All Things Must Fail

My walk to campus every morning would leave my heart in convoluted knots. I lived so awkwardly close to campus that driving would be silly, but walking was no luxury. That labor accumulated in emotional heaps, and I blamed the towering T4 building on the south side of the missionary training center for it. I’d peer into the classrooms at the stark white shirts and dress skirts, reciting their missionary purpose and role-playing lessons where the learner always agrees to a baptism date––and in an act of defiance I’d scold the sight of it all in my mind. Some mornings I felt like the building was mocking me. 

I didn’t hate the MTC––or the missionaries, for that matter. I didn’t hate anything associated with that walk to campus in particular. It’s really the longing that hurt. I could remember being there. I could vividly recall my eagerness and my list of I know statements every time I’d bear my testimony. That certainty would carry me through to the end of my mission, and above all, I knew that it would never change. I remember as a missionary during one of my door-to-door routes seeing a mother and her children playing with a ball in their front yard––a wholesome vignette into their life––and pitying them in my mind for not being a part of the one true church. I have something they don’t, I thought to myself. 

A pandemic and a year in college changed a lot. I found myself looking around at these once flawlessly constructed idols of certainty strewn all over in jagged, broken pieces at my feet. I didn’t know how to clean up the mess. I didn’t even know if I wanted to. Worse yet, my peers at BYU didn’t seem to understand. All of them appeared to still be riding that wave of unfailing conviction, and their orthodoxy manifested in scathing villainizations of the group who had stepped away from the Church. That group included people I loved––people who were often better disciples than those I worshiped with. 

Going to church felt like an inconvenience. Attending second hour transitioned from a tonic to a sacrifice I wasn’t willing to make. I was surrounded by a sea of faces who were struggling in their own ways, but none ever had the courage to get up in testimony meeting and admit that they weren’t sure they believed in any of this. I didn’t have that courage either. From what I could see, everyone around me was doing well, and if they weren’t, the Church was a healing place for them and not the very source of their grief. 

I was coming to terms with the fact that I was bisexual, and the years of conformity and the sudden obsessive grasping for whatever was left of my faith felt jarring. I was disappointed in myself, and based upon the way certain leaders, friends, and family talked about people like me, I was pretty sure God was disappointed in me too. 

I spent months in mourning. At one point, I told my wife that I didn’t know what I believed anymore. I just knew I was tired of trying to reconcile so many paradoxes. I decided I would read and listen to everything I could get my hands on, and I promised myself that I’d go on this journey without leading with the conclusion that the Church and my beliefs were true. I told myself that if I ended up needing distance from the Church, I’d take it. 

I scoured through scriptures to figure out who Jesus was, independent of my Mormon-steeped construct of Him. I consumed articles, podcasts, journal entries, biographies, and speeches. I studied theology and the origins of Christianity. I vented to any BYU professor who would open their office door to me. I counseled with my bishop. I commiserated with friends and family who felt similarly. I was horrified. I was enlightened. I was entangled in a briar patch of the worst––and best––of the Church. I oscillated between indignation and grace. The pendulum would swing back and forth depending on the day––sometimes the hour. I processed the loss of my beliefs like the loss of a loved one––one who comforted my teenage anxiety and encouraged me to love myself and others; who disappointed me and ingrained in me internalized homophobia. They loved me in their own imperfect and sometimes harmful way. 

The more I read, studied, annotated, connected, contextualized, debated, and ranted, the less I knew. That knowing, which I once held in a white-knuckled grasp, had become completely foreign to me. One day, after a soul-crushing study session, I yelled at God and told Them I was done. I told Them I didn’t know anymore, and if They wanted me to know then They should have simplified this utter trainwreck I had once considered to be Their church. They should have made it more palatable and consistent. 

I released my sacred rage in a prayer of profanity and pleading, and then I laid on the floor of my apartment. I waited for something––anything––but the heavenly silence seemed to be my only answer. I felt betrayed. The God who had once helped me locate my lost car keys and make decisions about where to go to college apparently had nothing to say about any of this. I was angry with Them. As the silence shifted into unnerving peace, I let myself take it in. I gave myself the space to just be, for a second. My tears were unrelenting. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, and I gasped for light and clarity. In that solitude, the words of Mormon, the very colloquial namesake of this mess, came to my mind. It was a verse remembered from a past self, a missionary who perhaps once had it memorized but had long forgotten it.

“My beloved brethren, if ye have not charity, ye are nothing, for charity never faileth. Cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all, for all things must fail––but charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever.” ––Moroni 7:46-7 

Right there, nestled in a verse I had cherished, quoted, and internalized so much, was one hidden assurance that I had yet to read with open eyes: all things must fail. That was it. I didn’t need to know. I didn’t need to defend. It wasn’t my job to reconcile. It wasn’t my calling to find an answer for why there was so much disappointment and wrong in all of this. It was inevitable, because all things must fail: God’s church, God’s people, their execution, their ministry, their structures. I realized that I wasn’t supposed to cleave to those things. I needed to cleave to charity––charity for the people around me, charity for God and Their plan for me, and charity for myself. When I loosened my grasp on certainty, I felt that God finally had a grasp on me. 

In my yearning to recover the heart and brain of my younger self, I neglected the fact that they had failed me long ago. Somewhere between my post-mission faith crisis and my self-acceptance I shed off that version of me because it was no longer serving me well, and then I frantically and vainly longed to reinstate it. Today, I know very little, and finally––for the first time in my life––I believe in something. I believe in who I have become. I believe in God, and in Their love, wisdom, and grace. I believe in uncertainty, with its satisfying inconclusions and shortcomings. I believe in having charity for that former self that failed me long ago. I’ve decided to have compassion for him and for his shallow and immature conceptualization of God. 

I believe in having charity for the people around me––even the ones who don’t want me in their Sunday schools, elders quorums, and temples. I realize now that the Church gives me a space to try on charity––to stretch it out and let it change me. And when I wear it with deliberateness, I love how it feels. I love its warmth and struggle. I love how it demands greater expectations of me and the way that I live. Above all, I love that it makes me ask myself daily if I am genuine in my efforts to love my neighbor and to love my God. I learn to practice charity most when I am wandering in the spaces of uncertainty––in the wilderness of true faith. 

I walked to campus the other day and stopped for a brief moment somewhere along that metal fence separating me from the missionaries in the MTC. As I looked at the missionaries talking, laughing, teaching, and learning, I no longer saw a version of myself that I hated. I no longer felt mocked. The longing no longer hurt because the longing was no longer there. That version served me for a season and left when he needed to. I’m allowing the current version of myself to serve me in his fullest. 

May I let him fail me when the time is right. 

May I welcome the more refined and holier self that follows.