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For all you want to welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast, I'm your host John DeLin, November 16th, 2017.

We are recording from a secret location in downtown Salt Lake City and I have to say, and I say this often, but this is one of the most exciting interviews for me in a long, long time.

Often times we try and mix things up and find novel or even celebrity kind of interviews because we want to make sure that people stay engaged and say interested and enjoy these interviews.

But we regularly get feedback that listeners sometimes just like hearing from, say, average members, you know, Mormons or post-Mormons and just kind of better understand people's individual journeys.

Now, I'm not going to claim that the people that I'm about to interview, Mel and Stu, are average, they're phenomenal people.

There's some of my favorite people on the planet. They're actually dear close friends and in some ways they've been alongside my journey in sort of deep and meaningful ways.

But I met them in Cash Valley years ago as I was going through my stuff with the Disparing Councils and the Ask Communication.

That's kind of when for me, Stu and Mel kind of burst onto the scenes. But they have a really cool story.

In some ways, a very traditional Mormon story for many, many years, kind of born and raised in the Church, Orthodox, active, devout members, return, you know, a term mission for Stu and many other kind of cool, normal sorts of Mormon things.

But a way that it's a little bit, you know, interesting or novel is that, you know, Stu kind of was living in Cash Valley when I was there.

He was very supportive of what I was going through. And something that is also probably pretty interesting or relevant is that Stu's faith journey sort of began before Mel's did.

So in that sense, they had to deal with a mixed faith marriage and a mixed faith marriage while Mel was pregnant, which was its own complicating factor, and with kind of young kids.

And so we're going to be talking about them as Orthodox members. We're going to be talking about Stu's faith crisis.

We're going to be talking about what that was like for Mel as she remained a believer and he wasn't. And we're going to talk about kind of how they navigated that and then kind of what, what allowed Mel to kind of become more sympathetic and supportive of Stu's concerns.

And then we can get to the really interesting and compelling stuff, which is kind of how they navigated mutually a faith transition and then finally kind of how they've rebuilt the life after.

And these are two really special people. They're both entrepreneurs. Stu runs a moving company. Mel sells jewelry online. And they also have young kids.

So a lot here, a lot that's really interesting. And I'm just super excited to welcome Mel and Stu to more of a stories podcast. So hey guys.

Hey, John. Thanks for, thanks for joining us. Thanks for inviting us.

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