I can still remember the exact spot on my back porch where I was sitting  more than 10 years ago when my best friend told me that he had received personal revelation that we were meant to be married for time and all eternity.

I was young and …utterly confused.

I had always heard that you are supposed to marry your best friend, so you would think that hearing my best friend of 3 years tell me in detail about a prophetic dream he had had, and how it explicitly stated that we were to be wed, and then followed it all up by saying he had awoken from this dream still burning with the spirit of confirmation, I would have been over the moon with joy.

Not so much.

While I loved my dear friend deeply, I was not in love with him, nor had been in the entire 3 years we had known one another. Of course I had tried to have those feelings for him. I had even gone so far as to give a good ol’ fashioned make-out a try (once), but wasn’t able to get much past the first kiss because kissing him felt a lot like what I would imagine kissing my brother would have been like.  I don’t say this to be cruel, in all honesty I knew that he would have made an absolutely incredible husband to me in many ways. It was for those  very reasons and more that I found myself in a deep internal struggle on the matter.

I was raised to believe in the Priesthood and Priesthood power, including that of Divine Revelation.  I knew that personal revelation existed, but to date, I had never personally experienced it. I never had any kind of prophetic dream, or whisperings in my ear, or even  any overwhelmingly strong feelings or inclinations for or against something to which  I could attribute to anything other than my own desires on the subject.  I was pretty good at knowing whether or not I wanted something, but so far as I could tell, I was total rubbish at figuring out what God wanted for me and my life. This would have been fine if I didn’t care about what God wanted for me, but the truth of the matter was that I have always cared more about what God wanted for me than what I thought I wanted. He is God after all. He knows everything, and everything includes what would be best for me. Because I never felt confident in receiving solid personal revelation in my life, and because I was terrified of making the wrong choice , I did what many LDS folk do and relied on the authorities to inform me of Gods will for me and my life, and to me the authorities were men who held the priesthood.

When I was in my early 20’s I felt the strong desire to serve a full-time mission. It was one of the rare occasions in my life when I felt as though I was being led or prompted towards a certain direction. When I told my bishop about my plans he looked at me with all of the love and wisdom he could muster and informed me that there are two kinds of girls in this world, those that will have an opportunity to get married, and those who won’t. He went on to explain to me that I was part of the former group, and that missions were mostly meant for those who fell into the latter category. It took me a moment to realize what he was saying exactly, but once I did the message was clear, at least to me…

A. You are too viable marriage wise to serve a mission

B. God wants you to stay here and get married…Leave missions to those “other” girls.

I was heartbroken, confused, and relieved.

Heartbroken because this was something that I earnestly wanted for my life and now it would appear that it wasn’t in the cards for me. Confused because I had truly felt as though I had received a personal confirmation that God also wanted this for me and my life, and yet now I had to believe that I had been wrong somehow in my interpretation. Relieved because as I stated before, I believed thoroughly in priesthood authority. If the Bishop is given stewardship over his congregation then of course this would have included me, and if he says that a mission is a no-go for the sake of marriage, then that must mean that marriage is just on the horizon.

I never went on my mission, and to date, I have never been married.

So what is the moral to be learned here? How are we to interpret revelation? What happens when our personal revelation is in conflict with the revelation of another person? Does anything change if that person so happens to be in a position of authority?

Part of the issue I had when my best friend told me we were supposed to be married, was the fact that I didn’t trust my own revelation. As strange as it might sound, even though there was no part of me that wanted to marry him, I still seriously considered doing it simply because I believed that he was receiving revelation that I was not privy to for whatever reason. I wondered if maybe God was testing me and my faith, and I thought that maybe if I just married him that on the day of our wedding all of those feelings I had never felt for him (including sexual attraction) would magically appear.

I know I am not the only one who has had experiences like this. I have heard my friends tell stories about boyfriends/girlfriends who have claimed to have received a personal witness that they were meant to be together forever. In most cases this usually sends the receiver of this message screaming in the opposite direction, but occasionally you come across a person like me who gives these claims a lot of perhaps misplaced credibility. I do know people personally who have made major life choices based upon the counsel of what they believed to be a priesthood authority. Whether that was the right or wrong thing to do in their case is not for me to say. All I can do, all any of us can do is to weigh out all of the variables in our own minds and make the best decision we can.

As you might have already guessed, I didn’t marry my friend. Not too long after that he ended up meeting an amazing girl who he later married, and now they are living happily with their beautiful children, and so far as I can tell, he is indeed an incredible husband and father.

For me, the choice to not marry my friend was what I believed was best for me. Is it possible that God intended for us to be together? I suppose, but then again, I also believe that the whole reason God gave us agency, experiences, and a fully functional brain was so that we could make decisions for ourselves about what is best for our own lives. This is not to say that we throw revelation that comes from outside of ourselves out the window, again, it is about weighing all of the variables and then making the choice you believe is best.  It is possible that when you  receives personal revelation that also includes another person,  God is in essence telling you that something might be a good choice for your life, but that it has nothing to do with whether it will be the best choice for the other party involved.

Above all things it is apparent that God values agency. He values it so much that an entire war was waged over it. He values it so much that He sent His precious Son to suffer and die for it. If agency is that important to God, then perhaps we should spend a little more time teaching our children and one another to weight and value of their own revelation. Respect your leaders, respect the mantle, but never feel as though you must forgo your own inspirations, desires, revelations simply because you believe that they might somehow outrank you spiritually.

Everyone is entitled to a personal relationship with God, and if ever you find yourself in a situation where you feel as though someone is trying to undermine that relationship, and by doing so, relieve you of your agency, gently remind them of who’s plan that was in the first place, and then do what you feel is right for you.