I Didn't Choose My Mormon Faith, It Chose Me

I am a Mormon. I haven’t always been: my family converted when I was in grade school, Dad casting off his skeptical, sometimes Presbyterianism for this new faith of golden plates and modern prophets and smiling, dark-suited young men, toting scriptures and riding bicycles, Mom reluctantly following, her Roman Catholicism, the Roman Catholicism of generations of her Polish and Hungarian ancestors, a much harder thing to leave. I went to church and graduated high school and went on a mission, became one of those smiling, scripture-toting young men, dressed in a dark suit and pedaling my bike through the streets of East Los Angeles. I went to college and married a lovely Mormon girl and started a family and kept going to church. I became a bishop, the leader of a Mormon congregation. I held my wife’s hand and watched as our eldest child left for his mission, another smiling, scripture-toting young man, this one sent to pedal his bike in the small farming communities of eastern Nebraska.