00:01
Welcome to God’s Guiding Light. Hello, Jessica!

00:02
Hi! How are you?

00:03
I’m well, yourself?

00:04
I’m doing great, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your conversion story with us.

00:06
Yeah, not a problem! Tell me a little bit about yourself. Where are you? What are you doing? I hear you live in the Rocky Mountains, is that correct?

00:14
Well, I’m currently in Orem, but I moved out here a year and a half ago with my daughter. We’re originally from Ohio—born and raised. We just sold everything and moved out here.

00:34
Well, that’s an adventure, isn’t it?

00:35
Yes!

00:36
Have you been through the snow yet in Utah?

00:38
Yeah, we came out here last summer, but we always go back to Ohio for Christmas, and I feel like that’s when the bulk of the snow came.

00:47
All right! Well, I like to ask three questions. The first question is: What was life like before finding the gospel?

00:54
I talk about this a lot. To me, my life was happy. I come from a family that was not religious. We never went to church before. I lived with a single mom at times and then moved in with my dad. I have two siblings. When I was younger, I was very family-focused, but once my parents got divorced, the family aspect kind of went away.

01:12
How old were you?

01:13
I was in fourth grade. But I always tried to live better than what I was raised in, right? I think that’s what everybody does. I went to college. I didn’t graduate, but I did go. I got a job and had lots of friends. I was living a good life.

01:30
The split of your parents—have you come to grips with that? I know that can be a lot of weight for many people.

01:36
Honestly, it didn’t take long to get over it. They fought a lot, so it was better for everybody.

01:42
Gotcha. It’s kind of tragic and sad, isn’t it?

01:44
Yeah, there were a lot of bad things that happened, and I’m not going to go into all those details, but it helped lead me to where I am today. Looking back, I can see God’s hand in that, though I didn’t realize it before.

02:01
Well, let me ask you this: You said you saw God’s hand in your life. How did you find the gospel?

02:06
So my brother actually married a member, and they got engaged when I started dating my daughter’s dad. We ended up moving to the same town just randomly—in Ohio.

02:21
Okay.

02:22
My brother and sister-in-law were in this town that I ended up moving into with my daughter’s dad. My relationship was really bad; I was pregnant, and we had just gotten custody of his oldest daughter. He was an alcoholic, and it was a very emotionally abusive situation. But I stayed because of his daughter, Felicity, whom I ended up getting custody of when I left.

02:45
I see.

02:46
I was in a really dark place, and they kept sending the missionaries to my house. I kept sending them away because I was just like, “There’s no way I can even think about anything when I’m in such a deep, dark place.” You know, when I was 17, I was told I couldn’t have kids, and then I ended up getting pregnant at 30. That made me think, “Science is wrong—I’m growing a child!”

03:09
Wow!

03:10
So I talked to my brother about it, and they just kept sending missionaries to my house. Eventually, I talked to them, and they answered questions I had asked before when I took a religion class in college. I got to talk to different pastors and leaders of various churches, and every time I asked questions like, “Why are there so many religions?” and “If there’s only one God, why do we call Him different things?” they all gave me different answers.

03:34
That must have been frustrating.

03:36
It was! So, when the missionaries answered my questions, I immediately knew it was true. There was no question about who God was to me then. Everything just made sense—Joseph Smith, The Book of Mormon, everything about it.

03:51
So what was that experience like? What’s the first thing you remember when they said something to you and you thought, “Oh my gosh, this is true”?

04:01
The first thing they told me was that there was a living prophet on the Earth today. That was something I had questioned before—God has always had prophets, right? He wouldn’t leave us without a prophet if He’s real.

04:17
Absolutely.

04:18
So when they told me we have a living prophet that leads and guides the church, I got chills all over my body. I just knew! Then they talked about Joseph Smith and how he was the first prophet in our day, and The Book of Mormon—chills the whole time. I didn’t question it.

04:36
That’s incredible.

04:37
I’ve come to learn that when I have a question, God tells me yes or no right away. When I was investigating the church, there were some things that didn’t sit well with me, and I immediately got an answer. It made sense, and I just let it go.

04:54
Did you have any cultural pushback? Did you have friends saying, “Don’t get involved in this; this is crazy”?

05:00
A lot of people I worked with were very Catholic. They told me to be very careful about false prophecy and apostasy. So, yeah, I did experience some pushback. I lost a lot of friends, but not because of the church—it was because my lifestyle changed. I was a drinker and a smoker, and I did what I wanted.

05:20
That must have been hard.

05:21
Yeah, but the missionaries helped a lot with that, and I’m still really good friends with them today.

05:25
How nice!

05:26
Your brother—did he marry the Latter-day Saint girl first, or did he join the church first?

05:30
I think he joined first and then they got married.

05:33
Okay.

05:34
I remember laughing at him because they would spend three hours in the afternoon going to church and had to drive an hour to get there. I was like, “You are spending five hours going to church—are you crazy?” Then I ended up doing it!

05:47
Funny how that works!

05:48
When I was baptized, I spoke at all kinds of firesides for the missionaries. I became like a mission mom and spoke at many different firesides and zone conferences to help missionaries understand a convert’s perspective. A lot of missionaries don’t have experience with addiction and abuse.

06:05
That’s so valuable.

06:06
I was able to travel around our mission boundary and help with missionary work. If they had a convert struggling, they would ask me to come or call in. I would go with my daughters, and she would see me doing this missionary work, helping people understand that it’s okay to have an addiction. It’s okay if you have a testimony of everything but tithing—go to church anyway, get baptized anyway; it will come.

06:29
That’s a great message.

06:30
I think there’s a stigma around Mormon culture. As converts, not being raised in the church, I don’t focus on cultural things, but it’s hard because many members do.

10:31
They’re like, “Oh, you can’t do that,” and I’m like, “Show me where it says that.” Because that’s a cultural thing; you have all these fences, right? So I’m opening eyes up for people even in my current ward.

10:48
So are they still in Ohio?
Yes, my whole family is in Ohio.

10:53
So you’re by yourself out in Orem?
Yep, just me and my daughter.

10:57
Do you feel like you fit in there?
I do. You know, it’s funny because I moved because I felt like that’s what God wanted me to do. I felt called. I pushed back on it a lot, but He made everything that I needed to happen, happen to make the move happen. So His hand is definitely in this. I didn’t want to come to Orem; I had never been to Orem in my life. I spent a week in St. George looking for places and spent time in Arizona, and I didn’t want to be cold.

11:39
I’m with you—I love Arizona! If I were to move to Utah, it would be St. George.
Yeah.

11:44
So let me ask you this: you kind of touched on it, but how is your life different now that you’ve joined the Church and found the gospel?
I feel like I have joy and purpose. You know, I was happy before the Church; I wasn’t sad, I wasn’t miserable. But joining the Church, I now know I have a purpose. I have a divine purpose. I’m not just here to live and die; there’s a purpose, a reason why I’m here. I’d already chosen God once, and now I’m here to choose Him again.

12:15
Brilliant point! So few people realize that it’s all about right and wrong and good and evil, and that we’ve been on this track for a long time and had to make decisions along the way. So, bravo to you!

12:28
Thank you! Just purpose and joy—just knowing that what I’m doing is taking me to my place for eternity. My life’s not over when I die, so the whole perspective of my life completely changed.

12:49
Now, are you seeing—if you don’t want to go here, that’s okay—what about your daughter? Is she accepting of the gospel? Is she loving it?
Yeah, so she was 18 months when I joined the Church. She was a year when I started investigating the Church, so she was pretty much born and raised in the Church. I was baptized in January of 2018, and in March, I was called as the primary president.

13:21
Oh, how nice!
Yeah, that is when I learned that Jesus has a funny sense of humor. She was with me at the Church all the time. We were in a really small ward, so for all the activities, I was there every Wednesday and for hours on Sunday. She absolutely loves the gospel. I asked her if she wanted to be baptized, and she said yes, so we flew back to Ohio, and my brother baptized her with my nephew.

13:53
That’s wonderful!
Yeah, she loves the gospel. If she were here, she would probably tell you all the blessings that she has seen since moving out to Utah. She loves talking about it just like me.

14:05
It’s so nice to see the deep joy in your life and to hear about it. That really touches me. I really enjoyed your story. Is there anything that you would like to say about the gospel or your life, or anything that we didn’t touch on?
There was a big point during my investigation that really changed everything. I was having a hard time quitting smoking, and the missionaries had already taught me all the lessons probably like five or six times. So we were on the topic of where God had been in my life.

14:53
I’m going to try not to cry, but when I was in seventh grade, a friend of mine passed away; he got hit by a car. I walked around my little town, collected money for his family, and then we took the money to his family. Shortly after that, I moved to Chicago, so I never saw them again. Well, we were in Relief Society while I was still investigating, and they had asked a sister to give a closing prayer, and they had the same last name. I went up to her afterwards and asked if she was his mom. She said yes, and I said I was really good friends with him. I don’t know if you’re going to remember me, but I was the one that brought you that check. She immediately started crying.

15:36
At that moment, I had a flashback of where God had been in my entire life. I could see why things happened, why I did things, and why things happened to me. I saw His hand in every move, every action, every reaction. I was baptized two weeks later.

16:02
Sometimes you feel like you’re by yourself on occasion and that you just don’t know what to do next, but when you turn around and look back down the road, you can see that God’s hand was there every step of the way, guiding you.
Yeah, there are so many of those moments. Even with me feeling called to move—I fought it for so long. I was pleading with God, saying, “Okay, I’ll go, but I need these things to happen.” One of the things I wanted was to have $10,000 saved for the move. I was planning on moving within a year, and after a couple of months, I’d only saved a little over $2,000. I was like, “There’s no way I’m going to be able to do this.” Then we got an extra Christmas bonus; only certain people got that bonus that year, and I was one of them. The amount deposited, after taxes, was the exact amount I needed to add to what I had saved to equal $10,000.

17:11
Wow!
So there are so many moments that have happened that tell me I’m on the right path and I’m doing what God wants me to do. Why am I in Orem, Utah? I have no idea, but I’ve been here for a year and a half, and I’m trying to figure it out. He’s helping me, guiding me, and blessing me—blessing my daughter, too. We miss our family and friends back home, but we’re not homesick. We’re very content and made great friends right away. He really is providing for us.

17:47
I think that’s what this journey was for me at first: to take my faith, because I had that as a convert, and learn to trust God. A lot of people forget that you can have faith, but do you really trust Him? Do you trust Him with your life?
Right, right, right, sure.

18:06
That is something I have learned—to just put it in God’s hands because I know He’s going to take care of me. I know that for a fact now.
That’s wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.

18:23
Well, Jess, I’m so grateful that you found the gospel. I’m so pleased to have you as a friend. Thank you for sharing this story with us. God bless you and your daughter, and I look forward to maybe running into you sometime and hearing where God has taken you.
Absolutely! Keep in touch, and if you have any other questions or just want to know more, let me know.

18:48
Thank you very much! Bye-bye.
Thanks! Bye!

Link to CHRIS (Friend of Jessica)