The Fringes of Faith

There's hurt pounding in my heart today. And it's LOUD. I remember the moment I first realized that "church leadership" didn't mean the same thing to everyone as it did to me. I was 8 years old. A friend of mine and I were being teased by some bratty kid in the halls of the church, and I loudly declared to him, "You better knock it off. HER dad is the BISHOP." The kid looked at me with his eyebrows high and said, "So what?" It floored me. It had never occurred to me that a bishop's authority wasn't THE authority to everyone around me. The audacity of this kid to question what could happen if he treated the bishop's daughter with disrespect!  As I grew, that respect I had for bishops only grew. I revered them. I feared them. Stake Presidents? They may has well have been the presidents of countries.  General Authorities? Well, they were pretty much Gods themselves! As I grew up, I would defend those priesthood leaders with every ounce...

I want to burn the church handbook. Hear me out. I'm in several LDS moms groups on social media. The topics that come up vary from simple things like baby name ideas all the way up to the real traumatizing stuff that most women post anonymously. Almost daily though, I read posts about women asking questions similar to "what does the church think about this...?" First...can we focus on the fact that "the church" is an organization, and not a living, breathing person?  And...I don't know...maybe for the sake of just being argumentative, can we also focus on the fact that "the church" is also not God?  The handbook changes constantly, based on opinions of (mostly rich white) men who run an organization that includes people from all over the world. People who believe in different things. People who follow different customs and cultures. People "the church" doesn't know from Adam.  The men who write the handbook don't have a clear unde...