My Testimony - My Religious Background

I always wanted to start my story off the way Ellen DeGeneres started her book, "My Point...And I Do Have One." Here goes nothing.

I was born, bred and lightly sauteed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I burst into this world on May 5, 1979. I am the youngest of three children and the only girl. My parents were older when they had me (Mom was 37, Dad was 43... which, back then, was pretty old to be having a baby) and my brothers are ten and twelve years older than me. My maternal grandmother came to live with us when I was 2. My grandfather had Alzheimer's and, at the time, it was a relatively new disease and many nursing facilities didn't take Alzheimer's patients. Yet they were able to find a nursing home for him nearby, so Grandma moved in to be closer to him and to help take care of us kids.

According to my mom, we had a religious family. If by "religious" you mean we went to funerals, then maybe that's an accurate description. My mother and her side of the family belong to the Mormon faith. My dad is an Episcopalian, and his side of the family is a combination of Episcopalian and Catholic. I recall going to church once in my life, when I was very young. It was my mother's Mormon ward, and I loved Sunday School and didn't want to leave and screamed and kicked when my mother and grandmother came to get me. During the service, we received communion (known in the Mormon church as receiving "Sacrament") and I really liked the bread. Nobody explained to me what the bread meant, so I assumed it was just a nice snack for the congregation. I took a piece and my brother took the basket from me and I yelled, "WAIT... DON'T TAKE IT, I WANT MORE!!!!" My father shushed me and I remember being good and PO'd that I wasn't able to snatch a handful before the basket was passed on.

That pretty much covers my childhood church experience.

Of course, my mother had visitors from her church periodically. She had friends from the Relief Society stop by at times, and the bishop would visit. When I was a child, I loved all of them and I loved their visits because they always brought me something. I used to sit in the living room while they did a Bible study (or maybe it was a Book of Mormon study, I really don't remember) and we'd pray. My mother participated because SHE was born, bred and lightly sauteed in the LDS (Latter-Day Saints) Church and it was the thing to do. I participated because it fascinated me.

I don't know how much you know about Mormons... but they don't drink alcohol or coffee or smoke, all of which my family did. Quite a bit, actually. So when the Mormons showed up, the coffee pot got shoved under the sink where the liquor was hidden, the smokes got stashed away, and my folks went through a bottle of air freshener at a time to get rid of the awful stench of sin.

Other times, church people were not welcome at all. Religion in my family was very much a mood-based sort of thing. I had a job to do, and I did it well: if I was outside and I saw the Mormon missionaries coming (it's hard to miss a couple of hot-looking teenage guys in black pants, white shirts and black ties carrying Bibles) I ran inside to warn my family. If they were not in the mood to be bothered spiritually, we all ran around closing the drapes, locking the doors, and we huddled together on the staircase in silence until the knocking on the front door ceased.

Ah, good times.

Now, my mother always told me the reason we didn't go to church was because she was forced to go to church growing up. They lived in Provo, Utah, where everyone was white and everyone was Mormon, and if you didn't go to church every time the doors were opened, something was considered wrong with you. Apparently, it didn't matter if my mother and her siblings were attacked by a pack of pit bulls and mauled within an inch of their lives - they went to church, and by golly, NOBODY COMPLAINED.
In an effort not to force church on her children, she just didn't take us at all.

It wasn't that my family didn't believe in God, it was just that everyone was afraid of overdoing it... so I supposed they underdid it.

However, that doesn't mean I got no religion growing up. My parents also enrolled me in a Christian preschool which I actually remember very well. I used to walk around singing "Jesus Loves Me" all the time and I played with wooden figurines in the likeness of Bible heroes. I'm pretty sure I accepted Jesus as Savior during that time of my life, though I don't remember it. I was totally down with Jesus, though, and it stuck.

A lot of the religion I got as a young child came from - believe this or not - my older brother's girlfriends. A few of them were Catholic, so when my oldest brother brought them home from college for Christmas (I remember 2 of them), they always wanted to go to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Fortunately for me, those girls thought I was cute so they let me tag along. I loved all of it - the liturgy, the Latin, the somberness of it all. I always had a longing for God, even before I knew the first thing about Him. I just felt like He was real and I wanted to know for sure.

At the same time all of this was happening, I was being sexually abused by a neighbor on a daily basis. My grandfather died when I was 4 and my grandmother began drinking a lot and slipped into senility. I often found her passed out on the floor, at the bottom of the stairs, or mumbling incoherently in her recliner. My uncle - my mother's brother - started stealing money from our family (about a half a million dollars) and my mother sank into depression. I started eating to soothe my broken heart and by the fifth grade I was officially "Fatso." I was bullied mercilessly by kids in the neighborhood and at school.

By that point, I wasn't so "down" with Jesus anymore. I wasn't sure I believed in God at all. I spent a lot of time alone in my room, just sitting on my bed and thinking about eternity, the size of the universe, how we got here, and whether or not we went anywhere when we died. Everyone thinks about that sort of thing, but I'm pretty sure it's not normal for a 10-year-old to think about it daily, or to the point of becoming suicidal...

It was around that age I knew something was wrong with me. I know that the problems in my life were enough to make anyone depressed, but it was just... different. I didn't know if I really believed in God or not anymore, but I did start praying - that God would kill me. I started asking God to take my life because life was too sad to live anymore. And I begged him, if He was real, to have mercy on me for not knowing what to believe.

I started to get a better idea of who God was when I entered the sixth grade... Pin It