Hello and welcome to Not So Mali Mormon podcast. This is Katie and I'm here with another

mini-sode for you today. This one comes from our previous guest, Noah. Now, if you haven't for

whatever reason, listened to that episode, go back because Noah was an

amazing guest. And I wanted to share Noah's story, mission story, because they wrote this

to us and I was floored by how incredible and eloquent and

emotional this story made me and I thought I'm going to read this on a separate podcast because

I wanted Noah to have all the time that they needed to tell more on

the other episode, which, by the way, we've heard you loud and clear. We're going to have Noah

back on. We're going to ask Noah to come back on. So I'm just going to jump right in, and I'm

going to try to not pause too much to insert my own

opinions because I really like the way that this flows. So here we go.

I left for the Morristown, New Jersey Mission, English speaking in the summer of 2010.

I was attending BYU at the time.

While the school would later seem oppressive and stale, my freshman year was a time of social

blossoming and self-discovery, not that it wasn't without its quirks. By the end of my first semester,

it seemed there was someone opening their mission call every night in the lobby of

the Heritage Hall's dormitory building. I was studying French at the time and hoped to put it to good

use in my mission, but the Lord had other plans for me. I remember opening my mission call and not even

realizing that New Jersey could have been on the list of potential places.

I reminded myself that an apostle of the Lord had supposedly knelt and prayed to know where I should go

until I convinced myself that it was truly called of God.

Being born in the church, I knew my whole life that I was going to serve a mission. I sing songs and nursery about serving after I had grown a foot or two. I was taught in young men's that if you were truly converted in your heart, you would know it by your desire to share the gospel. I consequently tried to prove I was truly converted by giving a book of Mormon

...