Soulation Helped Ex-Mormon Voice Her Doubts

While I was still in the LDS church, your articles really made me want to start looking for truth more actively.

This month I am taking a break from regular posts to spend time fundraising in Soulation’s hour of need. This week you get to hear a story from “S”, a woman who came to Soulation as she was beginning to question her upbringing in the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. S is a web designer and grad school student, currently in her sixth month as a FreedomBuilder.

While still in the LDS church, I wondered if motherhood was supposed to be my identity. It was my main issue with the Mormon church. I found honesty and hope in the RubySlippers’ post, “How Motherhood has (and has not) Changed Me.” I realized, motherhood is wonderful, but it doesn’t have to completely define who I am. I can also be a wife, a friend, a writer, and so much more.  This was good news to me, especially watching my sisters and friends enter motherhood and buy into church views and start losing who they really are. This post was one of your articles that really made me want to start looking for truth more actively

Soulation posts and sermons gave me the courage to question everything that had been building up inside me my entire life.

I admitted my doubts to myself and voiced them out loud.

I used to question myself at every turn. Now I have stopped living in fear. Shame and guilt no longer plague me constantly.

According to the LDS church, I should be staying at home, not working at all, with at least two or three kids by now. According to the LDS my husband should be the only one working and with a 9 to 5 job. He should go to work happily regardless of how much he might hate that particular job.  But we don’t do our marriage like this and you can imagine, my marriage is stronger because of the truth I found at Soulation. A lot of people look at us sideways when we say that I work full time and go to graduate school full time while my husband goes to school full time as well. Freedom from an oppressive religion has allowed us to have the courage to build the life we are made for and not look back.

Instead of simply following the norms expected of us, we now feel free to plan for our own future. This is particularly uplifting as we considering the possibility of growing our family through adoption when the time comes. Why should I feel guilty for providing a home to a child in need?

I no longer have to fight with myself every second of every day, and can instead focus on getting my soul to the place where Jesus wants it and helping others who are on this same journey to freedom.

If you have found, like “S”, that RubySlippers has been a well of biblically faithful nourishment and honesty, please help us continue our work by giving today.

Photo Credit: Micah Sheldon, cc via Flickr