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Hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John DeLynn.

It is August 23rd, 2016, three days after my 47th birthday.

It's a Tuesday, and I'm broadcasting from North Logan, Utah in my basement, and I'm very excited to be continuing my series on Mormon missionaries in the 21st century, specifically in the 2010s.

We've interviewed four people so far. The feedback on the interviews has been very strong, very, very positive, and I'm excited to begin my fifth interview in the series.

This interview is with Rose Soranson. Hey Rose, welcome to Mormon Stories.

Hi John, nice to be here.

And a shout out to some of your siblings who I think are listeners to Mormon Stories.

Oh yes, thank you for her and Daniel and Brian Teddy for all listening. You guys are great and supportive.

Excellent. All right, so we're trying to cover different aspects of the mission experience and of early return or loss of faith.

And so I'll just give a quick preview of Rose's story, but then I've read through her experience and it's definitely worth staying for the whole thing.

But in Rose's case, what you're going to be hearing about is someone who started experiencing doubts as a 12 year old and started having concerns then, but decided to serve a mission anyway.

In part, Rose, if I understand it to kind of strengthen your faith, is that right?

Correct. So kind of figure it out once and for all.

Yeah. And in your case, as you titled your email to me, Missionary Turn to Atheist, apparently you became an atheist on your mission, is that right?

That is correct. I serve the last few months of my mission as an atheist.

Yeah. And then, and then, you know, we'll talk about this, but you decided to go ahead and finish out your mission. So in this case, there wasn't an early return, but we're going to dive into sort of what it was like to not be a believer and to try and serve when you really didn't believe anymore.

And what that did to your mental health, how the mission treated you, how your mission president treated you, what types of mental health services you received, and then what happened once you got home and why you felt compelled to want to do this interview.

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