Autonomous

  The Oakland Temple This might be long.  Preemptive apologies.  Limited understanding. As a child, I was taught to strive to enter the temple one day.  I cannot emphasize this enough.  It was the end goal here on Earth.  Go to the temple.  Be married there.  Return often.  Period.   It was where the fullness of the gospel was given and received.  Going to church and taking the sacrament and being a good person was all well and good, but if you didn't make it through the temple doors, you had fallen short.  This notion was never a debate.  You can ask any good Mormon.  As I mentioned before, because my parents were converts to the gospel who already had 3 kids, we needed to be sealed in the temple to be an eternal family.  This happened twice when I was a child.  The first time was when my parents were sealed in the Oakland temple.  I was taken to a 'nursery' of sorts while their sealing was taking...

  Nope.  No personal photos.  I will spare you all.  Just a stock photo of this nice lady doing some garment shopping.  So fun.  Growing up, I was not an immodest young woman.  I want to stress that.  I never owned a two-piece swimsuit.  I usually wore a t-shirt over my one piece, for Pete's sake. I had a few tank tops that I would wear in the summer, almost always with something underneath, and usually when going to a pool or the beach.  I didn't wear spaghetti straps to school or shorts that my butt cheeks hung out of.  I did own cut-off shorts, but I usually wore tie-dye leggings or black tights underneath (I was a weird kid - my mom loved it - just kidding - she hated it).  I did wear dresses to formals (all two that I went to) that showed my shoulders.  But that is the extent of my debauchery.  All this to say - I was modest.  I didn't think that the leap to wearing garments would be so difficult.  But ...

  In faith crisis lingo, these items on your shelf come about when you are studying the gospel and you come across a principle or a piece of history that doesn't quite make sense to you.  Rather than seeing that thing as evidence against your current religious worldview, you just assume there is a good answer to it out there somewhere and you put it on "the shelf".  Once it's there, you can move on, ignore it for a while.  Every once in a while you might pull it down off the shelf and glance at it, just to see if you have found any answers relating to it.  If not, you just put it back.  This can happen multiple times over a lifetime, coming upon troubling issues, not having an answer, putting it on the shelf.  Eventually, the shelf is so full, so weighed down with unanswered questions, that it can break.   Over a lifetime of church membership, I shelved a number of items.  I didn't realize that's what I was doing until much later, but I ...

  It's hard to adequately explain what it is like to finally lift the hood, peer inside the box, pay attention to the man behind the curtain.  It's like when Dorothy opens the door to her twister-ravaged Kansas home and sees the Land of Oz in color for the first time.  It's so much to take in and process.  When I was baptized into the church at eight years old, I was (metaphorically) handed a beautifully wrapped box.  It was huge and had glitter paper and a shiny bow.  I was told it was the greatest gift I would ever receive. I was told to guard it, keep it close, keep it safe.  But I was cautioned against opening the box.  Family and friends and leaders assured me that there was no need.  I just needed to have faith that the box contained beauty and truth and light and love.  So this is what I did.  I obeyed.  The box sat, for over 30 years, unopened.   As a faithful member of the church, you are encouraged to seek k...