About
Hi. Welcome to Living With Mormons!
My story begins at various stages of my life, but I promise to keep it short.
From birth to my teenage years, I lived in the South East part of Brazil as many Brazilians do, playing soccer, skipping school, and dating.
In 1990, at the age of 15, I found myself in Boston with a few roommates and was introduced to and baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormons.
I religiously attended a Portuguese speaking ward in Cambridge and was a very active member for the next 3 years.
After a few years of freezing my marbles off in Mass, I was headed back to South Florida to meet my future wife; a sweet girl hailed from Michigan and raised by loving, traditional Catholic parents.
Religion was never an issue for us. I was mostly inactive in my faith and she was mostly Catholic in hers.
In the early part of 2001 we ventured out West and came to fall in love with Utah. The rocky mountains of the North, the red rocks of the South, and everything in between.
We decided Utah was the perfect place to start our family, so in 2003 our first boy was on his way.
In that same year, however, God decided to set me straight (as my wife tells me) and sent a bolt of lightning into my body and almost answered all my questions about life after death.
I survived the strike and, after spending a considerable amount of time recovering, I decided it was time to go back to church… you know, just to cover all my bases.
My new ward was great! I was taking my first look at what being a Mormon in Utah was really like and was very happy with the experience. People were very friendly and neighborly, unlike whoever lived next door to us in South Florida.
I would go every Sunday with my son and my wife would stay home.
She started seeing how active and happy I was in the Church and her interest grew into the Missionaries teaching her the discussions.
About 6 months later she was baptized (by moi) and we were now the perfect Mormon family.
A young white couple (let’s be honest) with a beautiful baby boy, a house in the suburbs, a calling or two in primary and the nursery, and a plan to take out our Endowments and get sealed in the temple in a year’s time (after we managed to pay tithing, of course).
About a year later we paid our visit to the Bountiful temple and six months later I left the Church.
No, nobody offended me and no, I wasn’t doing anything wrong like drinking coffee at Starbucks on a Sunday.
I asked questions.
Yes, that’s it. I asked questions and received ridiculous answers.
We’ll get to explore these questions here on this blog.
