Paul's Story Part 1

You're entering Outer Brightness. Today, we're really going to be focusing on Paul's journey, how he was brought up in the LDS Church, what things that led him out of the church, and what led him to Christ. So we'll be interviewing him, asking him a few questions, and we hope you'll all enjoy what we have to discuss here. So Paul, starting off, could you just briefly introduce yourself, maybe your upbringing, where you were born and raised, that kind of thing?

Sure. So I was born of goodly parents in Bountiful, Utah. We lived in North Salt Lake for the first nine years of my life.

Those were good times. The ward that we were in there was the Salt Lake 22nd Ward, and you know, have some good memories of growing up there. Parents were good members of the church. My mom comes from a family that goes back in the church generations. I have a great-great grandmother who left Denmark and traveled to America in the 1860s and crossed the plains pulling a handcart with her daughter and settled ultimately in Pleasant Grove, Utah.

And so, you know, go back to pioneer stock on my mom's side. And then dad actually was a convert to the LDS faith. He was born and raised and christened as a Lutheran in New York. And when he was a young adult, I think he was 26 or so, his dad passed away unexpectedly and that caused him to do some seeking. And around that time, some Mormon missionaries came knocking on the door and he took that as a sign and so took lessons from them and eventually ended up joining the LDS Church. Spent a few years there in a small branch in upstate New York, baptized my grandmother on that side of the family before finally making the decision to move to Utah. One of the missionaries that my dad had known there in that small branch in New York lived in Utah and when he went home, my dad moved out. They had become pretty good friends and my dad moved out to Utah and lived with his parents for a while. His parents introduced my dad to my mom. They knew her because they did genealogical research at the genealogy library in downtown Salt Lake City. And my mom had studied library sciences at BYU in order to become a professional genealogist and do work for people to help them find their ancestors and help them prepare the the paperwork that needed to be done in order to take names to the temple and do baptisms for the dead and other ordinances for the dead that LDS do. So this family introduced my parents. They were married about a year later in the Salt Lake Temple in 1975.

My sister came along in 1976 and I came along in 78 and have a younger sister born in 81, another younger sister born in 83, and my youngest brother is the caboose of the family. He was born in 85, so grew up in a stereotypically large Mormon family. When I was nine years old, we moved from North Salt Lake City to out to the suburbs of West Jordan, Utah, and lived there throughout the rest of my adolescence until I served a mission. And then when I came home from my mission, I moved out of state.

So that's briefly my upbringing. Paul, do you mind, I just want to know, because I know you said your family was pretty big into going into the temple. Was that something that you did frequently as well before your mission?

It was, yeah. So my parents, after we moved out to West Jordan, Utah, they were ordinance workers in the Jordan River Temple. They worked in the baptistry for a number of years, so on Thursday nights that's what they did. Dad would come home from work, they would both get ready, and they would do a session in the baptistry from typically around six o'clock in the evening until after nine o'clock, almost ten o'clock some evenings. And what that entailed was for, you know, the various wards there would have their youth go to the temple, have a temple night for doing baptisms for the dead.

So there would be five or six wards that would bring their youth through in the evening and do baptisms. And so my older sister and I were old enough that when my parents were workers there, we would go with them occasionally on Thursday night. It was an enjoyable experience because we got to go to the cafeteria in the temple and eat dinner with them. So it was a nice time to spend together with family, with my parents, and then we would do these baptisms for the dead. Funny enough, it was one of those experiences that kind of got me to start questioning because when we were there in the temple, people who were there working in the baptistry, it wasn't uncommon for them and my parents too to talk about feeling or seeing the people for whom they were doing the baptisms. And I remember going and participating but never feeling or seeing anyone and that always had my mind wondering what they were experiencing that I wasn't. So yeah, one of those early experiences that got me questioning.

Okay, thank you. That sounds like you were brought up from a young age to be a Latter-day Saint then. You were baptized at eight, right?

Yeah, that's right. So when we were still living downtown, I was baptized in the the tabernacle that makes the Mormon Tabernacle Choir famous but I guess they've changed their name, right? So but in any case, there's a baptistry in the basement of the famous tabernacle there on Temple Square and that's where our stake would perform its baptisms. So when I was eight years old, I was baptized there and it was an interesting experience. I've written about it as an adult and I described it as joining a men's club and the reason I described it that way is that when I was younger, we used to go to what was called the Northwest Multipurpose Center, sort of like the YMCA type of place. That's where my sister and I took swimming lessons and so we would go over there on Tuesday nights and do swimming lessons and then when we were done, my dad would take me into the men's changing room. My mom would take my sister into the women's changing room and we would change and often my dad and I would go into the sauna room that was there.

I don't know if you all remember or have ever experienced a sauna room but you know, it's basically people sitting around with towels wrapped around them and you open the door and step inside and dip a ladle of hot water onto hot lava rocks to create steam and you sit around and sweat. It used to be, I think, more popular than it is now but that's what we would do after swimming lessons on Tuesday nights and I remember it was just a strange experience going into that sauna room with other men who were mostly naked except for a towel and I remember going into the basement baptistry changing room in the tabernacle and it felt like a similar experience, you know, changing and getting ready and my friends from school were there because they were also being baptized and one of the kids was kind of a jerk at school and I was surprised to see him there but he was being baptized so we were all part of the same club and I don't know, it was weird. It was like joining a club. As you were growing up and you were a member of the church, what were some of the positive experiences that you had while you were a member?

You had mentioned your experiences in the baptistry and you'd mentioned some positive experiences there so what are some other positive experiences that you had? Yeah, so the LDS Church used to be very involved with the Cub Scouts and the Boy Scouts when I was younger. I did that, went all through Cub Scouts.

I'm not an Eagle Scout. I reached a point in my life where other things were more important to me than scouting but early on when I was a Cub Scout, I would go to camps, you know, day camps in the summertime and shoot arrows and make leather work. In fact, I came across a piece of leather work that I had done at one of those camps when I was a kid the other day when I was going through some things that my mom had given me a few years back and, you know, those experiences were fun. You know, just, I don't know, I kind of loved everything about scouting. I loved camping. I loved being around other guys and everything about it except going after the awards, going after the merit badges. So yeah, got to a point where the chase of that just wasn't as important but I would definitely say the scouting is one of those positive experiences that I had with the new LDS Church.

Another one I would say is I remember there used to be a real effort to do things that were fun but also educational. So I remember a Christmas, I guess it was a Christmas party, but they, whoever was in charge of it, planned it really well and they decked out the gym and the church like it was Jerusalem. And the whole idea was that you would spend the evening in, or I guess Bethlehem, in Bethlehem, that you would spend the evening in Bethlehem where the Savior was born. And, you know, they had, I don't know how authentic the food was, but they had pitas full of, you know, meat and stuff. So they tried to make it as authentic as it could be. And for me as a kid, I thought, that's kind of cool, you know.

The lights were turned down in the gym and they put up props that looked like shops in what you might imagine ancient Bethlehem to look like. So that was kind of cool. There's not much effort put into that kind of thing these days, I don't think, but that was a positive experience. I know some of your story because I've talked to you in the past about it and I think you said that after, sometime after your mission, you were, I guess, in the elders quorum and you were involved in teaching and things of that nature as well.

Was that for a while? How was that experience for you? Yeah, so I held a number of callings here in Kentucky after I moved here. One of them was ward mission leader. Spent a few years within the Young Men's Organization in the ward and also a number of years within the elders quorum presidency, helping to run that organization and also teaching on a regular basis within that organization.

I guess I should step back a little bit and talk about my mission. So as a teenager, I kind of fell away from activity in the church. I kind of alluded to the fact that there were things that became more important to me than scouting and the thing that I'm talking about there is basketball. So when I was a teenager, I got into playing basketball with some friends of mine.

When we moved to West Jordan, Utah, I was the new kid in school and got to know some friends. One of the things that I noticed pretty quickly about the ward that I moved into in West Jordan is that it was pretty cliquish and that remained that way throughout the time that we were there. I know my family felt it. Some other families felt it and that's not to say that there weren't good people in that ward.

You both know that Mormon wards, they can be very kind but they can also be unforgiving for some people. I would say that probably my struggles socially as a teenager were probably related to my falling away from regular activity within the church. So I don't hold any of those people that I grew up with to too high a standard in that regard.

I think given what Mormonism teaches about being the chosen generation and that type of thing, I think they were kind of beholden to what they were receiving. But there were some times when it was difficult as a teenager to feel like I was a part of things. And so I kind of drifted away like I said and spent more time focusing on playing basketball. I played both for my middle school and for my high school and was fairly successful at that throughout those years. And one of the things that my mom would always say to me because it was clear to her that that was becoming a passion of mine and I wanted to play at the college level. And so she would always say to me that there are two years of your life that don't belong to you.

They belong to God and you need to give those years to Him. And we would sometimes argue a little bit about that because I really wanted to go on and play college basketball. But you know as a loyal son does, I took her guidance to heart. And so when the Bishop of my ward called me in and asked me if I had intentions on serving a mission, I told him yes even though I didn't really want to do it. And so that started the process of preparing papers for going on a mission. And you know both of you know that that process can, depending on how busy your bishop is, that process can take some time. There's things to be done, you know, medical forms to be filled out by your doctor, dental forms to be filled out, all of that.

So I started working through that process in the spring of 1997. And during the time that I was working on my papers and actually had them all ready to turn in, the night before I had an appointment with the stake president for a final interview before the papers would be submitted, I was out with a friend and we had gone to a pool hall which was not uncommon for, not an uncommon thing for us to do on a Saturday night. We'd go to the pool hall and play pool for a few hours. And we were there and some people that we knew from school came in from our high school and they had a smuggled drink. They had a 44 ounce drink from a gas station that they had doctored with some alcoholic beverages. And they offered me and my friend a drink. And so here I am on the on the eve of the final interview with my stake president, being ready to turn in my mission papers and I'm taking a swig out of an alcoholic beverage. And so the next day, next morning got up, felt incredibly guilty for having done that.

Didn't get drunk, took a couple of swallows of an alcoholic beverage and then went home. But felt incredibly guilty the next morning so confessed that to my stake president and kind of got a brow beating from him. He basically said that I needed to go home and pray and think about whether a mission was something I really wanted to do and that we would have to delay submitting my mission papers for some time. So that delayed the submission of my mission papers for a couple of months.

During that time, I was working at the the same company where my dad was working. I was testing microchips to make sure that they were within specifications for what they were needed for the device that they were being put in. And I was sitting there you know just absentmindedly putting these microchips into the tester, pressing the test button, letting it go through its process, pulling them out, putting the next one in and sitting there realizing that I had never read the Book of Mormon all the way through, yet I was full-on in the midst of preparations for going on a mission. I had certainly read parts of the Book of Mormon. I had graduated from LDS Seminary even though I had spent a good portion of time skipping third period seminary to go to breakfast with friends to the point where one of my teachers had to make me the class president to try to get me to come to class. But in any case, I had read quite a bit of the Book of Mormon, but I had never read it all the way through.

And I had certainly never done Moroni's promise to get down on my knees and pray about it. So sitting at work there that one day, thinking about that and realizing you know I probably should make a serious effort to read it all the way through. And so I started to do that day by day with read and actually much of my work day was was pretty monotonous.

Testing microchips like that or doing you know other things that you know you repetitively that you would do something and then there would be a process of waiting a few minutes for that that process to complete and then doing that thing over again. And so I started reading the Book of Mormon while I was testing the microchips, thinking that I might if I if I was seen by anybody I might get in trouble, but the president of the company was a stake president. So he actually did catch me reading it and was like, oh good, good, good for you. I still did not get all the way through before my mission. And so finished reading it through the first time while I was in the NTC.

But before I went and before I submitted my papers, I did decide that I would would follow the promise in Moroni chapter 10. I got down on my knees in my parents living room in West Jordan after spending an hour or so reading one one night late and prayed to know if the Book of Mormon was true, if Joseph Smith was a prophet, and thought I felt something like warm water come over my body radiating out of my chest, and thought to myself that was a strange experience. And I remember staying there on my knees for a long time trying to understand what that was. And I realized that if I slowed my breathing down and really kind of focused all my attention on my chest, and it's interesting because as a Latter-day Saints, at least when I was growing up, I don't know how much, I've been out of the church for almost 10 years now, so I don't know how much it's emphasized now. But when I was growing up, it was really emphasized that if you prayed about the Book of Mormon, you would receive a burning in the bosom. So the witness that I received was exactly what I'd been told I would receive countless times. And I stayed there on my knees for the longest time and realized eventually that if I slowed my breathing enough and focused my energy and my attention on my chest, that I could kind of recreate that radiation feeling. And that bothered me, and it bothered me to the point that I continued to pray for a witness of the Book of Mormon throughout the entire time that I was in the MTC, throughout the entire two years that I was on my mission.

Even up until the very last area of my mission, I was still praying for a witness that I couldn't explain away. And so eventually did submit my papers, received a call to serve in the Budapest Hungry Mission, spent about half of my time in country in Budapest in various areas. Budapest is actually two cities that are on opposite sides of the Danube River. Buda is on one side, on the side of the river that has more of the hills, and Pest is on the other side, the opposite side of the river.

It's a flatter area. I served in three areas in Budapest. During my time there, I spent a number of months in a small city out by the Ukrainian border called Nida Caza, and then I spent a few months in a college town near the the border of Hungary and the former Yugoslavia.

That city is called Szeged. The mission was a great experience. I learned discipline. I learned study habits. I learned a lot about interpersonal relationships and learning to get along with people. So I enjoyed my mission, but definitely throughout my mission, like I said, I was aware that although I was there to teach, and I often told people when they would ask me, because people are generally surprised that a 19-year-old would spend two years of their life preaching rather than doing other things that 19-year-olds typically do. And so I would often get asked why I did what I did, and I often went back to what my mom told me, that these two years are not mine.

They are dedicated to God, and so I had to give them to Him. And so that's the way I viewed it. That's the way I viewed what I was doing, but I was aware of the fact that in some sense I felt like I was a fraud because I was going out to tell people that this book and this prophet were true, and I wasn't sure that I believed that myself, and I was certain that I didn't have a witness of it. So towards the end of my mission, we were teaching, I'll say a family, but we mostly taught the wife. The husband was not very interested. They had both been, I would say, burned by religion and had come out of Christianity and had considered themselves atheists.

He was much more strident in that than she was. She was still open to seeking, which is why she met with us with his permission. And so we would meet with her on a weekly basis. She did eventually end up getting baptized into the LDS faith, and I spent several months at the very end of my mission just pleading with God to make that family whole and bring the whole family into the church. And went to the branch where I was there in Budapest.

There was a branch of U.S. expatriates who were working for various companies over there in Budapest and were largely only English speakers, didn't speak Hungarian, and there was a gentleman who was in that English-speaking branch who, for whatever reason, our mission president decided to call as the branch president of the Hungarian branch that we were serving in. And so we went to a branch get-together at his home there, and this family that we were teaching, including the husband, came and got to kind of witness a discussion between this American businessman and this Hungarian husband and father that I've been praying for, and listen to this man just be completely authentic in describing his disbelief, and it affected me. The way he was able to be honest, even though his family was going a different direction, it affected me. It made me realize that maybe I was pretending a little bit, a lot, and it made me question a lot of things. So I spent the last few months of my mission in kind of a weird space in my head and in my heart where I was just really wanting Mormonism to be true, but I was pretty certain that it wasn't. But I imagined myself, so I would sit on my bed and read the Book of Mormon, and I would think about how there was no archaeological evidence for it.

And I'd always just accepted that it's true, but there was no evidence for it. And so I'd sit and daydream on my bed during morning study that I would go home and study at BYU and become an archaeologist and go to Central America and find the ruins. I would find the artifacts that would prove the Book of Mormon to be true, and that's the kind of thing that I was daydreaming about in the final months of my mission. But one of the other things that I was wrestling with is that I had reached a point where I was reading, so I had set myself a goal that not only would I finish the Book of Mormon, but during the time that I was on my mission, I would read all of the LDS standard works.

So Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Old Testament, New Testament. And in those final months of my mission, I had gotten to the point where I was reading the New Testament and I was reading through the epistles of Paul, and they were blowing me away with some of the things that he was saying because it didn't fit. And I remember being on the bus and reading through the epistles of Paul and thinking to myself, I might not be saved. And I went home that night and for the next few weeks through the end of my mission, my prayer was for God to save me. And strangely enough, I started praying to Jesus, which you don't do in the LDS faith. You pray to God in the name of Jesus.

And so, but I would just kneel by my bed and plead with Jesus to be my Savior and to save me. And then I came home and I went back to Utah and put on the good face that everything was great. The mission was a success and by all measures of a Mormon mission in Eastern Europe, I would say I was fairly successful. There were a number of people who joined the church as a result of me having contact with them, not just me, my companions as well. And so, you know, came home and felt like even though I was in a weird headspace, I had been a successful missionary. But there was a lot of pressure to fit in the social ladder of Mormonism. You're a returned missionary now and so now it's time to find the bride and get married in the temple and start having kids.

And I was home in Utah and all of that just terrified me. Let me ask you a question back to the mission real quick because you said you were praying quite a bit to get a spiritual witness. And I know a lot of times, especially in foreign missions, missionaries will take the fact that they were able to learn a language as like the gift of tongues or like a miracle. Did you have other experiences that you were kind of grappling with, maybe like that, that you were arguing against yourself, like maybe you had had like a different kind of a witness?

Oh, for sure. So there were times when... so Elder Charles Didier was our district president at the time. So a couple of times during my time in Hungary, he came from, I think he was stationed in either Frankfurt or somewhere in France. I can't remember exactly where he was stationed during that time, but he would come and speak either at a district conference or... but there was one time that he came to speak and Elder Earl C. Tingey came to speak at the small branch house where I was serving. So I was in my third area of my mission.

See, first area was about four months, second area was five months, no, second area was four months. So I was maybe nine or ten months in the country when Elder Tingey came to speak to the membership. And normally, they would have native Hungarians translate, but I don't recall exactly what happened, but there was something that happened that they would have... when Sister Tingey would speak, they would have a female native Hungarians translate for her, and then they would have a male native Hungarian speaker translate for the General Authority who was speaking. I don't recall exactly what happened, but I was asked to translate for Elder Tingey that evening, which was incredibly nerve-wracking. But I got up and I did it, and I remember being told by the native speaker who had done the translation for Sister Tingey that there was nothing about my translation that was off, that it was exactly as she would have done it if she had been translating for him.

It's incredible. So yeah, I took things like that as evidence that I was in God's good graces, that what I was doing was meant to be. You were previously talking about your return home from your mission and how you were kind of having to put on this mask to kind of hide your true feelings or your true experiences from your mission. So did this continue going on, or did you feel like you ever had that witness that you were hoping for, or did it kind of just continue on the same path that you had started?

So yeah, the mask. So while I was in the MTC, and this is to answer your question, I'm not going to back up too much, but while I was in the MTC I was struggling with this as well, because I don't know, I don't recall exactly when the missionary materials were changed, but we still used the old missionary guide when I was in the missionary training center. And so if you all are familiar with that, there was role play, right? You would take turns with the other missionaries in the group who were going to the same country or going to the same mission. Two of you would pretend to be a couple taking the discussions, and the other two of you would pretend to be the missionaries giving the discussions. And you would practice delivering your memorized discussions to the other missionaries, and then you would get to a certain point in the missionary guide where it would instruct you to testify of Jesus Christ or testify of Joseph Smith or testify of the Book of Mormon. And I remember one evening doing that in a role play there in the MTC, testifying of the Book of Mormon, and my companion got tears in his eyes, and I was just taken aback by that because we were just role-playing, right? And I didn't really feel like I had a witness. I was still getting down on my knees by my bedside each night and praying for that witness so that the fact that he would be moved by my testifying was a little upsetting to me. And later that night when we had gone back to our dorms, he asked if he could speak to me in private, so we went out from our dorm room to get away from the other two others that were in there and sat out in kind of a common area under the stairs, and he told me that he had a really strong knowledge, and he was right about this, a really strong knowledge of LDS Church doctrine and teachings, and he'd read the Book of Mormon. You know, he was much more doctrinally astute than I was at that point, but he told me that he had never had a witness of the Book of Mormon, and that when I testified, he could just tell that I had, and it made him sad and jealous, and that's what he was experiencing in that moment in the classroom earlier in the evening. And that just really messed with my head because I didn't have a witness, and here he was supposedly moved by my witness, and so that just messed with me. So I talked to one of our instructors about it the next day, told him it was bothering me, and he gave me a talk by Boyd K. Packer called The Candle of the Lord, and in that talk, other Packer basically recommended that the witness would come, the testimony would come through the bearing of it, that if you bore your testimony in faith, you would get the witness, even if you hadn't received it yet.

And he goes into quite some detail talking about, you know, that trying to kind of dance around the idea that doing so would be lying, but basically said, you know, it's kind of like the fake until you make an idea. And so that's kind of the philosophy that I went into my mission with, was that, you know, okay, I don't have this witness. I want to believe, and I'm going to testify as best I can, and hope that that witness comes. And, you know, eventually I got to the point where I just started going back to the witness I talked about before. I started going back to that feeling of warmth radiating out from my chest, and so that's what I would describe when I would talk about the witness.

And I did that all the way up through probably like 2008, both during and after my mission. And eventually we were in Elders Quorum studying through the Teachings of the Prophets series of books that used to be studied in Elders Quorum Relief Society, and I think it was David L. McKay. And there is a part in that book where he describes going out into a field, riding a horse out into a field to, you know, as a young man to pray about the Book of Mormon himself. And he talks about, you know, that he realized that when he got up off of his knees that day that he was the same boy he was before, basically meaning that he had not received the witness or anything spectacular in his time of prayer there that day. And he goes on to explain that his witness has come to him in the performance of his duty. And so when I saw that experience from David L. McKay, who went on to become the president and prophet of the LDS Church, it kind of made me realize, well, if he never received a witness, maybe I never will, even though I'm trying to describe one that I know I can recreate.

So yeah, I didn't ever receive anything that I thought was something that I couldn't recreate. Well, I'm trying to process all that. That's a lot of great stuff. We thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Outer Brightness podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Please visit the Outer Brightness podcast page on Facebook. Feel free to send us a message there with comments or questions by clicking send a message at the top of the page and we would appreciate it if you give the page a like. We also have an Outer Brightness group on Facebook where you can join and interact with us and others as we discuss the podcast, past episodes, and suggestions for future episodes, etc. You can also send us an email at outerbrightness.gmail.com.

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Stay bright, Flyer Flies. The world made fresh, the risen Son. Heaven and earth will pass away, but the word of the Lord endures forever. All of this world is in decay, but the word of our God through ages remains. Lord, you promised that we, as your church, would remain upon this rock, and the gates of hell will not prevail against us.

You have power to keep your word unspoiled in purity. Heaven and earth will pass away, but the word of the Lord endures forever. All of this world is in decay, but the word of our God through ages remains. As the rain falls down from heaven and waters the earth, bringing it life, so the word that goes out from your mouth will not return empty, but does what you desire. Lord, we hear your word and believe in you. Heaven and earth will pass away, but the word of the Lord endures forever. All of this world is in decay, but the word of our God through ages remains. The word of God remains.