Come Back Podcast

"When I was in Young Women's, one of the themes was... I'm a daughter of Heavenly Father who loves us and we love Him. You always say those things but I never really thought about what it really meant. And then I really thought about it one time, like, I'm a daughter of Heavenly Father. Which means if I have inherited things from my earthly parents, I must have inherited things from my heavenly parents. That means I have a divine potential. We all have divine potential! Which means that we can do things that we cannot even imagine. There are people doing things around us that we never thought possible until somebody does it. Just the knowledge that I am a daughter of my Heavenly Father and Mother and that they really love me. They know me. They know everything about me. They know more about me than I know. Knowing that gives me so much strength. So now every day I use this as an affirmation. I say to myself, I'm a daughter of heavenly parents. I have divine potential. I have the power to overcome everything. I have Christ -like love inside of me. I receive this love from others and I give this love to other people. Doing this makes me strong, it helps me keep the commandments." https://www.plantwhys.com/comeback

"I've read a lot about history, like the founding fathers and enlightenment and tried to really get into their heads of how they thought. I feel like they had a kind of expansive view of Christ. They thought that His teachings of the golden rule applied not only to bringing brownies to your neighbor, but also in big things like how you structure the government. I feel like what's happened over time is kind of a shrinkage where if you have problems with your plumbing, you call a plumber. You're not like, oh, let me go look in the Bible. Over time, I think what's happened is if you have an economics question or if you have an ethics question, you go to the economist, or you go to the ethicist. I feel like what's happened is that the influence that Jesus has and the gospel has is kind of shrinking as it's being crowded out by these secular theories, which again, if they pointed back to gospel truths, that would be okay, but they didn't seem to, at least in my opinion. So that was one last thing that just drove me crazy. I had to figure out who was right. Either the economists are right or Jesus is right. My money's on Jesus." Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brett_alder Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brett.alder/

"There is a truth and there is a line. I did cross that line and I am back. Christ is our savior. He did do what he did. There is evil. I felt it. I felt it on a stage. I felt the coldness of being on that stage in front of an entity of evil spirits. I felt it to my core. It made me shake I felt it so much. I've also stood next to President Nelson. he came to our mission and I got to look at him and be with him. And I felt on fire. I felt calm. I felt peace. And so I knew at that moment, and this, by the way, was the week that President Monson had died and President Nelson was being put in as prophet."

"We need to learn how to let go of those things. We can't focus on the bad things. We have to move along. We have to move forward. It is hard. It is very, very hard. It's very challenging, but it's not impossible. I can tell you that it's not impossible. For those of you that are struggling with your testimonies and are questioning things about the church, ask Heavenly Father. You've got to get it from the direct source. Don't go looking at videos and don't go talking to people that you're not sure of. Just get down and ask God, because he will tell you and he has his own ways of telling you. It may not be something huge. He may not open the heavens to you with all this dramatic stuff that some of us are looking for. Sometimes it takes that one little small, tiny, still voice to resonate in our soul."

"I would tell my mom, it's just so enlightening. That's the only word I could think of when I would talk to her, that it's so enlightening. So I'm doing all these things, and everything at home is a big fat mess. But everything I was learning at church just all made sense. And it's funny because I had learned those things before, but now it was different because I was trying to gain my own testimony. Everything just clicked for me, the restoration made sense and I wanted to learn more. I really wanted the husband to go on this journey with me, but he just wasn't really having it. So things got pretty bad where I felt like he needed to move out. I remember every step I would take, I would pray like, 'okay, Heavenly Father, I think this is the right thing. I'm going to do it unless you tell me not to,' is usually how I would approach it. And every time I did that, it was almost right afterwards I would get some kind of confirmation blessing that told me yes." https://www.plantwhys.com/free-1-week-meal-guide

"In the New Testament there is a story where Jesus heals a blind man and it says: Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not: one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see. That's how it was for me, all the sudden it just hit me and I thought: I can't explain all these things, all I can say is I have felt God's love, I have felt Jesus's love and I have felt forgiven for my sins. I have felt the joy that comes from being able to change. I can't explain all these things, I can only know what has happened to me."

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"He comes back and he doesn't know everything, he doesn't know the doctrine super well. But he has a powerful testimony that he can bear and he can share with people. A little while later he and some of the brethren in Salt Lake decide to go on a carriage ride up the eastern bench of the mountains. They decide to pull the curtains on the carriage so that they can see out the window and see the view. And when that happens, Martin sees the valley lying before him, he sees everything that's been built up, and all the saints and how large of a population is out there, and he is just stunned by it. Martin's been spending all his time in this little podunk town, Kirtland, where there's hardly anyone who will take him seriously and listen to his testimony. Then he has this reaction where he says, 'who would have thought the Book of Mormon could do all this?'" https://archive.bookofmormoncentral.org/author/Rappleye,%20Neal https://knowhy.bookofmormoncentral.org/tags/martin-harris https://evidencecentral.org/evidence/martin-harris https://witnessesofthebookofmormon.org/three-witnesses/martin-harris/

I started to get promptings and I was like, 'I'm going to go read the Bible at the temple.' I still had no inclination of going back to the church. Zero. So why did that make sense to me? I don't know. But I went to the temple and parked in the parking lot and just read my Bible at five in the morning. There was one morning when I was just reading the Bible in the temple parking lot and had words in my mind that I knew weren't mine. It just said, 'you need to go to the temple.' And I was like, 'God, I hear you, but what other churches have temples? Because that's not the one that I want to go to.' But I was like, message received. Then it took some time, and I started to feel promptings that I should open the Book of Mormon. This was all in secret because I knew that Melissa wouldn't approve or that it would upset her. So I was reading the Book of Mormon and then at some point this really strong witness came that this was the church that I needed to be going to." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rte6B5TyT0 https://www.plantwhys.com/free-1-week-meal-guide

"The community is really awesome and going to school is really awesome. But I'm happier now because I have a healed, happy, healthy, strong relationship with Jesus Christ and with Heavenly Father. I have peace in a way I never had before. I did a lot of healing from my traumas on my own in secular therapy but this has brought me beyond healing, it's brought me to hope and trust. That's why I'm happier, it's just been so amazing. The saying is true, you do become a new creature in Christ. I still look at the things I'm doing and am surprised."

"I just had the desire. I thought in order to be baptized, that I had to know everything about the religion. Just like I told her "you gotta know, you better know." So I wasn't planning on getting baptized so quickly until I read Alma 32:27. It says you just have to have a desire and God will do the rest. And I was like, I have a desire, I really do. I have felt so good about this. I've been going from summertime until April. I decided to start reading the Book of Mormon in January so by April I was devouring it. I was mind blown by all of the truths. I couldn't believe it. I love the Book of Mormon. It's amazing! It's so relatable, you know, to your life. You can just see yourself." ⁠

"When I compared what I heard from the antagonistic point of view to what I saw in my wife or my children or my parents or my brothers or in my bishopric or the relief society presidency. When I compared what everyone was saying on the antagonistic side of the coin to everything I saw in real life. It didn't make sense .They were saying such terrible, horrible things, but I'm like everything I'm seeing is good. I'm not seeing perfection. But everywhere I look, I look at all my brothers and they don't cast stones. They don't teach to be against any group of people or anything. They're just loving and kind with their fair share of mistakes and with their fair share of issues."

"I felt so confused. I would listen to something that was negative and then I'd listen to something that was positive for the church. And it felt like I couldn't be in the right mindset to fully grasp what they were talking about. So I needed to just turn it all off and go directly to the scriptures and Heavenly Father. That is where I found absolute truth, it was in the source. Even this conversation, this can be a beautiful spiritual conversation you and I have, but if someone is actually just questioning and none of this is helpful to hear, then turn me off, turn my voice off and go directly to Heavenly Father and talk to Him. He is our truth, He knows the truth of everything. So instead of trying to seek for truth here or there, I would just turn it off and go directly to Him." https://www.aubreygrossen.com/ https://www.amazon.com/He-Came-Me-Stories-Modern-Day/dp/B0C6BXJ3F8

"Jesus' first miracle was to transform water into wine. It was almost a foreshadowing of what He can do. He can transform things, He can transform people. I feel like that's what He's done with my life. Not about being gay -- it's never been just about that. But going from pride and not knowing, to knowing good from evil and becoming perhaps a little bit more humble than I was back then. I just love the teachings of the church around family, without that, I would not have even tried to have a family." https://youtu.be/i7gfejDrdn8?si=MPfYluHfW1c3DNPw https://www.northstarsaints.org/ ACT IN DOCTRINE by Elder Bednar

"For anyone who has left and even has the smallest desire to come back, one thing that I would say to you is: I could have left my marriage and maybe I could have healed. But me healing within my marriage was like nothing else. I don't know that I could have healed another way. Sometimes people need to come back to heal within the church; maybe they feel like the church broke them and the church caused them a lot of pain. I see that, but that might be just the place that you could come back to. And if you can heal there, it's such a deep part of us, and if you can come back there to heal, it's like nothing else."

CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains sensitive content that may be triggering or offensive to some audiences. Parental discretion is advised. "Once I got to the celestial room I was just sitting and thought 'I am ready, 100% if you tell me to do something I will do it.' I sat there for 20-30 minutes and nothing was coming to me. At this point I was beginning to remember what the Spirit felt like and what promptings felt like because I had experienced a lot of that on my mission. After sitting there for 45 minutes all of a sudden it was like a bus and boom I heard 'You need to be in the church, I have a lot of plans for you, you need to be here.' It was like a light switch after that, I had conviction not just in school but in every part of my life. Things I had never been able to accomplish before I was now able to do."

"I remember my dad, he sent me an apologetic video -- initially I was like 'dad I don't want to listen to this pseudo scholarship, this mental gymnastics the church isn't what it claims to be, come on give it a rest.' He was like just watch it. I sort of recognized that I'm not being very open-minded, I'm not willing to listen. I'd already come to a firm conclusion so I was like fine I'll watch it. It was by a guy called Bruce Porter and it was about the connections and correspondences and parallels between our temple endowment and ancient Egyptian temple rituals. If I'm being intellectually honest and consistent, just as I couldn't deny that there are things which are similar - if not identical, between a Masonic ritual and the temple endowment, there were things which correspond quite well. So I was like, 'okay, I can understand why a true believer they might think that the temple endowment is like a restoration of an ancient temple ritual.' So that sort of sparked some curiosity and I started to explore more evidence for things like this." Check out his channel: https://www.youtube.com/ @mormonismwiththemurph

"From then on, I'd listen to conference talks, I'd been studying the Bible and just trying to sort everything out. All these bombs would be going off in my heart -- where everything that I'd learned for 47 years just melted seamlessly into the restoration. It's just the most amazing thing, beyond human understanding as far as I'm concerned. It's like a class triple A miracle! I haven't even scratched the surface of the vastness of the Restoration! As soon as I really humbled myself it just began to open up to me. It still took me another two months after that before faith completely came to me and I heard powerfully and definitively in my heart that the Book of Mormon is the Word of God and that Joseph Smith truly was a prophet of God." https://www.youtube.com/@davidmalvinalexander

"How I handle things when I have questions is I do my own studying and I look at things from different sides, but I always lean on Heavenly Father, I always keep Him in the loop. I always tell Him what I am questioning, what I am struggling with and He always points me to sources that help. Sometimes it takes a while, the answers don't always come right away. But He always points me to something that helps me understand things or helps me feel at peace about it even if I don't fully understand it." PSA: The Letter For My Wife is another anti LDS document that Sarah is writing a rebuttal to on FAIR https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Sarah_Allen_CES_Response_Posts

"There were a lot of small steps along the way, and then one day I had a revelation. A voice came to my head, it was my first spiritual experience in 15 years and it said: "your family needs you, it's time for you to go back to the church." And I just said who are you? But I knew what I heard and I knew what had happened and it was a faith filled journey from there. I had to rethink things again. One thing I thought about was the story of Rip Van Winkle. It was like all the sudden I woke up and thought how did I get here? What am I doing on the side lines? Why am I not in the church anymore? I just felt upside down." https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2015/04/waiting-for-the-prodigal?lang=eng