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A Falling Away Was Required

While reading an article in the most recent Ensign magazine (specifically Elder Koichi Aoyagi’s Helping Hands, Saving Hands in the May 2010 Ensign), I had a thought that was almost completely disconnected from the message of the article. In the article, the Elder Aoyagi explains that, after being baptized into the church and subsequently going to college and living by himself, he “became lonely and strayed from the Church”. After a letter from a friend (his future wife, as it turns out) gave him encouragement and incited him to pray about whether the Church was true and the Book of Morman was the word of God, he received an incredible witness that it is true. This experience catapulted him into a devout manner of religious practice, and he’s now a member of one of the quorums of the Seventy providing glorious service to the Lord– perhaps on a level that far exceeds how he would have been if he had never fallen away from the church first.

This story seems to have various allusions…

• Alma the Younger
• Alma the Elder, too
• Zeezrom
• Saul of Tarsus (or Paul)
• Others speckled throughout the Book of Mormon, restored Church histroy, and the Bible
• Thousands of others in our modern day
• The very church Jesus Christ himself instituted

It’s plain to see that the Church’s worst enemies and persecutors can and do become its most fervent evangelists and preachers. I don’t suggest that the Church’s most devoted and most helpful members can only come from ex-persecutors, and I don’t suggest that a person ought to fall away from the Church in order to become more righteous in the end; in the Nephite’s day and in our own day, apostates almost always seem more hard-hearted and even often hateful of the Church more than those who never tasted of its goodness, and very few out of the many who end up in this situation do make a miraculous Alma-esque return. No, I don’t suggest apostasy to those who value their religion; the best way to become more religious is to become more religious.

I do, however, suggest the following:

• Falling away from the Church can eventually lead to spring-boarding into the very heart of faith and devotion but doesn’t always.
• The Lord has a plan for each person, and sometimes falling away from the Church to return ten-fold to it is His way of getting a person where he needs to be; however, there are more desirable ways of getting a person to where the Lord needs him to be that don’t involve apostasy.
• Because of the choices that some people make, apostasy in contrast with belief is the only tool the Lord has left to work and mold those people into what He would have them be.
• The Lord never gives up on an apostate.
• Apostasy is only another way to testify that the Church is true without meaning it.

The conclusion?

Don’t give up on even the very hardest and most hateful apostates, for, especially with our constant examples, help, and friendship, they may one day be the most devoted and serving leaders in the Church. Of course, sometimes it may be necessary to separate oneself from another for spiritual and/or physical safety; this still doesn’t mean that a person must give up praying and hoping for the other.