Living my faith more, instead of just thinking about it more

Nearly a decade ago, I was a recent college graduate and a new mother, sitting in the foyer of my church building, refusing to attend Sunday School. The teacher, a kind but outspoken brother who would give you the shirt off his back, was also more than willing to give you all his political views and everything he thought was wrong with my generation while doing it.
I had stopped attending Sunday School in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a few weeks prior when he had made a doctrinal claim that I found to be offensive and exclusionary. And after meeting with a member of my bishopric to express my frustration, I decided I could conduct a more effective study of the week’s lesson on my own.
As I began questioning my faith, as so many young adults do, I thought answers could be better found in the work of scholars than from my ward members bearing their personal testimonies of God.
The same bishopric counselor walked by and deduced my Sunday School boycott from my hallway sitting. In a tone that I immediately concluded was patronizing, but now realize was the quiet confidence of wisdom, he reminded me to have charity.
Years later, I have more children, and I am no longer questioning my faith. While I had many moments during my “faith crisis” where the Spirit and inspired people spoke answers to my heart, many of the questions I had then are still sitting on my proverbial shelf.
I haven’t “figured it all out.” But I love going to church. I love my ward and I no longer feel different or isolated in my church community. I look forward to general conference of the Church of Jesus Christ and try to listen to a talk every day. They are no longer a source of frustration or angst for me.
I also love President Russell M. Nelson, and I fully sustain him as a prophet of God, not just a nice older man.
What changed? The major turning point was when I had the impression that I needed to ease up on the “research” and instead give something else a chance: really living my faith.
When I say “living my faith,” I do mean the primary answers — reading scriptures, paying tithing, attending the temple. But I mean so much more. I mean showing up for every activity that I can, bringing a meal for every new mother.
I have a friend who often helps others with faith struggles and some of his best advice is “go to choir.”
Participating in these things has practical benefits — if you bring a meal to everyone in need, everyone will bring a meal to you when you need one (if not Karma, love really does come back at you).
This kind of participation in others’ lives strengthens your bond to your community, while helping it function well. It also changes you spiritually — pulling you out of your own problems and anxieties and helping you situate yourself rightly as a part of something larger — God’s stunning creation, living and breathing and suffering all around you.
This also means tolerating some discomfort, which is a part of enduring relationships. That includes tolerating some poorly prepared Sunday School lessons. In “The Crucible of Doubt,” writers Terryl and Fiona Givens give this beautiful insight:
“What if we saw the mediocre talk, the overbearing counselor, the lesson read straight from the manual, as a lay member’s equivalent of the widow’s mite? A humble offering, perhaps, but one to be measured in terms of the capacity of the giver rather than in the value received.”
“If that sounds too idealistic,” they continue, “if we insist on imposing a higher standard on our co-worshippers, if we insist on measuring our worship service in terms of what we ‘get out of’ the meeting, then perhaps we have erred in our understanding of worship.”
“Worship is about what we are prepared to relinquish — what we give up at personal cost,” they conclude.
Living my faith also means realizing that a life of faith is not a life of ease, nor a life free from trial. When I study faithful women in the scriptures and church history, I see women who loved God and trusted him in times of rejoicing and times of sorrow. The psalmist who wrote “Blessed are all” [who] walk in obedience [to the Lord,] blessings and prosperity will be yours,” also wrote “I am worn out from my groaning. All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears.”
Living my faith means taking much more seriously the commandment to love my neighbor — and not just the one who looks or talks or votes like me. That’s easy.
Our political persuasions try to teach us the right people to love — the right side in a war, the right group of marginalized people, the right social class. They tell us that some groups of people are “the real Americans” and others are “Nazis” and “Fascists, “bigots” and “haters.”
By contrast, Jesus taught us to “do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”
I am not the first to point out that the geographical clumping of our Latter-day Saint congregations is a feature, not a bug of our faith. We don’t get to choose who we go to church with based on how our co-congregants dress or what hobbies are or education level. Developing Christlike attributes is impossible in isolation, and far more difficult to achieve in carefully curated environments with only our “chosen families.”
“Holiness is found in how we treat others,” the Givens added, “not in how we contemplate the cosmos. As our experiences in marriages, families, and friendship teach us, it takes relationships to provide the friction that wears down our rough edges and sanctifies us.”
Another writer on whom I leaned on during my faith struggles was the late Rachel Held Evans. She wrote about having challenges with her faith. While she ultimately came down on a different side of some theological debates than I do, I have great admiration for how she “leaned in” to her faith rather than checking out when it got tough.
As part of her faith exploration, Evans lived “A Year of Biblical Womanhood,” meaning for a year, she lived practices described in the Bible including “growing out her hair, making her own clothes, covering her head, obeying her husband, rising before dawn, (and) abstaining from gossip.”
In another book, “Searching for Sunday,” Evans reflects on what she’s learned by seeing her questions as an opportunity to go deeper in her faith. One of her reflections that resonated most with my experience was this, “Christianity isn’t meant to simply be believed; it’s meant to be lived, shared, eaten, spoken, and enacted in the presence of other people … try as I may, I can’t be a Christian on my own. I need a community. I need the church.”
That aligns with what I’ve learned too. Living our faith is impossible without fully immersing ourselves in our faith community. When I spent hours and hours googling difficult church topics, listening to people debate ideas and theology, and reading every book I could get my hands on, I still came up short on my quest for faith. But when I fully immersed myself in my ward and in living the gospel, in the words of President Nelson, I found the Lord leading me in tangible and joyful ways on my journey of spiritual discovery.
Amanda Freebairn is a writer and special education teacher. She lives in Mesa, Arizona with her husband and three children.