I had wanted to thank her. Not just for answering my questions, but also for a quality that I was finding was far more rare than I had given credit at first.
It was as we were walking back down the hills that she mentioned, "I have tried really hard to not assume. When I heard you were LDS, I, of course, had heard generally what they believed, but I tried really hard to not bring that in. Instead I always tried to ask you what they believed."
This was just the thing I had been trying to get into words. That quality that makes it much harder to be ignorant. I had even tried the day before to explain to someone else why I didn't like what they were doing when it was along those lines.
Basically, as I put it to my friend on the hike, "They had some things right and some things wrong, so I'm thinking, 'Look. I don't care if you don't agree with the religion; I just want you to be accurate about what you're disagreeing with!' " She found it amusing, but it was the truth. I wished that more people were like my friend and would consciously ask before assuming. There'd be a lot less hate in the world.
