Participant #1:
Welcome to Lift and Love Conversations, where we're building a supportive culture around LGBTQ families in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. I'm Allison Dunton, and I'll show you how to embrace your child and your spiritual discomfort to deepen and grow your testimony of Jesus Christ. And I am Jenny Hunter, and I will help you identify and overcome obstacles that can get in the way of sustaining healthy relationships. And I help you realize the blessings of being an LGBTQ family. Each week, we will bring you lessons that we've learned from our own life, the experiences from hundreds of families that we have worked with, and conversations with amazing experts. Hello. Our lift and love community. Okay, we're a little gaga today because we have two men that they rocked our world in the last couple of months. I think every conversation we've had has been talking about the book that they wrote together and proclaimed police, which we have sent many quotes out of it already for many of our podcasts. And we have the authors on today. Patrick Mason and David Pulsiver is with us. So we are so excited about this conversation. We know that what we will learn and what the Lord will teach us in this hour will change your hearts and it will change ours. I know. Exactly. Excited too. Thanks for having us. Thank you both so much. Well, and what a better time? Let's just talk about the timing of the book and how it landed just at probably the most conflict written time of our church, probably in many decades. Really? Yeah. We've been working on this book together for ten years, so it wasn't like we were waiting for things to get really bad before we dropped the book. It just happened that way. But sometimes maybe there's a little bit of providential purpose in some of this timing, but certainly the world, the church, our broader culture is in need of healthier ways of engaging conflict. Absolutely. Well, and that's what drew me to the title. I love patrick, I love your writing, I think planted to help me see things new and restoration was such a life changing, like, vision changing for the church for me, that I love that vision changing for how you look at human beings, for sure. So powerful it is. Thanks. That just proves my point, Patrick. I really feel like God is five steps ahead of us always, and this book is another testament of that. Right. When you start writing it ten years ago, you probably had no idea how visionary what our world would look at, like in 2021, right? And it is a great handbook for us in 2021, for sure. No, that's absolutely true. I feel that way with all of these books, and I feel the same way that the Spirit is moving upon the waters, that God is doing something in this church and in the world and wants calling us to something better. So for me, it's not a matter of creating anything so much, it's just getting on board. Yeah, so true. Okay, Jenny, why don't you introduce them, and then we can dig into the book. But there's so much goodness here, it was hard for us to kind of tear down where we go. But let's hear a little bit about you, too, and then we'll begin. Yeah, and why don't you guys introduce yourself? Like Patrick. You are a professor at Utah State, right? Yeah. So I teach at Utah State. I hold what's called the Leonard Arrington Chair in Mormon history and Culture. I've been here a couple of years. I've taught at a few other places before that. But yeah, my wife and I live here in Logan. We've got four kids, and we're happy here. Such a great place to raise your kids. Yeah, really. It's one of the reasons we came. It's been terrific. Well, my missionary is going up there, and he'll be up there next fall, so I'm having him sign up. All right, sounds good. He's fascinated with war, so it'll be interesting to see how he takes the second half of the book. Well, I teach a course called Religion and Violence and Peace. So he needs to sign up at the course. So he needs to sign up for sure. I'll get him there. All right. And, David, you do conflict management for your day job, right? No, actually, I'm a professor of history. Most of us are historians at BYU, Idaho. But we have also just recently started a new program. It's a minor in peace and conflict transformation. So I do teach classes. One class called Conflict and Peace, and then another one, The History of Peace, and another one called Conflict Transformation and Peace Building, which we're teaching actually for the first time next semester. So mediation on the side, mostly just as a volunteer right now. But we've been living in Rexburg for about 25 years, almost raised our family here, and it's been a great place for us as well. Only other place that I would probably think about moving other than Richford would be Logan area. I love Cash Valley, so my favorite places looking for houses for you, David. So how did you two fight each other, and how did this book even get started? So we first met in 2007, I believe it was at the Mormon History Association conference that was being held in Salt Lake City that year. And I had just been handed from a friend of mine an article that Patrick had written while he was in graduate school called The Possibilities of War in Peace Building. And I just had to find this author. So I basically accosted him at the conference and told him how excited I was at the work he was doing. He was going to Cairo to teach at American University there, and I was going to India. So we kind of both of our wives were pregnant at the time. I think it was interesting confluence of events. And then later, after he returned from Egypt and of course eventually back in BYU, Idaho, we got together for a conference and it was the Peace and Justice Studies, I think, association conference in Milwaukee. And then things have just gone from there in a variety of wonderful ways. Patrick suggested we write a book together and that's how this all began about ten years ago. You both sort of even early on, just had a fascination, I would say, with peace. Right. I had a very comfortable childhood. I grew up in the suburbs of Salt Lake, and so a lot of in a great family, great church experience, all those kinds of things. So for me, really, my first main exposure to these kinds of things came at BYU. And my freshman year I took a History of Civilization course from Professor Wilfred Griggs and Alan Keele legendary course called The Pen and the Sword, where we went through the history of Western civilization on this theme of like, how is it that humans always say they want peace but end up in war and end up fighting each other? We look through scriptural texts and literary texts and listen to opera and did all kinds of amazing things to reflect on this. So that was really important for me. And then foundational. And then when I went to Notre Dame, I was exposed to this thing called Peace Studies, which I didn't even know existed. Sort of stumbled into a class with a bunch of Peace studies students and it just absolutely captured my imagination to meet these people from all around the world who were motivated to work for peace and justice in their various contexts. And so I left my PhD program for a year, got my master's degree in Peace Studies and then went back and finished the PhD. Well, David, what about you? So my journey was in some ways similar, in some ways different. I'd never had formal training like Patrick did. I never found case studies. I didn't even know it existed. He had the benefit of going to graduate school a few years after I did. So I did my undergraduate in American Studies at BYU and then when I'm to do a PhD in the University of Minnesota. So my training was in cultural studies. And in cultural studies we do a lot of analysis of conflict, a lot of really wonderful theories that helped me understand power and cultural dynamics and so on. But I remember feeling like there was something wanting. And I approached my professors. I said, these are really helpful for me to understand the dynamics of the world, but where are the theories about altruism and love? And they looked at me and said, that's a great question. I don't know. And they could not point me anywhere. So I spent my entire graduate studies without any guidance. My professors were fantastic human beings but none of them could direct me to the question towards answering the questions I had. It wasn't until I was teaching at what was then Rick's College and then later BYU. Idaho I was teaching the civil rights movement and I started noticing the parallels with what was happening in the civil rights movement with one of my favorite stories in the Book of Mormon which the anti Niki Lehighs and the ways in which they went out and met their oppressors and transformed their hearts through their willingness to suffer at their hands. And I thought oh my word, what's going on here is exactly the same thing. So I got very interested in nonviolence theory and just read my way into it and fascinated with the intersections of those theories with the gospel of Jesus Christ and of course so much of what the civil rights movement motivated the civil rights movement was their deep faith in Christ and led by pastors it was being led the most famous of course being the rep Martin Luther King Jr. And so it was really easy for me to see the ways in which our theology and those principles were just the same in many ways that got me interested and that's when I read Patrick's essay was one of the first people I'd seen who was really thinking about how these things dovetail and that's why I had to meet him. I love it and I love to see God working a lot ten years ago to bring something like this about so amazing. I have to say the ideas that you bring up with Nephi and the Book of Mormon like totally shifted everything for me. Yeah, David is an amazing reader of scripture. One of the things that I love the most from our collaboration was just reading scripture with him because he sees things in ways that I oftentimes miss and so it's most of those really good readings of scripture we can attribute to David and part of it is just learning to see scripture through new lens, asking different questions. That's why I think both of us really benefited from our education or from reading other things. From paying attention to things sort of outside of Mormonism that we were able to get some of those lenses from other believers or sometimes people of no faith. People who are committed to peace. People who are committed to making the world a more just place and then we could bring that back into restoration scripture and say wait a minute. This has been hiding in plain sight all alone. Really in all the times I've read the Book of Mormon and all the times I was yet to read the Book of Mormon I'm not sure that I could have ever taken the Book of Mormon stories out of the war and into the I'm not sure I could have ever done that without your understanding and the way you view it. It changes everything in the way I think we and we need it because we're there. Right? Right. Yeah. We're in this complex that it feels like we're all justified. Let me just quickly say so. I know David's sister. We were connected because we both have gay sons. And I loved Holly immediately. Obviously, she's wonderful. And Holly did a story for us a couple of months back. I meant to get the stats, but it was read by I don't know how many, 350 people or something like that. Like crazy amounts of people read the story of her son's coming out and how it had enriched her testimony. So I had she and another woman over who also had a gay son. And we were talking and I was saying how excited it was about this book coming up. And she said, well, my brother I said, oh, Patrick Mason, sorry, David, about this part. But I said, Patrick Mason has written this book about conflict. And I'm so ever since, like the last couple of years in politics and math, I have always been demanded. People listen to me and understood me and believed what I thought. I'm passionate and I'm strong and I speak loudly. And so I've always been that kind of person. But now I started realizing, like, that's not helpful and it's not doing what I think it's doing. So I started watching with politics and everything and I just realized, like, what I'm doing is wrong. And I think it sent me down this path of like, how do I handle conflict in a better way? And we'll get to that with YouTube, but like, so interesting. So always like, I'll give you his phone number. So I connected. And last night she told me she's like she says David is the oldest of six and I'm the second. He's always been the perfect and ideal brother. Even in our adult years, we always love and kindness, which I think is high praise from a sister. Yeah, and that means an awful lot because Holly's is one of the people I admire most in this world. And what she's been doing has just been tremendous. And interestingly enough, probably the greatest conflicts in my life actually came when we were younger. Typical brothers, sisters, sibling rivalry stuff. But it was such a joy when we got past that and found ways to ski is just one of my favorite people and became one of my best friends. So I was younger when I probably was not open to that. Well, I was going to say, I'm reading this and I'm like, I remember my brother chasing me around the house with some sort of like I think it was my baton, but it felt like a club, you know what I mean? I tried not to get hit, so I'm like, wow, their life was ideally crazy. I'm glad to know that part right. Everybody learns early the conflict management through siblings, for sure. Yeah, true.

Participant #1:
It was largely jealousy on my part. She was faster than I am, stronger than I am, more popular, my younger sister. And that just didn't feel like the way it was supposed to be when I was younger. But I got over that pride eventually and was able to. She's amazing, and she thinks you're amazing. And she said once to me that you love her son Sam, who is gay as much as she does, but mom could say that about another person. That's really high price. So I love it. Okay, well, you two talk to us about the conflict theories and the theological journey that you went on, just like, what might pertain to what we're doing here as moms and the theological ideas of conflicts that you sussed out in this book. Sure. Maybe I'll start David, and then I'll pass it over to you. Does that work for us? One of the things that is just foundational for us in this book is the Scripture from DMC 121. No power, influence, counter ought to be maintained by power, the priesthood or by virtue of the priesthood, except through and I don't have it memorized. David probably does. Except through love belongsuffering meekness, gentleness, kindness. Right. Love untained. And I heard that Scripture a million times growing up in the church, usually in priesthood meetings, as if it only applied to men. Right? And it took me a long time, but now I understand that actually, in some ways, that is one of the most inspired statements that was ever revealed to the prophet Joseph Smith. And here's why. Oftentimes we focus on the no power or influence ought to be exercised or maintained through this thing. So in other words, you ought to be nice, right? You ought to love people, you ought to be kind. And that's really important. We ought to do all those things. But the kind of singular insight in that verse is that it's not just no power influence ought to be maintained, but no power influence can or ought to be maintained except through these godly characteristics. And this is the thing. So in Mormon theology, we believe that we are all free agents, right? And we have always been free agents as intelligence eternally. Even before we were born, we were free agents. And so in a universe of free agents, you can force people to do things temporarily, right? And this is what political leaders have done sometimes, what parents have to do in a righteous way, right? Little Johnny is running out into the street. You don't say. Please. Johnny, stop. You grab Johnny. Right? So there are times that even I think there's a kind of righteous impulse to restrain somebody even forcefully at times in that relationship of love. But you can't hold on to Johnny forever, right? At some point, Johnny's going to have to learn on his own not to run into the street at some point that power or influence that you have over him can't or her. It can't be done through intimidation, can't be done through force, can't be done through coercion of any kind. And so in this universe, in this world, the only kind of power influence that can be maintained over time comes through meekness and gentleness and kindness and long suffering and most of all love unfeigned. So that to us is the foundational principle. It's not just a nice way to live your life, right? But this is the way that power works in this world, in this universe. This is the way that Godly power works. That's the way that God exerts power over us, not through coercion and intimidation, but rather through kindness, gentleness and love. So that's a foundation for us. But then we think again, we learned some things along the way from reading other things and through life experience, and most of all from the scriptures about what conflict is and what conflict isn't. And David, do you want to pick up from there? Sure, yeah, I'll be happy to. As Patrick mentioned that all power in the universe, including God's power, is based on love and trust. Ultimately trust is enduring, fear is temporary, all of those things. So then we get to, if we take that principle, this idea that how we try to engage in exerting influence in the world and start thinking about the way conflict works. One of the things that I think most remarkable out latterday theology is that we don't actually, if we really get into it, our theology does not deposit the idea that conflict is bad. So this is something that I think sometimes as Larry Saints, we think we believe, we think we believe it because people will quote endlessly the scripture from Third Nephew, chapter eleven where the Savior says, contention is not of me, but of the devil. And we say, okay, so conflict is bad. If I'm in a conflict with my wife or my sibling or my roommate or whoever, then I must be of the devil right now. And we immediately think that conflict is a negative thing. But interestingly enough, when we go back to that verse, it doesn't say conflict is not at me, it says contention is not at me. And contention and conflict are not the same thing. And this is where we look at and one of the things that makes Larry, since theology so unusual is we have four versions of the creation story, right? We've got three in the scriptures, we've got Genesis, we've got Moses, we've got Abraham, and we have a version of it in the temple ceremony. And in each one of these descriptions of the creation, we have a very interesting dynamic that goes on, which is a division. God divides the light from the darkness, god divides the land from the water. God divides the firmaments from the waters above and below the firmaments. God creates multiple creations in both plant life and animal life and then creates male and female. And in this process of creating difference and in this process of creating division, it is good. And God looks at it and says, this is good. It is good to have a world that is divided. And the minute we have a world that is divided, you have these opposites of light and darkness, of land and water that are now in conflict with one another. In tension with one another. They're put deliberately into that kind of a relationship. And it's in the conflict that the creation occurs. It's in the ways in which I live near the Tetons were my favorite and to me, one of the most sacred places in the world. And those Tetons were created as the earth lifted itself up and as the waters came down upon it and carved out these remarkable peaks and canyons and left us with that process still happening. And we have these streams and these waterfalls and we go to the edges of oceans and watch the waves crashing against the rocks are lapping up on the beach. And those are the places we're drawn to in the world. It's the creative places in the world where things are in conflict with one another. And so if we can start looking at conflict is actually having potentially a creative element to it. And it plays in music as well. The tension between a bow and the strings or between a hammer and strings on piano harmony. Right? Yeah. We actually have things in tension, two notes that are in tension with one another. And it's in the tension that you get the beauty. So conflict itself is a necessary dynamic in the universe. And that's where we then ask the question not is conflict to be a voided? Because we're classic. Latterday Saints are classic. Of course, most of the world is. But Latterday Saints, we're especially good at avoiding conflict. And so the point is not to avoid conflict but to engage the conflict in a creative way rather than a destructive way, because conflict can be destructive. Conflict can leave devastation and pain and death in its wake. But conflict can also create life and create beauty and create joy. So the question becomes not how do I avoid conflict, but how do I engage conflict? Because conflict is inevitable, and therefore we have to learn how to embrace it and learn how to and I think our theology teaches us to embrace conflict in love. And when we embrace it and love, it creates a very different outcome than when we engage it in anger or fear. I love that because I have to say so back to where we come from, the conflict of I have a gay son and I had a gay brother. That conflict has been the making of my testimony, right? Sort of like the Tetons are getting there some way, maybe not quite that high up. But it wasn't until I had to figure that out that I even began to dive into what the religion was really teaching me. And it was all in the conflict that was the catalyst. And it's still a conflict. And we have this notion already. We know, for instance, we talk about the pioneers all the time, right, that their faith was forged in hardship, in these kinds of things. But it's not just the experience itself, right? Walking across the plains was just going to give you a sore feet. It's what do you do with those kinds of experiences? What do you do with the conflict that finds its way into your life? So, as David said, for us, the whole book, again, it's really just trying to channel the principles that are in the scriptures already of engaging this conflict in love, in productive ways that are going to produce growth rather than just suffering. Yeah, the creative conflict versus the destructive conflict. That principle right? There was a game changer just in the way that I'm discussing things with someone else. Am I being creative? Am I helping or am I being destructive? And I like how that ties in with nonviolence as well, because it wasn't until Kate we had Kate Toronto on our podcast, and she was talking about how and she's a woman that had done some research of LGBTQ research, and she talked about how she had decided to have a nonviolent approach, meaning not even hurting people with the things she said, but still speaking up. And I love that, how you bring all of that into this kind of creative conflict. What would you call it? Conflict management? Conflict. Approaching conflict with the creativity we're both shaped by the notion of conflict transformation. Okay? It's not just managing it. It's not just resolving. It like making it go away, but it's actually transforming. It taking the kind of fuel that conflict has and doing something positive with it. And we're drawing on there's a lot of literature on this. The kind of father of conflict transformation theory is a guy named John Paul. But for us, it's about transforming conflict with love, not just getting rid of it or putting the pot, the lid on the pot. Right. Well, this brings me to your book. Doesn't have anything to do with LGBTQ issues. Nothing. Not directly. Yes, of course not directly. But I don't think you even speak of it, do you, in the book? I don't think we do. Maybe just in passing, very briefly in a few places. We have all of those letters in the book, but probably not together.

Participant #1:
So don't expect, reading the book, that you will find us. But as families and individuals. I'll speak to families. It's easier for me because I am in an LGBTQ family, and I had a brother who grew up in the really hard times of cultural and religious beliefs around LGBTQ people. And it was ultimately it was sort of the destruction of him for a lot of reasons. So in our conflict, I'm going to borrow your wording from you did a podcast, Patrick, with Faith Matters and Tom Christopherson after President Holland's talk and used the term the Zion Canyon. And I really like that because I think we're all really trying to go to the same place, but we're on this canyon. Right? And on one side, I believe what we have is a stereotype that was sort of formed in the early seventy s and eighty s with cultural and religious beliefs about LGBTQ people. And there's a bit of a war cry of defend the family. And the LGBTQ people are enemies to God, and I think it comes from a good place, protecting families, which we so value, and marriage, which we value. And I think we historically, LGBTQ people were sort of ostracized from their culture and their family. So they stood alone, and we looked at them in a certain way like they were we had AIDS and we had all sorts of things that sort of built this idea. But now, 20 to 30 years, 40 years later, we have kids coming out in latterday St homes, and they're comfortable to come out, and their parents are embracing them, and they see their divinity, and they're there in this with them. So we have families. So now these are the kind of things that we used to say, like protecting the family. Well, those things are landing on families, those kind of comments, and the family is taking the shock of that rather than just the individual, and it's causing an even, I think, bigger Zion Canyon. Right? So the thing that Jenny and I really talked about was how do we teach our families to speak up in nonviolent ways within the church to help people understand who they are as an LGBTQ family, who their children are and what they're learning. So is that too much to solve world peace for us now? Right now? That's what I said at the beginning. And then if you guys can just solve this problem and you two promised you would, is that right? Yes, because I think you guys see it, too, where, like, both sides have such good intention, but it seems to be we're at an impasse, and there's a lot of division that the Lord cannot be happy with. Well, and like you said, Patrick, we're lobbying artillery shells at each other. Maybe I could jump in here, because I also love that podcast, by the way. Image for me was a striking image, too. And I liked the way Patrick phrased it, but she said it's the space between where Jesus does his work, right? That's the work of Jesus is in that space, in between what appears to be a chasm. And I think part of the challenge is twofold, one, Is being willing to speak with love to be like the anti nephi Lehighs to go out and meet people who feel like there are enemies. Sometimes I'm talking to both sides of the canyon here to go out and to meet people to greet them and to do it in a spirit of love and to stand for the truth that one feels passionate about and to speak that truth but not speak it in a way that's trying to necessarily dominate. Right. So one of the problems that we have in our society is that we live in a world that doesn't give us very good role models of how to do this. We live in a world that's a zero sum game. Every conflict is a zero sum game. We have to win and everything that our side believes in has to be victorious and the other side has to accept whatever truth we are bringing to the table and it's when we get into that kind of a conflict and that kind of a dynamic and then what we have is we're surrounded by tons of allies who tell us if the other side doesn't accept what you're proposing then they are evil or they're wrong or they are whatever it might be. And part of the challenge of conflict transformation is actually learning to live with the tension and not necessarily getting it resolved not necessarily having one side wind. If you think about creation if water one we'd be living in a pretty miserable place. If land one it would be an equally miserable place. We live in the tension and we're not necessarily going to resolve that tension and that's a challenging place to live and that's where the love of Jesus really helps us through it because we learn how to live with detention and to see each other as sons and daughters of God people who are speaking and trying to best with the tools they have to pursue truth and to give each other the benefit of the doubt and to say we may never be able to fully resolve this but we love one another and we can live in that tension with one another. That's where I think the beauty happens. That's where the canyons get created. That's where the sun sets and the sunrises get created in our world. It's when we learn to live and hold that tension in a spirit of love with one another because as you said there's truth and there's goodness in both camps and being able to not listen to the allies who tell us and the allies on both sides again here that you're telling us that it's a zero sum game which is not. It's going to be in many ways maybe a perpetual tension. Yeah I'm glad that David pointed out that in that metaphor that I used to Zion Canyon that I really do think the most important place is the space in between because that is where Jesus is. For me, the scripture that changed and continues to just transform. The way that I think about the work of Jesus in the world comes from Ephesians Two, where it says, but now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ, for he is our peace in his flesh. He has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall that is, the hostility between us. He reconciles both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death the hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. And so that's the work of Jesus. Jesus recognized here the specific context about Jews and Gentiles. But this could be for any groups in hospital. It could be between a husband and wife, it could be between siblings. It could be between people of different political persuasions, or it could be between LGBTQ folks and then sort of gender and marriage traditionalists within the church. And Jesus occupies that space and proclaims peace to everybody, and he wants to break down the hostility, the dividing walls that exist between us and to reconcile all things in one through the cross. Now, in the short term, we don't always know how to get there. It's hard to know. So it's important, I think, for us to build some of these bridges across the canyon. And I think that's the kind of work that you're doing here is to try and to say there isn't a necessary divide here. We can learn to love one another even in our differences. That's what David has been talking about. But that to me is the fundamental work of Jesus, is to proclaim peace to those who are near and to those who are far off. And in this conflict in the Church right now, this is the thing everybody feels hurt. Everybody feels pain, right? So it's not just one side. And when you've got two groups in a conflict, both of whom feel pain, both of whom feel attacked, both of whom feel victimized, vulnerable, minoritized, that is a bad position to start from. And so that's exactly where love has to step in. And the refusal. The main principle of non violence is non harm, right? That I will not harm the other person because I see in them the dignity, and in our case, in theological categories, I see them that they are a child of God just as much as me. Even if we fundamentally disagree about this thing, they are a child of God just as much as I am. That's the place we begin from, and then we go from there. And it's not an easy place to get your brain. No, it's not. Every incentive is otherwise, every psychological incentive, every cultural incentive. We naturally put up defenses. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says I'm wrong about everything or about the things that I care about most. So the very natural thing to do is to put up these barriers and to see another person as the other. That's how radical the gospel of Jesus Christ is, that it asks us to drop those pretenses and to see the other person the way that God sees them. That's the hardest thing to do. I have to say, with this last political the presidential the leading up to the race, I had this dear friend who I just value so much and just so wise. She was really, like, all in with the other candidate, and it was the first time in my life I was like, maybe there's something I'm missing because I loved her. Otherwise I would have just dismissed her out of hand like crazy. And it was just that feeling of, like, either it doesn't matter which political candidate we believe in, or it's okay either way. You know what I mean? It just was the first time that this kind of idea, no matter how destructive, I think whatever the candidate was, was the first time that it sort of occurred to me that there's something more important than who is right on this one. I had stuff to learn from her, and hopefully she had something to learn from me. There's a wonderful line from President Benson's famous talk on pride. Pride is more concerned with who is right and what is right. And often we see that happen in our conflicts. We become convinced that it's important for our narrative to be right and not right. And what is right is to love one another. And of course, again, that's the thing that the culture around us is constantly pulling us away and saying, no, what you need to do is find people that believe like you do and then rally with them against the people who do not believe like you do. And the minute we're into that, then, as it says in this really moving part of Moses, where Enix sees Satan laughing at the division that he's created in the world and God weeping, he says, I commanded them to love one another, and they hate their own blood. Whenever we find ourselves dismissing the other side or seeing them in anger, then we're playing into the adversaries playbook here. But it is a challenging, challenging space to get to. But it's in that gap. I love that image design canyon. It's one of my favorite images that it's in the gap, kind of stepping into that gap that we find the love of Jesus creating something and lifting us and bringing us together and uniting us, because we know Enick took 365 years, so let's hope we can figure this out quicker than him, right? That would be a long time for us to endure this, but one of the tools I use for myself is when I'm in conflict with somebody, I go to they're just like me. How are they just like me? That kind of mindset helps me. Is there any because you guys have studied this, this is your Life's works almost like what are some other tools that we could give our families on both sides to shorten the gap, find the bridges. My favorite scripture on this is one of my favorite scriptures for years. I think this is the one I even put on my missionary plaque is Moroni 748 wherefore my beloved brother and pray under the the Father with all the energy and part of you may be filled with this love. I think sometimes we think we have to muster to love ourselves and especially for people that we disagree with. When the Lord tells us to love our enemies, he doesn't leave us without resources to do that. The Lord says love your enemies and I will help you. In fact, I will give you my love for them if you will ask for it. And so when we're asked to love those who are hard to love, people with whom we are in deep disagreement, I think too often and myself, I don't avail myself of this enough, is to go to the Lord, say Lord, help me to love them, help me to see them the way you do. There's this famous and beautiful image of Corey Kenbum who had this experience with a guard that had been very brutal to her and her sister and meeting him later at a meeting where she had been preaching forgiveness. And he approaches her and she knows she does not have the power to love him. So she pleads in that moment for God's love and all she can do is raise her hand. And so maybe that's a beautiful image, maybe we can't feel it, but we can go out there, we can pray and ask God for help in doing it and then raise our hand to connect with the other person. And when she does, she feels that love flow into her and she realizes this gift from God. So I think we often think we're going to do that with really horrible and easily identified enemies. But we have to do this kind of work all the time in our own homes with people that we love and find ourselves in conflict with. And we need God to help us get past that in our homes, in our wards and in our communities generally, in our nation. Surely we need to be praying for that love after you have any other tools, I think that's great. I think another set of principles would be god does not ask us to simply roll over. He does not ask us to be passive in the face of suffering, in the face of pain, in the face of injustice that we may experience. In fact, we see over and over. This is one of the things that David always talks about with the anti NFI. Lehighs that they didn't just wait for people to come and slaughter them. They actually went out and proactively went and met them and they were defending their families. Oftentimes people say, oh well you've got to defend your families with the sword or whatever violent weapons you have at your disposal. Well, the anti Nephiwehi did defend their families. They defended their families with love and they went out and met in their case their enemies who were literally trying to kill them and they met them with love and it was a proactive act. Now there was a lot of suffering. There was a lot of death that day. There was though, a lot less death than we see and a lot less suffering than we see in most of the other battles between Nephites and Lamanites between different kinds of groups. And so there's no promise. God does not give us the promise that as we engage these things in love that there will not be suffering. He does not promise us that. He doesn't promise us that there won't be pain. He doesn't promise us that there won't be loss. We worship a God who is crucified on the cross. We worship a God who is vulnerable and opens himself up to pain. So God doesn't promise us insulation from any of those things. But what he does do is he gives us a set of tools to proactively assert our dignity. Right? And so when we do feel like we're being attacked, when we feel like great injustice has been done he doesn't ask us just to roll over but he gives us principles to actually engage in love and we talk about it in the book. We don't have probably time to talk about it here but that's what turned the other cheek and go the extra mile and all those things in the Sermon on the Mount all of that is about how do you assert your own dignity as a child of God even in the face of a situation where you can't change the situation. You can't change the fundamental dynamics of power that might be at play but you can assert your dignity and also at the same time show love for the person on the other side. And I love the idea everyone has to go read that about turn the other cheek. Yeah. It's very powerful. You will learn something new about I did not know that until you're right. We don't have time but we want people to buy the book so go get it. I just think as we as LGBTQ families work through what we have to work through and it's interesting that you talk about that gap because Jenny and I always say one of the problems with our families is that the parents. Particularly the mothers because that's who we work with they are afraid to walk in to step into the gap between what they believe and the other side. Their child. And they're afraid that the Lord won't meet them there. That they'll be off the course or off the path or whatever. And we keep saying, like, sometimes we say we shove people into the gray area. I think the gap would be a better place than the gray area because that's where we meet God. Yeah. God's waiting for you. I know you're alone here. I know you're afraid. I know you don't know what to do. And let's just take this one step at a time together. I think it's interesting that I didn't get that when I listened to the podcast. That kind of connection between those two things that we have to do. And that's what it is. It is like stepping into the void, right? We could go on forever. I know. There's so much we've have not. Read this book. Please go read it. It will change your heart. And I love how you said assert your dignity, because it gives you to learn to do that. Because I think a certain your dignity is really learning to love yourself like God loves you. It's just another way of saying that. And I think we're the most powerful of loving others when we love ourselves as we see ourselves, as God sees us. So thank you both. David and Patrick, we want to ask you our famous question at the end, but they can get this book at Desireet. And where else can they find this book? Amazon? Anywhere online. Yeah. And I know it's audible because it's both. So it is a great gift and it will teach you, really how Christ wants us to interact with human beings. I really do think that it's pretty powerful. I can see why it took ten years. It's that good. Yes. Patrick, I know you have to jump off to a meeting. We're going to ask the question, what does lift and love mean? But if you have to go, I knew we'd run short on time. So do you have time to give us that? I'll give you my two second answer to that. Thank you so much to run. But yeah, I mean, to me, we want to lift up everybody. What we're called to do as Christians is to look for those whose hands hang down, to look for those who feel like they're on the outs or who feel marginalized, or whose burdens are too heavy for them to bear, to look for those. So it's a proactive act of seeing, of seeing pain, seeing suffering, seeing mourning, and then responding to our covenantal obligation. The very first commitment that we make is covenanted Christians to mourn with those, mourn to bear one another's burdens. It's to lift up those burdens so that they're not so heavy on other people. And why do we do that? Because that's exactly what Jesus does for us. So that lifting comes out of a place of love. For me, it's simply responding to the call to be a Christian. Perfect. Thank you. And thank you so much. I know you got to go and we just enjoyed this. Thank you. This was awesome. Thanks so much. Okay, David, we're going to give it to you. You're ready? I think so. Although it's just a wonderful question and Patrick answered it so beautifully, but over the last maybe just add I would say amen to everything he said and then just add maybe something that just in the last month has, for whatever reason, has become important to me. I've become fascinated with the word receive and to receive the Holy Ghost, to receive Christ, to receive another person in marriage, to receive someone else. And I realized for me. Lifting and loving is ultimately opening ourselves to others and that the act of receiving someone means ultimately emptying ourselves of who we are. In a sense. Not necessarily to disavow our identity. But I'm saying that our will and our selfish desires and to open ourselves and be vulnerable to another person and also to open ourselves and be vulnerable. To receive even God self is an incredibly courageous act and one that takes an awful lot of. One of my heroes outside of the restoration is Gandhi, Mohamed Gandhi. And he talked about to engage in the kind of nonviolent, well, assertive, aggressive, assertive, confrontational love that he taught his people to do was to be fearless. He says fearless is more than courage. Fearless is a willingness to essentially open ourselves without defenses. For me to truly lift and love someone is to open ourselves to them and be willing to receive who they are in all of their glory and maybe also in all of their messiness. Right. And that takes a lot of courage. It's hard for me.

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I'm very comfortable being by myself and I'm married to a woman who helps me constantly think beyond myself. So opening myself is not an easy thing. And I'm grateful for those moments when I've been able to do it. So I guess I don't know if that's a good answer, but it's the way I would see lifting and loving. Because once we open ourselves to one another, that's where connection, healing and the work of God is really happening without defensiveness. That's the key. That was beautiful, David. Thank you so much. And thank you for being there for your nephew and writing this book. Like putting all of the things yes, like this book, it will help change the world and I think really prepare us for the gathering and what the people we need to become for Christ. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you for receiving us so well. All right, thank you, listeners. I hope that you were delighted as we were today with David and Patrick. I know if you have any questions, they'd probably love for you to reach out to them or to us because this is just a conversation that we need to keep having because keep building these bridges as our community and making God not weep and becoming one, becoming the Zion people he knows we can become. All right, bye. Thank you for joining us. If you like what we share, subscribe to the Lift and Love podcast. And if you have a minute, leave us a five star rating so other families like yours can find us. When your child comes out, you need to find support where you feel safe and understood. This is why we created the Lift and Love Coaching Community, a place where parents can connect, learn and grow in a private setting. Jenny is a certified, advanced trained spacebased life coach with almost ten 0 hour of coaching. Together, we have worked with hundreds of families just like yours. To see if the Lift and Love community is right for you, go to liftandlove.org and click on the Community link. For more free information, support groups and available resources, check out lyftandlove.org and liftinglove.org on Instagram and Facebook. But most importantly, remember you are not alone in this journey. We are building a community, thriving and faithful LGBTQ families who are here to lift and love you.