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Here's my "coming clean to parents" story from 7/10/2006:
As an introduction I'm BIC, MIT, but didn't go on a mission. Both my parents have pioneer ancestry and the majority are believers. In my immediate family all are believers of varying degrees, and while somewhat liberal myself I never doubted the truth claims of the church. My father has had varying levels of activity in the church throughout my life but was unable to be my escort through the temple when I received my endowments; this duty fell to my father-in-law.
In early January 2005 my sister-in-law sent me an e-mail explaining that my father-in-law was leaving the church and that she wanted to warn me beforehand so I would be better equipped to deal with my wife when this revelation reached her. She suggested I visit josephlied.com if I had any questions. The e-mail was soon followed by a call from my mother-in-law explaining the same thing, and about how she'd been dealing with this personal hell for the last year.
I was pretty shocked and a little afraid at first and wouldn't touch the website with a 10 foot pole. Then one Sunday about a month later my wife's frustrations with the church came to a head and she blew up. She'd grown increasingly disillusioned with the church and had been asking a lot of questions I couldn't answer for her and was frustrated with a constantly short-handed ward. I broke the news to her about her dad and she was shell-shocked for the rest of the day. That night we hit the website and the whole tapestry started unraveling for me. I found link after link that explained the church in a new light, in a way that made much more logical sense and I found myself thinking more critically about my entire life. If was a wonderful period of self-discovery for me and I wouldn't trade it for anything, even with all the fears that went along with it.
At first we thought we could do the NOM thing for her mom (my wife was the last believing member of her family besides her mom) as well as my extended family of believers. Each week at church grew more unpalatable and we would find any excuse to leave early or skip church altogether, but we both held callings that made that difficult. In June 2005 we decided to quit our callings and stop attending, so after transmitting the tithing on my last Sunday I asked the bishop if I could speak with him. I let him know that we no longer believed in one true church, that none of it was his fault, that we appreciated all he'd done for us, but that we would no longer be attending. It was one of the scariest but most empowering things I've ever done.
We followed up with a letter so my wife could explain that we were on the same page, and we also requested that there be no re-activation attempts. To the bishop's credit we haven't been part of any overt or official re-activation attempts, just the monthly round of missionaries going through our neighborhood that we saw anyway when we were still members.
My parents moved into our Stake before any of this happened and it was inevitable that they would catch wind of something. One day they asked why our daughters hadn't been going to primary and I sort of brushed it off. Sometime in August 2005 I decided I was going to come clean to my parents. I wrote a letter to my dad explaining that I'd come across evidence on the internet and in books I'd read that led me to believe the church was covering up some of it's history and that I could no longer believe it was the one true church. My mother, father, and younger sister were all home when I brought the letter for him to read and I sat there as each one of them read it over. It was pretty gut wrenching waiting for their reaction.
My dad took it fairly well, my sister cried, my mom was fine until she asked if I still wore my garments. My sister nailed it on the head when she said, "Why would he wear them any more if he doesn't believe in them?" My mom continued to be argumentative for the next couple months off and on, asking how we could raise our children without a foundation, how their salvation would be on our heads. I continued to explain that it was her opinion, that I'm sure she never invited her mother or mother-in-law to tell her how to raise her own children, that I was old enough ( 28 ) to make my own decisions on how to live my life and raise my children.
It was a tense few months that have gradually given way to a different equilibrium. While our relationship isn't exactly the way it was before, I'm glad I told them. There's only the very occasional "You need to read this article in the Ensign" or "You just need to have faith." Turnabout is fair play and I return with my own Ensign articles talking about Joseph putting his face in a hat and perhaps my parents know, even if they don't acknowledge, that not everything is as it's taught in church. It was important to me that I explain I didn't quit attending church because I desired to sin or because I'm lazy, whether they actually believe it or not.
_________________ translucentcitrus wrote: Instead of 'elite' maybe some of us can be 'the group who appears big and scary but will inevitably accept you once you stop screaming and crying'
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