In my last post, I spoke about feelings of abandonment and loneliness. Another true feeling that has jarred me over the last 5 years is the feeling of being lied to. It hurts.
The feeling of being lied to is perhaps the single hardest thing to overcome in this world. When pains run deep, can you ever truly trust again?
The last lines of that song though. Wow! Lyrics are here.
The answer is “Yes.” You can.
The antidote to this feeling is perspective. Understanding things as much as possible from the perspective of those behind the pain.
In my life, I have learned to ask “why” someone would do something hurtful to me. As I seek to answer that question truthfully, I gain perspective and love. Empathy. It leads to enough understanding to forgive. Both sides are edified in forgiveness.
No matter how much it hurts. No matter what. Forgiveness.
It includes the necessary act of forgiving myself as a part of repentance. When I am deserving of it. That requires aligning my own life with a truthful perspective.
Underlying is a trust that mankind is generally going to manage our own natures and nurtures well enough to improve our lot. During my freshman year at BYU in Econ 110 with Dr. Kearl, I learned that we should be self-interested, not selfish. In so doing, we make everything else outside of that a little nicer. Faith. Hope.
After all we can do, nothing is complete without Christ. Christ suffered more than we can fathom, and we can lean on His Atonement. In other words, God descended beneath it all, and through His great strength, whether it be the strength of His arm or the strength of His outreach through time, space, and Almighty engineering of science, He is able to move. To create and ignite. To improve our condition. To help position our stake as we align with Him. Charity.
When things fell apart with my marriage and faith in the way I was raised, especially faith in Christ, I felt lied to. Not by any individual living person, but by the framework of my life. Nearly every participant in the Ex-Mormon Reddit feels to some degree united by that feeling, along with incredibly positive feelings of building a new life in the real, non-bubbled world. For instance, this post from today talks about feeling lied to.
While truth does not change, our understanding of truth changes, as we gain perspective. In the process, it may seem that the truth has changed. It is better to think of previously understood truths as early threads placed in a tapestry under construction. Beauty arrives as new threads are added, woven around those early threads, subduing the relative importance of the originals. Necessary for the overall end product. Spreading the contribution out more evenly across all threads, people, truths. The analogy is deep.
Let’s take a break with a great song.
“Arise and seize the day.” I feel that as I struggle with pain from my car accident.
“Wrongs will be righted if we’re united. Let us seize the day.” What a message for 2020. What a message for both members of my church and former members of my church to hear; both stand to benefit from this message.
The same growth analogy could be said of lilies. Consider them. Oh how they grow.
Religiously, I didn’t know where the lies I felt ended. Did they end with Mormonism, while Christianity remains true, as some of my friends and family believe? Or is Christianity full of lies too? Is there even a God? If so, how concrete is God?
At the core, I asked myself: How do I unlearn 35 years of daily prayer conversing with Heavenly Father? He was real to me. So real. My understanding of God had been steadily improving. A constant climb upwards. Those 35 years became a tremendous knowledge and experience bulwark for me. Built on the backs of loving friends and family. Generations of them. Was all that in vain?
It was not. I don’t have to unlearn it. I know better. I’ll align.
Is it for you? Should everyone do what I do?
Nope. You are out there discovering truths on your own.
Your understanding of truth is vital. I want to learn things from you that I don’t understand. I want to teach the things that I do know.
Let’s all align with true principles of life. With true happiness. peace, and joy. With truth itself. The truth is the truth.
Turning to God, to the best image of God we’ve ever had, likely when we most reverenced Him, is the quickest way to get from where we are now to an improved state. A state where we can be aligned with more truth than ever before.
I overcame my doubts and chose to return to church through a massive perspective shift and alignment with God.
Which coincided in lockstep with healing my perspective and alignment with Kaylynn. The day this occurred for Kaylynn and I was on Memorial Day in Destin. It was my density, no I mean my destiny. It paved the way for me to consider the option to return to church.
Add in 3 ER visits and, yeah, I think I have my bases covered. I am ready to be home and rest peacefully. I’ll write sometime soon about an idea of proxy measuring peace.
I’ve lived.
“With every broken bone I swear I lived.”
So where I once had departed, I came back. Logically.
First, it was at a lunch with my friend Justin that I went from anchor up about God, to a choice to firmly believe in Him.
Second, it was a mental bridge-building exercise for me to understand that Jesus Christ is my Savior. He is who I have always understood Him to be. My understanding is pretty good, but imperfect. I have so much more to learn. All of this I will write about in time.
I’ll also write soon about mental bridge-building to get from a belief in Christ to a belief in my church. That bridge for me was the hardest to rebuild. I have seen new perspectives as I have had different perspectives. Along with it, I have discovered much truth about the world that would have been otherwise difficult for me to understand.
I had burnt my bridges of faith. In rebuilding them, I’ve now used better materials and methods. I know how to do more things than I used to.
Disobedience is painful because it’s outside the box of safety. Thinking outside the box builds collective truth and allows for wise readjustments of the box. For me, it requires alignment with things I know to be true which I have learned on Reddit and from other former members of the Church who I love. I am still learning from them. That is a good thing for me. Likely for my family and beyond; it’s their choice to listen.
Does disobedience, after a repentance process, become obedience? It sure can be painful, let me tell ya. If done right, it expands the overall understanding of truth.
I have felt lied to by the church. My current bet is that the church did lie. Which means some church leaders have probably lied. They aren’t perfect.
My bet does not change my choice, because I have gained perspective.
Perhaps church leaders of the past encountered difficult leadership issues in a time when God went quiet on them. Their test. God has gone quiet on me before even when I was doing good things. We cannot control Him. We are His children. Not vice versa.
Perhaps church leaders rationalized with “It is better that one man should [lie] than that a [church] should dwindle and perish in unbelief.” It does seem better to lie than to kill. God will do as He pleases. That much I know.
Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.
1 Nephi 4:13
Or maybe God doesn’t really go quiet on church leaders. Maybe their hardship is that though they know things, they are told to keep it sacred. Hidden. Personal.
It doesn’t actually matter to me. It’s nothing more than interesting. God’s truth is marching on.
All of this leads me to reconstruct my spiritual framework with a renewed belief that President Russell M. Nelson is a Prophet God. That all the prophets before him have been called of God. That knowledge is aligned for me. I believe.
“There can be miracles when you believe.”
It’s a nice belief for me. I’ll take it over any alternative. Anything else brings me fear. I cast out fear through alignment. I’ll write about fear in the near future.
Avoid fear. Hold to truth. Search for more.
As long as I am aligned with truth, I am aligned with God. And vice versa.
It’s my problem free philosophy. Can you feel the love tonight? Christ lives in you. He lives in me. In our reflections. In our agreement through alignment.
Comments on this entry are closed.
{ 2 trackbacks }