I thought the gospel is supposed to make me happy

A message for anyone who, like me, does not have a spiritual experience in every sacrament meeting.

Have you ever heard the Jerry Seinfeld standup bit about how excited people are in commercials? They’re jumping around, they’re having a great time, they’re so excited to have a certain brand of soda or whatever. I particularly like this part:

Have you ever been standing there and you're watching TV and you're drinking the exact product that they're advertising right there on TV, and it's like, you know, they're spiking volleyballs, jetskiing, girls in bikinis and I'm standing there— "Maybe I'm putting too much ice in mine?"

Soda is one thing, church is another. But church is full of people telling me how much joy they get from the gospel. It’s joy and happiness! All day long! These people are bursting out of bed in the morning, full of joy. Their kids are all standing in a row, with their hair neatly combed, raised on VeggieTales and a steady stream of raw, unadulterated joy.

We teach in the Church that this happiness comes from the gospel, and that the recipe for getting it is simple. Below are the titles of some General Conference talks over the years; each one has an arrestingly straightforward and simple solution. If we take these decades of teaching at face value, happiness will come from any one or several from the list, including full conversion, the atonement, gratitude, temple work, patience, having a father who cares, selflessness, service, prayer, faith, or family:

• Full Conversion Brings Happiness

• The Atonement Can Secure Your Peace and Happiness

• Gratitude: A Path to Happiness

• The Joy of Living the Great Plan of Happiness

• True Happiness: A Conscious Decision

• Happiness and Joy in Temple Work

• Patience, a Key to Happiness

• Happiness Is Having a Father Who Cares

• Selflessness: A Pattern for Happiness

• Happiness through Service

• Prayer, Faith, and Family: Stepping-Stones to Eternal Happiness

But my experience is that the gospel is not so cut-and-dried, not so cause-and-effect as we make it out to be. “Do X and you will be happy” is a really difficult assertion to make, and yet we do it all the time from our sacrament meeting pulpits. Enormous blessings are promised for reading your scriptures, praying, doing your ministering, paying tithing… really, just about anything. Happiness is sold as being not only available to each of us, but nearly unavoidable to those who live the gospel.

The reality is that not every day is all happiness and joy. Most Sundays go by without me having a spiritual experience in sacrament meeting. Lots of prayers don't seem to leave the room they're said in. Sometimes General Conference talks seem like I've heard them before. I enjoy reading the scriptures, but my head is often somewhere else when I do.

Despite how they’re taught, these things usually aren’t a straight line to happiness. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m doing them wrong. Like Jerry said, maybe I’m putting too much ice in mine.

And just like the soda commercial bit, it’s the same when I see something online where someone has, say, lost a lot of weight—simply by quitting doing something that I already do not do. “I lost 30 pounds by quitting drinking alcohol”—I don’t drink alcohol. “I lost 25 pounds when I stopped eating fast food every day”—I don’t eat fast food very often. And somehow, the fact that I don’t do those things doesn’t make me skinny. If all of these miracle, single-solution weight loss tips worked for everyone, then we’d all be dropping weight all over the place. We wouldn’t be able to keep it on.

The analogy here is when I hear new convert stories about someone joining the Church, and how it filled them with light. How they suddenly felt encircled in the arms of God’s love. How that happiness and joy has, apparently, become a constant companion. I don’t doubt these new members’ experience. But I’m already a member of the Church—why am I not feeling that love and that light and that forgiveness all the time? How is it that my days just feel normal most of the time?

I deeply appreciate that President Gordon B. Hinckley was willing to say the quiet part out loud:

Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he has been robbed.

Most putts don’t drop. Most beef is tough. Most children grow up to be just people. Most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration. Most jobs are more often dull than otherwise.¹

Really, this seems to be a core principle of the plan of salvation. We specifically chose a plan that would cause us to forget our pre-mortal existence, and have to cobble together our spiritual knowledge from the bits and pieces we encounter during our journey here. This is undoubtedly the plan we wanted, even though (and possibly because) it included pain, struggling, and even just days that are flat and uninspiring.²

I recently read it framed this way, in the book The Power of Stillness:

A couple who had spent most of their lives as active Latter-day Saints asked to meet privately with their local leader about some spiritual concerns: "Is this it, Bishop? Is this all we can expect?"

Despite doing all they thought they were supposed to do, this couple struggled to feel the peace and contentment that many others in the ward seemed to find. But why? Compared to those experiencing a greater depth of joy in the gospel, why do some come to feel so much less nourished in their walk of faith, while still others experience deep conflict and pain?³

And then a few pages later, more relevant questions—but while these questions are focused on ministering to others, we should ask them about ourselves:

Could it be that, in many cases, people are walking away not simply from the Church or the gospel itself, but instead from an impoverished, depleted experience of the same? If that's true, how can we better support and minister to individuals who find themselves spiritually sapped and hollowed out (or on the path to getting there soon)?⁴

I relate to these questions; there have been times when elements of my spiritual practice have felt “impoverished” and “depleted.” Even when I do these things exactly by the book—church attendance, scripture reading, prayer, etc.—sometimes they don't bring me the joy that is promised when we live the gospel.

But that's exactly it. Trying to live the gospel in a one-size-fits-all way is bound to not fit some people.

The change to an explicitly “home-centered, Church-supported” emphasis in 2019 was important. It abdicates the Church’s responsibility for our individual salvation and gives it back to us.⁵ It quite literally puts church meetings in the backseat relative to our own spiritual practice, which is now front and center. In other words, it’s up to each of us to decide what worship means, and what our relationship with Divinity will look like. The Church is simply here to help with that. Church-supported.

With that freedom in how we worship, we are allowed—encouraged! exhorted!—to find spiritual practices that work for us, even if they’re not what we’ve always been taught in Church. Home-centered; this is the “home” part. We are in charge of our own spirituality, and how we grow it.

This became real for me when I realized that the way I’d been taught to read the scriptures doesn’t really work for me. I’ve always been taught that I should read some amount of the scriptures every day—at least one chapter, or 5 minutes, or something like that. Every day.

But I’ve always wrestled with that approach to the scriptures. It always felt like a box to check, a to-do list item that just needs to be crossed off. Reading based on time or chapters often meant I would pick up in the middle of a scripture story or narrative, and finish my daily reading in the middle of another one. I know this method works for a lot of people, but it never consistently resulted in productive and spiritual scripture reading for me.

I had to realize, at some point, that while we are urged to read the scriptures, it’s not a sin to read them in a way that works for me—even when that’s different from how it’s most often talked about. When I study by topic, instead of for a certain number of pages or minutes, I find that I learn much more and get much more spiritually out of my scripture effort. I bounce around all of the Standard Works instead of reading one straight through. That means sometimes I don’t read the Book of Mormon every day. Sometimes my study takes me outside the Standard Works. And that’s okay.

Another example is prayer. As a missionary, I taught a lot of people—using the old flipchart—that prayer follows a certain sequence: 1) address our Heavenly Father, 2) thank Him for things, 3) ask Him for things, and 4) close in the name of Jesus Christ. And while that's a winning recipe and structure for many people, I found that I needed to approach prayer differently if I wanted to commune with God. It's a work in progress, for me. But feeling the freedom to approach prayer—and to approach God—in my own way has breathed new life into a practice that has, at times, felt depleted for me.

The rules of the game are simple: If it brings you closer to God, do it. If it doesn’t right now, then find what does.

Making these changes has been hard, because I’ve had to rethink the way I measure my own spirituality. I used to think that being righteous meant reading the scriptures every day, and praying before each meal. Those are great things to do, but those are outcomes of your spirituality; counting them and checking them off does not make you a spiritual person in and by themselves.

A colleague of mine talks about “playing work,” in a business setting. The idea is that sometimes you’re doing the core, crucial work that is going to build your business, like getting new clients or fulfilling orders. But other times you’re redesigning your logo, tinkering with your website, and updating your LinkedIn profile: all things that look and feel like work but don’t actually do anything for the business. You’re just pretending, just “playing work”—like when you played house as a kid.

If I can extend that concept, I think when we follow a checklist-style gospel, often we’re just “playing church.” We’re doing things that look a lot like living a spiritual life, but that we don’t gain anything from. It’s easy to convince ourselves that this is what we’re supposed to be doing. And sometimes those things even distract us from doing the harder, core work that builds a deep testimony and relationship with God.

Michelle Obama talked about this a different way in her book Becoming. I came across this bit in a recent At Last She Said It episode:

As a kid, you learn to measure long before you understand the size or value of anything. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you learn that you’ve been measuring all wrong.⁶

If I were to rephrase that for our Latter-day Saint conversation here, I would say that as kids, we learn about the act of “reading your scriptures every day” long before we understand the spiritual value we can get from real scripture study. We learn the behaviors first, and then if we’re lucky, we learn what those behaviors were always supposed to point us to. And find the joy that’s behind them.

One of the tender mercies of a home-centered, Church-supported gospel is that it takes the pressure off of the Sunday block to always deliver a first-rate spiritual experience. If the focus is on our own personal relationship with God, then what we do the rest of the week, and how we make that relationship a part of our day-to-day, is so much more important. Talks and lessons on Sundays become just one more thing. If a talk is bad or a lesson is unfulfilling, it’s okay. Church is a tool in our toolbox; it's not the whole toolbox.

In my experience, that’s where I find joy in the gospel—through a little bit of trial and error, in finding what works for me individually. We might need to stumble through some unproductive spiritual practices along the way, acknowledging that they’re still right for other people. And we may not find joy every time we open the scriptures or every time someone steps up to the podium on a Sunday. And that’s okay. That’s part of the plan too.

Here’s the rest of the quote that President Hinckley referenced:

Life is just like an old time rail journey… delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride.

I hope you get enough beautiful vistas and bursts of speed to keep you on the ride. Sometimes I’m not ready for how much smoke and dust there’s going to be, and how much of this mortal train journey is just passing through barren fields with the occasional tumbleweed. Sometimes people see one thing as beautiful, and I find beauty in something else entirely. At least we’re on this ride together—neither you nor I has been asked to travel alone.

Finding joy may mean changing the way we approach basic gospel concepts. It may mean leaving behind some of our established ways of doing things, to find the ways that really work for each of us.

But there is beauty and happiness and joy on this journey. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it, and someone else’s path won’t get us there. But it’s there, if we can find it.

1. President Hinckley famously said this in General Conference, but note that he is quoting someone else who originally said it.

2. And this coming from a white man, returned missionary, BYU alum. I can only imagine how much worse it must be for women, who find themselves in a church run by men; people of color, who are constantly othered in our congregations; and—heaven help us—our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters, who are constantly reminded that there are people in the Church who will not make space for them.

3. Jacob Z. Hess, Carrie Skarda, Kyle Anderson, Ty Mansfield, The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2019), 194.

4. Hess, et al., 196.

5. I'd suggest it could better be called “self-centered, Church-supported,” except that “self-centered” already means something else.

6. Michelle Obama, Becoming (New York City: Crown, 2018).