Episode #0 - Introduction

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the podcast. This is a Latter-day Bridge Builders. I'm your host, Mitch. And I'm Garrett. Mitch's neighbor. Yeah, good friends. This podcast is meant to build bridges between people, specifically those who fall into the Latter-day Saints spectrum. Those members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, as they're referred to sometimes. We want to help people build bridges between each other and repair relationships, build relationships with those who may not believe the same as you. We're not here to judge. We're not here to make any major claims where our main goal here is to try to get to understand different perspectives and, in the end, be able to come together and not judge the other. Exactly. We'll get into that a little bit more in just a minute, but first we wanted to just do some quick introductions about ourselves. So, Garrett, why don't you go ahead and ask a good about yourself. All right, so I did not grow up in Utah. I've lived here for about three years. I grew up kind of a military brat living all over the place. Virginia is kind of home, mainly. I live there the longest out of all the other areas that I lived. I eventually made it out to Utah for my first job as a registered nurse. I worked in the ICU for a couple years and throughout the pandemic. Now I work in mental health, graduating this week, actually, with my masters in nursing as a nurse practitioner in psychiatry. So that's kind of my career. I'm married to a beautiful woman named Luis. She's from Sweden. We met roundabouts through our mission in a weird way. I was companions with her brother. That's kind of the short story to the long story. We have two kids. I've got a four-year-old son named James and a six-month-old daughter named Vera. I'm very happy. That's great. Awesome. Thanks, Garrett. A little bit about myself. My name is Mitch. I did grow up in Utah my whole life. I've been here. Yeah, whole life. I'm a Utah boy. I grew up a member of the church as well. It's kind of inferred, I guess, when you're growing up in Utah. I served a mission in a couple of everyday. Cape Verde is the other name for it. A lot of people don't know where that is. I say it's an Africa. I'm like, "Oh, yeah." They're thinking of Cape Town, which is South Africa. That is not where I served. I did not serve in South Africa. I served in Cape Verde, which is 10 islands off the West Coast. I just want to throw that out there really quickly. It's a lot of islands. It is a lot of islands. It's super cool though. It's an awesome country. Love it there. I'm married as well. A beautiful wife named Whitney. We have a 13-month-old daughter named Evelyn. She's a little girl. I love her so much. Whitney and I met through work. We both are pharmacy technicians working on the inpatient side of things like more in the hospital with nurses and doctors. I didn't work directly with you as a nurse, but I know you're learning to work just a little bit. We're all in the same team. Exactly. We're both healthcare workers working through the pandemic and stuff. I am working on going to pharmacy school, finishing up some prerequisites. I should be starting in fall of 2024, hopefully going to the University of Utah for pharmacy school. That's where my career path is going. Yeah, that's me and my family, so. I have talked a lot about this podcast and what we want to talk about. I think one thing I really want to drive home is we both have a passion for trying to understand, except others without judgment. That's our main number one mission here. For sure. We both have gone through a faith crisis, faith journey, whatever you want to call it. I feel like I'm a better person because of it. I don't know about you. Likewise. Yeah. Absolutely. And I still trying to be one. Yeah, it didn't end. You know what I mean? And this is going to be the rest of my life. And we just want to be a supportive voice out there for people who are going through their own faith crisis or haven't yet. But may one day, you know what I mean? I never thought that I would be where I am today, but obviously. Right. Or at the very least, maybe come to some understanding of somebody that you love that's going through a faith crisis. Exactly. That could be a huge asset. To them, into you, to just being able to still find some kind of common ground to be able to express love to each other, you know, without necessarily agreeing on the same things. Exactly. Kind of on the other side of that, like, people who have left the church, I want them with this podcast to be able to listen to it and realize, like, members of the church aren't that bad. You know what I mean for the most part? They're pretty cool. They're great people. And they're even the leaders of the church, you know, like, this isn't a place for criticism. We don't want to, when we do, there will be some criticism at times, but constructive criticism and not belittling or disrespectful or anything like that. Trying to point out an opposing view, you know, like, because we were biased, right? We know that. And so we're going to try our best here if we ever offer criticism to keep it constructive, like Mitch said, and also to try our best to offer an opposing view to how we feel about something. Yeah. That was advocate, right? Yeah. And whether that's, yeah, it's, we've already recorded a couple of episodes. We're doing this interaction post, but it's a really like what we've talked about so far. And I feel like we've really done it in a fair, respectful, unbiased manner as best as we can. And I hope people see that. Like, we really are trying to offer out a hand and another big thing about this, like, another goal that we have is just not to try to expect anyone, like, we don't want to expect anyone to end up at a certain spot. Right. As far as conclusions go, as far as beliefs go, beliefs about the church or anything like that. And like, I don't expect people to stay in the church. I don't expect people to leave the church. I'm not trying to make people stay in the church. I'm not trying to make people leave the church right as part of the same here. Yeah. Yeah. Like, we just want to talk about this stuff because we feel like it's an important thing. And right. I think both people out of the church and people in the church can both agree that it's just people more and more people are going to be losing their faith. Moving forward, whether you see that as like a sign of the times like Jesus is coming or as you see it as like the internet age and the age of information and more things are available and stuff. Like it's going to be more of an issue moving forward, especially here in Utah where the church and culture and society is like so ingrained one with another right. So we just wanted to get this medium out there because we didn't really feel like there was like a lot of opportunities like that. There's a lot of podcasts that are kind of polarized in all the ways. Like at the end of the day, you know, we, yeah, we just want everyone. It's always better to feel like somebody understands you, you know, if they don't agree with you, right. We need that. I think everybody can agree. Yeah. We need that more than ever today in our country in this religion as well. Yeah. Definitely. Cool. One other thing kind of like goals thesis statement, I guess, about this podcast is we're not the expert on your journey. You the listener and you the listener are not the expert on our journeys. Garrett, I'm not the expert for your journey. Yeah. I don't know your whole story. Exactly. I don't know your whole story. I'm not you, right. And so we cannot judge others for the conclusions that they come to or the beliefs that they have or anything like that because something I want to add here to is along those lines, I think it's while we don't want you to come to any conclusions you the listener, this podcast might make you stretch a little, you know, like it's going to be you're going to stretch a bit to try to understand someone else's view and to accept someone else's view as their own, right. Exactly. That's going to force you to stretch a little bit, you know, and that I think that is the goal of ours. Yeah. I think that is for sure, and there's growth in that discomfort zone, you know, I mean, right. Right. I think that's, you know, we're not trying to drive people one way or the other, but we do want people to question themselves. Yeah. In a way, because questioning brings about a higher sense of purpose and really helps you understand like what you believe, right. Yeah. I mean, I love the story of Joseph Smith. He had a question and he turned to multiple sources. He turned to the scriptures. He turned to local pastors. He turned to God. He went to his family, like all these different things like questions bring about goodness. And don't be afraid of them, you know what I mean? Right. I'm thinking of that him right now that I forget the title, but we often sing it in sacramenting, but teach us tolerance and love. Yeah. That's awesome. That's kind of a mantra that I kind of keep, you know, with me when we're talking about these things is that, you know, however I believe now, you know, I'm not going to go into that. But, you know, like, I want to, I want to have tolerance and love like Jesus would. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Okay. Let's talk about some rules that we have for ourselves just so that you the listener know exactly what you're getting into if you want to listen to this podcast. And we're bound by. Yeah. What we are holding each other accountable to and call us out on it. Call us out. Yeah. If you feel like we're not doing these things right, like send us an email at LDS Bridge Builders. Because we want this to be a safe place. Exactly. We want this to be a safe environment. We want this a place. We want this to be a place where anyone can feel comfortable, whether they're completely active believing member. Peter Breached it. Molly Mormon. If you were to say or a ex-member of the church and anti Mormon, someone like that, you know, like everywhere in between. Because I don't think people are really that for the worst. Exactly. It's that you're somewhere in the middle more likely. And we just want people to feel comfortable and welcome here. So let's go over some of these rules that we have for ourselves. So first one is no swearing. Yep. Yeah. We bold. Agreed. Have some colorful language offset off the podcast sometimes. But we want this to be a place where children can listen. Yeah. If they feel so inclined or at least younger, I don't know if like eight year olds would be listening to this per se. But you know, I mean, like, yeah, there's for sure going to be some people who probably don't like swearing. Yeah. Exactly. We respect. And we want to respect that. So yeah, no swearing. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, second ground rule is we don't want to offer any details about anti-material quote unquote. We might bring up like, you know, issues that are questions that are common among members and members who struggle with their faith. But whenever possible, we're going to be using resources or quotes from church sources. Exactly. We don't want to, we don't think this is an appropriate place to talk about those things. There are other podcasts, there are other websites that do kind of dig into those quote unquote anti. I kind of hate that term now like anti-mormon. Like I really think there aren't as many anti-mormons as I thought there were, you know what I mean, or material. Right. But we're not going to go into those details specifically because we want this to be welcoming to those who do truly believe and we don't want this to be combative in any way. And that can be seen as a combative thing. So we won't be going into that kind of stuff. Another one, if we mentioned this before, but if we make a criticism, we want it to be a constructive criticism, whether it be towards the church, towards certain groups of people, maybe an individual person, or podcasts, or anything like that. Like if we do, I don't know, I don't want to call out other podcasts necessarily, you know what I mean? But if we do talk about that stuff, we want to be respectful, tactful, constructive with it, and also offer opposing viewpoints to it, playing devils out of a kid, right? Right. Right. Right. Right. For checking ourselves on that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Another rule is, although we may share facts about ourselves, this is not about us. We're not here to tell our stories or to try to use our stories as reasons for justifying the way we believe. You know, we're definitely going to just inevitably share a bit about ourselves over time, but this isn't about us. This wherever possible, we're just going to try to use our own experiences to try to convey a concept that we can then discuss. Exactly. Of course, we can't, like you said, not talk about our experiences in certain ways, but we don't want the focus to be on us. We want the focus to be more on the issues. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Because this is for you, the day of the day. Exactly. And I feel like I'm learning and growing already with this thing, so I'm loving it. Okay. Last thing, and we kind of mentioned this before, but a positive environment for all people, like no belittling, no calling people stupid or any of these very pejorative, very strong terms for anyone, for any group, that isn't what Christ would do. That isn't what people who want to be good people would do. And we don't want, we feel like we're pretty good people. Again, we want to be that way. So we also would extend this invitation to those who comment on our social media pages or anything like that or send us reviews or anything like that. You can be constructively critical of what we say. We don't expect people to believe everything that we're going to be talking about. We're not experts in this. We're just, you guys are passionate about it, right? But we still want just like positivity, the quote, good vibes. Yeah. I kind of hate that sort of thing. Exactly. Right? You know, who knows? Maybe we'll even feel the spirit a little bit. Yeah. I would hope so. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. And then yeah, lastly, we did mention this before, but send us an email. If you do have any concerns with things that we're talking about or anything like that, we, we welcome that feedback. And or if you have like episode ideas or, you know, we want to do some occasional interviews with people. Yeah. All over the place. I've already had multiple people reach out to me. Like someone who makes faith marriage. Some of their groups, I don't want to say certain things because they might out someone specifically right now. But send us an email to [email protected] with any questions, concerns, feedback, something that you want to talk about. And we'll respect that as best we can. So, yeah, those are rules. Anything else you want to say? No, I'm just excited. I'm excited if you're listening to this. I think this is going to be great. You know, like, you know, I think that it's inevitable when we come together. If we can respect each other's differences. If we can understand each other, you're going to feel good, you know, you're going to be uplifted. This is in no way going to tear you down. Exactly. No matter what your stance. Yeah. All right. So, let's go out there and build some bridges. Let's do it. Okay. Thanks. [BLANK_AUDIO]