My Story
Mason Boddy
I have wanted to write this down for a long time. The people closest to me have heard it many times, but I want it in one place, in my own words, for my children and grandchildren, for the members of my church, and for anyone who has wondered how a kid raised in a Christian home ended up in the waters of baptism in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have tried to keep it readable and to explain a few terms along the way for those who aren't familiar with the Church. My purpose in writing this is the same one Nephi, a prophet in the Book of Mormon, gave for his own record: to "persuade men to come unto the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and be saved" (1 Nephi 6:4).
Farmington
I grew up in Farmington, Utah, in a blended family. My parents, Richard and Starlee, divorced when I was a year or two old, and both remarried when I was still small. My dad married Christina when I was about four, and my mom later married Ricky. Though raised in the Church of Jesus Christ, neither of my parents remained active, and neither of the people they married was a member of the Church. My stepmom Christina is a devout Christian woman, and she raised us to know Jesus. Sundays meant Calvary Chapel, a non-denominational Christian church, and that was a constant in my life from the time I was very young all the way through high school.
Farmington is a very Latter-day Saint town, and most of my friends were members of the Church. Socially it made no difference; I was just one of the guys. When religion came up, my friends and I would debate doctrine the way teenage boys debate anything. Most of my extended family were members too, and I would go to church with them for family functions or when a friend invited me. But my knowledge of the Church was superficial at best. I wasn't very interested in religion in those years. My life was football, the weight room, and my friends.
Football was the thing I was good at. I played defensive tackle, and one of my good friends, Ryan Workman, was our quarterback. We had gone to junior high and high school together, and he will come back into this story more than once, including at the most important moment of it.
I graduated from high school on June 4, 2009, my eighteenth birthday, with a scholarship to play football at Brevard College, a small school in Brevard, North Carolina. The way that scholarship came about was a small miracle. My stepdad, Ricky, happened to run into one of Brevard's assistant coaches and showed him my football film. The coach called me right away and offered me a scholarship. I wasn't interested at first. But over the next few months things kept pointing me back toward it, and during the first week of fall camp I called and accepted. It would turn out to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Looking back, I can see the Lord's hand in it. Brevard was where I would first investigate the Church in a serious way, and where a painful awakening would begin about who I was and what I really believed.
Brevard
I got to North Carolina in August of 2009 and was overwhelmed almost immediately, by college football, by college classes, and most of all by the culture. I felt like I had landed in a foreign country and everyone was speaking a language I didn't know. Welcome to the South. The bubble I had grown up in was shattered, and that opened my mind and my heart to new ideas, for better and for worse. I was swept quickly into a lifestyle I had never been exposed to. I wasn't guilty of any heinous sins, but I was lost in the party life. There was drinking, and there were things that went along with it that I shouldn't have been involved in. I got my ears pierced. I got a tattoo. I was wandering, and I was wondering who I was.
That was the version of me who met the missionaries.
One day, my hallmate Anthony and I got to talking, and our conversation somehow shifted to Utah. He asked me if I was a Mormon, which is the first question anyone asks when they find out you're from Utah, and of course I said no. But he kept asking questions about the Church, and I didn't have all the answers. Finally I told him that I couldn't answer his questions, but I knew who could. I reached out to my friend Ryan, who gave me the phone number for the local missionaries, and I set up a time for them to come over and talk with Anthony.
During that first visit neither of us was interested in what they had to say. The only reason I let them come back was that I was too nice to say no when they asked. Anthony refused to meet with them again, so I met with them on my own.
In our second discussion the subject turned to salvation. They asked me whether I thought a person needed to be baptized to be saved. I recited what I had been taught my whole life: that we are saved by the grace of God through faith. They answered by reading John 3:5: "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." That verse threw me completely. I was basically Bible-illiterate at the time and had no idea how to respond. And as they read it, the Spirit witnessed to me that what they were teaching was true. I couldn't understand why the pastors I had grown up with had never taught that baptism was necessary for salvation.
That experience led me to investigate the Church sincerely. For about two months I met with the missionaries several times a week, and I went to church with them a few times. I asked a lot of questions about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. There were moments in those discussions when I could feel, deep down, that what they were saying was true. But I was like Amulek, another Book of Mormon prophet, who said, "I did harden my heart, for I was called many times and I would not hear; therefore I knew concerning these things, yet I would not know" (Alma 10:6). When they invited me to be baptized, I politely declined. I simply wasn't ready to change, and I wasn't ready to embrace the testimony that was starting to grow in me.
At the end of the semester I moved back to Utah. I no longer wanted to be in North Carolina. But the lessons the missionaries had taught me came home with me, and they would stay with me through the hardest months of my life.
Utah State
In the spring of 2010 I transferred to Utah State University to chase my dream of playing Division I football. What I didn't understand yet was what my search for the truth had already done to me. The missionaries had taught me the truth, and "the power of the Holy Ghost carrieth it unto the hearts of the children of men" (2 Nephi 33:1). The truth was there. The Lord just needed to humble me enough to let it in, and He would spend the next several months doing exactly that.
The NCAA denied my waiver to play as a transfer student, and with that my dream was crushed. All of the hard work I had put in since junior high vanished from my grip. Football was the sun to my earth. It was what drove me, what got me out of bed in the morning. Its presence in my life was the purpose of my life. And now it was gone.
The absence of football gave me time, and a reason, to think about what the real purpose of my life was. Was I put on this earth to bash people's heads in on the football field? Was that what God made me for? On top of those questions, my time with the missionaries had made me question the foundation of my faith. As I dug into it, I realized I did not have an independent witness that Jesus was the Christ, and I never had. My faith in God existed primarily because my parents and my pastors had told me He was there and that the Christian faith was true. Was that reason enough to believe?
I remember the exact moment it dawned on me that I did not believe in God anymore. I was sitting in class watching a documentary about factory workers in China. I saw the awful, hard lives they lived compared with the luxuries I enjoyed, and I thought about how much suffering God allowed so many people to endure. I wondered how a loving God could allow such things to exist. And in that moment the small glimmer of faith I had left went out. It felt like someone had taken a vacuum and sucked the hope out of my life. Immediately the next question came: if there is no God, and no hope of a better world, is life even worth living?
That was the beginning of my journey through a living hell, walking in darkness.
The Wrestle
Before this story gets better, I have to tell you, as Enos did, "of the wrestle which I had before God, before I received a remission of my sins" (Enos 1:2).
I want to be clear that I didn't become a full-blown atheist. I was an agnostic; I simply didn't know whether God existed. After that day in class I decided I had to start from square one. I could no longer assume there was a God. I would have to find Him myself, and gain my own conviction that He was real, or that He wasn't.
With football out of the picture I had a lot of time to think and to research. I became bitter toward people who had faith in Christ, and especially toward members of the Church, because they were the friends around me. I started tearing down people who believed. I read websites full of anti-Mormon material to build my case for why it was absurd to blindly accept God and the claims of Joseph Smith. My friends were remarkably patient. Instead of confronting me, they would simply bear their testimonies and tell me how they knew. And even while I was lashing out at them in anger and frustration, deep down I wanted what they had. I wanted to believe there was a God. My rational mind just wouldn't let me accept it without a real reason.
Part of what held me back was a belief I had started to form: that religion was something man invented to cure our fear of death, a story we told ourselves to give us hope in what was, at bottom, a dark world without much of it. And part of it was that the heaven I had been taught didn't appeal to me. As I understood it, eternity meant sitting on a cloud playing a harp, an angel with no progression and nothing to do but worship God forever. Christianity says very little about what the afterlife is actually like, and what little I understood of it wasn't a place I wanted to go. I almost preferred the version where the screen goes black and I simply ceased to exist. Looking at those two alternatives, an eternity that didn't seem happy or an eternity of nothing, filled me with despair.
The other belief I couldn't get past was the teaching that a man could be saved only by believing in Jesus Christ in this life, when so many have never had, and never will have, the chance to accept Him in mortality. Whole nations across the history of the earth had lived and died without ever hearing His name, and according to what I had been taught, they were condemned for it to a literal lake of fire and brimstone. That didn't look like a just God to me, or a merciful one. It looked like salvation was predetermined by where and when you happened to be born. When I thought about the ancient Americans, or people in parts of Asia where the gospel can't even be taught, or everyone who had gone before and everyone alive today who would never get the chance, I could not wrap my head around a God who would condemn them for it.
I had an intense longing for a true purpose, something to anchor me in a world that was getting more complicated and more lonely by the day. There were many nights I lay awake, or stood staring at myself in the mirror, wondering who I was, why I was here, and what the point of any of it was. Without faith in the Atonement of Christ, life began to lose its flavor. Everything turned dull and gray, as if all the color and variety of life had been wisped away in the wind. My relationships suffered. Hanging out with my friends lost its meaning. Conversations lost their flavor. When I thought about my future, I had no motivation to improve, because I knew life would end and nothing I accomplished would matter. The fleeting pleasures of sin became shallow and unfulfilling; the party life could not fill the void in my soul. Like the Nephites in the Book of Mormon, I found that the Lord "would not always suffer [me] to take happiness in sin" (Mormon 2:13). Nothing could quench my thirst to know the things of God that were hidden from me.
The best way I know to describe the spiritual darkness of those months is this. Imagine you have been asleep for a very long time, and you wake up in a pitch-black room with the darkness pressing so thick against your body that you can "feel the vapor of darkness; and there could be no light, because of the darkness" (3 Nephi 8:20–21). All you know is that you exist. You have no idea why you're in this room. There are no answers within reach. You aren't sure there is a light switch, let alone where it is. All you can do is hope, and pray, that one day you will be delivered from the darkness and find what you're looking for. That was my life for the next few months. Maybe you have felt something like it and don't need the analogy.
But through all of it, I was not truly alone. The Lord wanted me to learn what life was like without Him. He let me hit the bottom of the barrel so that the only place left to look was up.
The Light Switch
I remember vividly the first time in all of this that I felt a quiet assurance that God lived. I was in the shower, pondering, and a gentle feeling came over me that there was a God. It was subtle, but it was powerful. I got dressed and walked outside to catch the bus to campus. The wind blew softly in my face, the trees rocked in the breeze, and the same feeling came over me again. I knew then that there would be an end to the darkness.
I was immediately filled with a desire to find out who God was and what He wanted for my life, and I was drawn back to what the missionaries had taught me. Their doctrine lit up my mind. It answered questions that no other religion I'd been exposed to had ever answered, and at the same time it raised new ones. My friends helped. I remember my friend Oliver explaining to me that the seven days of creation were really seven periods of time, that God had made the world over those seven periods rather than seven twenty-four-hour days, and thinking that it simply made sense. That was one small example of something that kept happening: the more of the Church's doctrine I learned, the more complete the picture of the Savior became, until He was someone I could actually believe in and wanted to know. I went back to the critics of the Church and compared what they said with what I had learned in Brevard and my own studies. Over time I came to a realization that was hard to accept: I could not logically prove or disprove the claims of Joseph Smith, and neither could the people trying to tear them down. Nobody alive today was standing in the Sacred Grove when God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him. Sooner or later I was going to have to take someone's word for it. Faith was the only logical answer, because no one had firsthand knowledge of those events but Joseph himself.
The Sermon
The school year ended while I was still wrestling, and I went home to Farmington for the summer to piece together the hardest year of my life. There were days that summer when I believed the Church was true and days when I had nothing but doubts. I was sitting on the fence, deciding which side to land on.
That summer my dad and Christina invited me to come to church with them at Calvary Chapel. I accepted. As it turned out, that sermon was the thing that pushed me over the edge.
Partway through, the pastor started talking about the Latter-day Saints. He said the missionaries had come to his house and asked him to read the Book of Mormon. My ears perked up, because that was exactly what I was living through. He said they had asked him to pray about it, and that his answer was that he already knew the Book of Mormon was not part of God's plan or gospel, and above all, he knew he didn't need to pray about it. He also told the congregation that they did not need to pray about it because it was not true scripture.
As he said those words, the Spirit came over me and warned me that what he had just said was not true. It was undeniable. I knew what God was saying, and I knew what it meant: praying about it was exactly what I needed to do. God knew that, and He helped me know it. It was the first time in this whole journey that I actually recognized the Spirit for what it was. It shocked me, because I didn't even believe in the Book of Mormon yet. But I knew what I felt.
I went home that day and pulled out the little pamphlets the missionaries had given me months before. When I read about the plan of salvation, the truths that had been hidden behind my unbelief were suddenly as clear as the noonday sun on a cloudless day. Here were the answers to the very things that had driven me away. The purpose of this life is not to earn a seat on a cloud; it is to become like our Father in Heaven and like the Lord Jesus Christ, and to keep progressing forever, with our marriages and our families continuing into the life to come. And God has a plan for all of His children, not just some of them. There is a spirit world where everyone who never heard the gospel in this life will be taught it and given their agency to accept it, so that the "gospel [is] preached also to them that are dead" (1 Peter 4:6). Instead of one heaven and one hell, there are kingdoms of glory, and every person who has ever lived will receive all the glory they are willing to receive. That was a plan in which God could be "a perfect, just God, and a merciful God also" (Alma 42:15). It painted a picture of a God I could believe in, a God who truly loved all of His children and gave every one of them a chance. I didn't fully understand it that day, and my understanding has grown in abundance since, but I knew as I read it that it was true and that it was God's plan for all of His children. I felt in my heart that God had a plan for me, and I knew that I knew He was real. The doctrines the missionaries had taught me were the truths my soul had been hungering for. Nephi said the Holy Ghost carries the truth "unto" the hearts of men, and that is exactly what had happened in Brevard. Now, at last, I let it all the way in, and it filled the holes in my heart. I knew immediately that I wanted, and needed, to be baptized. I still hadn't prayed. But I had my answer, and it hadn't come through "the wisdom of men, but in the power of God" (1 Corinthians 2:5).
I called Ryan and told him I wanted to be baptized. He set up a meeting with the missionaries at his house. When they came, I told them I wanted to skip the lessons and do my baptismal interview. They went ahead and taught me the entire first lesson anyway, and then asked what I thought. I told them I had thought this was my baptismal interview, because I was already ready. So they called their district leader, and he drove out that same day and interviewed me. My baptism was scheduled for a few days later.
The Water
The night before my baptism I finally opened the Book of Mormon and took up Moroni's promise. Moroni was the last prophet of the Book of Mormon, and the angel who delivered its record to Joseph Smith; he promised that anyone who asks God with a sincere heart and real intent will receive an answer by the Holy Ghost. I knelt down with a truly sincere heart and real intent and simply asked God whether all of this was real, whether He was real. I didn't see angels. I didn't hear a voice from heaven. What I felt was a still small voice whispering in my heart that I already knew it was true. Like Elijah, I found that the Lord's voice "was not in the wind," nor "in the earthquake," nor "in the fire," but in "a still small voice" (1 Kings 19:11–12). I felt a sure confirmation that what I was doing was right.
On July 17, 2010, Ryan Workman, my friend since junior high, baptized me. I remember coming up out of the water and feeling the power of the Holy Ghost come over me. It was the first real connection with heaven I had felt in my whole life. I walked back into the changing room feeling as though I had landed on "the shores of the promised land" and "did shed tears of joy before the Lord, because of the multitude of his tender mercies over [me]" (Ether 6:12). My long search for the truth was over. "After wading through much tribulation, repenting nigh unto death, the Lord in mercy hath seen fit to snatch me out of an everlasting burning, and I am born of God" (Mosiah 27:28).
From that day my life changed forever, and for the better. I no longer suffered the pains of a lost and damned soul. I had seen the glorious vistas of the gospel and found a happiness I hadn't known existed. I knew who I was and whose I was: I was a child of Christ.
Since Then
A little over a year after my baptism, I was called to serve a two-year mission. I had wanted a foreign call like my friends were getting, somewhere I would have to learn a language, China or Mexico. Instead the Lord sent me to the Nebraska Omaha Mission. The only person who came close to guessing was Christina, who had said she thought I would go to Iowa. She was nearly right; the mission covered western Iowa, and I spent part of it serving in Council Bluffs. It didn't take long to understand why I was there. The people of Nebraska and Iowa were my people. Most of them had grown up in Christian homes like mine, with a Bible on the shelf and a pastor they trusted, and I could sit in their living rooms and tell them I had been exactly where they were. I knew their objections because they had been my objections. I knew what it felt like to hear John 3:5 for the first time. That call was inspired, and I never doubted it.
I was blessed to serve with two great mission presidents, President Kunz and President Weston, amazing mission companions, and in areas with so many people to teach and share the gospel with. I watched people I loved go into the water and then walk in a newness of life. I watched a man who had been beating his wife come to understand the gospel, and a young man ask us, with tears running down his face, "How do I repent?" One evening a prompting told me to go check on a woman we had been teaching, and following that prompting saved her life. I learned that the Spirit is real, that it speaks, and that it will teach you what to say in the very moment you need it (D&C 100:6). I also learned something about myself. Not everyone has the soul-searching questions that drove me. Doctrine is what filled me on my journey, and I assumed it would fill everyone. It doesn't. Many of the people I taught weren't lying awake wondering who they were or where they came from; their concerns were different from mine, and I had to learn to meet them where they were rather than where I had been. And I learned, mostly by getting it wrong first, that the whole thing runs on love. Moroni's words became the center of everything I taught: "charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever" (Moroni 7:47). People do not come to Christ because they lose an argument. They come because someone loved them enough to listen, and then told them the truth.
Because I had witnessed the glory and majesty of Christ for myself, I "labored without ceasing, that I might bring souls unto repentance; that I might bring them to taste of the exceeding joy of which I did taste; that they might also be born of God, and be filled with the Holy Ghost" (Alma 36:24). I was blessed to watch other people come to know what I had come to know, and that is still my greatest desire: that everyone who wants to return to live with God will have that chance. My baptism happened on July 17, 2010, but my conversion was cemented in Nebraska, one door and one living room at a time.
It has been sixteen years since I came up out of that water. I married Laura in the Salt Lake Temple, and we have four children: Emma, who is eleven; Kendrick, who is eight; Gabriel, who is six; and Jude, who is two. My work has prospered. Our home is a happy one, built on the gospel. I have been blessed in every way, spiritual and temporal, and I take that as a testimony of what King Benjamin taught in the Book of Mormon: "consider on the blessed and happy state of those that keep the commandments of God" (Mosiah 2:41). I have lived the blessings of that verse.
My Testimony
If you are reading this and you doubt the existence of the Lord Jesus Christ, or that His kingdom has been restored on the earth through The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I bear you my solemn testimony that God lives. His kingdom is on the earth today, and it was restored through the Prophet Joseph Smith. I know the Book of Mormon is the word of God, and that it will lead souls out of darkness to behold the glory of God. I know these things because God Himself has borne witness to me by the power of the Holy Ghost, through the spirit of revelation and prophecy. I have watched Him change me and mold me into a new person, a new creature in Christ.
I invite you to read the Book of Mormon, to ponder it, and to pray about it. I promise that if you do so with "a sincere heart, with real intent" (Moroni 10:4), you will come to "know that these things whereof I have spoken are true" (Alma 5:45), as I know them.
