Is there a God

Don't worry Im not questioning my faith today, I am reflecting on how it has developed.

This morning in my Book of Mormon class we had a discussion that highlights perfectly something I have seen time and again during my time as a member. The assumption that all humans are searching for the reason behind everything, and that if you do not profess belief in God, you actively don't believe in him either.

This is a perspective that I personally cant understand because I was literally the exception to that rule before I joined the church. In retrospect I would declare that I was agnostic. If you had asked me before I joined the church I would have given you a response of "I'm nothing" or "I don't have a religion." To me, religion, God, pre or post life, were all just non-factors.

No I never once wondered where I came from, or where I was going to go after I died. I never once thought about why the world was the way it was or why things happened to me. Those feelings are associated with an innate belief that there is SOMETHING else going on and I just had no reason to think that there WAS something else going on. This is very important to understand and I hope I can explain this clearly.

It takes some form of faith to even entertain the idea of God, whether you believe he exists, or is a coping mechanism developed by the collective human experience, you must believe something for it to matter in your life. That is where people like I was are so hard to understand for people who have always had a religious context.

Try to picture what it sounds like when you tell someone that they can say words in their head, and a parent they don't remember, that has seemingly supernatural powers, will hear them and talk back to them in their thoughts and feelings. How motivated would you be to actually do this? I know I wasn't! It was the initial seeds of faith that I let grow within me, that gave me the desire to know it there was a God, that drove me to my knees the first time, no matter how ridiculous it felt (It was by far the most humiliating thing I had ever done up to that point in my life.)

The point of this post is this. It takes some form of belief to cause action. If you are sharing the gospel with a friend and it seems like they might be negative, its very possible that they just do not have the desire to know. You can never give them that desire, they need to find it for themselves. Don't worry if it seems like you aren't accomplishing anything. Though they may not realize what you are doing is out of love, you can be giving them the crucial frame of reference that will allow them to find their "why" someday.

Always remember your "why." Keep it sacred, because it is the driving force behind what you do, who you are, and who you will become.