Hi, I’m Isaac! I was raised in the LDS church and served a full-time mission in Armenia. I enjoyed my mission a lot and I learned a lot of people skills that helped me out, especially since I had difficulty relating to my peers as someone with mild Asperger’s syndrome. However, about six months after my mission, I experienced a faith crisis, where I wasn’t sure if I believed in God anymore. Prayer and scripture study no longer gave me the same spiritual uplift. Since I associated with a lot of Mormon feminists and had heard about praying to Heavenly Mother, I decided to try it, and I felt a powerful spiritual reassurance that I hadn’t felt for a long time from thinking about addressing a male deity. I have never felt that Heavenly Mother is any less in status than Heavenly Father, so it seems self-evident that She holds the priesthood.
The Ordain Women movement spurred me to think more about the feminine divine and women having authority. Since I believe that men and women can offer complementary and helpful advice about life, I was disappointed to think that I mainly heard the advice of men in General Conference growing up, but missed many things that women could have taught me, because women cannot currently be apostles or seventies. If my mission president, stake presidents, and bishops were not exclusively men, I would have had more opportunities to learn from women. Men and women need each other as equal partners, but they cannot be equal while women are systematically excluded from most leadership positions in the church.
Because I need more wise counsel from women in my life and because I believe that Heavenly Mother, whom we should strive to emulate, holds the priesthood, I believe that women should be ordained.