What a crazy week it has been. Life has a way of getting away from you. At least it seems to for me.I have always seemed to struggle with balancing all the different things of life. I would be a terrible juggler, but I digress. The real thing I wanted to talk about in today’s post is also the real reason you are reading this and that is to learn more about why I decided to live in a plural marriage.
Plural marriage just wasn’t something that was talked about when I was growing up in the mainstream LDS church and when it was talked about it was always in a negative way. So why would I eventually come to believe in it? It started when I was about 16 years old and I read a book called The Bishop’s Horse Race. The main character in it is the son of a polygamous Mormon bishop and it was the first instance I was exposed to of someone having a positive experience with plural marriage, even though it was a fictional one. Up to this point everything I had learned about plural marriage was very negative, so this really got me interested in finding out more about it.
From that point on I did more reading and studying, mostly in old pioneer journals and scriptures. I came to have a testimony of the principle of plural marriage. It wasn’t until I met Colton and realized we had a lot of the same ideas about polygamy and we really began to discuss how we each came to believe in it that I gained a desire to live it.
At first it was more of a hope than anything. I knew that we couldn’t be members of the mainstream church if we lived plural marriage and so we hoped that someday the church would change its stance on not living it right now, realizing that if that did happen in our lifetime it would be too late for us to experience it in this life.
As the years went by, I became less and less satisfied with the way I felt in the church. I felt like I didn’t fit in anymore and there were a lot of things that I just felt didn’t match up, like how we praise the pioneers but defame modern plural marriage and anyone living it. It got to the point that I felt like I was being dishonest with myself to remain in the church. I wasn’t happy and it really just got to the point that I didn’t want to be part of it.
When I got to that point I knew I had to re-evaluate what I believed. I spent a lot of time thinking, studying, and praying about it and gained a realization that I still believed in the principles of the gospel, I just didn’t believe in the church anymore. Now, a lot of people in the church will say “you can’t have the gospel without the church”. My belief is that church is a vessel for the gospel and priesthood to be applied in life and to get people on the pathway to exaltation. The church can’t be without the gospel (although they’ve rejected the fullness of it), but the gospel doesn’t need the church to remain true.
Not trying to hide what I believed was so liberating. Once Colton and I agreed that we didn’t want to hide that we believed in plural marriage any more, we revisited the possibility of living it. We still needed to seriously consider how strongly we believed in it, because polygamists are still heavily persecuted in Utah. We felt like we weren’t being honest with ourselves, God, or anyone else by not living up to our belief in plural marriage and we no longer felt an obligation to the church, so we decided to open our lives to God’s will and see where he would lead us.
If it was what Heavenly Father wanted us to do, we had faith that he would lead us to someone who felt the same way as us. Colton felt the same and we started to put ourselves out and try to meet like-minded people. Just when we began to feel like this wasn’t something we were meant to do, we met Sophie and as they say, the rest is history. Although it feels like the rest was just the beginning of a new journey.
Now you know more about me and my journey into living plural marriage, Sophie will share some of her story with you next week!