Alma 32

(April 10, 2015)

                The concept of seeing a sign in order to believe (particularly why that is bad) is something that I never really understood until I had my own crisis of faith.  I always thought that I had faith, and that faith came from the fact that I had seen and experienced things that allowed for no other explanation than that the Gospel was true.  To say the Gospel wasn’t true was to, in essence, concede to myself that I didn’t experience the things that I experienced.

                Then, sadly, my failures caused me to carelessly abandon my testimony.  I lost so much of what I once had.  I remembered the experiences of my past, but yet that someone wasn’t enough.  I had no other explanation, but I considered in my heart whether there could be some other explanation that I simply didn’t know about.  I found that I could rationalize away even the miraculous events I had been blessed to participate in during my times of doubt.

                Now, having been blessed and preserved to regain my faith, I look back on that with a great deal more understanding.  My faith was not a result of those experiences, but rather those experiences were the result of my faith.  When I abandoned my faith, I had no more of an explanation than before but I chose not to believe those experiences any more.  When my faith returned, it was a decision rather than a consequence of those experiences that brought about my return to faith.

                It is not so much that there is something intrinsically wrong with miracles as a basis for faith, but rather that miracles are utterly incapable of performing the job of being the basis of a testimony.