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A prayer for strength. 🙏

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I love the imagery of the Lord chasing us with his love. Like you WILL be loved. You WILL get found and hugged.

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Prayer must be your lifestyle, not just your emergency contact.

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God doesn’t remove your problems, He makes a way through them.

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God's not going to let you sink. He is in control, and He is going to see you safely to the other side.

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Y'know, it's funny being a mormon because sometimes I forget that most Christians actually believe in Hell. Like. There is a place where people will go when they die, where they will just suffer eternally, and that a whole lot of people will go there, actually. And that the assignment just happens based on your one mortal lifetime. It's wild to me.

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Some practical life skills I've gained from being a member of my Church:

Public speaking. Kids in my Church start giving talks and speeches starting around age 4. I've given talks so often that it's second nature to me; once you explain the priesthood [which you do not have] to a congregation of hundreds of people in a language you don't speak, public speaking doesn't seem like such a big deal.

Reading music. I read 4 part harmony every week, and that practice has made me valuable in choirs and orchestras ever since. Most wards and stakes have choirs too, which get to do complex hymns and arrangements. I perform a special musical number almost on a monthly basis in various congregations too -- if I ever had stage fright, I don't anymore!

As a side note, playing piano. It seems like every member of my Church learned how to play piano as a kid. I'm not a great pianist, but there are so many good pianists around me that I don't ever have to play for church. And we don't even get paid do to it!

Teaching lessons. I was my young women's president growing up, and, being an exceptionally poor planner, I often forgot to ask other people to teach lessons for me. This led to many sacrament meeting cram sessions where I struggled to come up for an object lesson about the Atonement involving only what was in my bag. One time I had to give the "how to pick a good husband" lesson as a young little aspec who did NOT want to get married or have a husband and who frankly wasn't too keen on the idea of marriage as a whole. I sucked up my pride and rebellious queerness and gave those 13 year old girls the BEST "how to pick a good husband" lesson that they've ever been given.

Intergenerational relationships. Being part of a religious community means that you interact with a lot of very old and very young people. When I was in high school I would think "Why does everyone say teens suck at talking to adults, me and my middle aged friends are homeboys". Age really doesn't matter when you're all worshipping the same God.

I know I gained a lot more than that but those are the things that you could like, put on a resume or something.

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Why is a picture of S1 Dean Winchester meeting Jesus in my seminary class

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Love answering ”why are you transgender?” with “God told me to” because it’s funny and it confuses everyone except for me. And God. Because he told me to.

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Deliverance for the Captives

I recently attended a ward that was different than any other ward I have ever attended before. It was located near a prison and comprised mostly of men who were either currently incarcerated or previously released. They met in a warehouse conference room. Folding chairs were set up in a fan shape, pointed toward a podium. On the week I attended, they were having a testimony meeting. I arrived a bit late and took a chair a friend was saving for me just as the testimonies were beginning.

An LDS testimony meeting can be a real cultural experience. Everyone is welcome. A typical testimony meeting involves members taking turns standing up and delivering whatever words are in their heart to the entire congregation. Testimonies may be a minute long or considerably more. The entire program is completely free form and open to all the unexpected moments such a format suggests. Sometimes testimonies are brief and focused on a witness of Jesus Christ. Other times, they delve into personal experiences or provide the congregation with an impromptu lesson from the speaker. And there are, occasionally, some that are quite memorable and depart from the typical formulas entirely. It’s a uniquely Mormon event, and you really should consider attending one just for the experience (you can sit in back and not participate, and they are typically held on the first Sunday of each month).

In this particular meeting, a man who had spent decades behind bars spoke encouragingly to the others. We also heard the story of a homeless man living in a park and dealing with police issues. The US incarcerates a lot of individuals, and most have significant difficulty finding work and putting their lives together after release. Almost all the speakers were men, though two were women.

The testimony that stood out to me the most came from a wonderful sister who was married to someone who had spent time in prison. She followed up with more wonderful thoughts a bit later as we sat in a lesson together. The two messages touched my heart and have been coming back to me ever since. This is how I have been remembering them:

1. During the testimony meeting, she spoke to the men about living with ‘the jail that is in your head’. She talked about how they carry with them the burden of their own negative self-perceptions and how this holds them back from believing they can heal and re-integrate, holds them back from realizing who they are as children of loving Heavenly Parents and from becoming who they and their families want them to become. She also spoke of how the negative beliefs and judgments of others hurt us and bind us down. Christ came to set the prisoners free. Part of becoming free is realizing that the past does not dictate all that is possible in the future for us. Christ wants to free us from the chains of negative self-perception and the shame and fear we inherit from the world around us when they see us as something other than children of God.

2. In a later class she spoke again. This time she talked about her own situation. How hard it was to have a husband who was in prison. She spoke of a box of expectations, and how she placed in this box all the things that had been part of how her life was supposed to go, and all the accomplishments and milestones she had expected to experience along the way: college, marrying a returned missionary, living happily ever after, and so on. Instead, her box had blown up, just fallen apart in tatters. As she lived through that, she learned that the love of God exists outside of boxes. God works powerfully, even in lives that don’t seem to fit the mold of conventional expectations.

Some people who read this may be offended by the idea of these men attending church. They may want to focus on the fact that these men are criminals who have done bad things and hurt others. They may want to continue ostracizing and isolating them or avoid interacting with and seeing them at all. Those are natural feelings, and I do not expect and am not calling for the victims of these men to forgive or embrace them. However, they are still human beings. They are still children of God. They are still in need of redemption. Christ called on us to minister to those in need, including those in prison – physically or otherwise. Our prophet has encouraged “each of us to reach out to ‘the one’ in our lives who may be feeling lost or alone”. Mercy and the enduring love of Jesus Christ can be difficult topics.

After that meeting, I found myself feeling glad these men had this place to gather, a place to seek healing and fellowship, a place to express their desire to do good and become better, a place to work on their hope for putting off the sins of the past and becoming reborn and redeemed through the atonement of Jesus Christ. I was glad that their families, and those who still love them and want them to heal, could join them there. And I thought about how Jesus might embrace and welcome them if they ever attended His ward, regardless of where it was.

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Mormoncore

Do you think they realize how much cooler that makes it sound?

Like. I'm not even an apotheosis type of guy. But you do know that makes it sound so much cooler right?

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we're a "peculiar people"? So I'm NOT like other girls!

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Our Heavenly Father is more liberal in His views, and boundless in His mercies and blessings, than we are ready to believe or receive.

Joseph Smith

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@ all the religious queers who follow me (or don't lol), y'all should reblog this with what your favorite part of your religion is. it could be a particular ritual, an item, a belief within it, an experience you had, anything!

we should share some good against all the bad that we get <3

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I remember being upset when I Am a Child of God changed "Teach me all that I must know" to "Teach me all that I must do". That's what I grew up with and I didn't want a change.

But then I came to understand. It takes more than just knowing something to return to God's presence.

Someone pointed out that "Satan knows everything necessary to return to God's presence. But that knowledge isn't going to save him, because he's not doing anything with it."