Your life vs. the one you were given

At what point in an adult's life does it become your own? What I mean by this is it seems like people spend a lot of time explaining away their behavior as a function of the way they were raised. I'm not sure there is a person out there who had a perfect childhood, whose parents fell short of the ideal, large or small. So when is it no longer okay to blame it on your upbringing, and time to take control of what you are and what your life has become?

I've heard recently from people who were raised in the LDS church that they've become disillusioned with the church itself. For instance, what happens when you've been raised to see the Bishop of your ward as "the judge in Israel" (which some people translate into somehow a perfect person) and he ends up being a child molester, or something not as heinous, maybe he has an affair or whatever happens to people. Or if your bishop tells you and your spouse you should have children, when you think it's none of his business. They're not perfect. But what do you do with the information that your Bishop is not the perfect person you were raised to believe him to be?

Or what about if someone gives a talk at General Conference (bi-annual meeting of the entire church broadcast via satellite where talks are given by church leadership) that you don't necessarily agree with? Case in point, this past October Julie Beck, General Relief Society President gave a talk entitled Mothers Who Know. There are many who view this talk as putting women back in the home, barefoot and pregnant. That's a little exaggerated, but you get the picture. I heard the talk and read it later and viewed it as an ideal, something to aim for, but consciously avoided internalizing it in any way because I feel like I'm doing the best I can and am not in a position to pile on anything else right now. I think she may even make some statements that I flat out don't agree with, and I'm okay with that, too, so I basically ignore it.

Not being raised in the church, I have a different perspective on church leadership. Joining as an adult, I think I have enough sense (I hope) to know what is right for myself, and enough sense to figure out when I need to pray about a certain principle to find out what is true. Isn't that what the church is based on? This is one of the reasons joining the church made sense to me, I didn't have to believe anyone just because they said it was true (and still don't have to), I can find out for myself, as can every member of the church.

With that, what is one to do when they disagree with something someone says at General Conference, or one of the church's positions on something? I don't have the answer, but I have come across something that until today, I wasn't aware of as a philosophy, but think there's real value in.

A friend of mine recommended an article in a magazine, The Sun (one of my favorite magazines) regarding a Japanese philosophy called Naikan (which I'm not going to explain, simply say "read the article." It's the interview with Gregg Krech.) It resonates with me in that if we concentrate on the things we've been given in our lives from the people around us, we're in debt. I think this can be translated into an LDS perspective in that if we attribute everything we've been given, people, things, opportunities, to God, we're still in debt. Even further, no matter if we're Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or Atheist, we have many things in our life to be grateful for, and if we acknowledge how they came to us, and recognize them as sources of gratitude, our lives will be enriched, and we will stop being concerned about the potential misconceptions we were raised on, and start looking at what we can contribute to the whole with the knowledge we now possess. The knowledge is that we are in debt to God, to the universe, to the people around us for where we are today, and there's no time like the present to move forward and be a positive force instead of look back and complain. Like it or not, we cannot change the past, but have all the power in the world to change the way we act in the present and look forward to the future.