Chapter 21

Excerpt

Our whole world was in an uproar. As far as the kids were concerned, the family was falling apart, and we were going to hell in a hand-basket. It was a time of great confusion for them. Our youngest three children, ages six, three, and newborn, were too young to understand any of what was going on. The other seven kids, ages 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, and 20, were extremely worried and upset. All their lives they’d been taught that Mormonism was true—the only true religion on the face of the earth—and that they could have testimonies of its truthfulness simply by praying for a warm feeling about it. All their lives they been taught to rely on their feelings which, they were told, were the promptings of the Spirit. For every other subject—history, politics, mainstream media, and public education—we taught them to think and be critical, to not believe everything they heard, but to research things out. Sadly, in the very thing that mattered most (religion), we had told them to rely on subjective emotions…