Welcome to All Out in the Open. We are so glad you're here and super excited because this week we have an open up episode with a special guest.

His name is Justin Teltors, which I had to practice to say because he's a weird last name like me. And he's a gay Catholic. And I have been following him for a bit online. He has an Instagram page called Empty Chairs Home. Right. That's the handle. And when he talks, I, and I hear him talk about being a gay Catholic. Honestly, if you just change the word Catholic for Larry Saint in almost all of his posts, like it would be the same. And I've just felt such a connection to his stories. And it just helped me see like, we're going through the same thing. Yeah, y'all want to tell you, this is fascinating. This is not one you want to miss. It was so fun. We could have gone for hours and we probably will because he flew out and he's going to be here for a couple days. And it's just, it's fun. I'm like, wow, there's someone else doing the same thing in the same slash different space. And yeah, just love it. Listen, you're going to love it. I haven't heard him say that the Catholic Church is true. I was like, that's what we say.

I didn't. I miss that. It was in the car right down. Enjoy.

All right. Justin, we're so thrilled to have you today. So good to be here. Thank you. Can you just tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah. How much is like a little? Do you want like... Give us like two and a half minutes. Okay, okay. Maybe three. Maybe 90 seconds. I'll start the timer then. Three minutes. Okay. So, I'm originally from Illinois.

I'm Catholic.

Interestingly, I did spend them time with a couple Mormon missionaries at the University of Illinois, which is where I went to, went to college, which was fun.

Did they convert you?

They didn't.

Did you convert them?

Nope.

Nobody won.

Bible bashing?

Did it happen? Only a little bit. I think we were pretty nice. Like I think everybody played nicely. We enjoyed getting to know each other, like great people. That's cool. But yeah, grew up, grew up in a small town in Illinois. You know, wonderful place to grow up. Ran across country. Went to the University of Illinois and switched majors, I think, three times

before I landed on philosophy because I was going to be a Catholic priest. We tried that route.

Didn't quite work out. But then I graduated college and worked as a Catholic missionary for five

years. What does that mean? So, yeah, so Catholics don't have any sort of mandated missionary work, but there are several

organizations that have kind of popped up, especially in the last like 20 years that kind of give

Catholics the option to go on mission. So this was specifically to college students. At the time,

it was just in the United States, but since they've kind of expanded to other college campuses

specifically over in Europe. So I was at the University of Wisconsin and Madison for a year and then actually West Point,

New York at the military academy for two years.

And then, yeah, great experiences.

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