Later that same Sunday, this same brother gave the lesson in priesthood meeting, and he said something that changed my life. He said: “It only takes a few minutes to perform all the saving ordinances that an individual needs in order to enter the Celestial Kingdom. But it takes a lifetime to become the kind of person who can abide a celestial glory. You can have all the ordinances, but if you haven't become that kind of person, all those ordinances won't help you in the next life. But you can lack the ordinances, and if you spend your life becoming a Christ-like person, the ordinances can be added later.” This brother had just shown me what the road-map of my life needed to be. I needed to work at becoming Christ-like enough that, someday, when I was able to receive the ordinances, I would be ready for that celestial life. I was so glad that the Spirit stopped me from walking out of Church that day, and so grateful to the Lord for delivering that message to me through a brother I never would have imagined I'd be able to learn from.
Some time after I had started attending Church, I felt a prompting to pray for the missionary work. At the time, I said to myself, Wait a minute. Do I really hope for the Church to grow? It seemed to me that the majority of Mormons had serious misconceptions about homosexuality, and had very negative and false stereotypes about what it meant to be gay. And I wondered if the growth of the Church would make it easier for such negative stereotypes and misconceptions to spread. Maybe the growth of the Church would be very bad for gay people – in much the way that the growth of Evangelical Christianity in Uganda has been disastrous for gays in that part of the world.
I pondered this question very seriously, and as I did, here is what the Lord told me. The Lord reminded me of his tremendous love for me and of his great gift of forgiveness to me for all my various sins of pride and anger and being judgmental of others, and what a relief it was for me to feel forgiven of all those sins. And the Lord reminded me of all the blessings he had poured out on me, including the blessing of a loving husband who has brightened my life and brought me so much joy and has been a companion to me in all the various challenges we've faced together. Then the Lord reminded me that the Church belonged to him, not to human beings. It was his Church and he would guide it and prepare it and sanctify it so that all its sins and imperfections would be purified away, until the Church was ready to receive Christ at his coming. And if I knew of God's great love for me and if I knew of all the ways in which he had blessed me and my husband, then surely I must know that in his plan for the Church, there would always, always be a place for me and my husband, and that the spread of his Church, far from being bad for gays, would make a world that is far, far better for gays and for all God's children, whatever their sexual orientation, race, gender or other aspects of who we are. And the Lord promised to bless me in even greater ways than I had heretofore imagined if I could find it in my heart to exercise faith and do whatever I could to support the missionary work in whatever way I could – through prayer, by bearing my testimony, and in whatever other ways I might be called.
One of the things I have learned since then is that a person's attitudes toward their LGBT brothers and sisters can be transformed in a few short minutes. All it takes is new information and a slight shift of perspective, and homophobia can be cured. But the Gospel makes us into a certain kind of people that it takes a lifetime to bring to fruition. The Gospel teaches us faith and hope and self-sacrifice. Serving a full-time mission for the Church taught me self-sacrifice. If we don't understand the principle of sacrifice, we will never truly understand what it means to love in the way that Christ loves us. A person can be homophobic, but if they learn how to love, once the scales of homophobia are removed from their eyes, they will love us far better than someone who was not homophobic, but never learned the value of sacrifice. This is why we need the Church to grow, and why we need to be a part of the Church, and why we need to learn to live the Gospel ourselves.
