This is Ashley Stone and you're listening to the Comeback Podcast.

Well, I am just so over the moon to have you on the podcast. I feel like I've just, I mean, I've just I mean I when I first started the

podcast I found an article I think it was in like the Salt Lake Tribune and it was

about you and your story and then and then I listened to the podcast which I think was on fair and then I saw you on Saint-Sunscripted and I was just like wow like he's just so awesome and I know that a lot of things that you talked about in those different

episodes that you did are similar things that people struggle with today that's a big, you know, thing that challenges

their testimony and so I would love for you to just kind of jump in and tell us from the beginning,

your story and you know where you were when you were a

kid what your testimony was like then all the way up to just the whole thing I'd love to hear it.

Okay. Cool sure. I started out on the East Coast, my parents were converts, so even though I do

Mormon history, I don't have like a deep Mormon heritage or anything like that.

But I was from a really devout family.

I became, when I was 15, I became very devout myself.

And so I started started it was partly a result of seminary and the

teacher telling us to like set goals and so I started setting spiritual goals so I could grow more

learned to better keep my Aptimal covenant and so I was I was a pretty maybe precocious teenager. I was like 15 then. That was wonderful. Then within a couple years I had

encountered things that raised my first doubts. This kind of happened accidentally, right? So the local library where I was, we lived in Utah at this time, the local library carried all kinds of church-related books including like critical things like

Gerald and Sandra Tanner's Mormonism shadow or reality and I would sort of steal glances at some of this stuff, but I I knew that it was you know anti-Morman right and so I had my guard up when I was dealing with that stuff. Then I encountered things that raised out in another way. So it was actually family home evening and it wasn't anything that it wasn't anything in the lesson or anything like that.

My dad took us to Deseret Book in Orham.

He offered to let us each get any church book that we wanted.

This was our family who meeting activity.

And so there in the general authority section between Boyd K Packer and Joseph Hilling Smith, there was this book by B. H. Roberts titled Studies of the Book of Mormon.

And for people in the audience who may not be familiar with us,

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