Cultish - Mormonism, Temple Marriage, & Life Beyond the Veil

welcome back to cultish everybody it is the super sleuth here flying solo where is jerry have you guys seen him i didn't see him i was at the studio today looking for him i you know i looked under the couch i looked everywhere he was nowhere yeah he's little he's nowhere to be found he's out doing things maybe like last time maybe he went out looking for some ufos i don't know but i do have some wonderful guests with us today in the studio i have aj how you doing yep and i have brandy hello yeah and there they have a beautiful story of coming to know the true and living god and coming to know one another as well through that story so we have them here today and we want we want to get to know them more and we want to hear their stories so we're going to we're going to start with aj aj what where did you come from that's the mystery where did i come from yeah oh man um so i was actually born in california and i moved to arizona when i was uh still in first grade um younger but i was born into the mormon church my parents converted when so my dad started getting involved with the church when he was like 15-16 and then when him and my mom got married uh she joined the church as well and then so when i was born i was born into the church we were sealed in the oakland temple oh wow in oakland yeah man from the streets yeah so so your dad was a he was essentially the first generation lds in your family because you said you came into it 15 16. yeah so uh he had kind of a rough family life growing up and uh i don't really remember exactly how he got involved with the church but somebody one of his friends or whatever invited him so he used to go to a lot of the outdoor activities and a lot of the youth stuff and so that kind of is what got him away from kind of the bad upbringing that he originally had and and you know helped helped him um you know i think as much as we talk about the mormon church and stuff i i do think that um there are some good things that that do come from at least having that kind of right atmosphere and and for my dad at least i think that it really helped him through a hard time in his life to kind of get out of you know bad behavior get away from bad um influences and of course and all that stuff he's the first member of our of our family to go to college and and those kinds of things so um you know he he did uh achieve a lot but yeah it definitely um it was the he was the first one yeah okay so what what are some of the memories you have growing up like you know growing up in an lds family oh man tell us about that kind of bring us into your world you brought me this i did yeah today maybe i'll put it like right here so maybe it'll be in focus this is uh the my baptism activity and memory book so how old are you when you get when you get baptized so when you get baptized in the mormon church you're eight okay yeah and uh so yeah there's not a lot filled out i don't think i was super um well you're eight yeah yeah so it's still very interesting if you notice there's like spots to fill in uh like the first presidency and all the high priests and things uh the leadership of the church because they really want you to know that um and what really struck me when i found that was the some of the scriptures they tried to kind of tie in uh i thought that was interesting but um growing up in the mormon church was i would say probably very different than how kids grow up in the mormon church today um so when i was a kid we weren't we were not allowed to have soda really at all like anything with caffeine in it was a was a no-go um like not even a question right um we could have root beer though and i remember going to costco and getting like the dad's root beer for like 50 cents that was like my favorite thing ever um and then uh like we couldn't go swimming on sundays sabbath uh yeah also i think they teach you not to go swimming from what i've heard anyway i didn't go on a mission but uh from other missionaries that you're not allowed to go swimming as a missionary like the whole time really yeah uh interesting from what i was told it was like i don't know like satan has dominion over the over the waters or something like that and there's been like stories of missionaries that like almost drowned during their mission because of going swimming or whatever weird so it's like this weird like supernatural yeah thing going on with swimming yeah the whole thing is really interesting too because in islam like they believe the same thing and when i was deployed to iraq the saddam's like palace was actually like in a moat surrounded by water and they believe that like allah can't see like in water because like it's kind of like the same kind of similarities like they would commit evil like over or within water because like all i couldn't see so like hearing that when i joined the mormon church which we'll get into like i was like that's really interesting because wow what i learned when i was in iraq about the islam faith wow that is extremely interesting that is like blowing my mind a little bit yeah i'm kind of curious if i i haven't had a chance to really talk to dan tate at all but i i'm curious if if that's something that he or if they told him that while he was in mtc or any of that stuff i'm kind of curious so yeah wow yeah we'll definitely get you in touch with dan tate yeah yeah yeah that'll be really cool to see a conversation happen about that because i'm sure there's lots of similarities that you guys would have growing up especially being in an lds family yeah and i would say so [Applause] the big difference i think between like my family and other other kids that i knew um i was allowed to have some non-mormon friends because my parents were converts and so the way they looked at things was kind of you know well if we were converts like if we didn't you know if we didn't interact with any other non-mormons then you know who else would who else would convert to mormonism right it's like an outreach opportunity kind of yeah and so i did grow up having you know the occasional but for the most part my main group of friends all came from church okay and that's kind of how i saw it right it wasn't like uh like as a christian now the way that i look at my faith in jesus and the way that i view um everything it's it's not really about going to church or it's not i don't know i don't call it church right i call it you know being a christian or whatever but for for growing up as a mormon it was always like oh yeah my friends are members of the church we're part of the church we're you know we're going to go to church we're one with the fold yeah yeah it's like a great group thing checking off boxes almost yeah yeah and um so there was those things i mean i was a boy scout um so i did that that whole thing and that was an interesting some interesting experiences the people that they let around children uh let's see what else i mean i don't know there's a lot of weird stuff that i can so so how do you think it differs from the lds person now like you were saying earlier that well i think for sure the one thing would be like the caffeine stuff right okay um i i think there's that i think that most likely oh here's the other thing too when i was growing up they were very very uh adamant about making sure that we knew that mormons were not like other christians okay they made it very clear that we are different we're separate we are mormons we're not christians we're mormons right and they don't have the truth we have the truth you know what i mean it's a very us verse them kind of thing yeah and now it's kind of this weird blend of where you know uh we we've even encountered christians who thought that mormons were christians and i brandi even had an experience where she got yelled at by a girl at a christian church oh really so so i think that's one of the bigger things and even actually my um my nieces or my niece told my son that they were christian oh wow yeah and he was like what do i say i'm like ah man like ask them if you could call yourself a mormon that's what i said right but it's you know it's kind of like uh you know at this point i think we just want him to be able to have a relationship with his cousins so it's like i don't we don't want to get you to like be too you know because he'll he's he'll just change stage 100 oh yeah he'll be like you guys are wrong you guys aren't doing the right thing you're going hell like he'll help your son oh yeah man he's old is he he's nine he's nine okay he's got that nine-year-old spunk to him oh yeah he'll just he just says things yeah yeah so wow yeah i've noticed that we do a lot of outreach to the the lds wards in the community so you'll find different generations of lds and i do find it very odd when they they bring up the well your truth is your truth my truth is my truth uh we believe this about christ you can even go through the deity of christ and how the deity of christ and the lds organization differs than that of biblical christianity and at the same time they go well your truth is your truth mine is mine as long as you're a good person yeah it's all it's okay it's really it's really sad because if you think about it when they bear their testimony they're already in pure contradiction to the your truth is your truth and my truth is my truth because they claim that joseph smith is a true prophet and that the book of mormon is true right yeah and that the church is true right right so right and because by joseph smith becoming the true prophet he had to say all other churches creeds right or incorrect that's why god came to him yeah or sent you know sent the vision to him the first vision and that's what breaks my heart right now about the current state of these people is that there's the spirit behind mormonism that has caused this cognitive dissonance in these people because we got to remember they're slaves right they're slaves not only to their sin but now to an organization that is distorted the true gospel message and has told them something that has literally caused them to not think logically right like so when you're baptized at eight years old literally you're asking a fundamentally a different jesus a different spirit and a different gospel into your life here's something else that is i don't know if you guys are aware of this but something the church has taught for a very very long time is that they don't want you to think for yourself um there is actually documented talks and um manuals that were written that straight up said like the the church authorities are there to think for you and you don't need to worry about that stuff right just do what you're told that's why there's the church essays there's an essay for every answer like every question you could have you can go on well no it's not lds.org anymore it's come unto christ or something like that yeah and you could go on there and you could type in any question in the search box and the church is going to have an answer for it which is why the ces letter was so controversial that the church had to respond and admit that joseph smith was you know like married to youth essentially because there wasn't an answer for that so so real quickly brandi for the listeners just in case they're not aware what what exactly is the ces letter yeah it's the church education system the gentleman who wrote the ces letter approached someone who said you know any questions you have about doubting your faith that you can submit a letter to us with any questions you have and we will answer them and he wrote a letter and i think it was 74 questions ish or 74 pages so more probably less questions um and none of he wrote them several times hey didn't receive anything back haven't received anything back um and it was not only the question but also like this is the evidence i found for the question that i would like you to respond to um and for me that was my shelf breaker which i'm sure we'll get into but yeah it addressed things like plagiarism um basically garments in the footnotes of the ces cs letter this guy that wrote it was just fantastic he he um is my scholarly dream for his presentation um in one of the footnotes he presented another document that someone had written uh to the church which had you know evidence that the garments were originally worn so that joseph smith would know who was part of like the original um sex cult of the lds church like that's why the garments were originally worn so they knew who was like basically one with the fold and who they knew they could communicate their secrets amongst like their secrets and that's documented verified in the ces letter yeah so if you go the ces letter so what we did yeah it's a book now oh wow so what we did is we went through the ces letter and then we went through every single footnote which took us it took us forever um i think we got about three quarters of the way before we were just broken um and it in every single thing it goes back to a factual document either reference to the church website which now they've changed the website right so what's archived what's not um but i'm sure that that there's people that have archived it for us wow wow okay so so aj we've gotten to your stories when you're about eight years old growing up a little bit into the lds organization now now what about you brandi tell us about you growing up how what about you yeah so i grew up in louisiana georgia and arkansas so i'm just southern through and through third of my life in each of those before i joined the military and moved to california um i grew up um second baptist and episcopal which is crazy to think but i would go stay with my grandmother in the summer and she was episcopal and my family was second baptist so we'd go to second baptist church and um and not only i guess we kind of went to a presbyterian church or like just a non-non-denominational as i was hitting my teenage years that was a cool thing to do as a teenager right non-denominational church yeah and in georgia and georgia they're playing killer music right yeah in atlanta they're plenty right um and so we definitely went to the one that had the awana or like the sports the upward sports programs because my parents put us into that so that was really a draw for us to go to that church so that's the church we went to um we were definitely cultural christians and i'm grateful to say that my mom has uh become more uh like concrete in her faith yeah definitely i'm closer to god as she's gotten older and i'm so grateful for that amen um however back then church was something that i was grounded from it was a privilege it was not a right like it was not um something that our family was concreted upon it was something like well you can go to church if your room is clean oh wow so um it was definitely there would be times that i was grounded for six seven months um and i wouldn't be in church there would be nothing um wow that do you think that would be the place where you're you should be at right now if you're having these troubles at home like not honoring your father and mother you should probably be in church uh that should probably help with your speech definitely um you know like when you have your kid you're like what's something i can do differently with my child right and one thing is my i don't care if my child's sitting there grumpy he will be at church you know and i love this church i love apologia because not only do i get to sit there with my child grumpy every other kid gets to see him and know that he's in trouble you know he doesn't get to go away to sunday school and pretend that everything's taken church grumpy more than once yeah that's funny yeah you don't get to go to sunday school and pretend that everything's great so that's very very true so yeah wow so so take us so you grew up in a not like nominal christianity essentially so what led you into mormonism then so when i was um i turned 18 and like i said i didn't have a very good home life and um literally on my 18th birthday i was still in high school um i left my parents home by by whoever story you want to take um i left their home and i moved in with someone from high school and once i graduated i essentially was homeless like my time was done there i went to memphis and i stayed in memphis for a couple weeks from atlanta and at that point my time was done there and the only person that i had known because i was not welcome into any of my family's house because that would cause family drama was my grandparents neighbors literally across the street driveways matched right up and um i called them and i said hey i need a ride and little rock was like two hours from memphis and they came and picked me up and i moved in with them and i lived across the street from my grandparents for about a month and a half i would say longer than that and i found out that they were mormon and that's not something i ever knew i did not know what mormonism was i knew there was a mormon church by our high school and now that i was mormon i knew that's for seminary right i can't tell you who in my high school was mormon i don't even know there had to be some i and i even went back through my yearbook and i was like who was it you're trying to look through the pictures yeah and in georgia it's much harder because there's probably all converts you know there's hardly probably any um actual utah mormons that move there for fun right um so i didn't know and to me it was just another church so the rule for me to live with them was you take the lessons and you go to church and you can live with us and to me i'm like okay i'll go to your church and i was taking the lessons but back then this was 2005. um every single lesson even after the first lesson the missionaries were like are you ready to get baptized and i felt this like real drive within me after every lesson i would rebel i had like this real rebellion in me don't tell me what to do yeah it was crazy i not that i was like sneaking out or anything but um i felt like the like i was not doing good things in my life like and i knew that the daughter was not doing good things in her life and what got me essentially and i was trying to do right by them so i didn't want to get baptized so every time i'd be like i don't know this isn't the right thing for me i got almost done with my lessons and the daughter had um snuck a boy into her house and at this time i was trying to do better trying to do better and i told i woke up the father and said there's a boy in the house or i didn't i called the missionaries because i didn't know what to do i said there's a boy in the house i don't know what to do um and they came over and woke the father up and i was kicked out so because at that time you know you're trying to do better and i and i thought i was doing the right thing because like the missionaries make it seem like you know you're supposed to be a good person this is who the church order is and um then again yet i was homeless and so uh my nana found out that i was doing lessons i went over there i basically knocked on her door and said i have nowhere to go and this is what the stipulations are for me to live there which she didn't know and i found out that they knew that they were lds they were vehemently anti-lds my papa was a freemason um 32nd degree until he passed away and then he achieved 33rd and they let me move in and from there my life was just in shambles i dealt with like demonic possession and the house and it was just really really bad time for me up until the time i was about 21. i joined the air force right after i moved in with them wow yeah crazy a lot of stuff going on yeah so that's how that was my introduction to mormonism okay that was your injury yeah so welcome to my life okay forward like 18 years okay okay so so aj bring us bring us up to up to speed then let's go from being young being eight up to the you know to where you you meet brandy and things of that nature if if we if you want to go to that to that spot or where where you think would be i think aj has a lot that he's not touched on really time period there's a lot okay tell us tell me what i got him to actually leave the church like what you witnessed yeah well i mean okay so and i've had numerous conversations with my dad about this too he's no longer a member of the church anymore okay but uh and so we often talk about things that happen growing up and those kinds of things and and you know he told me a few times he's like you know as a parent in the mormon church you kind of have this feeling that most other adults are trustworthy and are people that you can leave your kids with and and so he's like yeah we kind of just trusted that they were uh you know good mormons and all that stuff um unfortunately though that's not always the case yeah um so there were numerous instances that i remember growing up where just things were not right for example when i was at scout camp we had there was a guy that they had uh i don't i don't even think he was actually like an official scout leader they just had him come up as like a chaperone or an adult or whatever some floater or something yeah but this guy was a member of our ward okay and he choked out a kid oh wow yeah like with his bare hands and we're all just standing there like uh yeah i was nuts here's the worst part though is the kid that he choked was not even a member of the church we had two boys they were twins great guys uh we went to school with them but they weren't they weren't church members that was just the closest scout troop to where they lived yeah we all knew them so not everyone was a boy scouts lds right yeah yeah yeah i actually remember uh one year at scout camp one of the leaders saying like you lds scout camps are all you know you mormon scout camps or the you know your scout scout kids are the worst or whatever like i don't know if that's just because we were badly behaved or what um but i do remember that being told that when i was when i was younger by some rando scout leader that was kind of weird that was weird yeah anyway um so that happened and my dad was actually the scoutmaster at the time but he wasn't at scout camp and so i remember him talking about how he had to kind of deal with the fallout of that and how they pretty much had to like convince this these kids mom to not press charges yeah or yeah press charges or whatever um and you know he said it was like a big deal and they were really adamant to like kind of sweep it under the rug and and kind of let it so it left marks like he choked him bad oh yeah no it was wow it was significant yeah any choking is bad but what i mean like what i mean is like it you know i mean he was like yeah oh my god you saw that happen yep wow man yeah and then um there was another i remember there was a sunday school teacher when we were a little bit older who uh he was just i don't know how to explain he's kind of a jerk and and so we would you know being teenagers would kind of give him a hard time you know maybe say stuff or me just disobedience or whatever and i remember he used to go up to my buddy and like oh let me fix your tie and kind of do that whole like you know and too tight kind of thing and uh it was it happened more than once it was it was numerous times actually and both me and my buddy were were both in karate at the time and so finally i think this happened for the last time for him and he kicked him in the groin like in the middle of church oh yeah wow yeah like we literally would so the way that we would do it the way that the order of kind of service would go we'd have sacrament meetings so the big kind of group everybody meets together and then you'd have someday sunday school and then we'd have priesthood or young women's or whatever and yeah so anyway it was i remember it happened as we were transitioning from class to priesthood this happened and he you know yeah so so when he did the whole thai thing he wouldn't it wasn't like a joke it was kind of like he would hurt people yeah yeah no yeah wow and that never really got addressed by i remember us telling people about it and no one really cared or really wanted to deal with it at all in fact it got to the point where that same guy we were older there was a girl that was a little bit younger than me who was upset probably by something he'd said and she got up to leave his class and he physically grabbed her shoulders and like shoved her back down into her seat oh wow yeah so lots of weird physical altercations are going on while you're younger you're seeing so what you're seeing as a young you're like almost like a young adult this time like in your teens yeah i was like 14 15 16 out something yeah so so we have a an organization that claims this spiritual holiness right like this reverency that needs to be happening at all times but there's like an outward uh expression or let's like like a mannequinism that they like to portray to people like that's a perfect word for it yeah but then but on the inside you're seeing like physical abuse starting to happen in areas and i'm not going to say that this happens at every single ward or anything like that this is your personal experience this is the stuff i witnessed but one thing we have to understand especially as listeners here is that regardless of what people say about themselves is we know the true spiritual state of man is that they're slaves to sin and if you don't if you're not released by the spirit of god we shouldn't be surprised by these things regardless of what people say right so so walk walk me through that as being a teenager and growing up trying to have this reverency in terms of the religion that you're in but then seeing something that's totally opposite like the fruits in a sense are opposite of what's actually being portrayed so i think an important thing too is there is a lot of separation between like real life and church life um i kind of saw them as different and while being mormon did kind of encompass a lot of things of my life um growing up it was always like a like while we're at church you know we do kind of one thing and and you kind of put on your best you know what i mean and then when you get home things are kind of different right so there's a dualism you had a mediocre oh for sure yeah and and so uh so when we'd see those things go on it was i never really attributed it at the time to like oh this guy's you know supposed to be a high priest or a or a melchizedek priesthood holder and he's supposed to be doing this i never really looked at it that way it was always kind of like this guy's a jerk this guy shouldn't be acting this way i think the bigger problem too was the fact that like when we would bring stuff up and we kind of my age group kind of had a reputation of being like troublemakers um so much so in fact that uh one of the members of the bishopric's young son at a at a camp trip started a forest fighter forest fire there and we got blamed for it oh wow yeah and i was like adamant that it was us you know yeah and uh once of course once it came out who it was there was no apology given it was just well you guys you know whatever this guy actually the same person ended up becoming the bishop and uh it was like a flip a switch got flipped and he all of a sudden like the youth were like his main ministry like he had this special little what he used to call it uh like the bishops bible club or something where he'd invite like the youth over to his house and they would do like a bible study thing it was very strange very strange um so wait which guy which guy became the bishop the guy who started the forest fire the guy whose son started the forest fire and he was very adamant that it was my right me and a couple people gotcha granted we had gotten in trouble a few times at camp trips before uh for doing stupid things but we didn't do anything wrong that time right yeah not that time uh was this the same guy that like used you for like child labor so no but that was also kind of a pervasive thing right so one of the big things when you're uh a member of the church is doing service projects right so uh when you're a scout when you're a boy scout you do service projects and like the church loves that stuff because people are like oh i got eagle scout project great we can all do you know community service or whatever right um and you're kind of expected to do those things right and of course we've i think you guys have touched on this too like the the doing things because you're expected to is not the same thing as like doing it because you have that in your heart because jesus gives you that that drive to be uh you know help others right um but i remember specifically when i was uh like 16 or so um there was a few different guys and actually yeah i think we did go to that guy's house the so he was so this is before he was a bishop he was like in the he was in the bishop rick so like they have like they usually have one bishop and two counselors he was like one of the counselors and um i remember we went to his house and laid a rock one time because he was getting ready to sell his house and he wanted to put rock in the backyard so that you know it'd be nice for the firm to sell it like does that seem to me to you like something that is needed like for community outreach right but they'd be like hey bring the youth over they're gonna do some you know some service active service yeah yeah yeah right so there was there was weird stuff like that another guy um who was like our teacher or whatever and he was he was he was very oh man trying to think of a good word for it anyway he was not nice to us he was very obvious that he had issues with us he kind of he kind of came in hard like this is how it's going to be and bro i know you guys and you know what i mean same thing like we had a reputation and and you know no one really gave us a chance to actually like be good people right um you know so what so what should have happened real quick is we should have been discipled properly and said hey this is how we should be growing you know in christ this is how uh sanctification works you know what i mean and instead it was more like you guys are terrible we're going to make things difficult for you so that you turn your life around you know what i mean right yes and so he once again had tried to get all of my age group i think we were priests at the time um that's the title not actual priests right uh so you thought yeah at that time so you did well i thought i was very holy at the time yeah i could you know bless the sacrament and stuff um so uh but he was trying to get people to i think we were they wanted us to help us do a uh i think he was doing like a stain and a seal on his like driveway oh okay you know what i mean just kind of like i want to do this i need people to help come do it for me yeah send over the bad boys yeah and i remember hearing my dad yelling at this guy on the phone about how he's abusing the youth wow it's like you're just getting them to do things yeah i mean realistically yeah like oh hey i need somebody to paint my house let's get the youth over to do it like it's just where does it end you know what i'm saying like where does it where's that like you know are we helping the less fortunate no we're just helping a guy doesn't want to pay for it yeah you know it's interesting you say that because i've had multiple conversations with many lds missionaries right now and one of the tactics that they're using uh is doing like yard work for people or not new yeah oh okay yeah they actually come to the women's house like when my husband this is before i was lds in california they would come and ask us if uh if i needed my laundry folded it's like they knew he was deployed or satan told them or godzilla i don't know i told them that he was deployed and they would come knock on my door and say do you need laundry folded you know like in exchange for dinner or lesson yeah you know and at that time i was like uh no like why are you at my door no you know hmm that's very interesting okay so this is something that's been going on for a long time oh yeah i remember when i was i i want to say 16. one of the things that really started getting me to start uh like doubting the church uh was they had this whole lesson planned out well first okay let me back up a little bit when passion of the christ came out um and we were specifically told do not see that movie it's terrible it glorifies the death of jesus like this is not something that that good mormon people should be viewing right this is horrible right and so that was kind of the notion i had in fact when i met brandy and she's like you've never seen passions of christ the best movie i ever will you know and and not the best movie ever but like yeah she was excited she wanted you to see it yes i still haven't seen it yeah oh yeah i mean he just watched legally blonde for the first time like a couple weeks ago so like public programming as well i'm wearing a buff now because i didn't watch movies growing up really we watched we watched like animated mormon stories okay um like i would be laughing about like rocco's modern life yeah he's like what's that and like wow wow i know he's like i watched sesame street he was 16. oh for sure yeah that's pretty bad yeah seriously it was like my mom was such a stickler to uh any any anything that was out of the so was pg-13 and i was not 13 could not watch it ah you know what i mean that's the standard yep yeah but think about now like if that's the lds rule now pg-13 like there's things on netflix that are pg-13 that i would never terrible yeah never there's some bad stuff so if that's like like theologians this week just touched on it like to think that your lives as parents and children run parallel and you are just like oh that's their life like they're they're living it and i'm living mine but like i'll touch in like that's the lds family life like on mondays we meet on sundays we meet but tuesdays through saturday our lives run parallel and like their children they know what to do they know the rules so if you have an lds child that's watching something that's pg 13 and they're 14 even 15 and there's things i'm 34 and i would never watch that is what the things are being younger than that we encountered we encountered something that was right and it meant to like digress no you made a good point in fact it just reminded me of it's even younger than that like we ran across something that was like it was pg but they were they were talking i think he he yeah he told us he said hey this show's got like two girls kissing and it was a tvp like tvg on netflix oh wow and i said what and i went and made a post on in the women's group i'm like i can't believe this like but i thought like to think if we were lds that's the things my child would be exposed to because that's just the rule that's the standard like i would never check in now granted i did grow up watching you ever heard of feature films for families you ever heard of that uh it sounds it sounds familiar did they do like the buttercream gang movie yeah okay buttercream gang was my that was what's that movie it's very popular with uh ponyboy oh uh the outsiders outside that was like my i don't know if the buttercream game was an lds movie or not but i would consider the buttercream gang to be like my christian outsiders yeah i know we we were all like we watched those movies like we had all of them on vhs you know i mean we watch stuff like star wars you know but like but i never watched like the things that he was allowed to watch like you what was that scary movie you watched as a teenager with your dad and your sister oh man that was when i was older it doesn't like i was never like to think the things that he was allowed to do and i was like whoa well so here's what crazy i was never allowed to watch when i was about 16 or so my dad stopped going to church and he was like i'm done i can't do this anymore and so uh but my mom was still very much like you guys are going to church and so we would still go and do whatever we needed to do church-wise you know i mean i went through four years of seminary in in high school like all that stuff and um so but my dad would be like hey we're gonna go see a movie don't tell your mom and we would go watch like underworld that was like the first fight club was the first radar movie i ever watched love that movie yeah great movie um but not something you'd probably want to show your kids right right yeah but yeah and he's like don't tell your mom watching this or like we went to the movie theater and saw underworld you know and and then he's like we can't it's like me my older sister and my dad he's like we cannot tell your mom and we did we did not tell her she did not find out for like a year and then it finally i think your sister probably told your mom i think we casually mentioned it maybe i don't know we casually mentioned it my mom was so mad yeah just because we'd forgotten um but yeah so like there was like things where my my dad kind of started getting more lacks on just because he was like what's up you know what i mean he probably didn't think it was important or as important especially since we're getting older but yeah i never talked about my dad sat us down and we were gonna watch the movie it i'm sorry not it the shining oh okay so we sat down to watch the shining and it was like my dad's like i'm tired i'm going to bed and so my sister and i are sitting there in the dark at night my dad just went to bed and we're like uh let's turn this off we're gonna go we're gonna go to bed too um that's funny anyway that's a little well i mean like to be fair too like i grew up in like a christian household but i mean i watched robocop at the age of five oh that movie you know in the first 30 minutes there's like hundred like not a hundred percent 25 people getting shot up in like uh a high-rise building you know isn't there a guy that just like explodes yeah yeah there's there's a lot of crazy stuff but yeah for example like i like i watched you know the exorcist probably at like i've never yeah i've seen the shining i've seen it i watched it when i was very young very terrified of how i watched it when i was young but at a neighbor's house see when i was going to school i knew kids who they would come to school with like friday the 13th shirts and stuff like that and i never was allowed to watch this well these what's funny though is these things absolutely terrified me and i probably shouldn't have watched them when i was a kid but i mean in terms of like the way parent people parent i'm sure that it's very similar across the board on how involved people want to be in their children's lives regardless if they're they're lds or christian um we have standards though that are very important in the bible of how we should actually shepherd our children whereas i can see it being a very tempting thing to do if i were to be lds to think well you know these children that are in my life they're not necessarily my children they're the spiritual offspring of elohim and one of his goddess wives they're actually my brothers and sisters that i'm actually keeping here in this mortal probation and they now have their free will to do some x and well not to mention or sealed together for time and all eternity right it's their own responsibility for their own salvation so it's their choice whether they're 8 5 17 35 for the choices they're going to make they know the way yeah let's just say i can see that i can see the temptation being there but i'd also see that there's probably many many lds parents who are probably like nope you're not watching this you're not doing that you know to try to make it easier for their time in mortal probation i guess that was definitely more of my experience growing up was a lot of like don't do this don't do that yeah um yeah so so i think my first purview into kind of starting to doubt the church was i was in elders quorum uh and they had brought up how the church was coming out with like a new initiative or something basically they they were like yeah you know we really want you guys to be friends with your neighbors you know like people you know like you see your neighbor like cutting his lawn go ask him if you want some help or whatever whatever you know and he's like the whole like and i remember them explaining that the whole point of this whole thing was to like basically be kind to them and then they would ask us about the church and then we could friendship evangelism so flirt to convert that was the term so in you know what 25 to 10 years ago that was the term that they talked about in relief society was flirt to convert that was like the joke the meme then and so when he's telling me about it and i'm like oh yeah flirt to convert he's like don't call it that i'm like well that's what they called it when i was in church being told to flirt with my neighbors you were just told that well it's to be friendly and you know like to be yeah to be jovial well that's right that's that's the thing show them the light that's within you yeah there's like friendship evangelism even within christianity but in in terms of doing that type of friendship it's almost it's almost um fake it seems dishonest it's dishonest completely different um between cross-cultural evangelism or cross-cultural communication to bring people in and actually learn about them that's completely different you know the way that we're called by christ to do right um to actually like get into their lives and from the inside out versus it being completely surface like okay great you're a member now by e which is what happened to me yeah i think genuinely loving and caring about somebody as a person and where they are in salvation and and trying to share the truth of them because you want them to be saved and and you want them to know christ i think it's a completely different uh you're coming out from a completely different place right yeah and and i remember being told that and just thinking to myself like aren't we supposed to be just being kind to others because christ would want us to be like it was the first time i'd ever really had like a huge disconnect where like i felt like they were telling me something that was completely the opposite of what the what we were taught about jesus interesting yeah and and um sorry you you were okay no no no i wasn't i know i felt like i interrupted i i i wasn't sure i can understand there's a very big uh similarity uh to that more like the the woman thing or the man thing yeah you know what i mean and it's like really i i mean gosh i hate to say this but i was you know when i became a christian after mormonism and i was talking to one of my pastors wives at this point and i said i'm just really afraid because the mormon church is releasing their own new testament and this was the weight that we had to stand upon was the truth of the new testament and now they're releasing their new testament and you know she said the only thing we have to stand on is what christians are supposed to be doing correctly not the mormon church and and i said wow you're you know and she talked about like how we're supposed to be evangelizing the way christ told us to not to be shallow we're supposed to be actually living christ's word not to be this vapid person that lives by this fake set of rules essentially that's made up like these pharisees and um that really got to me and she said it doesn't matter what new testament they have when you're living the truth and you can actually demonstrate it to them by your life and then showing them in the new testament regardless of what their says then you have the truth that christ shares like you have that evangelism that they don't have and that really i went to her crying did you hear did you hear the lds church is releasing a new testament um and that's you know that was the hope that she shared with me and she said you know for so long the mormon church has been doing it correctly christians should be the ones knocking on doors christians should be the ones folding the pregnant woman's laundry christian should be the one taking dinner christians should be the one sweet like raking the leaves and um the mormon church has only been deceiving people because they got that part right right it's everything else that they're not getting right that's right i think i think one thing uh i feel like i'm jumping around so i was listening to the latest episode with uh micah wilder yeah and a lot of a lot of his experience really like touched me because it was it felt a lot like my experience not the mission part obviously because i left the church before i was old enough to go on a mission or i was right about that age but um for me like i had friends that were christian i remember specifically going to a couple different christian concerts uh like i went to a super tones concert when i was in high school with some some kids from band when i was in band and uh no one shared the gospel with me like at all yeah and and so it's really weird thinking about this now and it's like you know what i've listened i don't know but um the fact that that no christians in my like vicinity growing up even attempted i mean that's huge right and it goes back to what brandy was saying like that's stuff we should be doing on a daily basis you know what i mean yeah um and so i don't know i i try to we're really trying to be more you know outspoken about our faith and more uh evangelistic and loving of course we don't want to be right uh brow beating people but you want to be a noisy gong right exactly exactly um yeah so and then i think the the other thing so i left the church like right when i turned 18 like right when i turned 18. and and the last thing for me really was uh i remember watching so i was huge into church history as a kid like really into church history i had all these audio tapes that were like uh dramatizations of like lds church history okay yeah reenactment oh yeah sorry not real churches yeah the lds church has their own uh like movie studio which is now vid angel i didn't know like so the same company that makes the chosen oh okay yeah and i really feel like christians should know that i don't know if you want to get that out of here but um they are now the company that produces like the temple videos um and the videos that you call the reenactments and stuff right right yeah so i remember growing up listening to these uh audio reenactments of uh like joseph smith's first vision and pretty much all the way up to uh his his death at carthage jail and stuff and i remember i listened to them over and over and like all the time because they were so fascinating to me yeah and uh and so i was like oh man how great is it that the you know the the lds church has like got all these stuff archived and documented and like this is so amazing and then i watched a documentary on the meadow mountain massacre on the history channel i'd never heard about it before okay and i was like why would the church not tell me about this this is insane like if if a bunch of mormon settlers murdered a bunch of people i would like to know about it you know what i mean and so then things started kind of you know the sweater started unraveling for me a little bit um and it was like all right i'm done but unfortunately for me like first off i didn't have anything to really go to it was just like i'm done with everything yep and uh it was like i just i just was like okay well i'm not going to organize religion anymore this is kind of garbage i'm not listening to this i'm not going to deal with this anymore yeah um i'm just going to be a good person right that's kind of the whole like i'm just going to be a good person and i'm saying god will god will forgive me you know yeah uh obviously that's not how it works right and um the other problem too is that i didn't have like a theological basis for why i left all of my issues were with the people that i grew up with obviously that was kind of a problem for me and then also uh maybe not the people but just the encounters i had with people that were part of the church and then also the um sorry i lost my train of thought uh there was the people and then the history stuff so right those two things together for for me was enough to be like this is all a lie you know what i mean he said like your dad left you like when your dad left the church he didn't take you with him no not really my mom still kind of you know made us go to church and it was all kind of very much like will you guys do your own thing and and that kind of attitude i unfortunately kept so when brandy started taking the the church lessons with the missionaries after we got married i kind of was like well it's your choice you decide and all you know whatever makes you happy and and obviously that's not what i should have been doing as a spiritual leader in our home right um and that's something i i regret but i'm glad that we went through it because you know now we're kind of out the other side um having you know the spirit of of god with us and and having faith in christ and being saved and all that um but so i kind of just lived in the world and and did my own thing did whatever partied in college and all the you know stupid stuff you do um not really caring about uh god or anything i do remember one really significant encounter when i was in college so uh i went to nau for about a year before i joined the military okay and uh i'd been out of the church for a couple of years at this point and um well when i say out of the church i just wasn't going i hadn't left you didn't revoke your membership or taken off the record yeah that happened later um i just wasn't going so uh but i was up at nau i'm at my job and i hear this girl talking about how mormonism is a cult and immediately it was like it was like i was a church member again it was weird i was like they're not a cult you know they believe in jesus but like i was like oh wow you went on the defensive oh yeah and that's happened to me i have literally been sitting at a football game beside someone who was holding a beer in their hand talking to me about how their family was lds and i said oh i used to be lds like it so feels so good to be free of the cult life and turns to me and just start they're not a cult we believe in jesus like i'm still a member of the church like girl look like let's reflect on where we're at right now in life right you know what are you defending yeah it's just like those uh it's almost being you know growing up in it for people like going through it for so long it just it's just like it's like they're almost trained yeah instantaneously they hear that one thing and their brain reverts almost like a muscle defending their testimony our son up until i guess just this week uh the way he starts his prayers heavenly father like the way like because then when you're in the mormon church you say heavenly father and you and you're like it's very repetitive it's very repetitive the same and we just kind of broke it down for him like hey man uh you've been saying the same prayer since you were like four uh at night so you're old enough now we need to start talking about the things you know because he would pray properly he would pray in the mormon prayer like the way they teach kids to pray but still add like oh i'm thankful for this please pray for this um please pray for missionaries bubble you know but he was sincerely meaning it from like a christian way but i said like let's demonstrate like and we would show him in the bible before like you know this is how jesus prayed yeah but just this week it really got to us it really just like you know he it really clicked with him where he said oh wow and then even last night when he was trying to pray he was like heavenly fat um uh and he said our father in heaven he started like jesus in the lord's prayer wait how do i do it let's well let's do it how jesus taught us today yeah yeah that works man yeah our father who is in heaven yeah that's how he started our father who is in heaven you know and it but that's it's so indoctrinated because i mean he was two yeah he had just turned old enough to go to nursery they don't let them go to nursery until they're a year and a half okay so we had just joined i remember making a joke like oh look i i joined at the right time i didn't have to have my baby in church but now i mean obviously we had another baby we're back at apology no i'm just kidding we get them through 18 in church right that's right family integration yeah that's amazing it's great it's the right way yeah wow okay so yeah yeah keep keep going from from there i want to hear how okay so you're you're going to join the military and what's what's tripping me out a little bit is you joined the military yeah so at this point like what two years before me okay yeah i joined at 19 but i crazy so i left my nana's house because i was still partying at this point i was into drugs um and you know my nana super episcopalian went to theological seminary for the the episcopal church the two-year program that they have my papa a devout freemason um but there was so much darkness in my life and and like physical like actual like physical darkness tangible darkness you can cut it with a knife yeah yeah yeah and i remember my nana saying that you know like if you ever get if you ever feel it like this is something my family is aware of and has been aware of like since my mom was a teenager her friend died um they were in a horrible like a horrible accident and i mean this is something like we could have conversations about with my mom and she would say like yes um this person i don't know remember the name but um as present at your nana's house you know and like that's scary um so just you know read psalms 21 22 constantly so i would have it open at night and just like read it consistently well i left nana's house um because i couldn't stop partying and was doing like drugs and stuff i shouldn't be doing at that time and and what's interesting is i actually i just remember i got baptized at 10. okay in the back in the baptist church and baptist church yeah so what's so crazy is like and i think of all the people i grew up with who did the same it was at a point in awana where you became like this point i was gonna ask if it was vbs this little like stage in awana is where everyone goes and gets baptized yeah so you just do it it's ritualistic um everyone else is doing it your friends are doing it yeah well it was like part of you got signed off in your book to like move on to i don't know wow like a stamp i got this yeah yeah so yeah i didn't know that so it was like to move on at that and i'm sure juana has changed now it's probably not as evangelistic as it used to be it's more babysitting now um but it it's so crazy to think that like i was baptized and there's no fruit in my life like ever um but i still thought that i was saved at times when i would try to reach out for christ and stuff would still pray regularly and try to read the bible but like now i know the truth you know darkness cannot reside where light is you know um jesus is my protector like my my faith is my truth and like that jesus is the truth he's the only truth amen the truth is a person and his name is jesus yes amen yeah amen that's so i like god chills that's so true jerry said it i took that from jerry oh wow that's the thing i'm gonna get that tattoo that's my next tattoo that's a good idea thank you jerry you're not here but you're here wherever you are wherever you are you should put that on a shirt with his face on it yeah would jerry would you know jerry's like smiling they'll think his name's jesus oh that's true we shouldn't do that never mind because it is jesus jesus and it looks like jerry what's going on yeah that's what i was thinking all right so i ended up i moved out and i had met a guy on like i don't know whatever tender probably like hot or not or whatever it was or something yeah it was a hot or not a show on mtv or something i think so i don't know whatever it was then were you secretly an mtv celebrity from the early 2000s yes no i'm just kidding and i moved in with him and then i went to basic training i didn't have a driver's license or anything so i kind of relied on like the very like arkansas life like you just rely on whatever guy will take you to work that day um and that's so cliche i'm sorry for people from arkansas that's not arkansas life i'm from west little rock not anyway um please get that out and i'm just kidding i don't want to offend anyone from arkansas uh so i joined the air force and i actually got married to him when i was in basic training not he was already in the air force right and i was already going to join the air force so by chance i had gotten orders to japan but because i um had gotten married to this gentleman i ended up stationed back in arkansas and it was a very abusive relationship which i mean is expected when there's two unbelievers together that you know trying to pervert god's image of marriage right um and trying to live in this like weird like we're got a good marriage you can't have a good marriage if god's not in it um and so i remember one night i was just laying in bed and we were about to move to california and i just look up and there's literally the ceiling is like moving in black and i'm like okay god um when you're ready like i'm done like well there's like this moment where you don't have the security in your faith to be like i'm done like lord rebuke satan um and so you're you know like in you put your foot back under the blanket and you're like okay god uh like so you're laying in bed you wake up in the middle of night and you look up and it's like your ceiling is moving yeah and i had felt this presence like many times yeah in the past yeah so when i was actually a young child at my nana's house i had woken up in the middle of night and uh the like the whole house was moving like and i couldn't walk like so there were like little things that um gosh i mean it sounds so like christians get it like that's the thing like people who believe in demons and angels like they get it but like it just sounds so insane to like say out loud which i've never really like said out loud except to my husband right um like people like coming out of the wall like screaming at me like and like keeping me from getting to my parents room wow like physically keeping me from getting to my parents that was when you were yeah when you were yeah i was probably like four okay and like the whole the whole floor is like moving like waving and such and i couldn't get to my parents room and then all of a sudden it just stopped and um i ran in my parents room and and then they put me back to bed where it happened so man i came here for a reason yeah i risked my life to get to you mom and dad and you're bringing me back yeah and i and i'll never forget that there's a lot that i can't remember in my childhood um but that i'll never forget and then so anyway back to being um that night i'm laying in bed and and i wake up and it's literally i can't breathe like it felt like whatever this was was standing on me and i'm looking over to my ex-husband and he's just laying in bed sleeping peacefully wow and my bible again was always open always open so i'm trying to grab it and i couldn't grab it and i'm just like trying to breathe and i couldn't breathe um but at this time you have to understand i thought it was saved so like while at this time i totally believed that demon possession could happen to christians or demons okay taunt christians um i was of that belief and i was able to like finally just be like lord please lord please help me and get up and walk outside i'm in my pajamas and as i'm walking outside of the apartment like all looked like all the lights were off and i made it downstairs because we were in a two-story apartment come to find out later after right after this happened my mom lived in the same apartment building when she was a teenager like when she when she was like a young adult so like she moved out of nana's house and lived in the same apartment building that's weird oh like crazy crazy things that's right in our family do you have experiences when she lived there i don't know i've never talked to my mom i only talked to nana about these things so so i go outside and like all the lights look dark and i'm like running out to the grass and i'm just like i can finally breathe and i'm like lord please make it stop and like all the lights just like get bright again weird yeah wow and so at that point i was grateful we got orders to california and we moved to california and i was of the belief you can move and it won't follow you because that's what i was taught as a kid yeah so we moved and guess what followed me that yeah the entity yeah so i deployed um i let's see i moved and that was horrible california was horrible it continued to be horrible um and i deployed to iraq um i almost lost my life a couple times um once on an explosion and then when i our plane was landing in baltimore a plane crashed at the it's actually still there like the plane was so damaged they use it as like firefighter training so that was in 2009 wow and the plane is still there where were you in the plane when it crashed um actually it was a dc-10 so i was actually in the middle like right in front of the the movie screen and i thank god for that every day i never sit in the middle aisle i was in so the middle aisle was five seats and then the three seats on the outside and i was in the middle seat right with my feet up on the the movie screen wow did many people in that plane crash die um no i don't know if anyone ended up dying but i know that everyone like in the back like the luggage ballast like fell on them and then the ones on the sides that were like on the inner like the aisle rose that the luggage opened um and the ballast fell on them and all the lug inside of it fell on them and then um the fire like we had to stay on the plane because the firefighters had to take a lot of people out so after that can i can i really interrupt for a second so so uh the first half of my career i was aircraft maintenance and so typically when you have something like a hard landing um they'll do like a repack of the struts and like they'll fix things right this plane was damaged they hit the runway so hard that they couldn't repair it oh the runway the plane was about to go into like the river so they had to take back off again shut down the engines and glide back to another runway because or another like taxiway because there was so much damn like like debris on the previous taxiway yeah so this wasn't just a hard landing this was like seriously yeah this is a smash landing yeah it's like the wings were like touching the ground when we finally landed like i remember we were going back around and being like i could see the print on that guy's shirt and he's like fishing like looking up at like the plane like wow he's like this is not good yeah so but the whole time i was deployed they had chapel and i lived right i lived i stayed by the chapel um but the chaplains and i i this is not to say anything about individual chaplains in the military um the chaplain corps in the military is not equipped for salvation they are your friends they are your counselors you go to color you go to get ramen noodles you go to get girl scout cookies um so when i was deployed and i'm really needing assistance you go to chaplaincore to color or to open letters from boy scouts um they have like their little military new testaments um and at that time i was flying from baghdad to blood um we were getting shot at on our planes and and i was also working in the hospital so going baghdad blood hospital baghdad hospital seeing a lot of death um trying to find respite in the the chapel there was no message and i'm sure there was church but it was not at a time that like you probably had to work a nine to five but i worked like two days and nights two days a days two days a night that's totally true because when i was when i was in iraq uh in 2018's when i went there uh same deal like she's like oh you're trying to go to church i'm like i can't i work like every day so yeah and so um at that time i really was like all right god like i've almost died like so many times like the plane would land at the end of the runway um to make sure that no one was shot like that kind of thing because they would stop it then the runway because they're not going to taxi in if the plane's on fire right yeah um or someone's dead they're just going to kind of like the ambulance will meet you out there um and i had kind of just like given up hope at that point um so we come back and i i divorced my ex-husband which again is i want to make clear that that is against god's law like but when there's not god in the marriage like there's no hope for the marriage so we didn't have hope i actually had been going to a military chaplain before this while my um there was a very abusive relationship and i've been going to chaplain on base before my deployment and he had said like well this is what the bible says about divorce your husband has to say that he wants to divorce you before you can divorce him so i was staying in a very abusive relationship still trying to seek what god's word said about my marriage while i wasn't saved and he wasn't saved and the person you're going to for council is not actually yeah knowledgeable about god's word um and so i actually stayed in that marriage until he said he wanted to divorce me and so i was wait a couple years too long and i landed i crash landed in baltimore you know found all my money was stolen by my ex-husband when i got to baltimore so it was like a whole like disaster and i just like given up like all like god's not for me god i'm not on god's team or he's not on my team you know right yeah and so where are you god look at my life yeah so i finally make it back to california and i um had severe ptsd i had dreams about my crash realistic dreams about my explosion the hospital is a very very tough time i started drinking really bad grateful that i do not have an addictive personality and i did not let myself get into that i actually had a cat at the time that uh like woke me up out of like a real bad flashback dream and uh aj hates that cat to this day because that cat did not like aj he only liked me that cat would punk me out every minute they had the opportunity oh wow yeah um so i um found a church that was a lutheran church and got involved there still thought i was saved they don't verify your salvation um became a youth leader crazy that they would even let me be a youth leader i was living with my boyfriend at the time in a premarital sexual relationship which is just insane yeah um so i'm still searching god still trying and i ended up going on a the winter retreat i'm still in the air force at this time go on the winter retreat with the youth and one of the teenagers comes up to me and says i forgot my birth control and i'm like why do you need your birth control like you're on a youth retreat with church yeah you don't need your birthday she's like well i'm sleeping with i'm sleeping the same sleeping bag as my boyfriend i need my birth control and i'm like we're in tahoe and our church is in vacaville like we're not driving all the way like we just shoveled snow to get in this house you're not sleeping in this sleep so i go to the go to the boyfriend pastor and i said hey this is going on and he's like um well that's for her and her parents to deal with so if she wants to sleep in the same sleeping bag as her boyfriend we have to call her mom and ask her mom to bring her medicine oh my goodness and i said well this church is not for me and i stopped going after this so funny because we actually got staff pictures like the weekend before the the youth retreat and so then i was like church isn't for me still i didn't know that this is the state of church these days um and i actually had like considered at this point going to a mormon church to go find a husband like a real husband wow um but then i found aj and that's where aj comes into my life we met on match.com oh okay because at that time i was like had written off like ever my ex-husband was in the military too and i was like i'm never going to date anybody in the military and then i funny as i said the same thing aj who was in the military and we actually almost worked together and everyone in his work knew me but he didn't know me oh wow and i didn't know him so when he started dating me everyone was like oh you're dating her she's so cool and i'm like i know i'm pretty cool that's funny anyway so that's where i my story she's pretty cool i'll admit that so wow on record all right so my life is pretty cool so bring us up to speed up to speed with your life going up to where you met brandy all right so i was not searching for anything right uh at all at this point um i joined the military in 2008 so like about two years af uh after she had joined um i tried to do college at that point my parents kind of were like if you're going to live with us you got to be going to school so i went to school um and then it kind of got you know really difficult being at home being an adult having to live under your parents roof um and so i was like oh i know i'm going to go to a university so i went to nau and that didn't end well uh the curse of arizona college maybe i don't know it was just trying to escape my parents turned into a really expensive right you know situation uh in fact it was i i so i i got kicked out i mean at you because they put me on like academic probation and they're like hey you need to leave and get your grades you know yeah better uh somewhere else and uh i was kind of i was like man what do i do with my life and i was working at uh avis and budget rent-a-car okay um and i worked with this old salty you know retired senior master sergeant who was like yeah military's the best thing you should join the air force well you know and uh after a while i was like you know maybe i will it's because it's either this or i become a truck driver you know and um and so uh still not really thinking about god still not really even considering anything it was more like as long as i'm good person other people you know that's kind of the the motto i lived by which i was not very good to other people it's more like now what can i do to make a living yeah yeah and in fact at one point it was like financially it was bad enough that i like me and this other girl that i worked with uh moved into an apartment together she had a kid and a boyfriend who was like did not like that i was living with her um but like it was the trashiest apartment ever it was like one of those apartment complexes that's like there's only four units yeah and it was like 500 a month to live there and we split it and we still had a hard time making rent wow yeah it was rough um we used to live next to this guy that had like 15 cats we used to call him the cat lady um uh so anyway um i finally was like i got into with the recruiters they're like hey you know whatever and so i finally asked my parents hey can i move in with you guys well just while i wait to join the military and they're like okay yeah so i moved back down to phoenix joined the military all that stuff um and i had already deployed like twice before we even met like when i started deploying when i got qualified in my job to be able to deploy i had i deployed for like almost a year straight like i went on one deployment i was home for about a month then i went on a tdy for like another month or two and then i went on another deployment uh tdy's like a short term uh temporary duty whatever temporary duty like yeah we ended up going to australia and diego garcia and doing some secret missions to afghanistan moving cargo no one knew what it was wow yeah we're just like yeah yeah it was weird is that even your real name wait till you find out what he did after that oh yeah well anyway yeah uh yeah it was cool i mean i didn't get to go to afghanistan whatever i'm scared um there was no denial did you see that there's just the shoulder shape [Applause] uh anyway yeah so so when we met um it was kind of i i mean for me it was love at first sight i know it's kind of cliche to say but we met in this like dingy bar it describes california it has bras yeah it was bad california it was bad yeah i could see that yeah california is amazing parts of it yeah uh great place to visit so we lived there for like six years yeah for a long time um it was beautiful anyway we met and she started pressuring me to go to church and it wasn't it wasn't like you need to go to church it was like we need to really get involved in in church because we're our son you know we got a son on the way like i don't want to raise him without faith in our home and at the time i was like i don't want to do this but but but i was like okay fine like if you want to do that it's gonna make you happy i'll go with you right um and for a while it was okay we went to this non-denominational church um in what was it was in vacaville yeah and uh come to find out it's part of like the bethel circuit oh okay so that's why it was great at the time it was real great i went there because i liked the music so she spoke tongues there was a lady which is kind of weird when he was deploying yeah it was strange and i was like i did have one i did have one kind of strange spiritual experience when i was there like pretty much this is really i did not think that i went there long enough to really any have anybody say anything but since i was deploying like they called me forward and they like prayed for me and stuff and i was like oh this is weird um and then this guy i'd never seen him before ever and then he disappeared after that he came up to me and he gave me a coin which is like in the military that's kind of a thing you do every squadron every unit has a coin most aligned organizations have a coin and it's kind of like a it's a traditional thing you give someone a coin it's it's like a the whole history of it is basically like during world war one the these these guys these pilots they they all had these coins that they'd earned or they made for each other or whatever and and um one guy crashed and he got stuck behind enemy lines and so when he tried to make his way back to um the base they almost shot him but he had that coin with him and that's how they knew who he that he was telling the truth that's what he was so the challenge coin thing is like a big tradition in the military and so he gave me this coin and it was like the i remember the name patriot riders or something like that but it was a christian motorcycle like organization club that they had a bunch of old privates or whatever but i'd never seen the guy before in my life and like the way he looked at me like in his eyes was like it like freaked me out because i it was like there was something there you know and then like i said he gave it to me and then he like disappeared and like i remember when he shook my hand it was like he was like looking into my soul it was very weird and um for me it was like uh what is this you know um and i i think and as i look back on my life too i really think it was like part of like god calling me because like i remember growing up i had christian friends i listened to like christian music that i didn't even know was christian right um one of my favorite bands is thrice you know and yeah and dustin cantoru like was a worship leader for a while and a lot of his music is very very influenced by christian uh by the bible and stuff and so you know looking back on this memory and others it's just like wow like god was really calling me to him for a long time before i actually accepted christ um and this was one of those instances but uh we moved we moved after my deployment i changed jobs i used to be a sensor operator on mq-9 reaper drones oh wow and so i had to come to las vegas for that job and when we moved we didn't really have a church and we didn't really think about where we were going to go or anything it didn't really you know now it's like the first thing we think about like we moved here we're like okay we're gonna go to church i was like we're going to apologia and he's like it's an hour or so away i'm like he's like what are you gonna do if you like it and i was like guess we're driving an hour every sunday yeah an hour each week every single time like three weeks before i was like okay finally fine we'll check it out and then after we were done i was like yeah we're going to be staying here time to start saving gas money i know right yeah so we're actually moving closer um anyway so uh we we're going to a they're they're canyon ridge is part of should we say the name i don't think we should say the name anyway they're aligned with a larger body yeah yes and uh so we were going there for a while and we i remember we really liked it at the time because we could drop off our sun and we're like oh we can actually sit together and enjoy and he was a baby the christian date service yeah pretty much yeah yeah rock music and then there was a smoking section outside we didn't smoke but like it felt like a rock service pajamas for us after the kind of like i went away it was like i had no we didn't know anyone this church that had like probably a thousand people per service we didn't i'm sure but yeah they i mean their their sanctuary was like an auditorium you know right right and we didn't know anyone like at all and we would go there we'd show up for church we'd leave no one would talk to us we didn't have people would say hi you know the greeters and stuff yeah but we didn't have any sort of personal connection with anyone and so after a while we're like man this i don't know if we like really like doing this and for me i was still like oh yeah you know the music blah blah blah uh i i still wasn't really looking for for god i was just kind of doing it i was just doing it for her i was letting her lead i was just kind of like whatever this is what you want to do uh but i met someone when i was stationed in las vegas who was mormon okay and they invited us to a christmas party christmas cookie party yep christmas cookie party and his wife and my wife actually became really good friends and shortly after that she started taking the discussions and i basically was like okay well if we're if we're doing this for our son then i can get on board with that i had a lot of good memories as a kid in the mormon church i had good friends you know um i mean obviously there was some of the bad stuff i mentioned but i did have some really good friends growing up and uh i think for me that was like i want him to have friends like i had growing up and that's kind of where i saw that coming from because it's what i knew and so she started the discussions and all that stuff and i actually got worthy so that i could take so i could baptize her so i actually baptized her into the mormon church oh wow you know what's crazy having done the missionary discussions or lessons um whatever you want to call them they were called two different things for me um at two different periods back when i was 18 taking the discussions um they were just a little pamphlet okay little small pamphlet and there was actually one of the pamphlets that had planets on the front of it so like actually got into kolob and really discussing the terrestrial like celestial like those kingdoms right and and where we came from and where we're going right um and now or not now but 10 years ago i'm sure they're so different now they're on ipads and you don't actually get to hold them but then they were little booklets 10 years ago so i had little booklets a little fill in the blanks and in the back if i had questions i could write it down and um there was not one about planets there was not a booklet that had planets on the front of it i distinctly like i will and i remember that and so thinking about my missionary discussions i guess seven years prior six years prior to that i they were completely different at the time so i felt like this the book was completed like the story was completed all my questions i had before where it was baptized baptized baptized which might have been the little rock mission like um that might have just been their thing because in the south it's very different which i'm going to touch on that was one of the reasons i left the church was going back to the south as mormon um there like there was a movie so we got to watch a movie with joseph smith's death okay um like a martyr oh i remember watching so yeah like his he has martyr like um i just called his death because he died he wasn't a martyr um uh he was killed for for his his crimes he shot back too yeah yeah um well the reason they're looking for him was because of his criminal gross violation of the freedom of press yeah the navy expositor yeah and um watching that the emotions so so each time that they left in the las vegas mission which like i said and one of the things that i've noticed as i witnessed to mormons now is that's not how my ward is and i and i want to make it clear that each mission field may have different experiences each missionary that's listening to this may have different experiences in their mission field but in the las vegas mission where i was it was very experiential it was i want you to take time and pray about this and we're not going to come back for a week or two weeks whereas in the little rock mission um six years before that in 2005 it was we're going to be back tomorrow yeah and then i want you to know if you want to get baptized um and that kind of change may have benefited the church bringing in the experience and the emotions yeah um because the emotions are what got me after watching the joseph smith video which was then i believe the same day that we had the families our forever lesson or right afterwards was what sealed my my fate into the mormon church for me it was answering the questions that i had as a christian where does satan come from mormon church has an answer being content now as a christian with knowing that i don't have to know everything and god will be there when i have the answer when i get to heaven and if i and i you know when i'm in heaven i may not even have that question because i'll be so content it won't matter um but then my questions to the missionaries were where did satan come from they had the answer well i know my husband in heaven because at that time we were still like greatly in love we had just had a baby we were the prime subject the prime like you can be with your family for eternity yes for eternity and now knowing that yeah i may know my husband in heaven but the love that we have is not even a compare to the emotion and the moment that i have with christ every single day in heaven right on this restored earth like it's not even going to matter we may be passer-bys but like it doesn't matter right and the joy i will sing hymns every day and that's what like is missing and so like when you would get mad when i get mad at my spouse on earth and think this is the person i'm supposed to live eternity with like oh you know like no i mean it's true and you you come to find out other things in the temple um about like that may not be your spouse in heaven but uh the guy that you guys had on for the ghost hunting episode kind of oh jerry fawcett oh my gosh that was amazing yeah yeah there's things that you pick up on in the temple when you go enough like your spouse that you're sealed to the reason you get secret names is because you go to when you go to mormon heaven and your spouse yells out that name right those are the spouses he gets your name mine was camilla yours was alma yeah yeah another man the name he got at the veil may be different you know it's just like little things like that or i may not hear his call i may hear another guy yelling camila and that's my spouse in in heaven oh interesting here's what's weird too but it's a polygamous thing so like he's going to get all the women in his realm that hear his name and those are the things that break your heart when you find the truth like this is supposed to be my solo husband well like so when you're everyone that went through the temple for the first time when we were going through got the same names yeah so like everyone gets the same name that day the names are by day so so you guys were you guys were sealed in the temple yeah so like when you go to like the prayer circle in the front there's a part of the temple ceremony where you veil your face yeah and the men don't okay that's for that's that part of the ceremony where like you're basically like saying like and it's crazy when you watch the older temple ceremonies or you hear about and they kind of gloss over it now and it's really when you get into the history of the church and what the purpose of that was which goes into the ces letter and like reading the footnotes knowing that i may not hear my husband's call on that day and it may be another man and not only is it i'm not the only person to that man it's 10 other women it's so heartbreaking so so how does it feel when you think about john 6 when it says that when jesus says that i will raise him up on the last day or i will raise you up on the last day that your salvation's not by being called out by your husband whoever that man makes it so much easier to not be so angry at my husband for eternity but it's actually it's actually jesus i love you but it's actually jesus who says he will raise you up on the last day no it's beautiful because it's not determined yet again upon another sinner like everything in the mormon church is dependent upon another center like there's a point where you realize i can't trust my spouse because they're going to go tell the bishop on me if i share things with them we lived that for a lot for a little while yeah and it almost ended in our divorce i was almost a second divorcee because of and i felt like a failure i felt like there was nothing i could do yet again like here i am in church following christ and and like doing what i thought i was supposed to be doing and my marriage was going to fail again and i remember just like being in church and like and feeling not there's never real joy like with my spouse it was always like you know you have that thing now as a christian there's the memes that are so true like angry like arguing like you're not getting ready fast enough and then you get to church and you're smiling it's not like that in the mormon church like you are all out like spiteful angry and then you come to church and it's like you have to pretend like you love each other and i'm not again not saying it's like that for every relationship but there's a lot of people i became very close to and that was all of our experiences yeah you know well there are some statistics you can look up about salt lake city and utah in terms of opioid addiction they call it an epidemic pornography addiction all of these things are extremely high they even have a very high suicidal rate compared to the rest of the country but i would say these are spiritual manifestations of the state that these people are in imagine i've said this multiple times but imagine being a person who doesn't have the spirit of god that has to manifest all the fruits of the spirit you know how hard that is yeah it's impossible because only the holy spirit can truly manifest those things in somebody's life it's called something's going to snap you know it's not a health and it's going to be secretive probably yeah it's not a healthy way to live we see that it expresses itself in multiple ways eventually someone becomes spiritually abused like you were spiritually abused like you you went i like to call it from out of the frying pan when you first left the church when you were younger and into the fire oh for sure you didn't go to anything better you had no hope yeah and actually uh you know speaking of that i actually developed a pretty bad pornography addiction while i was a member of the church and that was part of the reason why our marriage was so terrible is because you know i had this secret sin that i was you know at times fighting at times not fighting right and i i couldn't go to my spouse for any support i couldn't go to her and say i'm struggling with this i couldn't do that because i knew that she was going to go right to the bishop and be like he needs to do this and they're going to be you know there's going to be church discipline or you know however they decided to deal with that public anything like there's no pastoral counseling like there's nothing like if anything goes wrong it's it's public immediately yeah there's um actually i don't know i can't remember if it's handbook one or handbook two yeah i think it might be handbook one but essentially they have a book that's a guidebook that tells them how yeah how to how to handle certain situations and i find that interesting because the jehovah's witnesses have a similar book as well it's called shepherd the flock of god of course i do and what's very interesting to me about that is well we already have the book right it's right here and your pastor the elder who should be counseling you should be bringing you to the word using the holy spirit as conviction as a guide to help you through these situations not a handbook right right i mean that's a big red flag in my thought process right there but we already know there's also extra books that they have in terms of extra biblical revelation that don't help whatsoever either either but um yeah so so walk us through that so you guys are in the mormon church now you got did you get re-baptized do they do that so since i never had my name removed okay i was just inactive okay and so i had to do like a period of uh did it prove yourself almost kind of i basically had to become like when i was like get worthy because it was like um i had to kind of basically like go through the things and like have meetings with the bishop and like show that i've i've kind of been improving um but like i didn't know that guy right so i'm not going to tell him all the stuff i'm just struggling with you're just doing what you can to be honest i'm like hey man i'm good like i had some problems with this but i'm fine now and he's like all right you know which says a lot about someone who's supposedly called of god and has like you know the melchizedek priesthood yeah and has the holy spirit to to help him discern if people are maybe lying or not you know right yeah um or maybe not maybe not lying overtly but just being you know you should master discernment if you have the melchizedek priesthood you should be a very important if you are like a christophany you should have exac exactly christ is the only one who holds them yeah so if you have something that powerful i don't know i used to have the melchizedek priesthood it felt pretty good and i'm just kidding it felt nothing i had no there was nothing extra about that so when you became worthy the steps that you took when you're going to the back into the mormon uh faith you weren't necessarily a believer or did you kind of make yourself or force yourself to trick yourself to believe how did that work so this has created many post-mormon um conversations between aj and i is like why so like well okay this is interesting that you asked him that because i've asked him the same question many times okay yeah that's weird okay so why did you let me do this and it's all because god that's the answer right well now that we're out of our like anger you know the cage where i've been out a few years there was like a how come and there was like why you know um so well okay let me back up a little bit first off um you gotta remember like where i was coming from right so for me it was like all right so i'm doing this for my wife she wants to do this and um i'm just kind of kind of go with it because i can live in the culture maybe not necessarily be super involved in the doctrine because you've done it before yeah and and i knew many mormons actually growing up who were that way who straight up would be like yeah i don't really agree with everything the church says but like it you know yeah i have the support i can find a good job yeah children are yeah you know unfortunately that's the kind of that's the case for a lot of people is that they they don't they just kind of accept the fact that that's how life is because they don't either they're not courageous enough or they don't they don't want to break up their family by by doing that where else am i going to go right and for me it was a little bit easier to leave because like my mom had already left at the time i left oh um or she was getting ready to that's yeah um the only remaining member of the church in my family is my older sister who is a whitmer okay so still yeah okay yeah she's married to a whitmer like one of the original like family line from from the front of the book original witnesses of the book of mormon wow yeah okay she's never leaving sorry amanda we've tried we've we've tried to talk to her about stuff and she just won't let's all pray for amanda every everyone who's listening here for amanda um so uh and actually i've got probably some more stuff to tell about that but that'll be later on um so uh at this point and i re so she was talking about this emotional experience she had watching this this video right for me i'm sitting back there like you know because and this is the weirdest part i know that like the truth because when i had left i'd kind of done some more research i knew kind of the circumstances surrounding uh the death of joseph smith i knew some of the things he was doing but i didn't know specifically as much information as we got from the ces letter so for me i'm watching it like wow if someone could die for their religion like that i'm surprised i must believe and i'm saying that out loud like if i'm crying crying my eyes out if someone could die for a religion like that it must be true forgetting jesus right no one reminded me of jesus's sacrifice because they don't remind you of that jesus sacrifice is like idolatry to think of jesus on the cross to have a cross in your home and at this time i want to say i was going to school to be a sommelier um so i had like three to four thousand dollars worth of wine in our home um and and i threw it away oh wow and i threw that life away from the mormon church i actually used to i used to brew mead too at the time and it was i remember asking the missionaries about it it was just crazy to think like what i gave up um i guess like my future because in las vegas that could have been very successful for us at the time i had driven wine tours in napa i was very knowledgeable about wine ver i was very successful wine tour driver in napa at the time and then we moved to las vegas and i was continuing my sommelier school and it just the brainwash like it's just that emotional experience yeah and them not reminding me there was someone sacrificed greater wow there was liberty greater than that freedom greater than that your heart is deceitful above all things desperately sick who can know it jeremiah 17 9 we we all know that first here and it's it's a very very true thing that is that is powerful make you give so many things up but yeah keep keep going man talk to us about that yeah so um yeah and i remember man i remember like whenever she would have me sit because i didn't go to all the discussions but i went to a number of them at work a lot yeah or sleeping yeah because i was working for your secret agent yeah secret international you already know aj's secret agent so it's a tiring job yeah yeah so um so she would have these discussions and then she'd come talk about about them to me later or like i remember being and mormon friends were there the missionaries because he couldn't be there they would always make sure that there were other mormons there oh wow the whole time even when he was there other mormons were there so it was not just me taking the discussions or just him taking the discussions it was two missionaries sometimes three four mission president him me and like two or three other people yeah it was very interesting that is very interesting yeah and and i kind of remember having this feeling of like yeah whatever you know if and and i kind of had like a really lackadaisical um approach to the whole thing it was more like if she wants to do it that's fine and i still had my own kind of beliefs about like issues i had with the church and all these different things and i remember uh challenging or asking questions to the missionaries at the time and uh i don't remember it was kind of like a negative thing like they kind of were just like yeah they've kind of ignored yeah they ignored you pretty much yeah because you were already a member yeah pretty much you're coming with me whether they think they knew that yeah um so so anyway uh i knew that what was kind of expected of me was to you know i felt like i had to follow her with this and you know i didn't really know any better so like i said i got worthy we um i baptized her and that was actually it was really spiritual it really was it was really strange actually i remember but now i know the spirit that it is right but it was one of the most spiritual moments that i've ever had in my life extra spirit like external spiritual now i know what a real spiritual conversion feels like explain explain it real quick the the spiritual experience with the baptism well real quick before i get into that i didn't have the same the same upbringing that she did as far as um experience with supernatural supernatural things yeah i i remember man i remember praying earnestly for god to show me something like my whole childhood and i remember like the height of my mormon experience was when i was deacon corn president you know what i mean like that that kind of stuff but i never had like the oh we went to do baptisms for the dead and i saw an angel or i was sitting in sacramento meeting and there was an angel looking down on the bishop or whatever like i never saw anything like that but i grew up with jesus jesus found me in the temple hallway alone and came and spoke with me after that one i've i've never experienced anything like that you know what i mean and i remember like praying like reading my scriptures and like praying that that you know for god to show me something and i never ever saw anything but when we were in the baptismal font together satan was not going to let me go from the mormon church it was it was nuts man like i remember and it like everyone disappeared which was which was significant to me because like i said i i'd never experienced anything like that before um for her i guess it was kind of old hat but uh no it was it was it was light it was not it was it was very weird so to hear after we left the mormon church and we were at the church which we'll get there the church we first went to the day we left the mormon church um we went to a christian church to hear you know satan comes disguised as an angel of light corinthians 11 yeah yeah um that is that was satan and it was like a cloud of light it was everyone else disappeared yep and it was just us two like looking at each other no one else was there and we we felt like i don't even know how to it was like it was like our souls were touching yeah and and outside of us yeah and and like i said everyone everyone disappeared and i remember i was talking about it afterwards and it was he asked me did you feel something i'm like yes let's talk about it wow yeah it was bizarre that was very bizarre um i mean now like i said then it was bizarre now i know exactly what it was right um but for us to finish each other's sentences as we were both talking about the experience was just insane and that was a test and now we know why there's mormons that will never leave mormonism when they have experiences like that and i and i want them to know that get into your bible and read your bible and understand like what the darkness can come as like what the darkness can disguise himself as yeah well it's it's very especially in deuteronomy yeah it's very interesting too in second corinthians 11 that's the same section where paul is warning that there's people who will come and preach a different jesus a different gospel who will accept a different spirit yeah and then halfway through the chapter he brings up satan masquerade or masquerading as you know angels of light uh they look like they're doing works of righteousness but when you read the end of the paragraph you're miserable in it yeah it says their ends will they will meet their ends which is the ways of death so although it looks legit although it feels legit if it's a different jesus a different spirit a different gospel the end is death and even in proverbs 11 there's a way that seems right unto a man but the ends thereof are the ways of death and it's a it makes perfect sense too in a religion that prize on emotional experiences like in james 1 5 if any of you lack wisdom let him ask of god yeah let him ask of god even though there's a difference between knowledge and wisdom in biblical terms and that's not what the text is specifically saying but instead of saying hey let's be like the bereans in acts 17 11 where when paul and silas go and preach the gospel yeah to the and they're like oh no we're going to go read the scrolls we'll be our be yeah we'll be harvey we're going to read the scrolls in the synagogue and they come back and they're like wow you know this is legit i see christ in the gospel proclaimed all throughout the old testament why because i searched through god's holy word no don't trust the word trust your experience and then once you believe the experience guess what god's word's not full it's missing many plain and precious parts it's been translated incorrectly multiple times and guess what you can become a god one day of your own planet it's the same lie from the beginning of the garden right it says did god say that and guess what you'll be just like him if you eat the fruit so it's a it's very interesting yeah that you that you bring that up because i think second corinthians 11 is such a beautiful text of scripture that a christian can use to help show an lds person because like you said there's a lot of people that won't leave because of these experiences and our heart as christians when we look at these people we got to go look i was once dead in my sin and trespasses and i want you to know the holy jesus if if the devil has a hold on you guess what there's only one one person who can take that hold away and that's jesus why because he created lucifer he's not the spirit brother of lucifer he's not the beck and women call yeah they didn't fight for the position they didn't fight one-third there was not a favorite son yeah yeah there was no favorite sun situation going on no jesus was the creator of lucifer and colossians 1 explains that john 1 explains that as well but it makes me it makes perfect sense to me though that their people would have extremely emotional experiences we see that with mormonism we see that in the new age multiple false religions have these emotional experiences but what's funny is god's word literally tells us to die die from our emotions and submit to the word of god that really convicts us to put our emotions aside and follow the true and living god this is the book that says no no no your emotions are leading you astray it's just so interesting to me for a religion like mormonism um that focuses so much on keeping journals and written records how much has to be left out because if for us to if we were to go and journal the baptism experience which i did um i don't have it anymore but to if i had kept journaling and maybe wrote about four hours later where my husband and i were at each other's throat and we were arguing with our family and how miserable the rest of the day was those are the things that are forgotten because you're only writing about the good things oh wow and um like even going to the temple we were like to get sealed it was horrible and even after we left we were miserable yep so we were miserable in it we were miserable at it we were miserable through it and like but after we left it's like everyone's like oh my gosh wasn't that so wonderful aren't you so in love isn't it so great you're sealed in the temple and it's an indoctrination the second you walk out and in my brain i'm like no that was horrible no that was miserable and everyone's like satan doesn't want you to be here satan's not going to want you to be to the temple that everything's going to prevent you from getting there so when you're fighting in the car on the way to the temple just know that it's satan no when you're fighting in the car on the way to the temple it's god telling you to stop and turn around and go find a church like that like i mean those are the things like i cannot believe looking back like wake up call and you know it's and it's like someone needs to tell them like and i have such a heart for them like the lds people like if you're listening and you're about to get sealed the temple you will fight on the way to the temple and if it's not on the way to the temple it'll be at your little barbecue afterwards and like that it's and it's so common that it was a thing it was a thing don't worry about your fighting before the temple it will happen everyone fights before they go get sealed like that it's a trope it's like yeah we got warned about it wow that's good bishop tells you like everyone tells you just keep going don't turn around it's just oppression in a sense it's just temptation it's just yeah don't just don't let satan stop you and and it's just yeah don't don't yeah forget the fact that your heart is desperately wicked right and that we follow the whims of our hearts and yeah you know a lot of times what we perceive as satan is really just us right yeah or god calling us or god calling us to not go do it right this is your time to stop like there was a time we were lds and we went to a christian church christian but um there's church and we went for their christmas ceremony oh yeah and we were i was desperately trying and i god calling me throughout my lds time and i was like oh look this looks fun let's go see what it's going to be like this is like a big thing and like at that time the mormon church like the relief society and stuff they were like you should do the caleb challenge so like they're like pushing you to do the caleb challenge which i mean i don't know if that says a lot about caleb right but um or like christian writ music these days but um we went to this christian church for their christmas ceremony and they're preaching the gospel of taylor swift boom right into mormonism [Music] say that a little bit the church we went to this this pastor gets up and they well first off they had like circus in vegas like people coming down from the rafters on like ribbons light up bracelets yeah i mean it was like a whole ordeal and then he gets up there and this guy starts talking about like he talk he like introduced my sermon today is the gospel of taylor swift yeah and he's talking about her let me show you in the bible where it tells you to shake it off and we got up and left and people followed us out and i said well god i guess mormonism is real if this is what's going on in the christian church it's sad that's so sad yep and we were in another two three like two three years after that conor was a baby yeah okay so you're did you guys dedicate him do they do baby dedication well he didn't because he was too old to get dedicated yeah they usually do it for like newborns oh so he wasn't born in the morning no no no no no no he was 18 months oh okay gotcha gotcha okay so tell me tell me how what was the exodus like what what got you guys to leave okay so we were almost about to get divorced because oh go ahead well i was going to say so we we had a time when we were living apart um i was about i was getting ready to get out of the military but i was still kind of stuck there until my time was up and she had accepted a job a lady that she had worked for virtually wanted someone to be there to work for her physically and so they had just moved to georgia she's like hey come out to georgia i'll pay you more whatever and at the time because of our involvement in lularoe don't say the name okay all right an mlm mlm that i was kind of pressured to join too because it's mormon roots yeah um it was you should join this for your family and it was very cold uh very cold it was actually really good all right hold on clap clap for that okay all right just edit that that out gabe where lularoe is said and just continue with the mlm all right set go okay so okay sorry my bad sorry gabe slash carmen i'm just kidding yeah anyway um go ahead okay so we at a time where we live depart okay ready three two one so there was a point at which we lived apart for a time i was getting ready to get out of the military and she accepted a job with a lady um who was she was previously doing a virtual assisting with and she wanted someone to be there to do physical like personal assistance um and we were kind of in a bad financial situation due to an mlm that my wife had been a part of for what like a year at that point yeah like two years okay yeah um but we had she'd been introduced to it from people from church yeah i was like one of the first people to join it because it was um mormon it has mormon roots and at that time they were really only having people join that were lds and a lot of the women at my church were like you should do this that you could provide for your family you can do this for your family and i ended up joining and found there was special treatment for lds and there were all these other things for lds people and um ended up putting us in almost a foreclosure so they their tenants were basically the same you know as it was when you were lds the pressure was different than if you weren't so they knew so i was invited to different things because i was lds i got it was really interesting yeah it was very interesting we got to the point where we were like um we're which is insane to me like i was a staff sergeant in the military at the time so like we should have had plenty of money and unfortunately though and i was making a good idea you were making a lot of money too but the problem is that all her money all our extra money went back into the business right and so um so we started having problems with our mortgage and and we went to the church for help hey like we're having a problem right and they're like well we can't help you pay your mortgage but we can offer you food just keep tithing and that was man that was so hard yeah the bishop said across from us one day at our dining table and said i see that you didn't tithe last month and you owe us about a thousand dollars or thirteen hundred dollars so he said oh yeah like you're back you back your back tithing is about thirteen hundred dollars i don't say that oh okay you're backed and tithing about thirteen hundred dollars um so if like i can't offer you any like food assistance because you are like basically in debt this thirteen hundred dollars for tithing um so once you pay that because you make plenty of money you should be able to i will be able to give you food assistance then you go to the pantry and get some candies right so we paid the 1300 to the bishop that day sat there and our mortgage was 1310. oh my goodness so and we got beans and rice for that so that's the pressure he said you know if i make if i can tie 10 10 000 a month there's no reason that you can't tithe a thousand dollars a month you should be able to figure it out not in my brain thinking this guy has been lds his whole life and prepared for tithing from birth we've been lds for about two and a half years this is new to us like to go from not tithing you know a thousand to two thousand dollars a month like to now having to tie the thousand to two thousand dollars a month that's a big hit on your budget especially when we were live and strapped yeah we had two brand new cars a brand new house we built um and we weren't like very financially responsible and so like his lesson was like this is going to teach you to be financially you need to tithe have faith in god blah blah blah blah but um on the flip side because we were tithing we thought that that's why we got our brand new house our brand new car you're being blessed because of your job yeah and here we were about to be in foreclosure well and that's not to mention like all the materialistic kind of keeping up with the joneses thing that we had to deal with too or not how to deal with but we were kind of 300 yeah the 350 a month gym membership because that's where everyone went but when you live by doctors and dentists and that's the award you're in um it's kind of hard to keep up with them yeah uh yeah bishop was a lawyer so crazy because i'm like with a very successful practice it's to look back and be like i shouldn't have done those things and it's really stupid for me to say oh i did it because everyone else did it but that's the culture yeah right like that's and i actually i know we're trying to get to the end here but i really want to get back into because you were asking me why i don't know how much time we were talking about no this is an extended episode of politician i'm having a great time with you guys sorry no i'm actually thoroughly enjoying it yeah so i kind of want to go back because i i i'm still as we're talking about this i'm like why did i do this and and i think honestly at that point i i think i was i'd finally kind of given in to maybe search for god i was like kind of giving it another try okay i want to give this i remember like like our elders corn president was a good friend of mine and we were home teaching partners or companions or whatever they call it uh and i remember like i remember going and trying to be super diligent about that stuff while dealing with the problems we're dealing with at home while dealing with the financial stuff and like not putting together any of it that hey maybe we shouldn't be doing this you know yeah it was never the church's problem it was ours yeah it was always us we weren't praying enough we weren't tithing enough we weren't happy in our marriage maybe we needed to go to the temple and do another endowment ceremony yeah like stuff like that like it we always turned it against ourselves or each other yeah i would tell him i just don't know why you can't be like the other husbands at church oh man yeah and i mean i do i feel really bad for that but i mean he forgives me it was a different time but i still like to say that to your husband is really bad yeah yeah yeah and i remember specifically like sitting in and this happened more than once sitting there as we're doing lessons to or talking with our uh our our families that we're home teaching like just thinking being like hearing a voice in my head like this is all lie this is all bull crap like this is not you know what i mean and and me being like oh that's satan trying to get me to you know what i mean and i thinking about it now it's like i bet you that was god probably trying to tell me like hey man shouldn't be here yeah um and i remember i remember multiple times thinking that and then also like in the midst of prayer like praying for this family hearing like this is all lie this is all a lie and and i still was like nah this is what you know and a lot of it i think was fear too like i didn't want to admit to myself to my wife i think really that we shouldn't be here i made a mistake i should never have let you get involved with this i was so full in i and and and she asked me after the fact too like how come you never told me about your experiences in the church growing up because i never really did i never really shared with her the the reason why i left or really much of anything and so when she took the discussions it was just like um she almost went into it with you know kind of fresh eyes almost and and none of and and that was also another thing too i didn't want to like taint her opinion because i was very much like well this is her thing like right i didn't look at it as like a fam familiar responsibility or even you know how biblically how you're supposed to look at it as the father is the spiritual leader in the home and it's up to me it's my job to raise my wife and my child my children you know wash them in the word you know i wasn't doing anything like that right and even when we were lds yeah it was really i was the one running the family home evening i was the one doing the conference stuff like preparation um and to try to get him to participate was another was another fight it was another argument i just don't understand why you won't do this and then it would come back to like well it's because you have this addiction and you don't want to even be with our family and and you know it would always go back to him him being the issue never the church right never like the church being the problem never the fact that we were in a cult yeah yeah it's a twofold issue it's a sin issue and there's no um answer for the there's no hope yeah it's just pointed back at you like no you should really pay that thirteen hundred dollars not your mortgage so yeah get you some beans and rice from the pantry right yeah yeah so uh so we're living apart things are pretty rough i wasn't going to church you know i i actually kind of went to like a pretty deep depression started drinking a lot and and just you know i live this is when i was in georgia yeah sorry i jumped forward anyway so we're yeah we're living apart not doing i'm not doing great she's going to church talking about how like you know oh it's so great over here and blah blah blah i was lying he was lying to me about drinking i was lying to him about how great church was there you know yeah and there was a couple times too or she because we used to have uh so when you're in the flying community as i was uh we would have things called like namings and and different events where we'd go out after work and a lot of it involved drinking and i would tell her like oh i'm i go there as the dd she's like they're really abusing you as the dd oh we would get in like huge fights i'm like you don't even need to go this is stupid that you're going and he's like i'm defeated and i'm like oh so they're just abusing you because you're lds they know you don't drink yeah yeah like no yeah so uh we still make jokes i still give a hard time the things we did when we were sinners yeah yeah we were still sinners we were extra deep we were frustrated yeah i know what you mean unrepentant unsafe centers yes um deep fried oreos yeah deep-fried oreos don't you sully the name of deep-fried oreos like that that's funny uh all right so so then you know i get out of the military i move out to georgia and we finally are living together and it's been like a year i think at this point we'd been living apart yeah um it had been a while it was it was kind of weird honestly um and we both kind of had to adjust a little bit but she's like let's go to church you know and i'm like and uh it kind of was back to the same you know problems with going to church and stuff but the whole time he's gone i'm going to a church that is nothing like this picturesque lds church that you see on the front of lds living right so the the church i call uh nevada and utah the motherland uh that like is obviously the church so i'm i call this not our arizona arizona is the red-headed stepchild i was gonna say i would include arizona arizona a lot of lds yeah but okay so i know it's true but there's something different about like las vegas being like three to four hours away from like two hours from st george three hours of salt lake city most people that are mormon that live in vegas from utah like they're from there they're not like they don't have kids and just continue growing like in arizona you find people that like we're mormon from salt lake they've pilgrimaged here and now their family is here right no that's like the pilgrimages from salt lake to las vegas every other drive yeah yeah like they just have moved back and forth because their business i mean shane george is only a couple hours away so we would say george like on the weekend for me to go from where the pressure is beauty uh spending 400 a month on hair uh being pressured into weight loss surgery which i never did i never went to tijuana for that thank god um because i've heard some horrible stories about women who did it wasn't just that too didn't they do like uh plastic surgery yeah so like this is my circle you know and like it was just really scary the drugs like like the antidepressants stuff like that to know that this was happening in las vegas to go to savannah georgia where he had to drive an hour from church and where i was told by the relief society president that if everyone in savannah georgia decided to be active one day there would be 600 people per ward there was maybe like 150 in the entire church building at any given time and people had to drive an hour to two hours to go to church so like that and there was then 600 people per ward for four to five wards so they're about 3 000 inactive members in like the chatham county area of savannah georgia um and that's just insane yeah like just people just mormons mormoning distractions we're talking i was at home one day and my doorbell rings like 8 30 at night in vegas and we had a three-story house our living room was on the top floor so to go from the front door to the third floor you kind of see our house right you can't avoid our bedrooms or whatever so i go downstairs and my relief society president standing on our front door which takes you up to the second floor and i open the door and she's like hi i'm just checking on you i know your husband's deployed just seeing how you're doing and i'm like um i'm good and like she's like can i come in i'm like sure so she walks from so like on the landing you can kind of see downstairs into my son's like playroom and then she kind of looks down there and then like goes upstairs to the living room sits down on the couch and she's like um if jesus were to walk through your door right now he would leave oh and i'm like oh okay well you weren't even invited so but i mean that's that's the kind of culture we're in in las vegas very very materialistic very like my house isn't even that dirty like i mean it was at times but at that time it wasn't and so i was kind of like uh like bye and so i didn't like you're not welcome here and so then to go to georgia where people are wearing like cookie monster pajamas to church and slippers and like the bishop had like was a known alcoholic oh wow and they would go to bring like food to some of the people because it was very like low income and there would be like empty beer cans outside their their home and stuff like that was completely different experience for me yeah um and i was shocked i felt like the church had left these low-income churches to kind of just survive on their own we would show up to church low-income churches we would show up to church in like you know full suit like i had a couple full suits well there was a colorado mormon there she was there because her husband was in the military we were the only two people really that showed up like like we had been cultured to like yeah and and everyone else is like one girl gave a talk on the word of wisdom on how to read a nutrition label like that like that is it wasn't even about the word of wisdom it was how to read a nutrition label and i think i sat there and i was like this is what they give talks about here like it was very um shocking to me and i felt like because it was low income and because this church wasn't like like sending enough money that the the maine motherland had just thought about them yeah left them to their own devices um same the missionaries uh the female the sister missionaries they lived in a very poor part of town and were harassed by male neighbors and the church didn't do anything to help them and so there was a lot of times they would just be at my apartment because they didn't have anywhere to go and they didn't feel comfortable being in the house that the lds church provided for them right and so it was just and they and no one did anything and the mission president was far away so it was just crazy to they were in augusta which was a couple hours so it's just crazy to think that that like that that happened like in my mind i i thought it was like an injustice like this is the biggest injustice i've experienced right which it's not my biggest injustice was being a white woman in iraq and being told i shouldn't be allowed to be here because i should be having children oh okay by you know by the locals um that i mean to tell you that's what i experienced in life but uh and being my life threatened because of that like you know what i mean yeah yeah um so at that time being lds that was the biggest injustice i experienced not being told i needed to pay thirteen hundred dollars to have food right right now they don't seem like a normal thing to us yeah that was normal that was normal it's it's seeing these these young women are probably 18 19 years old and they're in a sketchy part of town in georgia and then the organization's not doing anything to help them they can't be they didn't even have food some nights so like i would be feeding them i can understand seeing that and being like well where's the consistency where's the care where is the love of god within this organization why are they leaving them and they were joyful like and they would tell me like you're not allowed to tell anyone that we're telling you this right and i'm like who am i gonna tell like i don't even know anybody here and so like that's scary too that like i was the keeper of these missionary secrets yeah you know and there was one time they like fleed to my house um the the elders too uh i call them brother missionaries because they're not elders by the bible um but the young male missionaries they um they fleed to my house there was a church member who had called the missionaries and was like you all got to come here now um i have this whole baptist church ready to convert and so the missionaries showed up to their house or to the church the baptist church on like a wednesday evening which in the south that's dinner time 6 p.m at a baptist church on on wednesday that everyone's potlucking or picnicking and they almost got shot they were met at the doors with guns and they were about to get shot by this baptist church wow because the mormons were coming to proselyte right so think of baptists at a barbecue it's a mormon movie it's pretty funny it was mormons at a baptist barbecue i want to watch it again actually from the christian perspective now that i'm not a mormon oh my goodness and they fled to my house and they're telling me about this this church member and then how she's done this many times put the missionaries lives at risk and i you know in my mind i'm like is the church going to do anything about this like i'm like appalled you know and they're like no the church won't do anything about it you know they think that she's doing good for the church the bishop's not gonna do anything about it well that wasn't the first crazy she would say some weird stuff yeah in in church so but no one silenced anybody like it was very much like a ever almost everyone there was a convert the bishop was a convert um so you have to think it's a whole church full full of converts coming from everything pentecostal baptist yeah you got everything got a mixed bag and there's no lifers that's what i call them lifers right to show set the example well and here's the here's the key problem here and you touched on a little bit earlier but like growing up in the mormon church the emphasis was not learn your bible it was uh it was like oh you need to read the book of mormon that was kind of the big push was to read the book of mormon it wasn't so much the bible and and there was a lot of cherry picking obviously and so what you have here in this situation specifically is you have a group of converts a bunch of people that know their bible they don't really well what i'm saying is that the members of the church there don't really know the the word of god they don't really know the bible they're encountering people who maybe do know the bible in a lot of cases but for the most part not knowing the truth of god's word and and then just people kind of just have their own wild theories about things and i experienced this growing up too you'd have you'd have a sunday school teacher tell you one thing and it would be like their interpretation of the church's interpretation of something because you know they have manuals right right so they would read through the manual be like oh well this is what this says and you'd get you'd get all these crazy theories left and right about you know maybe like one passage of scripture and no one looked at it in like maybe the whole context of a book or a chapter or or anything right there was none of that i experienced that yeah and and that was actually something i really when we actually did leave the church i had a hard time with i really did was trying to figure out how to actually properly read the bible well that and um unlearning a lot of things that i thought i knew but i didn't really know and it was kind of just finding out like what was what was maybe mormon doctrine versus like what's actually in the scriptures um but anyway so so go back to what you're so for me when i first joined the church they put you in gospel essentials class and it's like with a couple missionaries and a couple like long lifers like a couple young lifers so depending on like i i think that they kind of plant people in the class because i was planted into a gospel essentials class with someone that had just joined the class they said oh you should go to gospel essentials if someone your age you would get along with um so i went to gospel essentials as a new member a new convert and they're going through the bible um it's kind of like a i it's a 12 week or it's like a 12 month very long series so at this point yeah at this point they're going through the book of mormon um and i'm asking them why is the book of mormons stating that the the fruits of the priesthood they are the fruits of the gospel and that oh isn't that so great that god would give us um like these these crossover revelations like we're in the bible it may say it's the fruits of the spirit but in an art like doctrines and covenants in the book of mormon it's the fruits of the priesthood and so i'm calling out like these plagiarisms but they're confirming them back to me as like like signs of great revelation right and there's a couple other verses that happen to me and that's really where i read the ces letter the first or second one is all the proofs where not only where were uh the book of mormon and the doctrine covenant some things were some revelations were plagiarized the inconsistencies and incorrect grammar in the original kjv that joseph smith used to plagiarize were also plagiarized so misspellings um calm is in the wrong place he also plagiarized left him there yeah wow and that right there i that i stopped reading right then so what what got you guys to read the ceo you've got to start this story off okay so he came to georgia and and we're so we had to act actually asked event we were called that's what they call we were called the bishop called us to be our son's sunday school teacher you know that's so divine yeah that our son needed a sunday school teacher we just so happened to be available to be open you know the calling and so we had the fact that the people that were there were not doing their job or showing up or anything yeah so we accepted this calling on the sidelines um and then that thursday he had an appointment at the like uh the basically the unemployment office for job fair it was a v it was a va sponsored job fair for yeah so he's at the job there and i'm in the car for like two hours and at this time i'm just sitting on reddit scrolling on reddit and i'm pretty good at spotting mormon like mormons have physical features um especially if they're like families of mormons or what sorry anyway game spot of mormon she's really good no they're there's little physical features that they have that i'm pretty good so i'm scrolling to family so yes and they have huge families so they're all going to look alike um so i'm scrolling reddit and this i stop on this post i'm like oh that's a mormon woman and her kids and i read it and it said thanks to it was like the apologia like thanks to apologia and the ces letter and i went back to search on reddit because i had saved the post it's gone so i think she deleted her ready because i was gonna bring it and i tried to show it to jerry like forever ago uh this was in 2 september 2007 yep okay yeah yeah i've been i've been so you guys had been like a month or two just started putting out content like this was the first one was like gospel for mormons or something like that it was like the first video and it was like thanks to apologia and the ces letter i've saved my family from the mormon church wow and i'm like oh i go to comment and i'm like let me tell you how bad of a mom you are and like that's you're angry oh i was mad and so um i go to comment that and and like i said i've searched reddit archives i've searched everything i like a lot of things on reddit i've read it purveyor and um of good books and i could not find it i've searched um i open it up and the first comment says if you're coming here to tell this woman how bad of a mom she is you need to read the ces letter wow and i'm like oh who are you to tell me that i can't tell this woman that she's a bad mother what is this ces letter so there it goes the link was there i opened it up and i start reading it and at this time i was going to school for to be a geologist so things like plagiarism and and like real fact were very important to me right like super important so to see the first or second thing in the ces letter be about plagiarism i was done like that right there like no we don't play with plagiarism at all and um i kept reading until he came out and he comes and sits in the car and literally i'm like oh how'd it go he's like i'm great and so i said hey i'll talk sometimes yeah yeah i have a question for you and he's like what and i was like do you think the church is true and he goes my brain was like and he goes um are you gonna divorce me if i tell you the answer wow yeah no that's what i said and i said well now i know the answer but no i'm not gonna divorce you do you think the church is true and he goes no wow quickly too huh that was that was the first time i think i had been honest with her in three years instantly our relationship was amazing instantly instantly like it was like we were holding hands on the way home we did not hold held hands in years wow like that night we went we went home immediately and i told him i found this thing i want you to read it on the way home we were like 30 minutes from the house and we printed it out and printed two copies and sat there and we read till about like i said three quarters of it done we were opening footnotes we had the digital one up clicking footnotes opening everything looking at everything um and it was just appalling the evidence that and not only was the evidence it wasn't even on websites like outs it wasn't people's opinions it wasn't on blogs it was on the lds.org website and that was what got me like like i said the plagiarism thing we're done i'm already done you've already proven to me but i'm going to keep going because i got to make sure that like we're nailed so not that um that was a thursday and we were supposed to go to church on sunday to accept the pro the public calling where everyone like eyes us and to like to be our son reading through that stuff it was kind of weird because i i i knew a lot of it i think but not to the degree and the specificity that it was so it's so good laid out in the ces letter and um so reading it there and seeing like all of the evidence and everything it was like they have power points like this guy had power points from byu like phd like people who'd done it as like their doctoral thesis to graduate from byu but it was like their shelf break so like you could click on this thing and it was like someone who was like going to get their doctorates and they had done this powerpoint for their thesis and you're reading through it like but they didn't get it i just said right i remember being brought into church one time and having like a special like whatever they had this guy come and basically tried to like convince us on the archaeological evidence okay um and they also talked to us about the uh how is it is it iambic pentameter i think it's what they call it the way that like one of the way they proof text that they try to proof text the book of mormon um basically like yeah so they brought this guy in and he was like a professor from byu or something like that this is like when i was a teenager i think um anyway so so this is this is not like this kind of stuff is things they do as you're growing up you know they kind of present these um arguments in a sense yeah essentially um yeah so so we were reading through it and we were supposed to be teachers and be confirmed as sunday school teachers that sunday four days later i literally waited until church had started yeah i said uh we will not be accepting the calling as teachers we are not coming back during church service contact us wow so then we publicly left the church we tried we took a couple families with us out of church out of that ward we submitted our resignation to quit mormon on thursday because it was all attached to ces letter website once we got into that community immediately that evening we found out how to submit on quit mormon so thursday we submitted our quit mormon sunday we text our bishop thinking he probably didn't have it yet he probably did um right after that about that sunday oh sunday we went to church facebook too i think also well you did because i no one to this day in my family knows that i was lds wow i had a lot of lds people that i was friends with on facebook though i just but i want to like go ahead my mom and my dad and my nanan well my papa rest in peace uh no one knows that i was lds she actually yelled at me one time because i had accidentally left out a book of mormon when they came to visit one time my parents found it oh and we had to i had to lie yeah so my parents would come into town and we would take off would you tell them that some mormon missionaries came by and gave it to us oh man and so i would take down all the artwork so if they listen to this this would be the first time they hear that you were once a month lovey mom wow so so okay so you you read the ceo you had a full secret life but yeah let me let me just like i want to touch on that like that is the mormon life you have secret lives and they're all in venn diagrams as to who is allowed in to each little circle right like each little oval slice and like you have your secret life that your secret sin because every mormon has secret sin that they hide from their spouse they hide from themselves that they don't want to admit to um they like whatever it is wow so mine was like at that time a shopping addiction i didn't know that i had so so in this venn diagram there's no section where every circle interlaps with someone being in there the there no one really knows the only one is that you are the creator of all these other little circles so there's no one that actually has that intimacy yeah in your life knowing anything nope imagine a venn diagram we're not none of them all in her lap yeah maybe like one or two like i think like when he shared with me about his addiction it kind of like a little but like a little sliver right right but like that is i mean she was she was telling stuff she would tell her friends more about our marriage than she was that was the culture yeah you know what i mean so she would exp she would be like oh he did the they would ex she would i never told them about a lot of stuff like but yeah yeah but i mean she would i remember her telling me after the fact that they were trying to encourage her to like leave me and like these were things uh the things that that she had told them about i hadn't didn't even know right like she never talked to me about it you know what i mean yeah we never had that kind of communication and so um but same for them to me for them to me right and i found myself actually burdening their experiences and bringing them home and living them out to my husband oh wow yeah i mean that's that's what happens in the form of idolatry yeah you know that's what it is you're not looking to the right spot for the answer so instead of consulting with your husband and and trying to work things out with jesus as the foundation you go to other people like we're like like calvin says you know we're our heart's an idol factor and we're idle factory and we're never idle in making idols yeah and we never find the answers we're looking for when we're doing that humans make bad gods we try to worship everyone else even ourselves and we always fail ourselves so so you guys find the cs letter how how do you come to biblical christianity though okay so that i was actually oh my gosh so because i uh god never gave up on me and let me tell you my wife never gave up on me if i could write christian music from my wife this album would be god never gave up on me and it would be like that bad worship leader the bad worship leader who just repeats the chorus ever over and over and again right like god never gave up on me god's sovereignty god's sovereignty like over and over again and that'll be the entire one-hour album um but like so we left and i was like we're going to church yeah coming out that album coming out this christmas oh yeah yeah okay yeah wow okay okay so you guys come out and you say you're going to church how do you know where to turn go okay so i grew up episcopal well real quick and i was ready like as soon as we're like done with mormonism like yep on thursday sundays are free again you know what i mean yeah thursday man he's like i'm done yeah i was like hey what are you doing what do you want to do thursday you want to go to a bar like that's kind of how like that was my mentality you know right like let's go do stuff we've never we haven't been able to do yeah you know yep um so sunday morning she's like nope we're going to church we were at an episcopal church that was a weird a gay past or gay uh bishop oh my goodness it was a very weird experience for me yeah so i grew up you know going to the episcopal church back in its like old days before it became progressive so to go to the episcopal church and see what it was now um was a little shocking yeah it kind of took me back a little bit but then it was kind of like weird because that guy went to the same episcopal church i did as a kid the liturgy was really strange too in arkansas in arkansas he went to the same church that's crazy yeah no that was that was really odd so we like had like memories like this bishop like it was really yeah that is wild yeah she's sitting there and i'm like this is super weird she's like no it's fine it's fine you know this is great and it's all old people yeah it was just great it was so homely holy grail well to me it also felt it felt too um mormon yeah not well it didn't feel mormon it felt too much like mormonism in in the the ritual kind of the pomp and circle yeah because you know he comes out in his robes he's got the bowl or whatever he was holding the liturgy yeah the like i said the liturgy was weird and and for me i was like this is so creepy weird i don't like this you know what i mean it was a very bad introduction into very very anglican like like old school church or like to go right after mormonism seven days after leaving the mormon church into an episcopal service with a gay with a gay master and i tell you what she has like five churches lined up and after we went to the episcopal church i was like i don't know if i had like i was like okay episcopal church gets done at noon i found this one that goes at one and i was like and then there's one at six and then there was one i was like i don't think i could do this i don't i don't think i could do so so did you know there was a difference essentially between like orthodox christianity and in mormonism or did you think that you're just going to a different i realized that mormonism was a cult but i didn't know that it was something different until 6 p.m that night okay so tell me about the 6 p.m that night okay talk about your shirt oh yeah okay so this is me this is me all right so this is me my son during this whole time had been going to a karate studio and i had developed like a friendly relationship with the owner um and uh she had become pretty good friends with the receptionist there and so i don't even remember when did she invite you to church it had been i texted her that day and i was like hey girl what church you go to oh okay there you go so i go to church at karate studio and i'm like you go to karate church what yeah yeah that's what we call a chronic church yeah it's not like that anymore but they had basically they had uh planted a church in um pooler georgia and at the time they didn't have a church building or really like a huge um congregation so they just met at the at the karate studio at the dojo so it was like okay this is kind of interesting so we went and um you know of course for me it was still kind of like a hood i don't want to go here you know um kind of typical i guess for from my experience up at that point but um i met the pastor we you know they did a little bit of worship but you know pastor gave like a pretty sure it was like a devotional it wasn't like a full sermon right uh and then he was like all right everybody break out to your groups and we're like what groups what's that yeah what's that yeah yeah so uh then um my friend carson was like hey man you're coming with me like okay so we sit down and there's a group it's probably like i don't know ten men we're all sitting in a circle and carson cart starts talking about how he just got back from trace diaz which is a like a men's retreat that they do in georgia okay it's kind of unique in that you can only go as a participant once you go once you get basically you have to be sponsored by someone who's already been there you go the one time and then you can go back again but you have to serve that's kind of the deal okay so the first time you go you just go to experience it um and while you're there uh your friends and family write you letters um talking about your walk with christ and you know different things whatever but he reads this letter his his sister sent him while he was gone and the dude starts crying i'd never seen that before yeah ever here here this grown man you know about the same age as me we're in our 30s and he's crying describing like reading this letter and then talking about his experience with christ at this men's retreat and that was the very first time i'd ever met like real christian men before who actually knew how to show the love of christ to others why i like that vulnerability yeah it was crazy and from that moment on i'm like i want to find out more about this this is something i want to i want to find out about so i started going to their small group that met every week and and uh we started going to their church and um eventually they moved to a school so we started going to the school you were baptized before that was i mm-hmm oh that's right because i had to go to their main building all right so they're mainly yeah we drove like an hour away their main campus was in statesboro and uh so yeah i forgot about that so so i've been going to their thing and i had a lot of questions um they actually i like cornered him with the pastor and i was like it's time dude and he was like well my mormon baptism is good i don't know why i have to get baptized again i'm like is your salvation and i don't know why after and actually everything clicked for the pastor was like oh no you gotta get re-baptized man he's like my salvation is good i don't understand why i have to get saved we're like in the parking lot like cornering him well hold on a second hold on yeah before that even happened yeah i'm going there i'm going to the small groups i actually got they're like hey we need you know like everyone should be disciples everybody should just type i'm like what's that like oh you know everybody said well you're here you go here's this guy so then we started meeting one-on-one bless john yeah thank you john we start a meeting and um so we started doing one on one-on-one intentional discipleship and john the guy who discipled me was actually discipled by the pastor there uh michael great guy both really great guys and um and so we're kind of going through the same stuff and me man i i really had a hard time at first because we're going through stuff we're talking about things and i'm like i just have all these questions right i'm like what's this trinity business all about you know what i mean like that can't be real yeah counseling i see you yeah yeah i know about this i didn't know anything about that man my prophet said that's wrong yeah i'm like no no you know so so i'm getting all defensive about that and then i remember i just i remember specifically telling her numerous times like like i don't think i can keep doing this you know i remember having not fights but i was very like aggressive with him at certain times because i was challenged i was confronting my own indoctrination right you know and like i remember talking to him i literally described to him the entire pre-existence story of mormonism yeah it's in the bible right he's like no that's that's not in the bible i'm like yeah it is it's he's like no i was like oh well that's that's not good so you know we start looking into stuff and you know it went at this time i didn't know this was happening because he'd be like i'm not going to discipleship i'm rescheduling i'm like oh no you're going like i had a really hard time like you're leaving i really i really did struggle um going to discipleship and sometimes even a small group i was like i can't do this i'm not you know what i mean it was it was really difficult uh to continue and you know fortunately my wife is southern stubborn enough to [Music] keep pushing get up out this house boy yeah yeah you ain't eating dinner till you're done so then uh but but after a certain point it was like things fl things clicked for me and i was like you know um so i i sat down with the pastor one day his his office was a coffee shop right by my house um best coffee shop ever for real um but he didn't have a building so that's where he would go and just do sermon prep and everything and i could walk there from my house and so one day i just went over there and i was like hey man so we started talking and she talked to him about a couple things and then uh that was when she was like you know i was like oh yeah by the way he's not baptized or saved and he thinks that his mormon salvation is like sufficient she called me out now at this time in the back of my head i'm thinking that my baptism at 10 was sufficient and that my entire life up to this point was just by chance so i thought that i was fine and i'm just throwing my husband under the bus like i had done my whole life so do you want me to talk about how i knew that i mormonism was go i mean false and then we'll catch up sure yeah okay so i sit down in my group and the women are doing a study of first timothy right and so they start i pulled up on my bible my trusty bible they start reading uh now that we know that the law now we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully understanding this that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient for the ungodly and sinners for the unholy and profane for those who strike their fathers and mothers and they continue in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed god for which i have been entrusted so they're talking about false teachers right and first timothy and it it just clicks and i said you know like i don't know what do you mean about like false teachers and i said i actually just left the mormon church this morning and they're like what and they all just start flipping to titus and second timothy and they're like giving me the qualifications for elders and deacons and like completely deconstructing like the bishop pastor term like you can't just be assigned this like it is like a biblical role um which is why i struggle with uh the term elder being assigned to like a 18 year old boy yeah in the mormon church um and really just just laying into me like the foundational truths of like where the church leadership comes from right not even an interesting angle yeah very interesting i never heard anyone go about that angle yeah not because that's where my question came from and so from there my uh my question to them was so you guys can go shopping on sunday so they're lit they're laying out the fine like how you know we get everything comes from jesus like pastors that you know they're ordained of jesus they're not just like dreamed about or chosen you know by their friend you know voted for by voted for like they're they're literally just like laying this out for me and my my response was so you guys go shopping on sunday they're like yeah girl where do you when do you think i go like i'm like i don't know thursday i just like yeah thursday saturday just yeah and so that like right then immediately i thought that everything i had just done for the past four years was just whatever and back just i'm gonna erase it straight up out of my salvation story just bloop gone back to being baptized at 10 i'm fine i'm saved okay you know and i remember them asking me are you saved and i was like yeah i'm saved i was actually baptized at 10 and and i'm so grateful for the pastor now and i really think that because of our experience and him discussing mormonism with us our his his flock will never falter and let a mormon person ever leave unsaved that like ever leave their group unsaved again but they got me good so he gets saved and then uh come like february i'm sitting in church and god is just like you need salvation you need salvation you need salvation and i look to my friend and our that church actually does not like an altar call but the pastor is like it's such a small congregation at that point like maybe 60 70 people if that yeah they're in the school at this point like maybe 50 40 50 people and he's you know it's really interpersonal relationship at that point it's still like a big life group so their their main growth like plan i guess for their church is is through those small groups because the life groups yeah yeah so yeah they yeah they're different names for them you guys what do you guys do yeah same kind of deal so you have like your group and then once you reach about 12 people you kind of multiply they call you invite people to church by inviting them to your connect group yeah and that's kind of how the majority of their ministry happens everybody that leads um one of those groups is actually like called by the by the pastor um you know and kind of discipled to make sure that they are you know doing yeah and they go out there and evangelize and stuff yeah it's great for the connect group so so i'm sitting there with my connect group leader and the girl that was the um she never left my side stacey and like she still uh she was actually the receptionist at the karate studio the front desk worker and i'm looking at her and i he said you know like i said it's so intimate at that moment that he could literally say is there anyone here that wants to pray for salvation like our pr like there's a couple people wait waiting to pray for you and um i'm looking at her and it was like super bowl sunday because you were not there you were with her husband yeah so i was i was friends with her husband but her husband worked like a weird i think he worked night shift so i never saw him and like he would come to our group like every so often it was very very rare that he would actually be able to come and so he was like hey i'm off for super bowl you're like you want to come to the house and hang out and i was like man i should go to church but i'm going to go hang out with this guy because i don't ever get to see you right so i'm looking at her and she's looking at me kind of like what are you like and i'm like i don't know like should i say something and she's kind of like looking at me she's like like are you saved and i'm like i think so and she's like that's not the answer you know and she's like if you she like grabs me and i'm like like shaking almost in tears like basically like all my conventions are going down like everything my cognitive dissonance left from my previous cultural now we're breaking down cultural christianity right where i thought i was saved right so we've skipped over the mormonism we're jumping straight to my childhood yeah and she's like if you walk out of this building right now and get hit by a bus where are you going girl you got it like that's i have always used that evangelism line when it comes down to like hot pressed evangelism with people no it's real and i and i'm like i don't know and she's like i think you know the answer pastor's already done with this he's already done like we're over the he's about to dismiss everything and just like me and he turns around and he's like what like literally he's like i think we have somebody and i just like lost it i'm like in tears and like uh kelly one of my really good friends kelly and meredith came and they were like holding me and just like they took me out to the hall because i couldn't even like take it anymore it was like everything that i had like held on to like that was my conversion like so to think that all these moments that i'd had in my life where i thought that i had been saved like that was it and like they're like why are you crying this is not a sad time christ took my burden just now well yeah that's what i said i was like i i said i feel like free like that's what i told them i said i feel i feel free now you know and they're like so these are hap like they're like so these are happy these are my friends you know so they're crying for happy reasons like yes wow and they're like okay and they just held me for like an hour yeah and like real right there yeah and and i ended up texting him like too bad you weren't here you were here i got saved without you yeah i heard about it later yeah this is why you don't miss church for the super bowl dude that's funny people get saved on the super bowl yeah and i got baptized on easter super saved sunday yeah right super safe sunday i got baptized on easter eggs on easter beautiful and the freezing cold water it was just like so it was so crazy to like shake mormonism and think that i was fine and still think that i was fine and saved and god being like no you're not this is i'm calling you now yeah i think a lot of people go through that because we had a couple friend um a couple's we were friends with a couple that's the best way to say it uh who yeah we had a couple friends uh who who also left mormonism this is when we took him with him after we started getting stalked by the missionaries is that what you're talking about the couple we took with us no the missionaries started stalking us no i mean this is when we're back to las vegas oh anyway i'm out i'm out of order here but i'm just saying that the the idea that your baptism still holds holds water no pun intended um when you're mormon is very real like people think that that is like when you even when you leave mormon i'm like oh i'm good yeah right uh and i mean like i said i went through it she went through it um you know and even we like i said we met we had a there was a a couple friend of ours who from our christian church from our christian church who kind of felt the same way about it you still feel like there and we you know i've tried to explain to them kind of that that's not the case at all um your baptism doesn't save you no it's especially for your salvation to mormonism into a different gospel right definitely does not save you yeah so um so once we left like i got back honestly i was man i was so excited like after i got baptized i felt weird because i was in front of everybody um but like my son ran up and hugged me i was like trying not to cry the whole time like it was it was crazy um anyway so this is this is the their their shirts they sell at the so he he's move studios he's got like a whole new karate studio and he went back i went back to go see it he's like hey man here's some shirts right and so i wear this all the time but it's it's their their shirt they sell at the karate studio where where the church got started wow you know man i feel like pastor jeff needs to meet that guy yeah oh they would be they would be best friends instantly they're like kind of very similar people yeah yeah and um and now the their church has grown so much they have like a dedicated building actually they've actually they actually moved from pooler to city and they've already split into a new church yeah it's it's they've been growing crazy yeah so so it's been just great like not only seeing their church grow right but also knowing that like we that god put us in georgia in a place where we could be a strong christian with strong christians where we could be surrounded and and not have to go through those same problems that i've seen with friends of mine and other people where you leave the church and you become an atheist or whatever that's the problem with the like the ces letters is great in a sense where people can come to know that the tr the mormon church isn't true but however then what's what's after that exactly from out of the frying pan and into the fire you know you actually had there was a faith-based system around you biblical christianity christians you went to the right church god ordained that specific time ordained your past there's no other way that it could happen yeah exactly we were already like kind of broke so like conor going to karate was really difficult but like that was one thing we were never going to give up like was karate and we were never going to stop paying for our son to go to karate so we kept that relationship months after we shouldn't have and and like it was just like weird we were always able to afford karate for our son and it was just like when you look back and like all the time this is before we got saved even yeah before we went through yeah before we went there to church and so all the time that god like placed people in our lives intentionally and all the times he didn't place people in our lives because had we moved to georgia and the church been the what it should have been or whatever you want to go the lds church should have been lds church standards finding the ces letter would have chased me back to church for questions the lds church um or had we still been in las vegas like and it's so i love that the bible even reiterates like you know people uses like a cliche like oh you have seasons of your life people come and go in seasons that's biblical like god places people in your life and takes them out of your life when you when he's done with them being there that boss the second we moved there i lost that job and we were in georgia like it is we felt stuck there she moved me to georgia and i lost and and she kind of get was done with that business so i was stuck in georgia and so he so he moved and got a job and then his job brought him his new job then brought him back to las vegas where now we were hated hated so yeah i had when we left the church i would like i said i was kind of public about it um but not even that we had not that you weren't that public you mean like i made a facebook post and you posted your publicism yeah yeah yeah but i got calls from people that within a day it was within a day of the quit mormon someone told me i thought you were i thought i always thought you were a good person i thought you were a good a good father las vegas were like calling and harassing us before we had even made an announcement so the quit mormon for whatever reason the church must have thought we were still in vegas and it assigned it to vegas and so we were getting calls from people within 24 hours of us submitting that by friday and saturday from people in vegas asking us while we were leaving the church i thought you were good people thought you were a good father and then we took a couple families after we started going to that christian church connection church we convinced a couple people to stop going to the mormon church now they're i don't believe that they're any christian church because we were very cage-staged we didn't know how to disciple them into a christian church um and i pray that god is with them every day um but we had lds missionaries like outside our house so like 11 o'clock at night watching our house see like who was at our house or like what we were doing in the world yeah it was weird it was really weird it was very strange like we'd look they'd be behind us or like you know yeah that's very odd it sounds like some scientology stuff so yeah speaking of scientology so the way i so okay up to finding the ces letter what's it up to or right after so leah remini scientology i think we saw it concurrently so at the time i'm in this mlm or had just left mlm i just lost the job that was kind of attached to that mlm um the scientology show comes out and i'm equating everything in the scientology show to what that mlm had to do like wow this is just like the mlm i was in these are the same things that they made us do wow so like i'm watching the scientology show we find the ces letter and i remember watching the show right after finding the ces letter and it clicking this is just like mormonism not as it just forget that it's just like the mlm this is just like the lds church everything she's saying like what not the little electric test but the brainwashing and the indoctrination and the the fear the fear tactics like having your friends follow you the the missionaries following us after that like the missionaries being outside her house and then that being on her episode about the church members taking pictures of them while they were walking around yeah that was literally like i broke down i would think i was like laying on the ground in our house like in a ball crying oh yeah like i i told him i need cold i need cult therapy and after that i ended up reading um finding a bunch of articles online like how to handle leaving a cult so i kind of did like self therapy along with um the biblical stuff like with my passion my discipleship and with my small group but um and i'm grateful i didn't go to mine it's a whole therapist because they probably would have took me out of christianity god's word of truth will do you know so yeah so grateful i had the bible my small group and those those resources online however i wish there were more did you just leave a cult a christian resort you know what i mean yeah yeah no that's very very true that's one thing jerry and i talk about a lot like you can watch leah remini scientology in the aftermath or you can do steve a song combating cult mind control they have these standards that they appeal to with no actual real answers into why those standards even matter in the first place christians should be the ones that actually are standing on the word of god very vocally about these things and it's jk van balen who stated that the cults are the unpaid debts of the church and that's a very real thing that we're facing today in our society and we can see what happens when the church is inactive in a in a nation i mean america is facing it with the judgment that we see all around us it's also i would say is the unpaid debt of the church you know it's time to to rise up and preach the gospel and truly believe that christ is king and that he reigns over every realm that we that we can that we can see he's over every government it says that he's over every every rule and authority he is master of it and that's our king and we're citizens of that holy nation is our duty as christians do you know preach the gospel which is the freeing truth of salvation uh i mean that's the only way we can live in a peaceful world a peaceful society is actually people being dead to sin and free to christ to actually know what it even means to be human again yeah like we're lost we're lost you know without that there was a point where we started to feel lost and complacent in our christian church um and i'll self-admit that we started to equate a lot of the service you know was setting up a church or setting up a school for church to some of the same service we felt in the mormon church it was still very fresh and new to us um so god decided that we were moving back to vegas i do before we get into that i do want to say one thing like when when i you know when i got saved i remember turning to my pastor who was with me and my wife was with me too but and asking him okay what now and he goes well now the real work begins right right and and i think that that is also something that's really important and really missing really missing uh from a lot of evangelical churches today is that they look at that moment of salvation at the peak as like the peak of your christian experience right whereas where the real joy comes in that justification that sanctification process and and where you really get to know christ wow you know what i mean yeah and and i've we've been to a number of different churches um and i could say that that's that's pretty accurate so so what what you're saying which is really powerful to me is that because you have peace with god you can now enjoy sanctification and sanctification is not necessarily something that's very painful you enjoy right that's the thing like well well they're suffering for the sake of christ and being disciplined by a holy god which is loving and in that suffering the christian knows it's only because he has peace with god that he experiencing the loving discipline hand of god though so you can have joy throughout it in terms of your sanctification like you said that shouldn't be our peak is this the moment of our salvation that is an amazing beautiful moment of our lives of course the holy spirit taking a heart of stone replacing with the heart of flesh but now he who started a good work in us will not leave us he will complete it the bible promises us that so we have joy as christians and suffering where if you go to anyone else who is suffering it's not suffering under the discipline of god it's suffering under the wrath of god and that's a hopeless suffering right and that's where we i think as you're talking about the evangelical church at large may very well suffer from the fact where they don't want their people to suffer the discipline of god yeah they want you to focus on one peak instead of actually continuing your walk with the lord and putting those sins to death which can be very painful but but but the truth is is that suffering in the bible suffering with god try to find one text in the new testament that says it's a bad thing yeah it does not find one you will not find one it's a beautiful thing it's a beautiful thing because it's love well for aj i mean i hope you don't mind but like when he was baptized he was still dealing with his addiction right and i remember you asking me like even a year into it like why would god save me and still have me deal with this in spite of your sin yeah yeah and i think that um in fact our when we kind of transitioned to uh our kind of understanding of reform theology i think that's really where for me that was really where i i kind of i don't really cry from books a lot um but i was reading this book that was it's called a humble humble calvinism by j meadors yeah and and he was talking about uh uh i think it was irresistible grace and um i'm like it just it really hit me you know like that i'm this wretched thing and that god would actually choose to save me from myself amen you know and and i'm even getting it a little bit now but it's like the weight of that i don't know that you you can never pay that back right that's that's you can't do anything to make up for that and other than just be thankful and and worship amen you know and that worship is what gets you through it is what conquers those things that's right that's right guys guys this has been a great i don't i don't want to end it but we're almost on three hours are we really yeah i think we need to do another one another episode uh with jerry it'll be great this is i hope everyone who's listening has had a wonderful time listening to this i know i've i feel like i've been on an awesome an awesome ride right now getting to know you guys and it was a beautiful conversation yeah beautiful conversation so everyone who has uh listened we we pray that you pray for us continually for cultish because we are trying to make big steps and movements into making this show better for you guys also you can go to thecultureshow.com you can donate there if you like what you're hearing you can support us you know one time monthly or annually we do appreciate that you can also go to apolgiastudios.com you can sign up for all access become an all-access member where you can get access to awesome content from pastor jeff durbin pastor james white so many different things you can see there but you can also get access to cultish the aftermath so again thank you so much for listening to this episode of cultish and we'll see you next time as we enter into the kingdom of the colts

Channel: Apologia Studios

Views: 37,670

Keywords: Jeff durbin, apologia studios, apologia church, cultish show, cultish podcast, cultish mormonism, Jeff durbin mormon, gospel for mormons, mormon history, documentary on mormonism, Joseph smith false prophet, leaving mormonism, mormon tabernacle choir, mormon testimony, Jeff durbin mormon debate, mormonism vs christianity, mormon vs pastor

Id: 2R0GH6wq8AA

Length: 173min 33sec (10413 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021