Dear Forrest

Father has known you since your spirit was formed in His image. He knew you throughout your premortal progression, and He sent you here—to this earth, to this life, to this moment—to continue your education, to strengthen your character, and to polish your personality to a celestial glow. He did not send you here to fail. He sent you here to be a success in all the ways that matter to Him: in love, in mercy, in the quiet daily work of becoming more like His Son. That has always been the mission. Not straightness. Not conformity. Not silence. Becoming.

I know what the fear cost you. I know what it means to walk into a marriage carrying a secret so heavy it bends the light around everything you do. I know the quiet violence of lying to yourself in the name of righteousness, of performing a life you were told God required while the truest part of you suffocated in silence. That marriage did not fail because you were not faithful enough or brave enough or good enough. It failed because it was built on a foundation that the institution laid for you—a foundation of fear and shame dressed up as doctrine. You deserved better. Your spouse deserved better. And the God who actually knows you—not the institutional proxy, but the living Christ—never required it of you in the first place.

But Forrest, that marriage also gave you three children. Three remarkable, breathing, laughing, growing human beings who carry your name and your light into the world. They are not the byproduct of a mistake. They are the fruit of a life lived with courage, even when that courage was born of pain. Whatever else the institution got wrong, your children are proof that God can bring beauty from any soil, that blessings arrive through crooked paths, and that the decisions your eternal opportunities spring from are never wasted.

You have been, and will be, called upon many times in your life to serve in ways you cannot yet see—and many of those callings will have nothing to do with a ward directory or a sustaining vote. Your deepest ministry will be to those who are walking the same road you walked: the teenager who hasn’t yet found the words for what he feels, the returned missionary trying to reconcile his heart with his faith, the parent who loves their child fiercely but doesn’t know how to say so without conditions. These people will find you—or you will find them—because the Spirit knows where to send those who have walked through the fire and come out with their testimony intact. You will sit with them not as a calling but as a covenant, not because a stake president extended it but because your Savior did, directly, in the quiet language of experience and empathy. This is the calling that transcends any single institution. It is administered through the pure love of Christ, and it was given to you precisely because you know what it feels like to wonder whether you belong—and you found your way back to God anyway. The laborers are few, and the time is short, and the people who need what you carry—the hard-won witness that God’s love is real and present and wider than any single generation’s understanding of it—are everywhere. In meetinghouses and living rooms. In chapel pews and in quiet apartments where someone is asking God at two in the morning whether they are still His. Your calling is to every one of them. It was authored by your Savior, sealed by your suffering, and confirmed by the life you continue to live. It is between you and Christ, and it always has been.

You have been given spiritual gifts that the institution may never fully recognize, but that does not make them less real. You carry the gift of discernment—the ability to know the truth of a situation, to read the hearts of those you serve, to give true and proper counsel even when the words come hard. You will know, in spite of others’ words, the truth of their hearts, and you will be able to give them what they actually need rather than what a manual prescribes. That is not a lesser gift. That is the greatest gift—a healer.

You have a tender heart. You have carried tears for others in a way that most people never learn. In many of your callings, seen and unseen, formal or informal, you have been and will be sent to comfort those who mourn. You will lift the burdens of those who have been injured and harmed by the very systems that harmed you. Be humble. Spend your time in quiet service in the name of the Lord.

I want to tell you something about fear, because I think you have carried enough of it for several lifetimes. “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love” (1 John 4:18). You know that torment intimately. You have lived inside it. But the verse does not say you must cast out your own fear through willpower or obedience or self-denial. It says love casts out fear. Not your love for God, but His love for you. It is His perfect love that does the work. Your only job is to stop running from it.

The hardships you were promised were never only the ones the world would throw at you—the pestilences, the earthquakes, the storms. The deepest upheavals you have faced were inward ones: the seismic fracturing of a self forced to live at war with its own nature, the slow illness of shame metastasizing through decades of silence, the storms that raged not in the sky but in the chest of a man kneeling in prayer and wondering why God made him this way and then condemned him for it. Those were your hardships. The fear. The guilt. The corrosive sickness of being told that the most tender part of your soul was a defect of the Fall. And you have passed through them. You are passing through them still. Not without scars—but without destruction, because something in you refused to let the fear win. That refusal is faith and a relentless determination to follow your Savior. Your life shall yet be a joyous dream—not because the pain was not real, but because you have already proven that your faith is in God and His Blessed Son Jesus, and not in the opinions of men who have never lived a single day inside your experience.

Love yourself as Christ loves you. Not as the institution has taught you to love yourself—conditionally, provisionally, always keeping one eye on the gap between who you are and who you are supposed to be. Love yourself the way Christ does: completely, presently, without reservation. You are not a project. You are not a work in progress whose value will be realized only after the resurrection fixes what mortality broke. You are a son of God, right now, in this body, with this heart, and you are worthy of love—your own love—exactly as you are. The command to love your neighbor as yourself presupposes that you love yourself. For too long, you were taught to treat self-love as pride. It is not. It is the foundation of every commandment Christ ever gave.

Now, there is a warning about pride that is worth heeding, but it is not the pride the institution taught you to fear. It is the pride that lets foolish things take over your mind and heart—the pride that puts the things of the world ahead of the things of God. If you let bitterness consume you, if you let the institution’s failures define your relationship with divinity, then those promises of joy and blessings that extend beyond your greatest hope will be nullified. Not by God. By you. Do not give the others that power. Do your best. Live a righteous life. And the rest—the vast, shimmering, unknowable rest—will unfold in ways that will astonish you.

Hold onto your faith, Forrest. The Restoration is real. The Book of Mormon is extraordinary. The First Vision matters. The sealing power is beautiful and true. The plan of salvation is vast and merciful and so much bigger than any single generation’s understanding of it. These things are yours. They belong to you as much as they belong to anyone who has ever been baptized.

Not everything is known. The Ninth Article of Faith is not a decorative platitude. It is a theological commitment to humility, an admission that the Restoration is ongoing and that God has not yet finished speaking. “We believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.” Many great and important things. The covenant with Father has not been fulfilled as yet. There is much work left to do. If the church could be wrong about Black people for over a century—and it was—then it can be wrong about gay people now. That is not faithlessness. That is the very faith in continuing revelation that the Restoration demands. Hold your testimony and hold your questions at the same time. They are not enemies. They are companions on the same road.

Be a good person. Goodness is who you already are when you stop performing and start living. You know how to mourn with those that mourn. You know how to comfort those who stand in need of comfort. You have borne burdens that most of your fellow Saints cannot imagine, and that suffering has given you a capacity for empathy that is, frankly, Christlike. Use it. Serve. Love. Build. Create. Raise your voice in testimony when the Spirit moves you, and do not let anyone tell you that your testimony is less valid.

Seek after good and righteous things. The Thirteenth Article of Faith is your compass: “If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.” Notice what is not on that list: conformity, silence, self-erasure, institutional approval. What is on the list is virtue, loveliness, goodness, and praise. Your love is virtuous. Your desire for companionship is lovely. Your faith, held together through decades of pain, is of the very best report. Seek after these things and let the rest fall away.

Avoid the Antichrists—and by that I do not mean the critics or the doubters or the people the Sunday School manual warns you about. I mean the systems, the constructs, the voices that place themselves between you and your Savior. If a teaching makes you hate yourself, it is not of Christ. If a policy makes you feel unworthy of God’s love, it is not of God. If a leader tells you that your heart is a defect of the Fall, that leader is speaking from the philosophies of men, mingled with scripture. You have the gift of the Holy Ghost. You have the light of Christ. You have a conscience refined by suffering. Trust them. They will not lead you astray. You must never say no to the Lord, but you are under no obligation to confuse the Lord’s voice with the voice of others.

And when the day comes—and it will come—when you stand before the Savior whose name you have carried through all of this, I want you to imagine that meeting. Not with dread. Not with the sick anxiety of a worthiness interview. But with the anticipation of a child running into the arms of a parent who has been watching from the window the entire time. He knows you. He has always known you. He knows about the marriage and the fear and the shame and the nights you wondered if you could keep going. He knows about the prayers that felt like they hit the ceiling and the ones that broke through into something infinite. He knows about the love you carried quietly and the love you were told to bury and the love that would not and could not stay buried because it was never supposed to be.

He knows about your three children—how you loved them with everything you had and how you demonstrated to them that faith and honesty can live in the same house. He sees the work you did when no one was watching—that only you know. He sees the service given in quiet, the blessings extended without title or authority, the tears shed for others when your own grief was still fresh.

And I believe that when He sees you, He will not ask why you loved the way you loved. He will not consult a handbook. He will not check your temple recommend status. He will look at you with the same eyes that wept over the Nephites at Bountiful, and He will say what He has been saying to you your entire life, if only the noise of others had not made it so hard to hear:

“Come unto me. You are mine. You have always been mine. And I am so glad you are home.”