Please note: All quotations in this post are subject to the inaccuracies of human memory. I have told it in the best way I know how, but it is filtered through my own experience.
The first time I remember feeling frustrated about women in the church was during high school seminary. My teacher split the room up into boys and girls; the boys were to talk about how to develop a desire to serve a mission and then how to prepare for it, while the girls discussed the age at which they would like to get married.
I could explain the quantitative and qualitative differences in these tasks, but I will leave that up to you to ponder. Suffice it to say, I considered quitting seminary for a week.
I hold onto that memory not to preserve anger (I do believe that seminary teacher was doing the best with what he knew, and I do believe he was and is a good man), but instead to see that my concerns about women in the church were brewing before I came to college. In college, though, they grew. By the end of my freshman year, I was asking longingly for my Heavenly Mother and mad at more than one conference talk's treatment of women. I was hurt in that deep, jarring way that can only be inflicted by the things you love enough to keep in the innermost part of your heart. I felt uncertain, fearful, and lonely.
Somewhere in that hurt, I concluded that the male leaders of our church could not possibly understand the experience of women in the church. That when they go to seek revelation, they do so through the lens of their own (male, 1960s) experience, and that couldn't include my experience.
For many, loving and trusting the leaders of our church comes as naturally as breathing. Others, like me, look at our leaders and cannot find one that represents their experience in terms of race, culture, gender, socioeconomic status, sexuality, age, ability, etc., and find it difficult to understand how they can lead the church with us in mind.
At first, I thought that this made me somehow a "worse Mormon" than those who had an easy, natural testimony of our leaders. However, my perspective changed upon reading D&C 21:5: "For [the Prophet's] word ye shall receive, as if from my own mouth, in all patience and faith." In this verse, I learned two very important lessons. First, God knew it was going to be difficult to follow his human mouthpieces, so He asked us to employ all of our patience and all of our faith in order to believe that their words come from His mouth. Second, He knew it was critical enough that we follow His prophets that He commanded us to do it, regardless of difficulty level.
In other words, I learned that it was not wrong for me to find it difficult to trust our leaders, but I needed to find a way to do it anyway.
In the days and years since my deepest feelings of distrust, I have been working to apply Heavenly Father's recipe for this struggle: patience and faith. In order to follow our leaders, I need to trust them, and in order to trust them, I need to believe that they love me, so I look for ways in which they demonstrate their love. So far, I have found that they do so by teaching me of a Savior who loves me perfectly, by expressing their hope for the welfare of my current and future family, and by asking me to participate and to love others in my local congregation. I am working to build my thought patterns around these actions being signs of love, rather than seeing comments about how more lipstick would get me married as signs of a lack-of-love. I can't say that all of my fears are gone or that the positive thought-processes come easy, but I celebrate the little victories and have seen progress.
With this particular struggle to improve myself in mind, I want to share an experience that I had recently that taught me just how aware my Heavenly Father is of my struggles and my efforts to overcome them.
