EPTNot that's over....
LDS = The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or, as most people have come to call them - Mormons.
It's important to note that my family and religion are very closely tied, so I will explain my family while explaining my religion.
My parents were both born LDS. My dad's parents and family have been the LDS church for some time as far as I know. My mom's family is a bit more complicated because my grandma met my grandpa at college, and she was inactive and he had grown up catholic. They eventually married, but my Grandpa didn't become a member until my mom was in high school, or shortly thereafter.
My parents had 7 children. This is common in LDS families, and in Catholic families I've heard too, but I can't verify for that for sure. The LDS friends I grew up with almost all grew up in families where they had 4+ children. My oldest friends are both in families with 7 children, and parents who have never gotten a divorce. Their parents and mine seem generally happy, though I'm sure there have been tough moments.
I have 3 brothers and 3 sisters, all of which are older than me except my little sister - and for most of my life have I been called the odd one out by the family jokingly because my parents had a Boy,Girl,Boy,Girl pattern going until they had me. I screwed it up, then it continued with my little sister. All of my siblings are all roughly 2 years apart, just looking at the year they were born. It's become really handy when people ask how old my siblings are, and I'm just like "It's easy!" Or I need to figure out how much older there are than me, although I have it memorized now.
Anyway, so I was born second youngest to an LDS family that lives in an area where being LDS is pretty common. In my earlier years, I remember not going to church quite a bit, but we would go sometimes. Then there was this point sometime during junior high where my parents decided that they wanted to start going again. By this time, my 3 oldest siblings had all finished high school - my oldest sister who is still mormon to this day, and my 2 oldest brothers who didn't go to church anymore. I knew my 2 oldest brothers didn't go to church, but it had never occurred to me why. My family is actually pretty smart - we have some damn good genes at work for us, but as a child I had believed I was stupid. Up until about 4 maybe 5? years ago, I thought I was a moron who was bound to end up doing something boring for the rest of their life. I had believed it from elementary school up until I was about 19 or 20, and so I never really tried at most shit I did - i just half assed it.
When my parents started going to church a lot more, I followed along happily until I was about 15 or 16 years old. I still went to church, but I did it because I knew they wouldn't not let me go anymore. They pushed me to go every Sunday, to a point where there would be an argument sometimes. Not often, because after a few times of arguing about it, I just accepted going to church. I never really started considering the deeper subjects of the LDS religion until I was in 9th grade, when I was forced to take the lovely class of Seminary. Every morning at 6 am, I would show up at a church building, and sit there for an hour ish learning about the LDS religion. They have four classes based upon the four books that everything is based off in the church - The Holy Bible (King James version), The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price.
Brief run down of what each of those book contains:
Bible - Old Testament and New Testament as they're written in the King James version, along with references to related material in any of the four books.
Book of Mormon - History of a peoples that lived in North America during Christ's presence on earth.
Doctrine and Covenants - The history of the beginnings of the LDS religion as told by several members including but not limited to Joseph Smith Jr. and Oliver Cowdry. Several revelations made to to the leaders of the church that form the basis for a lot of their beliefs and ethics about drugs, alcohol, sex, murder, God, etc. (and that etc. is a BIG etc)
The Pearl of Great Price - Revised books of the bible by Joseph Smith Jr. (or other wise known as "revelations" to revise books of the bible)
To learn more, wikipedia that shit.
Anyway, I started with Doctrine and Covenants with the most boring seminary teacher to ever exist in the life of any church. I assure you know one could make you hate seminary and want to be sleeping so bad than this woman could. She had good intentions, but she should never try to teach.
To describe here, I would say think of the most devout yet kindest LDS person you've ever met, and multiply the devout part by like 100x. She was really nice, but religion was her life - literally. She had taught I think all of my siblings, except my little sister. See, the year she got my class is the year she stopped teaching at that building. In fact, this is a pretty common theme throughout my life I realize, but I'm going off subject - back to my wretched freshmen year seminary teacher.
She was tone deaf. We sang 2 times every morning (just like every church meeting in the LDS church... hahaha, well most, not all), and she was absolutely tone deaf. What was worse was that she was in seminary class half full of people who had a history in music already, and knew she was tone deaf, and HATED IT. She was, like I said, also really really boring. I could not stay awake listening to her despite how much sleep I got - Despite what I drank in the morning - Despite any attempts to stay awake, I found it simply too hard to do. The only thing to make me stay awake was tipping my chair perfectly to balance it, and let me tell you, I mastered the shit out of that. I still try to this very day to balance on chairs with 4 legs because of that seminary class.
One more example of how awful this woman was at teaching - There was this girl in our seminary class who I have considered as the most mormon girl around my age I've ever met. She was super mormon. Her whole family was. This girl I'm speaking about couldn't even stay awake to this teacher. She honestly didn't like her as much as any of us, and THAT'S when we realized that this seminary teacher was really bad.
Said seminary teacher ended up leaving, like I said, before our year was up. About 2 months to go or something? We got a new seminary teacher, and he was such a bad ass. That dude understood how to teach people. He made seminary fun again, and pushed us harder than ever to study and read up on the LDS religion. It was seriously a giant turn around for me because I was getting so sick of my old seminary teacher, that she made me not want to go to church (there are other reasons I wanted to stop going aside from that seminary teacher, but I will explain later). Once we got the new teacher, I became more active and wanted to participate in seminary some more.
I'm going to end it here, because I realize how much more I have to explain, and I want to give people time digest this much before I start talking about high school seminary, and more about the church itself, and definitely more about my family.
