The 19 year old convert

Baptised.
Fresh
Clean
pure

I was now a member of a real live church.  I church I choose.  I church I hoped to one day fully know to be true.  I was happy & content.  Not a care in the world. 

I was surrounded by my old & new friends while I chatted after my dunking.  My father choose not to attend.  He said he could not support me in joining the church.  I couldn't blame him.  All the info he had about my church was from years back when he met some extremest fridge "members" back in the 60's.  They took him in after his rig broke down on a desert high way.  The gave him free room & board.  Fed him & fixed his rig for free.  He stayed a few days with the people.  Playing baseball with the kids & helping the men with their farm work.  He said they were kind, very poor, giving & polygamists.

He just could not support me in a weird cult.  No matter how much I tried to teach him what I was taught....the truth ..... he would have none of it.

And for the first time in my short life, I felt truly, utterly alone.

I pushed those thoughts away as I stood eating cookies with my new congregation. 
I...would enjoy my grown up decision with gusto!  I would eat cookies & cheese potato casserole with abandoned!  I had places to go, people to meet & a religion to adhere to.

The thoughts of loneliness & dread gave way to excitement & exhilaration

I was safe.
I was wanted.




I was a dumb as a box of rocks!

I fear it was my childish faith in the "arm of man" that brought me to where I was a few years ago.  Brought under & drowned in that sea of faithful but ignorant trust.

The night I was baptised a new missionary shook my hand.  He gripped it hard & stared me straight in the eyes.  He words to this day, etched in my brain.  But at that time, those words held no deep meaning.

"Sister...you must always remember.  The gospel of Jesus Christ is true...the people..... are not."

What the heck did that mean?  Well...I sorta knew what he meant.  But it wasn't until I walked through hell with these church people did I fully understand his words.

It took awhile to decode his meaning...which was pretty blunt.  I mean really...ya don't need a decoder ring from a cereal box to understand....GOSPEL = good.  People of earth = a$$hats.

I JUST DID NOT GET IT.

Not even when Brother Ay called those boys n*****s

Or I was called "sweet spirit" over & over again (sweet spirit means nice but ugly and/or slow)

Or when a young man told me he was disappointed in me when I could not fulfill my new calling (job in the church that is volunteer) teaching young children the Gospel...that I just was baptised into!  Even with the tears in my eyes & the vomit still on my shirt from having a panic attach in the bathroom after I fled in failure & humiliation from the room filled with children.

Or when I was taken advantage of for months by a man 7 years older (and wiser he might add) who had no right to touch me.  Who shamed me & messed with my head yet talked about his Priesthood power and how smart he was & how lucky I was to find him.

Or how I found out from a friend of mine, my name had been "written upon the walls" and I was known to a large group of young righteous men as a "snake"...a young women who used her charms (wait....wasn't I a "sweet" spirit few months ago?!) to lure young men to their carnal deaths....but yet all I had done was date the wrong man.  My virginity proudly intact after fighting off advances from that "righteous" Priesthood holding man.     

Or being insulted, demeaned, belittled & talked down to.

Or when I watched the father of the kids I was babysitting call his wife a stupid $itch over & over in front of his friends & his children.  And then to see him in the Holy house of the Lord....wha?!!!

Or listening to women tear into the flesh of their "sisters".  Watching the back stabbing, lying & venom spitting in aw & horror.

Or being just plain ignored.

Or the constant arguments from my father.  Our close relationship forever torn apart by my decision to join a cult. 




I would like to say I was strong in the arms of the Lord.  But at the end of the day,
 I was and will be, for the longest time

a lost, scared, hopeful
19 year old girl