Hello and welcome to Not So Mali Mormon Podcast Minisodes.

I'm Katie and I have a very sweet letter to share with you today.

This comes from Dusty.

Hey Dusty.

So this letter came to us just a few days after Christmas last year. So I'm a bit late, but let's just do a Christmas in July theme here. Okay. So put

yourself in the Christmas spirit. the spirit. That's a triggering

word, right? But yes, just put yourself in the mindset of I got this just a couple of days after

Christmas last year 2020. And I'm not lying to you when I say this had me sobbing. I mean this like it touched

my heartstrings so much because I think I relate to it and maybe in ways that weren't expected.

Anyway, so we'll see if I cry now, six months later.

Here we go.

I wanted to share this moment I had with you ladies.

It was Christmas Day and my house was total chaos.

Wrapping paper everywhere, a bow stuck to a child's butt, a dog trying to climb inside a box to hide from the crazy.

It was awesome.

I stood with my coffee cup at my hand watching my beautiful children playing together my husband putting together

something and i started to cry oh my god it's like getting me again i left the church ten years ago

i left because i was divorced and told i was tainted and shouldn't date anyone in the singles ward who wasn't also divorced

because though those other men deserved a virtuous woman, a virgin, of course. And I didn't want to be

somewhere that I was clearly unwanted. The last few years I've been researching what I was part of. I wasn't sure if I had made a mistake,

and now that I was a mother, I didn't know how to raise kids without the church milestones I had been

raised with. I even had my father bless my children, not during a church meeting, but because I felt

...