Light and Truth

From a young age, I anticipated the time when I would serve as a full-time missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. With many close family members and friends having previously served as full-time missionaries, I had many opportunities to prepare for my own experience. Among the many aspects of this preparation was a desire to know what the hard questions might be, and how to answer them. Listening to many stories from returned missionaries, combined with pretty simple reasoning, I concluded that religious questions (both sincere and intentionally-confounding) were unavoidable as a missionary. One of the most common intentionally-confounding questions involved in the stories shared by my fellow returned missionaries was how any of The Church's modern-day scripture (and particularly The Book of Mormon) could remain valid within the presence of the warning at the very end of the Bible, Revelation 22:18-19. "For I testify unto every man that heareth th...

When I was around the age of about six or seven a great challenge was added into my life. I began to have seizures periodically but unpredictably, and therefore had epilepsy. Little did I know at first that there would not be a single aspect of my life that would avoid being influenced by this challenge. The limited reading ability, personality side-effects of medication, feelings of being a burden to parents and siblings, reduced public privileges (such as driving), and feeling like the black sheep in school were only a few of the many challenges brought about directly by my epilepsy. While I never came to doubt the existence of God, I did ask the questions that nearly everyone asks in times like this: Why me? What did I do to deserve such a trial? Initially, all I could do was press forward through this tribulation of life, trying to not let my faith falter. And after nearly a decade of keeping my faith, wondering if I would ever find out why God allowed me to have epilepsy, the an...