About Paradox

{ My Conversion Story }

I have believed in God for as long as I can remember. My grandmother was probably the first person to teach me about God, but the extent of what she taught me can be found in the first verse of this song--pretty much because that's all she taught me. She bought me my first children's Bible when I was 8. The only things I ever read in it were the Creation story, and Moses and the Exodus. My sister ripped a page out of it, and I got so mad I stopped reading it. The last time I saw it, my mom was using it to prop up a VCR.

I did pray as a child, and I knew that God was real, and He listened to me. I knew He answered my prayers, and I knew that He loved me. These were simple things, but they were powerful. I didn't know these things because someone taught them to me. I didn't learn them--I felt them, discovered them. I may not have known God, but He knew me. No matter what happened to me, my life was fixed upon that certainty and no one could deny it, not even me. It was as true and certain, as self evident to me as the heartbeat in my chest.

But as I got older I stopped praying, and God stopped talking to me. Eventually I started to think He had forgotten me. So I forgot Him back. He'd suggest things that I could do, which would've built my relationship with Him. I wouldn't recognize it as Him communicating with me, and I'd ignore it. He'd call, and I'd ignore. And this was a cycle that went on until I started high school. At which time, God decided it was time for me to remember Him, and come home.

I attended my first Sacrament Meeting in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when I was 15. The feeling I had the second I walked into the church building was indescribable. After years of frustration and pain, after bitterness and heartbreak that nearly consumed me entirely, I felt light. I felt peace and truth. It was almost tangible as it surrounded me. My conversion began before the meeting did, and it wasn't until much later that I realized that the Holy Ghost was what I had been missing. He brought everything to my remembrance--and I began to recognize the role God had played throughout the events and circumstances of my life. His influence, His protection, His love were clear and unmistakable.

As jaded and sick as I was of religion by that point, I realized it was because I had been looking for religion instead of faith. I had been searching for the living among the dead. Until I recognized Christ, I was never going to find His church. When I was looking for Christ, it was only then that I would see that I had found Him. Alive. Speaking, touching, feeling. It was then that I knew I had to belong to the true and living Church of the true and living God.

After two Sundays, I wanted to be baptized. It took another 8 months, but it was worth the wait.

Every good thing that is now in my life is because I walked into a Church building four years ago, and I felt something I can never deny. I know it was because I was reunited with Christ and His gospel. I know that He is the way, the truth, and the light. I know He is the only way whereby man can be saved, and return to live with our Heavenly Father. I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet, that through the authority God restored through him, he translated the Book of Mormon. I love the Book of Mormon, and I know it is another testament of Jesus Christ. I know that as we give ourselves to Heavenly Father and submit to the plan He has for our lives, He will bring us to a knowledge of the gospel, of the Atonement of Jesus Christ, and an understanding of how we can return home to live with them for all eternity. I bear you my witness that these things are true, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.