Study, Prophets and Faith

 What if we chose to have faith in the wrong church? If there is a God don't you think he wants us to search for truth our whole lives? We've been told for years that the LDS church is the stone cut without hands and will roll forth to fill the earth. In the 80's and 90's the church was growing so fast it didn't know what to do. That growth is over and at our best the whole church, active and inactive and ghost members filled less than 1% of the whole earth. It's been 200 years since the founding and estimates say there might be 3-5 million active members. Looking at statistics the church is no longer growing, it's just maintaining current levels and by the 2040's people estimate the church will be getting smaller. The leaderships sees this and are now giving conference talks emphasizing that the numbers will be few. Isn't that weird that in the 70's through the 90's all the talk was about how the church would grow (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1973/04/the-true-strength-of-the-church and https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1990/04/filling-the-whole-earth) and now all the talk is about how the church will be few in number? (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2018/10/be-not-troubled?lang=eng)  (http://ldsstatistics.com/ look at the stats vs reality tab) 

If Joseph Smith was a prophet wouldn't he have seen that and prophesied that instead of the church filling the earth? I know you want to have faith that the church hasn't been lying to you your whole life but I don't think having faith means you can't search for truth. God doesn't lead the LDS church. If he's the same in the past, present and future, then the Prophet would have known about the pandemic and he would have been out preaching repentance so that we could avoid the pandemic. Look at any prophet in the BoM or Bible. When something bad is going to happen they know and they go out and preach about it and they don't preach generic stuff, they preach specifics, they know exactly what is coming and what the people need to do to avoid it. The first talk of the last conference the Prophet said "Little did I know, when I promised you at the October 2019 general conference that this April conference would be “memorable” and “unforgettable,” that speaking to a visible congregation of fewer than 10 people would make this conference so memorable and unforgettable for me!"  (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2020/04/11nelson?lang=eng) He's not a prophet! He's just an old guy that happens to be the leader of the LDS church, which is just a church. It's not God's one special chosen church. If he was a prophet then how could he have missed the chance to preach repentance before the pandemic?

I'm trying to doubt my doubts and have faith but unless you've been in this kind of situation, you have no idea what it's like to try and force yourself to believe in something that you have very serious doubts about. Can you make yourself believe Warren Jeffs is God's actual chosen prophet? It's a little different but the same kind of idea, I'm sure you have serious doubts that God would call Warren Jeffs as a prophet so making yourself believe is almost impossible. I have serious doubts God would call Russel Nelson or Joseph Smith as a prophet so it's hard to make myself believe.