Josh Packard, his wife Heidi, and his parents Cindy and Blair Packard join Kurt to discuss Josh’s faith transition away from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the lessons learned from the entire family about maintaining love in the family while respecting decisions.

Josh was raised in a traditional Latter-day Saint home, serving a mission, marrying Heidi in the temple, and attending medical school. While in medical school, Josh encountered areas that caused him to question his faith, ultimately leading years later with him deciding to resign his membership. Cindy and Blair, then serving as mission presidents when they learned about Josh’s decision to leave the faith, struggled (along with the rest of their family) with how to engage with Josh and Heidi regarding not just Josh’s faith status, but the impact to their family. Through learning from their mistakes, the Packard family came out even stronger by learning how to love unconditionally, engage in thoughtful and respectful discussions, and understand the other’s perspective in this difficult faith transition.





Transcript
Kurt Francom (LS): Today, I have the opportunity through the powers of the internet to connect with two couples who know each other well. Blair and Cindy Packard in - I'll get this right this time - Gilbert Arizona. Is that right guys?

Blair: Actually it's wrong. Now we're in Mesa right now.

LS: Now you're in Mesa, okay.

Blair: From Gilbert. We're in my Mesa office.

LS: Very good. Nice. Then your son Josh and his wife Heidi, who are in Georgia. Am I right, Josh?

Josh: Right. Columbus, Georgia.

LS: Nice. Cool. Obviously, Josh was raised by this great couple, the Packards. We're going to talk about an important subject as far as the dynamic of families, especially when an individual member or members of family take a different faith journey, that many times may lead people outside of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

I guess this started...It was interesting. I went to Mesa area and then had opportunity to visit with the Packards in Gilbert. But the night before I visited them, I had somebody that's in the audience of Leading Saints, and they said to me, "You know what we need is an interview that talks about the dynamics of when a son or daughter leaves the church and how that impacts the family." And I said, "Wow, that sounds like a great story, but I don't even know who I would talk to about that but I'll try and find somebody." Then the next day, I met Cindy and Blair, and they said, "That that's our situation. Let's talk about it."

So let's maybe put the story into context here. Cindy, you want to start maybe where this all began? The day you held little Josh in your arms...No, I'm just kidding. I mean, wherever you want to start.

Cindy: Well, I think speaking for all of us, we'd like to say we're very grateful for the opportunity to do this. After we kind of made our way through this journey, we thought it'd really be helpful if we could find a way to share this with people. So we're happy for the opportunity.

It's also a bear journey, where we want to share this personal journey - and it hasn't been easy. We hope that we can help other people who are going through this in some way. We did some things wrong; we did some things right. And as we share our journey, hopefully, other people will be able to learn something and maybe have a little less pain or a little more hope, where they're at. We don't want to preach to anybody, and we recognize that everybody's situation is unique and different. So this may not work for some people, but it may be something that's helpful.

When we talked about the best way to approach this because we have a lot of ideas to share, we thought maybe just going kind of incremental logical order would be a good way to do that. So you can take it however you want with that.

For me, a kind of a pivotal point was realizing that I was experiencing ...