Transcript

I think when you grow up without any kind of religious upbringing or context to what's going on in your life, you can rely on science a great deal. And science can provide a lot of answers. And it can feel like you know a lot about what's going on in the world and how the world works and so on. But when it comes to the deeper things, when it comes to what your life's really about, what the purpose of it is, why you're here, what suffering is really about and what that means, science has fairly few answers. And so, I always kind of felt like-- when I thought about what happens when you die, I felt like that was a really empty area. That was an area where I didn't have answers at all. And I always felt like there probably was something I could ever imagine, just life ending and ceasing to exist and to be a conscious person. I had a girlfriend who was a member of the Church. And she clearly believed in these things very strongly. She was an intelligent person. She could talk to me about science and everything else that I believed in very knowledgeably and intelligibly. But at the same time, she had these very strong spiritual convictions, these strong beliefs that were based on something else. Based on faith. And that made me curious, which made me ask a lot of questions. I wanted to know for myself. I wanted to be able to know whether these things were true that had been presented to me. And so, I had to then go through the process of finding out whether these things were true. What they were, first of all, but then whether I could get a confirmation through the Spirit that these things were true. I found praying difficult because I hadn't really prayed before ever in a real way, a personal prayer. I found reading the scriptures difficult, because I found that I was constantly in my mind challenging the things that I was reading saying, is this really true? Can I believe this? This seems somehow unreal. Could somebody have written this in modern times rather than it being an ancient record? And so, I really struggled with the process. But over time, I decided that I had to try that. That that was the only way to get the answer. And so I had to stick with it. I had to stick with praying even though it was difficult. But the way my mind works, once I had felt the Spirit confirming to me that some aspect of the Church was true, then I knew everything else must fall into place as well. I now have a sense of purpose, that I know why I'm here. And that kind of guides a lot of what I do in my life. It means that I'm going to be honest, that I want to be the kind of person that people can look at and say, this person must believe something that makes them act this way and makes them live this way, so that I could share what I'd received. Jan was born London, England, and baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in November 1995. He now lives outside Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife and daughter, where he works as a telecom analyst.

Purpose of Life—Jan

Description
Jan talks about the purpose of life.
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