Sassy Mormon

Being a recent convert is hard. Temptation comes at you tenfold when you are trying to live a life which will make Heavenly Father proud of you, coffee cravings keep you up at night and then something happens that makes you so scared to tell people you have become a Mormon that it dictates your ability to converse with people. Here's how I lost my courage to tell people that I became a Mormon. A few months ago (December to be exact) and less than two weeks after I had gotten baptized, the high that I was on got cut. As a new convert, that high was everything. I loved my new church, my new family and my returned faith but it wasn't until that fateful December day that I realized that I would have more people be afraid and insult me for my choice to join a church they knew nothing about. While Barbados is a Christian society, most of the population falls into four main sections. You are either Baptist, Anglican, Methodist or Catholic with all other churches somehow shrou...

I'm not a jealous person but on Friday I got a glimpse at the life I could've had. And for the first time in months, I cried over having lupus. A life that meant I finished my communications degree and got a job as a journalist like I always dreamed of. That life meant by twenty five I would be on the top of my game with a guy and a car and all the things I thought would make me happy. Life didn't turn out that way. At fourteen I had my first blackout while on vacation in Boston. I shrugged it off as a sign of tiredness and forgot all about it. At fifteen and in the middle of my exams, I realized it was that much more harder to concentrate and retain information. At sixteen after I was working for the Christmas vacation I had my first "real" scare and passed out on the stairs falling down the flight of stairs. By eighteen my episodes were so frequent that all notion of continuing my education was off the cards. I wanted to be well. At twenty-one family...

Hey everyone. Life as a recent convert is great. Sure there are some days that I get judged for being a member of the church and being an Afro-Caribbean member  yet I know with all conviction that this is the church and the family I belong to. Here is the beginning of my story  found a forever home in the Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints. Stepping away from my old church was one of the hardest thing I have done. I was a member of the Methodist church from before I was born, coming to church long before my birth in my mother's tummy. It made sense that I would come up Methodist and follow in my mother's footsteps of teaching Sunday School. From a young age, I remember feeling empty and constantly being compared to my cousin who was also a member of the church and who fit the mould of being the perfect Methodist-in-training. Matters were only made worse when I realized that I didn't have church friends while my cousin was the more popular one and everyone in ...

Its not enough to read the Book Of Mormon. On my last visit with my sister missionaries, Sister Fuller and Sister Hawkins  I was quite taken aback by what I assumed was one of my greatest strengths. Reading the Book Of Mormon just wasn't enough... I was shocked. Here I was doing three hours of scripture study every evening and suddenly my efforts wasn't enough. At first it caught me off-guard but then I suddenly realized they were right. I wasn't doing enough... In missionary terms, I was what the missionaries and even the Missionary President in Barbados dubbed as a " Golden Investigator" . Although I don't know how I got this status, it was one that I prided myself on as I went through my conversion and started throwing my entire being into being the best Mormon convert that I could be. Then something changed. As life started to shift around me, my faith took a serious backseat as I tried to navigate through the many challenges life seemed to be ...

As someone who has dealt with depression and mental illness from a young age, talking about the monster in my closet who to this day gives me great anxiety. Here I am on my path to Heavenly Father's kingdom almost four months post-baptism and I'm depressed again.  Good girls don't get depressed. In my younger years, I thought that depression was a state of seeking attention from people who wouldn't own up to the things which bothered them until the fateful day when at twelve years old, I realized I was beginning to exhibit the symptoms of depression. As someone who has a long family history of mental illness, the thought of anything being wrong inside my brain scared me. For many years, I hid the emotions I would feel on a daily basis hiding behind a smile that never seemed real. I was sad. In my fifteen-year-old mind, depression was weakness. In African and Caribbean culture mental illness comes with an unspoken stigma which made it that much harder for me to exp...

Hi there. For months I have contemplated making a secondary blog based on my faith based everyday life and the long winding road that is the convert life. Tonight, awake due to my lovely insomnia I finally decided to do it. I should introduce myself. My name is Ramona and I am a twenty-five year old young woman from the island of Barbados in the West Indies. Other than my obsession with Bridget Jones, Netflix and my knack for learning new languages, I am pretty much the average young woman navigating the challenges and self discoveries of their twenties. My convert story starts with a movie on my Neflix cue called "Meet The Mormons"which I am sure many of you have probably seen so many times that you can recall the words by heart. As an avid documentary lover, social human interest documentaries always peek my interest but unfortunately with everything in life, the Meet the Mormons movie got pushed to the bottom of my watch cue. After many months sitting there, I drum...