Kristine: Personal Faith Crisis Survivor Who Is Now Thriving

After being raised in an orthodox home where questions about faith were not encouraged, Kristine had to learn to revise her belief-system when she received an unexpected and unorthodox answer to a prayer. Kristine had grown up in a world with black and white thinking and had to learn to overcome her certainty in order to start to see nuances in her life and in her belief system. She talks about how her husband’s willingness to try and and understand her helped her survive her faith crisis, especially when other loved ones reacted with fear and criticism.

Further Reading in Faith Is Not Blind:

“The Lord thus asks us to ‘be believing,’ but for reasons intended to encourage our absolutely essential participation. He won’t make the case for belief irresistible. He can’t control whether we voluntarily choose to believe Him, to receive Him, to seek after Him. He can only offer us His hand, and if we elect to take it, then He can guide us. . . He is so close, so available to those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, He is so close to whose faith is not blind.”

(Faith Is Not Blind, Chapter 10, “Choosing to Believe” p. 88)

FULL TEXT:

Faith Is Not Blind: Welcome to the Faith Is Not Blind Podcast. We’re really glad you’re here with us. I am especially glad to have my good friend Kristine Anderson with us today. She’s here to talk about some really important things that she’s gone through personally.  I think every testimony is personal and every testimony has an important narrative.  So to begin your narrative, if you would please talk about the foundations of your testimony and your family and how that affected your belief system.

Kristine:  Sure. I grew up in Southeast Idaho in a big family–7 kids. My dad worked in sports. I think it was a very stereotypical type of Mormon upbringing–very active and the type of family where we attended every meeting and event. We never had any questions discussed at home. Everything was accepted without question. There were religious books in our home, but they were all from Deseret Book or from General Authorities. They were all from, I guess you could say, accepted, safe avenues. I grew up seeing my parents have faith. They believed deeply. They practiced their faith everyday. I think growing up, they were also very conservative and I think I was exposed to a lot of–let’s say I think my viewpoints may have been influenced by how much Rush Limbaugh I heard. And then combine that with some things that I heard from Church to create one type of truth. I know that not everyone in my family grew up with the same type of black and white thinking that I did. I also think my personality is a little bit more–let’s just say I was the only one in the family who would lecture everybody else on what they were doing right and wrong. I was called the “tattler” of the family. One of my nicknames was Mother Teresa because they said, “Well she never does anything wrong.”  So I think part of my lenses that I grew up with were part just who I was and how I absorbed “truth,” and also what I did hear around me. And so it was my home environment.  Leaders at church and the combination of just the type of person that I was.

Faith Is Not Blind: Interesting. You could start that narrative–like you said–you could look at that as a stereotypical LDS story. In some ways it is a stereotype to be sure and very normal and very mainstream, and a lot of people might say, “Well, that’s great. That’s healthy. That’s a very healthy way of approaching life and a very healthy way of approaching your relationship with God. But what happened to make you feel like maybe that wasn’t healthy, especially as you were feeling sort of superior and like, “This certainty is giving me a lot of comfort.”

Kristine: Yes. I embraced certainty because I thrived in it.

Faith Is Not Blind: And I think it’s easy to thrive in certainty because it’s so simple.

Kristine: And as my life progressed, sometimes God just put things in my path or just life happened. I attended college and got married and probably my first encounter with the gap between ideal and the real is when I got married and I couldn’t have children. And when you grow up thinking that the only purpose and role of women is to be mothers, that’s something to grapple with. And since at that time Sheri Dew was talking about how all women are mothers, that’s something I clung to for maybe the next 10 to 12 years of my life. We had a child through IVF, we did 5 years of foster care, we had an adoption that fell through, we did other medical interventions. It just seemed like almost everything in my life for the next 10 to 12 years was just attempting to be a mother. And we moved to Virginia at that point and I just told my husband, “I’m just exhausted emotionally, physically, psychologically–everything I’ve been trying to do to ‘be motherhood.’ I need a break.” Financially I needed to get a job. I said, “Just give me some time to think and rest and then we’ll hop back in.”  I think I had the most cognitive dissonance in my life when I started working full-time and I had a seven-year-old daughter and I was a working mother, which I thought should never happen–that’s not the right choice to make. And I felt the most peace come into my life.  I had this overwhelming feeling of peace and happiness. My family found a rhythm that we all enjoyed and there was so much happiness. And I was confused. And we were living in Virginia and I wasn’t able to reconcile it. I didn’t know what it meant. And I went to the temple and I had just been thinking about it and praying about it and, as I was sitting in the temple, I felt like got the answer to my questions. I got an answer to my prayer that said, “I didn’t send you here to fill a role. I sent you here to build my kingdom.”  And that didn’t make sense to me because I only understood women through roles. It feels like I rushed home, but there was a 5-hour journey home. And I feel like I went straight to the living room and got out the Teaching the Living Prophets manual and I broke it open and I read pages and pages about the role of women and mothers and things the prophets had said in the past about how women shouldn’t be working outside the home. And I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what it meant. I said, “How could I have an answer that doesn’t match what I’ve been taught or told my whole life?” It took me a while to wrestle with that. That was about the time I think that blogs were big and I started reading a blog and there was a post about a father that felt like he didn’t want to be a provider in the home. He wanted to have an egalitarian, equal partnership. And I started being introduced to questions I hadn’t thought of before and Church History that I’d never heard before. I felt unmoored. And amidst all of this I finally just decided to trust my personal inspiration even if it didn’t match what I understood the authoritative answer to be. I think that was a very significant moment in my life where I claimed spiritual authority for myself. Up to that point I probably handed spiritual authority to others.

Faith Is Not Blind: I think what’s so interesting about that experience, especially as we talk about binary thinking, is to say, “I felt like the authority figures were telling me one thing and yet God was telling me another.” Did it help you to recognize the authority that came from God? Did that help you get through it?  Because you said you recognized it as a spiritual experience. Did that help you and, if so, how did it help you get by saying, “Maybe my personal story is going to develop with the help of God rather than what I’ve always thought.”

Kristine: That was exactly the linchpin. Because my prompting into questions came from a spiritual experience with God, I think I may have had an anchor that other people may not have had. I felt like how could I throw out everything when the first thing that gave me a question was a personal experience where God was speaking to me.

Faith Is Not Blind: I think that would understandably be an Impulse to get rid of everything in order to have certainty. Then you wouldn’t have  to grapple with it. As you were  grappling with it, what helped you continue to grapple rather than give up?  What helped you stay connected to God?

Kristine:  I would say that I  fell into a deep hole of questions–a faith crisis–a certainty crisis. It probably lasted several years of searching and reading and learning–of trying to find my bearings again. And at a certain point you get tired. And I was at the bottom of the hole–which I never thought I would get to. But I think that it’s common to just start to question everything and feel like, well, none of it is real. And a quick answer came that said, “Well then all that matters–regardless of whether any of this is real or not–all that matters is how we treat each other.”  And I climbed onto that. And then the next step I went back because it felt like everything had kind of fallen apart and I had to come to a personal conclusion that I wanted to rebuild. I think that part of that was because of my spiritual experiences in the past. But I have to make a clarification. I came to distrust all of my warm fuzzy spiritual experiences because in that spiral I remembered that growing up I would feel those feelings when I would watch an inspiring movie. I would feel his feelings when I was at an Amway convention with my parents. And I had to grapple with the fact that those emotional feelings may be confirmation bias, they may be emotions, and they may be the Spirit. So I wanted to find a different way to feel. I felt like I had to rebuild without relying on those warm fuzzy experiences.

Faith Is Not Blind: And maybe that’s because your experience with certainty before had come from those experiences. So the fact that you wanted to find a way to find belief in a different way makes sense. And is certainly praiseworthy. As you were going through this–and I think it’s important for other people to understand as they watch someone they love go through this–how did you learn to avoid the same binaries that might have caused some of the trouble in the first place?  And I don’t even know that it’s fair to call it trouble because it is such a good healthy thing in so many ways.

Kristine: I would never want to go back and not have my experience.

Faith Is Not Blind: I’m so glad you feel that way. I think it’s important to see it that way. But were there times when it was more difficult when the people you loved were trying to push you back into certainty? And if so, what was more helpful for you–especially for people who are wondering, “If I have a loved one going through this, how do I help them?” What was helpful for you? And what was maybe not so helpful for you with other people’s reactions?

Kristine: The main response I got from family came from fear.  A lot of my questions or a lot of my beliefs seemed to match people who had left. And they were afraid I was going to be an empty chair at their “Celestial Kingdom table.” And I knew it and I felt it and I felt rejected and I didn’t feel trusted. And I didn’t feel loved. And it was harmful. The more that I got of that, I think the harder it was for me to stay. I think one of my lifelines was my husband who started a little nervous. When it all started he was very nervous. But it came to a point where he sought to understand and he didn’t need to agree. There were times I really wanted him to agree and to see things the way I did but, we never forced each other or put pressure on each other to be where the other one wanted to be to the  point where it created conflict. And while he was trying understand, the fact that he tried to and the fact that he said I will love you anyway helped. And he said, “I didn’t fall in love with you because of your belief in blank.” And I felt safe and I felt like everything would be okay no matter what happened.

Faith Is Not Blind: I love that. Because I think safety doesn’t always come in certainty. I think safety comes through love. You remind me of the scripture that says, “Perfect love casteth out fear.”

Kristine: Actually I think it’s a terrifying feeling to lose every foundation of how you see yourself in the world, and that provided the temporary space that I needed that allowed me to find space to rebuild to say, “I want to live a life of faith. And what do I do now? How do I do this?” And I looked around and I said, “Well, who are the people that know the things that I want to know and still make it work?” And I looked at the work of Mormon Historians and academics and even some people who have experienced a faith crisis outside of the Mormon Church in their own faith. There are many. There’s one in particular that is a very good example of how things can be deconstructed without losing Jesus. And I still just desperately love Jesus. I love Jesus. I Love The Gospel of Jesus. And that became my new foundation as I rebuilt. I realize that I may have had some of my foundation built on a belief in infallible prophets and some other things that I found out that were not as steady as I thought and maybe I felt let down by.  So that’s where I started my rebuilding.  And even if it’s wrong–like I had to there was still amidst my rebuilding of Jesus and God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I am still giving myself space to be wrong, I may be wrong about Jesus. There was a moment where I was seeking sources of people who are making it work and there was one that explained how belief is not faith and that if you conflate two,once you lose belief, you lose your faith. And as I was searching I tried to ask, “Well, what do I believe then?” There’s a lot of angst when you’re in the midst of so much information and you’re trying to figure out what you believe.  I gave myself space to say some days I’m going to feel like seeing Shall the Youth of Zion Falter from my rooftop and other days I may feel angry and  want to burn everything down andI  may not believe any of it. And that’s okay because I’m not sure that anyone knows all of the spirituality and everything about God. I’m not sure that any human who ever lived knows all things. We all see “through a glass darkly.”  But if I allow myself some flexibility on belief, it allows me to engage in a deep life of faith. I can trust my Heavenly Father. I can have hope that it’s true. And through my actions–how I can love others and how I live is how I engage with my faith.

Faith Is Not Blind:  I love that. It’s interesting that being able to recognize that gray area brought you more clarity with your relationship with God, which seems counterintuitive, but is so beautiful because he wants us to come to know him through our experiences, both good and bad. And from where you are now, I like that you can admit that it’s still difficult and they’re still that tension or still hard days.

Kristine: And sometimes I see people who have those hard days and it breaks them and they leave, Or they have a hard month. I’m just not sure if I’ll ever be sure again, but I know that I find beauty here. I know that I love practicing. I know that I love God. And I know that I’m a better person when I do.

Faith is Not Blind: As you look back on where you’ve come from, when you see people who do think in binaries or maybe see people who don’t understand why you don’t anymore, what has helped you develop charity for them or helped you to understand them better? Have you had experiences where you realize it’s not helpful to judge them any more than you used to judge other people?

Kristine: Right. It was very difficult because sometimes how other people live their binaries can hurt you. Or you feel like you were hurt by binaries growing up and so you want to make sure that no one else is using binaries that will hurt if you can help. It can be difficult when you’re in a place where a lot of people think in binaries and they see your faith is lesser. I was with a group of women one time at this Retreat, and one of them is a therapist and she came over and she talked about how we need to love all versions of our past self. And she said that sometimes the difficulty that we have with others is actually the difficulty that we have with our past selves. And I saw that the difficulty that I was having with others was because I was not loving my past self–that I was judging who she was and how she went through the world and saw things and judged others and how it was wrong and bad. And when I came to have charity for my past self and to love her and to be grateful that she was part of who I became–that I needed her–it was so much easier to love others who were in that same space. You have to forgive yourself for things that you might have done that were damaging to others because you didn’t know better. And when you see that you were doing the best you could with what you had, you know that others are doing the best they can with what they have. That was also an important moment in my process.

Faith Is Not Blind: As you think about that somewhat painful process that you appreciate as transformative, as sanctifying– knowing what you know now, what would you tell yourself? You talked about that deep dark hole. If you could go back and talk to yourself,  what would you say to yourself at that point to give you hope?

Kristine: Oh. That there’s a space on the other side that you can find and that you can work for. If you want to, you can get to the other side. If you want to get to the other side, I feel like you have to have a desire and that you have to work really hard to find it. It’s a type of engagement that with faith and with God and with others is deeper than anything that you’ve experienced before. That you’ll find more love and safety than you think is possible. And even as you continue in uncertainty, you can stay in uncertainty and find safety and faith. You don’t have to choose one or the other or be certain that it’s all true or be certain that it’s all false.

Faith Is Not Blind: Going back to one of the things  that caused you to question your value as a woman, it’s so interesting that you found value not through womanhood, but through your relationship with God.

Kristine: Yes.

Faith Is Not Blind: I love that you found that value. And I love your story and I love you. Thank you so much for sharing.

Kristine: Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here.