Farewell Talk
Farewell Talk
I have waited a long time to give this talk and I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to finally be here. I have requested the topic of diligence and will be talking about the diligence it took for me to get my mission call. I am twenty-two years old. I am leaving three years older than the normal age, and this is not because it took me until this age to decide to go on a mission, or because I didn’t want to go and the Spirit told me to and I eventually relented, or because I have any health problem or worthiness issues. I have waited three years to serve a mission, because I was rejected.
In 2015, I filled out my mission papers while I was attending a YSA ward in Provo and living with roommates. I offended my bishop in that YSA ward by cutting in line at a ward pizza party. I am a vegetarian, I was told there was only one cheese pizza, and if I couldn’t get up to the front of the line to get the one, I wouldn’t have any dinner that night. The next day was a fast Sunday and the BYU cafeteria would be closed. When I got up to the front of the line and saw there was no food I could eat, I began crying out of fear of going hungry. One of my roommates took me to a nearby café and bought me a sandwich, so I carried on, had a good time, and went home happy that night. But another of my roommates, the Relief Society president in our YSA ward, decided that crying when I was hungry was a sign of mental instability. She told our bishop that I would struggle to serve a mission.
He didn’t tell me of this for months. When I went to him to set up my mission papers, he found out that I’d had Tourette’s syndrome when I was ten years old. Long-time ward members will remember this and know I don’t have this anymore. I also have mild OCD. He told me I had to get a mental illness evaluation with LDS Family Services. I didn’t think anything more of this than having to go a dentist or normal doctor as part of my papers. Yes, I thought it was odd that my other roommate hadn’t been made to go to LDS Family Services for her mission when she was on medication for anxiety, but I didn’t see the red flags. I went into LDS Family Services and treated it like a routine doctor’s visit rather than a job interview or a legal trial. I didn’t think I was going to be weighed and measured. But unbeknownst to me, my bishop had poisoned my reputation before I ever even had a chance to speak for myself.
The therapist didn’t care about my former Tourette’s, the reason I was ostensibly there. The questioning went on for an hour and a half and would have gone on for much longer if I hadn’t insisted on leaving to get back to class, which made him angry. It was not an interview, it was an interrogation, and looking back on it later, I felt that all my answers were, in the words of the poet Kipling, “Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.” He sought out any flaw in me that he could. I said I volunteered with special needs people in high school, and he said I was incapable of making friends with anybody but those who have special needs. I said I reused plastic grocery bags as trash can liners, he said I horded plastic bags. I told him I was an honest person and that I considered myself mentally stable. He told me, “That’s great if you’re telling the truth.” He compiled a five page report of all my flaws, the imagined and the real, and told my bishop I was barred from serving a mission for the next six months. I was not allowed to submit my mission papers to Salt Lake or even fill them out again until LDS Family Services gave me approval.
When I told people about my rejection, they asked, “Have you prayed about going on a mission?” As if I didn’t deserve to go on one unless the Spirit had told me to, though many people go on missions simply because they want to. I had, and yes, I’ve had powerful witnesses that I am supposed to build up the kingdom of God. After rejection, I went back to my bishop, and asked him if he had prayed about sending me to LDS Family Services, or if he had made a snap decision. He told me, “I made a snap judgment” and told me that he was well within his right to do that as a judge in Israel. When I told him the kind of anguish I was going through, and that I still had hope in spite of it all that I would serve, he told me, “Don’t have hope in that.” When I told him I had faith that God would help me and I would serve a mission, he told me, “Don’t have faith in that.” He then pulled out the full five page report. He had only given me one page of it when he announced my rejection to me. He then proceeded the read me five pages of all the flaws that therapist had seen in me, flaws about plastic bags and volunteering with special needs people, flaws that in no way set me up to be a terrible missionary. I cried as he did this, and he did not comfort me. I tried to flee his office twice and he forced me to stay for an hour. When I interrupted his tirade to defend myself, to tell him that I thought volunteering with people with Down’s syndrome was wonderful, his face grew dark, he slapped my file down on the desk, and roared, “Young lady, don’t tell me what is wonderful!” For years after that, I could not hear the word wonderful without cringing.
He is not the only bishop whose face I have watched turn pink with anger at me. The rejection, the loathing, the lack of sympathy from YSA church leaders, plunged me into the most abject misery I have ever felt. I would come home from class and collapse in bed crying. I stopped eating. I skipped $800 worth of meals in nine weeks. I didn’t have the strength to sing hymns in church and had to hum instead. I’d try to read scriptures when I went to bed each night, but my phone screen would go dark and I’d stare at it until 1:00 am, praying for the strength to turn it on and read so I could sleep. I turned to everyone person I could possibly think of who might help me and got scorned and rejected so many times. Soon, I stopped talking about it because people compared me to early returned missionaries. “My nephew/ cousin/ friend/granddaughter/girlfriend came home from her mission early because she had mental illness and she’s found peace now.” That’s different. I wasn’t given the opportunity to serve a mission and didn’t complete it fully, I was barred from the opportunity to serve at all. Every general conference, I prayed for a talk helpful to my situation, and what I heard instead was talk after talk raising awareness and acceptance for early returned missionaries. Everybody was comfortable with me being a failure. Nobody told me I could succeed.
The advice I ran into over and over again was “Go see a therapist.” I didn’t go see a therapist. I saw six. Not one of them offered suggestions or advice to either improve my situation or give me the tools to endure it. When I asked the first one, “What advice do you have for me?” He told me, “It is not my job to give you advice.” The next therapist, when I told her I did not have clinical depression, told me to leave without scheduling a follow up appointment. I believed that I would not have the confidence to go up against LDS Family Services again until a therapist made me better, so I saw more, sinking hundreds of dollars into this industry. It would take me hours to recount all of them, so I’ll just talk about the last, a therapist who liked to talk about himself. He talked about his days in the navy and his horses. We talked about everything, except for how I could feel better and get on a mission. I interrupted him. I told him, “With all due respect, I am paying for your time, and I’d like to get back to therapy now.” That enraged him, and he roared, “Young lady, this is therapy!” He told me was a (expletive) good therapist. I told him, “Don’t swear at me,” and he sneered, “You’re just looking for anything to complain about.” This appointment ended with him chasing me down the hallway out of his office, nearly slamming my foot in a door when I tried to turn back to talk to him. Screaming and swearing and chasing a client isn’t enough to get a therapist fired. It would be in most industries. But not in therapy. I filed a complaint with the state board, but he is still practicing today.
I gave up on therapists and applied again to serve a mission. I decided it would be smartest to go to the Riverton LDS Family Services office instead of the Provo one. I spent six hours either on the phone with the Provo office, on hold with the Provo office, waiting for a call back from the Provo office, or in the Riverton office trying to arrange that appointment. After six hours and several conversations with rude secretaries, my patience finally snapped and I spoke rudely to one of the secretaries, complaining about how long I’d been on the line.
My appointment was set up. I got the name of the psychologist and prayed for her every night for months. I put her name in the temple. I’d been rehearsing this interview in my head for over a year, and thought I had it down, but she rejected me as well. I later found out that the secretary I’d complained to in Provo had called Riverton and retaliated against me by putting in a bad word for me to this psychologist.
It didn’t matter how poised, well-spoken, or articulate I was in my interview. My reputation had already been poisoned by that phone call months before. When I told the Riverton psychologist I was prepared to apply a third time, she told me, “But Erica, what if there’s no hope?” Like that first bishop, she wanted me to not have hope.
When I tell people of how I got barred from serving, I’m often told that people who have committed great wrongs are “imperfect” or “human.” Being human is not an excuse. Some humans are good. It was so painful to me to spend almost three years listening to talks about members being “offended” and bishops being “human.” I cannot recall a time where I have heard it the other way around. The members are “offended”, yet bishops never offend. Is it not human to feel pain, as well as to give it? If these bishops are just human, then these creatures who feel offense, when none was given, must be sub-human. I certainly felt sub-human these last three years, with LDS Family Services psychologists and bishops telling me not to have hope or faith.
So where could I find hope and faith? When I sought advice from other members of the church, all they told me was Ether 12:27-this trial will be good for you-and the Liberty Jail anecdote-this trial isn’t so bad, it will give you experience, and it’s but for a small moment. My trial lasted me one thousand and forty days, a lot longer than Joseph Smith ever spent in jail. And it wasn’t making me stronger, no matter what perspective I took. It was weakening me to a point where I couldn’t sit through a sacrament meeting without sobbing. The scriptures seemed to hold no hope for me.
That summer, I was twenty, and I remembered that when I was fourteen and fifteen, I thought my seminary teacher Brother Day was the wisest man I’d ever met. So I drove to the high school and asked to speak with him.
He made time for me. He took me back in his office, we sat down, and I told him how I’d been rejected from a mission. Since he had taught me Old Testament, I told him how, at my former young women’s leader Juli Adams’s suggestion, I’d made a study of the entire book of Job. A friend ridiculed me for this, telling me all I needed to know of Job was the beginning and end of the story and there was no value in studying the middle. I told him I remembered Job from his class and he surprised me. He told me, “Erica, everything I taught you about the book of Job was wrong.”
I said, “Well then, thank you for my education,” and asked him what was so wrong about it.
The year after I took his class, Brother Day had a stroke, which made him unable to teach. God had called him to teach seminary, so how was his stroke good for him, or his students? It isn’t. As a result of his stroke, he also made a study of the Book of Job. He recommended a book to me called Rereading Job by Michael Austin. Brother Day and that book explained to me that Job consists of a frame text, the beginning and the end of Job, written in prose, and an inner text, written in poetry, which is the 39 chapters in the middle. When we teach the Old Testament in gospel doctrine, we usually just teach the frame text since there’s a whole lot of Old Testament to get through and we come up with a flawed understanding. We think Job is patient and is rewarded for his suffering in the end.
I’ll read a bit from this book. “The much-lauded ‘patience of Job’ ends with chapter 2, after which Job complains almost constantly about God. The phrase ‘the patience of Job’ has become idiomatic among people who have never opened a Bible. Religious materials often collaborate to reinforce this reading by ignoring virtually of the poem and focusing on the lessons of the frame…It gives us a great example of a man who loses everything and remains steadfast-and who is rewarded in the end for his patience and his faith. And it allows us to comfort (but really to criticize) those who are complaining about something in their own lives with the allegedly cheery thought that, at least, they aren’t as bad off as Job.”
Job’s friends try to comfort him, but they end up saying things that hurt him instead, things like “it happens to everyone” and “God’s just testing you because he loves you so much” and in Job 16:2, he tells them, I have heard many such things: miserable comforters are ye all.
That line meant a lot to me after I’d turned, and been ill-advised by, so many miserable comforter therapists and bishops. I got two big takeaways from this book. One is that if we are righteous in order to receive blessings, righteousness is self-interest. So the interpretation that Job is rewarded at the end of the frame text because he suffered so patiently isn’t just inaccurate to the inner text, it’s encouraging us to be good for a reason other than goodness’ sake. The second is that if you think you’re in the wrong religion, don’t go looking for a new one, make a deeper study of your own. I thought I belonged to a church with no answer to suffering but Ether 12:27, which answers a different problem than the one I had, but the scriptures held the answers all along. I just needed to make a deeper study of them, and there was a story about miserable comforters, about someone who felt neglected by God when he’d done everything right. There is so much to be gained from a deeper study of the scriptures we think we already know, to be familiar with whole books instead of oft-quoted snippets.
Job and Ether can coexist. Scripture is not a threat to itself, but the scriptures hold different answers for different situations. In the book of Esther, we read that if you are ever a person with influence over a king and the king has banned your religion, you should hide your believer status and use your subtle influence over him to get him to reconsider. But in the book of Daniel, we read that if you are ever a person with influence over a king and the king has banned your religion, you should pray openly, get arrested, and trust in the Lord to deliver you from lions. Her way was not the right answer for his situation. Likewise, Ether 12:27 and the Liberty Jail anecdote are not the right answers to every situation. Bad things are not inherently good, and if you order a suffering person to see their trials as masquerading blessings, then you are acting as a sharp arrow in the quiver of the adversary. Don’t be a miserable comforter. Succor those who come to you in need. Listen to their anguish, learn what their needs are, and do something to actually help them. It is not the thought that counts, and service is not about the server more than the one served. Your loved ones are in need. Serve them. Help them.
When LDS Family Services rejected me a second time, they rejected me for a year. When that year was up, I applied to go on a mission a third time. I went in with my little notebook. It held notes on how to sit, how to present myself, what stories to share and which ones to leave out, how to issue a graceful and firm correction when a therapist tried to twist my own words to trap me. I have a mission call now, though not a solid one. I have been permitted to go on what is called a two transfer mission. These are given to mentally ill people the church doesn’t put much stock in. I will not be sent to the MTC, so the church does not have to pay the cost of training me. I will go directly to Boise. It is Boise, rather than some far-off place, so the church doesn’t need to trouble themselves with arranging a plane home should I fail. This mission call is for three months. I hope that I will be able to prove myself here, and from there, be allowed to enter the MTC and then serve another fifteen months for a full mission. I was devastated when President Davis told me that after all this time, after all the times I had been scrutinized and made to prove myself, I was still not going to be treated like a full missionary, but instead live in a state of vulnerability for three months. But it is, at least, something to go on.
A friend of mine was told in his patriarchal blessing that he would learn a language on his mission. He then got called to England. He spoke only English for his first transfer, his second, and his third, and four, and so on. Then, a year and a half into his mission, he met a deaf man and learned British Sign Language. He joked, “That was a confusing eighteen months.” He told me this story between my first and second rejections, when I’d been waiting about eighteen months for my mission call. I loved this story and hoped that my second interview would result in a mission call, and I’d soon be able to say, “That was a confusing eighteen months.”
I can’t. It’s been a confusing thirty months. Some of you may feel weary in listening and wonder why I chose to tell this story rather than make some vague reference to having “a trial” and getting in a call “in the Lord’s time” to explain away my age. I have done this not out of malice towards the people who have hurt me, it’s for the people here who need to hear it. There may be a youth in the congregation today who will one day be in the same situation as I was. Youth, I want you to know the warning signs. If you apply to go on a mission and your bishop refers you to LDS Family Services, here’s how to solve that problem: move out. Young adults have a special kind of transiency. Sell your apartment contract if you have to, or switch your records from a family ward to a YSA ward or vice versa. Do not confess to having a mental illness to anyone who can hurt you. If any youth or parent of one later goes through this same trial, even if it is twenty years from now, I am giving you my permission right now to contact me and I will give you the help that was never given to me.
I have also shared this story because I know there are people in the audience today who are enduring a crisis of faith while maintaining a façade of normalcy. People who have been deeply hurt, not just offended, by church leaders. People who are debating whether they should leave the church. People who are atheists at heart while continuing to attend meetings. I am here today to show you that I have remained in the church despite all that has been done to me. Despite bishops and psychologists telling me not to have hope and faith. Yes, there was a time when I questioned whether it was right to propagate this religion. My older brother, who has not been a practicing member for some nine years, asked me what has kept me in the church, and I told him, “There were times I believed the church was not good, but I never believed the church was not true.” Leaving isn’t worth it. I let myself slip out of meetings and into the hall occasionally, but though I cried through countless church meetings, I never once woke up on a Sunday and decided not to go to church. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote, “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been.” If you leave now, you lose your “it might have been.” Many of you are older than I, and my three-year trial sounds as short to you as Joseph Smith’s four and a half months in Liberty Jail does to me every time someone tries to cheer me up with a reference to that prophet’s suffering. But you may feel at ease in this church ten years from now, and in ten years, you’ll wish you had stayed. If you stay, you can imagine what your life might be like if you were to leave, but if you leave, you will never know your “it might have been.” I choose to stay, and I say these things and embark on my mission in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
I have waited a long time to give this talk and I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to finally be here. I have requested the topic of diligence and will be talking about the diligence it took for me to get my mission call. I am twenty-two years old. I am leaving three years older than the normal age, and this is not because it took me until this age to decide to go on a mission, or because I didn’t want to go and the Spirit told me to and I eventually relented, or because I have any health problem or worthiness issues. I have waited three years to serve a mission, because I was rejected.
In 2015, I filled out my mission papers while I was attending a YSA ward in Provo and living with roommates. I offended my bishop in that YSA ward by cutting in line at a ward pizza party. I am a vegetarian, I was told there was only one cheese pizza, and if I couldn’t get up to the front of the line to get the one, I wouldn’t have any dinner that night. The next day was a fast Sunday and the BYU cafeteria would be closed. When I got up to the front of the line and saw there was no food I could eat, I began crying out of fear of going hungry. One of my roommates took me to a nearby café and bought me a sandwich, so I carried on, had a good time, and went home happy that night. But another of my roommates, the Relief Society president in our YSA ward, decided that crying when I was hungry was a sign of mental instability. She told our bishop that I would struggle to serve a mission.
He didn’t tell me of this for months. When I went to him to set up my mission papers, he found out that I’d had Tourette’s syndrome when I was ten years old. Long-time ward members will remember this and know I don’t have this anymore. I also have mild OCD. He told me I had to get a mental illness evaluation with LDS Family Services. I didn’t think anything more of this than having to go a dentist or normal doctor as part of my papers. Yes, I thought it was odd that my other roommate hadn’t been made to go to LDS Family Services for her mission when she was on medication for anxiety, but I didn’t see the red flags. I went into LDS Family Services and treated it like a routine doctor’s visit rather than a job interview or a legal trial. I didn’t think I was going to be weighed and measured. But unbeknownst to me, my bishop had poisoned my reputation before I ever even had a chance to speak for myself.
The therapist didn’t care about my former Tourette’s, the reason I was ostensibly there. The questioning went on for an hour and a half and would have gone on for much longer if I hadn’t insisted on leaving to get back to class, which made him angry. It was not an interview, it was an interrogation, and looking back on it later, I felt that all my answers were, in the words of the poet Kipling, “Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.” He sought out any flaw in me that he could. I said I volunteered with special needs people in high school, and he said I was incapable of making friends with anybody but those who have special needs. I said I reused plastic grocery bags as trash can liners, he said I horded plastic bags. I told him I was an honest person and that I considered myself mentally stable. He told me, “That’s great if you’re telling the truth.” He compiled a five page report of all my flaws, the imagined and the real, and told my bishop I was barred from serving a mission for the next six months. I was not allowed to submit my mission papers to Salt Lake or even fill them out again until LDS Family Services gave me approval.
When I told people about my rejection, they asked, “Have you prayed about going on a mission?” As if I didn’t deserve to go on one unless the Spirit had told me to, though many people go on missions simply because they want to. I had, and yes, I’ve had powerful witnesses that I am supposed to build up the kingdom of God. After rejection, I went back to my bishop, and asked him if he had prayed about sending me to LDS Family Services, or if he had made a snap decision. He told me, “I made a snap judgment” and told me that he was well within his right to do that as a judge in Israel. When I told him the kind of anguish I was going through, and that I still had hope in spite of it all that I would serve, he told me, “Don’t have hope in that.” When I told him I had faith that God would help me and I would serve a mission, he told me, “Don’t have faith in that.” He then pulled out the full five page report. He had only given me one page of it when he announced my rejection to me. He then proceeded the read me five pages of all the flaws that therapist had seen in me, flaws about plastic bags and volunteering with special needs people, flaws that in no way set me up to be a terrible missionary. I cried as he did this, and he did not comfort me. I tried to flee his office twice and he forced me to stay for an hour. When I interrupted his tirade to defend myself, to tell him that I thought volunteering with people with Down’s syndrome was wonderful, his face grew dark, he slapped my file down on the desk, and roared, “Young lady, don’t tell me what is wonderful!” For years after that, I could not hear the word wonderful without cringing.
He is not the only bishop whose face I have watched turn pink with anger at me. The rejection, the loathing, the lack of sympathy from YSA church leaders, plunged me into the most abject misery I have ever felt. I would come home from class and collapse in bed crying. I stopped eating. I skipped $800 worth of meals in nine weeks. I didn’t have the strength to sing hymns in church and had to hum instead. I’d try to read scriptures when I went to bed each night, but my phone screen would go dark and I’d stare at it until 1:00 am, praying for the strength to turn it on and read so I could sleep. I turned to everyone person I could possibly think of who might help me and got scorned and rejected so many times. Soon, I stopped talking about it because people compared me to early returned missionaries. “My nephew/ cousin/ friend/granddaughter/girlfriend came home from her mission early because she had mental illness and she’s found peace now.” That’s different. I wasn’t given the opportunity to serve a mission and didn’t complete it fully, I was barred from the opportunity to serve at all. Every general conference, I prayed for a talk helpful to my situation, and what I heard instead was talk after talk raising awareness and acceptance for early returned missionaries. Everybody was comfortable with me being a failure. Nobody told me I could succeed.
The advice I ran into over and over again was “Go see a therapist.” I didn’t go see a therapist. I saw six. Not one of them offered suggestions or advice to either improve my situation or give me the tools to endure it. When I asked the first one, “What advice do you have for me?” He told me, “It is not my job to give you advice.” The next therapist, when I told her I did not have clinical depression, told me to leave without scheduling a follow up appointment. I believed that I would not have the confidence to go up against LDS Family Services again until a therapist made me better, so I saw more, sinking hundreds of dollars into this industry. It would take me hours to recount all of them, so I’ll just talk about the last, a therapist who liked to talk about himself. He talked about his days in the navy and his horses. We talked about everything, except for how I could feel better and get on a mission. I interrupted him. I told him, “With all due respect, I am paying for your time, and I’d like to get back to therapy now.” That enraged him, and he roared, “Young lady, this is therapy!” He told me was a (expletive) good therapist. I told him, “Don’t swear at me,” and he sneered, “You’re just looking for anything to complain about.” This appointment ended with him chasing me down the hallway out of his office, nearly slamming my foot in a door when I tried to turn back to talk to him. Screaming and swearing and chasing a client isn’t enough to get a therapist fired. It would be in most industries. But not in therapy. I filed a complaint with the state board, but he is still practicing today.
I gave up on therapists and applied again to serve a mission. I decided it would be smartest to go to the Riverton LDS Family Services office instead of the Provo one. I spent six hours either on the phone with the Provo office, on hold with the Provo office, waiting for a call back from the Provo office, or in the Riverton office trying to arrange that appointment. After six hours and several conversations with rude secretaries, my patience finally snapped and I spoke rudely to one of the secretaries, complaining about how long I’d been on the line.
My appointment was set up. I got the name of the psychologist and prayed for her every night for months. I put her name in the temple. I’d been rehearsing this interview in my head for over a year, and thought I had it down, but she rejected me as well. I later found out that the secretary I’d complained to in Provo had called Riverton and retaliated against me by putting in a bad word for me to this psychologist.
It didn’t matter how poised, well-spoken, or articulate I was in my interview. My reputation had already been poisoned by that phone call months before. When I told the Riverton psychologist I was prepared to apply a third time, she told me, “But Erica, what if there’s no hope?” Like that first bishop, she wanted me to not have hope.
When I tell people of how I got barred from serving, I’m often told that people who have committed great wrongs are “imperfect” or “human.” Being human is not an excuse. Some humans are good. It was so painful to me to spend almost three years listening to talks about members being “offended” and bishops being “human.” I cannot recall a time where I have heard it the other way around. The members are “offended”, yet bishops never offend. Is it not human to feel pain, as well as to give it? If these bishops are just human, then these creatures who feel offense, when none was given, must be sub-human. I certainly felt sub-human these last three years, with LDS Family Services psychologists and bishops telling me not to have hope or faith.
So where could I find hope and faith? When I sought advice from other members of the church, all they told me was Ether 12:27-this trial will be good for you-and the Liberty Jail anecdote-this trial isn’t so bad, it will give you experience, and it’s but for a small moment. My trial lasted me one thousand and forty days, a lot longer than Joseph Smith ever spent in jail. And it wasn’t making me stronger, no matter what perspective I took. It was weakening me to a point where I couldn’t sit through a sacrament meeting without sobbing. The scriptures seemed to hold no hope for me.
That summer, I was twenty, and I remembered that when I was fourteen and fifteen, I thought my seminary teacher Brother Day was the wisest man I’d ever met. So I drove to the high school and asked to speak with him.
He made time for me. He took me back in his office, we sat down, and I told him how I’d been rejected from a mission. Since he had taught me Old Testament, I told him how, at my former young women’s leader Juli Adams’s suggestion, I’d made a study of the entire book of Job. A friend ridiculed me for this, telling me all I needed to know of Job was the beginning and end of the story and there was no value in studying the middle. I told him I remembered Job from his class and he surprised me. He told me, “Erica, everything I taught you about the book of Job was wrong.”
I said, “Well then, thank you for my education,” and asked him what was so wrong about it.
The year after I took his class, Brother Day had a stroke, which made him unable to teach. God had called him to teach seminary, so how was his stroke good for him, or his students? It isn’t. As a result of his stroke, he also made a study of the Book of Job. He recommended a book to me called Rereading Job by Michael Austin. Brother Day and that book explained to me that Job consists of a frame text, the beginning and the end of Job, written in prose, and an inner text, written in poetry, which is the 39 chapters in the middle. When we teach the Old Testament in gospel doctrine, we usually just teach the frame text since there’s a whole lot of Old Testament to get through and we come up with a flawed understanding. We think Job is patient and is rewarded for his suffering in the end.
I’ll read a bit from this book. “The much-lauded ‘patience of Job’ ends with chapter 2, after which Job complains almost constantly about God. The phrase ‘the patience of Job’ has become idiomatic among people who have never opened a Bible. Religious materials often collaborate to reinforce this reading by ignoring virtually of the poem and focusing on the lessons of the frame…It gives us a great example of a man who loses everything and remains steadfast-and who is rewarded in the end for his patience and his faith. And it allows us to comfort (but really to criticize) those who are complaining about something in their own lives with the allegedly cheery thought that, at least, they aren’t as bad off as Job.”
Job’s friends try to comfort him, but they end up saying things that hurt him instead, things like “it happens to everyone” and “God’s just testing you because he loves you so much” and in Job 16:2, he tells them, I have heard many such things: miserable comforters are ye all.
That line meant a lot to me after I’d turned, and been ill-advised by, so many miserable comforter therapists and bishops. I got two big takeaways from this book. One is that if we are righteous in order to receive blessings, righteousness is self-interest. So the interpretation that Job is rewarded at the end of the frame text because he suffered so patiently isn’t just inaccurate to the inner text, it’s encouraging us to be good for a reason other than goodness’ sake. The second is that if you think you’re in the wrong religion, don’t go looking for a new one, make a deeper study of your own. I thought I belonged to a church with no answer to suffering but Ether 12:27, which answers a different problem than the one I had, but the scriptures held the answers all along. I just needed to make a deeper study of them, and there was a story about miserable comforters, about someone who felt neglected by God when he’d done everything right. There is so much to be gained from a deeper study of the scriptures we think we already know, to be familiar with whole books instead of oft-quoted snippets.
Job and Ether can coexist. Scripture is not a threat to itself, but the scriptures hold different answers for different situations. In the book of Esther, we read that if you are ever a person with influence over a king and the king has banned your religion, you should hide your believer status and use your subtle influence over him to get him to reconsider. But in the book of Daniel, we read that if you are ever a person with influence over a king and the king has banned your religion, you should pray openly, get arrested, and trust in the Lord to deliver you from lions. Her way was not the right answer for his situation. Likewise, Ether 12:27 and the Liberty Jail anecdote are not the right answers to every situation. Bad things are not inherently good, and if you order a suffering person to see their trials as masquerading blessings, then you are acting as a sharp arrow in the quiver of the adversary. Don’t be a miserable comforter. Succor those who come to you in need. Listen to their anguish, learn what their needs are, and do something to actually help them. It is not the thought that counts, and service is not about the server more than the one served. Your loved ones are in need. Serve them. Help them.
When LDS Family Services rejected me a second time, they rejected me for a year. When that year was up, I applied to go on a mission a third time. I went in with my little notebook. It held notes on how to sit, how to present myself, what stories to share and which ones to leave out, how to issue a graceful and firm correction when a therapist tried to twist my own words to trap me. I have a mission call now, though not a solid one. I have been permitted to go on what is called a two transfer mission. These are given to mentally ill people the church doesn’t put much stock in. I will not be sent to the MTC, so the church does not have to pay the cost of training me. I will go directly to Boise. It is Boise, rather than some far-off place, so the church doesn’t need to trouble themselves with arranging a plane home should I fail. This mission call is for three months. I hope that I will be able to prove myself here, and from there, be allowed to enter the MTC and then serve another fifteen months for a full mission. I was devastated when President Davis told me that after all this time, after all the times I had been scrutinized and made to prove myself, I was still not going to be treated like a full missionary, but instead live in a state of vulnerability for three months. But it is, at least, something to go on.
A friend of mine was told in his patriarchal blessing that he would learn a language on his mission. He then got called to England. He spoke only English for his first transfer, his second, and his third, and four, and so on. Then, a year and a half into his mission, he met a deaf man and learned British Sign Language. He joked, “That was a confusing eighteen months.” He told me this story between my first and second rejections, when I’d been waiting about eighteen months for my mission call. I loved this story and hoped that my second interview would result in a mission call, and I’d soon be able to say, “That was a confusing eighteen months.”
I can’t. It’s been a confusing thirty months. Some of you may feel weary in listening and wonder why I chose to tell this story rather than make some vague reference to having “a trial” and getting in a call “in the Lord’s time” to explain away my age. I have done this not out of malice towards the people who have hurt me, it’s for the people here who need to hear it. There may be a youth in the congregation today who will one day be in the same situation as I was. Youth, I want you to know the warning signs. If you apply to go on a mission and your bishop refers you to LDS Family Services, here’s how to solve that problem: move out. Young adults have a special kind of transiency. Sell your apartment contract if you have to, or switch your records from a family ward to a YSA ward or vice versa. Do not confess to having a mental illness to anyone who can hurt you. If any youth or parent of one later goes through this same trial, even if it is twenty years from now, I am giving you my permission right now to contact me and I will give you the help that was never given to me.
I have also shared this story because I know there are people in the audience today who are enduring a crisis of faith while maintaining a façade of normalcy. People who have been deeply hurt, not just offended, by church leaders. People who are debating whether they should leave the church. People who are atheists at heart while continuing to attend meetings. I am here today to show you that I have remained in the church despite all that has been done to me. Despite bishops and psychologists telling me not to have hope and faith. Yes, there was a time when I questioned whether it was right to propagate this religion. My older brother, who has not been a practicing member for some nine years, asked me what has kept me in the church, and I told him, “There were times I believed the church was not good, but I never believed the church was not true.” Leaving isn’t worth it. I let myself slip out of meetings and into the hall occasionally, but though I cried through countless church meetings, I never once woke up on a Sunday and decided not to go to church. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote, “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been.” If you leave now, you lose your “it might have been.” Many of you are older than I, and my three-year trial sounds as short to you as Joseph Smith’s four and a half months in Liberty Jail does to me every time someone tries to cheer me up with a reference to that prophet’s suffering. But you may feel at ease in this church ten years from now, and in ten years, you’ll wish you had stayed. If you stay, you can imagine what your life might be like if you were to leave, but if you leave, you will never know your “it might have been.” I choose to stay, and I say these things and embark on my mission in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Comments
Post a Comment