While chatting with a new LDS convert recently, he asked how long I had been a member of the Church. I told him that I’d actually been one from the very beginning—that my parents had been practicing members of the faith when I was born, and that I had been raised in a more or less orthodox household. In fact, I mentioned, much my family’s participation in the Church ran back some five or six generations, when early forbears made the choice to embrace the faith and let it completely transform them. As a result, the threads of Mormonism now make up much of the warp and woof of our family identity.
Hearing this, my convert friend squinted at me with envy. “You’re lucky,” he said, “to have been raised in this.” He was in the process of working to restructure his life. I think it must have seemed to him that if he had only known what he had found in the LDS faith from the beginning—if he had always had his new cosmology and life principles all along—everything would have been much easier.
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