I Found the Right Faith For Me

Tags

Asperger's Syndrome, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Interests, Mormons, religion

For most of my young adult life, I led what some people may call a double or a contradictory life. During that time, I still professed to be a Born Again Christian and I admit that I was going through the motions. I would read the bible and pray every evening and that includes when I would go out and get drunk and indulge in other vices as well. I clung onto the words in Ephesians 2:8-9. Eventually I would settle down, marriage and children so my wild days were eventually put behind me. Still, while I might not have been living wild, I was still going through the motions in regards to faith.

Then something happened that marked a turning point in my life in many ways. One day two Mormon missionaries approached me and began teaching my budding family and me about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Trust me, I was no easy convert. I remain convinced that the missionaries would come to my house dreading what I was going to ask them next as I was trying to catch the church out. Going back to my Born Again days, I was taught that the Mormons were one of the false prophets talked about in the Book of Jude. I remember it well when I worked at the bible camp. The instructor called them false prophets because they taught that Jesus went to the Americas after his resurrection. The joke was “What was he doing, preaching to the Indians?” At one point, I did ask a question where the missionaries had to get the senior mission couple to come and answer. To make a long story short, I finally ran out of things to ask and after prayer and study, I was baptised into the faith.

Some of you are probably shaking your heads in the belief that I was led astray, I believe I wasn’t. It has been said that the LDS faith was founded on blasphemies. Well, I have read the Book of Mormon and studied many of the articles and doctrines of the church and I have found nothing blasphemous. I have also read a lot of anti- Mormon literature and most of it is very comical. In fact, it’s a past time of some members to read the anti literature for a good laugh. I have also been to the temple and even though I have been out of the church for some years, I won’t reveal the sacred things within. I will say that I never saw any animal or human sacrifice take place in the temple. Yes, more anti- Mormon literature. The church has answered many of the questions that had built up inside me in the time before I joined. Questions like the other sheep that Jesus talked about to his disciples and books mentioned in the bible that don’t appear in it like the Book of Nathan the Prophet. What’s more, it has given me a more defined insight in the creation of our world. See, unlike some anti- creationists tell you, God wasn’t some cowboy builder who created the Earth out of nothing. He created the laws of science and would have used those laws in the creation. He would have sent celestial bodies hurtling across space and crash them into each other to form our world. I still take great comfort from this. For me, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was the right faith for me.

So, why did I leave? The main catalyst was the fact that my life was contradicting the things set out in my patriarchal blessing but the main bombshell there was my first marriage dissolving. For me, that was the final straw in many ways. I mean how could we reign in heaven if we split up. Plus the fact that I was finding it more difficult to live by the commandments of the Church. Again, these things began to effect my mind and instead of driving myself into a state with it, I left the church. I confess, that I got into some worldly ways and was excommunicated. Although, I have slipped on a couple of occasions, I try not to be boastful of this. One more point I would like to make here is the Mormon belief that we are all potential Gods in the making. I believe this, however, I know that I don’t want to be a God nor reign in heaven. For all the things said against God and the job he’s doing, I know for a fact that I would not be able to do any better. I don’t want the responsibility.

Though I’m not a member of the Church any longer, I still won’t hear a bad word said against it. For me, it is the true faith, I just don’t wish to follow their rules at the moment. I will go into more detail on my thoughts on this in my next post. However, I still believe enough that when my grandmother on my mother’s side passed away, I gave her name to the temple to have work done on her behalf. Yes, I believe in the Mormon principle of baptism for the dead and when I had my hernia operation, I sought a blessing from the local priesthood. So, I did gain a lot from my time in the Church but I feel less stressed now that I am out. Of course, if the Church did have a tunnel dug from Liverpool to Salt Lake City, I wouldn’t have left because of the money I would have saved travelling to the US and if temple garments were bullet proof, I would have kept mine. I will say that unlike my time as a Born Again, the LDS faith did not mess up my head.

Now the link to He Was Weird. There really is none because back at that time, I had only learned about the Mormons in Social Studies and all I really knew was that they settled in Utah. Therefore, transferring it to Mark in the story, he would not have known anything about them more that.

Next post: Asperger’s and Religion, My Final Thoughts

To buy He Was Weird, go to: http://www.amazon.co.uk/He-Was-Weird-Michael-Lefevre/dp/1909740942/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395872371&sr=1-1&keywords=he+was+weird

Advertisements

Asperger’s and Religion in He Was Weird

Tags

Asperger's Syndrome, Autism, bullying, He Was Weird, Michael D LeFevre, religion, school shootings

 

For those who have read “He Was Weird” and those who are hoping to, you will know that Mark becomes a Born Again Christian fairly early in the story. Like me, he accepts Jesus as his saviour out of fear of eternity in hell because in his mind, he is determined to go to heaven. At first, his conversion has no direct impact on him, he just gets on with life, still suffering the bullying. It never impacts on his growing fantasy world where he is a star ice hockey player.

As the story develops, so does his faith. In the summer following his conversion, he goes to bible school and then to a church run summer camp where he has his week in paradise. That is the only time where his faith is an ultra positive for him. He is the star of the camp both in sports and in bible knowledge, which makes him popular enough to be voted camper of the week. It also during that week he has his only encounter with the opposite sex as he has a girlfriend for the week. It is no wonder why in that chapter, Mark feels he has been truly blessed by the Lord.

Naturally, it all comes crashing to Earth immediately after he comes back home. The bullying doesn’t go away, in fact it only gets worse, much worse. That has a knock on effect on just about everything he does and is seen as a failure in school, sports and in life generally to just about everybody. His prayers to the Lord to deliver him from the hell he is facing go unanswered and those in authority, who could help him, don’t. Neither do his own efforts like when he asks his father if he could go live with him. Therefore it is no wonder that he eventually snaps and goes to school with two guns and mows down his classmates.

The little twist of irony is that when he justifies his actions to himself via two verses in the bible. That’s because his faith is so literal, that he truly believes that God is showing him the way out through scripture and he goes and carries out God’s will. After his big climax, his local minister does mention what a good Christian Mark was and how he must have been blessed by God because why else would Satan heap so much misery on him? This is something that could be debated for years.

Like Mark, the bullying I experience at the same time in my life was so bad that whenever I hear or read about a school shooting, my first reaction is, “This could have been me.” Fortunately, God did hear my prayers and I moved out of that town and the bullying stopped. That strengthened my faith as a Christian at the time.

The final question in my mind is that if my book was actual, how would God judge Mark? Would he be a villain or victim? How much would he take into account the suffering Mark was going through? Would God say that he is forgiven his sins or tell him he hadn’t suffered as much as Job? Another point that could be debated, as to this day, the contradictions between God’s wrath and mercy still cause great conflict in my Asperger’s like mind.

Next post: I Found the Right Faith For Me

To buy He Was Weird, go to: http://www.amazon.co.uk/He-Was-Weird-Michael-Lefevre/dp/1909740942/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395409099&sr=1-1&keywords=he+was+weird

Asperger’s And Religion- Part 2

Tags

Asperger's Syndrome, Autism, D.A.M.P., religion, Self Esteem

In the last post, you read the history of my religious faith and how my Asperger’s like traits effected it. This time, I thought I would look more at the Asperger’s side of it, at least according to what was going on in my own mind. The hardest part to this is thinking about where the best place to start is. For the first few years after my coming to Jesus, things went pretty straight forward for me. Most of the trials I suffered seemed to be resolved with help from above. The biggest was the terrible bullying I suffered in sixth and seventh grades, which ended when I moved out of that town at the beginning of eighth grade. Still I was able to accept everything as God’s will and thought not to question.

I think my real trials started when I was sixteen during the second summer I worked at that bible camp. I went through a period there where I couldn’t seem to do anything right and I was convinced that I was frustrating my supervisor and some of my work colleagues. One night, after making what I thought were some silly errors in a softball game, I drew the conclusion that the only reason God put me on the Earth was so that he could have a good laugh at all my mishaps. I felt worthless like I was the joke of the world. Unfortunately for me, I never talked to anyone about it, instead I depended on prayer and bible reading for the answer. The result of that led me to believe I was committing blasphemy and that was the only reason why I stopped thinking that way. However, that thought never completely went away.  Whenever I had an embarrassing moment or was the target, I sometimes believed that the Lord was having his laughs at my expense. It all became very confusing in my mind.

The big problem was that except for that those couple of summers, especially the last one of my youth, my life didn’t seem to be all that happy. The worst of it seemed those few months after that summer when I couldn’t find an after school job before finally getting a paper route. In the years after my backsliding, I would sight this as part of the reason. It seemed things would generally not go well for me and no matter how much I prayed, the Lord would only come to my aid when things got really bad. But he would only do just enough to keep stringing my faith along.

More evidence of this manifested itself when I was on Parris Island. Boot camp was like a roller coaster ride going from high to low throughout the entire twelve weeks. For example, I gave great praise to God when I maxed the first phase tests only to be caught by the senior drill instructor sitting down during the barracks clean up two days later. Then the next day, turning in a shocking performance at the initial drill competition in spite of my platoon winning it. Two weeks later, I thought the Lord had abandoned me again when I was kicked off the rifle range for committing a safety violation. During the next week, it looked unlikely I was going to qualify with the rifle but I thought the Lord was with me on qualification day as I qualified quite easily. I went back to my original platoon only to be threatened with disciplinary action for not locking my rifle up. Here, in my mind, the Lord did perform a miracle because when the platoon came back from an inspection, which I failed, three quarters of the platoon had forgotten to lock up the rifles. It was enough to set the drill instructors on me and it seemed nothing was going right; like the time rust was found on my rifle. Whether or not I was going to graduate came down to final inspection which, after everything going wrong that morning, I passed seemingly with flying colours. So, I was allowed to graduate.

Naturally, I praised God for coming through for me in the end but even then he seemed to do just enough to get me through. I think as things progressed after that, I became of the same attitude, I would do just enough for the Lord to get through but then the verse about being lukewarm took hold so I thought it best to be cold. After all, it didn’t seem to me that God cared all that much. As a result, I stopped trying to live for God and started living for me. Things became less confusing for me on that part after that. Now, because I was in the marines at the time, many said that I was led astray by the evil heathens that make up America’s peacetime military. No, that’s not the case. Sure, the Corps provided the means and definitely the encouragement but they weren’t the cause. I made the choices and blaming the marines is just a cop out.

Next post: Religion and He Was Weird

To buy He Was Weird, go to: http://www.amazon.co.uk/He-Was-Weird-Michael-LeFevre/dp/1909740942/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1394742571&sr=1-1&keywords=he+was+weird

Asperger’s And Religion

Tags

anxiety, Asperger's Syndrome, He Was Weird, religion, Self Esteem

This was one subject I have been wanting to post about for several months because religion played a huge part in my early life. Actually, up until I was nearly thirty-nine. After posting my previous post about getting bullied in my church youth group, some people will say that the bullying I suffered at the time contributed to my straying from God a few years later, although most of those people would still rather believe that it was heavy metal music or the evil heathens I met while serving in the military. Those are just easy cop outs for those who don’t want to come up with a more appropriate cause.

Let’s explore this then. I will start with when I first became a born again Christian when I was eleven. I was afraid of an eternity in hell and according to what I was being taught at the time, accepting Jesus as Saviour was the way to avoid it. Therefore, I did. I didn’t have any epiphanies or white light experiences and it took almost a year before full realisation of my choice actually kicked in. When it did, I became committed to serving the Lord.

Anything I read in the bible or explained to me by a minister or Sunday school teacher was incorporated into my beliefs. My Asperger’s mind took the teachings quite literally. I became a spiritual sponge soaking up all the knowledge about God that I could.  However, on the flip side, I never quite had the courage to go out and convert the world to my beliefs and while now with hindsight, I see this was probably the good thing, at the time I felt that I was failing God on this part.

I carried my faith all through my high school years and there were times I thought the Lord came through for me. Unfortunately, there were also many times when he didn’t and it left me pondering God’s will. Often times it seemed that it didn’t include me and I couldn’t always find the answer in the bible though I managed to find some sort of explanation most of the time. For instance, I attributed the bullying in youth group was the world resenting for being one of God’s chosen and the bully leaving the church as God rescuing me from said problem.

Where it all began to unravel was my senior year of high school. Up until then, I did my best to serve God and most of the time, it seemed to pay off. For three summers, I worked at a bible summer camp for children, I had been a camper there myself before that. I was in my element, serving the Lord with all my heart and hearing that my service would be rewarded in heaven only spurred me on. That third summer before my senior year, I thought God had blessed me more when I had a Christian girl friend who also worked at the camp. That was probably the best summer of me pre- adult life.

It all came crashing down when the summer ended. When I got home, no matter how hard I tried or prayed, I couldn’t find a part time job in spite of working three summers for the Lord. When I did, it was delivering newspapers in my car and while I was grateful for God for getting me this job, I still felt silly being a seventeen year old paper boy. While I kidded myself that I was doing right for not letting pride get in my way, my self esteem was still low. In fact, going off topic for a sec, I can say that I hid my low self esteem behind the Christian belief of not thinking too highly of oneself. Then there was the girl friend. I actually remained faithful to her because I was told by a minister that one night stands and short term romances were against God. Therefore, I thought I was only doing right by him. Unfortunately, members of my family and even the girl herself didn’t think that way. The girl’s belief was that she didn’t own me and I was free to go my own way. Family members thought I was wasting my time with someone who was so far away. As a result, I believed that I was being condemned for living Christian standards by the very people who I thought were supposed to be on my side and while I wasn’t looking for praise, I didn’t expect that. The whole thing sent me into a state of total confusion and though I tried, I couldn’t find anything in the bible to enlighten me.

I wasn’t questioning God or even faith, what was going through my mind at the time was whether it was worth it trying to work so hard to serve God. After all, came one set of reasoning, we were saved by faith and not of works lest any many should boast according to Ephesians 2: 8-9. It began to play on me big time and my saint like behaviour began to slip. I did have a period where it went back up. When I enlisted in the marines, I needed a lot of faith to get me through boot camp or at least I thought. During those twelve weeks on Parris Island, it felt like I was going from one mishap to the next and my Asperger’s gave me some situations there too, but I’ll save that for another time.

Eventually, I did backslide in the eyes of many Christians. Though I went through the motions of reading my bible and praying, I no longer went out to live for the Lord. Many things contributed to this beyond the events already listed but I will say that one major event that hastened my downfall was when I was in the marines about six months. I was still in love with that girl I mentioned and we still had a relationship going, even if it was long distance and I did most of the work. Therefore, I was convinced that she was the girl God chose for me, so I proposed. Well, she turned me down rather bluntly and that really sent me off the rails in many ways. I’m not blaming her, but it sent lots of conflicting thoughts in my head to which I had a near melt down. I believed God had set me up for a fall and the whole thing didn’t make sense to me for a long time.

I could write volumes about this subject alone and since there is more material in my brain, I will save it for the next post. Before I go, let me just say that I have no problem with people who follow religion or a spiritual belief, especially if they draw comfort from it. But for me, it messed my head up more than drugs or heavy metal music ever could.

Next post: Part 2

To buy He Was Weird, go to http://www.amazon.co.uk/He-Was-Weird-Michael-LeFevre/dp/1909740942/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1394143098&sr=1-1&keywords=he+was+weird