Ashly  00:00
This is Ashly Stone, and you’re listening to the Come Back Podcast.
Your episode is one that people have been really asking for a ton. You have a story, and people really need to hear it. So let’s go for it.

Wendi  00:30
I hope I can help people in the best way. That’s what I’ve been praying for. It takes a lot of guts, I think, and hopefully, a lot of respect for my husband, because he’s not able to share his story,

Ashly
Right. Yeah.

Wendi
So it’s taken a lot of courage to be okay with this, so I’ll do my best.

Ashly  00:52
Let’s go ahead and jump in. Let’s start with you. Tell me a little bit about you and your story. Give us some context there. Tell me a little bit about your faith journey. I know you kind of went through your own stuff, and I’d love to hear kind of some background about your story, and then I’d love to jump into the rest. This is a unique episode, because we’re talking about your spouse, and you, and that dynamic, and we’ve had a lot of questions from listeners.

Wendi  01:27
Okay. I just want to say that everybody’s story is different, and anything that I might say here, it’s purely my opinion and my experience. So I never want to offend anyone or hurt anyone’s feelings. So if I say something, that’s not my intention.

I grew up in a large family. I had really great parents. Gosh, I’m already getting emotional. Like, what the heck? I always had such a faith and testimony of the gospel. Maybe not always as strong as now, but I remember going to baptisms and crying, because I felt the Spirit so strong. I just was such a sensitive soul, I guess. And I always knew the gospel was true, but there came a time–and I do think this is pertinent to say in my story, that when I was about 15, I had a Sunday school teacher ask, “Do you guys know that the Church is true? You guys should pray about it.” And so I prayed about it, and that next week, during Sacrament, I had the most spiritual experience I’ve ever had in my entire life. It was like, so, so strong and so … I don’t even have answers to everything that was there, and I still have questions, but no matter what, I knew that the Church was true. I knew that Joseph Smith was a true prophet. I knew that the scriptures, the prophets, everything encompassing temples, families, all the great values that the church has, there was no doubt in my mind from that day forward, that this was true. And I have never faltered from that because of my experience I had that day. I remember looking around, thinking, “Can anybody else feel this?” I didn’t get to see anything, but I felt so much that I knew.

So I had that experience, and me and my husband, we met in a singles ward in college at ASU, and we got married pretty quickly. I was just out of high school. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about that, and I definitely felt that. Constantly, every time I faltered, I thought, “I shouldn’t do this. I’m so young, I’m barely 19. Why am I getting married?” My answer was so strong, to marry him. And every time I faltered, I felt like angels were pushing me along, saying, “No, this is what you need to do.” And so I really did feel like this was exactly what I needed to be doing, getting married to my husband. We were married in the temple, the Mesa, Arizona temple.

Fast forward a couple kids, and we were living in a ward, and my husband met a friend. He would hang out with him, and they were just having good chats. Again, I’m talking for my husband, so this is my perspective. Of course, this friend kind of brought some doubt into him, and had him look a little bit further, gave him some links to look at things. We actually had been moving out of state at that point. So we moved out of state.

Fast forward a year or two. I just had my third baby. We lived in Austin, Texas. There, I knew one person I had met online. I didn’t know anyone. She was even about 30 minutes away, so I didn’t really know her, but I kind of did. So I felt very isolated in this different place. Anyways, I had my third baby. It was a rough delivery, so I was trying to heal from that and try to cope with having a third child and all that, all the things that go along with that. My husband didn’t renew his temple recommend, and I said, “Hey, you need to renew it.” Actually, I had said that before I had my baby. He had said, “Okay, yeah,” and he just wouldn’t. I thought, “That’s kind of weird. Why wouldn’t he renew his temple recommend?” So after I had my baby, I said, “You really need to do that. What’s going on? Is there something going on?” And so that’s kind of how it started: he had doubts, and he kind of just kept it to himself for a little while, then it just kind of all came out. We had to go through that, but also our marriage was struggling. We had a lot to work on in our marriage. So it was like my health, and his faith crisis, and our marriage, and everything was in shambles.

Ashly  06:19
When he told you that, how did you feel? Because I’m sure you were probably thinking, “Whoa.”

Wendi  06:20
When he told me … And it’s so funny, this was seven years ago, so it’s been quite a while. I feel like I have to go back into that space, which is kind of weird because it has been so long. I don’t remember exactly, but I do remember feeling a lot of pain. And a lot of anger, towards the person that brought these things to him. And he had said, “I always had some thoughts,” and throughout his life, he kind of had some questions that he kind of put on a shelf. I don’t know, I can’t speak for him, but I know his perspective or his story might be a little bit different. But from my perspective, I felt very angered towards this person that I feel led my husband away from the church. I literally felt like my whole life was gone, because, like I said, I was dealing with so many really hard things at one time. It was a really dark place, and it was really hard. I felt like I had the world on my shoulders. I’m trying to make my marriage work, and trying to help my husband, and that’s the thing that actually I did wrong. In actually trying to help him, I pushed him more away. We’d have these conversations, and it would just bring so much contention in the room. We’d just be fighting, because I’d say, “No–this, this, this,” and he’d say, “No, you don’t understand. You don’t get it.” And so I was coming at it as if I’m trying to prove him wrong, and as if, “I’m going to tell you, because you don’t know.” And so I learned really quick that you don’t do that.

Ashly
Yeah.

Wendi
And so I had to just take a step back, and I actually looked, I looked at the CES Letter. I looked at some of the stories that he was looking at from people that had left the church, and he was gravitating to those kinds of people because he felt like it was similar to him. Because I wanted an understanding of what was going on. It was just such a whirlwind. I was just trying to understand it. I think that, because I have never had a faith crisis, I’m never going to understand them fully. You know, he told me he had anger and resentment, and a lot of these really big emotions with the church and I’ve never had those feelings. So I can’t say what it’s like, but I can say, in my perspective as a spouse and trying to to make everything work and make our marriage work, because our foundation was the temple. We got married in the temple, and we went to church every week, and we went to the temple together, and we did Family Home Evening, and we taught our children these values.

Ashly  09:31
You’re going through all of this stuff, and then your husband’s having a faith crisis. And I imagine that where you want to be, typically, the gospel is such a light, enduring rough times in life. And I imagine that having that happen at the same time with your husband is extremely– I just can only imagine what that would have been like, to have that darkness surrounding your testimony and your marriage.

Wendi  10:09
I think the hardest part was I had no family, no friends. I grew up in Arizona, and that’s where we were married, and I knew everyone, because I’d lived there my whole life. Now I knew no one. Sure, I could call my parents, or my sister in law I would call sometimes. But honestly, it’s such an isolating trial. It’s really hard. I actually just told one of my really close friends that I was going to do this podcast, and she didn’t even know about my story. It’s just not a topic of conversation. And it’s not that I’m scared to tell anyone, you have to just say it. It’s not like other trials; my husband doesn’t have cancer, so nobody knows that he’s struggling,

Ashly
Right.

Wendi
and nobody knows, really, what’s going on. So I really felt like, not only was I isolated, but no one knew anything that I was feeling. Even my friend that I had mentioned, she said, “I have no idea what that feels like.” And it’s true, it’s such a unique feeling. But there was an angel put in my place that I’m super grateful for, and it was a bishop. He probably saved my marriage and my life. I was just in such a dark place for so long.

It’s not that I ever wavered from the gospel. I was clinging to the Savior, that is the only reason that I’m here today. This was four years in, and it was just as fresh as if it happened yesterday. I’m sitting there, trying to teach my children, and I’m doing everything. My husband doesn’t do anything as far as the gospel. I know that Heavenly Father knew that I couldn’t go on without an angel put in my place. He came from the perspective of having his dad leave the church, so he saw his mom struggle. But he had the best communication, and the most compassion that I have ever experienced from a male or even just a bishop. He was exactly who I needed, and I could call him, talk to him, text him at any moment. It didn’t matter if it was in the middle of the night, which I never did, but it was so great to feel like I had someone earthly on my side. I never felt like I didn’t have Heavenly Father and Jesus and angels there with me, but to have someone physically there that I felt was in my corner, rooting for me and listening to me, because that was the hardest part. I was feeling all these feelings, and I was dealing with all this stuff. I had even talked to other people in the leadership, and they just didn’t have an understanding. And so I was seeking just some type of connection,

Ashly
Right.

Wendi
because I just needed to connect to be able to get through it. So having him there was so important. I know that my marriage and my life now is because of him. And that sounds funny, but he really, truly just gave me a listening ear, and he loved me with everything. And so I felt like it was like the Savior was in front of me, and I just felt all the good things, and validated. And so then, I could move through this hard thing.
My health started getting better. That was another big topic. I had some major, major health issues that I had to work through at the same time as all of this, and our marriage started getting better. It feels like I just hit rock bottom, and my foundation was completely gone. And Heavenly Father rebuilt it for me. He took everything. I felt like He took everything from me, everything that was good: my marriage, my health, everything, was gone. And so I feel like He made it even better than I could have imagined. And I don’t know if that’s everyone’s story. I don’t know if that’s going to be your story, but I do hope that this is everyone’s story, that He can rebuild us to be even better and greater, and have more joy than I have ever imagined.

Ashly  14:24
Yeah, for sure. Your husband is still not in the church, correct?

Wendi  14:31
My husband is still a member. He does still go to church with us. I kind of have a unique story. And I have heard from other spouses, or women or men that have different experiences. But for my husband, I kind of just sat him down. I said, “If you want to still be married, this is my boundary: you’re going to come to church with me, or we’re not going to make it. You don’t have to believe, but I need your help. I can’t be a single mom in church. I just can’t do it.”

When everything first happened, it was like the dust settled and we were kind of trying to figure things out, like I said, with my health and our relationship and everything. And then about four years in, he was pushing some more boundaries, like stopped wearing his garments. Things didn’t happen overnight. And that’s something that I do believe, it’s how I’ve seen Satan work, in that it’s little bit by little bit. It doesn’t happen all at once, at least in my experience. He stopped wearing his garments, and he would say, “I don’t want to go to church.” And we had actually moved back to Arizona at this time. Actually, it was kind of in between–we were still in Austin, but we were heading back to Arizona. I felt like he was just going to keep pushing boundaries until I told him to stop. I don’t know, like I said I didn’t want to be a single mom at church. And so I said, “Dude, you can decide. That is totally up to you, what you want to do, but I’m telling you what I’m feeling. And this is a boundary for me.” And so he comes to church.

Ashly  16:15
I wanted to get some context for where he was at today, because I think that, like you said, “I don’t know if this is everyone’s story, and I don’t know,” but I think the the thing is, for you, the ideal case scenario would be for your husband to restore his faith and come back. But you’re saying that yeah, it’s not the perfect scenario, but you have been given this huge gift of peace. And actually, even though your husband isn’t saying 100%, “Yes, I’m back, let’s go,” you still are in a place where you can say, “Hey, my whole foundation was rebuilt, and I’m in such a better place, and my life is so much better.” That just struck me as really incredible, that you can recognize all of the miracles in this, even though maybe it wasn’t exactly what you had hoped for it to be. You know what I mean?

Wendi  17:18
And see, like I had this whole plan. I’m glad you brought that up, and I might need you to ask me that question again, because there were like three things shooting through my head at this time. So I had this plan. We got married in the temple, we’re gonna raise our children. We’re gonna die and be happy. Live for eternity, right?

Ashly
Mmhmm.

Wendi
And I knew that I was supposed to marry my husband, and I did question. I thought, “Was I supposed to marry him, have a couple kids, and then we’re done? Is that really what you were wanting me to do?” There were a lot of questions and trying to figure that out. In actuality, this was our foundation. “This is how we’re supposed to live our life,” I thought. Like I was putting it in a box.

Ashly
Right.

Wendi
And Heavenly Father would say, “No, no, no. That’s not how life works.” He took me into a place, and I had so much learning in this experience, so much learning that could only be through this experience. And it’s funny, I will mention, and I didn’t know if we were going to get to this, that I have a grandma who has a very similar situation as I. She was married in the temple, and her husband never went to church again. Hers is different. I often rely on her and ask her for help and strength all the time. So I’m super grateful that I have an ancestor on my side, on the other side of the veil. I just had these expectations, but God made it so much better. If we were just doing the same old, same old thing, like, what would my life look like then? Not to say that everything’s perfect, because it’s not, but He made it so much better than I could have ever imagined.

Ashly
Right.

Wendi
And again, my marriage is not perfect, but my marriage is good, and we have struggles, but it’s really good. I’m just glad that I stuck it out. And I don’t know if that’s for everyone, because that’s where your situation might be different than mine. I am glad I stuck it out as much as I kind of wanted to just give up, because we have such a sweet marriage, and I’m really lucky to have him. And to know that I can be married to someone that isn’t in the church–that had never crossed my mind. You know how in Young Women’s, you’re making these lists of characteristics for spouses, and you’re putting things like, “a really strong testimony,” and “taking you to the temple.” And you have all these dreams, and my dreams are shattered. But Heavenly Father is making my dreams come true in just a very different way. And also, my husband has agency and I have agency. We’re different people than when we were first married. There are just so many aspects and flowing things in our relationship.

One thing that I actually just understood recently is that I was putting eternity in a box. Just because my husband is struggling right now, and just because he is where he’s at right now, or like our situation right now, or where it was five years ago, it doesn’t mean that that situation is going to be like that always.

Ashly
Right.