Welcome to this bonus episode of This is the Gospel, an LDS living podcast where we

feature real stories from real people who are practicing and living their faith every day.

I'm your host, Corinne Leigh, and I'm not going to lie. I am having the hardest time

getting into the Christmas spirit this year. Maybe it's the fact that we're all still

mostly in masks in public, or maybe it's the fact that the weather here in Salt Lake has stayed

warm enough that the late summer flowers being irrigated by the leaky spiket out the side of my

house, they're still blooming. They're bright yellow at the beginning of December. I mean, really?

Or maybe it's a little homesickness for my family on the other side of the country.

Well, whatever it is, I have got a plan of attack. A little light the world, a little more

Christmas music, and a lot of time watching formulae, call mark movies of people who have

wrestled past their inner scrooge to find the true spirit of Christmas.

Listen, I'm not watching them for their Oscar worthy acting or the original dialogue.

I'm watching them because they speak to a part of my heart that longs to believe in Christmas

miracles and happy endings, even if the road to get there is a little bit sloppy or poorly written.

And today, we have a story from Amber that I think is way better than a home art Christmas movie,

because it's anything but formulaic, it's real and it has a happy ending. A true story of what

it looks like to wrestle with the realities of life's scary moments and come out the other end

with hope, peace, and a true sense of God's love for us. Here's Amber.

I grew up in a really small town in Idaho. There was probably 5,000 people and everybody knew

everybody. Everybody was intertwined in some way. And, anyway, and growing up in this small town,

there was a high saturation of members of the church at Jesus Christ's Flatterday Saints.

And I remember over and over people asked me, are you a member of the church? Are you a member of

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