The Gift of Faith

(From a talk given in the Chattahoochee Ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on November 23, 2025)

Good morning, Brothers and Sisters. My mind has been working on this talk for a very long time. I hope the effort I put into my remarks brings you some joy today, and I pray that the Spirit will lead us into profound gratitude for “the gift of faith.” I am going to share my experience.

My faith has evolved from construction, growing up in the church and raising my younger family here, to deconstruction as things unraveled following a divorce and a decision to choose cynicism, doubt, and departure, and finally into reconstruction following a spiritual experience I had five years ago, in the summer of 2020.

I held my rebaptism in this same room last June. People from every season and area of my life showed up. It was so sweet. I spoke then of some of the physical events that coincided with my spiritual wrestle, which led me to turn my life around.

Today, I will explain that spiritual wrestle through the lens of the “gift of faith,” and I will reconstruct it from scratch with you, explaining the realizations that led me to change my mind.

First, I realized that, at its core, faith is simply an initial trust that motivates you to act, gather experience, and discover whether that trust proves true. I saw in it an analogy with the scientific method, where faith is the initial trust that a hypothesis is worth testing through observation and measurement. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for faith, ’Ĕmûnāh, carries this sense of trust, loyalty, and faithfulness. So I thought to myself that there is this first layer of faith, which is simply the openness to methodically experiment with spiritual concepts, like the basic existence of something bigger than whatever puny understanding humans can derive through manmade systems. That willingness to restart my engine of spiritual investigation was the first big choice that enabled me to receive the gift of faith back in my life.

I’ll pause here to say I see two kinds of doubt: one is a blessing, the other a curse. The sort of doubt that is a blessing is the kind that makes us question things and investigate. It is a motivational force that eggs us on in our explorations. When we struggle to accept something, it prompts us to figure out what we are missing or to try something else.

But the second kind of doubt is the one that shuts down discovery altogether and tempts us to check out of spiritual investigation. This second sort often comes as a result of trauma, when events in life do not match expectations of how we think things should be. Or when we feel betrayed and harmed by our spiritual or religious experience. Or it can come in more subtle ways if we surround ourselves with doubters who mock and ridicule spiritual exploration as foolish or irrelevant to how they want to live their lives. In any case, this pernicious form halts the engine of spiritual investigation. I realized I did not want to spend more of my life with that engine turned off, and I had nothing to lose by turning it back on.

So then, I asked myself, “What do I turn my faith back on to?” In spiritual matters, faith can become a trust in any number of random spiritual conceptions. Of all conceptions to evaluate, the core truth that there is a Heavenly Father who hears and answers prayers was the one I desired most to explore. Any other concept of a God outside of that Parental framework made less sense to me. So I chose to place my faith in God again, not because I was convinced, but because I genuinely wanted to know.

I remembered that the Book of Mormon spoke of faith by “[comparing] the word unto a seed.” I went back to Alma 32, where it says in verse 28, “Now, if ye give place, that a seed may be planted in your heart, behold, if it be a true seed, or a good seed, if ye do not cast it out by your unbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord, behold, it will begin to swell within your breasts; and when you feel these swelling motions, ye will begin to say within yourselves—It must needs be that this is a good seed, or that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me.”

So to exercise faith in a doctrine, like the existence of a Heavenly Father, we plant it in our lives as though it were true, not out of blind obedience but out of curiosity to explore something we have yet to figure out fully. Then we look for fruit. In fact, we hope for fruit. This hope becomes the experiment. In that hope, my mind began to spin. For nearly 2 weeks, I could not sleep as my mind would not turn itself off, as I reconsidered what the existence of a Heavenly Father might mean to me in my life. If I were to believe again, how would I reconcile the life I had outside the church with the things I had been taught growing up?

I did not expect to believe most of it. But I stuck to the things that matter most. I remembered that He is Almighty, the Creator of all things, and fully proficient in the realm of low-probability events. I had to turn off the brain that makes decisions based on likelihoods and turn on the brain that finds hope in unseen things that might very well be true, even if the world says they are unlikely.

I put my faith to work in a Heavenly Father who is merciful, gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in goodness. I put my faith to work in a Heavenly Father who is no respecter of persons and sees all of His children as equal spirit sons and daughters, for whom He has a plan for their progression, which includes a probationary period here in this mortal life of ours.

As I started sinking those beliefs back into my mind, I began to be crushed by the realization of all the ways in which I had screwed up my probationary period. I could have cowered in fear and stopped there, but I was more interested in admitting my mistakes, which I knew were real, and coming to terms with my life. My thoughts turned to Heavenly Father’s greatest gift in sending Jesus Christ as our Exemplar and Savior. I realized that I truly love my Savior. If I could believe in a loving Heavenly Father, it followed for me that the gift of His Son and everything I understood about His plan of mercy could be true for me and for my family.

So, I decided to put my faith to work in the Father and the Son once again. I experimented with prayer. I had so much to ponder and pray about. What all would I need to change in my life to conform to those truths, to give the experiment of faith the most genuine inquiry of my life? Sincerely thinking through each of those details has been a work in progress for me ever since.

The earliest fruits that arrived were spiritual impressions or personal signals I received from the Holy Spirit. With the belief substrate of a loving Heavenly Father and Son, I found peace and joy returning to my life in ways I had forgotten. My ability to hear Him was back, and it was so sweet. It still is. These are not things I can show to others as evidence, but are personal rewards for having real intent in something good and true.

Later, as I have spent transformational time under these doctrines, I have been able to look back and ponder the effect on my life. Alma continues, in verse 32-33, “Therefore, if a seed groweth it is good, but if it groweth not, behold it is not good, therefore it is cast away. And now, behold, because ye have tried the experiment, and planted the seed, and it swelleth and sprouteth, and beginneth to grow, ye must needs know that the seed is good.”

So for over five years now, this basic process of spiritual investigation has become central to my life. Each evaluation of a point of doctrine, including those of the restored Church, has involved a hypothesis of faith, followed by an experiment in hope conforming my life to the doctrine, and finally, an observation of fruit through an increase of the love of God, or charity, in my life. In this manner, faith, hope, and the fruit of charity have rebuilt a doctrinal tree of delicious, carefully acquired spiritual fruit that is undeniably sweeter than anything deconstruction could offer.

I could spend hours walking you through every ex-Mormon doubt I had and why I had been wrong, but time does not permit. When, as an ex-Mormon, I returned to a church that had stopped using that nickname, I joked that we are all ex-Mormons now! The overarching observation of this talk is that doctrinal or church history doubts are relatively unimportant compared to the foundation of faith in a loving Heavenly Father and His Son. Whenever concerns arise, avoid the temptation to throw the babe of Bethlehem out with the bathwater.

When I had removed the Father and Son from the foundation of my belief system, I naturally became more focused on the things of this world and how they relate to one another. I adopted agnosticism, which avoids placing a stake in any particular spiritual belief. It is a lot easier to point cynical fingers of doubt, including the ones we keep to ourselves, than it is to have the moral courage of faith. Maybe the “spaciousness” of that great building is the emptiness that the experience of exercising faith could have otherwise filled.

I close with a story from the first year of the church. John Whitmer, the first church historian, wrote, “In the beginning of the church, while yet in her infancy, the disciples used to exclude unbelievers, which caused some to marvel.” The Lord corrected the error with Section 46 of the D&C, which some dub as the “Visitors Welcome section.” In verse 5, the Lord says, “And again I say unto you, ye shall not cast any out of your sacrament meetings who are earnestly seeking the kingdom.” So we’re here together on our faith journeys. Then He goes on to say, in verses 11-14, “For all have not every gift given unto them; for there are many gifts, and to every man is given a gift by the Spirit of God. To some is given one, and to some is given another, that all may be profited thereby. To some it is given by the Holy Ghost to know that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that he was crucified for the sins of the world. To others it is given to believe on their words, that they also might have eternal life if they continue faithful.”

Sometimes, we may not have any better reason to accept our gift of faith than to trust the testimony of someone we respect until our faith can stand on its own. One of the reasons I come to church is to mingle with those who take their faith seriously, share experiences, and strengthen one another. In the 4th century, Saint Basil the Great visited the Egyptian and Syrian hermits who were living in isolation. He admired their dedication but concluded that solitary monasticism was incomplete. Basil taught that the essence of the Christian life—love, charity, forgiveness, service—cannot be practiced in a cave, because it requires other people. Thus, no spirituality is complete without a religious community. We need both.

Earlier this month, Elder Uchtdorf posted to social media, “Faith in Jesus Christ is a gift, but receiving it is a conscious choice that requires a commitment of all our ‘might, mind and strength’ (Moroni 10:32).” So, faith is not something we arrogantly presume to generate ourselves, but we choose to open up to and receive.

Our Stake President Zivic invited us in last week’s Stake Conference to “replace fear with faith and to replace hostility and indifference with charity.” There’s that spiritual investigation, hopeful experimentation, and loving charitable fruit. I pray we heed his counsel.

With the gift of faith in my life, I have found incredible strength, peace, and purpose as I have weathered storms of betrayal, employment uncertainty, health challenges, and relationship upheaval. Things that could have thrown me seriously off track have been swallowed up in the fruits of practicing faith in Jesus Christ. I feel the love of God in my life, which comes from choosing a mind that opens to Him. His healing balm and enabling power fill me with Thanksgiving for what lies ahead.

In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.