believe half of what you see and none of what you hear

I sometimes write about what I believe, but really it's simple, I believe what is real.

Ah you ask how does one know what is real?

This is the rub, I've always believed what is real, and I think everyone does the same. Yet my beliefs have changed over the years. So what has changed?

Growing up I was told to pray and get answers, that those answers were real. My mother would pray to find her car keys and she would find them. We prayed for my father to return from Vietnam safely, and even though there were times that it seemed that his plane should've been shot down, he returned home safe.

As a teen i read the scriptures, was a good kid, Deacon and Teacher quorum president then assistant to the Bishop as a Priest and prayed to know if the Book of Mormon was true.

I've heard "believe half of what you see and none of what you hear". I've also heard "believe what you feel."

I was successful at getting my friends to stop swearing and we talked about religion
but I was always ashamed to bring them to church because the kids there were not good examples. It was always the same no matter where we lived.

At 16 an older girl at the kitchen I worked at talked to me about evangelical Christianity, she was born again and wanted to "save" me. I listened to her, discussed the scriptures and was sorry that she was so lost.

One day she brought a sheave of papers for me to read, proof that Mormonism was false. I took it home confident in my faith. It said crazy things that I knew were lies, evil oozed out of it.

I had been praying for years for a testimony of the Book of Mormon, this book was the answer for me. If this was so evil that i could feel the evil radiating off it and through my bed, then what it was fighting against must be true.

I still prayed for a more clear answer. In the MTC preparing to go to Georgia on my mission i met missionaries that knew nothing about the church, none of the doctrine or history, yet had strong testimonies. In Georgia I met a return missionary who had a burning testimony, but only in Spanish, the church did not feel real to him in English.

We met a Church of Christ minister who accepted our invitation for a discussion about the Church. During that meeting he bore his testimony about the truthfulness of his belief and that after her read the Book of Mormon he knew that Joseph Smith was not a true prophet. His Testimoney was one of the most pure and honest testimoney I had ever heard.

I still had not recieved a testomoney as strong as his. I had been telling people to pray and believe what they felt... yet this guy did just that and got the "wrong" answer.

This started turning into a crisis of faith... so I went to my mission president who told me "the church is not true, but it is divine" that the path that the church lays out for people to follow is the path that will lead to the greatest happiness. I believed him.

There were other crisis's of faith for me but I wanted to believe, felt that belief in the church was tied to my family and i clearly was "a chosen one."

Imperfect members, general authorities saying racist things, church policies that were dangerous were all excusable because it was the path that was good.

but then