This article was previously published on Latterdaysaintwoman.com
When I was a young girl, perhaps ten years old, my family was on a day trip to Los Angeles, California. As usually happened on our outings we were lost. In our family, being lost automatically converted a planned outing to a Serendipity Outing. This particular serendipity, a word meaning fortunate accident, would turn out to be far more fortunate than I would realize for many years to come.
Serendipity!
On Serendipity Outings, we simply kept driving until we saw something interesting, and then we stopped there. We were all instructed to keep our eyes open for likely prospects and soon my younger sister called out that there was a castle in the distance and she wanted to see it. My father followed the spire and we soon found ourselves in front of the “castle”, which was really, according to the sign, a temple for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It didn’t really look like a castle but my parents promptly saw an educational moment before them and they took us to the Visitor’s Center. We joined a large group of people on a tour. I remember nothing of the tour until the moment the guide began to tell us about Joseph Smith and the vision he had when he was fourteen years old.
As the guide continued the story through the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, I felt an overwhelming power fill my heart and move outward until it enveloped me. I felt surrounded by a sense of peace, safety, and truth. I didn’t know what the feeling was or what it meant, only that it was the most perfect experience I had ever had and I never wanted it to end. As the guide spoke of the Book of Mormon, his words escaped me but my heart pleaded for a copy of that book. I didn’t know why I wanted it, but I did, more than I had ever wanted anything.
Mormon Temple, San Diego California
I was so taken by the powerful feelings I was experiencing that I paid no attention to the remainder of the tour. When it ended, the missionary who had been our guide approached my father. He said that as he had been telling the story of the Book of Mormon, a powerful prompting had come over him that he was to give me a copy of the book. Because I was so young, he wanted my father’s permission to do so. My father was amused, knowing that I loved books, and would never reject a free book of any kind. He was puzzled, however, as to how the missionary could have known that. I did have an unusual love of religion, always teasing people to take me to church, but of course, the guide could not have known this, either. Still, my father believed in agency, so he looked down at me and asked, “Do you want a Book of Mormon?”
I was so happy I could only nod, and my father reached for his wallet. The missionary shook his head and said he wanted it to be a gift. I clutched my precious book to my heart, hoping that by doing so the wonderful power centered in my heart would remain. I carried it to the car, continuing to hold it close. At home that night, I tried to read it, but had too little experience with scriptural language. I kept it by my bedside though, and often pondered why I felt so much happier just knowing it was there.
The Search for Religious Truth
Eventually the memory began to fade a little, but as I got older, my love of religion and church grew stronger. Instead of just going to any church to be there, I began searching for one I could join. My parents were of differing faiths, and had given me permission to choose for myself. Each time I went to church, I came home feeling disappointed. My mother liked to meet me at the door and watch my expression as I approached.
She always asked if I had found what I was looking for. I always shook my head. One day she told me that she knew a lot about various religions, and if I would tell her what I was looking for, she might be able to help. I hesitated, not sure how to explain why I felt let down after each visit. Finally I said, “When I come out of a church, I want to be different than I was when I went in.” My mother shook her head. She understood that this was something I had to do for myself.
As I pondered what I had told her, I realized that I wanted to believe the church I chose would make a difference in my life, that the decision to choose a religion would matter for eternity. I knew that once I committed to a church, I would never change my mind, so I wanted to be absolutely sure. I didn’t like the religions that seemed to be two-hours-on-Sunday. I wanted one that took all day every day to live, one that mattered to every part of my life. I wanted it to be hard, to challenge me to reach summits I never imagined impossible. I knew this was something I needed for myself.
To make things more complicated I had begun to think about doctrine on my own. Each time I visited a church or read a book, I learned new teachings. These teachings often conflicted with each other, and yet each church claimed to be telling the truth, to be teaching God’s word. This couldn’t be. I knew that if one doctrine was true, then the opposing one must be false. But who was right? I decided that only one church could be true, and I wanted to find it. I started a notebook–my standard way to solve every problem. The notebook had three columns on each page. Each doctrine I learned went into one column: I agree, I don’t agree, or I don’t know. I noted which churches taught each thing. Somehow, I thought this would lead me to the truth.
The Spirit Taught Me
Just to add even more layers of complication, I had come to some conclusions on my own that I had not learned anywhere at all. Somehow I knew that certain teachings must be true, although I couldn’t, at that time, have explained how I knew. Something in my heart often whispered information to me when I pondered, not in words, but in understandings. A few of these ideas became so important to me that I felt uneasy joining any church that did not approve of these beliefs, but I had not found any that accepted all of these teachings.
One teaching, central to all others, was the belief that God loved me and was kind and gentle. Despite hearing in some churches that I needed to fear Him, I could not. I loved Him and was certain that he loved me and wanted me with Him someday.
A second idea was one that marriage and families were meant to last forever, something a young Mormon friend had told me when I was in eighth grade and he was in sixth grade. I wrote a short story one day based on this idea and knew immediately that it was true. I often heard in churches that when I got to heaven, I would no longer be me and I would not care about such worldly things as families and husbands. I found it impossible to think of my family as a worldly possession or one that was not essential. If I was going to spend an eternity in Heaven, I wanted my family there with me.
Third, I had begun to believe that we must have lived with God before coming to the earth. I had looked at reincarnation as an explanation for certain experiences, but the theory just didn’t work. Living with God somehow before coming here made more sense. No church agreed with me on that idea!
Finally, I decided that if these were the last days, then God ought to be helping us to get through them and giving us instructions to prepare for the challenges to come. I decided that the world needed a modern prophet. A vacation Bible School told me we didn’t need prophets anymore. Even I, just a child then, could see that was not true. Every visit to a church showed me how badly we needed a prophet to tell us which of the conflicting teachings was true. I carefully listened to each church leader to find the answers, but I found none who taught these principles.
Meeting a Member-Missionary
When I was sixteen, a Mormon friend began talking to me about his religion. Remembering the power of my little blue book, I listened and then accepted an invitation to church. My conversion process was much harder as a teenager than it had been as a little girl with a child’s ability to feel the spirit. I found all four of my “weird” ideas there, but I also found other things I didn’t want to believe. I hadn’t given any thought to them previously, so it wasn’t a matter of trying to unlearn something. I simply wanted to create the world my own way.
Being academically inclined, I spent a lot of time at the library in this pre-internet era. I read books that supported the church. I also read books that opposed the church. The anti-Mormon books seemed silly to me. They were trying so hard and were so unbalanced that I decided they had nothing to offer. I had often said that if your religion is so great, you will be so busy telling me about it you won’t have time to attack anyone else.
I saw these books wanted to take away the faith of the Mormons, but seemed to offer nothing of value in return. The authors appeared to me to have what I considered an odd obsession with the religion and they were careful never to offer anything that might actually be positive. They seemed afraid to let people know there was good to be found in the faith. Their descriptions of Mormons did not match my own observations of the Mormons I had known. I soon lost interest in them.
This church was hard, though. I had to agree with some of the writers on that. Well, yes, I had wanted a hard church, but I felt a little overwhelmed by all the things a good member of this church was supposed to do. I did not yet understand that we weren’t expected to be perfect, only progressing. And the ideas they were teaching…even for me some of them were confusing and strange, simply because they were so new to me. The story of how I learned to solve this dilemma was told in the New Era and can be read here. For me, the solution was to learn how to receive answers to prayers. Within a few months, I had committed to a baptism.
I didn’t have a perfect knowledge of the church at the time of my baptism. There were areas of doubt and fear and there were still things I sort of wished weren’t true because they were different than what I had believed before.
The missionaries insisted I pray about everything they taught me. They wouldn’t let me take their word for anything. I found that puzzling, but reassuring. I stopped keeping up my notebook. I had come to realize it told me what I believed, but it did not tell me what God believed. I was still an intellectual by nature, but I combined serious study with serious prayer to find a more balanced answer to my questions. I was seeking the truth as God revealed it, not my own wishes. Truth was not mine to create.
When I prayed about joining the church, I understood that God wanted me to join. I had enough faith in Him to do that, even without a complete testimony. Over time, I would continue to pray about various aspects of the religion.
What I did have was a testimony of that little blue book, the Book of Mormon. The book that started it all held the key to my conversion. I prayed to know if it was true. I eventually understood that if it was true, everything else had to be true as well. If it was not, there was nothing of the truth in the church.
To read more of Terrie’s articles, click the picture.
I was finally beginning to understand that what I had felt that day on the temple grounds, and what I had felt several other times before I began attending The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was the Holy Ghost, testifying to me that the Book of Mormon was indeed the word of God, a glorious gift to help us find our way back to Him. I loved the book and learned to love the gospel that it taught and the church that made it possible. The full testimony of the restored gospel came with time, but the Book of Mormon was the key.
Get your own “little blue book” (although it’s actually black now). See if it can change your life, also.
Read my profile on Mormon.org.
The late Terrie Lynn Bittner—beloved wife, mother, grandmother, and friend—was the author of two homeschooling books and numerous articles, including several that appeared in Latter-day Saint magazines. She became a member of the Church at the age of 17 and began sharing her faith online in 1992.
