Losing the faith that I had always had was a slow process
you don't realize what you've lost
until much further down the road.
My parents taught me to love God.
When you're little, I think oftentimes you do things
because your parents want you to do them.
About the age of fourteen, that changed for me and I had this deep desire to
follow God because I wanted it.
I felt that He was there, I felt that He loved me; this is what motivated me to
be a good person.
When I was nineteen, I went to serve a church mission
teaching people about the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
I got home, went to college and basically just picked up where I'd left off.
Reading the scriptures, praying,
serving people, that was just life as I knew it.
I did this for a few years, then it just started to
become old.
I felt like I had done it all, I'd figured it out, I'd been reading my scriptures forever and saying
my prayers that
I didn't need to anymore.
I saw people who were not following God's commandments as we know them
and yet they had more money
they were dating the girls that I wanted to date, it seemed like their life
was better.
I thought, 'well maybe
what I'm doing is wrong, maybe I need to change the way I go about this'
I became cynical
about everything religious.
If you cannot measure it, it must not be true. So the feelings that I had had,
where I had felt God in my life of love and joy,
I must just be creating it in my mind or something, right?
I started to become cynical about all the problems that are
in this world. Wars and disease,
natural disasters, and started to, in a way, point the finger at God and say,
"where are you?" Because of all this pain and suffering that exists
maybe that means that God doesn't exist.
I left my family and the culture that I had grown up in
and I moved to Seattle looking for another way of life that was
outside of God's way that brought
more happiness.
I had a great job, I was making tons of money,
I could do whatever I wanted.
It's almost easier to not believe in God because you don't have to think about
an afterlife, you don't have to think about moral clarity or any of these rights and
wrongs.
This is just life, and whatever happens in life is life, and you die, and there's nothing after.
There reaches a point where
you start to think about some of these
deeper questions about life. When I have kids,
do I raise them with a belief in God, do I not? In these moments
I started to feel what I had felt before
and for the first time in a long time
something triggered inside of me
I felt something that I hadn't felt in a long time
I felt the Spirit.
and I felt-- I felt the spirit
tell me that what I was doing wasn't right.
and I got a glimpse of what I once was.
And I realized what I had to become again.
and so that was really the turning point for me.
The feelings, the experiences, the emotions that I had felt was more than just
a chemical reaction that's being triggered in my body.
No matter how illogical it may
sound, there is a God; an all-powerful, all-knowing God.
Once I recognized the wrongs that I had made,
the things that I had to make right, I also understood that
there was no way that I could return to God
without a Savior and that
because He had suffered for my sins,
that He made it possible for me to become clean
and to wipe away those--those wrongs to
take those sins away. I couldn't do it
on my own that I--I needed him.
Despite the mistakes I had made, the wrong turns I had taken,
and the faith that I had abandoned, my Savior was there with
open arms ready and willing to help me back.
He was there to lift me up when I needed Him most.