[candyprpl]

A week after I was baptized (LDS) I went to California to visit my daughter. She is a recovering addict and we were invited to a dinner celebrating another person's one year sobriety. As dinner progressed, my ears caught a conversation across the table. The young lady was talking about having been married in the Temple and her divorce and falling away from the church. She said many horrible things about the church and Temple marriage. Being a new member and have very little knowledge I didn't want to get into the conversation. My feeling at the time was that she was not being truthful -- even my daugther who is not a member knew she was speaking with anger and not truth. Later and even now I think about this person often. She left her marriage (and maybe she had good reasons for doing this) and she left the church and where was she now? A recovering alcoholic filled with bitterness! I felt sorry for her. I know that when a person has been excomunicated that it is pretty humiliating and unless they take a path of repentance, bitterness takes over.

In the Book of Mormon there is a scripture that tells it all; Alma 24:30 "And thus we can plainly discern, that after a people have been once enlightened by the Spirit of God, and have had great knowledge of things pertaining to righteousness, and then have fallen away into sin and transgression, they become more hardened, and thus their state becomes worse than though they had never known these things."