What I know [Ryan]

I’m not sure about the purpose of this particular blog entry. I think it’s coming from a number of needs — to prove my own faith to myself, to respond in kind to Elder Holland’s last talk in general conference, or to answer the challenge from various General Authorities to share the gospel over this newfangled thing called the Internet.

I don’t know where this blog is coming from, but I do feel the need to write it.

I encounter a lot of anti-Mormon stuff when I’m at work. It seems someone is always trying to bring the Church down. Sometimes they have understandable concerns, like people who despise the Church because its stance on same-sex marriage, and sometimes they’re just nutjobs, like the guy who wrote in last week saying the Ensign was part of carefully calculated plot by the LDS Church to manipulate the world’s thinking and take over various secular governments.

Sometimes, honestly, it makes me think. Is the Church off-base on gay marriage? What exactly is the deal with blacks and the priesthood? Does unfavorable DNA evidence disprove the Book of Mormon?

I’m slowly coming to an understanding of those and other troubling issues, but my purpose today is not to tackle the things I don’t completely understand. If you want to hear the arguments batted back and forth ad nauseum, go Google them.

But running down every argument will only get so far. There’s always compelling evidence for both sides. An argument based solely on logic can go on forever; logic is based on facts, which are subject to change as new facts are discovered and tested.

Truth, however, comes from somewhere else, and it never changes.

And it’s truth that is important here: It’s not what I don’t know, but what I do know that makes the difference.

Here’s what I know:

Jesus Christ’s sacrifice made it possible for us to fulfil our eternal potential.

In 1820, Joseph Smith saw God the Father and Jesus Christ.

Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon using divine power granted as a part of his calling as a prophet.

Joseph Smith’s successor continues to exercise that role as prophet.

There are some who would call my reasoning flawed — how could I know these things? How can I so callously dismiss logic and hold everything to the standard of knowledge that can’t possibly be proven?

Call it a leap of faith.

How do we truly know anything? Even the most godless, stoic atheist must accept that what he takes as absolute fact must still be taken with a degree of faith — what is reality? How do we know our conscious interpretations of the world are right? An ancient philosopher once asked, “I had a dream I was butterfly — or was I a butterfly awakening from a dream that I was a man?”

We all have to take the world on faith sometime. Every man has to be backed against that wall and make his stand. Sooner or later, we will have to accept that we cannot truly know anything without the assumption of faith.

This my faith. This is what I know because of it. What I don’t know shrinks in the face of what I do know with the promise that all will be made clear someday.

I’m nothing special, but somehow I got lucky and have been able to develop this knowledge. My words lack thundering rhetoric delivered over a pulpit, but you can be assured that they are not less heartfelt that the speaker of such words.

That's what I know.

What I do [Ryan]

I resolved at the very beginning of this blog that it would not be one of those blogs where the readers get a weekly travelogue or life update, like some kind of extended,
useless Facebook status.

(Those usually go something like this: “Hey, everybody, thanks for reading my blog. I just took my dog out for a walk this week, and my sister visited. We went to the movie and it was great. 'Julie and Julia' was good and kept us entertained. Then we ate out at Red Lobster. Stay tuned till next week!” If anything exciting really happens, they writer springs it upon the rest of us as an afterthought, like this: “… kept us entertained. Then we ate out at Red Lobster. One of the live lobsters they keep in the tank had mutated and took control of the restaurant for six hours until a SWAT team arrived.”)

But I think I might break that rule. Two weeks ago, I started my internship at the (LDS) Church Magazines, and people have been asking me exactly what I do. I’m going to assume that most of my audience is LDS, but for those who aren’t, I’m going to briefly give some background:

The Church magazines are monthly publications put out by the LDS Church that include news of the Church, inspiring articles written by Mormons all over the world, and messages from Church leaders. They are headquartered on Temple Square in the Church Office Building.* There are no mutant lobsters anywhere in the vicinity.

So what exactly is it that I do?

I write news. The stuff that goes in the back of the "Liahona" (the international magazine) and the "Ensign" (the English-speaking magazine) is pretty much all me. I spend my time calling the people like the Church’s West Africa public affairs director and writing articles about them.

I have an iMac in my cubicle and a high-tech phone that I really haven’t yet figured out how to use.** I’ve never liked answering phones, for various reasons. First, just about anyone can get a hold of you, which leaves all sorts of amusing possibilities for the kinds of yahoos who might have your number. And I’m not talking about prank calls.*** I also have three X-Wings made out of tape, paper clips, and Post-It notes.

Occasionally I see General Authorities, the leaders of the Church. My fourth day on the job, I ran into Elder L. Tom Perry in an elevator. He said, “Greetings!” and I said, “Hiiiii,” though it really sounded like I was trying to expel a pigeon through my nose. It wasn’t that I was star-struck; I simply was caught off-guard and everything clever I’d ever written in my hypothetical "Things to Say When Caught In An Elevator With a General Authority" book went out the window. I see Elder Yoshihiko Kikuchi from time to time; I guess he’s involved with the magazines a lot.

There’s a cafeteria in the basement that serves a basket of chicken and fries for under four dollars. A piano’s off to the side, playing hymns, Broadway songs, and folk tunes. The other day, a girl sat next to me at the table and asked in her heavy accent, “Did you know that the Church is not of man, nor of the Earth, but of God, and that we have a prophet today?”

Trying not to be rude, I said, “Uh … yeah, thanks. I’m already Mormon.”

She seemed slightly disappointed, and left. Maybe she was practicing for her mission. Maybe she was nuts. Maybe she just forgot that she was sitting in the basement of the LDS Church Office Building.

There you have it, folks. That’s what I do.

* The whole Church Office Building experience actually reminds me vaguely of the Ministry of Magic in the Harry Potter universe.

** These are actually the exact phones used in the TV show "The Office." Really.

*** Semi-related anecdote: A friend of mine recently got a job at a pest control center answering phones. She got a call one morning from a person with the following dire question, which neither she nor I are making up:

“I’ve got pests and I can’t tell if they’re mice or bats. My neighbor says they look pretty much the same. How do I tell the difference?”

I don’t remember what my friend told the caller, but I’m sure I would have referred her to my #1 Bat Vs. Mouse Rule of Thumb:

Check if it’s flying.

Unless you’re dealing with handicapped bats or genetically-altered mice, that rule is pretty much fool-proof. Obviously not idiot-proof, though.

Finding faith with other faiths

When I was little, I viewed people who weren’t members of the Church like they were in some way irreconcilably different from the people like me. I viewed them way I would lepers, aliens in disguise, or Democrats.

They were different from the others in my predominantly LDS community. Some people had tattoos; others had earrings in odd places. Some people just smelled different — a clear indication that they weren’t on the straight and narrow.

I remember when the first family of non-members moved into our subdivision. I rode my bike past them with furtive glances over my shoulder, as if their dark influence might cause my tires to explode, leaving me at their mercy.

My parents were and are great examples of tolerance, but I still couldn’t get over the way non-Mormons were simply different — and that made nonmembers scary.

A mission was an eye-opening experience. Most of the people I met weren’t LDS, and many of them could totally have passed for such. In my two years of service, I encountered hundreds of amazing, wonderful people who either hadn’t had a chance to find the gospel or simply weren’t interested.

Still, these people loved their families, went to work every day, watched Star Wars, called themselves Americans, used deodorant and ate regular food. They went shopping at the mall, drove cars, spoke English, celebrated holidays and got irritated when people played hip-hop at full volume in the middle of the night.

They did not, however, sacrifice goats to their demons gods, plot the hostile takeover of peaceful neighborhoods, eat babies or soak their tentacles in specialized alien fluid every night to keep their skins moist in Earth’s atmosphere.

In other words, these people really were normal human beings.

I went to General Conference recently, where the protestors against the Church were engaged in their semiannual quest to save our souls. Four years ago, when I attended conference before my mission, I saw the protestors as minions of Satan out to destroy the peace that existed on Temple Square.

Now, I see them as possibly God-fearing, good people who might just see their holy crusade against Mormonism as nothing more than their own version of missionary work.

Then, just as I was coming to appreciate a heterogeneous environment and accept that a world where everyone was a clone of me might not be the ideal situation, I came to BYU–Idaho.

I wouldn’t say that diversity is dead here, but I wouldn’t say it’s alive and thriving, either.

I simply wish we had a little more diversity to even things out and prepare us for the real world, where not everyone is a Primary graduate.

A few weeks ago, I went on a date. It went great, and afterward, I called up the girl’s roommate, with whom I am good friends, to get the scoop. “Oh, she had a great time,” said the roommate, who then filled me on more details.

Certain that I knew all I needed to know, I swooped in and asked the girl out again.

This time, as we were making cinnamon rolls, she blithely informed me that she couldn’t eat sweets because she was on Lent.

Yeah, she was Catholic. Here at BYU–Idaho. I stuffed my cinnamon roll into my mouth, uncertain of what to say.

It seems my spiritual journey had reached an apex — She wasn’t LDS, and yet she shared our morals and values. There really can’t be anything too bad about that.

I love my religion, and I know it’s true. But I can accept that others might have their own beliefs, creeds and faiths.

Here’s to BYU–Idaho, where you can be assured that the person sitting next to you probably shares your values.

And here’s to the real world, where there are still a lot of good people, and where we can all join together and do some good.

Life within a life

We’re all born. We grow. We get disappointed. We gain victories. We watch our children grow. We’re happy, we’re sad, we’re hopeful. Then we all die.

Some people get to do it twice.

I served as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in New Mexico. In a way, this experience was a microcosm of life, a shortened version of all that gives life its venerated humanity.

Nearly two hundred years of missionary work has spawned a lingo that only missionaries can understand — Fathers give birth to sons, sons succeed fathers, and the circle of life spirals on and on to the measured rapping of calloused knuckles on doors.

I was “born” in the little town of Bloomfield, a splotch of diners and gas stations on the prairie of northwestern New Mexico. My “father” — my trainer — was a self-admitted hick from Driggs, Idaho, a scion of the same old polygamous family that produced me.

Like any child, I sometimes wanted to learn faster than I was — I cried, I fumed. I strained through spiritual growing pains, falling on my face and trying to walk before I could crawl. Soon, I was able to do full door approaches alone, hawking the Book of Mormon like a vacuum salesman with the desperate belief that his Hoover could solve the world’s problems.

It wasn’t over. My inadequacies haunted me. Sometimes, in the quiet of my study at the twilight of a long day, my shoes piles at the door covered in dust, I would kneel in prayer and beseech my true Father for relief from my infirmities, that I might better serve him.

But this was life, and I was a child walking in faithful obliviousness to my parents’ purposes for me.

In time, I sired a son of my own — my first trainee, Elder Findlay, was a spirited young missionary with a headstrong passion for the work. When our paths diverged, I watched his progress, watched him grow.

Every emotion embedded in the human psyche, every feeling that combines to separate the human creature from the other animals on this God-given earth, exists in some form on the mission.

Sadness prevailed when an investigator fell away into the mists of dogmatic falsities. Joy reigned when I returned to Albuquerque to watch a women I had taught and baptized enter the temple.

Disappointment struck me again and again, contention reared its sagebrush-laden head, and even romantic love ebbed and flowed, only to be snuffed out by the subsiding trickle of letters.

And then, as in the age-enduring lament of poets and bards, death faced me. Two years of service stared me in the eye with all the ferocity of a life spent. I recalled my first years as a missionary, my growth, my successes and failures —

Then I stepped off the plane. One life was over; I was ready to continue the next, the things learned in the first stockpiled for the second.

One can never live too many lives.

Why I'm not married yet

DISCLAIMER: If you're looking for a depressive rant about the sad status of my love life, go somewhere else. (Also, you might want to ask yourself exactly WHY you're looking for such a thing, and possibly seek help.) This is not the rambling of a lovesick loser lost in his laments, but an intellectual look at the reasons behind my — and perhaps other people’s — lack of the One Ring to Rule Them All on my left hand.

Two more of my friends recently got engaged. Another one or two are close. My friends, none of them older than 22, are all biting the matrimonial dust. And those are only the male friends. My old female friends, for the most part, were sucked into the marriage dimension a long time ago.

And yet here I am, lingering in limbo. I don’t feel any particular pressure to get married, but it would be nice, sometime down the road, to have an assurance that my wife wasn’t killed by a stray arrow in the war in heaven. It would be nice to discover that romance was more than, in the immortal words of The Monkees, “fairy tales / Meant for someone else / But not for me.

“What’s the use of trying? / All I get is pain / When I wanted sunshine / I get rain …”

Thought the use of that song carries the risk of relegating this serious reflection to the status of whimpering melodrama, it really can sum up how I feel sometimes.

I try to think what my problem is. I’m attracted to enough girls to rule out the possibility of my being gay. I think I might just be too picky.

My ideal girl is smart, talented, attractive, spiritual, and mature. The exact definitions of those qualities are a little flighty, allowing for some leeway, but I know exactly what I want, and I’m not willing to budge.

Somebody once told me that in order to find the one, I have to be the one. That could be why I’m not yet married. Have I learned enough? Have I honed my talents enough? Have I attained a level of confidence enough to accent my attractiveness? Have I grown enough in my spirituality? Am I mature enough?

I don’t know.

To employ a horribly sappy metaphor, my heart has been broken at least three times since I’ve been home from the mission. Not that this is any unusual feat at BYU–Idaho, where loves are found and lost like the rise and fall of petty empires, but it still hurts.

If you jump off a diving board and do a belly flop, you try again. If you belly flop again, you still climb up the ladder to give in another shot. But what happens if you get the same result the fifth or six time? Statistically speaking, you’re going to eventually do a flop-free dive, but try telling yourself that when you stand dizzily at the top for the eighth time, your stomach still smarting from the last seven impacts.

That’s how I feel about the whole love thing. What’s the use of trying? All you get, after all, is pain. The Monkees knew what they were talking about, even if they could’t spell worth a flying banana.

My point in writing this blog isn’t to sound depressed or desperate, only to get my thoughts onto the screen — where, like any good writer desires, people can read them.

If, by some crazy random happenstance (to borrow a line from Dr. Horrible), my future wife is already one of my Facebook friends, listen up. I’m trying to make myself better for you, so be patient.

I'll find you soon enough, but it's not my priority yet. I'm not yet what I want to be for marriage. It would also help if I had some money.

Wife, be ready for me.

Also, I sometimes quote Star Wars in my sleep, so be prepared for that.

On MY mission ...

I run the risk of sounding like an arrogant punk, I know. I only ask that during the short slice of time when your eyes are perusing this column, you suspend any judgment of me and instead evaluate what I have to say.

As my mission drew to a close, I harbored the impression that once I got back, I would be honey to all the beautiful flies out there, to use a completely unflattering metaphor for girls.

I thought that using my newfound powers of spirituality, I would be able to woo any girl I wanted.

Now I wonder what alien parasite burrowed into my brain, forcing upon me such naivety.

Here at BYU–I, everyone is a returned missionary. Sometimes I swear I can hear the Manwaring Center vending machines reminiscing among themselves about the good old days when they baptized a village in the Amazon.

Hardly an FHE goes past without those weary words “When I was on my mission …” RMs are full of stories. If they’re not telling about the time they had to spend a night in an active volcano, they’re describing the incident where they followed a hunch and converted half the country’s mafia.

The details may vary from RM to RM, but the premises, unless we’re cautious in the sharing of spiritual experiences, can be a dime a dozen.

However, it’s not my intention to sound cynical.

The mission experience was a microcosm of life, all the hopes and sorrows of life compressed into two years. The Spirit abounded. It’s only natural for RMs to let flow the rivers of memory. It’s another idiosyncrasy typical of those quirky communes of righteousness we call wards and stakes.

And another thing — there were a lot of missionaries out there who were mediocre at best. My mission, during the two years I resided within its borders, contained a significant number of those who considered themselves outside the realms governed by petty things like rules. My mission even had a few real bad apples, the ones who got into trouble I can’t even mention.

Anyone who has served a mission should know what I’m talking about. Perhaps you were one of them. And not to sound narcissistic, but it might irk missionaries who tried their best that such former elders are also claiming the title of RM.

And what is a returned missionary, exactly?

Before I came home, my mission president told me that there are two kinds of returned missionaries.

First, there are those who come home after two years or eighteen months of dodging rules and enduring the admonitions of priesthood leaders confident that at long last they have earned the exalted title of returned missionary and can take their place in LDS society. These missionaries went on a mission and returned to life as it was.

Then there are the ones who return home, but don’t return to the way things were. They can’t. The people they were before the mission are forever buried beneath a polished sheen born of hard-learned lessons. For them, the RM title isn’t an honorific, like a cold medal pinned on a uniform. It’s an invitation to continue the growth that so accelerated during the course of their service.

Listen to me. I sound like John Bytheway. Again, I’m not trying to vaunt myself above anyone else. I won’t tell you what kind of missionary I was. I’ll let those who know me now and who knew me on my mission be the judge of that, one way or the other.

But, girls — remember those two kinds of returned missionaries? Which one do you want to marry?

Give everyone a chance; the principle of repentance is real. My only request, really, is that every returned missionary act like one.