I remember vividly my first “faith crisis.” I was 14 or 15 years old. It centered on my desire to receive for myself, independent of my mother, a testimony of the Book of Mormon. Except for a period of rebellion when she left the moorings of her youth and wandered in the wilderness for a season, she was a believing, committed Latter-day Saint and the godliest woman I knew. The solid base of her faith was the Book of Mormon, which restored her to her roots and anchored her there for the rest of her life. I can’t recall a day when I did not see that book lying on her bed stand or on the lamp table next to her chair. I started reading the Book of Mormon fully expecting that its concluding promise would be fulfilled in my life as it had been in my mother’s. I was filled with Alma’s “desire to believe” (Alma 32:27). I wanted my own tree.
