About eight months ago, I started attending a new church in my neighborhood. I say attending, but that’s not entirely accurate. It’s more than passive attendance. I coordinate the altar guild. I spoke on Easter Sunday. I’m on the fundraising committee. I make the coffee once a month for services (though I’ve warned them that if the quality is bad, that’s what they get when they ask the Mormon to make the coffee).

And I guess that’s the problem. I still think of myself as the Mormon. I love my new church, but not infrequently, I feel pangs of longing for Mormonism. It’s not that I’m done with Mormonism forever: my husband and children are still active Mormons, and I accompany them to church every Sunday, all three hours. I sit in the pews, sing the hymns, say amen to the prayers. But it’s not the same. The familiar rhythms of Mormonism—once the only spiritual language I knew—now feel oddly disconnected, like when you return to your hometown after you’ve lived somewhere else only to realize it’s not your home anymore.

My separation from Mormonism wasn’t entirely voluntary. Over the past months and years I’ve watched, helpless and heartbroken, as the church I was raised in repeated the sins of its past: turning away from difficulty when it should have turned toward it; deflecting honest critique when it should have listened openly; excommunicating and silencing thoughtful believers when it should have enfolded them in the arms of fellowship. They drew the circle smaller and smaller until I woke up one morning and realized it no longer included me.

Simultaneously, I felt a pull toward another kind of life—one of public ministry, of Christian leadership. When I’m honest, I recognize that I’ve always felt drawn to ministry, from the time I was a missionary in Bulgaria, perhaps earlier. As a Mormon, I hoped for teaching and leadership callings because they filled me in a way that nothing else did. I felt joyful and alive when I was speaking, teaching, or talking about faith. I wanted my life to be deeply involved in God’s work in a way that I never saw modeled as a Mormon woman. Doing my visiting teaching and floating from ward calling to ward calling, while meaningful in many ways, didn’t fill the part of my heart that yearned for a more encompassing path. (I’ve since learned the word for this, by the way–vocation–and I’ll be starting seminary in the fall.)

Sometimes I wonder if I should shrug off my Mormon identity entirely. But how can I deny my Mormonism when there are parts of me that are still so deeply Mormon? I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to shake them. I’m not sure I want to. I catch glimpses of the expansiveness of the Mormon cosmos, of its reckless, radical theology, and it takes my breath away. I could believe that. I do believe that. How can I ever be anything but a Mormon?

But how can I be a Mormon when there are parts of me that are so deeply Christian? I don’t say that to rehash the tired question of Mormonism’s Christianity, but rather to express my alignment with the broader faith tradition I now claim. Mormonism has separated itself from the Body of Christ with its insistence on “one and only.” I believe in a God of scandalous grace, who tears down walls instead of building them up, who rejects worthiness checklists in favor of the earth-shattering declaration: You are enough. This truth has revolutionized my life and filled me with peace I didn’t know was possible. How can I ever be anything but a Christian?

And so in many ways it has seemed that the process of discernment is a process of division—two authentic parts competing for dominance, and in choosing one, the other must fade away.

But what if there is another way?

I see both parts of myself, the Mormon part and the Christian part, and they are both integral to who I am. All my life I was told I had to pick one or the other, that I could only be one thing, but such strict, black and white binaries don’t reflect the God I have come to know. Great art is comprised of more than one color. A single day progresses from dark to light to dark again. Jesus was fully human and fully divine. All truth is circumscribed to one great whole.

So today, I claim me, all of me. The Mormon me. The Christian me. The contradictions and the fragments. The conflict and the friction.

I claim all the experiences God has given me. I claim my mistakes and I claim my courage. I claim myself to be true to myself. I claim myself to honor God.

Perhaps it’s true that the process of discernment is division.

Or perhaps it’s discovering that in embracing what is real—in all its messiness, complexity, and wholeness—there is no division after all.