Faithless in the Field

I stare at the worn, beaten blue book resting on the end of the bookshelf in my room, wondering when the last time I opened it was. It used to have legible text on the cover, but time and heavy use have chipped the gold lettering off completely.

 I thought back to the day I arrived in Sierra Leone, when the book was mostly untouched and the pages were fresh and white. The book began to show signs of wear as I toted it around each day in the jungle. I remembered the day my sweat had seeped through my backpack and dampened the first several chapters, rendering them permanently crinkled. The pages adopted a distinct brownish color caused by the clouds of dust kicked up by our motorcycle taxis as we sped from village to village.

Most missionaries hold their tattered scriptures up with pride, as a testament to their deepened faith and intense studies over their course of service. I leafed through the worn pages of my own set and instead thought about the testimony I lost. I thought back to how hard I tried to believe with hours spent reading each page, looking for something to fix my broken faith. As I turned through the last pages of the book, I saw my countless notes of heartfelt and desperate attempts to “doubt my doubts.”

I had begun as a zealous and energetic defendant of the faith, a version of myself that would almost be unrecognizable to the person now holding the tattered book. The book had survived the past couple of years but my testimony had not. What happened? Where did things begin to fall apart?

The beginning of my deconstruction stemmed from a pattern I imagine is familiar to those who have challenged the faith of their childhood. It began as a simple question I couldn’t find an answer, which in turn, led me down a rabbit hole with more questions and no answers. I found myself with a list of topics, questions, and doubts that I couldn’t reconcile. 

The first time I ever put my thoughts into words  was in a series of frantic emails to my parents. I told them I loved being a missionary and that they shouldn’t worry about me, but that I was having some serious doubts and wasn’t sure what to do. 

For months I wrestled with my list of questions. I wanted things to click into place and for my prayers to be answered, but no number of conference talks could erase the fact that the Church openly condemned gay marriage. No discussion with my mission president could explain the lack of female leaders chosen to speak at general conference. No scripture could truly resolve why Black people weren’t given the priesthood until 1978, or why women still couldn’t hold it at all. 

Day after day, I was told to have faith, to not linger on the parts of the gospel that caused me discomfort, and to trust that “someday it would make sense.” Frankly, I hated this, and I couldn’t understand why no one could look me in the eye when I read through my list of qualms. 

My inner conflict became the new normal. It seemed as though every spare moment of each day was spent mulling over this gigantic puzzle I had somehow never noticed before. I thought about what my life would look like after my mission and balked at the idea of having to grapple with these issues for the rest of my life. I felt as if my whole life had been planned out for me. Mormonism is not a weekly-service religion, it is an all-or-nothing lifestyle. I knew what the rest of my life would look like and the part I would play in each chapter.

I spat on the silver platter. The life that had been laid out for me—polished, perfect, and prepared by others—was not going to be the life I lived. I made the hardest decision I’ve ever made: to go my own direction. 

I chose to be myself and believe according to my own conscience rather than what I was told. I would allow myself to question, debate, and doubt anything and everything around me. I would decide for myself what was “good” and “true” not because I knew better than anyone else, but because at the end of the day nobody really knows anything for sure. The brutal reality of life is that we all have to guess, and I decided that I would guess on my own terms and not on the terms of the Church. 

However, I knew I still believed in parts of it—in service, forgiveness, kindness, charity, and love—but not much more than that. I felt ripped apart, angry, confused, and terrified without knowing what to do. Countless nights were spent in my muggy Freetown apartment journaling, trying to find a way to wrap my mind around stepping away from the only life I knew. 

Those nights brought growing pains that stretched and broke me into what felt like a whole new person. I struggled to know how to process the blank pages that were the next chapters of my life. There is a special loneliness reserved for those who long define themselves by faith, only to later doubt the very thing that they defend. 

I knew I should go home, that it was the right thing to do,but I was simply too scared. It was easier for me to keep hiking around Africa than to face what awaited at home. Life for an early-returner in Provo, Utah was scarier than any situation I’d face in Sierra Leone. I told myself that I should stay and stick it out. I was a coward. I was an immature nineteen-year-old  who thought that I was being tough by staying out.

I slowly built mental barriers and an emotional silo around myself. I focused on getting through each day and trying to put my mental health back together. Meals, exercise, and the walk between appointments were the highlights of my day. During lessons, I deflected hard questions to my companions, went home, and filled pages and pages in my journal. Time crawled by, but I started to heal. Simply existing in Africa was a logistical undertaking, and eventually, I was more immersed in making sure each missionary apartment had enough water for the week than the spiritual plight that had plagued me for months. 

As soon as things seemed to be getting better, they only got worse. One morning, I walked outside to borrow eggs from the elderly sister missionary that lived in our compound. I turned the corner and found her body lying still at the bottom of a concrete staircase. She had fallen while on a walk and passed away immediately. Attempts at CPR, frantic calls to the mission president, and the local hospital were futile, she was gone the moment she had fallen.

I had never lost anyone close to me, and navigating grief, especially without religion, was brand new to me. The next several weeks were a blur as we helped arrange a flight home for her casket and mourning husband. Without a built-in certainty of an afterlife, her death shook me up in a way that nothing else ever had before and I was forced to navigate the reality that life is temporary and fragile. How was I supposed to make sense of all of this without confidently knowing that she really was in a better place? A couple days after her body was flown home, I stumbled into my mission president’s office, not knowing what else to do. I had to open up and  be honest with at least one person in my life. 

My talk with him was the first of many conversations I’ve had regarding my faith. In the years since I’ve been home, I’ve looked my closest friends and family in the eyes and told them the same story you’re reading today. Although everyone reacts a little differently, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the understanding and empathy that’s been shown by the majority of the people close to me. 

Now I stand here today, holding that same tattered Book of Mormon. It’s been five years since I first opened it and three years since I last closed it. My faith journey has been a roller coaster by every measure, but life continues to surprise me with how deeply beautiful it can be—even when it is confusing and painful. The roller coaster eventually came to a peaceful stop, and I have made my peace with the absurdity of life. I have embraced that I don’t have nearly as many answers as I once thought I did, and that I don’t need certainty to lead a life of purpose. 

Every morning I wake up and realize more and more of how little I know, and how lost I am. 

And what a blessing that is.