Mine started as community-driven. His was history, or lack of transparency, driven. But it was a choice we didn't take lightly or easily. In fact, I've been in therapy for months about how to process it because I went through a serious bout of depression and anxiety over it. Then covid hit. Covid made it easy to disappear from our ward. My ward didn't care about me anyway, I'm not kidding when I say that. I had zero actual friends. And not from a lack of trying. I threw one game party for the ladies in my ward years ago and one person didn't get invited and a whole other crap happened because of it and I became ostracized. FOR YEARS. I sat alone in the back. And roamed the halls because I never felt wanted or welcome in any of the classes. I have been only going because of my kids. In fact some women thought we moved and didn't even bother to ask or check. So covid made it real easy for me to step back. For my husband, thanks to new podcasts, he learned more about the missing history we were never taught about growing up. Which made him question why they never told us. We both look for reasons to look past, and ignore but ultimately we couldn't follow something that was dishonest with us and our money. (see that was my second thing I had a hard time with.) The tithing money. We have been living paycheck to paycheck, not even we rely on our credit card because we can't afford anything because we obediently gave 10% of our gross income to the church, only to find out in November 2019, the church had amassed over $100BILLION in money, not including how much they own in land and other investments. I started looking at the church as a corporation, a company, and not a religious entity. I get it, everything costs money, but here we were scraping by while the church was sitting on a huge nest egg, for what!?! They barely donate to charity, they don't really help the people locally who need it. They fired all the cleaning people and make the members do the cleaning of all the buildings and temples. I thought they had the members clean because the church didn't have enough to cover it. No, just another way to save money. Oh and leadership gets paid. Even though it's been stated in conference talks that there are no paid clergy. Well, the bishops give a ton of time and don't receive income but the higher ups have multiple perks, but not the higher up women in the church.
Anyways, this has been brewing and stewing for awhile with me. It is our choice to leave the mormon faith and one that is with a heavy heart. We've finally told our families and as you can imagine it didn't go well for either side. But this is for us. We can't follow blindly anymore. I look forward to our future that we make. That our children make. And my children, when they are adults they are welcome to choose to join the Mormon faith or not. But we won't be pressuring them to get baptized when they turn 8. We want them to make an informed choice. This post is not intended to hurt or damage any person's personal belief. This is just a way for me to move on, and to give transparency,
unlike the church.
If you have any questions, feel free to email me at: connectthdotsginger@gmail.com
