I am Jam, a 22 year old from England. In 2007 I was handed a Book of Mormon by a friend who had recently joined the church. I took the book, and thanked my friend for it. That book stayed on my bookshelf for nearly 3 years... unread. Mid 2009, I became friends with a guy, and whilst hiking around my local area we often got into discussions about religion and the idea of God. He had all these ideas about God, Heaven & Hell and ideas about religion that, at the time, I had never heard of before. I soon found out that he was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or by the more popular name, the Mormon Church.
As soon as he mentioned the name Mormon, I remembered this book that had been handed to me a few years previous. I instantly had a lot of questions to ask him, but sadly most of the time he would just reply with "Why don't you read the Book of Mormon, and find out for yourself?". This got annoying very quickly, and so at the beginning of 2010 I began to read.
A few months later I had nearly finished the book. I found parts of the book hard to understand, and I struggled to understand just what the Book of Mormon was all about. I managed to get in touch with a local missionary who helped to answer some of my questions, and provided me with a number of different books to read: The Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, Gospel Principles, and A Marvelous Work and A Wonder. All of a sudden, things started to become clear. I now understood where some of my friends wonderful ideas came from.
At the time of reading all these books, I was without Internet access, and without access to any other sort of reading material. So I decided to re-read what I have already read, and to ask more and more questions to anyone that I thought may be able to answer them. Eight months later, I managed to get a stable Internet connection at my house, and since then my knowledge, and thirst for more knowledge hasn't stopped growing.
"Faith without knowledge is nothing more then a wish"
So now, in the summer of 2012, nearly three years after the religious talks with my friend, I find myself almost obsessed with the ideas that I have read about, and that the LDS Church teach. I have spoken with a number of fantastic missionaries both in person, and online. I have read a number of books, read hundreds of articles, and watched hours upon hours of documentaries and pod-casts online. Yet I still find myself unable to put my faith 100% into it. I once read something that has been stuck in my head ever since: "Faith without knowledge is nothing more then a wish". As I am the sort of person that likes to know as much as possible about the topic before making a decision, I feel that I am still a long way off before I can defiantly say I believe, or I don't believe.
Thanks for these thoughts. Very interesting.
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