A life spent acting on that decision to act
In reading Locamama's excellent article, I started to respond. But then the short, spiritual, and resonant response became far longer and I decided to post it on my own page.
I feel that everybody has to find their own path through life. Whether that path is towards God or away from God, that's one's own choice. Since I can't really speak for the atheist and agnostic of the JU audience, I will focus on my particularly circuitous route I took to God.
I freely admit there are many paths to God that people choose to take, whether that way is the pious way of a monk or the worldly, Sundays-only-and-even-then-not-really-devout Protestantism in which I was raised.
I was christened Methodist because that was the closest church to my house growing up. I certainly hadn't been raised around religion, though we'd pretty much bounced from church to church as the years wore on. In search of enlightenment, we attended the previously-mentioned Methodist church, Lutherans (all good Minnesotans are also Lutheran), the Assemblies of God, the Unitarians, and even a Buddhist temple. At the height of ridiculousness, we quite regularly attended a non-denominational service in a drive in movie theater! On Sunday mornings, we stuck our speaker in the window and listened to the preacher, who stood up on the snack bar with a microphone. Offerings were collected at the exit, where you tossed coins and/or bills into buckets like taking a toll.
When I went off to college, I guess I was looking for some kind of stability though I didn't know it at the time. I had a pretty hands-off attitude towards religion, figuring myself to be a "generic Christian" with allegiance to God but not to any one denomination. I went off to Eastern Arizona College where I fell in with a group of Mormons. One girl seemed particularly interested in being more than just UNO buddies with me, and we started dating. Early into our third date or so, she sprung the magic question on me: would I be interested in meeting with the LDS missionaries? Yikes, I thought... but I figured that if it wold endear me to her even more, then sure -- why not? I've been everywhere else religiously, why not give the Mormon Church the time of day too?
Three weeks later, I'd read enough of the Book of Mormon and taken enough lessons from the missionaries to understand what this church was all about. I'd received my own witness from the Spirit that this message was correct, and I knew I needed to act on it. When my mother heard about this decision to be baptized into the Mormon Church, she was okay with it, thinking it to be just the next in a long line of church attendances... he'll tire of it soon enough. A year after my baptism, I volunteered to be a missionary myself, going to the great land of England for two spiritual, fun-filled years.
Seventeen years later, I am still going strong in church and in my relationship with Jesus Christ. I read my Bible and Book of Mormon daily, my wife and I hold positions of responsibility within the church, and my kids are getting the religious stability my childhood lacked.
I respect the fact that everyone has different religious needs. I know that this conversion to the Latter-day Saint denomination and my years of continued attendance are a reflection that this is what I needed and continue to need in my life. I am very pleased to raise my kids in a religion that preaches that Jesus Christ is the Savior of mankind, the importance of service to God and fellow-man, the continued strength of families, and how to stay unspotted from the world in this incredibly challenging time in human history.