Originally I planned to come out after the first of the year but a Facebook copy and paste message got me started. It was one of those posts that say they'd rather believe in God than to find out later they were wrong. I'm not one to live my entire known life in fear of the unknown life to come. I reluctantly came to the conclusion God did not exist after many years. I first settled for agnostic status because I didn't want to make the leap to atheist.
Since a young age, I knew I didn't have the deep seated conviction of God and Jesus. I saw people around me rely on them for almost everything in their lives. Some believed in a loving God while others saw God as vengeful and judgemental. I didn't relate to either. I knew I didn't have whatever these people had that caused them to believe.
Mom and Dad were, for the most part, believers and went to various churches on a sporadic basis. Dad would go to other churches but return to the Church of God in Christ. He said, "I don't feel like I've been to church after attending a Baptist church." The Church of God in Christ is a lively congregation with drums, loud music, clapping, and people 'getting happy'. We studied with the Jehovah Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventist, and visited nearby Baptist churches. When I stayed at school on the weekends I visited a Catholic church, other Baptist churches, and I think a Methodist church. None of these churches had a message that spoke to me.
I guess my sister and I being born legally blind may have bothered Mom more than she let on. One day she took us to a faith healer who had an office somewhere. She said to tell people we went to the eye doctor. I don't remember if he prayed for my sister and me together or separately. He put either one or both hands over my eyes and made what I considered even then stupid pronouncements. He said there was nothing wrong with my/our eyes. He said we needed to rest them because we'd been "Playing too much baseball". I didn't know how much baseball was too much, but I knew I hadn't been playing any. At that point we didn't play kickball or fist-ball in P.E. yet. I didn't even watch ballgame of any kind on TV.
I have always been a logical person; later I'd add science to help me reach a conclusion about things. As a youngster I'd ask my great grandmother for coffee when she made some for herself. "Coffee make you black," she reply. This didn't make any since. She was old, but she had light skin. Besides that, I was already darker than she was.
Sunday school was always a conundrum for me. The teacher would read a passage from the bible and ask, ''what did Jesus mean when he said that?" It was always a riddle to me and when someone else answered with the correct answer, I still was confused. The one that comes to mind is, "You can't put new wine in old bottles." Many years were to go by before I got a satisfactory answer to this one.
I didn't like getting up, getting ready, and going to church just to be yelled at. After surviving a perplexing Sunday School lesson the minister would preach a long, drawn out, fiery sermon about Revelations, The Second Coming, Judgement Day, or burning in Hell. I couldn't be frightened into belief. At baptisms I'd wonder what was said to move these people to be baptized.
Mom taught us The Lord's Prayer and we always said a blessing on the food. The food was blessed at school until it was changed to a moment of silence. One houseparent gave us an award when we memorized The Twenty-third Psalm and John 3:16. I can still recite them.
My first memory of not being able to trust God came when I was in the third grade. Every morning the teacher would read a Bible story. She read about Noah's ark and the flood. The end of the story stated how God put a rainbow in the sky as a promise not to destroy the world by flood again. Shortly thereafter we had a substitute teacher and she read the same Noah's ark story. I came to the conclusion that God doesn't keep his promises. Logically I know she read the wrong story, but my conclusion stuck with me.
I'd seen people pray for the sick, pray to find something they lost, say Jesus never failed, or help me Jesus. If the sick person had a cold, flu, or broken bone, they got better. If the sick person was elderly, it was hit or miss. People usually found what they lost, and I didn't see the help they asked for. Others continued to believe; I continued to wonder if I ever would.
My sister got baptized when she was thirteen and I was nineteen or twenty. I felt I was missing something because I still hadn't felt the need to be baptized or join a church.
the Christmas after I moved into my own apartment, Dad gave me a family Bible. He said I'd be embarrassed if somebody came to my place and wanted to look up something in the Bible and I didn't have one. I wrote the names in the proper places and put it away. There it stayed for about two years.
I'll give a bare bones account of my conversion to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints. I've given a more detailed account before. I wasn't looking for religion or a church when the missionaries came to my door. I had time to listen to them if they were finished before the guiding Light came on. They said they would be, and they were. I let them come back same time next week because I had time then and they were just a couple years younger than I was. I went to an open house at the church and met a lot of nice people. the three degrees of glory made more sense to me than just Heaven or Hell. the lifestyle was appealing because I wasn't a party girl anyway. I could accept extra scriptures because Dad bought a large print Catholic Bible which had the book of Macabees and another book or two in it. Also the Jehovah's Witnesses had a Bible. Continuing revolations also made since to me. why would God talk so much back then and be silent now? I was a psychology major and had already studied abnormal psych so I could logically explain Joseph Smith's visions.
I knew I didn't have the deep belief and personal witness other people do when they decide to be baptized. I knew I believed as much as I was capable of believing. I knew at twenty-two I should belong to a church.
For the most part between my baptism in 1983 and this year I've been a good Mormon. There were ups and downs but, on the whole, good. I never developed a strong testimony of any of the principles of the gospel. I never felt a burning in my bosom, and I never thought the Prophet knew more about running my life than I did. My LDS friends would say God is testing me. I say why would God give me a test he knows I'll flunk?
I started to be concerned about my eyesight in 2007. I saw the eye doctor and he wanted to monitor my vision before he said it was glaucoma for sure. I started praying. first, that it wasn't glaucoma, and also that whatever it was wouldn't get worse. It got worse, and I continued to pray. I was finally diagnosed with glaucoma in September of 2011. I kept praying my sight would stabelize. It got to the the point where I wouldn't go to a new place alone. After I'd been there once, I had no quams about going alone.
I went from one eyedrop at night to a full schedule of drops throughout the day. My sight got worse, I continued to pray. You get the picture.
I bought a white cane when it was time to take Andrea to college. I was flying back and didn't dare brave the airports without assistance. I cried in the visibility Store the day I bought the cane.
After I got home from taking Andrea to school my sight went on a slippery slope. Shopping became an almost impossible chore. A lady from church offered to take me shopping. I missed my stop on MARTA a few times and started using paratransit exclusively. It got to where I didn't dare fry chicken anymore. I enlarged my smartphone text and started using my CC TV to read mail.
By the time Andrea came home for Christmas I could no longer hide how bad my sight had become. Before she left in August I'd thought about asking her to stay. I couldn't do that because I knew how much it meant to her to go away to college and I wanted her to go at the same time. I had taken a few Christmas photos for the stock agencies. There weren't nearly as many or as varied as usual but I knew these were my last stock photo submissions. I did set up the camera to record Andrea's homecoming. It took far too long to set up.
I bought myself an Apple TV and a tablet for Christmas. The Apple device was too much of a struggle to use so it went back.
Andrea and her then boyfriend, Brett, took the pictures Christmas morning. That was the first time I could remember not taking pictures. I had Andrea change my monitor to 600 by 800 so the print would automatically be larger. This helped somewhat but less information was on the screen horizontally so scrolling back and forth was a real pain.
One day, I lost it. I ran upstairs fussing and yelling about something I was having trouble with. Andrea said something about maybe it's time for me to move to South Dakota near her.
I don't know when I stopped praying. I know I stopped because it wasn't doing me any good. My prayers were to stabilize, not restore my sight. If there was a god he wouldn't or couldn't. I couldn't bring myself to say there is no God yet. I was so frustrated. I'd been a photographer all my life. I'd been an excellent computer user since 2000, why take the only things I have going for me away? I hadn't stolen as much as a candy bar; sure, I'm judgemental, I help people when I can, and I can't even get my sight stabelized. Also a friend's cancer had come back. She was a good person, she fought the good fight, she didn't make it through the second fight. How could god let her cancer come back? I decided I was agnostic just in case.
I didn't pray about it; I decided to take Andrea up on her offer. We looked for apartments in her South Dakota town. there was an ad for a newly constructed townhouse development. I called and was told they were filling up fast. I got an application to start the process. I called the top real estate agency in Metro Atlanta and put my house on the market. I got an offer after four days. No prayers on my part. Closing was set for Feburary 29. The townhouse people said a unit would be available the first week in March. After bluffing and blustering my way through a delayed closing, I flew to Sioux Falls on March 9th and signed my lease on March 10th.
Before I moved and after Andrea went back my sight got even worse. I had to abandon online bill pay and write checks using the CC TV. It took forever to read mail even with the CC TV. I'd heave a sigh of relief when there was only junk mail and almost jump for joy when the mailbox was empty. Sometimes the lights would be on but they didn't illuminate; the room would still be dark with the light bulb bright. the sky lost it's color, no more distinguishing between blue skies and gray skies. I slept later because the outside light didn't light up my room very much anymore.
My first Sunday in Sunday School at my new Branch in South Dakota I found myself speaking out. The teacher ask why we thought people didn't pray. I had a lot to say as you can guess. Later, a lady said something about having an illness or losing a child so we could learn something from it. I asked what are we supposed to learn if nobody tells us. And as a Mormon crutch, being tested was brought up. I asked why test somebody who has little or no faith to begin with. After class the teacher said I took the discussion in a whole new direction.
Now I am down to light perception and that light is getting darker. Why would a loving god let this happen to me? Didn't the vengeful God get enough vengence when he made me legally blind since birth? And not to mention all the other people who suffer from terrible things due to no fault of their own?
My uncle was diagnosed with stage four bone cancer. He was very sick, in the hospital, and not expected to live. Miraculuiously he was cured. He is now back home living a normal life. Some say God cured him. I think he was misdiagnosed. If God cured him, how does God decide who to cure and who to leave uncured?
Don't tell me to read the bible. Don't tell me to have more faith, don't tell me to join another church. My life has shown me through fifty-six years on this earth that something as random as prayer and apparently, god, can't be relied upon.
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