Afraid to Believe

I have a sneaking sympathy for Zacharias (see Luke 1:5-24). When an angel told him that his barren wife would have a child, his response was “Whereby shall I know this? for I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years.”

I get it. I get it because sometimes I’m afraid to believe. I imagine his feelings at the time were something like this: “I’ve been praying for this for years. There is nothing my wife and I have wanted more. This has been our most deeply cherished hope. Now she’s past childbearing years and I think you’re telling me she will have a child. And, oh, how I desperately want to believe that. But I’m afraid. I’m afraid of what will happen to me and my faith if I believe that now and then it doesn’t happen. So please, help me.”

The angel responded: “thou shalt be dumb, and not able to speak, until the day that these things shall be performed, because thou believest not my words, which shall be fulfilled in their season.”

I think I would have been grateful. I would have thanked God for something tangible to help me believe it really was from Him, something to help sustain my faith until a child was conceived. And then, throughout the pregnancy, with all the fears of complications and the many things that can go wrong so easily when an older woman has a child, it would have been a daily reminder of God’s promise.

I trust God. I really do. He makes me promises. Sometimes He makes me very specific promises. And I believe them. For the most part.

I have so many experiences where I trusted inspiration and it was clearly right. God tells me a friend needs me and I find out they do need me. God tells me what to do for them and it works. Or God tells me he’ll take care of my financial stress and then I get an unexpected promotion. He does that kind of thing all the time.

But sometimes, things don’t happen the way I think they’re supposed to. Sometimes that’s pretty easy to reconcile. There was the time I felt strongly to pursue a job. Every time I’d felt that before, I got the job. So I was excited, because I really wanted this one. And I prayed before, during and after the interview and felt really good about it. And then I didn’t get it. But God never actually told me I would get it. He just told me to pursue it. So that’s OK, right?

But every so often, it doesn’t work like that. Every so often I feel like God is telling me something that I desperately want (like an investigator is going to get baptized, or I’m going to meet my husband this year). And I believe it. And it doesn’t happen.

My reaction is usually not to doubt God. It’s easier to mistrust myself. Maybe I misunderstood. Maybe He was just telling me to work towards it and I wanted to believe it was a promise that it would actually happen. But, then, there are times when I’ve clearly only felt “work towards it” and that felt different. So why did it feel so sure that time? People say “well maybe it’s what you needed at the time to get to where you were supposed to be.” No. I won’t accept that. God doesn’t lie to me. He won’t lie to me to get me to do something.

I’m a lawyer’s daughter. I’ve learned to break down wording. Things like “soon” and “but a small moment” are not legally defined lengths of time. “This will happen” without a qualifying timeline can mean it will happen in the next life. God can and does give very specific revelation. I don’t want to chicken out of fully receiving it. But I don’t want to be a sucker either.

So I hedge my bets. I leave myself an out. When God makes promises, I believe Him, but tuck away an alternate interpretation just in case. But where’s the line? Where’s the line between patiently, humbly submitting to the Lord, and insufficient faith? I don’t have the answer to that. I like to think the gap is narrowing with time, but I don’t know that it will ever disappear completely.

I'm Not as Good as You Think I Am

“I found someone new for you to help.” She said it with the same tone that I would expect someone to say “I have European chocolate for you” or “I got you a new book.” She literally thought she was offering me one of my favorite things in the world.

I didn’t have the heart to tell my friend she was wrong, that I wasn’t the person she thought I was. Because I wanted to be that person. I really did. And apparently that was enough to fool her.

It’s not that I don’t genuinely want to help people. I do. I want to care. But sometimes, that’s all I’ve got. I know I should be patient with a new employee, or go talk to the new person, or offer to do the dishes. And I usually do it. But I don’t always want to. It’s a choice. It’s a habit.

My friend saw me as the person I want to become, the person I try to emulate. I am grateful for that. She saw the best in me. She didn’t see that sometimes I fight it. She didn’t see how often I have resented the expectation that I will act altruistically. "Oh, ask Laura. She's good at that." No, I'm not. It's no easier for me than anyone else. I just choose to do it because it's right.

But it really isn't just others’ expectations. I expect it of myself.

God has set me up. My whole life is a set-up. He sent me seven younger siblings. He gave me responsibility early in life. Some of my first visiting teaching assignments were to sisters with serious medical problems. God led me to jobs that involved teaching, training, and coaching. He called me as a missionary. He set me up, over and over, to care for the most vulnerable – for children and for people with disabilities.

And I’ve walked right into it every time. I’ve walked right in because that’s where I want to go. Or at least, I want to want it.

I’m grateful really. I worry about who I would be without that drive to serve, to take care of people. I have other characteristics, too. I’m ambitious. I’m comfortable with hard work. I like to think I’m reasonably intelligent. None of those qualities are inherently good. They can be used for good. But they can easily be used to be manipulative and selfish, and even downright evil.

God has given me a focus, and it has (mostly) kept me out of trouble. It’s grown within me. I am closer today to the person I want to be than I was when my friend told me so enthusiastically of an opportunity to serve.

Things I No Longer Believe

There are some things I used to subconsciously believe. They were never taught as doctrine, but I don’t think I am the only teenager who developed a dangerous kind of faith. In a nutshell, I believed something like this: If I follow God, the really, really bad things can’t happen to me.

What qualifies as “really, really bad” is probably not the same for everyone. In my case, it would be things like rape, divorce, or a child committing suicide. I think having to come home early from a mission was on that list at one point for me, too.

There were some fundamental flaws in my thinking, but they are so subtle it’s hard to see. Because God does protect us from things. Because the truly worst things really cannot happen if we follow God. But there’s a heck of a lot of room for suffering before it reaches that point. He doesn’t promise that things won’t happen. He just promises that he’ll be able to heal us. He promises that if something truly horrific happens it won’t rob us of our exaltation, of our opportunity to endure to the end.

And I think that’s my problem. I subconsciously categorized some things into being beyond healing. Like rape and divorce. For me, the opportunity to give my virginity to my eternal companion is essential. Rape or divorce would take that away. And regardless of how much emotional healing Christ gives, I would not be physically restored. Granted, I couldn’t be physically restored from amputation either, and the thought of any permanent physical damage bothers me a lot. But somehow that doesn’t seem quite as bad to me. Maybe it’s because I could see how a missing hand would be restored in the resurrection, but I somehow exempted other forms of physical restoration from that miracle.

Whatever the reason, there are certain things I believed God would protect me from. He would warn me not to go to a party, or not to date/marry someone, or to check on my child, or not to do the thing that would cause the injury that would send me home from a mission. And the thing is, I still believe God does that frequently. And I believe that sometimes really, really bad things happen because promptings are ignored. I have ignored promptings and had bad things happen. And when that happens, it is important for me to accept that and learn from it.

But what if there are times when you are following God and the bad things happen anyway? What if you hide Jews during the holocaust and the end result is that you end up in a concentration camp where you’re sexually abused? What if God is the one who told you to hide Jews in the first place? What if it’s not that obvious? I think it would be a lot easier to come home from a mission because you got hit by a bus while saving a child than because you developed severe depression as a missionary. But what if God needed you for six months and you never fully realize how that changed lives? What if a battle with depression was the inevitable result of your service (just as permanent health problems and an early death were an inevitable result for three young men who carried a handcart company through the icy Sweetwater River)? What if you’re Job?

I think, in the course of discipleship, everyone will eventually come up against something “really, really bad.” That doesn’t mean it will be something exactly from your list. It may not be something you realized would be that hard. After all, I think that list is mostly subconscious. But there will come a point when you ask “God, why didn’t you show me how to avoid this? Did I miss something? How could this be right? Why didn’t you warn me?”

When that happens there are a few possible answers. One is “I did warn you, but I let you choose. And now, stick with me, and I will heal you and turn your suffering to glory.” That answer takes a lot of humility to receive and time to sort through.

Another answer is “I won’t protect you from everything. That’s part of mortal life.” Or, even, “There was no righteous way to avoid this.” And that can be faith-shattering. It can challenge foundations of belief. It can mean discovering that God is not who we thought he was, or at least that we misunderstood our relationship with Him. It doesn’t mean that God wanted it to happen. He never wants something like rape. That only happens through sin and God hates sin.

I get that the drunk driver has to have the agency to drive drunk, but I want God to tell me not to drive down that road with my family that night. Sure, I’m willing to die to follow Christ. But am I willing to suffer other forms of abuse and still follow Him? Am I willing to watch loved ones suffer or die and still follow Him? These are questions I once conveniently ignored.

In the last few years, I’ve grown a lot more comfortable considering these questions. The following things have helped:

•  I’ve gained a deeper testimony and understanding of the atonement. Part of this is seeing the atonement in my own life. Part of this is seeing the atonement in other people’s lives. I’ve seen people go through terrible trials and come through battered, wounded, but eternally OK

•  I’ve had bad things happen to me. Not really, really bad things. But I have asked God “Why? Why didn’t you protect me?” and He’s told me “I won’t protect you from everything. But, let me show you how I already prepared everything to allow you to heal completely.”

•  I have followed the Spirit and experienced results I didn’t expect. I have asked “Why? Why did you tell me to do that if it was going to have this result?” I’ve had him respond with “trust me” and found that I really do.

I think the most important thing is that I’m better at believing that who I become is more important than a sum of events that happen to me. For example, I genuinely see sexual purity as being about whether I am filled with pure Christ-like love for myself and those around me, whether I see everyone as a child of God and not an object, whether I have control of my passions, whether I have the ability to give myself completely to a spouse and be entirely faithful. That is, in fact, what the doctrine teaches. It’s just hard to wrap your head around it as a teenager in Sunday School.

Skipping Church

I’ve seen a lot of love going around Facebook for Elder Renlund lately, so I feel like maybe I should focus on saying nice things about the other two apostles. But the thing is, Elder Renlund once gave me the answers I needed almost a year before I needed them, and that’s the story I’ve been thinking about lately.

You tend to pay really good attention to General Conference when you’re a missionary. There are several talks where I can tell you what year, month and session they were given in simply because I remember what city I was in, what investigators I was thinking about, and if I had any of them there with me. So, I remembered Elder Renlund’s October 2009 conference talk even though it wasn’t one that struck me too deeply at the time (in case you were wondering, I was in Praha. I was thinking about Lubomir, Jitka and Saša. And Saša should have been with us, but wasn’t – he needed Elder Holland’s talk that session).

Fast forward almost a year. I was home from my mission and working as a caretaker/trainer for people with disabilities. I had just been moved to a shift that required me to work on Sunday mornings, with the understanding that I would be able to take some of the people I worked with to church, and thus attend myself (there are definite perks to living in Utah). I’d never worked on Sunday before. I’d never had a job that I felt justified it, but the people I worked with would not survive without 24-hour care.

The problem was, not everyone in the apartment I cared for was able to go to church. So if I was working alone, I couldn’t just leave some people home alone. But, I had felt good about moving to that shift and felt that if I did my part, the Lord would bless me to be able to attend church.

The first Sunday where I worked alone, I went to every other apartment in my building asking if there were other residents who wanted to attend church and if it was possible to combine apartments so I could take everyone who wanted to go. No luck.

Next, I asked if there was anyone who could cover my apartment so I could take my half-hour lunch break at 9 am, run over to the church building, take the sacrament, and run back to the apartment (another perk of living in Utah… that was actually a possibility). Someone said they would try.

At 9:10, nobody had come. I sat down in my apartment and cried. I felt I had done everything in my power, not only to attend church myself, but to help those who wanted to go. I’d failed. And I felt let down. I don’t think I realized until that day how much weekly church attendance meant to me.

That’s when I remembered this story from Elder Renlund’s talk the previous year:

In 1980 we moved as a family across the street from the hospital where I trained and worked. I worked every day, including Sundays. If I finished my Sunday work by 2:00 p.m., I could join my wife and daughter and drive to church for meetings that began at 2:30.

One Sunday late in my first year of training, I knew that I would likely finish by 2:00. I realized, however, that if I stayed in the hospital just a little longer, my wife and daughter would depart without me. I could then walk home and take a needed nap. I regret to say that I did just that. I waited until 2:15, walked home slowly, and lay down on the couch, hoping to nap. But I could not fall asleep. I was disturbed and concerned. I had always loved going to church. I wondered why on this day the fire of testimony and the zeal that I had previously felt were missing.

The spirit whispered to me that “the fire of testimony and the zeal” were important. As long as I maintained that, I would be OK. I would be spiritually safe even if there were times I could not attend church. I pondered on the times in the New Testament when the Savior was accused of breaking the Sabbath. I’d thought in the past it was kind of odd that it came up so many times. But now, it was a distinction I needed to understand.

The Savior fed people on the Sabbath. The Savior treated the sick on the Sabbath. I realized that I had been very blessed for several years to be able to focus on myself and my own Sabbath worship. But my job was not the only thing that would challenge that. Someday, as a mother, I would have babies and sick children. I needed to know how to keep the Sabbath in those circumstances, too.

And the answer, again, was Elder Renlund’s talk. Would I ever use my circumstances as an excuse not to attend church? Or would I maintain the fire and zeal to do everything in my power to worship in sacrament meeting every week? That Sunday, I felt my offering was acceptable to the Lord.

In conclusion, my fervent but unsuccessful effort to attend sacrament meeting that Sunday had an impact I didn’t anticipate. Because of that day, everyone in the building knew how much I wanted to attend church. I never missed again – not even on the day that the sanitizer broke and flooded the kitchen. Others stepped in to finish cleaning up so I could take people to church as planned.

And on the Sundays when there weren’t enough staff for me to be able to take people for the whole time, someone always covered me for a half hour so I could go participate in the sacrament ordinance (in fact, it was usually the lady who I had initially thought disliked me for being a goody-goody Mormon).

Here’s the link to Elder Renlund’s talk: Preserving the Heart's Mighty Change