ClobberBlog | Mormonism, Evangelical Christianity

So, there’s two narratives I’ll be posting soon: my testimony and the story of my journey with Mormonism. The first will be posted in one page; the second will be a longer series of shorter posts. But there’s some background that’s relevant to both stories which I thought I would give here.

Some info on my family:

My father ~ Got married for the first time when he was 18 or 19 to a woman named Judy. Had one son in that marriage before it ended in divorce. Married my mother in his early 20s and was married to her until her death in September 2008. His father was an alcoholic who abused all his children badly. Was raised with Baptist leanings.

My father’s first wife ~ Whom I’ve never met and know very little about. When their marriage broke up, she abandoned her ex-husband and son in Arkansas. In the mid-90s, when we were living in Puyallup, Washington, we discovered that she was living in nearby Federal Way, Washington with the children she’d had since leaving my father, my half-brother’s other half-sisters.

C. ~ My older half-brother from my father’s first marriage. Has several mental health issues; my father says his first wife used to beat him as a toddler, but my father is an obvious hostile source. We were living in Alaska in 1990 when my parents could no longer handle him and sent him to live in a group home in Oregon. He has not lived with my family since, now lives in a group home in Tacoma.

Karen ~ My mother, was raised with Nazarene leanings. Was married to my father until her death in September 2008. Had four children, step-mother to C.

Bridget Jack Jeffries ~ Me, born in 1982, was my mother’s first child and my father’s second. Prone to know-it-all’ism. Think Hermione Granger or Lisa Simpson and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what I was like growing up. My original middle name at birth was Leanne; I’ll explain how I became Jack in my testimony.

M. ~ My mother’s second child and my father’s third, born in 1983. Has autism.

S. ~ My mother’s third child and my father’s fourth, born in 1986.

J. ~ My mother’s fourth child and my father’s fifth, born in 1988.

I was born in Arkansas but moved to Alaska as an infant, and living in a poor family so far away from the lower 48 (as we call it), I had very little contact with my extended family. I spent the first ten years of my life in Alaska, where my childhood largely consisted of dodging moose and earning head injuries from going down icy snow hills on the fastest sled I could find.

My mildly Christian parents had trouble with religion when my brother M. was diagnosed with autism. Several churches tried to tell them M.was possessed by demons. I remember attending a few churches as a young girl, but all I remember is how horribly mean the church workers were to me. I remember being scolded a lot and excluded from games and activities that other children my age were allowed to play in. I also remember telling my parents that I did not want to go to church anymore, and they said okay.

When I was about 8, my mother had a nervous breakdown from the stress of raising both a mentally disabled stepson and an autistic child of her own along with 3 other children. I was not present when she had the breakdown; I’m told she ran screaming and crying into the street. I was staying the night at a friend’s house. After that happened, my parents sent C. to live in a group home in Oregon, and I became the functional oldest child in the family.

Not long after C. was sent away, I was home alone on a very cold, snowy night when there was a knock at the door. I opened the door to find a Jehovah’s Witness woman there, braving the bitter cold weather to go door-to-door sharing her religion. I’m not sure why she was alone, but I invited her in. She was the first person who ever told me about Jesus, giving me a book called The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived. I was intrigued. I wanted so badly to hear more about Jesus.

This is one of the reasons I have so much respect for other religions, even if I think their theology is wrong. I know from personal experience that God uses them in spite of their theological error. God used a Jehovah’s Witness woman to tell me about Christ where several Protestant churches and my own ostensibly Christian parents had failed miserably, and yet evangelicals often treat Jehovah’s Witnesses like everything they say and do is darkness. Why do we do that?

Anyways, when my parents found out I had let someone into the house while they were gone, they were alarmed, and they told the Jehovah’s Witness woman not to come back when she came again. They told me they would take me to their church if I wanted to go to church, but they never did.

I moved to the Puget Sound area of Washington when I was ten, where I met my evangelical aunt, Joni, and accepted Christ as my personal savior. A few years later, when I was 12, I saw an advertisement on television for the Book of Mormon with a number to call to find out more. The advertisement said that the Bible was not the end and Jesus had visited the American continent afterwards. I thought that sounded interesting, so I picked up the phone to call the number. My mother asked me who I was calling, and I indicated the ad on TV. She told me to put the phone down.

When I was 15, my aunt loaned me a book called A Concise Dictionary of Cults and Religions, and I took it to school with me. I knew there were several Mormon kids in one class, so I flipped to the section on Mormonism and read aloud from it before class. From what I remember and what I know now, the information on Mormonism contained in the book was not very accurate. I think it said, for example, that men could become gods, but women could only obtain the highest level of heaven. Several students listened with interest and laughed at some of the things the book said. “You actually believe that?” we asked the LDS students. They looked frustrated and hurt and I don’t think they knew what to say; I certainly did not feel bad at the time for being such an ass to the Mormons. I gave the book back to my aunt and did not think of it again.

So, by the time the LDS church actually entered my life, I had some general negative impressions of the church, but for the most part I knew nothing about Mormonism. That was all going to change.