The Trouble with Mormons

I’ve been stewing over what to put in this post for a while (a while as in 6 months or so).  Most of you know that in Utah the predominant religion is LDS.  For those that don’t know what that means (and even for those that do) I will be using the term “Mormon” (not my favorite term but it will do) for the rest of this post.  There are several things about Mormons that trouble me.  I should clarify that I am mostly referring to Utah Mormons…there is a big difference between Mormons here and Mormons in other states.  I am Mormon so I don’t in the least feel bad about calling everyone out on at least a few of those troublesome things as I myself am guilty of some of them.

The trouble with Mormons is that they think everyone else not only should be Mormon, but wants to be Mormon and is just waiting for someone to come along to convert them.  I got news for y’all (that’s the Southern coming out in me), Mormonism is part of Christianity…there are many religions that are Christian and if you took the time to research or learn about any of them, you would see quickly that all of them have basically the same idea of the “big picture”, they just go about getting there in different ways.  Of course each religion has its own little unique practices and histories, but the end-goal is pretty much the same.

One of my biggest peeves is that Mormons equate religion with spirituality.  They are NOT the same.  I am not a religious person but I am very spiritual.  Yes, I’m Mormon.  Yes, I’m proud to be Mormon, but I don’t believe that I need to go sit in a building with 500 other people for 3 hours every Sunday to have a one on one relationship with God.  I converse with God on a daily basis…you could say we’re tight :) 

I know that church is meant to renew your covenants and rejuvenate your soul blah, blah, blah…too bad.  I work way too hard and spend far too much time away from my family the other 165 hours of the week, and I refuse to give up those 3 hours on Sunday.  If that is wrong, then let the big man upstairs be the one to judge me for it.  Church for me is spending Sunday with my son (and pretty soon, my husband too), enjoying the blessing of motherhood and the beauty of this earth.  For those of you that are right now ready to reach through the screen and argue with me, let me ask you a question: who is the better person—someone who races through their life week after week doing everything possible to “keep up with the Jones’” but manages to keep up appearances at church on Sunday…or, the person who takes a few minutes each day to enjoy the small things in life and stops to smell the proverbial roses but doesn’t go to church because they need personal rejuvenation that they can’t get in a building full of people??  Think about it…

Another trouble with Mormons is that they are judgmental…I am the first to admit that I sometimes (more often than I should) judge things that I know nothing about.  You never know the battle someone else may be fighting…  Of all people, I know that and I should know better than to judge a book by its cover.  But it is ingrained in us!  Sadly, we are taught (inadvertently) as children to be judgmental.  Mormons aren’t the only ones that do this of course, but again, it seems to be more rampant than among other religions.  It’s very hypocritical really…our beliefs teach us to love and accept ALL of our fellow men and women yet we leave the church building and go right back to judging and comparing ourselves to everyone else!

In this city, image is EVERYTHING…at least to many Mormons it is.  It comes back to taking it upon ourselves to be judge, jury, and executioner.  Perfect example: Mormon moms (and dads probably) expect that their sons will go on a mission the very moment they turn 19.  They don’t even stop to take a millisecond and give their son a say in the matter.  If, God forbid, said son decides not to go on a mission, the parents take it personally as if it harms their image because their son didn’t do God’s work!  And don’t even get me started on if the son decides to serve his country in the military INSTEAD of serving a mission…  Girls aren’t allowed to go on missions until they are 21 because they are expected to get married and have kids…that has always bugged me.

Same goes for temple marriage.  I think temple marriage (and marriage in general) is a wonderful thing, if it’s what the bride and groom wants…not what the parents want.  Contrary to popular belief around here, just because you get married in the temple does not mean you will have a happy marriage and just because you don’t get married in the temple doesn’t mean you will have a bad marriage.  But again, it all comes down to image and what are your kids doing to better your image…dumbest thing ever.  Who freaking cares what other people think about you…you are feeding their judgmental beast when you care what they think!  I heard a great quote once: “What other people think about you is none of your business”…wise words!

Another thing that really bugs me is that Mormons have their own time system.  If you have never heard the term “Mormon Standard Time” (MST), now you have.  Now we all know what EST, CST, & PST stand for and what MST is supposed to stand for, but in Utah, it has officially been changed.  In Utah, MST indicates that no matter what time you are supposed to be somewhere, you can be at least 15 minutes late, and people will wait for you.  Now I wouldn’t suggest this for things such as your own wedding, graduation, or funeral (haha!) but pretty much anything else is acceptable.  I know many of you are nodding your head in agreement and thinking “oh, that explains a lot”… :)  My grampa (yes I know I spelled it wrong…) always taught me that if you were 15 minutes early for something then you were on time, on time meant you were late, and late was not even an option (this will come in handy when I’m in the military!) so the new MST was not allowed in our house!

Don’t even get me started on home teaching and visiting teaching…I don’t know how they do it, but every time I move from one place to another, THEY find me!  Someone tell me, is the church a relative of Big Brother??  Do they monitor your movements and stalk you wherever you go??  :)   Seriously though, it’s kind of annoying when I change my address and I have new visiting teachers or home teachers calling me before I even get moved in.  I don’t mind if they stop by to chat and introduce themselves, that’s just good manners.  What bugs me is that they automatically assume that I WANT them to continue to come over and talk to me about church.  Honestly, that puts me off more than anything. 

True story: I moved into my current home nearly 3 years ago.  I no sooner got settled (sort of) and I had some OLD (seriously, we are talking mid to late 80’s) man knocking on my door asking when he and some other OLD man could come over and visit me.  There they go with the assuming that I want them in my home…  Anyone who really knows me knows that I am not super social.  I don’t go out of my way to meet new people and I certainly do NOT like visitors in my house (except for very close friends and family) so I was bugged from the get go.  I’m not even sure how he ended up with my phone number but after that first visit he called me…incessantly!  He even managed somehow to get my work number and called me there when I didn’t answer my cell phone.  That made me pretty mad…for heaven’s sake it’s just home teaching, not life and death.  You don’t have to call me at work…better yet, DON’T call me at work…

Finally one evening (hoping that if I agreed then he would leave me alone) I caved and said they could come over…  More assuming…the first question was “so what does your husband do?”  I had my wedding ring on so it was obvious that I’m married but, they still could have asked.  The next question: “so do you work outside of the home?”  As if my answer to the first question hadn’t pretty much already answered the second…they then asked “so who takes care of your son?”  Perhaps I was being judgmental in assuming that they would have figured out the answers to #’s 2 & 3 based on my answer to #1…

The not-short-enough visit wrapped up with the usual “well we hope to see you at church, it’s at such & such time on Sunday (duh, I already knew that Mormons go to church on Sunday…)  As much as I had hoped that they would leave me be after that, they didn’t.  That’s not what bothers me though…what bothers me is that they have a whole 30 days to contact the 3-4 families they are supposed to contact every month but they wait until literally the second to last day of the month to call me!  Really???  I’m busy people, I can’t just drop what I’m doing and let you come to my house just because you waited until the last minute to do your home teaching this month (and every month).  What’s worse is when the first OLD guy just stops by out of the blue…I swear he watches for me to come home then runs (haha, RUNS?!?!) around the corner to my house.  Every time he expects me to invite him in (which I don’t because again, I don’t like visitors, especially uninvited ones) and then he almost acts upset when I tell him I don’t think there is a time the next day that he can come back!! 

Then there’s my visiting teachers…how many freakin teachers does one little 29 year old need for cryin out loud?  I loved the visiting teachers I had when we first moved to this neighborhood.  They were awesome!  They always called a few days in advance (and not at the end of the month) and always asked what time was convenient FOR ME for them to come over.  If for some reason we couldn’t set a time, we would chat on the phone for a minute and that would be it.  I really appreciated the respect they had for my time and situation.  They always made me feel like they cared about me…not just about whether or not they fulfilled their obligation to visit me every month.  I was very sad when about a year ago, our ward boundaries changed and I was assigned new visiting teachers.  The new relief society (similar to the red hat society, only with religion involved…haha!!) president, who had to be at least 75, called me and asked if I would like to have visiting teachers.  My exact words were “I would love to have visiting teachers if you can make sure to assign me someone that is close to my age”.  I didn’t think that my request was out of line…after all, I’m 29 years young, if I’m gonna have to socialize, it would be nice to socialize with people that were born in the same decade.

About 2 weeks later I got a call…it was one of my new visiting teachers.  Any guesses on how old she is???  C’mon, someone guess…OVER 60!!  Not that that is a bad thing but seriously she talked to me like I was a little 12 year old and that totally drove me nuts!  Why on earth do the ward leaders think that I want the geriatrics unit (home teachers included) at my house???  Why why why do they assign 80 year old men to visit (or stalk) a 29 year old temporarily single woman???  CREEPY!  What the hell am I supposed to talk about with them…the weather??  They are all of the mindset that women belong in the home making and raising babies and men should provide a living for the family.  Fine, maybe that worked for them but this is the 21^st century…  I could go on and on about this but I won’t…

As much as I would love to keep ranting, this post is really long already so I’ll leave you with this: in a talk at LDS General Conference about 2 weeks ago, Dieter Uchtdorf gave the best piece of advice I have heard in a very long time: “don’t judge me because I sin differently than you”.  Fellow Mormons, Christians, & humans: if you have paid attention to nothing else in the last 15 minutes, pay attention to those words.  Realize that IMAGE IS NOTHING, CHARACTER IS EVERYTHING.  We are not put on this earth to judge each other but to love each other.  So, if you love me a little less after reading my Mormon bashing rant, I accept that.  After all, it’s none of my business what you think of me!!!  Peace and Love to all of you :)

Running the Race or Chasing the Dream...

"You block your dream when you allow your fear to grow bigger than your faith." ~ Mary Manin Morrissey~


So it's been a while since I posted anything new on here...things have been crazy to say the least! I was just reading Here's Your Life, Would You Like Paper or Plastic? when I realized that it is time to write a sequel...

I must start by restating the question that defined that original post: WHAT IS YOUR DREAM AND ARE YOU DOING WHAT IT TAKES TO ATTAIN IT? It just occurred to me that many of us may not even know what our dream is until it shows up on our front door step...that is, if you are lucky enough for it to just show up. More often than not, if you don't know what your dream is, then you will likely never find it, or have it find you.

I stated my dream in that original post but here is a tidbit of it in case you didn’t go back and read it: I’m a musician…I want to get paid to play…music!  What could possibly be better than making a living doing what you love to do, when you want to do it, because you want to do it?  It’s hard to know where to even begin the path to achieving what you want most but I think that by simply knowing exactly what you want, you will attract it…or at the very least find yourself on the right track to getting it.

That happened to me!  I have known for 2 years now that I wanted my career to be in music.  I initially wanted to teach high school and that is what I strived for.  Gradually I began to feel like I belonged in an ensemble rather than in front of one so in November (2011) I changed my major from Music Ed. to Music.  Once I did that, it seems that the pieces just fell into place…

One Wednesday at my private lesson, my teacher said that he had been contacted by the local Marine recruiter to see if he had any students (clarinet students) that would be interested in joining the Marine Corps as a musician.  I had been considering the military as a career option for a while (although not very seriously considering it) but it had been on the back burner so I could finish school.  But when my teacher asked if I would be interested in meeting with the recruiter, I said YES!  A meeting was set and a week later, we (my teacher and I) met with the recruiter.

I’ll spare you the details of our meeting (and the one’s that followed over the next couple of weeks) but just know that I did my research, asked my questions (many of them), and thought long and hard before making my decision.  After about 3 weeks, I decided that this was the opportunity I had been waiting for, or better yet, had been waiting for me.  I believe that everything happens for a reason and I know what opportunity looks like so I decided to go for it.

I received about 15 pages of technical exercises (stuff that is used to determine how well (or badly) an instrumentalist can play) and instructions on what to have prepared for the first “round” of my audition.  I practiced those exercises nearly every day for about 2 weeks so I could get everything just right. 

I did the first part of my audition on January 20^th and passed with flying colors :)  After that, my live audition was scheduled for February 3^rd…and I also passed that.  I was a little bit nervous for it but I felt prepared and knew that if I just played my best then things would turn out the way they were meant to turn out.  Well, I passed!  I got a high enough score that I even get to choose where I am stationed!!

So, enough about that for a minute, the whole point of this is to prove that no matter your circumstances, your commitments, or your doubts, if you KNOW what you want, you CAN get it.  Put aside all the “what if’s” and “but’s” and just go for it.  The only failure is in not trying.  Had I let my doubts get in the way and not auditioned, I still wouldn’t know what to do with my life and I would have passed up what is probably the best opportunity I have ever been presented with. 

How many times have you passed up what may have been THE opportunity of a lifetime because you THOUGHT you couldn’t do it?  You can’t go through life thinking that you can’t do something, you have to KNOW that you CAN do it! 

I know that the road ahead is going to be tough and that I will want to throw in the towel more than once, but my success will come by holding on to the towel…and probably using it to wipe sweat off my face a few times :)  

So, to sound like a broken record, are YOU doing what needs to be done to attain what you want in YOUR life??  It‘s a simple question really.  Are you just running through your life with no clear goal to run to or are you chasing your dream all the way to the finish line??  I can now say that I am 100% chasing my dream…actually, I have caught it and am pushing full steam ahead to the finish line.  My only wish is that more people can step outside of themselves, be a little uncomfortable, and reap the rewards for going after whatever it is that they desire!

Thanks for reading, I know it was a doozy :)