The Short Story of My Conversion

Sacrament Talk: January 16, 2011

Stan and I were asked to give talks about The First Article of Faith in Sacrament Meeting this week. The outline for this talk became a summary for how I joined the church. As I gave the talk, I restyled the talk to include some incidents that I had not remembered until I was on the stand. I have rewritten the talk to include those remarks as well as some remarks I did not actually say for clarity.

First Article of Faith: We believe in God the Eternal Father and in His Son, Jesus Christ and in the Holy Ghost.

I have always believed that while we have many stories to tell about our lives, the most important story we have is how we came to accept the truths of the gospel.

I was born to parents who weren't members of any religion. My father was brought up Protestant but by the time I was 10 claimed himself as an agnostic (meaning he did not believe or disbelieve that there was a God) and my mother, a non-practicing Methodist.

I did not attend church or Primary, have Family Home Evening, read the Book of Mormon, know who Joseph Smith was or have any knowledge of Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost. However, even as a little girl I knew there was a God and thought of Him as my Father. I attribute this to my mother’s relatives who did pray over meals and went to Christian churches regularly. They were also very kind and loving to me. The source of their peace and kindness seemed to be their belief in God.

Someone taught me a night time prayer which goes like this:
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Every night before I went to bed, I would recite this prayer. Once settled, I remember gazing into the Heavens and wondering about God before I went to sleep. Around five years of age, my wonderings turned into personal prayers that allowed me to ask questions or pray fervently for some need.

For me, God was the creator of all the wonderful and beautiful things in my world and my protector at night. I felt a very personal relationship with Him and knew that He loved me and watched over me.

I remember asking my father about Jesus Christ. He told me that there were many great teachers in the world and Jesus was one of them. He would be pleased if I used the teachings of Christ as a guide in my life but that he did not believe that Christ was a God or that there was a God for sure. However he said that I could believe in anything I wanted to as long as it came from my heart.

I was always amazed that my Dad did not know there was a God. As a young girl I thought that his lack of faith was the source of his depression and addictions. But I listened to my father about Jesus Christ as I had no other reference point.

As my brother and I asked other questions about religion, my parents noticed that we were looking for answers from our peers. About the time I was thinking about being a nunn, they decided to take us to a number of churches always careful to not impose any religion on us but merely to introduce us to other ideas. As time went on we were informally introduced to various world religions and philosophies.

When I was ten, I befriended Sally, a girl in my sixth grade class. I highly respected Sally because she was the youngest of nine children whose mother had died and was in charge of running her family's household. With eight older brothers on a large farm, Sally was in charge of breakfast, dishes, laundry and house cleaning chores. When she invited me to attend her church one Sunday, I was curious to see how her religion helped her manage her life.

Her church was a small wooden, clapboard building at the end of a dirt road surrounded by trees. Inside was one long room with pews down the both sides leading to a pulpit area with a portrait of Jesus in the highest arch of the room. Everyone was dressed in Sunday best, very friendly and appealing. But I was astounded by their church services. There was no mention of God. Every song, story, prayer and sermon was the retelling of Christ, His life and teachings. I was horrified that they had put Jesus in God’s place of worship, worshipping the teacher instead of the Father. I went home angry and determined to never have anything to do with Jesus or Christianity again.

That night as I knelt down to say my prayers, I told God about my experience and promised Him that I would never worship Jesus Christ. I laid out my anger and reasoning to Him expecting peace to settle down upon me. Instead, I immediately felt God’s displeasure with my decision. It was the feeling of being rebuked, even chastised and I started crying in response. Then I became very frustrated by my situation. I knew that my parents would not support my claim that God told me Jesus was something more than just a teacher but at ten, I didn't have the resources to go looking for answers in other churches. With resignation and some irritation, I told God that if He wanted me to understand who Jesus was, He would have to provide the way for that knowledge to come to me.

A year later, we had moved to Florida and I was introduced to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by a Karen Mitchem, a classmate in the 7th grade. I was so impressed by how happy her family was and how they responded to me. Eventually Karen asked me to attend Young Women's where I learned the hula. I also went through about four sets of missionaries but never got past the first discussion because they always talked about a baptism date and I could never understand what baptism had to do with anything relating to God. Finally in ninth grade Karen started attending early morning Seminary every day before she went to our high school. That was just too much for me. I felt she was becoming fanatical. I drifted to other friends not knowing that my Mormon friends fasted for me every fast day for two years.

When I was fifteen, I started working at a facility for the mentally retarded in the nursery helping to care for approximately 30 children under four years of age. One of the other workers would sing hymns and spirituals as she worked feeding, bathing and dressing the babies. One day she started lamenting to herself about how these children would all be damned to eternal damnation because they had never been baptized. I was aghast that anyone could possible believe these innocent sweet children would be anything but loved and healed in the next life.

Shortly after this incident, Karen invited me to attend a fireside. The speaker was going to address the topic of "Do Little Children Need to be Baptized?". I went purposefully to debate the topic. I wanted to express my disapproval in the belief that children who died without baptism were damned.

The fireside was held in the newly built chapel in Orlando. A girl also about 15 years of age lead the discussion and I was impressed with her articulate message and clarity. She explained that little children could not sin until about eight years of age and God didn't require baptism of innocent babies.

Over cookies and mingling, I met a nice red haired boy who asked me out. After two weeks dating, he gave me a Book of Mormon to read, asking me to read 50 pages a night. I didn't know this was hard and quickly knew that the book was a true record God's relationship to men. It was like coming out of a dark tunnel into the light and I felt more clear and secure than I had ever felt in my life.

My brother and I asked to be allowed to go to early morning seminary at the start of the school year. There were nine of us that traveled about a half an hour in an old 1940s automobile leaving at 5:00 a.m. We would seat four in the front and four in the back with one of the smaller boys laying across the four in the back. The class was taught by Vera Smith. We studied the New Testament and the mission of the Savior. It was in Seminary that I finally found the knowledge of who Jesus is, His relationship to God and the Holy Ghost.

The concepts of God as the Eternal Father, His Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost are some of the precious truths that were lost because of a series of historical events. With the deaths of the Apostles and Prophets, converts with many different backgrounds tried to interject their old beliefs into their new Christian faith, especially the ideas and philosophies of the Greek converts. This caused many disputs and factions within the church and eventually transformed Christianity.

“From Wikipedia:The First Council of Nicaea (ni-SEE-ah) was a council of Christian bishops convened in Nicaea (an old city in what is now Turkey)* by the Roman Emperor Constantine I in A.D. 325. This council did not create the doctrine of the deity of Christ (as others including my father have claimed) but it did settle to some degree the debate within the early Christian communities regarding the divinity of Christ. (This idea of the divinity of Christ seemed by many to be confusing because they thought there should be only one God.) The council affirmed and defined what it believed to be the teachings of the Apostles regarding who Christ is: that Christ is the one true God in deity with the Father.” (And the Holy Ghost.) (My comments in italics)

Dallin Oaks
“We must begin with the truth about God and our relationship to him. Everything else follows from that.

In common with the rest of Christianity, we believe in a Godhead of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. However, we testify that these three members of the Godhead are three separate and distinct beings. We also testify that God the Father is not just a spirit but is a glorified person with a tangible body, as is his resurrected Son, Jesus Christ.

We maintain that the concepts identified by such nonscriptural terms as “the incomprehensible mystery of God” and “the mystery of the Holy Trinity” are attributable to the ideas of Greek philosophy. These philosophical concepts transformed Christianity in the first few centuries For example, philosophers then maintained that physical matter was evil and that God was a spirit without feelings or passions. Persons of this persuasion, including learned men who became influential converts to Christianity, had a hard time accepting the simple teachings of early Christianity: an Only Begotten Son who said he was in the express image of his Father in Heaven and who taught his followers to be one as he and his Father were one, and a Messiah who died on a cross and later appeared to his followers as a resurrected being with flesh and bones.

The Nicene Creed erased the idea of the separate being of Father and Son by defining God the Son as being of “one substance with the Father.”

While trying to unify the Christian believers, we believe that essential truths were lost. Ones that bless the lives of Heavenly Father’s children by defining Who God is, His relationship to Christ and the Holy Ghost.”

This quote is part of a marvelous talk from Dallin Oaks in April 1995 Conference. called Apostasy and Restoration.

The conclusions I draw from it are that there had to be a restoration of basic truths and these were brought to Joseph Smith, 14 year old boy is was seeking to find out the nature of God." April Cconference 1998