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VIEW PERSONAL BELIEFS
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POSTED BY:
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GB-UK
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DATE:
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02.09.2008 |
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SUBJECT:
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My Testimony of Gospel |
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LOCATION:
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Wallsend, Tyne & Wear, United Kingdom
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I became a member of the Church when I was 17 years old, after meeting and becoming friends with someone who shared the same musical taistes as myself. He was different to all my other friends in that he didn't drink or smoke or swear. I wanted to find out what the reason was for him being so differnt and one thing led to another and I began to have the missionary discussions.
I was lead through the discussions by two missionaries, one from Australia and the other from New Zealand. I found the talks inspirational, and when challenged to read the Book of Mormon I didn't hesitate. Reading through the BoM was easy, I couldn't put it dowm, every spare minute that I could get I had my nose burried in it's pages. I was about a third of the way through reading the BoM when I realised that it was TRUE! I just knew that the Holy Ghost was giving me a witness to the truth, that the BoM was true and that Joseph Smith was a real Prophet of God. I remember that the next lesson with the missionaries was the one where you pray for a witness of the truthfulness of the Gospel and remember arriving at my friends house for the talk and blurting out that I knew that it was all true.
I was baptised a member of the Church and ordained a Priest in the Aaronic Priesthood. I attended church and was very happy, then I began to drift away. It was about a year after I became a member that I became inactive, I just drifted away from the Church, missing a Sunday here and there lead to weeks without attending and finally not attending at all. I lost contact with my friend who had initially led me to the Church and lost contact with the Church itself aswell.
Several years past and the spiritual hole inside me grew. In 1994 I started attending a Baptist Church in the area I was living in at the time. I wanted to be part of something spiritual and found that this little Church met my needs. After about a year I felt that God was calling me to do his work and went to Bible college to study. I spent three years studying for a BA Honours degree in Biblical Theology and enjoyed every minute of it apart from one period. That time was when a couple of LDS Missionaries came to the village that the college was based in. they were nice enough, they chatted to the college students about the Gospel and were even invited into a class to share their Gospel message. They were ripped apart by my fellow students when the floor was opened to questions. I remember thinking, where is the love? Why are they treating these young men with such contempt? The missinaries left and we never saw them again.
I graduated from college and began to work in a Baptist Church in Redcar, Cleveland and everything seemed fine, to begin with. I soon found that I was questioning the whole setup at the Church, many of the congregation seemed to not believe at all in what I believed to be the Gospel message found in the Bible. I struggled on for about six months before resigning with my faith left in peices around me. I returned home depressed and feeling let down. I began to attend the Baptist Church I had joined before going to Bible college but it just didn't feel right and I saw all the same kinds of unbelief around me in that Church aswell.
Luckily after leaving the Church in Redcar I walked into a fantastic job working at a school for kids with special needs, which I still work at now. I gave up on Church and never looked back to it. I got married, and we had our first child a little girl we called Emily. Then that spiritual hole began to raise its head again, I began to think back to the good times I had had in the LDS Church and how it had been so right for me. I began to buy Church related things from Ebay including a new quad and some scripture study aids. Over the coming few years I longed to come back to the Church but could never pluck up the courage to actually do anything about it. That all changed on 12th August 2006.
On that fateful day I had gone to Sunderland to find the local Family History Centre to expand my research into my family tree. I found the centre and was making my way home when I was knocked off my motorbike and broke my ankle. Some would take that as being a bit of pretty bad luck, but what it gave me was a period of about four months with a lot of time on my hands. During that time away from work I saw an advert on the TV for a Church video, I rang up and ordered the video and was asked if I minded if some Church representitives could drop it off. Within a few weeks I was once again meeting with the missionaries and once again I received that confirmation of the truthfullness of the Gospel. I returned to the Church in January 2007.
Things have not been great since my return to the Church, my wife is not supportive of my membership, and we have been going through a tough time financially. My wife gave birth to our second child in August 2007 by C-section which has meant that I missed a long period of Church attendance while she recovered, but I cannot give up that which I had previously found, then lost and found once again, the true Church of Jesus Christ.
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