Feeling Lasting, Satisfying Faith.

  • 1 Comment

I felt sapped of my spiritual strength. It was harder to pray and harder to study scriptures in the right spirit.

Several years ago, my sister and her husband began to experience a crisis of faith. They had started studying the arguments of the skeptics and were becoming persuaded.  They began to question whether the foundational claims of Christianity were true and whether there was a God at all. They frequently came to me with difficult questions. At first, I was reluctant to engage because I did not want to focus all my spiritual energy on negative things. However, my sister and her husband felt that I could not understand them or help them if I did not engage meaningfully in their journey. So for the next 10 years, I read much of what they wanted me to read and tried to provide them with satisfactory answers. I felt like I was playing spiritual “whack-a-mole” — where doubts and questions (the moles) would pop up and I would try to hit them down. With enough study, I could answer many of the questions and doubts that arose, but there were some that I could not. Moreover, the questions never stopped coming. The whole process was like spiritual poison to me. Although I was never shaken in my underlying testimony, I felt sapped of my spiritual strength. It was harder to pray and harder to study scriptures in the right spirit. Then one day, I had an epiphany. People choose to believe or not to believe. The idea initially repulsed me. If faith is merely a choice, then how can I be confident that my faith is based in truth? However, the more I wrestled with the idea, the more I understood that I could choose to feed my faith or I could choose to feed my doubts, and that choice would usually be outcome-determinative. In many ways, my choice to believe is like my choice to love my wife. Love truly is a choice as much as it is a feeling. In saying that I have chosen to love her, I am not saying that I have forced myself into feeling affection for her. Rather, I am saying that in every marriage, there are things the partners choose to do or not to do—to serve each other, to play together, to dream and plan together, and to build a life together. We can choose whether we will focus on each other’s faults (which every partner has) or whether we will focus on the things that brought us together in the first place. We can choose to try to enhance the good in each other or we can choose the opposite. And if I choose to nurture my relationship with my wife, at the end of the day, I do not find myself saying: “Well, the only reason I love her is because I chose to love her -I mean how satisfying is that?” Rather, I find myself saying: “I love her because we have a full spectrum of marvelous experiences together, and we are now welded so closely that we truly are one.” Love fostered in this way is real, and the fact that I deliberately chose to do the things that strengthened the relationship does not alter the depth of my affection, nor does it lessen how meaningful and satisfying the relationship is. The same is true for choosing to believe. I can choose to serve others, to study scriptures, to forgive others, to pray sincerely in my quiet times, to share my faith, to fast, to attend church, to keep promises and to do all the other things that make it more likely that I will have spiritual experiences. I can also look for the hand of God in my life. However, I can also choose to focus my mental and spiritual energies identifying and amplifying my doubts and concerns, and/or I can choose to allow work or other activities to simply crowd out the activities in which God would likely be my companion. If I do choose to believe, at the end of the day, I do not end up saying: “Well, the only reason I believe is because I chose to have faith.” Rather, I have found myself saying: “I have faith because I have had a lifetime of spiritual experiences of all different varieties, and the fact that I deliberately chose to have the developmental experiences that have kept me close to the Lord does not alter the depth of my faith, nor does it alter how fulfilling my relationship with God has become.” We all have choices every day, but the choice to believe or not to believe, the choice to feed one’s faith or to feed one’s doubts, is imbued with deep moral significance. In the end, whether I have faith or not says much more about me than it says about the state of the evidence on any particular point. Thus, I have chosen to build my life on the things I know rather than on the things I do not know, and to choose the light rather than the darkness. In so doing, I have found ample reasons to believe, and I have found joy, direction and meaning in my life.

Facebook comments

Website comments

  1. Darci Reply

    Thank you for this article. It hit the nail on the head for me in many ways. My husband left me last year when I returned to the LDS church, after many years of inactivity (which began long before I met him). He had never been a member and his only exposure was living in SLC for a few years. We have young kids who I take to church on my weekends…which infuriates him. Over the past year he constantly pummels me with attacks and name calling about how Mormons blindly follow despite the mountains of evidence against our beliefs. I had never heard of this site until he sent me the link to the Alone video, and a comment that it is “an excellent video produced for the church”. I was conflicted with the ending of the video, as it appeared that the couple decided to ignore their doubts and just choose to believe. Which is exactly what my ex accuses Mormons of. Your article gave me a clear understanding of what it really means to choose to believe and the importance of feeding my faith. Well put! This is exactly what I needed and it gives me comfort to know why this ‘choice’ is not a passive action. I sincerely hope he will take time to explore this site. What I have read so far is pretty phenomenal!

Leave a Reply

Your Comment (Required)

Name (Required)

Email (Required)

Website

Copyright © 2024 Mormon Challenges. All Rights Reserved.
This website is not owned by or affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (sometimes called the Mormon or LDS Church). The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the position of the Church. The views expressed by individual users are the responsibility of those users and do not necessarily represent the position of the Church. For the official Church websites, please visit churchofjesuschrist.org or comeuntochrist.org.