To Hurt, Heal, and Celebrate It All

The Surprising Path to Divine Love

This isn’t the conversion story we like to hear, but it is mine. 

I woke up recently with an impulse to buy myself a cupcake and light a candle. It was my two-year anniversary of being baptized a member of the LDS Church. I have such tender feelings toward my membership and my own peculiar, often grueling, walk with the Lord. I do not enjoy telling my conversion story. I offer the quick version, that I investigated the church for eight years during which I also earned a bachelor's degree in Religion and a master’s degree in Theology. People ask me how I decided, at long last, to be baptized, which compels me to calculate internally whether the inquirer  really wants to know that it was an act of desperation. It was not a decision made out of any particularly warm feelings when I read the Book of Mormon or any confident knowledge of truth. It was a leap of faith with an emphasis on the word leap. I was past the end of my rope—I had fallen off, flailing and screaming for God’s help. In the months before my baptism, I was beset with the sinking sense that I lacked a moral compass. For years I had battled with unbridled rage at everyone and everything, particularly myself.

On my baptismal day, May 22, 2022, I stood in front of the Young Single Adults of Boston and bore my testimony, which was more or less a comedy routine. People loved it, but it was fabricated. I didn’t feel like I could be fully honest with this group of potential friends who were so thrilled to have me and my various advanced degrees in Religion (“she knows about all of them and she still chose us! Wow! Point for our team!”). If I had chosen to be honest, I would have said, “I come to you broken and bleeding and scared. I do not yet understand the Book of Mormon. I’m leaving behind so much to be here today. And worse yet, I know nothing about Jesus Christ.” 

To be a Christian, a theologian, a convert, and to not know Christ is its own unique type of hell. But it was at least an informed hell: I could speak for hours about soteriology, christology, and atonement theory; or write an exegetical paper about the woman with the issue of blood and disability theology; or describe what so many members of the Church love most about Jesus, his infinite love and compassion, his mercy and salvific grace. Perhaps it is not surprising that I learned most of these things outside the LDS Church. My parents and grandparents were faithful Christians. They taught me about Jesus Christ, and why worshiping him was worth my while. I’d prayed to him since I was a little girl. I could point to an act of kindness and acknowledge that it came from the light of Christ which covers the earth. 

None of my well-informed hell translated into my own knowledge. When I watched The Chosen, I saw the actor, not the man the actor portrayed. When I attempted repentance, I saw only me, fighting to fix myself before God, with no helpful older brother anywhere in sight. I couldn’t imagine what he would say to me if we ever ended up meeting. It felt scary, lonely, and shameful.  

Shortly after I was baptized, I received my patriarchal blessing. In it I am told that my spiritual gift is healing. It is explicit and clear. I have the capacity to heal in all the ways one could imagine: spiritual, emotional, physical, all of it. I am not supposed to use this skill on myself. In the months after learning this about myself, I would question again and again, “how could this possibly be true of me?” I could feel my mental illness flowing through my veins, oozing from every pore. I could not conceive of any healing happening while hurting remained such an inherent part of who I was. 

Of course, I was disappointed. If God wanted me walking around healing people, why did he make me so paralyzingly unhappy? I brought these frustrations to my bishop and the missionaries and my friends. I would always receive some variation on the same advice, “let Jesus Christ do his thing.” My response came as some variation of a frustrated retort, “who?”

Until I met him. And it is important to me that I am clear that I did not meet him in some discrete, isolated instance of light and ecstatic vision, but rather in the slow unfolding process of a waking dreamer. I found him in a softening heart, my own. With every piece of sacrament bread I swallowed, every temple prep class I took and covenant I made and hymn I sang and prayer of confusion I uttered, Jesus Christ became more and more familiar, until I knew exactly whom I beheld. Jesus Christ appeared to me not in a moment, but in the process of endurance, which has no end, and is the eternal life of every moment of every day. And he was so ridiculously nice to me that at first I bristled at his touch, refusing to believe anyone could feel that tender towards somebody so spectacularly awful as me. But Jesus was so persistent, so gentle, that finally I melted into his arms. My hurt oozed out of my pores and into his cupped hands.  

I sobbed, “it has been so dark and scary without you. Where have you been?” Jesus laughed and grabbed my shoulders and turned me around. 

I saw my Relief Society president ditch her date to come sit on my couch, cry with me, and tell me that insecurity plagued her life too. I saw the Mount Auburn Ward “writing group”  reading each other poems they had written about shame. I saw friends describe to me the experience of chronic physical illness, showing me patience and grace when I failed to fully understand. I saw the bishop who didn’t ask me to leave when I dropped “the F-bomb” in his office but proceeded to share his own experiences of grief and loss. I saw ministering sisters who took my hand and said, “I think I know exactly how that feels,” and ministering brothers who said, “I have no idea what that’s like, but thank you for describing it to me.” 

Not everyone that I saw in my slow vision was Mormon. I also saw my brother who, as he got older, shared more and more with me about his life and what made it hard. I saw my parents who threw their whole selves into giving me the world, even at the expense of themselves. I saw countless teachers and professors who told me, “you have some talent—don’t let this whole self-loathing thing ruin that.” My slow vision encompassed the hurting and healing of the body of Christ. It wasn’t necessarily a pretty scene, or an easy one to behold. I didn’t feel better knowing others are hurting. But watching others create their own identities of healers rather than sufferers was beautiful and somehow salvific. 

When I had seen all that, I turned around to Jesus, stunned. I offered up a small penance: “Thank you. What now?” And he told me that he had once upon a time invited his people to access him through his wounds. He told me that he had accessed me through mine. He told me other people, deeply wounded people, have been his foot soldiers, sent on a mission to reach me. Jesus wept and told me He hates when any of His beloved feel pain, but that He is proud of us when we can use our wounds to love and help one another. He wiped His tears,  smiled at me, playfully, almost teasingly, and offered, “now it is your turn.” 

And that’s where I am today. It’s been more than two years since I stood before the YSAs of Boston, and now I can bear my wounds in a way I couldn’t before. So much of life, including life as a Latter-day Saint, has been so acutely painful. The waters of baptism did not wash away my pain. I still feel it. Nevertheless I would enter those healing waters again and again.

I feel so at home in Jesus Christ’s gospel, not because he’s wiped my slate clean and made me this perfect, pristine daisy. No, I feel at home because he invites me to use my wounds to aid him in what he does best: heal others. When Jesus appeared to the Nephites in America it was his wounds that made the people shout “Hosanna!” Jesus Christ heals just as much through his wounds as he does through his perfection. He asks each of us to do the same. The vulnerability of others, when they bear their wounds to me, has made me feel welcome and whole. I know that the commission within my patriarchal blessing, the one that urged me to go out and heal, is because I have wounds of my own. This does not make our wounds desirable and we all rightly avoid fresh pain whenever we can. But it does mean that through the pain we inherit, we can better bear the wounds of others, that Christ can heal and that we can help. Connecting with Jesus through our wounds has turned a solitary bitterness to a shared joy as I’ve realized that wounds are what connect us through Christ. 

So maybe on my third baptismal anniversary, I will buy myself a cupcake, put a candle in it, and sing myself a song. Maybe I’ll sing “I’m Trying to Be Like Jesus.” Maybe I’ll buy Jesus a cupcake too, and hope he’ll sit down at the table with me. Maybe he’ll glance down at his wounds, I’ll glance down at mine, and we’ll share a knowing sigh, or a laugh, or maybe even a tear. And we’ll say to each other, “we’ve been walking together for quite some time now. Let’s finish these cupcakes and keep going.” 

Louisa Packham is an aspiring writer, educator, and lifelong learner. She graduated with a Masters in Theology from Boston University. While in grad school, she converted to the LDS church. Louisa’s current love is her calling as a seminary teacher.

Art by Leslie Graff.