Doubt or Faith

Last year and this year I have had to come to terms with some of my

 religious belief, namely how Women in my (Latter-Day Saint, Mormon religion) 

are viewed as equals by the authorities and ecclesiastical  members of

 the church which are, all Men holding the highest

 leadership positions in the Church.

I have always be a questioning person, ie: 

-Why does God allow this (tragedy, senseless thing to happen...)

-When will there be the opportunity to be an equal (among men) in God's world,
in God's church?

-Why do we not talk of a Heavenly Mother and worship her?

Why do just men hold the priesthood? (a power from God to act in his name).

I get that God and Heavenly Mother created us in their image and we do have gender specific traits.

What I don't get is.. why through the generations of time, women have been excluded.

I'm not convinced that our Heavenly parents commanded it to be this way.

As I search for answers and have prayed, I have felt peace with 

some of the answer and non-answers I have felt spiritually. 

If you have read this far in my post, you are probably asking yourself;

 "why is she posting this?"

I am posting this because it's therapeutic for me, it is letting you know

 that I struggle to know the meaning of life and its complexities.

I have felt peace and inner struggle at the same time in my doubting,

 but I would not want to change this, it has opened my eyes

 to many things that have not be right with how I view my religious belief's.

This statement below really made me think about my faith and my doubts

It was a talk given to a BYU forum by Terryl Givens
that gave me hope for my doubt.

We need rethink the relation-ship between doubt and faith.

 In a 2005 BYU Forum ad dress, Terryl Givens defined faith in a radical new way: as a choice, one made when legitimate evidence supports each side of possibility. 

While some people, Givens believes, are simply born with 

faith or a gift for faith, more often faith is an acquired trait. 

And “among those who vigorously pursue the life of the mind in particular, who are

 committed to the scholarly pursuit of knowledge and rational inquiry, faith is as

 often a casualty as it is a product.”1 

In this setting, life becomes, as Givens maintains, 

a test of our own willful decision to choose faith over doubt. 

As Givens continues:

I am convinced that there must be grounds for doubt as well as belief, 

in order to render the choice more truly a choice, and therefore the more deliberate, and

 laden with personal vulnerability and investment. 

The option to believe must appear on one’s personal horizon like the fruit of paradise, perched precariously between sets of demands held in dynamic tension.

 One is, it would seem, always provided with sufficient materials out of which to fashion a life of credible conviction or dismissive denial. 

We are acted upon, in other words, by appeals to our personal 

values, our yearnings, our fears, our appetites and our ego.

 What we choose to embrace, to be responsive to, is the purest reflection 

of who we are and what we love. 

That is why faith, the choice to believe, is in the final analysis an action

 that is positively laden with moral significance.

Is this a part of life to doubt?