Several months after my conversion and baptism as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I was given the professional opportunity to implement and supervise a sex crimes unit covering twenty-five percent of the Los Angeles Police Department’s jurisdiction. The unit consisted of twenty hand-picked detectives, most of them experienced in sex crimes. The rest were chosen for their attitude and aptitude.
Though it had taken me a long time to become converted as a Latter-day Saint, I had long held a personal testimony of Jesus Christ. Prayer had always been a daily part of my personal life, but played only an unconscious role in my professional career. This changed significantly after my baptism.
Not only had I prayed to seek the Lord’s will regarding taking over the new unit, but I received a positive answer in such a loud voice I could only wonder why nobody else in the church meeting at the time could hear it. While I endeavored to use spiritual guidance to lead my unit on a daily basis, I was shortly faced with a situation I’d never encountered in my then twenty-eight years of police work.
There was a child molest suspect waiting for me in an interrogation room. A detective had already attempted to elicit a confession, but had been unable to crack the suspect’s hard veneer. In most child molestation cases, especially those involving very young children, a confession is critical to getting a prosecution filing. In many of these cases, the victims are too young or too inarticulate to give testimony in court. Usually, there is no medical or physical evidence of the crime, or it can be explained away by other symptoms common among young children. A legally obtained confession, however, often makes everything else moot. Without a confession, however, suspects frequently walk free to molest again – and again.
In more than twenty years investigating sex crimes, I’d participated in hundreds of interrogations with a higher than average record for gaining confessions. I taught interrogation skills to other detectives during training days. I knew I had been given a gift of getting sex crime suspects to talk to me. This time, however, I sensed something was different. I suddenly recognized I was being prompted by the spirit to do something I’d never done before starting an interrogation – pray.
Personal Changes
As an adult, becoming converted and undergoing the ordinance of baptism is obviously a life-changing event. Being confirmed a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost adds exponentially to the emotional and spiritual impact of the experience.
Many of us who undergo this humbling, yet uplifting repatriation also recognize it as both an opportunity and a mandate to reassess our personal lives. Through baptism, we can see more clearly, recognize when we stumble, and have the knowledge and resources through the sacrament and the atonement to overcome our transgressions and start anew.
With the fire of the Holy Ghost newly bestowed, we look forward to making positive changes in our family interactions and personal habits. The amount of effort required to continue forward progress in this quest is different for all of us, yet essential to the path we have chosen.
After baptism, our personal evolution should be a constant ongoing process. It is something at which we must persistently work. Setbacks should be used as learning opportunities, the humility gained through repentance being a major part of our blessings. This type of emotional and spiritual progress is not easy, but we need to remember that just because we have joined the orchestra does not mean we can immediately play all the instruments.
Some of us progress along this journey faster than others, and each of us face different individual challenges. Prayer, scripture reading, fasting, paying tithing and other offerings, acceptance of callings, attendance at church meetings, and a pro-active approach in freely giving ourselves over to the Lord’s will can help make the journey easier as we strive to understand eternal perspectives.
Professional Changes
The ripples of adult conversion, however, also need to go beyond changes in our personal lives. When we are newly baptized, the changes needed in our interactions with family members or in our individual habits are often clear, sometimes even glaring. What can be more difficult to recognize and address are the changes needed in our professional capacities.
Too often we can be swayed by the constant secular concept of the separation of church and state. While this may be a legal concept, it is not a spiritual one. If we are truly converted, we will honor our covenants with the Lord not only in our homes but also in our business dealings.
This doesn’t mean we need to make loud declarations of faith within our workplaces. Few of us are called to be full time apostles – giving up all things secular to do the Lord’s work. While conversion and adherence to our covenants is full time, most of us live lives that involve interaction with the secular workplace. As such, it is incumbent upon us to conduct ourselves in a manner honoring the Lord.
I first started to see spiritual applications in my professional life a few weeks before my baptism. Two years earlier, I’d made a major arrest of a wealthy man and his female companion for a series of sexual assaults utilizing the date rape drug Rohypnol. This was during a time prior to the formation of the specialized sex crimes unit I began supervising after I was baptized. The suspects supported their sybaritic, cocaine fueled, lifestyle by commercially distributing Rohypnol and by renting out their Sunset Boulevard mansion and grounds for use as movie sets by the pornographic film industry.
When they were arrested, they immediately unleashed a dog pack of high-priced lawyers to enforce their vigorous denials of guilt. All of this proved to no avail. The solid case against them had been painstakingly pieced together. Each step leading to their arrest had been accomplished with the approval of the District Attorney’s Office, and a prominent judge had reviewed and signed all search and arrest warrants.
The evidence recovered at the suspect’s residence further supported the allegations against them – hundreds of commercially produced bottles of drinking water spiked with Rohypnol; a room covered in cocaine residue; and photos of several of the victims in obviously drugged states and compromising positions.
The jury didn’t find any problems with the case. Both suspects were found guilty in record time and given stiff prison sentences. It was a time for congratulations and commendations all around.
Unexpected Challenges
Then something strange happened. From prison, the suspects filed an eighty million dollar civil law suit against the City of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Police Department, and specifically the investigating officers (my partner and me). The suit alleged not only false arrest and imprisonment, but went further to accuse the investigating officers of racism (interesting, since all suspects and law enforcement personnel involved in the case were Caucasian), sexual involvement with the victims, drug abuse, planting evidence, and of being bribed by organized crime figures to get rid of the innocent suspects.
Nonsense? Absolutely every word of it! However, could they legally file the civil suit? Unfortunately, yes.
There was also a chance the city’s legal department would follow an established practice of settling cases out of court – no matter how absurd the allegations – as often a deal could be struck to pay the plaintiffs a sum smaller than the cost of fighting a protracted trial.
To say I was furious at this turn of events would be an understatement. I was further upset because, due to the allegations in the civil suit, police department policy caused an internal personnel investigation to be instigated against me. It didn’t matter the allegations were easily proven to be unfounded; I still stood at risk of losing my reputation, my livelihood, and an unthinkable sum of money – all because I had been doing my job properly.
For the next eighteen months, I was subpoenaed to numerous civil depositions where my integrity was constantly scrutinized; I attended numerous strategy meetings and debriefings with the city’s attorneys, who fortunately were as incensed by the ridiculousness of the law suit as I was and were determined to fight it all the way; and was forced to keep preparing for court dates that were ultimately continued.
Finally, a date for the civil trial was set for a specific Monday. On the Sunday before, I found myself highly agitated. Anger flowed through me as I thought of the eighteen months this case had hung over my head and the numerous problems it had caused in my professional career and the stresses that overflowed into my home life. Although I understood how the legal system worked, I could still find no logic or comfort in the fact two convicted felons could be allowed to wreak such havoc with this type of nuisance suit.
I knew I had to do something to relieve the pressure building inside me. I had prayed numerous times before for the Lord to relieve me of this burden. I had prayed for His will to be done, but still had trouble having the faith to accept the continuation of this unjust case being His will.
Still, I dropped to my knees again. This time, however, something different came from within me as I began to talk to Heavenly Father. For the first time, the words coming out of my mouth were not about me – were not about relieving my burden, were not about just or unjust. Nor were they spoken with the noise of anger and hurt drowning out my pleas.
This time a sudden calm descended upon me, and I finally conceived the lesson Father had been trying to teach me for eighteen months – the two suspects I saw as ogres attacking me were in reality two souls trapped in the talons of the adversary, crying out for forgiveness.
My prayer that day spilled out of me in a rush of fervent feeling. I prayed for the Lord to forgive these two individuals – two of his spirit children who had strayed extremely far. I prayed for Him to somehow send them a ray of the light of his love to illuminate their dungeon and give them a chance to return unto Him.
As a secular law enforcement officer, I’d seen these two violent criminals as a waste of human protoplasm – a blight on the human condition to be spurned and incarcerated for as long as the law would permit. They had made their choices, all bad, and should be forced to suffer the consequences.
However, as an individual whose heart the Lord was preparing for conversion and baptism, I was experiencing an epiphany regarding the true nature of these individuals – recognizing at long last a brother and a sister from the premortal existence who were trapped in an agony of the adversary’s misery. Their only hope lay in the atonement of Jesus Christ, but they were too blinded and too deep in the adversary’s clutches to pray for themselves. Someone else had to pray for them – me.
When I rose from my knees it was as if a mountain had been lifted from me. All anger was gone. So many thoughts flooded through me, along with an instant recognition of the Comforter’s powerful presence, and a depth of gratitude that put me on the verge of tears. The calm I’d felt at the beginning of the prayer stayed with me, and I was blessed with the sudden knowledge all would be well.
The Kicker
This experience, of course, would not be complete without the kicker. The following day, I was preparing to leave the police station for court when the phone rang. It was the city’s attorney. I immediately prepared myself mentally to be told the case was being continued again. This time, however, it was much different news. The attorney told me the presiding civil judge had reviewed the case over the weekend and dismissed it as being without merit. There would be no court hearing.
“What exactly does that mean?” I asked. I could almost hear the city’s attorney’s smile down the phone line. “It means the case is over,” she said. “The plaintiffs have lost all standing with the court, and there is no process for appeal. The city, the police department – including you and your partner – have all been vindicated. It’s finished, done. Get on with your life.”
Wow! Eighteen months of pressure and struggle removed from my shoulders just like that – a snap of the fingers and a directive to “get on with my life.” Right then I knew – not just believed, but knew – the Lord had dragged me kicking and screaming like a recalcitrant child to this point in my life, teetering on the edge of baptism, and smacked me hard enough to get my full attention. I saw the lesson, the learning, and the response with the clarity that only comes from being infused with the spirit. The internal vision, however, went even further with the sure knowledge I would shortly be applying this lesson in humility and compassion again and again.
Secular theorists (those who preach religion as “the opiate of the masses”) would say I was doing nothing more than rationalizing. They would be unable to see any connection between my prayer for compassion to a (in their opinion) non-existent deity and the essentially immediate resolution of the court case hanging over my head.
To them I say an inarticulate, yet resounding, “Bah!” How empty their lives must be without a testimony of God’s grace among us. How bitter their existence without the sweetness sustained through humility.
Perhaps worse are those who acknowledge God, yet play the false humility card by labeling efforts to understand His plan or lessons as arrogance. To them I offer an even more resounding, “Bah!”
Socrates didn’t mince words when he stated, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” He believed the purpose of human life was personal and spiritual growth. Clearly, we are unable to sustain this growth toward greater understanding of the Lord’s plan for our lives unless we take time to examine and reflect upon our interactions with Him.
Society attempts to keep us too busy as workers and consumers to have time for the self-reflection needed for self-awareness. Certainly the success of secular commercialism relies on an unaware and vaguely dissatisfied populace trying to fill the emptiness inside with shiny new products.
It’s a drastic and sometimes scary undertaking to stop and consider our lives and our relationships with the Lord. But, if we do not, how can we open ourselves to the guidance of the Comforter? How can we know we are keeping hold of the iron rod, or what to do when we have let go?
For us to truly reap the blessings of adult conversion and baptism, we must examine the experiences gained through prayer, fasting, and faith. We must further apply these lessons in order to make the changes required of us to continue our journey back to Father’s presence. If these changes are to be complete, we must apply them in all areas of our lives. We cannot allow the morals and ethics we uphold at home, be different from those we practice in the workplace.
