Ah Sacrament Meeting. The hallowed hour when edificationalisms are supposed to abound. The time spent in this meeting is designed to recharge the batteries of the faithful practitioner so they might go forth to serve throughout the next week. Here you will read the collection of real to life experiences I have encountered from god's lips to my ears. Here is the first:
This Church Feels Evil, Elder
Mormons spend an exorbitant amount of time feeling their way through life. It's not all half bad, you know and I readily confess that I used to make judgement calls on the most important life decisions one could make not based on logic or reason, but by how the surrounding data of circumstance felt to me. Usually, this was accompanied with long and serious moments on my knees requesting divine guidance to poof into my world and ratify the decision I had just made. This feeling has been explained and expounded upon as being none other than coming from the Holy Ghost.
The first time I explained how the feelings mechanism for Truth and life Guidance was actuated in my life by a Holy Ghost to a non Mormon, I was shocked to discover he thought that was hilarious.
"No seriously", he said. You get your Truth and Guidance from a ghost who you think is holy?
and there you have it. It cannot be explained any clearer. I never saw my spiritual guide as anything peculiar in the slightest. It was, you know, the Holy Ghost sent to us humans from God as a comforter. Anyhow, on to my story.
I was sitting in Sacrament meeting and the speaker was discoursing on this very thing, the ghost who is holy and who reveals sudden strokes of ideas to mankind. The speaker related an experience while on his mission that galvanized his convictions that the Mormon church was true. He and his companion had been tracting all day and came upon a church with people entering it. They stopped to chat with some of the faithful. A nice but quasi-embattling conversation ensued, pleasant demeanors prevailed and they were invited in to participate in the goings on. Note to reader: the speaker made no reference that they were conversing with devil worshippers. Anyhow. The Elders became enthusiastic about the chance to, like Alma the Younger, engage in a possible down home preach fest Pentecostal experience with these of a different faith. So they decided to join them.
The climax and highlighted point made by this speaker was made when he then proceeded to account how he felt as he walked into this decidedly ominous Non Mormon Chapel. Both of them walked through the doors. He turned to his companion and with low tones asked him if he felt anything. In fact the exact realization was accounted thus:
Elder, did you just feel that?
Indeed, the companion felt it too. I was granted the explanation that as they walked into this church, both of them felt the presence of the Holy Ghost leave them. This caused quite a concern to this speaker and he reflected upon it many times since that day. His conclusion was that he just knew that the Holy Ghost could not enter such an edifice on account that it was not the true church. I sat up in my pew. Did I just hear this correctly? Was he actually bold enough to declare that the Spirit of God turned its nose up at this church? I looked around the room. All smiles. At least the ones who were paying attention. Was I insane?: No I was not. I just witnessed a pomposity of great proportions and not even one gut check surfaced in the pews that surrounded me.
Well, not feeling inclined to be counted among the happy supporters of such mindless drivel, I stood up and chose to exit the building.
