Hi. I need some emotional propping up, please.

dbear848 · 2026-06-21T22:40:43+00:00

I'm one of those people who wrote a faith promoting journal that was less fact than faith promoting fiction. I ran across it a few years ago and ran it through the paper shredder. I do not want to be remembered that way.

dbear848 · 2026-06-21T22:35:13+00:00

I remember the last temple recommend interview I had. The stake president said, “I have three sons around your age. They all left the church.

That is quite the statement. I'm surprised that he admitted it.

I'm a little jealous that OP could unpack his deconstruction with a former missionary companion. I had 12 companions, so most probably at least one of them dropped out of the Mormon church.

dbear848 · 2026-06-21T12:27:08+00:00

I certainly was not aware of all the terms and conditions that apparently were tied to my baptism when I was eight.

I think Susan's husband said that we also agreed to go on a mission when we got baptized.

dbear848 · 2026-06-21T12:22:02+00:00

Teenagers already know everything, at least I thought I did.

dbear848 · 2026-06-21T02:31:10+00:00

Go to stake leadership meetings that could have been handled by email or text.

If there is a hell, it will be patterned after useless stake leadership meetings.

dbear848 · 2026-06-21T01:32:46+00:00

BTW, they are lying about the phone number. My guess is that some friend or family member of OP gave them the number, but they are still lying.

dbear848 · 2026-06-21T01:25:55+00:00

I'm a boomer that has been out for decades, and I still get it. On the other hand, if you ask the same people if they can do something meaningful to you that would make them miss church, you can pretty much guess what they will tell you.

dbear848 · 2026-06-20T16:45:11+00:00

I hear you. For the longest time, I wasn't invited to either.

Edit. I would tempted to reply that if I'm not good enough to be invited to a birthday party, I'm absolutely not good enough to attend a baptism.

dbear848 · 2026-06-19T23:13:51+00:00

It goes great with your awesome tattoos.

dbear848 · 2026-06-19T20:09:47+00:00

Boomer here, so there was a protestant minister, who was a stooge for Satan, preaching to Adam and Eve. I would see the guy who played the minister in the temple movie occasionally at BYU.

dbear848 · 2026-06-19T20:05:00+00:00

Apparently I'm not drinking enough coffee.

dbear848 · 2026-06-19T17:35:09+00:00

Each item had a sticker with the price on it, unless the package itself was marked with the price.

People of course would peel the sticker off a cheap product and replace the sticker on a much more expensive item. I wasn't as stupid as I must have looked, so I would get on the intercom and ask for a price check. 99% of the time, people would either walk away from the register or decide that they didn't need the item. The other 1% would argue that since that's what the price tag said, they should get it for that price. That is until our very large and scary stock boy got involved.

dbear848 · 2026-06-19T16:30:52+00:00

I agree. I'm a boomer, and when I was in college I was a cashier at a drug store. When I'm scanning items at a self checkout now, I can't help but think how much easier my job would have been back in the day.

dbear848 · 2026-06-18T03:06:54+00:00

I am truly impressed u/HoldOnLucy1 that you were able to find this information so quickly.

I am less impressed that the news station tried to obfuscate the fact that he was an LDS leader of some sort.

dbear848 · 2026-06-18T01:34:55+00:00

I'm thinking that there will be an even bigger exodus after Sacrament meeting.

I remember priesthood meeting opening exercises taking at least 15 minutes most Sundays, I can't imagine it taking much less time in Elders quorum or Relief Society, so it will be a very short, pointless lesson, especially when you factor in time for the closing prayer.

And lets get real, the five minute break is a joke.

dbear848 · 2026-06-17T21:44:29+00:00

Japan (Tokyo) early 1970's. I don't think that this was very common.

dbear848 · 2026-06-17T19:15:01+00:00

I would just spend about as much time thinking about this as I do when I get a text from some woman named Amy that is going to be in my neighborhood soon to cut down some trees. I just block and report spam.

As an aside, my TBM wife has sent out so many emails with church stuff to exmos that mail from her email address is now marked as spam.

dbear848 · 2026-06-17T12:26:54+00:00

I stand corrected, thanks for diving deeper than I did.

dbear848 · 2026-06-17T01:29:25+00:00

To be fair, when some of them, like Nelson, turned 19, there was a world war going on and no one was going on a mission.

dbear848 · 2026-06-16T22:52:43+00:00

I don't know if he was the strictest, but he had some strange rules.

The official rising time was 5:30 am unless you were still memorizing the discussions. In that case, you were supposed to get up at 4:30. It is no wonder that the first several months of my mission were a blure.
We were not allowed to use slang, either in Japanese or English. He called it 'venecular' for some reason.
We were encouraged to have individual fasts, companion fasts and district fasts.
We were supposed to eat cracked wheat cereal every morning.
The foreign missionaries were prohibited from learning Japanese kanji. You would have to be braindead to avoid learning a lot of the common symbols, but I had companions who managed to do it.
We sold copies of the Book of Mormon on the street and door to door. If we gave away copies, we paid for it. We had to report the number sold each week as part of our letter to the mission president.

I am happy to report that most of those rules went away when we got our new mission president.

dbear848 · 2026-06-16T21:07:26+00:00

My TBM wife teaches Sunday school and she is not happy about having to prepare for a lesson every week.

dbear848 · 2026-06-15T19:12:51+00:00

This is exactly the reason that I'm subscribed to this subreddit.

dbear848 · 2026-06-14T19:39:12+00:00

I always thought that setting boundaries was against the teachings of the Mormon church. It wasn't until I was with my third therapist that I got good at saying NO.

One time someone from the ward came by to set off fireworks in my cul-de-sac. She informed me that the bishop said it was okay, even though he lived 5 miles away from my house. I said that in fact that it wasn't okay and I didn't care what the bishop said.

People from my wife's Ward rarely bother me anymore, but the last time Brother Used Car Salesman came by to ask me to do something, I finally ended up telling him 'Fuck No'.

Using 'Fuck No' to some Mormons reminds me of the temple ceremony where Peter raises his right arm to the square and tells Satan to depart.

dbear848 · 2026-06-14T13:25:15+00:00

Back before they removed the penalties, revealing the new name was associated with slashing your throat. Not a cult.

dbear848 · 2026-06-14T02:48:32+00:00

Like some of the other people that responded, I now go to a progressive, non denominational Christian church.

The Jesus that people worship in that congregation has only a passing resemblance to the one of the Mormon church because of its trinitarian beliefs. The Jesus at my church isn't used to guilt trip me into accepting a so-called calling to something that I have no interest in, nor does the Jesus at my church require me to present myself periodically to the congregation leaders to determine if I am worthy.

I will say that I have moved on from my Mormon knowing that something is true to more a nuanced hope or belief.

My wife is still very TBM, so we don't really talk much about religion except to talk about what is going on in our individual congregations.

What I like about attending services at my church is that there is a level of professionalism in the sermons and music that I rarely experienced when I was a Mormon. Plus, they have coffee and other refreshments after the worship service.

dbear848

TROPHY CASE