I’ve been thinking of some of my experiences with other religions growing up, other than Catholicism, and a bunch of stories sprang into my mind at once. So I thought I’d share them.
When I was a child, my mother enrolled me in two Vacation Bible Schools. I went to the Lutheran one because I had a bunch of friends who went there. Yeah, that didn’t go so good. She also enrolled me in the Baptist Vacation Bible School one year. I can still see the church, it was right next to the KTXA radio station in San Antonio, on Eisenhower Road.
I remember really enjoying that church, everyone paid lots of attention to me and we did lots of crafts. At some point in the week, they started talking about baptism. They pulled us in a little room and told us about how great it was. There were only 5-6 of us in that room with two teachers, I think. I remember getting baptized in the LDS church and really liked it, so when they offered to baptize me again, I was like, ok! That sounds fun!
They had to get permission to get me baptized by my mom. Yeah, I didn’t get permission to get rebaptized. I think I might have gotten pulled from the rest of the school.
When I got to college at what was then East Texas State University, there were maybe 3-4 Mormons on campus. I was a good, upstanding, chaste young lady, and some of the debochery on campus was more than I could bear. I decided to hang out with the kids at the Baptist Student Union. They had free lunches there, and a cool lounge where I could hang out, and they didn’t drink or smoke or do naughty things.
I was very active in the union for the first couple of months I was at school. But I was also very Mormon, still attending the ward I went to as a teenager (it was a small college near where I graduated from high school). They decided to hold elections for offices for the union, and I volunteered to run. But they wouldn’t let me. They said, “We just *can’t* have a Mormon officer! You don’t believe in the same Christ we do!” And they just unloaded this spew of anti-Mormon bile, until I started crying and left the building. My testimony of the Mormon church was still very much intact, but my view of the Baptist Student Union was shattered forever. I only went back once, to tell the head lady that I had left the church (three years later, when I did). She said, “We’ve been praying for you!”
When I was in the Singles ward, there was a young lady who had converted from being a Baptist. She had been a member long enough to go through the temple and receive her Endowments. She was pretty much considered one of the “special spirits” in the ward. (In Mormonspeak, “Special Spirit” = “Good Personality”). Her family was all Baptist, and at some point, she decided to renounce her Mormon baptism and become Baptist again.
She showed up to a church dance, and tried to talk to those of us who used to be her friends. She was throwing her no-longer-Mormon right into our face. She kept talking about “going to Worship” and not wearing her garments anymore and how she was so happy that she left the church. We tried to talk to her and explain that no longer wearing the Garments was the most sinful thing a person could do just about, but once we realized that we were not going to get through to her, we all started to drift away until finally she was standing alone. All by herself. And then, with a sad face, she left.
She kept calling some people, inviting them to come to Worship with her, but we pretty much shook the dust off of our feet, as the Missionaries say, and blew her off. We figured she was probably mentally unstable anyway.
