The Photograph of Faith

I loved the end of this talk, where Brother Jared Halverson shares how faith is like a black and white photograph. We may have questions (dark parts of our photograph) but there are things that we know (white parts). We may try to throw it out when we start to focus on the dark parts and cause we can't find answers, but we can't really throw it away. All we're doing is flipping the photograph. Start at 1:26:58

"It's like you have this black and white photograph of your faith and the light parts of the photograph are what drew you to it. The dark part you don't even tend to look at. ...until you start seeing them and someone brings them up and pushes them in your face and you start really worrying about and wrestling with these things and pretty soon you get so fixated on the negative, or the dark parts of the photograph, and again since we're all human, and there's going to be both light and dark parts of it, that we start to forget about the light parts. And so what do we do? "I can't do this!" and we throw away the photograph. The thing is, we can't. If you're truly intellectually honest, you can't destroy the photograph. You can only replace it with it's negative. Now all of a sudden you're looking at the same picture, it's just reversed. 

"The old question marks, you don't have to worry about now. Now they're exclamation points. Or atleast non-punctuation marks. 'I don't have to worry about plural marriage, or race and the priesthood, I don't have to worry about any of that stuff, I'm out of the church! It doesn't matter to me.' Fine. So your old question marks have become exclamation points, but did you notice that your old exclamation points, if you're still honest, have now become your new question marks? You used to not be able to explain those tricky parts of church history. Now how do you explain the things you once knew to be true? How do you explain, or explain away, your old spiritual experiences? 

"I had an evangelical friend call me once, an anti mormon, but we got along well, and he said 'Halverson, just leave your Church and join mine! You know you like evangelical doctrine!' 'I do! I love how much you love Jesus. But I love him that much too. I just know a little bit more about him, Premortally and American ministry, and there's just no, I'd miss too much. I appreciate your concern for the welfare of my soul, but in the arithmetic of my deconversion it would be nothing but subtraction for me.' And he said 'I know! Because you Mormons added things you shouldn't have so you need subtraction in your life!' I'm like 'I know where you're coming from... the difference is though, If I were being honest with you, and I'm trying to be, if I left the church over issue A, B, and C, and I know they're there... they've driven some people out.... I would lose sleep every day for the rest of my life over the Book of Mormon. Cause I wouldn't be able to explain it in any way that was intellectually satisfying, not to mention spiritually satisfying. That book has a hold on my head and my heart in ways that that exclamation point would forever remain a question mark for me if I left.'"