100 Posts and Discovering My Faith in Christ

This is the 100th article that I’ve posted on this site, and I have had remarkable experiences writing them. For my 100th post, I wanted to share how this site started, what I’ve learned, and mention some of my favorite articles.

How did it start?

I started working on this website after about 10 years of a fairly intensive study of church history, most of which was spent studying the Joseph Smith Papers.

My study of the Joseph Smith Papers

I started studying church history in February 2013.¹ Although I spent time searching the internet and reading things that were quite critical of the Church, my primary source of study was the Joseph Smith Papers. In either late February or early March 2013, I started reading the two “histories” volumes.²

The Joseph Smith Papers “is a ‘papers’ project that will publish, according to accepted documentary editing standards, documents created by Joseph Smith or by staff whose work he directed, including . . . papers received and ‘owned’ by his office, such as incoming correspondence.”³ Each series of volumes focused on a different type of record, such as journals, revelations, administrative records, etc. As I mentioned, the first volumes I started reading were the “histories” volumes.

Histories, volume 1 “presents the six personal and church histories written, dictated, or closely supervised by Joseph Smith.”⁴ Histories, volume 2 “presents four histories written by church historians by assignment from Joseph Smith.”⁵ In addition to providing the text of the histories, the printed volumes contain a significant amount of annotations that provide context for the histories. As I read these volumes, I was enthralled. I was familiar with the Joseph Smith story contained in the Pearl of Great Price (called Joseph Smith – History), but these volumes contained details and stories I had never heard. I loved it, and felt compelled to learn as much as I could.

Church history became an obsession

I loved reading those so much that it replaced what once had been my most favorite thing: video games.

That’s right, I loved playing video games. It started in elementary school when a friend in my neighborhood got an Atari. When I was in junior high, a different friend got the original Nintendo (or NES System), and I eventually convinced my parents to get one. I played it all the time. I even hooked the Nintendo up to our VCR and recorded myself playing my favorite game (Super Mario Bros. 3), and then I would watch back the recording of the game I had just played (I believe I invented video game livestreaming, except we didn’t have the internet then. I only had a VCR and a square TV). When I graduated from BYU with my undergraduate degree, my parents said they wanted to get me a graduation present, and I asked for a Nintendo 64 system. I remember my mom being surprised at that: I was now a college graduate, so why would I want a kids’ toy?

As the years went on, I continued to collect video games and video game systems. At one point, I had the most recent Nintendo (Game Cube), Xbox (Xbox 360), and Playstation (Playstation 3) systems all at the same time. This might sound weird, but I was married, had four children, and had a job as an attorney at a law firm in Salt Lake City, and even with all that, I would spend a significant amount of time every night playing video games.

When, in February 2013, I discovered church history and the Joseph Smith Papers, I started reading so much that I almost immediately stopped playing video games. I had typically played video games before going to bed. Once I started studying church history, I replaced my video game time with reading.

As time went on, I read, and read, and read. Not only was I reading the Joseph Smith Papers, but I started looking up and reading original sources that were mentioned in the Joseph Smith Papers, such as the Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt, The History of Joseph Smith by His Mother (Lucy Mack Smith), the Life of Joseph Smith the Prophet by George Q. Cannon, Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith, and many others. I also read original works that were negative or critical of Joseph Smith, such as An Address to All Believers in Christ by David Whitmer, Mormonism Unvailed by Eber Howe, Manuscript Found by Solomon Spaulding (which itself didn’t have anything to do with the Church, but was used in other works to raise questions regarding the origin of the Book of Mormon), and many others.

In addition to reading these books, I was also studying the scriptures more than I had for several years. I bought a new “quad,” and studied every night. I finished the standard works in about two years, while also reading the Joseph Smith Papers and other church history books. After those two years, I was amazed at how much I had read simply by replacing my video game time with reading. To this day, I wonder what I could have learned if I had spent my free time reading instead of playing video games.

I collected the printed volumes of the Joseph Smith Papers

In November 2013, we moved to Farmington. Not long after we started attending our new ward, I met Rob Jensen, one of the editors of the Joseph Smith Papers. Rob was able to get me on a pre-reading list for new printed volumes. The editors of the Joseph Smith Papers believed that the volumes sold better if there were reviews posted at the time the volumes were released, so they sent some people paperback copies to read and post reviews. Over several years, I received paperback copies of several volumes before they were released, and would then read them and post reviews.⁶ That forced me to actually read them. I was happy to have the paper copies, but I wanted to have the original collection in hardback, so I started looking for used copies. I eventually found an estate sale, and bought all the hardback volumes at a reduced price.

Because I was receiving these books to review them, I was actually reading them. I absolutely loved it. Several people have seen my collection of the Joseph Smith Papers, and ask, “Have you really read those?” My answer is, yes, I’ve read them all (except for the last couple of volumes, which I’ve just skimmed). In addition to reading these paper volumes, I’ve also done research on the Joseph Smith Papers website (josephsmithpapers.org), which has a lot more information than the printed volumes. I love the “reference” tab, which has information about people, places, and events; the “media” tab, which has videos, photographs, charts, maps, and podcasts. The podcasts are tremendous, with several episodes about the First Vision, the Priesthood, the Nauvoo Temple, Kirtland, and Carthage.

The last volume, and “what should I do?”

The final printed volume, Documents, Volume 15, came out in June 2023. The day it came out, I bought it and completed my collection.

I took this picture the day I bought the last volume. I remember sliding that volume onto my shelf, and feeling an overwhelming sense of gratitude.

For more than 10 years prior to that day (June 27, 2023), I had been studying church history, primarily using these books and the Joseph Smith Papers website. I learned a significant amount about the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

But more importantly, I had discovered my faith in Jesus Christ. I knew that gaining knowledge was important, and I wanted to learn as much as I could, but through this process of studying church history, I also learned that to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, I had to choose to exercise faith. On that day when I bought that final volume, I felt gratitude to my Heavenly Father and my Savior for their mercy and patience with me. I was grateful to Joseph Smith for his sacrifices and his role in establishing the Lord’s church. I was grateful to the Church for preserving these records and making them available. I was grateful to those who worked on this project. And I was grateful that I had chosen to exercise faith in Jesus Christ, which, more than anything, changed the course of my life.

But amazingly, as I was looking at my collection of Joseph Smith Papers and feeling that sense of gratitude, it slowly changed, and I started to feel almost empty. I had gained so much knowledge, but what would I do with it? I wanted to use it somehow, but what could I do? My feelings in that moment were similar to how I had imagined people felt in the scriptures when they asked, “what shall I do?”⁷

And that’s when I had the thought that I could post what I had learned on a website. During those years that I had studied church history, I spent a lot of time on the internet trying to find information, and I frequently ran across writings by people who were critical of the Church. I thought that if I posted faithful articles about church history, maybe there would be people who would find my site as they tried to find answers to their own questions, and hopefully, my experiences would help them discover their own faith. So, I started this site.

The articles almost wrote themselves

I posted my first article on June 27, 2023, titled “What is True?” Between that first post and February 4, 2024, I posted seventy (70) articles (that’s an average of 1 post every 3 days). I saved each article as a PDF for my records, and when I combine those PDFs, I get a document with 671 pages. During those eight months, I couldn’t seem to write fast enough. I knew what I wanted to write, and I felt an urgency to get as much out as fast as I possibly could.

In February 2024, I got a new calling that has taken up quite a bit more of my time, so the writing has slowed down, but I have continued to write. It has taken me almost two years to write these last thirty (30) articles (and my PDFs of those last articles total 375 pages). But during that time, there were other developments that have dramatically improved the quality of this site.

I have some friends who have started posting their own work. Casey Mortensen has written ten articles, Jeff Mulitalo has written four, and Stu Sondrup has written two. This is my 100th article, but there are a lot more posts than that because of the contributions of my friends. We have talked quite a bit about this site, and I love that I have friends who are dedicated to helping people discover faith in Christ.

My favorite posts

I’m proud of all my articles, but there are a few posts that I am most pleased with:

My favorite posts are those that pertain to the sacrament. In 2020, when we stopped attending church meetings for a while due to the Covid pandemic, I wanted to learn more about the sacrament. I studied the scriptures for several years, focused primarily on learning more about the covenants we make when we partake of the sacrament and the blessing of the gift of the Holy Ghost. I wrote fifteen (15) articles about what I learned during that study. Those articles are listed in my final post about the sacrament:

The Sacrament: Conclusion

My work on learning more about the sacrament has significantly influenced my discipleship, and so I have continued to write about the blessing of the sacrament, such as the following post:

Drawing the Power of Jesus Christ into Our Lives

My favorite thing about this site

I have favorite posts, but even more than what I’ve written, I’m pleased with my footnotes.

That may sound strange, but while I was studying church history, I noticed how infrequently people referred to sources. The Joseph Smith Papers cites absolutely everything. But the random, general statements online rarely reference or cite any sources. They say, “did you know,” or “Joseph Smith said,” or a myriad of other introductory phrases, without providing any sources or references backing up their statements. I have made a significant effort to provide references for everything I write, and I have tried to provide hyperlinks to those sources so people can study and learn for themselves. For example, my “Oliver Cowdery” post is a brief biographical sketch of his life, and I have 104 footnotes listing the sources where I found the information. That post was a significant amount of work, and I wanted to make sure everything I wrote was accurate and referenced a historical source.

My hope

I have learned a great deal in my efforts to write the articles I post on this site. I love doing it, and the work to write the articles is worth more to me than the final product. But I hope that what my friends and I are doing with this site will benefit more people than just us. I hope that people struggling with their faith will find this site, and perhaps find reasons to move forward in faith. I hope that people trying to find answers to difficult questions will read something here that will either provide an answer, or maybe help them know what they can do to find their own answers. I hope that this site can help people discover their faith in Christ.

I love working on this site, and I’m looking forward to writing my next 100 articles.

References

See my post “What Does it Mean to Choose Faith in Christ?” for details about why I started studying church history. ↩︎
Histories, Volume 1 and Histories, Volume 2 were published in 2012. ↩︎
Joseph Smith Papers, “About the Project,” https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/articles/about-the-project. ↩︎
Joseph Smith Papers, “Histories, Volume 1: Joseph Smith Histories, 1832–1844,” https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/articles/histories-volume-1-joseph-smith-histories-1832-1844. ↩︎
Joseph Smith Papers, “Histories, Volume 2: Assigned Histories, 1831–1847,” https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/articles/histories-volume-2-assigned-histories-1831-1847. ↩︎
I reviewed the following: Documents, Volume 7, on April 5, 2018; Revelations and Translations, V. 4: Book of Abraham, on October 30, 2018; Documents, Volume 8, on May 13, 2019; Documents, Volume 9, on October 8, 2019; Documents, Volume 10, on May 4, 2020; Documents, Volume 12, on April 27, 2021. ↩︎
Acts 2:37; Alma 22:15. ↩︎