by Amanda Parsons
As a child, I had enjoyed a close relationship with God. I was an enthusiastically religious young lady and was disappointed when my mother stopped attending church at the same time my parents split up. However, when we returned to Texas for the holidays, I could always look forward to visiting the Lutheran church where my parents had been married and my cousins and I had been baptized.
When I was a little older, we attended a nondenominational fellowship church where I was the only child of a single parent. This church had none of the prescribed processes of the Lutheran church to be able to participate in communion, and, being twelve (around the time I would have been confirmed in our family church), I asked permission from my mother to do so. I was filled with joy to be allowed to be counted worthy to participate. After the service, at the potluck that followed each Sunday service, I shyly approached the Pastor and shared that I had just taken my first communion. He told me “Oh that’s nice” and turned back to his conversation with the other adults. The next Sunday, I told my mother I’d like to take a break from church, and I never went back.
A few years later, a series of sad and terrible events caused me to turn from Heavenly Father and convinced me that I was beyond his concern. I was abandoned by my parents at 15 and was left to figure out how to raise myself in a world that was all too eager to avoid any discussion of religion at all. Over the intervening 25 years, I became a wife and a mother to four beautiful and amazing children, suffered a broken marriage and an exhausting career, and was left with my life a wreck.
Motherhood showed me that I was not forgotten. The birth of a child brings us closer to Heavenly Father on earth than we may ever otherwise know. But I was still angry, ashamed, and in my marriage, frightened to approach a relationship with Him again. I continued to try to carry my burden alone. Eventually, that weight was too much, and I surrendered to what path he had for me. I lost everything to get there. And when I was finally alone, I attended church and wept and begged for help.
Learning to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit and submit to the will of God is hard. I resisted coming back to North Carolina, and yet I was compelled to return. When Covid came, I was able to move back to Rutherford County and began to truly understand that there was a plan and purpose for my return. The Lord blessed me and my children with a home, with friends, and eventually, with a second chance to build a family with faith as its cornerstone.
I had searched for several years for a church home to bring my children to. It was scary, and it shouldn’t have been – I didn’t fear the Lord’s judgement, I was instead wary of people and their interpretations of scripture, practices of faith, and manipulation of children. It was very important to me that my children experienced a traditional and Christ-centered religious community like the one I grew up in, but I struggled to find a church that was conservative, traditional, and growing. Once my husband-to-be and I started dating, we began traveling an hour and a half every Sunday to attend a church that came closest to meeting my conditions. We began taking my children as well. They loved it, and the church was very welcoming. But we were so far away, it was hard to get to know people; I saw my daughters long for the opportunity to more fully belong, and the challenges we faced to do so.
My husband is a straightforward man and was clear in defining his faith. I had begun reading about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as soon as we had started seeing each other. I had literally dozens of tabs of information on the church, on being in a mixed faith marriage, of the good and bad things people had to say about the Church. My husband never pressured me or my children in any way to attend Sacrament or convert. If we had questions, he answered, but he respected very much that the spiritual education of my children was my department.
The summer of 2022, I had a series of strokes and my husband had brain surgery, all in the course of about six weeks. He and his mother arranged for him to receive a blessing from the Elders prior to his surgery, but even then, he met them in the park nearby. After overcoming these challenges, we decided we had better go ahead and get married, because the Lord had obviously brought us together; we both felt there was no way we would have survived without the other. Of course, the children had been trying to get us to commit for months, and our families were thrilled. We were married in December of that year.
In the meantime, the Pastor who led the church we attended was retiring. The church itself was so dependent upon him as a person, and only truly growing in a more contemporary direction that wasn’t what I was looking for. One afternoon, we heard a knock at the door (an infrequent occurrence where we live), and I went outside to find a pair of Elder missionaries. I assumed that they had come to check on my husband, babbled pleasantly at them, and asked them to come over another time when he was feeling better. Turned out they didn’t even know he was a member, but they definitely came back. I kept feeding them, and they spent a lot of time with my son.
Every time we would travel out-of-town, we would find that we were staying nearby the local Meetinghouse. It happened so much that it became a habit to look for them when we were on the road. My curiosity was rampant, and so was my children’s. In order to experience Sacrament Meeting as quiet observers, my son, husband, and I traveled around the area, visiting different wards. I kept reading about the Church, and I had interesting conversations with my son and my husband about both the Church as an institution and as the bearers of the Restored Gospel. In fall of 2023, my son announced that he would like to be baptized and join the Church. We were all so happy for him, and I knew that this was a choice he had made securely on his own.
My husband and I made a trip to Wyoming in November 2023, shortly before my son was to be baptized. We visited the Meetinghouse where he himself had been baptized as a child, and spent a great deal of the trip enjoying Temple architecture from the outside. We’re both history fans, and did a lot of reading on both secular and Church history on our trip. As we came home, we stopped in Nebraska to attend Sacrament meeting there, and I knew that I was going to join the Church as well.
I kept it under my hat until my son’s baptism. I didn’t want to take any of the focus off of his passage into manhood and his development of his relationship with Heavenly Father. My husband baptized my son, and two of his sisters were present. It was a beautiful thing. I told the missionaries afterwards that I intended to be baptized as well. My son baptized me on January 28, 2024, and my husband did my confirmation.
We made my first journey to the Temple in Raleigh last week with the missionaries. As I prepared to attend, and often on this journey, I have reflected on a Greyhound trip I made in 1996 that inexplicably took me through Salt Lake. As the bus left the station, it went past the Temple. I only had a fleeting glimpse of its stunning beauty, and I remember thinking, I’ll never be able to visit a place like that. Now, look how things have changed.
I know that Heavenly Father lives, and he loves every one of us. I know that Jesus Christ has blessed us with his Infinite Atonement, and that through my repentance, he has washed me clean in his sacred blood. I know that Joseph Smith received the Restored Gospel and shared it with the world that we all may be reunited in Glory. I know that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is true, and that Heavenly Father has illuminated the path for us, if only we can hear and see. I am so blessed to be a part of the body of Christ in his Holy Church, and I am so thankful to share this with my family.
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