Doctor CamNC4Me wrote: ↑Fri Aug 26, 2022 2:53 pm
Res Ipsa wrote: ↑Fri Aug 26, 2022 1:49 pm
I left my mission.
OMG.
I had major cognitive dissonance on my mission, but the thought of bouncing was, to me at the time, impossible. Major props to you for having the internal character to leave your mission. If you don’t mind sharing, what was the fallout from that?
- Doc
I can’t make any claim to internal character. I was dysfunctional to the point of telling my companion that I was sick and lying on the floor in my sleeping bag all day. It felt like I was emotionally and spiritually dying. All I knew was I couldn’t go on like that.
I wrote down a list of everything that I thought didn’t add up about the church, went out to the middle of a rickety foot bridge that spanned the San Juan River, and prayed my heart out. After a while, I felt a feeling of calm and peacefulness come over me, and I knew I needed to get out of there and that everything would be okay.
There was all kinds of fallout, some of it self imposed. Most importantly for me, my immediate family completely accepted my decision. They were very supportive. My dad came and got me. We flew to Mexico City for a week or so so that I wouldn’t have to talk about what happened with all kinds of people. He was never a true believer and, unknown to me, my mom was getting fed up with feeling like a second class citizen in Mormonism. Out of my immediate family of six, only one sister ended up staying a believing member. The religious divide in our family did not affect our relationships in any significant way.
My family had moved from Washington to California while I was at BYU and had moved within California while I was on my mission. So, I literally knew no one in my ward in California. I met with my bishop in California once to be released, and I never saw him again. No one knew me or cared about me, so there were no attempts to fellowship me back to church.
The self generated part was that I cut myself off from all my LDS friends, including my closest friend who was serving a mission in Germany and the young woman I’d dated at BYU. I’d internalized the notion that there was something wrong with me that caused me to “fall away.” I didn’t want to screw up anyone else’s life, and I didn’t want to subject myself to feeling like a “project” for my LDS friends to work on. I was too young and immature to realize that I had LDS friends who would have supported me without trying to tell me in. As a result, I had absolutely no peer support, which I desperately needed.
My girlfriend really wanted me to come back to BYU (I had a free ride there, so financial incentives, too.) She came out to visit me for a week, which was both nice and painful. At one point she told me that her parents were friends of Dallin Oakes (who I think had become BYU President). They’d talked to him and he’d said he’d be willing to meet with me to help me with my problems.
That triggered the final break. I needed help — but not help back into Mormonism. I couldn’t bear the thought of being a” project” at BYU for the next three years. I decided not to go back, and that was the end of the line for the church and me.
When I meet with with my bishop, I told him I had a plan. I was going to read Mormonism: Shadow or Reality and any LDS book that he recommended. He gave me a copy of that year’s institute study guide, which was on the Book of Mormon. Of course, it didn’t address the many questions I had, while the Tanner’s book addressed almost all of them. So, in the weeks after I returned home, I went from having serious doubts about the church to being convinced that the LDS Church was not what it claimed to be: The restored church of Jesus Christ.
The fall after I returned home, I resumed my education at UC Davis almost on a whim. And I was exceptionally lucky to fall in with some pretty wonderful students who helped me figure out how to be a post-Mormon me.