Digging Through the Past

     I am trying to get organized so I can go to my files and find the papers I am looking for. This is hard for me. I am like Mother. I have piles of papers in stacks all around my house. I know just where to find what I am looking for. I think... If it is not in this stack of papers, then it must be in this other stack. I look and look until I want to scream. So, I am filing everything.
     I went downstairs yesterday and brought up the papers and letters Beth passed over to me a few year ago. Mother had given them to her.  It was fun to look through them.  There is a letter from Brother Guy Musser. I guess Father had written him asking him how he was supposed to explain his new found belief in Polygamy to his family and friends.  Brother Musser told him that he was never to be combative. Just to tell them where he had got his information and that if they were interested in reading what Brigham Young and Joseph Smith really believed, they could read it too.
     There is also the letter asking Father to come before the Stake President and council to receive his excommunication. 
      The time when Father and Mother left the church was very hard on them. They loved their families so much. They didn't want to disappoint them, but once they had read the teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith and the 132 section of the Doctrine and Covenants, there was no going back. You either believed it all or you didn't.  Father wasn't one to go half way.  And Mother couldn't deny it either.
      It's pretty heady stuff, actually. You are told that when you except these teachings and you live the principle of Celestial Marriage, that you are among the chosen ones of God. You go to church and listen to your very own prophet. One who has been ordained of God.  You sing the hymns with a special feeling in your heart that you are different. And you are proud to be different. You would give your life for your new beliefs or do anything your prophet ask you to do. Including marrying the boy you hated in high school, because the prophet received revelation from God for every marriage that took place in your polygamist community and you would never dream of going against a revelation from God.
     I have often wanted to accuse father of getting into polygamy just because he wanted to make having more than one wife legal, if only in his own mind. But I think in the beginning, he was sincere and truly believed that Joseph Smith did have a revelation, telling him to live polygamy.  And that John Taylor really did have an angel come to him and tell him not to let one year go by without a child being born under the covenant of Plural Marriage.
     Father and Mother's decision to leave the church and join the Fundamentalists Mormons changed their life forever. And all of ours....                 Love you,  Jelene