Recently I sent out a request for guest bloggers to supply new “Reasons” for this blog, and Olavo dos Santos Martins sent the following. I am happy to share this testimony with you.
I got to have my first contact with the church through his missionaries in ´77. I had been a student of English and I´d been needing people to talk to, out of my regular classes.
Well, my father was the one who knew them and introduced them to me.
We started our chats on saturday mornings and that was where I got to have my contacts with them, the Ensign mag and the BoM.
My mom and I got the 1st. discussion. But, we didn´t want to go on.
In 1980, I got to know the principal of the Language School I had just started to work in was an LDS. My interest in the BoM revived and she introduced me to a new set of missionaries.
They taught me and baptized me about two weeks later on the 3rd. of May, 1980, along with three other people.
Well, I kept on going to the church, received both priesthoods, the lesser and the higher and in ´81 went on a full-time mission. Four months later I came back, sick and disillusioned. I was threatened to death by one of my companions with a knife. I was honorably relieved and served as a District missionary and later on as Ward Mission Leader twice. I served in almost every calling, but for bishop, stake counselor and financial clerk. I even served as a High Councilor. I got married to a returned short-term sister missionary whom I got to know as Stake missionary. We were sealed in São Paulo´s Temple along with our first son.
(We married in Paraguay and had to wait for one year to be sealed in SP.)
I stayed in the church for 30 years. Last year I accidentaly ran into some “anti” mormon info through the web but stopped looking into it. : I still had the cognitive dissonance!
This year I decided to investigate further. I downloaded “The Changing World of Mormonism,” by Jerald and Sandra Tanner. And after a whole month, I was convinced I had been in the wrong religion. I got deeper and deeper into my investigation. I stopped going to church. My two children left it too. Only my wife has stayed more or less active in the church. My children refuse to go back. Me too. I consider myself a post-mormon, even though my name is still in Church records. I´ve got my letter of renunciation ready to handed to the bishop. I´ve been seriously considering delivering it to him to have my name eventually removed.
Nowadays, like you and other ex-mormons I´ve become a deep investigator of the church. I´ve got a huge library of web-archives in my computer. And, as the times go by, I thank Our Lord and God for having rescued me out of the “Mormon Mirage (and delusion!)” that mormonism is.
For more information about Mormonism, see The Mormon Mirage 3rd Edition: A Former Member Looks at the Mormon Church Today(Zondervan, 2009). Also available as an audiobook and as an expanded-text E-book for Nook, Kindle and other reading devices.
