Tyler Johnson: Belief—A Wager Worth Making

have you been feeling lately like you need to recharge your spiritual batteries well we have just a thing for you join us for lift up your heart a magnify gathering this is a dayong event meant for women to gather recharge listen to inspiring speakers live music and most importantly be reminded of what we already know that Jesus Christ is our answer and that we're not alone it's everything you loved about timeout for women and more and it's coming to a city near you the best part is if you're a listener you get a special discount code at checkout so register Now by following the link in our show notes and use the code podcast 10 at checkout to get $10 off each registration that's code podcast 10 p o DC s T10 checkout go to magnify theeg good.com events or head to the link in our show notes the first city that's open is Plano Texas and it's coming September 24th and registration is open now we can't wait to see you there in his new book when church is hard Tyler Johnson writes faith is the combination of Grace personal tenacity and commitment that allows us to continue living as though the gospel is true even when we remain unsure it does not always allow us to make the right decision but it allows us to keep trying even when we falter end quote this sentiment captures what in many ways I feel like I've learned about what it means to be Allin the Gospel of Jesus Christ it made me think that maybe the definition of being Allin is simply acting in faith but fortunately we get to continue asking this question and on today's episode Tyler Johnson shares his thoughts on how to approach Faith related struggles both our own and those of people we love Tyler Johnson is an oncologist and clinical assistant professor at Stanford University through serving as the bishop of a young single adult ward he became familiar with the struggles and Earnest questions that many young church members grapple with this is Allin and LDS living podcast where we ask the question what does it really mean to be Allin the Gospel of Jesus Christ I'm Morgan Pearson and I am so excited to have Tyler Johnson on the line with me today Tyler welcome thanks so much Morgan I'm glad to be here well I wanted to start out you start your book in a way that I thought was really compelling and it honestly for me as a reader was kind of gripping which obviously any author is kind of looking to to grip the reader but you describe what it's like as an oncologist to share difficult news of a devastating diagnosis with patients and then you compare that to sitting with people as a bishop or an Institute teacher uh in a private church setting that that confide in you that their faith is faltering I wondered how did you choose to start the book in this way and for those that haven't had a chance to read yet what is the comparison or the parallel that you draw there yeah so thanks for that question I uh so as you said I I work as a medical oncologist so that means I'm the doctor who gives chemotherapy to people with cancer and I'm not usually the person who breaks the diagnosis of cancer per se because usually that's done by the doctor who performs the biopsy or maybe the primary care doctor or whoever refers the doctor to my off or the patient to my office but what I do sometimes do is I will sometimes have to deliver news for example telling a person that their cancer has come back after they thought it was in remission or perhaps having to tell them that they're no longer able to receive chemotherapy because we don't have any more effective chemotherapy options to offer them or sometimes I have to inform people that I'm afraid they don't have very long to live now on the one hand those are medical issues right and and there are biological and physiological aspects to talking about those things but the truth is that the biology is a necessary precursor in the sense that I have to understand that in order to know when to have the conversation and what the Contours of the conversation should look like but the content of the conversation itself is actually often largely uh what we might call spiritual or what people in another context might call existential it is that's to say that the content of the conversation often deals with things like what is the purpose of life what does it mean to be alive what does it mean to die and what happens after you die uh what does it mean to have a meaningful life and what does it mean to end your life in a way that is as meaningful as possible and so that actually the kind of the spirit of those conversations if you will or the kind of the emotional and intellectual and spiritual attitude that I often need to adopt in those conversations resembles in many ways the conversations that I have when I'm in a religious setting with students or word members or what have you and the reason that I say that is because you know I just because of the the things that I've been doing over the last 10 or 15 years I've worked a lot with young people in the church and so I I will speak most directly to that just because that's mostly my experience but I think that what I'm going to say about those people really applies to everyone a young person may approach a bishop or a parent or a teacher or or whomever with a question about Joseph Smith and polygamy or the racially based restriction on priesthood and Temple blessings or you know whatever the the specific kind of the tip of the spear if you will whatever the specific question is but in my experience behind that if you kind of you know dig a little and a little more and a little more almost always at the base of those questions lie much deeper questions about what is the purpose of my life what is the reason that I'm here who is God what does God want from me how do I learn about God how do I develop knowledge of the Divine how do I have confidence that my life is taking the appropriate course right it's really those sorts of questions and so even though on the surface it might seem like being a medical oncologist and being an Institute teacher or what have you would be completely different Endeavors often the sort of the heart of the matter of the conversations that come up in both roles is surprisingly similar that makes complete sense and and it's I completely agree with you I think there's often so much more there than what is initially expressed you mentioned that you've worked a lot with young people and part of that was as a young single adult Ward Bishop right and you've also been an Institute teacher you you talk a lot in the book and I thought this was an a really important point and you reiterate it multiple times the importance of Integrity to this younger generation and you talk about how it might seem like or I think the Assumption at times is oh people just want to be able to do what they want to do or uh they want to be able to throw out morals and you're like actually in this instance many times it's because they want to be people of high integrity why was this important for you to to write and why is it important for people to understand and how does that that desire to have high integrity affect Faith especially as it relates to members of our church yeah so you know I think I have found that uh and people could disagree with me on this and maybe they would be right but at least in my life most of the time in most circumstances I have found it to be a good rule of thumb to begin with the assumption that another person's motives are good and that their intentions are noble and to sort of work backwards from there now occasionally you work backwards and maybe find out that actually they are not so good or they're not so Noble but in most cases I have found that once you really work to understand someone they largely Merit that confidence they Merit that uh benefit of the doubt and so in doing that with young people of course it is the case that there are times when young people just want to sew their Wild Oats or they just want to you know they're just tired of being told what to do or whatever right of course that happens and and I'm not questioning the reality of that circumstance but my experience is that most of the people especially those who are really grappling and wrestling with deep questions about the church virtually always that wrestle comes from a place of love it comes from a place of love and integrity in other words they are trying to square what they see at church with what they understand to be the most important fundamental principles of righteousness and justice and mercy and other ideals that I think all of us would agree are noble and important and the wrestle comes not just because they want an excuse to walk away and do whatever they want but rather because they see something at church that just doesn't feel right to them and and that they that tension is very difficult to hold that apparent contradiction is very it weighs on them not because they are bad but precisely because they're trying to do what's right so I'll give you an example there has been a lot of treatment in the media over the past I don't know 3 four five years about the amount of money that the church has in particular in one investment firm and IGN Peak Investments but also more broadly just the amount of money that the church has right and so many young people and older people but again I spend a lot of time talking with young people many young people look at that and they say well good grief if there's this much money in the church's coffers and there are all of these people in the world who are manifestly suffering in end an endless number of ways right whether from starvation or lack of medications or because they don't have running water or because they can't get access to an education or whatever young people will look at the admittedly Noble humanitarian efforts of the church and say well sure that's great that they're doing you know abcxyz but that is a sliver of a sliver that entails a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the church's overall wealth then how can I in good conscience for example pay a very large percentage of my money 10% of my income to an organization that is going to put it into these coffers where at least as best I can understand as an outsider and etc etc it seems like it's going to be there sitting idle when I could instead take the money and give it to a uh vetted organization that will use virtually all of it in a short time frame to actually benefit other people that feels to some young people like a violation of their in it because they're because in effect they end up saying if I have let's say it's $10,000 if I have $10,000 in charitable money that I'm going to give somewhere how can I in good conscience give it to a place where it will sit in an in an investment fund for an undefined amount of time versus giving it to a place that will use it essentially immediately to better other people and so the the point of this is not that specific example so much as that example is emblematic of a broader set of principles which is that if a young person feels that that their membership or activity or what have you in the church has become a question of their integrity if we respond with accusations rather than a recognition of the Integrity behind their question the conversation cannot go anywhere except in a destructive Direction because here they are trying to bring the best of themselves to understand the universe and their place in it and now we're accusing them of being you know whatever of just wanting to go in sin or what you know whatever line you want to use so I'm curious Tyler for those listening how would you approach a question like that as as a bishop or as an Institute teacher allowing people to express those feelings acknowledging that they're coming from a place of Integrity how how do you approach a a question like that yeah so the I mean this is a little bit of a a sort of a well it may seem initially like a little bit of a side note but I would argue it's a really important side note for the for the following reason my experience is that most of us fundamentally misunderstand so I was talking a moment ago about uh the these encounters that I have right whether it's in the Bishops or Institute teachers whatever's office or whether it's as a medical oncologist I would argue that 95% of the encounters that go on in one of those places maybe that number is high but a high number anyway a high percentage are actually one kind of thing thing and we almost always want to assume that they are a different kind of thing and here's what I mean most of us assume that when a person comes to us with a question like that what they are what they are fundamentally looking for is an infusion of knowledge in other words they're coming what we think is happening is that they're coming to us with a cognitive Gap and they're saying hey will you fill in this cognitive Gap and so then our instinctive answer is to say oh here's some facts here's a thing that you haven't thought about or you didn't know about and now you know the thing and you can go on your way and be happy forever more that's what we think is going to work but almost always that's not actually what's going on almost always what's really happening is that the person is coming because of an emotion and not because of of a cognitive Gap now don't misunder understand me I'm not trying to say that they're that the cognitive questions that they're asking are not substantive that's not it at all because they usually are substantive but what I'm saying is that the substantive question has given risen to a deep and often powerful and even painful emotion and if we attend to the cognitive question before the emotion behind the question then the encounter is almost certain to go wrong so I'll give you a quick example if someone comes and says gosh I you know I grew up in a church where I was told endlessly as a young men or young women that young woman that I needed to abide by a standard of strict Chastity right no sex before marriage and then only sex with my spouse when when I was married and yet now I'm reading all of these things about Joseph Smith and polygamy that what's up with that now it may be that the person who's listening to that question H happens to have a deep well of knowledge about Joseph Smith's polygamy and in that case they're their first impulse maybe to rush in and say well no no no no but what you don't understand about Joseph Smith and polygamy is that this and that about the old testan and this and that about the ceiling system and anyway all these things and that's all fine and good but and it may even be true and in some case it may even be helpful but I would argue that what first needs to happen is just a recognition of the Integrity behind the question which can be as simple as saying something like I am so glad that your sense of Integrity makes this matter to you that you care about what initially appears like a contradiction between what you were taught growing up and what you see at least on the surface in this part of the life of Joseph Smith there is something deeply affirming about having someone see the Integrity that lies behind find a painful question like that and that initial affirmation and that initial sort of uh responding to the question with empathy rather than with certainty or with trying to fill the cognitive Gap can be hugely important and then I think once you have established and the other thing is it requires zero knowledge about the subject matter right you don't have to be a historian you don't have to know anything about Joe Smith and polygamy or the church's investment arm or anything else look whatever the question is about you don't need to know anything about anything except to know that you are that you have the trust to express confidence in the integrity and the goodness of the asker and then if you do have some knowledge that can help to fill cognitive gaps that can come afterwards and if you don't then you can in effect say to the person you know this is such a good question and it resonates with me so deeply that even though I don't know so to speak the answer to this question as Elder Ballard once councel Institute teachers to do why don't you and I seek out an expert who could help us to get an answer to this question so the the sort of phrase that I sometimes encourage people to remember to describe that approach is when ask if you are a teacher or a parent or a leader or what have you and you're asked a difficult question always let empathy come before certainty that's almost always going to be a more effective way to respond I think that's really well said Tyler you raised some interesting questions in the book that I think could be debated at length um but one is whether doubt is a good or bad thing and you kind of set the stage by sharing quotes that suggest that doubt is bad and some that suggest that doubt can be a positive thing what do you hope that readers Come Away understanding about doubt yeah so I I think that one of the sort of the messages of especially the first two sections of the book that I think is a really important principle that I hope readers will take away is that there is a difference between a word and the thing that the word represent presents right and the reason that I say this is important is because you can imagine the kind of miscommunication and sometimes the kind of Heartache that can ensue if we have a group of people let's say church members who are all using a certain set of words with the assumption that everybody understands those words to mean the same thing when in fact people have wildly different definitions of those words because if you if I have if I think a word means one thing and you think it means a different thing and then we sit here and have a debate about whether whatever it is that we're talking about is a good thing or a bad thing but we have different understandings of what the word even means in the first place then it's going to be almost impossible for us to come to any sort of understanding about the subject because we're starting from completely different premises but without acknowledging that our premises are complet different and I think that in few places in the church is this more true than about the word doubt so in the book I actually go in and outline I think it's six different definitions of doubt that I think if you look and it could actually be even more than that but I think if you look at the places in uh in church where we talk about the word doubt I think there are at least six distinct definitions that we use but then when we talk to each other about it we often talk about it as if it just means one thing and we should all understand that it means that one thing and so then as a consequence you have some people good faithful church members who are over here saying things like you know that anytime anyone gives any space in their heart and mind for doubt that they are sort of sewing their own destruction in effect and then you have people on the other side who are saying that a form of genuine doubt is a necessary precursor to building Abiding Faith right I mean those two things if the word only means one thing those two definite or those two uh approaches to doubt cannot be simultaneously true if doubt only means one thing right but I think that the issue is that doubt actually means a lot of things I I guess the I'm not going to get into all the details that I get into in the book because we don't have time to do that but what I will say for the purposes of this discussion are two things the first thing is that I think we have to recognize and again this is a a concept that I go into in great depth in the book I think we often have a misconception in the church that what we often call a testimony that is a sort of a knowledge of spiritual things is like a thing that you gain when maybe you're like an older teenager and then it's kind of like trophy that you can like put on a shelf and just sort of have there for the rest of your life and you just kind of every once in a while you go by and sort of Polish it and make sure that it's nice and shiny but it just stays there and it's stable but I think in fact that knowledge of any spiritual thing is a lot more like the mythical Phoenix right so the whole thing about the Phoenix is that it keeps dying and having to be reborn like that is its life cycle is it's is a continuous process of uh death and rebirth and death and rebirth and so I I think that it's important that we recognize that those deaths and rebirths of our confidence in any spiritual idea or practice or system or what have you are natural and to be expected they are that's not to say that you know there's a certain kind of person that might go sort of pretend to be having one of those because it feels I don't know sort of edgy or cool and I'm not talking about about that but I'm saying that when those Dark Nights of the Soul come to you I think we have to recognize that that's just a natural part of the process of being human and because that's the case the quote doubt unquote that is involved in that in that normal regenerative process of death and rebirth and death and rebirth is is normal and it's not a thing that we have to pretend is not there so that's thing number one and then thing number two I would say about doubt is that in my mind the thing that matters the most when we're talking about whether what doubt adds up to or whether it's quote good or quote bad comes to one of my favorite verses in the Book of Mormon which is as he's kind of finishing or close to finishing his overview of the people of the brother of Jared Mormon sort of interjects as he does from time to time and is sort of giving a summary of kind of like what he has learned from appending their record and then at the end he says and now I would commend you to seek this Jesus and in my mind if that forms the center of the Journey of discipleship in other words if seeking Jesus is the is the St izing force of our spiritual attitude then whether we feel doubtful or not I think that to paraphrase the line from the doctrine in covenants even our doubt can be made to work for our ultimate spiritual good as long as the center of our spiritual gravity is that we are seeking Jesus I love that I wanted to touch on because I think it's especially relevant to this podcast given given its name but you share a story from a man in your stake and how he wrote to his parents on his mission that he needed to come home early because he didn't know with certainty that the gospel was true his mom wrote him back and she told him to stop praying with his knees and to start praying with his feet he said that since receiving that letter he has instead devoted his life to wagering everything he has on a belief that the gospel is true I thought that this idea of of wagering everything you have was fascinating because set starting this podcast and realizing that going Allin is technically like a poker term which seems odd for a a church related podcast um I've read up on like what does that mean and and tried to Think Through like parallels of that we hear that those words all in all the time in our culture but what does that really mean so I wondered from your your personal experience why would you say Tyler for you that the gospel is worth that wager yeah so I think there's sort of uh two answers here or well I'll get to the direct answer in a second but the I think there's a sort of a precursor that has to come before that answer my experience and maybe I'm wrong about this but from you know a lifetime spin in the church is that most church folks I think would feel a little squirmy with that language right like it feels a little uncomfortable to talk about living a life of gospel living as a quote unquote wager and I think that the reason for that is because we have developed this mental framework in our culture and in our religious tradition where we talk about we act as if the only reasonable way to proceed is to have spiritual certainty first and then to live life based on that spiritual certainty now I don't doubt that there are people for whom it works just like that I'm sure that there are people who develop that certainty and then they sort of are sort of boyed and driven by that certainty for the rest of their lives and and you know more power to them that's great but I also think that if you look at the scriptures and the words of modern prophets and just reality and your own in interior life for most people that is just not how it works for most people a wager is the best we've got in a sense now I want to be careful there because I'm not I I don't want to suggest that a person should just you know sort of randomly make the wager like they just you know are picking a bet to put down somewhere so might as well put it here as anywhere else that's not what I'm saying and I'll get to that more in a second but but the point that I am trying to make is that if you spend your entire life waiting for certainty and then once you're certain then you're going to be Allin then you will never be Allin on anything save for these people who you know maybe have a spiritual certainty that they grasp early and then they just have it for the rest of their lives and again to those people more power to them but I think they are the exception not the rule in in this sense I love uh there was a Jewish thinker who came to speak at BYU probably two or 3 years ago now who was then had a um so BYU I'm sorry the desert news now has this thing called desert magazine I think is what it's called and they had a special uh issue that was devoted to why a religious-based higher education is a good idea RIT large and they invited thinkers from a bunch of different religious Traditions to basically say why do you think at your religious college that having a religious education is a good idea and what some of those thinkers did was that they contributed what they understood to be kind of their Faith's great idea to contribute to the public discourse or at least one of the great ideas and th this Jewish thinker wrote an essay mirroring what he had said at the BYU devotional or Forum or whatever where he said that one of the great ideas from Jewish thinking to contribute to the modern world is the idea of living in a covenant culture rather than what I think called a a consumerist culture and basically what he said is that in the Covenant culture you commit first and gather information after whereas in a consumerist culture you gather information first and commit later now you know and I don't know how he comes down on the nuances of this I want to be careful because of course you know that could idea could be twisted for example to try to force a woman to stay in an abusive relationship or whatever right so I want to I'm not endorsing the extremes of the idea necessarily but what I am saying is I do think that there is truth to the idea that to some degree we have to choose to commit and then make the thing to which we commit beautiful and True by virtue of the way we are committed to it right and and I think that there is great Beauty and Truth in doing that in a church context in a marriage context right if you think that you're going to gather information about all potential spouses until you find the perfect one and then that's when you're going to commit you are never going to commit right because the more information you get about someone the more you find out that they're just a flawed human like you are right and so anyway so but that gets to the heart of the question which is okay so then why is it worth making a commitment to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints like is there anything there to justify The Wager so to speak and I go into this in great depth in the book and I there's not time to do that here but the two overarching arguments that I make are that within the church we find a beautiful soaring revolutionary and I would argue ultimately nourishing theology that is the beliefs that we have the way that we think about God and the universe and our place in the universe and in relationship to God and we find a beautiful ful nourishing substantive meaningful form of lived religion in other words set the beliefs aside for a moment but just the way that we show up for each other and show up on Sundays and show up in the world and etc mean something now I want to be clear none of this is to paint any of this as perfect right but I still think that it is true like I I'm fond of Melissa anyway who uh passed away recently and who we all miss uh was fond of saying that so she was a scholar of other religions religion RIT large and she was fond of saying something like Grand visions theophanies and Grand ideas for how to run a society or a church or whatever in the world of Rel like of the history of religion those are a dime a dozen like you can find those all over the place but what is rare is establishing a people who show up and who like the culture and the group endure and I think that there is a genuine imperfect real but beautiful uh meaning to the culture and community that we have created and sustained within the church and so I think those two things the Theology and the lived religion give a rational thinking person a um satisfa basis for saying this is a place that it's worth putting down my wager or going all in to use your words I uh completely agree with everything that you said and and I love this idea of covenants I just taught Sunday school yesterday and we talked a lot about the power of covenants and the power of making them in the book you reference the the idea that you referenced earlier in this interview of The Dark Knight of the soul and you say you write this and I want to give people a little taste of how great your writing is he said first when we find ourselves wandering through a Dark Night of the Soul we can rest assured that it is not new and that we are not alone some of Christianity's most diligent disciples have faced similar situations in fact the perception of divine absence may be a necessary trial for many if not most who ardently follow Jesus second our response these moments of aloneness May Define who we who we become I don't know if you feel this way Tyler but one thing that I observed and have observed in my life but specifically with friends I was I was in the YSA uh stage of life for a good long time and one thing that I I felt like I saw over and over again is that when these questions related to Faith because faith is so important animportant to people when the the questions of Faith kind of start to pile up a little bit there can be like a sense of panic and I think that that feeling of panic like I need to figure this out right now comes from the adversary and instead I think God gives us place to to learn and to grow and to to seek answers to our questions so I wondered for you how do you think that approaching doubt knowing that doubt can be a normal part of maturation can help those struggling but also those who are seeking to help those who are who have these questions yeah so I I think I have learned so a few things the first one is I think there is a really tempting but potentially problematic and even painful even hurtful rhetoric and and idea in the church that we should score people's lives as either successes or failures so I'll give you a kind of a stark uncomfortable example I have heard people say things like well this couple are clearly wonderful parents because they have five kids and and all of them have stayed strong in the church that short sentence has about 117 bad ideas in it and is like so much of a problem for so many reasons just to cite two of the really problematic ones one is the idea that it suggests even if it doesn't quite say it explicitly that a person who grows up and stays actively engaged in the church is quote a success unquote and that a person who doesn't is quote a failure unquote again it doesn't say it explicitly but it's pretty I mean it is all but explicit in that statement and then of course the second idea is that you can measure any parents by what their kids do which you know is a great idea unless you've read anything in any of the scriptures at all in which case it totally falls apart right but uh I mean like literally from Adam and Eve and Lehi and Sarai on like choose your starting point it's always wrong but but the issue is if if people who have serious questions about the church believe that our starting point is to look at them and think you are on the precipice of deciding whether you will be a success or a failure and my job is to push you into the success category I.E continuing to be an actively engaged church member in that moment they recognize that they have ceased to be a person to us and they have become a statistic or a conquest they have been instrumentalized objectified and nothing is more offensive to our sense of Being Human Than to sense that a person who is interacting with us has objectified us and so at that moment the conversation is now over so I mean they may continue to talk to us but in terms of their you know heart or mind being open to anything they're done and so I I think that we need to change that underlying Paradigm so that instead of thinking about pushing people out of the failure box and into the success box we are instead saying the gospel has beautiful things to offer would you like me to help you to understand some of what I understand to be those beautiful and Powerful principles and ideas and and what have you and but it only works if the second part is just as sincere can you teach me what I don't understand about what is beautiful and holy or for that matter what it is that deeply concerns you about the church and then of course that goes back to the empathy piece that I was talking about earlier once the conversation is approached from that Direction then it becomes intuitive to understand that what I said earlier needs to be seen to be the case which is the life of belief is like a phoenix a Phoenix's life cycle is to die and resurrect and die again and resurrect again and I think that for most people that is what a life of belief is going to be like CS Lewis has a a part in one of his books where he says that I think it's in the screw tape letters where the Elder devil tells the Lesser devil that uh while we may while the Lesser devil may think that because his Quarry is not going to church anymore that that means that he's closer to being in the devil's grasp if the reason that the person has distanced the the subject of the devil's Conquest has dist if the reason that they have dist that he has distanced himself from the church is because he's looking with integrity and deep thought and conviction at his beliefs about the world that is the worst of all outcomes for the devil because what that means is that the person is now caring about drilling down to the truth about finding what is real and so in effect we have to have the confidence that truth and deep reality and genuine enduring Beauty are reflected in our church and our beliefs in such a way that we don't need to fear we don't need to imagine that the the truth that we hold is somehow harmed because someone doubts it or does not understand it or even thinks that it is silly or or or wrong because truth is not changed by our attitudes toward it TR truth is truth and I think that when we are filled with both that confidence and most importantly with love then it changes the entire way that we approach that kind of conversation I loved your chapter Tyler that discusses Mary Magdalene at length in short you write that Mary lesson to us is that sometimes believing is hard but to go into greater detail you say the dawning lesson she offers comes in the period between Jesus's death and his resurrection even when she could no longer reasonably hope even though she had no mental category within which to place the idea that Jesus might live again still she sought Jesus which goes back to that idea of seeking Jesus that you mentioned earlier and then you said she kept about the business of following him even into his grave I wondered partially because I find Mary Magdalene to be a fascinating character in the scriptures but can you tell listeners why you chose to to talk so much about about Mary Magdalene and why you feel that she's a compelling example of Faith yeah so you know I had this uh long series of conversations with a friend who read a very early version of the book many iterations ago uh and at that time I had this sort of long list of people who had been sort of quote unquote famous people who had been through a Dark Night of the Soul right so that included people like CS Lewis Mother Teresa Joseph Smith and then Mary Magdalene and what what my friend helped me to understand over the series of multiple conversations was that Mary is even though all of those people yes faced very deep questions and you can read more into this if you want to read up on any of the individual ones but like if so for example if you think of doine covenants 121 right the beginning of that is Joseph Smith saying oh God where out there where art thou and where is the Pavilion that cover thy hiding place in other words why aren't you helping where are you you know in effect do you even exist he never says that explicitly but that's sort of the implied bigger question CS Lewis Mother Teresa went through long periods of uish Divine silence as best they could perceive but what my friend helped me to understand is that although those all of those examples are compelling in their own way Mary's experience was different for multiple reasons the first one is that Jesus was a daily living palpable presence in her life right he he wasn't like a I mean I don't you know I guess I can't speak for whatever C Lewis or or Mother Teresa or for Joseph Smith but even Joseph Smith who had many Divine manifestations it was like he would live most of his life and then boom he would get a revelation or boom he would have a you know a Angelic visitation or whatever but the point is that those were like punctuation marks in the book of his life but for Mary at least for the you know last three years or whatever of Jesus's life we I guess I don't know per se if they were in daily contact but they were in frequent contact she was part of the party of disciples that sort of followed him and lived with him and anybody who's watched The Chosen I think you get a a sort of a you know cinematic idea of what that might have been like so then so so her knowledge of Jesus her familiarity with Jesus was just different in a way that I think is hard really for us to imagine that's number one and then number two is that at least those three other people that I mentioned CS Lewis Joseph Smith and Mother Teresa all of them the very basis or one basis of their faith was the idea of Resurrection right it was this this unimaginable idea that a corpse could live again but for Mary there was no such idea granted there was Lazarus but even Lazarus right that but that was the whole point is that Jesus was there to do the raising right and now the person who had always been there to heal the other people had died and it wasn't like he had you know slipped away to a different country and she heard a rumor that he had died like she had watched in the most extended anguished agonizing way had watched him take his last breaths and then had helped to prepare the body for burial and to lay it in its death tomb and I go into this in the book but I can tell you that as a doctor who takes care of a lot of very sick patients it is hard to overemphasize you know most people now have no first-person exposure to death because we have largely quarantined death off from polite Society right like you may maybe have had a parent or someone who you watch die but even that is relatively rare but for me it's not I've seen a lot of people die because of the work that I do and I can tell you that the qualitative difference between a living person and a dead corpse is something that is hard to really grab grasp until you have done what we call certifying the death which is that I literally when a person has died if it's my turn to to pronounce as we say the death I have to go to the bedside and like feel for the pulse and instead feel the cold absence of a pulse listen for the heartbeat and instead hear silence in the chest watch for the chest wall rising and falling with breathing and instead see it sitting there still it's it's hard to convey the depth of the change that happens when a person dies and Mary watched this happen to Jesus and then presumably like even felt the weight of the dead body in her hands as they prepared it for burial or what have you and so all of that is to say it is different to have had this daily pable presence of Jesus in your vicinity and then watch as that presence dies and have no as I say in the quote you read there's no mental category there's nowhere for to her to even place the conception that I mean come back to like come back to life what would that even mean like who would be there to do it right because the only time that she had seen something a little sort of parallel was with Lazarus but that was the whole point is that Jesus was the one doing the raising and now he's not even there and so I I don't even want I I don't even think the scriptures necessarily justify us in going so far as to claim to know what Mary's motivations were as she approached this as she continued to seek Jesus like I'm not even I mean the scriptures do seem to make clear that she was shocked when she finally saw him again so I don't it's not like I'm I'm not trying to suggest that she was sort of hanging around the tomb with waiting for him to wake back up that's not it but she seems to have been compelled by some still barely burning Ember of whatever you want to call it Faith or belief or devotion or something to stay as close to Jesus as she could even after Jesus had died and and I think the power of the metaphor for many modern people is that we may well arrive at a place where it feels like so uh sister or president Rosemary Wixom gave this beautiful talk in conference called returning to Faith and in it she tells the story of this woman who had watched in effect her testimony burned down and this woman the president Wixom quotes the woman as having said that uh once once this sort of process had fully happened everything had gone to ashes except for Jesus and this is just to say that I think we may experience that moment where either everything except for maybe even everything including Jesus everything all of our beliefs all of our are there to for what we thought to be knowledge Burns to the ground but the question then is what spiritual attitude will we adopt in the moment when it feels as though the very object of our belief has died I love that point that you make that holding all things in consideration recognizing that regardless of what's going on for Mary in that moment where she is is so significant um and she's found there outside the tomb and that is where Jesus meets her I want to before we get to our very last question I want to read one more part um from your book you talk about the complexity of belief and you say believing is complex belief and doubt battle for ascendancy in societies and each of us we may believe for a time and later find that that belief receding we may find the life of Faith initially intuitive only to find it later taxes us greatly it seems that for many of us anyway confidence in any spiritual thing will be defined by Dynam dynamism dynamism okay thank you um I can't read uh not constancy by change not consistency there will be days when when we believe despite it all days when we don't and days when the best we can do is hope that belief will one day reawaken you obviously have written this book Tyler and I know how much work goes into writing a book and you've written this book with deep hope that it will help someone I'm sure um that's why you've devoted the time to it what do you hope people come away from the book understanding about the complexities and the nonlinear nature of belief in the Gospel of Jesus Christ yeah so you know sort of to the point that I made earlier so the you know you mentioned this a friend of mine in in our stake here who wrote this uh essay or has given a talk called on praying with your feet right and the point of that if I were going to distill down the point of that essay it would be to question this idea that we often articulate in the church that that our spiritual confidence or even spiritual certainty has to precede our action and you know I think we probably wouldn't affirm that idea if we were asked it explicitly but we often affirm it implicitly or we seem to suggest that this spiritual certainty is a if not an absolute prerequisite for living a life of faith it is such an important uh it is so important that we sort of can't it's like it I guess I would say it this way we often act as if certainty about certain spiritual truth claims is the point of the Gospel as if certainty is the goal and and to the degree that we explicitly or implicitly believe that I think that's a deeply problematic notion for a lot of reasons one of them is because it's not scriptural both Elma 32 and I always get it mixed up it's either Doctrine cence 42 or 46 the one that talks about spiritual gifts the the section Doctrine covenants that talks about spiritual gifts says explicitly that it it to some is given to know by the power of the Holy Ghost and then the next part of the verse says and to some it is given to believe on the words of those who know especially offered in contradistinction to the first part of that verse what that tells me is that it is a spiritual gift not to know and my experience is that I learn deep abiding important truths from my friends who do not know or from friends who are in a season or period of not knowing and I believe that we are meant at least many of us are meant not to know and that's okay like we don't need to pretend to know when we don't we don't need to enter into the you know High Stakes testimony drag race where everyone's trying to Proclaim more certainty than the person before them we don't need to act like we have a confidence that we don't have I I would I think it would be aspirational for us as a church to have testimony meetings where it would feel entirely comfortable for a person to stand up and say I don't know if this is true or I thought it was true but now I'm not sure or I have really deep questions and here's why the reason that I say this is because my experience is that that's most all of us at least some of the time and some of us most of the time and I don't think that any of those things calls into question the depth of our discipleship or the ability that we have to contribute meaningfully to the body of Christ and in fact fact you know nobody nobody shows up at church and says well I was told in my patriarchal blessing that I had the gift of healing but I progressed beyond that I don't really do that anymore right like that would just be weird if some nobody talks like that right and so maybe it's the case that for some people the gift is not to know and the question and if and when the knowledge comes that's the other thing is that the doctrine covenants says I mean it's metaphorical but but to the degree that a metaphor can be explicit it seems to explicitly suggest in Doctrine covenants 121 that the doctrines of the priesthood it doesn't say that they will fall on you like an anvil from the sky it says that they will distill upon you as the Dos from heaven and one of the things that I understand that to mean is that when spiritual confidence or knowledge or certainty or whatever comes most often it will come subtly as a a famous Christian poem says it will come unasked unforced unearned it will just you'll get up one morning and it's there just like the Dew is Bejing the grass when you wake up in the morning because it just appears and so I guess what I hope that people will come away with is first off that they will give themselves more space to progress honestly on the pathway of discipleship and and to be unthreatened when they go through a period of deep doubting and that by the same token as they become more comfortable with that in their own interior lives that we can all give greater space to people around us who are feeling those same things my last question for you is what does it mean to you to be Allin the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a spiritual sense I think we would all do much better if we understood that in a in a frw work of ownership or in terms of thinking of what we own none of us owns anything we are all penniless right as king Benjamin emphasizes even the air you breathe is a gift right you can't add one inch to your own stature so you know what are you so proud of in effect right and yes that's true with money but it's also true with a college degree or a home or you know whatever your gifts are spiritual physical emotional or otherwise all of those things are gifts none of them is earned so if you understand that you're penniless and then if you understand that everything that you have been given is a gift then the question switches from you know many people think that the question of life is trying to quote unquote find yourself but of course Jesus explicitly excluded that as the reigning Paradigm of our lives and instead it becomes in my mind there are two operative questions in life question number one is what are my gifts and again this includes spiritual emotional physical Financial educational all of it what are my gifts and then the second thing is what can I do with those gifts to most bless the world when it comes to that second question I think of Life as a series of concentric circles so the tightest concentric circle around me is uh my immediate family those are the ones who are in the tightest Circle then my extended family then my ward family then my immediate community and then there may be some people who have such a you know a reach or influence or whatever that their influence actually goes beyond that to their you know city or state or Nation or whatever if you happen you know if one of your gifts is political accumen maybe you're a senator or whatever but of course that's not going to be most of us right but the point is that then the question becomes I I I give up the idea of ownership I give up the idea of having earned stuff and the question instead becomes how can I use these gifts to bless people around me and I think that in my mind that idea of consecration that idea of being Allin is simply a way of saying how do we use the gifts we have been given to worship God by loving and blessing the people around us and of course none of us is going to be perfect at those things but when we make mistakes we can repent and keep trying to do better and make our life a question of how to do that a little bit better every day I think you're spot on and I love that you you touched on this idea of you know finding yourself and that being kind of eliminated or placed by these other two questions I think that idea is so pervasive in our society today this like what's in it for me you do you be your true authentic self and in reality if we could recognize that we're children of God with god-given gifts to bless the world it would make the world so much better um Tyler I appreciate your work on this book I I learned a lot and and like I said it's been really uh good for me to reflect on my personal faith and and also how hopefully I can be more empathetic toward others so thank you so much for the effort that you've put into it and uh hopefully uh others can can benefit from it as well I'm sure that they will thank you so much it was a pleasure to be here we are so grateful to Tyler Johnson for joining us on today's episode you can find Tyler's new book when church is hard in desert at bookstores now a big thanks to Derek Campbell of mixit 6 Studios for his help with this episode and thank you for listening we'll look forward to being with you again next week