The summer of my sixteenth year is probably where it all starts. I don’t remember it well, but I do remember some of the things I felt in the week I spent at BYU Idaho participating in EFY 2002: We Believe. I think we were rolling down hills one afternoon, which all sounded well and good until I felt absolutely sick afterwards. That wasn’t a great feeling as you might imagine, but it doesn’t compare in my memory to the feeling I had that I would one day come to this point in my life. I knew that summer that I believed in Christ, and I knew that I had to serve a mission when I came of age.
Five years later I was of age, but nowhere near ready to serve a mission. In those five years I had faced deep depression and a loss of confidence. I was nothing. The world was nothing. I can’t blame my college education for steering me away from a belief in the fundamentals of my childhood faith, in fact it has in many ways strengthened my testimony, but in the years leading up to the year I turned twenty one had left me feeling that there was no God. Life was an accidental joke.
Nevertheless, the prompting to serve a mission has persisted. I have questioned why these feelings have remained, and I’ve tried to channel that resolve to serve into a desire to join the Peace Corps or teach English abroad. And then I realized one day that life wasn’t an accidental joke. There was a God, and He is Father of All. I’d been denying myself my testimony for years, justifying this by pointing out the ignorance of other believers and blaming them for ruining a good thing.
But faith is not a bad thing. It’s not claiming certainty. It’s a mode by which we live our lives in order to better ourselves and the environment in which we live.
Alma 32:21 famously states: “
And now as I said concerning faith—faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true
.” Truth does not mean fact. It doesn’t have to. It doesn’t matter. I can believe in Christ even though I can never be certain and find bliss in what others perceive as ignorance.
Upon deciding this, I found I was happier in life. I was so happy that I couldn’t understand why so many others were not, and that’s where the prompting to serve a mission comes in.
Now I don’t believe in trying to make people join a religion, but what I’ve come to understand is that my goal is not to convince anyone of anything. I’m going to
Baton Rouge to answer questions, listen, serve, and invite others to feel as happy as I feel. I don’t believe that everyone must join my religion to find happiness, but I do know that joy can be found in the Gospel and that someone out there needs to hear it, and I’m the only one to help them.
So, without further ado, I invite you to join me on the journey. This blog will be updated weekly by a designated copy/pasta minion. I would do it myself, but it goes against rules. The posts will be comprised from the emails I’m allowed to send to my folks on a weekly basis. I can receive and send traditional post, and I invite you to get cracking with a quill and parchment.
The Beginning
