Opposite Reaction

by Stephanie Radford

My testimony was already a little wobbly. Then I found the anti-LDS flier on my windshield.

At 4:30 A.M. my alarm went off as usual. I reached over and shut it off as I do every morning. I sat up in the dark and asked myself why I do this to myself every morning. After I was done complaining about how stupid early-morning seminary was, I got up and got ready to go.

Just like every day, I arrived five minutes late and sat in a seat in the back row farthest from the teacher. It seemed that lately my testimony had been going down the tubes. Things had not been going right. My grades had been suffering. I thought that if I were living right then everything else in my life should be good too.

As I sat in the back, not listening to the lesson, I began to wonder if the Church was really true. The thought scared me. I was worried that the things I had been taught all my life were wrong. It made me afraid. Right there in class, I started praying mentally to my Father in Heaven for help. I was asking him for help in finding out if the Church was true or not.

By this time, I had totally tuned out of the lesson being taught. Finally seminary was over. My brother and I were getting in my car when I noticed a piece of paper on the windshield. I took it and saw that it was from another church down the street. At first I thought it was an advertisement. I opened the paper and in big bold letters at the top it said, “In Which Shall We Believe?” I began reading it. It was a list of scriptures and quotations from the Book of Mormon and other Church books and leaders that seemed to contradict each other.

We took the paper home to my parents. We went straight to them and told them we got this anti-Mormon flier on our windshield. They read through it. We talked for a few minutes about one of the statements, which Mom helped answer for me. Then my parents put the paper on the desk. We had to leave for school.

A couple of days later, I took the other church’s flier and started reading through it. I started looking up each quotation in the scriptures and in other books. The paper was wrong. I found that the statements did not contradict each other. The people who had prepared the flier had only taken part of the scripture or part of a quotation. This made me remember what one of my Primary teachers had told me. She said, “Read the scriptures as a whole and not a part.”

I knelt down beside my bed and prayed. I asked Heavenly Father if the Church was true and if what I was reading in the Book of Mormon was correct. I said amen and stayed on my knees for a few minutes and listened. When I got up, I was totally energetic. I felt so good and so happy. I knew by how I felt that it was true. That was my answer.

Since that time I have studied the scriptures more. In a funny way I was grateful to those people who had been trying to tear down the Church. I even wrote a letter to the other church thanking them for the flier. I told them they had really helped me a lot with my testimony. Because of them, I was motivated to find out for myself. I found out it was true.

Photography by Jed Clark