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

 I had an epiphany at church on Sunday. Something that I'm ashamed to say I have never thought of in my 37 years on this earth. You know that scripture? The one every Christian knows and loves?  "For God so loved the world...He gave His only begotten son..." Do you realize that the Son in that scripture had TWO parents who loved us so much they sent Him here? Think about that for a second. We're always mentioning how we have a loving Father in Heaven who sent His son here, but not once have I ever thought about how difficult it must have been for our MOTHER in Heaven to send Her son to the earth to go through what He went through.  As a mother myself, I've never truly been able to identify with the thought of only Christ's father sending him to be our Savior. But the thought of his MOTHER...well that changes everything for me. At church on Sunday, we were asked to focus on one specific person who we love so much we would do anything for. It was obvious who I w

 Can we talk for a second about forgiveness?  People do stupid, hurtful things, and we're taught to forgive them for it.  Now...I'm all about forgiveness. Heaven knows I've needed to be forgiven for my share of wrongdoings, so I love the principle of forgiving others and being forgiven myself.  But forgiveness is not the same thing as letting people continue to treat you like trash. Years ago, I had a really close friend. We'd been friends since high school. We worked together, we helped raise each other's babies, I was there in the hallway when her daughter was born. She was one of my absolute favorite people. There's nothing I wouldn't have done for her...she was like a sister to me.  This friend hit a really rough patch for a while, and I didn't like the way she handled it. In fact, I got super judgy about it and after a while of holding in my distaste for her choices, one day I just lost it on her. I said horrible things that to this day I cannot bel

I was 17.  My best guy friend was home visiting from college. He had graduated the year before.  We were hanging out at another friend's house when out of seemingly nowhere he asked me to drive him home. I thought it was kind of funny, seeing as how his sister was there with us, and she was perfectly capable of driving. But I absolutely adored the guy, and I loved our alone time, so off we went.  Halfway home, my friend started to get really antsy and asked me to pull over. In a grocery store parking lot he shifted awkwardly around in his seat, and told me he had something important he wanted to talk to me about. My heart began racing, and after a few seconds of avoiding the subject, I finally just told him to tell me what was bothering him. "I'm gay," he said, and then almost immediately, he apologized.  My mind began racing. I sat silently for several minutes while my friend, filled with emotion, told me all the things he had done to try to beat the gay out of himse

“In the heav’ns are parents single? No, the thought makes reason stare; Truth is reason—truth eternal tells me I’ve a mother there.” We've been told She exists. We've been told she is equal to Her husband. We've been told women were created in Her image. We've been told that the church recognizes her Godhood. And we've been told we're not allowed to talk to her. We're supposed to follow the pattern of Christ, right? And Christ told us to "always pray unto the Father in my name." But can we just focus for a second on the fact that a quadruple combination of scriptures only contains about 3,900 pages, and that there is a very real possibility that Jesus had more to say than that in his roughly 35 years on the earth? Can we at least consider that he might have had more to say on the subject of his relationship with his Mother in Heaven, and that it was simply left out of scripture for the mere fact that men didn't think it was that important (much