Introduction to Amber Scorah and Her Story

John Dehlin [00:00:31] So last night, we had an intimate, very special book signing with Amber Skora. I learned about Amber Skora when my wife, Margi, sent me a link to a New York Times article where she talked a little bit about her journey, her time as Jehovah's Witness, and her experiences leaving the Jehovah's Witness movement. And so I got her book, and the book is called Leaving the Witness.

John Dehlin [00:01:07] And it's an amazing book. And I. And I listened to it on audiobook and on Audible, and I was really profoundly moved, not just at her mellifluous voice and the. The wisdom that she shared, but I was struck by the parallels between her journey in the Jehovah's Witness movement and in Mormonism.

John Dehlin [00:01:26] And so. And so, as Thrive started coming together, I thought, wouldn't it be amazing if we could not only have a bunch of people from our community share their experiences and their wisdom, but what if we could bring people from outside of our tradition to also share with us what they've learned and how they have figured out ways to heal and grow and even find community beyond their traditions as well?

John Dehlin [00:01:55] Last night, I think, because so many of you were planning to come today, we had a bit of a sparse attendance. I mean, it wasn't bad. It was probably 60 or 70 people. We were grateful to the community of Christ for hosting us there. But I asked her how, you know, in terms of the crowds that she's had on her book tours, you know, how last night ranked in terms of crowd size, and she said it was the third smallest crowd that she had seen in her book signings. And I was sad for just a moment, and I thought, oh, but wait a minute. We have tomorrow, don't we?

John Dehlin [00:02:29] Right? And so Amber Skora is an amazing author. She's a courageous person, but most importantly, she's just a lovely human being. And so, without any further ado, would you guys mind giving me. Giving Amber. Would you guys mind giving Amber joining with me to give her a huge, warm welcome and hopefully the largest audience that she'll have on her book tour or more. Amber Skora, please join us.

Amber Scorah [00:03:06] Thank you so much, John, and thank you to all of you. And I've definitely never spoken to this many people. People at once. And I was a Jehovah's Witness, so, you know, I've spoken to a lot of people.

Amber Scorah [00:03:17] But also, it's incredible to be here because as a Jehovah's Witness, as a woman, you're not allowed to give talks. So thanks for listening to me. It's A great experience. Now, I'm not sure if this went both ways, but back when I was a Jehovah's Witness preaching around the world, Mormons were our nemesis. And sometimes it felt like frenemies, but maybe more like nemeses.

Amber Scorah [00:03:46] I remember one time I was in Taiwan preaching, and, you know, it's really hot and humid there, and there's not very many elevators in the building. So I would go up and down all these staircases, climbing to knock on doors, and this one door opened, and a woman told me I had been praying to God that he would send me like a messenger because I wanted to find the truth. Please come in. So I couldn't believe it. I mean, this is every Jehovah's Witness dream.

Amber Scorah [00:04:17] So I sat down, and then she told me last week the Mormons came. So she said, I think that they are actually the true religion because they God sent them first. And I was so mad. So it's really special to be here with all of you now on the other side.

Amber Scorah [00:04:47] So even though Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses were kind of alter egos, at least in my mind, I didn't really know that much about Mormonism. And I think that it's similar with Jehovah's Witnesses. Despite the fact that Jehovah's Witnesses seem to be everywhere, I think most people spend a lot of their time trying to avoid talking to a Jehovah's Witness. So a lot of people don't really know what Jehovah's Witnesses are about.

Amber Scorah [00:05:08] And there's also not a lot of information from ex members out there. So just as a little background, I'll tell you a bit about Jehovah's Witnesses by way of introduction, and you can see if this rings any bells for yourself.

Amber Scorah [00:05:23] Jehovah's Witnesses fly under the greater cultural radar for a few reasons, but it's basically mostly because of the way that their own culture is set up. As a Witness, you are raised to. To believe or taught if you convert later, that you must keep separate from the world.

Amber Scorah [00:05:38] So this is why Jehovah's Witnesses don't vote. They don't get involved in charity work. They don't go to college or pursue a career to speak of. They don't get too close to people on the outside or have relationships with worldly people, because that's considered bad association.

Amber Scorah [00:05:56] The outside is Satan's world. Growing up as a Witness from a very young age, I was taught that I had to be different. And this was reinforced by Many of the arbitrary things that Jehovah's Witnesses pull out of the Bible and have decided are their doctrine over the years as necessary for salvation. So one of those things which a lot of people know about, that you can't take a blood transfusion, even if it means saving your life. But it also extends to being a kid and Hot Dog Day. Even at Hot Dog Day, our moms had to bring special hot dogs that were boiled separately that the other kids didn't have.

Amber Scorah [00:06:35] We didn't have Christmas. We felt it was pagan. So while we felt we were the only true Christian religion, we didn't have birthdays, Christmas, we had to sit outside the gym when they sang carols. There's a lot of ways that we were made to feel different.

Amber Scorah [00:06:51] And I think this is by design, in a way, creates a separation. We also couldn't date or marry a non Jehovah's Witness. We also married very young because that was the only way to have sex. And we were strongly advised, as I said, not to get an education. And all of this is because the Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the world is ending, that any day now apocalypse will come, Armageddon and architecture, all of the non Jehovah's Witnesses will be destroyed.

Amber Scorah [00:07:21] You don't see many books or memoirs such as mine by people who leave the religion because the leaders of the group strongly forbid anyone who leaves or who's in it to air any of the dirty laundry of the organization. And this applies to very minor issues. For example, if you say, had a problem with one of your brothers in the congregation, you can't take him to court even if he cheated you. But it also extends to really cool, quite major things, such as child sexual abuse.

Amber Scorah [00:07:50] When this happens in a congregation, it's generally suppressed. The parents of the child are encouraged, kind of coerced into not going to the police because they don't want God to look bad. This obviously creates a lot of problems.

Amber Scorah [00:08:06] Now, of course, you might think, well, now that you've left, you're no longer bound by these rules, right? You can speak openly. But what happens when you leave the Jehovah's Witnesses, as I did, is that you are shunned. And it's not like the nice shunning that you guys practice, as it's also been described as passive aggressive shunning. No, no, ours is very aggressive.

Amber Scorah [00:08:28] And of course, as you know, this is quite a severe punishment for people who have been trained and taught to build their life around a world, a community. So the Shunning is bad enough, but if you go one step further, as I have done, and actually speak openly about your experience in the church, then you're called something that's called an apostate.

Amber Scorah [00:08:53] Now, this is a very scary brand to receive, because apostasy, according to our literature, is the one sin that God would not forgive. It's worse than murder, child sexual abuse, anything, because you're sinning against God. Every week at our meetings, our literature talks about apostates. We would be described in terrifying terms. People who were mentally diseased, dogs that had returned to their own vomit, criminals with characteristics like the devil. We were said to be gangrene that needed to be cut off.

Amber Scorah [00:09:28] Identity is a weird thing, because even when I didn't believe in the religion anymore, when I came to sit down and write my book, I still felt a lot of anxiety because the last thing I wanted to be thought of, even though I didn't think of myself this way, but by people who knew me was, was as this horrible criminal creature. I didn't want to be mentally diseased.

Amber Scorah [00:09:49] And while I knew that I wasn't mentally diseased, I felt like I had all my faculties about me. I was disoriented. You see, what I hadn't realized when I woke up and realized that I didn't have the truth was that there was this whole community of other people who were raised in religions outside of mine who felt exactly the same way that I did and were experiencing the same difficulties and alienation.

Amber Scorah [00:10:17] To illustrate this, let me read part of a letter that one young Mormon man sent me shortly after my book came out in the summer. He had been doubting his faith, he said, when he came across my book.

Amber Scorah [00:10:31] I have been put through extreme isolation, he writes. Being misunderstood by those I love most puts me in a position where I'm alone in my thoughts, having no support group to lean on. This has been a horrible experience to live.

Amber Scorah [00:10:44] When I ponder and think of my position in this universe, haunting thoughts come in. What if you're wrong? What if you are letting go of eternal life and salvation? I can dismiss these thoughts, but the nagging whispers are still there.

Amber Scorah [00:10:59] You know, it's still possible the church is true. Being able to witness, pun intended. He said. The very mental journey through your eyes has taught me that my experience with my religion is not unique. My religion, my cult, is not the only one that people break free from chapter by chapter. I had to keep reminding myself that I was not reading about a Mormon woman's life, but a Jehovah's. Witnesses.

Amber Scorah [00:11:23] Each aspect of indoctrination and programming that you worked your way out of using your intellect and free thinking, has a parallel to Mormon indoctrination and programming. In my mind, if either the Mormon Church or the Watchtower Society is God's truth on Earth, then it can be only one of them, it cannot be both.

Amber Scorah [00:11:41] However, if the experience of leaving the two churches is intellectually and mentally identical, then how could any of them be God's? I was thinking we should tell that to the woman in Taiwan who's now a Mormon. Anyway, the young man concluded by thanking me for not being able to keep my mouth shut. First time I've been thanked for that. Thank you very much.

Leaving the Jehovah's Witnesses and Starting Over

Amber Scorah [00:12:07] So here I am, out here in Satan's world. I don't know if you all called it that. How did I get here? I'm so curious to know. How did all of you get here? But since right now I'm the one with the mic, I will tell my story.

Amber Scorah [00:12:24] The path to finding my freedom was in one of the most restrictive countries in the world, China, when I was in my twenties. After spending years knocking on doors in my hometown of Vancouver, Canada, to not much results, maybe you guys can sympathize, I decided to learn Mandarin Chinese and travel to China to preach.

Amber Scorah [00:12:44] China was the one place that had not received a witness, and I wanted to give these 1 billion people a chance to survive Armageddon by converting to my religion. There's no grandioseness in this story at all. Ironically, it was in China that for the first time in my life, I experienced a little bit of freedom, which I realized probably should have been the first sign that something was off, because most people, when they get to China, do not feel more free.

Amber Scorah [00:13:14] But it was different for me because at home, my life revolved around my religious community. There was multiple meetings a week, there was preaching, all my friends were witnesses. But in China, it had to be different because our work was illegal there and we had to do it underground.

Amber Scorah [00:13:30] Of course, yeah. When I got there, just to explain, I don't know how Mormons do their work. We're up there, but I'm sure it's similar that we had to do our work, had a cover job, and we couldn't tell anyone why we were there, and we would sort of do our work, you know, cloak and dagger style. Of course, even though I had this newfound freedom, which did feel quite good, I will admit, my aim was to preach. I was a true believer and I took my mission really seriously. But that too looked different because back home, as I said, Jehovah's Witnesses were not allowed to make friends with worldly people.

Amber Scorah [00:14:04] We only really kept people at arm's length unless they were interested in our message. But in China, because we had to first vet people to see if they were safe to preach to. And by vet I mean make sure that they weren't going to turn us into the government or that they didn't belong to the Communist Party.

Amber Scorah [00:14:20] It meant that we had to spend a lot of time just casually hanging out with people that we met incidentally or sought out with our ulterior motives. Often that vetting process took a long time. So what that meant was as a byproduct that I began to make worldly friends for the first time, I got to know people who were not Jehovah's Witnesses on a pretty intimate level before I ever brought up the Bible.

Amber Scorah [00:14:54] Preaching too, in a language like Mandarin. I bet you there's not many rooms where other people have learned Mandarin, but in this room I'm sure there probably are. So you could really empathize with the fact that when you learn Mandarin, it's not like learning Spanish, where you can just like learn the vocabulary in some conjugations and then translate your English. No, you have to change your entire way of thinking. It's almost like you have to excavate your mind in order to speak this language.

Amber Scorah [00:15:18] So over time, as I became more fluent, it was as if I was hearing what I was saying to people for the first time as I sat there across from my Bible studies, teaching them these truths that I had held dear and never doubted my entire life. It was as if I could hear what I was saying for the first time in this new language.

Amber Scorah [00:15:39] And to be honest, some of it started to sound a little crazy. 2. Here I was, this person who had this white woman who had come to their country with thousands of years of cultural wisdom and history, telling them that they should trade all of that in in favor of my 100 year old's new American religion.

Amber Scorah [00:15:59] It felt arrogant eventually, and it took a long time, but this mild disorientation and this new language and this experience of meeting other people started to open up cracks in my faith. This physical distance gave me a mental break from the constant indoctrination and meetings that I had had my whole life.

Amber Scorah [00:16:25] Slowly, one of the worldly relationships that I had started and I had began to engage with with a client at my workplace got deeper and deeper and it led to me questioning everything that I had ever held dear everything that I had built my life around.

Why People Stay in High-Control Religions

Amber Scorah [00:16:44] Now, shifting gears a little bit, a lot of people who have never been religious wonder why in the world anyone would stay in a religion like this that is so obviously to people on the outside, culty or wrong.

Amber Scorah [00:16:58] So I'm just going to share some things I've learned about being in a cult and getting out. And what I've learned is about controlling religions like mine. And just to qualify, I do call it a cult cult Y now, because I have done a lot of reading, and one thing that really stuck out to me was there's this psychiatrist named Robert Lifton who studied Chinese indoctrination in universities in the 1950s, and he came up with seven criteria for thought control, and Jehovah's Witnesses used each and every one of those methods on their members.

Amber Scorah [00:17:28] So here's the first thing. No one who is in a cult ever thinks they're in a cult. I thought I was living my best life, and in some ways it is a great life. I mean, I had no angst. I didn't worry about climate change. I didn't need a retirement fund. Armageddon was coming. Why did I need any of these things to worry about, which is problematic now?

Amber Scorah [00:17:54] So, yeah, it's great when you have Armageddon. It's going to solve all your problems. Plus, I had many wonderful family and friends who were in it with me, and I loved them. I had a warm community and I had no reason to want to leave.

Amber Scorah [00:18:06] I was also constantly told about how awful people's lives were on the outside. And because I didn't have any friends on the outside, I had no way to confirm that this was not true. And, you know, I did, of course, interact with people at work, and people seemed to have, you know, relatively happy lives. They had families, but they were all going to die at Armageddon, you know, any day now. So how happy would that be? Not very.

Amber Scorah [00:18:32] Yes. It isn't until you try to leave a cult or controlling religious group like this that you start to realize you've been in a cult, when the people in your organization and your family immediately shun you for questioning. Even one of the beliefs that are handed down from the leaders, which beliefs themselves have morphed over time, you know, that you're in some form of a cult.

Amber Scorah [00:18:56] Later, after I left, I found even stronger proof. I moved to Brooklyn after China, which was a dumb idea, but I had a boyfriend this first winter I was in New York, and the loft he lived in was unheated you know, hipsters. And the whole winter we just watched YouTube videos under a quilt. And he became really fascinated by cults, obviously. I guess that's why, you know, it was like a little bit of a fixation why he was attracted to me. But we watched every documentary on YouTube, one after the other, of cults, cult survivors, interviews of people who had survived Jonestown massacres, this type of thing, Scientologists, and every single one of them.

Amber Scorah [00:19:38] It shocked me because the people who had left these cults or survived, things that I, when I was a Josephinist, had considered to be those were the cults. In fact, these people sounded exactly like me. And their communities had treated them exactly how my community had treated me when I began to have some doubts.

Amber Scorah [00:19:59] So here you see entirely different belief systems, just like that young Mormon man's email that he sent me, but the same systems used to keep people in place. My lines of reasoning, my thought patterns, the black and white thinking, the thought blocking when doubts came up. All the things that I had been taught to do to stay in the religion were the same things that all these other groups I had considered crazy had used.

Amber Scorah [00:20:27] And while the Jehovah's Witnesses, of course, are not as extreme as some other cults, I came to see that this no blood transfusion rule was causing deaths completely unnecessarily over an error in doctrine. And to me, that came to feel no different than drinking Kool Aid and committing suicide for your beliefs.

Amber Scorah [00:20:48] It takes a lot of deprogramming to realize or to acknowledge to yourself that the religion that you were raised with as truth is just a mythology that was passed down from generation to generation. I was the third generation Jehovah's Witness in my family.

Amber Scorah [00:21:05] It was embarrassing to realize that I had been so wrong, that the religion had been something that merely had started with good intentions and then morphed to become this. It had morphed to enable the survival and expansion of the group, to consolidate the power of some men at the top of the organization.

Amber Scorah [00:21:32] And though many of the individuals, as I said, I love the people in the group, it's hard to reconcile. But what happened was that the organization itself became inhumane. And then it caused the people in that organization who were under its control to act inhumane at times.

Amber Scorah [00:21:46] And this seems to be a pattern in many religious institutions. So sometimes people ask me, is there anything that you miss about the religion? And this is hard for me because I think that I make a better worldly person than a Witness, honestly. So there's A lot that I don't miss.

What Is Lost and Found After Leaving Faith

Amber Scorah [00:22:06] And I have never been sorry even for one day that I left despite. Despite all the hardships that came. But the one thing that I did miss was the comfort of having all the answers. I don't know about being Mormon, but Joe's witnesses, they can answer literally any question you have that disturbs you about life.

Amber Scorah [00:22:28] Anything that bothers you, this religion can answer. What is the purpose of life? Why are we here? What happens when we die? It was so relaxing to have all these answers. When I began to have doubts about some of the beliefs, the one thing that was really hard for me to unravel was how could something that made so much sense not be true?

Amber Scorah [00:22:53] Because at first, there were only one or two things that I found that didn't make sense, that felt morally wrong. And it still was hard to unravel this whole structure of belief that had been created for me and that had been reinforced through my whole life.

Amber Scorah [00:23:08] So what I decided to do was put those. All that certainty that I had aside and put aside all those answers for a while and just do some research. And I came to learn some amazing things by stepping outside of the explanations of my faith and looking elsewhere a little bit at other faiths, but also at science and the history of the Bible and philosophy, all different kinds of ways that humans have used to explain the world. And one of the things I learned that was really interesting was that, and it made me feel better, was that it wasn't only people in religions that sometimes put their faith in a system or a belief so much that they ended up living their life for something untrue, that in fact, this is a tendency of human beings.

Amber Scorah [00:24:00] You can see it in science. There are people who were so wrong and were so right and were jailed for being right, and everyone else was wrong. You can see it in politics even to this day. The fact is that human beings, when we've decided or been taught or convinced that something is the truth, it can blind us to bigger, larger truths.

Amber Scorah [00:24:21] We're tribal by nature, and this can give us huge blind spots. We like to be around people who are like us. We want to fit in. When we believe something, it can be really hard to see what things we're not seeing.

Amber Scorah [00:24:37] And that helped me feel less bad. Like, as if, was I dumb? Why had I been duped? It was just that this was a tendency of being a human being, and it was what had happened to me. I had been taught from birth.

Amber Scorah [00:24:49] Once I had given myself enough space to see, I discovered that everything wasn't as I had been taught it was. And that in fact my religion had been built on a false premise. And even if everything added up way, way up here, everything made sense. If the core was rotten, then none of it meant anything. It wasn't true.

Amber Scorah [00:25:09] So now what? Maybe you can relate. Well, I had to go find a way to go from being a know it all to a person who knew nothing. In fact, I didn't know nothing. I knew less than nothing. Unlike Mormon, at least you guys get to go to college. I mean, I had spent all my time preaching and studying Job's Witness publications. And like preaching involved just driving around in cars, you know, taking down records. It was mind numbing. I hadn't read anything about philosophy or science, other religious traditions. The extent to which I knew about any other tradition was the extent to which I would refute their arguments at the door and try to convince them that I had the truth.

Amber Scorah [00:25:51] I could however, use the Book of Daniel and do all kinds of mathematical equations, picking some things from Revelation to prove to you that the beginning of the last days started in 1914. So we did learn some math.

Amber Scorah [00:26:05] Bit fuzzy numbers, but. So now it was not comfortable to be in a space with so many unknowns. And I had lost the entire community of people I loved and had spent my life with and had memories with.

Amber Scorah [00:26:19] It was disorienting and scary and lonely. So I was also in China. I was in this country all by myself. I had no choice. I just threw myself into the real world. I tried to blend in and I listened and learned from people. I remember one time one of my workmates said to me, commented after we had lunch, a group of us together, and he was like, it's so strange this thing about you, Amber. Because I still had never told them my secret reason for being in China. It's like talking to you is like talking to someone who's so unjaded by politics and by the world.

Amber Scorah [00:26:54] She was just like a sponge. I was like, oh really? I literally did not even know what a liberal or Democrat or Republican was at that time. But then I was also Canadian, so that might explain it. I'm American now, by the way.

Amber Scorah [00:27:13] Anyway, so people were, as I said, my workmates, people I met. It was hard, but people were kind and understanding. But still it was hard because it takes a long time to form deep relationships with people, to feel very comfortable. That kind of comfort of a friend that you've had since you were 10 years old. You don't just get that overnight when you're already in your 30s.

Amber Scorah [00:27:38] So I ended up moving to New York, which is a great place to move in the sense that there's a lot of people that move to New York that are kind of aimless and start over. All you gotta do is rent a room, basically, and get a subway pass.

Amber Scorah [00:27:50] But it was still hard, and it was a big world for me out there. It took time. I started going to college, though, and that helped. And I just started taking classes and keeping busy. And as I would learn things, it was so exciting because I learned about things like the French existentialists. And I was like my people. It was so good to know there were people, like past and present, who, like me, had opened up their mind to question things and found that. That often there were no answers.

Amber Scorah [00:28:20] That things in life maybe weren't so certain, that there was mystery and magic and that there could be some kind of fascination or magic in all of this unknown. In not having all the answers, I slowly rebuilt my life and lost all of that fear that I had been taught since birth. And it felt good.

Amber Scorah [00:28:44] I found a life again. I had friends, I had a relationship, I had a job. And eventually, happily, I had a child. I no longer had the fear of what if they are right? Or what if every thunderclap outside my window is Armageddon? Because I was now in this new phase of life. There was this beauty and this feeling of immortality almost, that came back when I looked at my child.

Amber Scorah [00:29:06] I would die one day, I knew that. But his life would go on, and it was a great comfort to me. But the one thing that I had not prepared myself for in my new life without religion was tragedy.

Grief, Loss, and Life Without Religious Comfort

Amber Scorah [00:29:22] Death. And that's to say, grief without faith. Or to put it another way, death without hope. In July of 2015, my son Carl, 4 months old, died. I had overcome a lot of obstacles by the time he was born, but I had never imagined that something this terrible could happen. No one does.

Amber Scorah [00:29:46] I think, too, that I thought on some level that after so much pain and loss, I had filled some quota and that somehow my life would be good. Now, of course, that was very naive way to think, because life doesn't work that way.

Amber Scorah [00:30:02] So death without religion is quite a different thing than death. When you have a religion that tells you all the answers, and I'm sure some of you have experienced this too. My father had died when I was a Jehovah's witness. I was 18, and I was sad, but I wasn't that sad, because I knew that as long As I stayed faithful, I would see him again in paradise.

Amber Scorah [00:30:22] I feel like religion was born for times like this. My faith had acted like a buffer to many of the more difficult and painful parts of being a human being. So now, when I lost my son without that faith, I experienced his death as nothingness.

Amber Scorah [00:30:39] My child, who was so full of health and promise and energy, just vanished. It was beyond my ability to accept losing him or to understand it. But it was even farther beyond my abilities to return to any kind of belief in life after death, after feeling so wholly deceived.

Amber Scorah [00:30:59] It really was the ultimate test. Now, many people who know my religious background have asked me if this terrible loss made me want to go back to religion. And I always think that's a funny question, like, as if you could just turn it on like a switch. And believe me, like in the midst of a loss like this, if it were a choice, I might choose it because it is easier.

Amber Scorah [00:31:23] But there was no believing now that what I knew before was now a myth. To go back to it, and that was really devastating. So let me just tell you what I learned about grief without religion. It has some surprising byproducts.

Amber Scorah [00:31:41] I now had no choice but to live with the reality of the loss of my child. I had no escape from the terrible emotions. I had no hope that I could put off seeing him again. I had to deal with what was in front of me. And what was in front of me was just devastation on every level.

Amber Scorah [00:32:00] Once you can't escape grief, though, something else happens. In the midst of the grief, where you have no escape, you're forced to experience a deeper pain. But you also become more clear eyed about life. You find that you are more sensitive and you see what is beautiful in life in the midst of all of this suffering. It's the strangest thing that you can be in such great pain and also experience such beauty.

Amber Scorah [00:32:27] Dimensions unfold in yourself that were not previously there. Dimensions in the world open up that hadn't been previously visible to you. And one of those things that I experienced was the great care and compassion that we as human beings possess for one another. And you don't see this every day.

Amber Scorah [00:32:46] You know, you're crowded into a subway or you're in traffic and someone cuts you off. I feel like you see it more in Utah than you see it in New York, to be honest though, because people are really nice here.

Amber Scorah [00:32:57] But when I, my family was in such great pain, so many people, both strangers and friends alike, reached out, gave in ways that they could share, showed so Much love. And they were what got us through that terrible time.

Amber Scorah [00:33:13] And it was really interesting as a comparison in that a few months after my son died, I found out that one of my former best friends, a Jehovah's Witness who now shunned me, who I had preached with in Taiwan, had been diagnosed with basically terminal cancer, a very aggressive form of cancer.

Amber Scorah [00:33:31] And even though she was chanting me and I tended to stay away, didn't force myself on people, I just felt compelled to write her an email and tell her that I loved her. Now, when you're a Jehovah's Witness, of course, everything, including a child's death or cancer, is an opportunity to try to convert someone or bring them back to the religion if they've left. So while my friend was very compassionate, she had heard about my loss, and though she hadn't gotten in touch, she had really felt bad for me. She also kind of subtly chastised me in the same breath.

Amber Scorah [00:34:07] You see, in her mind, my giving up the religion was me giving up the chance to see my son again. She also pointedly told me how her cancer had made her faith in the Jehovah's Witnesses organization even stronger. Where else could one find such love? She said, said the brothers and sisters had all pulled together, made meals, donated money for her treatments, just supported her family immensely during that difficult time.

Amber Scorah [00:34:37] I didn't have the heart to tell her that it was the same out here. People I knew, people I didn't know, all rallied around me out of the goodness of their heart. And why? Because those benefits of being in a religion are not the perks of being in that religion. They're the perks of being a human being.

Amber Scorah [00:35:00] That same empathy and goodness that you experience as a Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon does not only exist within the walls of a religion. And that's something I'm grateful to have seen. Now, of course, all that said, I do think that it is easier to deal with death when you have religion, when death doesn't feel final.

Amber Scorah [00:35:21] Someone once told me that great grief is like a character test, and it does feel like that. I struggle every day not to devolve into feelings of anger and jealousy and feelings of, why me? Why my son? But what I have learned is patience and endurance and how to tolerate devastating feelings, because that is what living without your child requires.

Amber Scorah [00:35:48] I've also come to realize that those things that we feel entitled to. For example, I mean, I'm the most neurotic person in the world. When I was pregnant, like, there Was, you know, there wasn't even like a leaf of lettuce that wasn't organic that went into my body. I was. You know, I did everything right. No drugs at childbirth. It's just somehow I thought that I could control things if I was good enough.

Amber Scorah [00:36:10] But the fact is that we can't control things. And what happens when you realize that when you stop feeling entitled to the things that you have, you begin to look at anything that you do have and everything that you do have as a gift.

Amber Scorah [00:36:28] Those first few years after Carl died, all I could see in front of me every day was the life that went on without him. The. The experiences that I was having that he should have had and now he would not.

Amber Scorah [00:36:41] All I saw were children who lived and were growing up without him while my child had died. And while I still wrestle with those feelings every day, I have changed a little with time. I've been able to see that each and every day that I had with Carl was truly a gift.

Amber Scorah [00:37:01] Really, everything that we have is a gift every single day, every single person. I once saw this quote that really, I thought summed it up well and made me think it was a 19th century Russian philosopher, Alexander Herzen. And he wrote, after the loss of a child drowned. Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up, but a child's purpose is to be a child's. Nature doesn't disdain what only lives for a day.

Amber Scorah [00:37:33] It pours the whole of itself into each moment. Life's bounty is in its flow. Later is too late. I think it's a lesson for all of us that later is too late now, whether there is something out there or not. The one thing I believe that we all have that no one can take away from us is this gift of beauty and love that we can find in this world together if we look for it.

Amber Scorah [00:37:59] And also the depth of grief that we experience is a reflection of the depth of love that we are capable as human beings. And I've also found ways to keep my son alive in the here and now with me by talking about him to his little sister Sevy, who's here today, and by holding close the memories that I have of him every day. Because if anyone who's been like a nursing mother knows that even though, like, Carl and I only had just about four months together, you spend 24 hours a day, you spend a lot of intense, intimate time together.

Amber Scorah [00:38:37] So many of us have suffered in different ways, and I'm sure all of you can relate to loss in this room. I remember reading that Jackie Kennedy once told her son JFK Jr. That 18 months after her husband was killed. Killed, she could finally smile when she thought about him instead of cry. And that made all the difference.

Amber Scorah [00:38:55] We don't get over our losses. But I can tell you this, that when I think of my son Carl now, even while carrying around all the pain of his death, I smile. In China, I remember being told that Confucius, when he was asked about death once, he answered simply, we haven't finished studying life to delve into the question of death. And I think that's really true.

Amber Scorah [00:39:20] The hardest of all the unanswered questions I have now, after leaving my religion, the hardest unanswered question is why my perfect, healthy son died. And though I will never have the answer, nor the answer to many of the other deep and disturbing questions, perplexing questions, maybe I should say, of life, I have come to see that there are other different questions to sit with.

Amber Scorah [00:39:44] And these are the questions of beauty. What force grew my child? How did that spine and those limbs form themselves from nothing inside of me? Why are the things that Carl saw on this planet so beautiful? Why did his eyes look at me the way that they did? Where did love like this come from?

Amber Scorah [00:40:04] How, in the face of so much pain, is there also beauty in this world? These are the kinds of questions that I can sit in now and be comfortable. There can even be beauty in contemplating the mystery of these things.

Amber Scorah [00:40:19] The physicist Richard Feynman, who I love. Look him up if you've never watched his lectures. But he spoke endlessly about this. He said, there's no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty, but there is no certainty.

Amber Scorah [00:40:38] That said, there is a pleasure in a question, a pleasure in finding things out, a pleasure in all of the magic around us. Because for all of the things that we can't answer now, there's so much to learn and fascinate us, so much to be grateful for. Let's all be full of joy and wonder at the gift of it all. Thank you.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.