Stumblinginthemists

Tonight it seems even Facebook is acting as some sort of spiritual guide. 7 years ago today I apparently finally posted my full testimony and conversion story on there. It's four pages of text so I've printed it out to give it a read, alongside my Patriarchal Blessing too. xxx

Thank you Zil for those talks, I've pondered them overnight (I'm in the UK!) I've got in touch with my bishop. On further contemplation on what you've all kindly said, I think you're all probably right. To begin, I will only be able to go for sacrament meeting due to circumstances at home (husband is recovering from cancer). I think all your responses have been the push I needed. xxxxxxxx

Needle - you are absolutely right at your point 3. I've spent a lot of time reading anti-mormon stuff, in fact my original conversion happened as a direct result of anti-mormon lies! But that's a story for another day. All too often I read of people saying that they've never had a revelation, never heard the still small voice, never experienced what I know to be a reality. In my journey, I never once met an ex-mormon who had those experiences. xxx

Thank you Lehi, but I feel right now that I need to work on my relationship with Heavenly Father, and not get bogged down with any politics or end up questioning myself on "why" I'm doing something. I need to make sure that I don't get so caught up in the what, and forget about the why. xxx

Cause to Pause Today has been a day of revelation. I’m inactive as far as the Church is concerned. I have shunned religion, shunned faith, shunned Heavenly Father for about a year. I’ve had my testimony rocked to it’s core. I became convinced that the church was a cult. You have no idea how hard that is to admit to myself right now, let alone anyone else. I have struggled, I have railed, I have wept and I have ignored. I’m a convert, no faith background except perhaps loosely Christian but no church attendance as a child at all. I’ve been dealt some blows in life, blows that others will never have to experience. I would write about them here but I fear they would make me too easily identifiable to anyone who knows me well. I’m not sure I’m ready to “announce” my intentions right now. I’ve been looking for another church to attend. I’ve been reading voraciously, trying to find something to grab hold of and extricate myself from the restored gospel. I’ve asked for help of anti-mormon folks. I have sat down and tried to analyse without any help from the Holy Ghost, what exactly it is that I believe in. Not just based on what I’ve been taught, but also based on my own experience. I even took a questionnaire online in an attempt to find another faith. 100% LDS. Despite that when I took it, as I answered, I considered that I was removed from LDS teachings, I thought my outlook had changed. In all this pondering I, not for the first time in my life, had a most curious dream. It woke me a good 4 hours before the alarm was due to go off. In that space of time, in the dawn of the day, I was able to hear the still small voice one more time. There is no other church that I can join. The contents of the dream are unimportant right now, but suffice it to say that it affected me enough to sit in quiet contemplation and to pray. Later, I was looking around for some music with a message downloads (I’ve always found music to be a spiritual medium that can set me in the right frame of mind). I inadvertently, thanks to the search engine with a y, ended up clicking on and off lds.org. But something caught my eye. President Uchtdorf’s General Conference Talk “Christ Will Find and Rescue You” from the April 2016 conference. It’s this week’s “Talk of the Week” on lds.org. Towards the end of this talk, the line: “Our Savior, the Good Shepherd, knows and loves us. He knows and loves you.” Never has something hit me with so much clarity of thought in my life. The talk goes on to say this: “His invitation is simple: “Turn … to me.”5 “Come unto me.”6 “Draw near unto me and I will draw near unto you.”7 This is how we show Him that we want to be rescued. It requires a little faith. But do not despair. If you cannot muster faith right now, begin with hope. If you cannot say you know God is there, you can hope that He is. You can desire to believe.8 That is enough to start.” Today is my start. I can’t deny what I know anymore. I am telling no-one I know at this stage, I’m not planning on attending church in the near future. I am going to take each day as it comes, and draw a little closer to Heavenly Father. Truly humbled. Axxx

Hi all, I just wanted to share an article from today's Daily Mail. I'm copying it in it's entirety as I'm not sure if I can post links, or how safe links are to the DM website to be honest. In any event, it sums up very well the general attitude of therapy here in the UK. "DR MAX: Please Kate, don't turn George into a therapy junkie By Dr Max Pemberton For The Daily Mail Yes, I know what I’m supposed to say. Well done, Kate! What a wonderful person you are! Thank you for speaking out about mental health problems in children. And I do feel that. Really I do. There’s just something that made my heart sink when I read the Duchess of Cambridge’s comment this week that she ‘would not hesitate’ to send her children to therapy if she thought they needed it. See more on Kate Middleton as she ‘would not hesitate’ to send her children to therapy There’s just something that made my heart sink when I read the Duchess of Cambridge’s comment this week that she ‘would not hesitate’ to send her children to therapy if she thought they needed it Kate was guest-editing a website as it launched a campaign to end the stigma around child mental health. She was heaped with praise for choosing what everyone claimed was an unfashionable subject. Actually, the really unfashionable subject is adult mental health. We all feel sorry for troubled children. It’s mentally ill adults who generate fear and prejudice. Speak up for adults with schizophrenia and people imagine you’re defending axe-wielding maniacs. Not a good public relations move. Of course, even if Kate chose a slightly safer cause to champion, it’s still a worthy one. And I don’t want to be churlish. But I couldn’t help but cringe, just a little, when she said she wanted ‘to encourage George and Charlotte to speak about their feelings, and to give them the tools and sensitivity to be supportive peers’. Kate Middleton guest edits blog post on mental illness. Kate was guest-editing a website as it launched a campaign to end the stigma around child mental health It sounded as though it was lifted straight out of some PR handbook. Slightly inauthentic, in other words — and when you’re talking about mental illness, being sincere and authentic are quite important. Clearly, Kate is a great advocate for talking problems through. She seems to think this is a panacea. I’m not so sure. You might be surprised to read this from me, but sometimes it’s better to bottle things up. Sometimes, talking endlessly about your feelings isn’t the answer. Sometimes, in fact, you just need to accept the past and move on. No amount of chatting is going to change what’s happened. Instead, the best advice doesn’t come from Freud, or Jung, but from a far more child-friendly source: Disney. I’m thinking of that maddening song from Frozen: Let It Go. After all, isn’t that all that psychotherapy is about, really? It’s meant to help us let go of something in the past and move on. I couldn’t help but cringe, just a little, when she said she wanted ‘to encourage George and Charlotte to speak about their feelings The trouble is that people get hooked on it. They keep turning over their problems like a treasured possession they can’t look at too often. Instead of letting go, they use psychotherapy to hold on. Yet all the time they convince themselves they’re being terribly brave and sensitive. That’s not to say I’m not a great fan of psychotherapy when it’s rigorous. I absolutely think that the unexamined life is not worth living. I’ve had psychotherapy and I’ve trained in it. But I also think there can be too much navel-gazing. And that’s not a good habit to get into — least of all right from childhood. How old do you have to be before you stop blaming your parents for all the mistakes you’ve made in your life? Of course, I’m not saying a stiff upper lip is always the answer. That can cause a multitude of problems as emotions fester. But it’s sometimes best to let wounds heal. Constantly reopening and examining them only makes the process take longer and scars more likely to form. I look at the younger generation who have embraced the idea that we must constantly examine every feeling we have. Are they happier? Have they grown noticeably wiser and more psychologically rounded? No. If anything, I think people have simply got a little more self-obsessed and narcissistic. I think about my gran and the hardships she endured. One of 14 born into crushing poverty, she watched as her brothers were killed one by one in World War II, was bombed out of her home, left school at 13 despite having won a place at a grammar, and fell for a man who turned out to be a violent alcoholic who beat her. N ot only did you never hear her complain, I didn’t even know about half of the stuff she’d gone through until after she died. She didn’t speak about it because she knew she couldn’t change what had happened and just had to get on with living. If Kate wants role models for her children, who are the modern royals we most admire? Who comes across as the most psychologically robust? It’s certainly not Princess Diana, who, much as I loved her, was hardly what you’d call psychologically stable. Despite hours upon hours of psychotherapy, she was still dogged by problems. More than any other royal, she spoke about her feelings and yet it did her no good whatsoever. If anything, she seemed all the more tormented by her psychological issues precisely because she spent so much time examining them. No, the royals whom people look up to are the Queen and Princess Anne, both of whom are paragons of emotional restraint. I’ve no doubt both have their issues, as everyone does, but they just get on with life, don’t they? They don’t wallow in self-pity or spend all day self-analysing. Yes, good for Kate that she’s speaking up about mental health. She genuinely seems a warm, caring mother. But turning little George and Charlotte into therapy junkies won’t do them any favours."

For me it's more a case of logically I know it can't be true, deep down I know it can't be true, but there is just that small niggling little voice of doubt that causes me to pause. I'm not sure a christian therapist would be particularly helpful, given some Christian denominations hatred of LDS. It's not possible under UK law for me to even ask about the religion of a would be therapist. However, that said, it's not something I am discounting completely, it is just a different avenue to explore. I'm not really clear how seeing a therapist, LDS or not, will help with regards to my relationship with Heavenly Father and the Church but... at this point in time I am pretty much open to anything. xxx

Vort, unfortunately that is what I've tried to do with speaking to one or two of my stake leaders but it seems like it may be too difficult or an unwanted task to deal. Loved the "Psychotherapist" cartoon, that was fab - I've never realized that was how the word broke down before! xxx

The best way I can explain it would be that the fact a lot of Americans use counseling services etc is a subject of ridicule over here in the media. The church's counsel is on the basis of finding an LDS counselor, probably sound advise particularly in the UK given that we are becoming more and more an atheist country. The idea is that a counselor who is not LDS might not understand exactly what is going on. Imagine describing to someone who you are talking to about your mental health, that you believe in a faith "started" by a 14 year old boy in New York around 200 years ago, that you believe that there is a Prophet on the earth today. You're not going to get very far without being sectioned (not sure what the US term is here, but where you would be taken into a mental health institution for your own protection). Mental health is still very much something that is hidden in the UK, it's still associated with the asylums of old rather than being something that we can positively and proactively help/assist/exercise. There seems to be a general consensus that anyone needing mental health assistance must be at the far end of the scale and be a full blown lunatic. Sorry I know that's not particularly politically correct but I can't think of any other way to say it. xxx

It's not something that's really done in the UK and more importantly the Church counsels us to ensure we speak with LDS therapists only who are few and far between. xxx

Thank you also for replying. I was listening to one of the Music with a Message podcasts earlier today which reminded me of your post. The basic premise was that the winds of trials will cause some people's flames of faith to blow out while it will fan others, even though it's the same trial. I suppose my problem is that my candle is all but gone. xxx --- EDITED As soon as I hit enter then, I realized that's a false thing for me to say. I'm not faithless in the sense that I don't believe in Heavenly Father or the Atonement or Christ or the Restoration etc etc. I'm not faith-less but I'm not faith-full either in that I'm not doing anything to actually work on that relationship. Like any relationship if people aren't willing to work together, then the relationship will wither and die eventually. I suppose I need to work out whether I want that to happen here. xxx

I must say that part of what you kindly replied hit me quite hard. You're right, I'm stagnating here, neither progressing towards Him nor really walking away either, because I'm not actively doing anything to jeopardize a relationship with Him, I'm just not acting on it. Food for thought. xxx

I've highlighted the main part I took from your post, thank you for replying. Since everything that happened with my husband's cancer, I feel as though things go wrong every time I do turn to to Him, but things go well when I don't. I know that sounds crazy, and I know the good and the bad will come anyway, but it feels as though I'm putting a huge target on my back by turning to Him. I wonder sometimes if we can recognise when we are the tares and if so, wouldn't it be better to step away from the wheat in the first place? xxx

Now therein lies a rather difficult side to my story; we had a very long engagement (in years) and had our first child together prior to getting married. It has been an interesting journey, partly due to disabilities within our respective families, lots of things. But we'd been together a decade and rightly or wrongly, as my husband isn't a member, it was semi-accepted by my local leadership. I became inactive, had our first child, and then began going back to church. I finally had my ducks in a row, we married on the 23rd May, by the 14th June my husband was taken into hospital. His nephew (12 at the time) even said that the reason my DH was in hospital was due to him marrying me! LoL. Seriously though, that the main crux of the matter. I feel like if we hadn't got married when we did that the cancer wouldn't have happened. Even though I know logically that's a stupid thing to think, it still is in my head. As if because my ducks were finally getting into order, that something bad had to come along as a punishment almost. I hope that makes sense, and I sincerely hope it doesn't put anybody off replying to me. xxx

Hi all, I'm going to reply one by one I think in a short while. I thank you for your responses, I have been ruminating on them for the last few hours since they landed. xxx