Where will you go?

I decided to pick up my blog again. I finished a long chapter of my life in my previous blog (Atheist Behind the Zion Curtain) back in October a few days before my wedding.

This is now my new chapter in life.

Now the LDS Faith is still going to have a strong influence on my blog. I can't completely take it out of my life as this is how I grew up, but I believe this is the best place to start my journey Beyond the Zion Curtain.

I frequent an exmormon support group and one of the things that has come up a lot is, "where will you go?"

This was a question asked by Elder Ballard in the October 2016 General Conference. In the naive wording he assumed that the world can't possibly offer anything better than the faith.

And as I have stepped beyond the faith I want to answer that question from an exmormon point of view that there is life after faith and in my experience a much happier life.

Where have I gone? Where will I go?

I found myself. I am me. I don't have guilt from a church. I don't feel like I can never be good enough for god. I no longer have to feel sorrow for my faults in order to make myself pure in god's eyes. I can be happy with life. I can find joy every day instead of worrying about what I have done wrong. A new and true joy has come alive.

I found a loving wife. We have a real connection of love. When I compare my relationships that I had as an active LDS member to what I have now it felt like we were together because we needed each other to get to heaven. I know this is not the case for all members of the faith, a lot of them do find real love, but I never experienced that myself. Now I am with my wife because we have chosen each other. We had almost nothing in common, except our friends, when we first started dating, but this is what gave us our strength. We each have gained so much in life due to our differences that I can't imagine life differently. We have agreed to give each other our time which is the most precious commodity we have in our short lives.

I get to see the world. Without the monetary obligations of the church I can travel. I went to Switzerland and the French Alps for my honeymoon. I get to go to Paris and the Loire Valley this coming fall. In the years to come I get to experience the world. I get experience new cultures. I get to learn about and meet people and other ways of life and from that I get to enrich my life.

So, Elder Ballard, you ask me and all the other exmormon and inactive members where will we go? I ask you, where will we not go? Where will our new lives take us?