BY: Rachel McCloskey
Having spent the first nineteen years of my life primarily in the largely
Latter-Day Saint community of Provo, Utah, I wouldn’t seem the likely target for an
incredible conversion story, and I’m not. In fact, I have spent much of my life
wondering when that life changing miracle would come and reveal
all the answers to all my questions. I had lived the commandments, followed
the Word of Wisdom, read my scriptures, and lived worthy to enter into the Temple, and yet I
still didn’t have a knowledge of the truth of the gospel, only hope.
In some ways I consider growing up around Mormons a constant test of
where I am with my testimony. I have been able to spend so much of my life relying on the
testimonies of the people around me as they all seemed so strong and
unwavering. My dad, who converted to the church when he was 23 years old, has one of the
strongest testimonies of anyone I have ever met. As he tells and retells the
powerful story of his
conversion, I often begrudgingly looked back on my life and thought to
myself how easy it had been for me. I will never forget what he has said, however, on the
topic of conversion. He believes that everyone, both member and non-member,
goes through a“conversion” of their own. We cannot rely on the testimony of
others our whole lives and we must either seek our own or fall away.
I have sought out a testimony of my own and am still on the path to
receiving a knowledge of my own, but I know that Heavenly Father is real and
that he listens to and answers my prayers. I know that Jesus Christ is the Son
of God and that he was sent to the earth to atone for the sins and sadness of
the world. I have always known of the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but
somewhere inside of me it sometimes seemed like one big great idea that gave a
lot of answers and made a lot of sense. But I have a testimony that everything
I believe is really real and that it is the source of my true happiness. There
really is no denying it and this makes the possibility of it simply being a
great idea, impossible.
So this is to all of you young, nineteen-year-old girls out there who are
either struggling between the idea of knowledge and hope, or simply longing for
their own conversion story: do not fall away because you feel as though your
knowledge is insufficient. Continue to learn and grow through the Spirit and seek to
build your testimony, and the Lord has promised that “he will manifest the truth of
it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost” (Moroni 10:4).
No comments:
Post a Comment