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.
”Counsel with the Lord in all thy doings, and he will direct thee for good; yea, when thou liest down at night lie down unto the Lord, that he may watch over you in your sleep; and when thou risest in the morning let thy heart be full of thanks unto God.”
The third step in any recovery program is the pivot point—the moment where acknowledgment becomes action, where belief becomes surrender. In traditional recovery, this step asks you to turn your will and your life over to the care of God. For a gay Latter-day Saint man, this step requires a critical distinction: you are turning your life over to God, not to the institution that claims to speak for Him.
This distinction matters more than almost anything else in this book. For your entire life within the Church, the voice of God and the voice of the institution have been presented as synonymous. When the prophet speaks, the thinking has been done. When the handbook changes, God’s will has been updated. When your bishop tells you to marry a woman, God is speaking through His authorized servant. This conflation of divine and institutional authority has been the source of immeasurable suffering for gay Latter-day Saint men. It has turned the act of trusting God into an act of self-destruction, because trusting “God” (as defined by the institution) meant agreeing to erase yourself.
Real trust in God—the kind Alma describes when he counsels us to consult the Lord in all our doings—is not blind obedience to institutional policy. It is a living, breathing, personal relationship with a Heavenly Father who knows your name, knows your heart, knows the shape of your longing, and has not for one moment abandoned you. Trusting God means trusting that the God who made you gay did so on purpose. It means trusting that the Christ who said “Come unto me” was not adding an asterisk for sexual orientation. It means trusting that the Spirit you have felt in prayer, in service, in the quiet moments of genuine worship—that Spirit was real, and it was for you, and it was not conditioned on your being straight.
Surrendering the performance is perhaps the most radical act of faith a gay Latter-day Saint man can undertake. The performance is everything: the way you modulate your voice in elders quorum, the way you navigate conversations about dating, the way you construct a public self that meets institutional expectations while your private self slowly suffocates. To stop performing is to stand naked before God and say: this is me. All of me. And I am going to trust that You love what You see.
This is not easy. It may be the hardest thing you ever do. The performance has kept you safe—or at least it has felt like safety. It has given you a place in the community, a role to play, a script to follow. Letting go of it can feel like free-falling. But the promise of this step is that God catches you. Not the institution—God. And His arms are wider, more patient, more forgiving, and more joyful than anything the institution has offered.
Consider the prophet Nephi’s prayer in 2 Nephi 4. He is devastated. He grieves. He rails against his own weakness. And then he does something extraordinary: he chooses to trust. Not in his own strength—he has already admitted he has none. Not in an institution—he is writing in exile. He trusts in the God who has carried him through everything, and he asks that God to carry him still. That prayer is available to you. That trust is available to you. Not trust in a system, but trust in the living Christ who has never once let you go.
Turning your life over to God does not mean abdicating responsibility for your choices. It means making those choices in partnership with divinity rather than in submission to bureaucracy. It means praying not for the answers the institution has pre-approved, but for the answers God actually wants to give you. And it means being willing to receive answers that the institution might not recognize.
In what ways have you confused trusting God with trusting the institution? Where do those two things diverge in your experience?
Write about what it would feel like to stop performing. What are you most afraid of losing? What might you gain?
Write a prayer—an honest one—in which you surrender not your identity, but your fear. What do you want God to know?
I turn my life over to the care of God—not to an institution, not to a handbook, not to the expectations of others. I trust that the God who made me knows me, loves me, and will direct my path.
The letter warns: “Avoid the Antichrists.” But the Book of Mormon’s Antichrists—Sherem, Nehor, and Korihor—are not who most Sunday School lessons suggest. Their common thread is not atheism or opposition to God per se. It is the interposition of human authority between individuals and their Savior. Sherem used his learning to redirect people away from personal revelation toward institutional orthodoxy. Nehor introduced priestcraft—using religious authority for personal gain and social control. Korihor denied the prophetic witness, but the mechanism of his deception was convincing people that they could not trust their own spiritual experience.
An Antichrist, in Book of Mormon terms, is any person, system, or ideology that places itself between you and your Savior—including institutional systems that claim absolute authority over your relationship with divinity. Moroni 7:12–13 provides the test: “Wherefore, all things which are good cometh of God; and that which is evil cometh of the devil. Every thing which inviteth and enticeth to do good, and to love God, and to serve him, is inspired of God.” Apply this test honestly to the messages you have received about your orientation.
One of the most important skills you will develop in this program—and in your life—is the ability to distinguish between the voice of God and the voice of the institution. They are not the same, even though the institution insists they are. Here are some markers that may help:
The voice of God builds up. It encourages. It fills you with light and peace, even when the message is challenging. When God calls you to repentance, it is the call of a loving parent who sees your potential and wants you to reach it—not the voice of an auditor checking your compliance with institutional standards.
The voice of the institution often diminishes. It tells you what you cannot be, what you must not do, what you are not allowed to feel. It speaks in the language of restriction rather than the language of invitation. It measures worthiness by behavior checklists rather than by the condition of the heart. When you hear a voice that makes you feel smaller, less worthy, less human—question whether that voice is God’s or the institution’s.
The voice of God is consistent with the fruits of the Spirit as described in scripture: love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith. If a teaching produces fear, self-hatred, isolation, or despair, it is not bearing the fruits of the Spirit, regardless of who delivers it or what authority they claim.
Learning to make this distinction takes practice. It requires you to develop your own spiritual discernment—to pay attention to how teachings land in your heart, to notice whether a message draws you toward Christ or drives you away from yourself. Alma taught that you can judge by the light of Christ whether something is good or evil: that which invites to do good and to love God is of God; that which persuades you to do evil and to deny Christ is of the devil. Apply this test honestly. When a teaching about your orientation makes you want to destroy yourself, it is not inviting you to do good. It is not of God.