Memoirs of a Prodigal Daughter: Returning to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

By Jane Starwood

Memoirs of a Prodigal Daughter: Returning to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the story of how and why one woman left the faith at age 19 and returned at age 74, fully recommitted to serving the Lord and His people. Like many Saints, I had doubts about the Church. I'm sure I could have weathered them if I'd nourished my testimony, but instead, I let it wither and die.

 

I wrote this memoir for people like myself, Latter-day Saints who let their doubts weaken their faith. It's also for those whose loved ones have left the Church, or whose faith is wavering. No matter how much you're troubled by doubts, and no matter how long you've been away, you can come back, even after half a century.

 

In prose and poems, spiritual insights, and personal revelations, I have tried to express in this book my deep joy and gratitude for my renewed faith. My hope and my prayer is that these words might touch many hearts and lead them home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jane Starwood
• Release date: Jan 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224731404

Book preview

Memoirs of a Prodigal Daughter

Returning to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Jane Starwood

Copyright © 2023 by Jane Starwood

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

This book is not a publication of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of the Church.

This text may also be read at prodigalmemoirs.com. Available in paperback from online retailers.

Cover photo by the author.

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Contents

PREFACE

Part I: JOURNEY INTO A FAR COUNTRY

1.Acquainted with Grief

2.A Great Mist of Darkness

3.Tempest Tossed

4.Trials & Tribulations

Part II: YET A GREAT WAY OFF

5.A Light in the Darkness

6.Heavy Laden

7.Stumbling Blocks

8.Sorrow & Grace

Part III: THE PRODIGAL RETURNS

9.Living Water

10.Obedience & Disobedience

11.Sacrifice & Hope

12.Coming to Zion

About the Author

Also by Jane Starwood

PREFACE

Our scriptural duty to witness of the Savior and to testify of His divine Sonship has been affirmed by the prophets in our own day. We are told that the commandments are given and the gospel is proclaimed that every person might speak in the name of God the Lord, even the Savior of the world’ (D&C 1:20). —Dallin H. Oaks, Witnesses of Christ," Ensign, November 1990

***

One evening, as I walked to the first meeting of the new Ward Primary Presidency to which I had just been called as second counselor, the Holy Spirit blessed me with an astonishing impression. Suddenly I became aware that I was walking in the space between two worlds: the pre-mortal spirit world, and the post-mortal world of eternal life.

At that moment I fully comprehended the temporal and temporary nature of this earthly existence. The sidewalk beneath my feet became the strait and narrow path I followed to return to my Heavenly Father’s celestial home. Joy filled my heart and determination quickened my steps even as I wished to prolong the experience.

The vividness of the impression faded, but I’ll never forget that feeling and the understanding I gained of the eternal life and eternal glory that awaits us if we endure in faith to the end. The path is laid before us. Our task is to stay on it no matter how hard the world and the adversary try to pull us off or, if we do step off, to step back on as soon as we can. In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we call this the covenant path.

That afternoon walk took place nearly a year after I returned to the Church. Thirty-five years prior, twenty years after I fell away, I was granted a different kind of vision. At that time, I was praying to the power for good in the universe to grant me knowledge, light, and truth. I didn’t believe in a personal God, but I believed love and intelligence created and permeated all things. It was a deeper knowledge of this truth I sought.

My dream vision occurred during the twilight time between sleep and waking, when the veil between worlds can grow thin. In the vision I was standing with my back to the block-long street in the Southern California suburb where my family lived when my father died. In front of me rose the skyline of Manhattan as seen across the East River from Brooklyn, New York, where I lived at the time.

As I watched, a brilliant red-orange sun rose from behind the skyscrapers until it came to a halt high in the sky. I was staring up at it when two more identical suns, and then two more, came from behind the first one, moving apart until five suns formed a circle far above me. After a moment they melded into a ring and then burst into a billion, billion sparkling shards of light.

A second later, the Manhattan skyline and the street behind me burst into identical particles of light. Then my body exploded painlessly into the same sparkling shards, joining the trillions of others in an ecstatic dance of lights against a velvet-black expanse.

My body as I had known it no longer existed, and yet I was still conscious of myself as a separate entity as I danced among the sparkling lights. I was surrounded and lifted up by infinite, incomprehensible love, which I knew was God.

My past and present had been swallowed up in an eternal dance of joy such as I had never felt before or even imagined existed, joy not of this world. I had joined with supreme intelligence and love. I had joined with All That Is. I had joined with God.

It’s taken me thirty-five years to discover the most significant meaning of that dream vision, the meaning beyond this trial of mortal life. Not long after I returned to the Church, during General Conference on April 3, 2022, Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor to President Russell M. Nelson, our beloved prophet, spoke about the highest kingdom of heaven as possessing the glory of the sun. I wrote his words in my spiritual journal.

Months later, as I reviewed my notes on that talk, I was struck by the parallel between that description and my dream vision.

Here’s what I wrote in my journal on August 22, 2022:

Q: Father, does this relate to the five exploding suns in my dream vision?

A: Yes. The joy and love you felt is the joy and love of the celestial kingdom, the joy and love of coming into My presence. Well done, Daughter.

I now realize I was granted my dream vision of oneness with God to inspire me to never stop seeking to regain that astonishing love and joy.

The purpose of this book is two-fold: to help strengthen members whose faith may be wavering, and to give hope that loved ones who have been enticed away by the world might return one day, even after half a century.

Heavenly Father used the fifty-five years I was away from His Church to teach me many things. I used the agency He gave me to turn my back on Him, but He never turned His back on me. He waited patiently and lovingly, and whenever I allowed a crack to open in my heart, He poured His love and the love of His Son into that crack, giving me experiences and insights that, through many trials and troubles, eventually drew me back to Them.

We all come into this mortal world with the Light of Christ in our souls (see Moroni 7:15-19). That light can’t be extinguished entirely, but its flame can be dampened. It can be turned down to such a faint flicker by the static of the world that we don’t know it’s there until something causes it to flare into new life. Then we might say, as in the Star Wars saga, The Force is strong in that one.

There have been times in my life when the Force has been weak in me, when the adversary fought hard to capture my immortal soul. He used the trials I faced to confuse and confound me, and he succeeded for a while. My flame flickered and almost went out, but the light and knowledge my Father fed me bit by bit stayed alive until He reclaimed me for His own.

When I was a little girl, my earthly father would mow the grass in twisting, turning paths for my older sister and me to follow. That’s an apt metaphor for my life until my Heavenly Father led me out of the maze and set my feet back on the path to eternal life and exaltation. I was His prodigal daughter, but He welcomed me home after more than half a century out in the world.

So I want to tell you this, because I know of a surety that it’s true: No matter how long you’ve been gone, no matter how much you’re troubled by doubts, it’s never too late to turn and see Him waiting there with open arms.

I don’t reveal the sacred things I share in this book — the things of my soul — to impress you. I urge you to seek your own personal revelations in all things that matter to you. My personal revelations are for me, but Heavenly Father has instructed me to share some of these precious things with you. From time to time, when I’ve doubted the wisdom of baring my soul to the whole Church and the wider world, Father reassures me, as He did on February 3, 2023, when the first draft of Memoirs of a Prodigal Daughter was nearly finished.

Here’s my journal entry from that morning:

Q: Father, I feel unsure of myself this morning, unsure that the book is as it should be. I fear I’m revealing too much that is thought by others too sacred to share. Am I doing as Thou asks of me, Father? Am I really meant to bare my soul in this book?

A: Yes, my daughter, you are doing as I ask. Only the baring of your soul in your words will reach the souls of those they are meant to reach. Do not worry over the criticisms of others. You are pleasing me.

—Thank you, Father! … Give me strength!

A: I will increase your strength and your understanding of your calling. Bold measures are needed in these last days. Be strong in me. Have faith in my purposes. I will lead you along, day by day, step by step. The book will reach far and wide and save many whose faith is wavering. Go to. Finish it. I am with thee always, to the ends of the earth. Let your voice be heard loudly and clearly.

So this is me, His prodigal daughter, striving to be bold and strong in Him, letting my voice be heard loudly and clearly. I pray that you will be among those it reaches, and I pray that you will be inspired to seek your own personal revelations to guide your daily life.

These Words

These words are weak vessels

They cannot hold the

Fulness of my heart

They spill and crack

They overflow and flood

The plains of my prayers

O Father

Strengthen my words

To match my love for Thee!

Thicken their sinews

Embolden their blood

And the marrow

Of their bones

Let me write Thee

In my heart

And the hearts

Of Thy people!

Let my words partake

Of Thy power

Let them live!

Let them move

And have their being in Thee

Father, I am Thine

Let my words be Thine also!

Part I: JOURNEY INTO A FAR COUNTRY

Introduction

Inspired by the Holy Spirit on November 22, 2022

We are all of noble birth. Every human on earth is the spirit child of God. He first formed our individual spirits from spirit elements. When we desired to come to earth to be tested and tried, He placed our spirits in bodies formed from earthly elements. We are His, and He gave us the opportunity to grow into celestial beings like Himself and like our Heavenly Mother.

The covenant path is the way He provided for us to return to Him in His celestial kingdom, to sit at His side with His Son, Jesus Christ, the co-creator of all things. The best of us, the most faithful and true, those who endure to the end, will be exalted on high, to rule and reign with Him over new worlds for all eternity.

This circular motion — from God, through our earthly trials, and back to God — is another meaning of one eternal round. The covenant path is straight and true, but our mortal trials may turn it into a maze through which we wend our way, sometimes coming to a dead end and through obedience and repentance, finding our way back to the path that leads to celestial glory. It’s meant to be hard. It’s meant to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. It’s meant to create gods.

But the covenant path has its beginning long before we come to earth as immortal spirits in mortal bodies. It begins the moment we are born as spirits, immortal beings of intelligence and love.

Love is intelligence. Intelligence is love. We may exercise our God-given agency to employ our intelligence in order to promote something other than love, even to promote anger and hate, but when we do so, we become unnatural beings, defying the purpose of our creation. If we persist in this unnatural course and do not repent, we will be cast into outer darkness at the final judgment.

Repentance is the gift of Christ’s Atonement, the greatest gift ever given. Only Jesus Christ, in all the infinite universe, could offer this great gift, because He was mortal and divine at once, in a way that no other could be: the son of mortal woman and immortal godhood. Because of His special status and His boundless love for all of creation, His willing sacrifice satisfies the demand for justice, tempering that demand with His mercy for all of us in our weakness and sin. Without Christ’s Atonement, we would be left forever in a state of misery.

To receive Christ’s mercy through His Atonement, all we need do is repent of our sins, be baptized, and set our feet on the covenant path that leads back to our true home. It is simple, but it is not easy. This world lays many snares and stumbling blocks in our path. It must be so. There must be opposition in all things because this mortal life is our trial and our test. We progressed as far as we could in the spirit realm, and then we were given the chance and the choice to come to earth, receive a mortal body, and be tested and tried to see if we were worthy of exaltation in the highest kingdom of our Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother.

We had to be brave to come here. We were given to know something of the trials we would face, but not all. Mortal life can be fully understood only in mortality. Certainly, there was strife and contention in the spirit realm, and each of us had our own personality and intelligence there.

But only in this mortal world is that fallen spirit, Lucifer, known here as Satan, or the adversary, allowed to tempt us to follow him, to choose the way of the fallen instead of the covenant path. We are given our agency so that we may choose for ourselves which way we will go, which path we will follow through this mortal existence.

But we are not left without a guide. We are born with the light of Christ embedded in our souls. If we let it, that light will lead us to the true path. Because we have the light of Christ, we instinctively know it is wrong to lie, steal, and murder. Because we have His light, we know there is something beyond ourselves and instinctively reach toward Him, toward the Savior we know is there, even if we don’t know Him yet.

His light can be dimmed by the things of the world. It can be nearly snuffed out by pride, greed, or mistreatment by others. One of the greatest sins in this world is the attempt to snuff out the light of Christ in an innocent child.

The inevitable sorrow and grief of this mortal life can also dim the light in our souls, especially if that light hasn’t been carefully nurtured by parents and other caretakers who comprehend the true nature of life and understand its eternal framework. Absent an understanding of that framework, we can be overcome by our losses and the grief that follows them. We can be led astray, into that Far Country from which it is hard to return.

Chapter one

Acquainted with Grief

Surely he has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows. —Isaiah 53: 4

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