Everyone needs mentors in life. One can't get anywhere without mentors. The same holds for the church and one's spiritual life. I can point to certain people who helped me along the way. Who played key roles in my reaching this point and being an active, believing member. My father, who has always been very sincere and honest and never one to "lie for the Lord." Another was a brilliant, eccentric man in my ward whose religious view fascinated me when he was a Sunday School teacher (shows you how important these "throw-away" callings are). One might consider him the kind of active Mormon who might have posted on CG, but way before the internet existed. Another was a man, whom I had never met, who out of the blue started writing me on my mission. He was one of my father's friends from his teenage/college days. My mission president, who responded to me when I said "I can only do things this way and feel like I am maintaining my integrity", "then you do it that way." Someone else as mission president might have completely altered my trajectory. Some of the Bishops I have had.
I'll give a more recent example from the era when I have been posting on these message boards. Sacrament meeting, and it happened that the Stake President was sitting on the back row. It was not normal for him to attend our ward. At the end, I think the Bishop asked if he wanted to share any words. He got up and started talking about how this church is a "big tent" and there are those of you who feel like you might not belong or fit, but you do. In that particular moment, with the things going on in my life, it felt like he could have been talking to me personally. This same stake president sent out an email/memo that it was not a commandment or an official church position for members to support the federal marriage amendment. These were very small things, but they mattered to me in the moment.
I walk in faith. I don't really know much of anything. I guess I'm kind of like a spiritual empiricist--my views evolve based on my experiences. I certainly have my doubts and my complaints, but I have found in those foxhole moments in life, that I fall on the side of faith. I've had enough experiences that I can't walk away and say "that was a bunch of nothing."
In the vision of the Tree of Life, the invitation is to taste the fruit. I can taste the fruit for myself. I can't taste it for anyone else. Neither can anyone else taste it for me. Descriptions of the taste are far removed from the personal experience of tasting. Words fail us. But the words can ring within us. Like charges of energy along a string, our molecules sing with truth. At least I think so. Each person has their own life and own experience, and the most any member of any faith can say is "taste the fruit."
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John Dehlin might be the first to start his own religion based on the opinion that the fruit is "meh" (I have to admit that I am chuckling at my own joke here). Maybe the Dehlin's tone comes across to me in a way that was not intended, but there is a real chick little the-sky-is-falling-in-Mormondom kind of vibe that I don't really agree with. But if I constantly surrounded myself with Mormons in existential crises, and was constantly praised as a leading light among them, then my view of what is reality in Mormondom might be different.
I have been a dim light among idiots, so that has helped temper my expectations and keep my spirits high!
Anyway, one last point. I think one can embrace the humanity of the church, with all of its foibles and human errors, but still hold to the authority and power and gifts of the Spirit within the church. The David O. McKay biography really helped shape my views on this, that the distance from the "ordinary" member of the church and the apostles is not so great. As Uchtdorf recently said, most of us live below our means.
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