Ashley cause a lot of folks to worry when she started dating Eric. Her mother worried. Her friends worried. People in her congregation worried. Even the bishop worried. He called Ashley to his office.
"Ashley," he cautioned, "If you marry a non-church member, you know you will not inherit eternatl exaltation."
But Ashley was not worried. She was confident that she could persuade Eric to become a Mormon. Eric had recently committed his life to Jesus Christ. He knew nearly nothing about Mormonism. He vaguely recalled some high school Sunday school sessions about the cults, but is was hard for him to see Ashley - pretty and unpretentious - as a "cultist."
Eric's decision to follow Christ had come deliberately and carefully. If Mormonism was a step beyond basic Christianity, as Ashley claimed, then it deserved a thorough examination. He still had the textbook from that Sunday school course, "Counterfeits at Your Door," and he read it with care. The book posed some serious questions about his sweetheart's church.
Ashley had never seriously questioned the teachings of her church. To question, she had been taught, indicated that she was losing her "testimony" - a conviction bestowed by the Holy Ghost that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the only true church.
Eric asked Ashley about the discrepancies among the Mormon prophecies and doctrines he had been reading about. She was defensive. "All I had ever experienced from Christians was Bible-bashing," she says. "They wanted to show me how wrong and stupid I was to believe this."
But Ashley could see that Eric was not trying to assault her religion. He merely wanted her to explain those apparent inconsistencies and contradictions. Ashley responded as she had been taught: That book was "hate literature," filled with lies and half-truths.
Ashley's mother liked Eric. He was affable and bright. He seemed a great fit for Ashley. But she was uneasy about his reluctance to join the Mormon church. Whenever Eric paid her daughter a visit, she called Ashley into a bedroom for long, whispered talks. She wanted Ashley to break off the relationship before it got too serious.
Then Eric met a former Mormon who had since become a Christian. The God of the Mormon church, he said, was not the God of the Bible. During a four-hour discussion with him, Ashley arrived at the same conclusion.
"I had been a Mormon for 21 years," she recalls, "and I knew the Book of Mormon backward and forward, but I knew very little about the Bible. I was shocked to see there was such a difference between the Mormon concept of God and that of the Bible."
Ashley prayed a simple prayer and welcomes Jesus Christ as her personal Savior.
When Eric and Ashley became engaged, a thorny hedge grew up between mother and daughter. Her mother looked pained when she saw Ashley.
"I'd never done anything to hurt my mother," Ashley says. "My father went blind when I was 10, so she had to go out into the working world to support the family. I was very protective of my mom, and she was very proud of me. I was her shining star. I held leadership positions in the church. I was in church plays. I was scared to death to do anything wrong. I was everything she wanted me to be. I had always been on her approval side. But suddenly I began to experience another side of her I had never seen before."
Her mother, now a widow, wanted nothing to do with arranging Ashley and Eric's weddings. They were married in a non-denominational church.
"I wanted my mom to share in the excitement and happiness of my wedding day," Ashley says. "But she was crying at my wedding. It wasn't a happy cry. It was a grieving cry."
Ashley understood what her mother was thinking. She believed her daugher was throwing away eternal blessings reserved for Mormons who marry in the temple and lead a righteous life. Now Ashley was an apostate, married to a "gentile." Her mother felt betrayed.
Early in her marriage, Ashley formally left the Mormon church. But she felt compelled to make up for her desertion by giving her mother extra attention. She often called her or dropped by her office for lunch. But there were no more warm hugs or hellos for Ashley, only pleasantries.
"To not have her approval was almost more than I could bear," Ashley says. "I felt I had lost my whole identity. I felt worthless."
Panic crept over here. Ashley began wondering if she had made a mistake in leaving the Mormons.
"I thought maybe I had denied the Holy Ghost and was going to hell," she says. "I was afraid there wasn't enough I could do to get back in good graces with God. It was the scariest thing in the world. I thought I was losing my mind. I felt totally black inside."
Ashley had nightmares in which images of her father scolding her for leaving the Mormon church. She woke up vomiting. Eric stayed up with her until the early morning, listening and holding her as she wept. But he did not understand why she couldn't simply forget about her mother and the Mormon church and get on with their life together.
Ashley felt trapped between her mother and the Mormon church and her husband and Christianity. Her relationship with Eric grew strained and sometimes volatile. She could think of only ways to escape the trap, even if it meant risking her marriage. She secretly went to the stake president of the local Mormon church.
"What do I have to do to come back?" she sobbed.
"I knew we hadn't lost you," he replied.
Those were reassuring words, Ashley says. "I felt I had come back to where I belonged. I could pick up where I had left off. I was back in my security system. I'd have my status again, my reputation for being an outstanding in the church."
Ashley explained to the president some of the reasons she had become confused. Why did the Bible seem to contradict the essential Mormon teaching on eternal marriage? How did the Mormon emphasis on good works fit with the complete atonement of Christ?
The president looked perplexed. He recommended she read a book by one of the church's general authorities. "Inside I just died," Ashley says. "Here he was, the president, and he couldn't answer my questions from the Bible. I could see that his authority was not in the Bible. I had come to him in terror that I had lost my salvation. I felt numb. But the panic had quit."
A month later, Eric and Ashley attended a seminar on witnessing to Mormon family members and friends led by former Mormons COnrad and Sandra Sundholm. The Sundholms explained how to help Mormons discover the discrepancies in Mormon doctrines and prophecies without alienating them, and how to help them discover the grace of God in Jesus Christ.
But more important, Ashley says, "I was exposed to other people who had felt the things I was feeling. I learned I was going through a normal grieving process. It was a hard battle, but just seeing that others had gone through it, I knew I could get through it."
Eric began to understand Ashley's struggle, and he relaxed his efforts to protect her from her mother's influence.
Previously he had grown suspicious and nervous when Ashley spoke to her mother by phone, pestering her to reveal all that was said. No he better understood his mother-in-law, too - that she lived in a world of grief and turmoil of her own.
Eric and Ashley began to pray that God would restore the mother-daughter relationship. God answered when her mother met an old friend at a high school reunion who had become a Christian. She had gone through some hard times, and she told Ashley's mother how God had been teaching her to love unconditionally.
One day Ashley went with the rest of the family to visit her father's grave. Her mother took her aside. "I've been wrong in my way of treating you," she said.
Mother and daughter wept in each other's arms.
"That was the starting point, and our relationship is getting better," Ashley says. "She still gets teary-eyed sometimes when she sees me. I think she believes that somehow she failed in bringing me up, because I left the church. But we don't talk about the Mormon church anymore. I consider it a gift from God that we have a normal relationship again."
Since the Truth-in-Love seminar, Eric has compiled a notebook of contradictory Mormon prophecies and inconsistent doctrines. That information has helped him lead a handful of Mormons out of the church and to faith in the biblical Jesus Christ. During one lengthy talk with his mother-in-law, he posed his findings to her.
"She sees those flaws," Ashley says, "but it doesn't seem to bother her. She is still emotionally bound to the church and some of its teachings. She can't let go of the temple marriage, to be married for all time and eternity, and having her children sealed to her."
"But we're praying for her, and I believe the Lord is working. She still doesn't understand His grace. I see my mom being hard on herself, just for being human. That just tears me up. She doesn't understand what the Savior has done for her."
This article appeared in Moody, a Christian monthly magazine, published by the Moody Bible Institute.