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Hello everyone! On today’s show, I speak with Dusty Smith who served in the Honduras, Tegucigalpa Mission from 1984 to 1986. Dusty has a pretty amazing story and while the podcast focuses on mission stories, his before mission and post-mission story had to be told as well. Dusty is a convert to the church, served a mission, left the church, became very vocal calling himself an anti-Mormon for many years, and eventually found his way back to the Church. His story was featured in an LDS living article and Elder Deiter F. Uchtdorf, then President Uchdorf even spoke about Dusty’s experience in General Conference, though his name was changed for the talk.  If you’re like me, you’ll probably want to go back listen to that again. I’ll put the link in the show notes, but it was the October priesthood session of General Conference in 2016.

And in my missionary minute, I talk about heeding them not.

--- listen to podcast ---

A big thanks to my new friend Dusty Smith and a thank you to Dave Johnson a former guest who connected us.

In today’s missionary minute --- I first heard about Dusty Smith on Nick Galettie’s LDS Missioncast podcast. I kept thinking about his story and about four years ago I decided to write a blog post about it, back when I was blogging pretty regularly. So I blogged about it. Then something happened that had never happened before with any of my other posts. I wouldn’t say that it went viral, but it exploded. It got circulated on Reddit in some groups that were less than favorable to the Church. I started getting a slew of mean messages. They attacked everything about me from my writing to my story, to my pictures that I had posted, to my looks, and pretty much anything you could imagine.   It really took me back and I kept re-reading it to see if I had said something terrible.

In the post, I told the story about Dusty.  I told of how I had become inactive for a few years during my teenage years. I told of how my mom got rebaptized into the Church after being out of it for a number of years. Then I wondered what it was that brought us all back to the Church.

The gist of the post was that we as family and friends of those who have left the faith could do nothing but love them, and then let God tug at the hearts of those who have gone to other paths. The Spirit would be what ultimately brings people back to the gospel of Jesus Christ and His Church. We must simply love unconditionally. And for some reason, that created a lot of hate mail.

Thank you for joining me today. I will be taking a break for a while during the summer. So, until next time, wax strong in the gospel my friends!

Links:

https://www.ldsliving.com/the-miracles-that-led-one-attorney-to-become-a-member-of-the-church-he-hated/s/86542

https://rockymountainsunshine.com/2018/05/12/anti-mormon-losing-faith-being-inactive/

https://abn.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2016/10/learn-from-alma-and-amulek?lang=eng

This is not an official production of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The opinions expressed are by the host and guest.