yourself before the Savior. You will be overwhelmed to the point of tears to be in His holy presence. You will struggle to find words to thank Him for paying for your sins, for forgiving you of any unkindness toward others, for healing you from the injuries and injustices of this life.
You will thank Him for strengthening you to do the impossible, for turning your weaknesses into strengths, and for making it possible for you to live with Him and your family forever. His identity, His Atonement, and His attributes will become personal and real to you.
But you don’t have to wait until then. Choose to be one of His true disciples now. Be one who truly loves Him, who truly wants to serve and lead as He did. I promise you that if you will study His words, your ability to be more like Him will increase. I know this is true.”
Bonus Blossoms
Hi! This is where I share a few random things I love, hopefully to add a little extra pink to swirl around your day.
An article I wrote for Church magazines: “How Can I Keep My Faith Strong When Others Are Leaving?”
I came across this cover of “The Sounds of Music” and think it will be go to calm-down song from now until forever.
And for all of your extremely calm music needs, please see everything ever written by Trevor Kowalski.