Guest Post by Sarah. Sarah lives in the Salt Lake area with her dog and like to sew.

Recent conversations about church leadership potentially cracking down on discussions of Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Parents and encouraging the idea of conditional love for God’s children have had my head spinning and my heart breaking and prompted me to tell the story of my current understanding of and relationship to my Heavenly Family and Heavenly Mother and how I got here. It’s a very personal story to me and isn’t something I have ever shared in its entirety, just bits and pieces with friends.

Basically, I’m sure of three things about God right now:

God wants us to be happy
God wants us to love one another
God loves all their children

The rest is details. I don’t believe God cares too much about how we view God. I think a God that requires a specific view of God is a small God. A God that can be damaged by someone making a joke is a small God. I believe that God loves their children. That God is not just male. I don’t know if God is all genders and none, or if God is made up of multiple Heavenly Parents, but I’m also not sure it matters. I think what matters most is that God’s children feel God’s strength and support when they need it. Sometimes I’ve felt like God is male, but when I’ve needed comfort these last few years, I’ve experienced a feminine divine. I don’t believe it is anyone’s place to tell others that they’re experiencing God wrong. To tell them that their experiences aren’t valid.

In early 2019 I prayed to receive an answer to a personal question that had been causing me pain for a long time: where should I look for a partner? I was 35. I hadn’t had a date in a decade. I was sat in a room of mostly single women like me. I was unhappy. I was attending my fourth singles ward in four years. I’d tried family wards but at that point they all served as a reminder of what I lacked, what I felt I wasn’t good enough to deserve. When the sacrament hymn finished I had one of the clearest impressions I’ve ever received: don’t look here, you won’t find what you’re looking for at church. I cried for the rest of the meeting. I cried for days. I prayed for comfort, I prayed to know why, and my Heavenly Mother said in my heart, softly and gently, that a temple wedding won’t make me happy. I was still sad, but I felt peace. She was looking out for my happiness. I continued to attend that ward. I continued to not feel like I belonged. I felt my Mother beside me as I stood up and said that God loved my queer and trans sisters as much as they loved me, as I testified of Their unconditional love for their children, for Their desire for their children to be happy and to love each other, to not cause harm to one another.

Several months later, as I was driving home, I saw the moon, huge and round, sitting between the mountains. I rounded a bend and there She was, shining down on the world, and I felt my Mother’s love. It was such an intense moment. I was minding my own business, driving down the freeway, listening to music, and then suddenly my Mother’s love surrounded me and covered me in moonlight and I felt more loved than I had in weeks. It’s been more than two years, but I still feel Her love in the moonlight. I lay in my bed, with the curtains flung wide, huddled in the dark, scared and alone, and then I look to the window and see Her there, and know I’m loved, that someone believes I’m worthy and deserving of love.

I’m largely distant from the institutional church these days, but I still find comfort in prayer, in scripture, in private devotion, and I feel loved when I walk under a full moon, or see a winking sliver in the sky.

This story doesn’t have a happy ending, because it isn’t over yet. I’m still single. I still feel alone. I still feel alienated from my family and from the faith tradition of my childhood. But in Her light, I feel peace.

This post is part of a series, Contemplating Heavenly Mother. Find more from this series here.