Update 2

I just wanted to take a few minutes to share some of the things that I’ve learned over the last several weeks. I fully intend to come back and continue the scripture blog here at some point but I’m barely hanging on as it is and between just trying to not self-destruct and wanting to finish my MBA program so that I don’t waste $5,000 I just can’t bring myself to focus on anything else right now. It’s been almost 3 months since my life flipped upside down and I feel like I’ve lived 8 lifetimes. I can’t even remember my life before this. I was so close to peace, just weeks away from breathing easier for the first time in my life and now I’ll never have it, not in this life anyway. I was so close and it’s like the weight of the next 50 years are crushing me and it’s exhausting. I have lived a difficult, painful, and violent life and this is by far the worst thing that has ever happened to me, and I think this is going to be my life until I die, and that is a very daunting and exhausting prospect. I cry every day, and before this I hadn’t cried in years. I feel like I’m being ripped apart from the inside and that it’s going to feel like that forever.

It's been a very spiritually forging, but here are a few things that I’ve found to be interesting. I think the most important thing that has come from this is that I’ve had to ask myself “is my belief in God just a mental illness that I’ve created to cope with a horrific life that has no meaning or purpose?” I’ve thought that before, usually just as a thought experiment but this was the first time I really had to answer this question, when it came down to it, do I believe in God or not? This is also a difficult question because most of my friends and family members have left the church and left me so I am completely alone in all this, figuring it out, I don’t have hardly anyone that I can talk to about these types of questions, which may be the point.

In the course of contemplating that question, these two scriptures came across my study, Helamen 6:35-26 which says, “And thus we see that the Spirit of the Lord began to withdraw from the Nephites, because of the wickedness and the hardness of their hearts. And thus we see that the Lord began to pour out his Spirit upon the Lamanites, because of their easiness and willingness to believe in his words.” This said to me that if I was going to second guess and question every single thing that I was being taught by the Spirit, I would be taught less and less because I would have a hard heart. That’s not to say that doubt is bad, because it’s a faith builder, but a refusal to believe what was being taught will result in less being taught. But a willingness to at least be open to what was being taught will result in the Spirt teaching me more and more. If I wanted to fight Him on everything then that was my right, but it wouldn’t lead to me being taught anything. Easiness and willingness to believe would lead to more teachings and that’s what I need right now.

The second verse that came with that lesson was when Sherem was trying to convince Jacob to deny Christ and Jacob 7:5 says “and he had hope to shake me from the faith, notwithstanding the many revelations and the many things which I had seen concerning these things; for I truly had seen angels, and they had ministered unto me. And also, I had heard the voice of the Lord speaking unto me in very word, from time to time; wherefore I could not be shaken.” I haven’t seen angels, but I had to consider all the times that Jesus had manifested himself to me in various ways and had to build on what I did know to help fortify me against what I don’t know.

There are some other ones that have helped and maybe I’ll come back later and talk about them but I’m tried now, even this has been a lot. I don’t know what life is going to look like from here on out and I wish I could say that I was confident that it will all be ok, but I’m getting there.