Midst of Heaven

The Witness

For most of my life, I was searching for heaven.

I believed there was something I needed to become, something I needed to prove, and somewhere I ultimately needed to arrive. Raised within Mormonism, I learned to understand my life through a framework of faithfulness, worthiness, obedience, personal revelation, and eternal progression. I sincerely believed in that framework and spent much of my life trying to live it correctly.

By the time I encountered A Marvelous Work and a Wonder^®, however, much of that foundation had already collapsed. My experiences within organized religion—and later within another attempt to find Zion outside of it—had left me questioning many of the explanations I had once trusted.

I was no longer convinced that all was well in Zion.

But I had never abandoned the Book of Mormon.

Whatever conclusions I had reached about the LDS Church, the Book of Mormon continued to hold a unique place for me. Because it had prepared me for the possibility that additional records would someday come forth, when I encountered a claim concerning The Sealed Portion, I was willing to examine it.

I began with the Book of Lehi.

What I found was not another religion asking me to join it. Instead, I encountered a case against religion itself.

That got my attention.

My own experiences had already given me reasons to question religious institutions and authority, but the Work did something unexpected. It did not lead me away from the Book of Mormon. It pointed me back into it—and toward other things I had already encountered repeatedly, particularly the biblical account of Adam and Eve as it is portrayed in the LDS temple endowment.

Christopher drew my attention to truths that had been there all along, yet I had overlooked their implications.

The startling part was not discovering something I had never known. It was being confronted with what something I had known all along actually meant.

I had spent far more time asking, Am I doing this correctly? Rather than stopping to ask, Does this actually make sense?

Once I began asking the second question, a great deal changed.

One of the most consequential changes involved the way I understood my relationship with God and what I had previously called personal revelation.

For most of my life, I believed I had some degree of personal connection to the divine. I prayed for answers. I looked for guidance. I interpreted dreams. I searched for meaning in experiences and sometimes believed I was being directed through them.

The Real Truth^® challenged that understanding profoundly.

It asked me to consider that what I had understood as communication or guidance from somewhere outside myself might instead have been coming from me—my own thoughts, hopes, fears, expectations, imagination, pride, and ego.

That realization was not immediately liberating.

It was destabilizing.

If I had been supplying some of those answers myself, then I also had to reconsider choices and experiences I had interpreted while believing I was being guided. For a time, losing that framework felt like losing my compass.

Eventually, however, I discovered something much more grounding.

Reality.

The Real Truth^® continually brings me back to what I can actually observe and examine. What do my senses tell me? What happened? What evidence do I actually have? What do I believe? What am I adding to it?

And when I reach the boundary of what I have access to, I can say something that once would have been extraordinarily difficult for me:

I don’t know.

That does not mean there is no answer. It means I do not possess it.

I no longer have to fill every unanswered space with an explanation, a sign, a dream, another person’s interpretation, or my own imagination.

That has changed more than the way I examine spiritual experiences. It has changed the way I examine myself.

For much of my life, my existence felt like an endless self-improvement project aimed toward some future heavenly outcome.

Be good.

Be worthy.

Be obedient.

Be faithful.

Be Christ-like.

Sacrifice. Endure. Repent. Improve. Become.

Those expectations landed upon a foundation that had been forming in me since childhood: the belief that there was something wrong with me and that somehow I needed to prove otherwise.

So I measured.

I measured my worthiness, my faithfulness, my choices, my mistakes, my relationships, my role as a mother, my spirituality, and eventually almost everything about myself.

I was so busy trying to determine whether I measured up that I rarely thought to question the measuring stick itself.

The Work did not magically make that tendency disappear. I still catch myself reaching for the ruler. I can still hear something challenging and immediately wonder whether I am doing something wrong, misunderstanding something, or failing in some way.

But now I can see it.

And increasingly, I can put the ruler back down.

I do not need to prove that I am a good person. That does not mean my behavior no longer matters. In many ways, it matters more because I understand myself as responsible for my own choices.

The question has simply changed.

Instead of constantly asking what my choices prove about me, I am learning to pay closer attention to what my choices actually do.

How do I treat another human being?

Do my actions contribute to another person’s happiness or misery?

Am I treating others the way they would want to be treated?

The Real Truth^® has also changed the way I understand human value. I no longer believe our value rises and falls according to worthiness, belief, identity, status, obedience, or the mistakes we make. Whatever differences exist between us, we share the same fundamental human value.

That recognition has required me to examine not only the judgments I have placed upon others, but the judgments I have placed upon myself.

Perhaps one of the most difficult changes has been learning to extend to myself the humanity I have always been much quicker to extend to everyone else.

None of this means I have arrived somewhere.

I haven’t.

I still question. I still misunderstand. I still catch myself measuring. I still encounter things within the Work that challenge me, confuse me, and occasionally knock me sideways.

What has changed is not that I finally have all the answers.

It is that I am learning to live without requiring myself to have them—and without turning my entire existence into an endless attempt to prove that I am worthy of some future heavenly outcome.

For years I wondered who I would be without all of that.

Who am I without Mormonism?

Who am I without striving?

Who am I without the roles, expectations, measuring, or some special destiny I am supposed to fulfill?

I no longer know that I need an answer.

Just Robyn.

Not as another identity I need to define or defend. Not as a final destination.

I am.

And perhaps, for now, that is enough.

There is one claim I do make deliberately.

I believe Christopher is the true messenger.

I use the word believe intentionally.

I do not claim to know something I do not know. My belief is a conclusion I have reached through my own observations, experiences, study, and examination of the information presented through A Marvelous Work and a Wonder^®. To claim more knowledge than I possess would not strengthen my testimony. It would make it less honest.

When I first encountered Christopher, something about him felt immediately familiar to me. I cannot explain that experience, and I no longer need to. More important was what followed. I listened. I examined. I questioned. I compared what I was learning against sources I already valued and against my own experiences and observations.

And I kept examining.

I believe Christopher’s claim concerning his role as the true messenger and the source of the intelligence he presents. But ultimately, my witness is not about Christopher the man.

It is about the message.

I can bear witness to what engaging with the Real Truth^® has done to the way I understand and experience my own existence.

It has given me a framework through which I understand who I am, where I came from, why I am here, my relationship to every other human being sharing this experience, and what ultimately matters in the way we treat one another.

It has challenged beliefs I once considered unquestionable. It has required me to reconsider assumptions I had carried for decades. It has shown me things about myself I have not always enjoyed seeing.

And it continues to ground me.

I do not have to reach into the unseen for an answer I do not possess.

I do not have to turn every experience into a message.

I do not have to make imagination into reality.

I do not have to prove myself.

I can observe.

I can examine.

I can choose.

I can change when I have reason to.

I can believe.

And I can say, I don’t know.

My purpose in sharing this testimony is not to persuade anyone else to reach my conclusions. Those conclusions belong to each of us individually.

This is simply what I can bear witness to today.

I spent most of my life searching for heaven.

In the midst of searching for heaven, I finally found the ground beneath my feet.

Thank you for taking the time to read my story. 🩷

If anything I’ve shared here leaves you with questions, or if you’d simply like to talk, you’re always welcome to reach out.

Robyn Lea Walter
307-448-0115
rockinrobynlea@gmail.com