Testimonies: Why We Believe

I grew up lighting candles in the cathedral with my abuela. I loved the Virgin Mary. I loved the rituals. But I never felt like God knew me — not personally. When the missionaries came to my door, I almost didn’t let them in. My priest had warned me about them. But something about the way they spoke about Jesus — not as a distant figure on a crucifix, but as someone alive, someone who knew my name — made me listen.

They gave me the Book of Mormon. I read it slowly, a few pages each night after my children were asleep. When I reached Moroni 10:4, I knelt beside my bed and did what it said. I asked God, with a sincere heart and real intent, if these things were true.

I had always believed in Jesus, but I had never felt Him speak to me personally until that night. It was as if He was in the room. I knew.

I preached for twenty-three years. I loved the Bible. I could quote Romans in my sleep. But there was a question I could never answer, and it haunted me: Who gave my denomination the authority to baptize?I traced it back through the Baptists, through the Reformation, through the Catholic Church — and every trail ended in a man deciding he had the right to start something new. None of them could point to a moment where God said, “I authorize you.”

When I learned about Peter, James, and John appearing to Joseph Smith — the same apostles who held the priesthood from Christ — something clicked. It wasn’t comfortable. I had to walk away from a career, a congregation, friendships. People I’d baptized felt betrayed.

But I couldn’t un-know what I now knew. The authority to act in God’s name had to come from God — not from a seminary board, not from a vote, not from good intentions. It had to come from Him. And through the Restoration, it did.

I grew up in the Church. Primary songs, seminary, the whole thing. By the time I got to college, I wasn’t sure if I believed or if I’d just inherited a routine. I stopped going. I told my parents I needed space. They were heartbroken, but they gave it to me.

Two years passed. I tried other things — other philosophies, other ways of making sense of the world. Nothing fit. One night, in a small apartment far from home, I pulled out a copy of the Book of Mormon that had been sitting in a box since I moved in. I opened it not as a daughter of faithful parents, not as a former Young Women president, but as someone who genuinely wanted to know.

I had to find out for myself. And I did. Away from everyone else’s expectations, away from habit, I read it and I prayed and the Spirit answered. It was mine now — not my parents’ testimony, not my bishop’s. Mine.

I was a committed atheist for most of my adult life. I had read Dawkins, Hitchens, all of them. Religion was, in my view, a relic of human ignorance. When my wife started meeting with missionaries from the Church, I was irritated. When she invited me to sit in, I agreed — not to learn, but to dismantle whatever they were selling.

The first discussion was fine. I had my objections ready. The second one, they taught the Plan of Salvation — where we came from, why we are here, where we are going. And something happened that I cannot explain with the tools of rational materialism. A warmth settled over me. My eyes burned. I wanted to dismiss it as emotion, but it was more than that. It was recognition.

I came to disprove God and left unable to deny that something — Someone — was speaking to me. I am a man who spent his life trusting evidence. The evidence of that evening was undeniable.

My mother died when I was eleven. She was everything to me. Every church I went to told me the same thing: she was in a better place, and I would see her again “in heaven.” But none of them could tell me what that meant. Would she know me? Would I know her? Would she still be my mother?

I found the Church’s website late one night, searching for answers I had stopped expecting to find. I read about eternal families — that the relationships we build here are not erased at death, that families can be sealed together by priesthood authority, that the love between a mother and daughter does not end at the grave.

Other churches told me my mother was gone. This Church told me she is waiting for me. That we would be together again — not as strangers in some vague paradise, but as mother and daughter, forever. That doctrine changed everything.

I left the Church when I was sixteen. I was angry about a lot of things — some of them legitimate, some of them just the restlessness of being young. I spent twenty years away. I tried other churches. I tried no church at all. I built a life that was fine on paper but empty in the places that mattered most.

What brought me back wasn’t a dramatic moment. It was an accumulation of quiet ones. I missed the priesthood. I missed the temple. I missed the Book of Mormon — the way it speaks to you like it knows you. I missed living prophets who could actually say, “Thus saith the Lord,” and mean it. I looked at every other church, and none of them had what this one had. Not one.

I didn’t come back because it was easy. Walking back into that chapel after twenty years was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I came back because it was true. And because nothing else was enough.