Below is the text of a talk I gave at my stake conference last night.
I am an optimist by nature. In spiritual terms, I was given the gift of hope. While I believe that in my case much of the hope I experience is indeed a gift from my Heavenly Parents, it is also the result of many experiences. As the hymn Be Still, My Soul beautifully teaches: “Be still, my soul: Thy God doth undertake / To guide the future as he has the past / Thy hope, thy confidence let nothing shake / All now mysterious shall be bright at last.”
At the age of 30 it felt like my life was over. How could I ever be happy as a gay Latter-day Saint? The future didn’t just feel mysterious, it felt bleak and hopeless. I spent some precious moments with my parents discussing my options and much time praying and searching the scriptures. If you had told me then, five years ago, that I’d be where I am now and doing what I’m doing, and that I’d be loving life more than ever before, I would have said you were crazy. A happy, thriving life just didn’t seem possible. There was no big revelation. No moment when my future was unfolded before my eyes. As the Lord said: “I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little…” (2 Nephi 28:30). My path has been guided by small nudges of the Spirit, often facilitated by the counsel of loved ones, that pushed me in the right direction.
Almost three years ago I was beginning the final year of a PhD program at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I started looking for jobs as a Spanish professor which is what I had trained to do. Every time I searched for jobs I felt sick to my stomach. Then one day my friend Reyna asked me to proofread a letter of intent she had written for a master’s in social work program. As I read the letter I felt an undeniable nudge from the Spirit to also pursue a master’s in social work. It was odd and unexpected. I drove two hours to the Gilbert, AZ temple to seek inspiration and felt the Spirit confirm within those sacred walls what I had already felt in my home—I needed to do a master’s in social work at BYU.
It was a very embarrassing thing to do, to get a PhD in one field and then immediately get a master’s in another. People accused me (in jest, I hope) of being an eternal student and not knowing what I wanted to do with my life. But that wasn’t it at all. I was simply obeying what I had felt prompted to do.
The last two years since I started and finished my MSW at BYU have been two of the most remarkable years of my life. The experiences I’ve had, the people I’ve met, and the things I have learned are well worth the embarrassment I felt, the rigorous assignments, the boring readings, and the tuition I paid. God guided me to the place I needed to be. As Proverbs 3 teaches: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all they ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths” (Proverbs 3:5-6).
In August 2017, the week before I moved to Provo, the Church expanded who was eligible to volunteer as a temple ordinance worker. The expansion included single men over 30 like me. I had wanted to be a temple worker for years, but had always rationalized that I was too busy and would do it later. At the age of 33 I called my dad who had spent 11 years as an ordinance worker in the Seattle temple. He is an incredibly pragmatic man so when I asked him if I should work in the temple while also doing a full-time master’s program at BYU I expected him to say, “You don’t have time right now. Focus on your studies. You can be a temple worker later.” But that’s not what he said. He went
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