Welcome and Introduction to Paul Cardall

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It's November 27, 2020. It's the day after Thanksgiving here in the United States, and we have a special holiday season Mormon Stories interview for you today. Today we are interviewing Park Hardall. Hi, Paul. Say hi to our audience.

Paul Cardall [00:00:22] How you doing? Nice to be with you.

John Dehlin [00:00:24] It's good to have you.

Paul Cardall [00:00:26] It's good to be here.

John Dehlin [00:00:27] Yeah. For those who don't know Paul, I'll read his bio. Paul Cardall battled long odds from birth, eventually triumphing over a serious heart disability to earn distinction as an outstanding composer and pianist. In 1997, Paul first won widespread notice by setting author Richard Paul Evans number one New York Times bestseller, the Christmas Box. To music. Paul Cardall's achievements range from releasing 11 Billboard number one albums to winning the Gospel Music Association Dove Award for instrumental album of the year, something Gladys Knight hasn't even done. Collaborating with Grammy winning singer Cece. Tell me how to pronounce that. Winans. Right, Winans. Cece Winans, Audrey Assad, and the piano guys. Among other distinguished artists, Paul is one of the highest streamed musicians in the world. Get this. With over 3 billion streams on platforms like Spotify and Pandora, he has 30 million monthly listeners. So this is one of the most popular musicians in the world by that. By that metric, Paul is preparing to release a new album entitled the Broken Miracle with an accompanying fictional novel based on real events, also called the Broken Miracle, which is available now for pre order on Amazon and Deseret book. And something that might be really interesting to my listeners, Paul co, let's say co composed, wrote, authored a hymn with David Bednar, Mormon apostle, and he recently co authored a song and a music video with none other than Tyler Glenn, former guest on Mormon Stories podcast, and a friend of mine. So Paul's done a lot of really cool things, and if you don't know him by name, I'm almost certain that you know his music. And so we're really thrilled to have Paul here today to talk about his Mormon story, his Mormon journey. And he's had a, let's just say a faith shift. And we're going to be talking about his faith shift as we talk about the chronology of his story. So, Paul, before I play kind of this opening intro to kind of introduce you to our audience, is there anything else you want to say to kind of correct the record or add or take away from the introduction?

Paul Cardall [00:03:00] No, you did a beautiful job. Thank you. Appreciate it.

John Dehlin [00:03:04] All right, well, happy Happy holidays.

Paul Cardall [00:03:06] Yeah. Hope everybody's had an amazing Thanksgiving. It's, it's been a great week.

John Dehlin [00:03:13] Likewise. All right. Well, listeners, so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to play a little clip. It's kind of like a 51 second intro to introduce you guys to Paul. Those of you who are just listening, you'll be able to hear some stuff. And those who are watching on Facebook or on YouTube will be able to see that as well. So here it is, an introduction to who is Paul Cardall, an American pianist. I'm really inspired by him and his story really touches my heart. Personally, I can tell you. He's a guy that exudes optimism. He's a guy that is winning in life. And he's an inspiration to me and my family.

Paul Cardall [00:04:16] Paul Cardone.

John Dehlin [00:04:30] And Paul who, who was that introducing you on that, on that introduction?

Paul Cardall [00:04:35] That was FOX News anchor Brett Baer. And the reason was because he has a son who was born with the same congenital heart defect that I was born with. And part of the Saving Tiny Heart Society that raises money for medical research. We basically try to help prevent future parents from having to go through what my parents endured, having a child born with a damaged, defective heart. In my case, I was born with only a single functioning ventricle in 1973.

John Dehlin [00:05:15] It's probably worth noting that you have had a heart transplant and you're alive today and in front of us with the heart of another human being. And we'll get to that in the story. But that in and of itself is kind of a miracle, wouldn't you say?

Paul Cardall [00:05:29] Literally? Yeah. I mean, a literal change of heart. Like a lot of you, our listeners, have had changes of hearts. And they say, you know, throughout our entire lives, we've been told to change our hearts. And I took that quite serious.

John Dehlin [00:05:43] So very literally. Yeah.

Paul Cardall [00:05:45] Yeah.

Family Background and Early Childhood

John Dehlin [00:05:46] All right, Paul, well, let's just jump in. Tell us about, I mean, tell us about your, your family and your birth and we'll just kind of follow the chronology.

Paul Cardall [00:05:55] Sure. I was born into an amazing home. My father, my mother already had three girls. The first two were twins. They were excited to have a son. When I came into the world, there was no Internet. There was no way to gather information about defects in newborns. And it was only within an hour that the doctors said to my mother that there was something horribly wrong with their son. I was blue. And fortunately, there was a cardiologist at LDS at Primary Children's Hospital, which is up the street from the old LDS Hospital. And he knew a surgeon by the name of Conrad Jensen, who happened to be the partner of President Russell M. Nelson. And that surgeon flew in from California. And within just a few hours, I think it was less than a day, 22 hours old. He cut into me through the side of the, put a bypass shunt in there to keep me alive. But the cardiologist would tell my parents he's probably not going to live very long. He won't make it through the year. My dad tells me the story of being able to go in a closet with me prior to that surgery, briefly against the doctor's order. Doctors allowed it to, to give me a name and a blessing. And my father's faith is phenomenal. I mean he's very loyal, very disciplined. Comes from a long line of pioneers. My mother from a long line of pioneers. We have ancestors from the Willie Handcart Company. John Taylor, who was the third, so successor of Joseph Smith, was one of our relatives, Christopher Leighton, who settled Leighton and Thatcher, Arizona. One of Brigham Young's most loyal polygamous followers who did a lot. That's all that blood runs through me. So it's, it's all enriched from people who lived in England that came to America for a better life, joined with the Mormon movement, came to Utah. And that blood is so deep in me that when my dad went to go give me a blessing, he fully believed that I was in God's hands. And you know, I think it was a couple days after that surgery that Howard W. Hunter, who was a successor of Joseph Smith and president of the LDS Church, he was in the hospital visiting another patient. My father asked him if he'd be willing to come and bless his son. And what I would been told is that President Hunter laid hands on me and said I was in God's hands, that I would live to be a man. And that was instilled in my parents hearts and I'm grateful for that because it gave them a spirit of optimism that even though the doctors have said, your son's not going to make it, that faith that they have and the expression of what that man did that day gave them the confidence to treat me with an optimistic spirit rather than a doomsday approach. And so I grew up with that notion that I might not live very long. Every time I went to the doctor's office, there were reports that my heart's not doing well or. But I was getting stronger, I wasn't doing well, it was all over the place. But it was that a prophet had said something really beautiful And a powerful blessing. And I automatically was drawn to the prophets, drawn to priesthood and blessings and prayer. And it was a big part of my nature as a child and a big part of our home. Like most who are from strong Latter Day St. Homes, my parents ended up having eight children. We had family night. We had really great meetings on Sundays. We'd had family council. Mom would go over the calendar, dad would share a lesson or mom would share a lesson. They'd bear testimony. And it was a beautiful, for me, for me it was a beautiful childhood. You couldn't have a better experience. And you know, until you travel or you get outside of, of the culture of, of that, you don't really recognize or know that there's problems in other homes. There's problems because my parents did a really good job of keeping a very safe, healthy, beautiful environment for us to grow. My father was a journalist and he worked for ksl. He was actually assigned, I think it was in early 70s to be the religion specialist. So his job was to travel with Harold B. Lee. But Harold B. Lee passed away and President Kimball. So he traveled everywhere with President Kimball. When President Kimball was in South America for the first time and in Israel and all these places. And dad would come home after being gone for two weeks, do his report usually air between conference specials around the 10 o' clock news at KSL, which was the CBS affiliate at the time. And he would share with us these amazing stories of being in Tonga and how the Polynesian saints were worried that, that it was going to reign over President Kimball. They wanted to have a beautiful outdoor meeting with this prophet they loved and believed in to be the voice of God. And he tells the story of how the people came together. They fasted, they prayed. And then when President Kimball showed up, the clouds departed and it did not rain on the prophet. And of course when the prophet left, it began to rain again. So these are the faith promoting stories that were a big part of our home. And I loved it. I loved it. I. It gave me a sense of identity, purpose, and it put everything into perspective that I was going through with my heart defect. Because the dark side of that is nurses and needles worried about having to be cut open again. I was an infant. I don't remember those things, but every time I looked in the mirror, there was that scar on my chest. And you know that that was tough as a kid going to the pool and you know, feeling like you're singled out because you're different. So that was.

Growing Up with a Heart Condition

John Dehlin [00:13:41] Did you have limitations on what you could do physically compared to other kids because of your condition?

Paul Cardall [00:13:48] Miraculously, I did pretty well. I could run around the neighborhood to an extent. I would get tired easy. I learned a bike. Had a bicycle and swim. But when it came to playing soccer, I couldn't play soccer. They made me the special team manager, which was fine. They eventually let me play some soccer. But, you know, I was different than most kids. It was hard. It was hard. But you. You make up for it in. In cynicism. I wouldn't say sarcasm, because sarcasm intentionally tries to. To hurt people. I was a cynic. I would use comedy, humor and just try to adapt to my situation. So that was pretty much up until the time that, you know, I got baptized at age 8. I remember my dad coming and saying, I want you to go on the National Scout Jamboree because you'd been on the jamboree. And I was about to turn 12, and I was getting into Scouting, and. And, you know, and. And what happened with scouting was the concern was, could I get all the merit badges? Because scouting was a big part of our life. My grandfather was the president of the council. He was the one that built Tracy Wigwam and donated the money for the hall that's there and Latent Construction. They were involved in the building of the Jordan River Temple, assisted Jorgense, some of the other construction companies town. So we had. We had a lot of interaction with Scouting, and it was a big deal to be part of that. Grandpa had built the. The new Lavelle Edwards Stadium. So kind of divert. But I talked about my grandpa for a minute there. But with scouting, it was get your Eagle Scout, very important. Our leaders were all Silver Beavers, and scouting was important, and I really enjoyed it. But going on those hikes, you know, my Scout master would usually say, because he'd walk with me behind everyone else that had gone ahead, you know, thank. Thank goodness for you and the diabetic, because I don't know that I can keep up with the boys. And that made me feel a little better. I was able to hang back with the Scout master and eventually get to the destination. But I was so, in a way, frustrated with scouting that I made sure I got it done fast. I got my Eagle shortly after my 13th birthday. And it's. It's really great that I got it then because that's when I started to get really sick with endocarditis. And I was in the hospital. It was so serious that they called up my family pretty much to say goodbye. And there was a surgeon, another colleague, of President Nelson Don Doty, who was going to go into my chest, open it up and cut out this walnut sized blister full of a staph infection that they had just barely found with an MRI that was brand new in Utah. The MRI had only been here for six months and he was able to detect the illness. If, if the MRNA MRI had not been invented, I probably would not be here today. And so they, I said goodbye to my family and this was age 13 and I was starting to have really deep spiritual yearnings and longings because I might die. Most kids don't have to think about that. Most kids think they're immortal. Most of us think we're immortal. That death is so far away. But. And I never thought of retirement, I thought of death. And I would be going to the spirit world. I'd continue preaching the gospel, trying to help everybody come to know Jesus Christ. Gospel that was restored through Joseph Smith. And that was my thinking, is if I die, at least I know what I'm going to be doing. And that brought a lot of comfort, knowing those things and going off into that surgery was very difficult. I was very sick and they ended up miraculously saving my life. The doctors could not believe it. They talk about it all the time. It's in the cardiology, pediatric cardiology textbook. This surgery that Don Doty came up with because he had to take a vein out of my leg to create something natural to keep me alive. But then they said, look, you got to go back to junior high and then come back next year. We're going to cut you open again. We have to go in and take that shunt down. We're going to reconstruct your heart. And of course, my parents and my dad very good at asking questions as a journalist and he could see all the different angles and he would get very clear answers from the cardiologist. And I attribute a lot of the fact that I'm alive to my parents asking solid questions and taking control over my health rather than just trusting the doctors. You know, you don't go out and just get a car that the car dealer gives you. You want to shop around for the car that's going to work for you. And that's the same thing in, in medicine that we've come to learn and understand is that I needed the right person.

John Dehlin [00:19:52] So

Paul Cardall [00:19:54] that was kind of frustrating. Have to come back, go to school. Oh yeah, by the end of the year, I'm going to have this surgery. And then they told me that the surgery was extremely risky and I could still die from it. So I was one of those kids that believed, well, you know, if I get a good thing going here in this life, God will permit me to stay longer because I got a good thing going. So I came back and I ran for student body leadership. And I used to get on my knees every night and talk to the Lord in a way like, hey, I want to stay. I want to be here. I want to love people and teach them who you are. I want to tell the world about the restoration of the gospel through Joseph Smith. I wanted. I just wanted, you know, and maybe if you can preserve my life, I can go out and serve a mission. And because I didn't know if I'd be able to do that, and it was hard, it was heavy on my damaged heart. I got very involved in seminary through this process, and I was obsessed and passionate deeply about that first vision that Joseph Smith claimed to have had, because at that age, I felt, okay, here's a guy like me, big family, great parents, who just wants God to guide him and be there with them. And I related to that, and I. I fell in love with that, that narrative that the church created. And it was very beneficial to my life at that time, because then when I would go to that surgery at age 14, I knew I had a purpose in life. I knew I was here to share the everlasting gospel with the entire world. And it gave me a lot of confidence. It gave me. But that, but, you know, we talk about these things, but looking back, I was not the perfect kid. I, I. A lot of my cynicism was sarcasm back then. I would tease the neighbor girls. I would try to be creative with cassette tapes and creating dramas on little, Little boomboxes of telling stories, like little variety show stuff. And I was doing that, and some of it was hurtful. Prank call a lot of people. I still feel bad about prank calling people in junior high school, but we do that. And, but at the same time, you'd have these deeply spiritual experiences, and then you'd feel so much guilt, you know, passing the sacrament knowing that you teased somebody or you made fun of somebody, and it was, it was hurtful to them, and it was hurtful to me, and, and. But they were all very supportive when I ended up having that surgery at age 14. Now going into that surgery, John, I thought, okay, I'm 14 years old. I'm going into the hospital to have this experience. And in my mind, I was going into the Grove, the Sacred Grove in Palmyra, to have an experience So I was expecting, like I had at age 13, a profound spiritual experience that went. That would really help benefit my journey. And. And that experience at that time was not only the most difficult period up to that point in my life, but it was the most sacred and spiritual experience because I, during surgery, was in and out. I didn't see a light at that moment. I. I did see what looked like an ancestor. I couldn't tell who it was. I learned that my. But they. But the person I saw this was right in the middle of a surgery. In the middle of surgery. I looked around the room, and there was one person in white. And I thought they were just in white scrubs. And this person looked like one of my aunts on my mom's side. She looked so familiar. And I couldn't figure out, who is this? And the next thing I know, I. She says, go back to sleep. And I said, well, is it over? And she goes, no, you have more to do. And then I went back to sleep. And I woke up, and on the side of my bed was this young girl who had a chake tube in her throat who looked like she had cystic fibrosis. And I didn't know who she was, and I didn't know the connection at all. And there ended up not being a connection, but this little girl was right there just staring at me. And I thought that was strange because I was coming right out of having this experience. Heart surgery, reconstructive heart surgery. I'd been hooked up to the heart, lung machine, transfusions of blood, family, friends, donated blood. And so I asked my nurse, after this young girl left, I asked this nurse, I saw one of you. I woke up during surgery. And they said, no, you didn't wake up during surgery. I said, but I saw one of you. You guys were, like, in there working on me. Everyone was. Everyone had left the room, but I saw one person come in. They said, no, you didn't wake up during the surgery. And I said, what color scrubs do you guys wear in surgery? They said, well, we wear green. I said, there wasn't somebody in there wearing white scrubs. And that's when the lady said, look, I'm not a believer, but occasionally you will see people that you think that you know. And another nurse came over and said, you saw someone who's passed away. I asked my mom then when she came, who this person was. And. And because it looked like one of my aunts. And then I was reminded that my grandmother gave birth to a daughter named Joanne, who had died at a couple days after birth from congenital heart disease. She wasn't able to make it because the surgery techniques that were available at my. When I needed mine were not available then. So for. For moms and dads out there, this was why my mother was very concerned even more about my situation, because she experienced her sister dying. And I can't even imagine what that felt like for my grandmother, for anybody who has lost a child. And so. So apparently, I believe that was my Aunt Joanne, who died. For whatever reason, at that time in my life, I had that experience. And obviously, there's a lot of science that can say it happened because of this and this and this. But for me, I'd have to have them prove that to me and then prove it again, and we could go into all that. But this was an experience that I needed, and it helped shape within me this overwhelming love for my family. So I. Whether it really happened or not is irrelevant. The principle I learned out of it is what I keep with me, which is.

John Dehlin [00:28:00] Which is what

Paul Cardall [00:28:04] we go through. These things that are tremendously hard. We suffer. But there's a reminder that family loves you, family cares for you, that there's people cheering you on, and that you're not alone. So that's the principle that I learned that I've taken with me through my entire life, is that somebody cares about you, somebody understands what you're going through. And whatever experience you have, whether it's supernatural or literal, remember those experiences, because they, for me, have really been a blessing.

John Dehlin [00:28:50] You were in what city? It was Salt Lake City. Right.

Paul Cardall [00:28:53] I was at Primary Children's Hospital in the Avenues, and then right after that, they built the new hospital over by the University of Utah.

John Dehlin [00:29:04] But your. Your home was in Holiday, is that right?

Paul Cardall [00:29:07] We grew up in a new suburb in Cottonwood Heights, and then at age 12, moved to Mill Creek. Grandpa had a family farm. You know, President Kimball was big on farming together. Talked to everybody about having a garden, and my grandfather had a garden, and all the cousins, I mean, the Laytons, the Cardall. There are so many of us, hundreds that are living just from my grandparents. We would all go to the farm and irrigate. We'd put on the boots and we'd learn how to. How to prune peaches and trees and plums and, you know, because we did the bottling, the canning, all this amazing pioneer food that's passed down, and it's kind of sad to see a lot of that go away. My brother still cans pickles, bottles pickles These are recipes that have been passed down. Growing up, our family outside of the garden ran snow girls ice cream. So we had ice cream every night as part of the tradition. And the prophet Saul loved snow groves ice cream. President Monson was always there. It was great. It's beautiful.

John Dehlin [00:30:25] Your family ran snow groves.

Paul Cardall [00:30:29] We have an aunt. We have a great, great. A great grandfather that started snow groves ice cream.

John Dehlin [00:30:34] Fun.

Paul Cardall [00:30:35] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:30:36] So one of our listeners says Paul had the best tree fort in the backyard. That's Jason Crawford.

Paul Cardall [00:30:43] Oh, Jason. Hi, Jason. Jason was the neighbor across the street. My dad was the bishop, and the Crawfords were great. They were great neighbors. See, we grew up in this suburb. Everybody was building houses, and so we would explore, and it was like. I almost say. I was gonna say it's like the buttercream gang. For those that know what the buttercream gang is, it's kind of like the Goonies. It was a lot of fun over there.

Teen Years and Early Heart Surgeries

John Dehlin [00:31:11] So, okay, so you're. You're living in kind of Mill Creek area. You have this heart surgery. The second one. The second one in your teen years. Was it 12 or 13? Is that what you said?

Paul Cardall [00:31:21] So I was 14.

John Dehlin [00:31:22] 14. Okay.

Paul Cardall [00:31:24] And then heart surgery.

John Dehlin [00:31:26] And you took. They reconstructed your heart, and you took away from that surgery the love of family. Did you. Did you believe that. That God intervened in the surgery or God helped to make that surgery successful?

Paul Cardall [00:31:40] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:31:41] And were there priesthood blessings and all that stuff?

Paul Cardall [00:31:44] Yes, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:31:45] Okay.

Paul Cardall [00:31:46] We had so many priesthood blessings. There was one blessing from my stake president. It was really powerful. He commanded my body. Body to heal, which I thought was interesting, because later, my cardiologist, who was very concerned because there were complications during that surgery. They had to put in a pacemaker. They had to open up my chest a second time. That pacemaker failed. And by that time, I. I had said to my dad, I don't want to live. Like, let me just go home to God. I want to be with heavenly Father. I. I don't want to go through this. I. I don't want a lifetime of illness, and I don't want to be a burden to you. I don't want to be a burden to anyone. And my dad, I. He was awesome. He goes, you go in there and you have that surgery, and then you come out and live because we love you. It was so powerful, direct, and it's what I needed. So it was a very complex surgery, but out of that, a lot of the foundation of my faith, that's still very strong in my heart, no pun intended, evolved out of that experience. It was, I used to call it my Joseph Smith experience.

John Dehlin [00:33:04] Yeah, I guess you don't call it a near death experience, but a visitation or a vision, something like that. Did you think of it as a vision?

Paul Cardall [00:33:14] It could be a dream, it could be subconscious, it could be just something. I. I'm just wondering how you thought

John Dehlin [00:33:19] of it at that time.

Paul Cardall [00:33:21] I just thought of it as somebody from heaven visiting me.

John Dehlin [00:33:24] Okay, beautiful. Okay. So you, you out of that surgery at 14, I guess you emerged with the pretty strong conviction of the, the gospel as taught by the LDS Church, right?

Paul Cardall [00:33:39] I did, because that's what I knew primarily. You know, just to back up a little bit. My dad reported all the conference and so we would get the brethren's talks before conference would air. And when I turned 12, he got me a nice suit and took me to my first priesthood session. And I followed along with the conference talks in the press box. And no one deviated. It was amazing. President Hinckley deviated briefly, but other than that, no. President Benson was the prophet at the time. I felt a connection because I was right there present watching this unfold. It was amazing. It was inspiring. It was a call to action. It was convince the world of Jesus Christ that he's returned to usher in the millennium. And it's very convincing, it's very powerful and I loved it. It gave me so much identity and I was obsessed in reading everything I could. We read the scriptures together as a family. Every morning I started reading the Book of Mormon and I. The focus was the Book of Mormon because you can get, because the quote from Joseph Smith was you can get nearer to God using the Book of Mormon than you can any other scripture. So that for me said the Book of Mormon is more important than the Bible. So I put the New Testament to the side and I would focus on the Bible also because the Book of the New Testament was considered not to be translated correctly from one of our articles of faith. We believe in the, the Bible as far as it's translated correctly.

John Dehlin [00:35:43] Right.

Paul Cardall [00:35:44] So right. Right away the Bible was not good enough.

John Dehlin [00:35:50] But the Book of Mormon was your thing.

Paul Cardall [00:35:52] Oh yeah. Because the Book of Mormon was revealed scripture translated. Right. By ancient records of, of this family that we all connected with because we have siblings and we don't get along sometimes as brothers and, and the culmination of Jesus coming. I remember reading one scripture that stuck with me where I felt a very powerful spirit. And it's not until recent and we'll. I won't talk about it. The effects of it. But what the scripture said was, if ye keep my commandments, ye shall prosper in the land. And that was in Nephi. So right off the bat, I thought, I have to do this and this and this to have happiness and to be wealthy, to prosper, to have things just kind of roll. I also thought that's how I'm gonna live because I have a heart defect. I could die any day. My doctors are telling me I could die. The statistics don't look good. I go in routinely to get pacemakers a minute out of the hospital, getting X rays, ultrasounds, all kinds of things. Then, you know, it's like, if I can just be a good person, keep the commandments. Try to avoid, as you're growing, you know, into maturity of puberty, try to avoid dirty thoughts, you know, don't look at Sports Illustrated swimwear. Avoid all that stuff. And you do the best you can. But ironically, Boy Scouts is where I first saw pornography, because the Boy Scouts had it. So you have to go through all those things, learn to, to, to deal with those things. Because obviously the goal is to stay alive. And you do that by keeping the commandments and then you can prosper.

Being a Mormon Teenager and Young Faith

John Dehlin [00:38:07] So what? So let's just, let's just kind of talk about your teen years, you know, up until your mission. What type of Mormon kid were you? And were you like super righteous Nephi? Were you layman? Were you a mix of both? Tell us about your teenage years leading up to your mission.

Paul Cardall [00:38:27] This is a little sarcastic remark. I would say it was more like I Nephi, always talking in third person. A little self righteous. Because I didn't have. Religion became my identity, my faith became my identity. Because I was born for a purpose, for a reason. Why would God give me this defect? You know, why would I have these scars on my chest, all over my body? I have more scars than most people. And sometimes I've said I can't go out and get tattoos because I've got scars and they tell my story. So, yeah, I mean, I think I was the kid that wanted to be the deacons Quorum president was never chosen because I was kind of. I couldn't sit still. I just couldn't sit still. But I was anxious, tired, obnoxious. But when it came to being alone where I could meditate and pray or think about the reality of my situation, that's when I would have deep spiritual experiences and I would, I would kneel by the side of my bed and promise God that I would just be nice to everybody. I'D be a good person, that I'd. I would do everything, that I would do my duty to God, you know, do my duty. I would, I would pull up my tuck in my shirt, wear the tie and go to battle.

Discovering Music and Early Piano Training

John Dehlin [00:40:12] Were you into music as a teen?

Paul Cardall [00:40:15] Yeah, I was obsessed with music. In fact I, I spent all my paper out money. I would sell nightcrawlers as a teenager, whatever job I could get. Ice cream scooper at snow groves. I went out and bought every cassette I could think of. Everybody knows the first album they ever purchased. My first vinyl was Rio by Duran Duran. And then wham. Make It Big. I started buying every Rush album I discovered. Rush, Tom Sawyer, yyz. I was spending all my money on that. I'd taken piano lessons when I was eight years old. Six months just was not very good. But then I started to discover New age piano. Mannheim Steamroller was popular. Yanni used to flip his hair back and all the ladies would go, whoa. And so I was like, I gotta learn to play the piano. And. But I wasn't very good. So I loved music. I was, I mean I would, I would listen to the top 10 every night. My JC Casem. Well, yeah, I was kissing. It was kissing 97.1, Fisher and Todd and then the Bob and Bob and Tom show. Yeah. Everything I could get my hands on.

John Dehlin [00:41:40] Yeah. Okay. But you weren't, you weren't a piano player as a teen.

Paul Cardall [00:41:45] No, no. It wasn't until I was 16 years old. I had a good friend named Dave and Dave was a junior in high school. He was a singer. We'd go to his house, he'd sit down, he'd play Billy Joel and he'd play Heart and Soul with people. And I was envious because you could sit down and play Heart and Soul with somebody and I couldn't play Chopsticks. Dave was hit by a car on a trip and, and killed. And that devastated me and led to going into my parents living room where there was a piano.

John Dehlin [00:42:25] He died.

Paul Cardall [00:42:26] He died. He was a group of friends from Olympus High School going up to a retreat. They were goofing off and someone threw a wallet out the window and he chose to go pick it up. But he got hit by a car. And it devastated me because I didn't understand. I'm the one with a heart defect. We were all talking about how we were going to go on missions. Dave never talked about it. Some of the guys friends started getting mission calls. Dave didn't know where he was going to go. So we used to Say, you know, Dave had been called on a mission early and I was mad because he was perfectly healthy and everybody loved him and I, I wanted to be like him because he was well liked and just a good person. And, you know, you always hear about the kid in high school, everyone loved him and then they end up dying. And I don't know why those things happen, but it somehow unites the school and that was our experience. And I turned inward, went to the piano, and that's where I discovered the tone of the. Just pressing the keys and I pressed three keys and it was a melody and it was so powerful. Music is so convincing. There's such a strong spirit with music that I began to be obsessed. I would play it, play the piano three hours every day. Kids would, Siblings would be like watching tv. So between the piano and the loud TV of Full House or whatever they're watching, you can imagine eight kids in the house was loud. But that was my experience, learning to play the piano.

John Dehlin [00:44:18] I love it. We have a couple comments from listeners that are kind of fun. Rich Bishop. Rich Bischoff writes Musicians and Paper Routes I can relate to. And he says Rush. Yes, I, I've been to Rush Cons. I've been to two Rush concerts. I was a huge Russ fan myself. Sharon's asking if that was Fry. I think she. Is that the last name of your friend who passed away?

Paul Cardall [00:44:43] His name was Dave. Career.

John Dehlin [00:44:45] Okay.

Paul Cardall [00:44:45] All right. I used to sleep out for Rush tickets. I slept out for a Rush concert with a bunch of buddies. We slept out at the Smiths. We ended up getting the tickets. I learned it was on Sunday. Yeah, they didn't advertise when it was. I just went and I didn't go.

John Dehlin [00:45:05] Yeah, I did the same thing. My brother and I got tickets to Sting Dream of the Blue Turtle album. And then we realized that they were on Sunday and we, we thought we were so righteous, we just skipped the Sting concert and felt we were. Felt super good about ourselves.

Paul Cardall [00:45:21] Well, and that tied into. In order for me to prosper in the land, I need to keep commandments for me to stay alive. Because I felt at age 14, I needed to repay back. I needed to pay back Jesus and Heavenly Father for allowing me to stay longer, to keep, for keeping me alive.

John Dehlin [00:45:41] Yeah. You know, and that's, that's a lot of pressure and it gives you a sense of meaning and purpose and drive. So it's. I don't know if it was a double edged sword, but it definitely, it clearly gave you a sense of meaning and Purpose. And I guess we'll get to the part about whether or not it was a lot of pressure. I'm going to read one more comment from a listener. J.D. chico writes, I'm so emotional right now watching this interview. I first learned of Paul watching him play at the Roof restaurant in Salt Lake. Paul's music helped me through my major depression when I didn't want to go on. Thank you, J.D. chico, for sharing that. Yeah, we love comments from our listeners. Okay, so anything else that any crucial part of your story before we talk about your mission?

Paul Cardall [00:46:26] Yeah, I think a lot of my testimony evolved out of, out of listening to Michael McLean's music and afterglow. But it was Kenneth Cope who created doctrinal albums of Joseph Smith, you know, my servant Joseph. A lot of my testimony of Joseph Smith came from listening to Kenneth sing in a. He brought the Joseph Smith that had been elevated down to earth. And so I would listen to that music and I, I started writing church LDS based music, but I couldn't sing, so I would just arrange the hymns. And it was a huge deal to me. And I gave my first performance at Olympus high school in 1991 during concerto night, wrote an entire concerto. We knew it wasn't very good because other people were playing Beethoven and Bach, but our conductor over there, Jack Ashton from the Utah Symphony, who was, he also taught Russian. So in the back of the score, after my performance in front of the school and their parents playing this concerto we wrote for Jack because of all his hard work dealing with this complex, crazy, horrible piece of music in Russian, we wrote, thank God there's no more, right at the very end. So he turns pages, starts laughing right in the middle of the thing. And that was my first, like, experience performing. And it was very contagious because there's a lot of adulation. People tell you how great you are.

John Dehlin [00:48:17] So. So did you get any formal training or were you just playing your music by ear at that point?

Starting Piano Seriously and Early Career

Paul Cardall [00:48:24] So I took piano lessons when I was eight.

John Dehlin [00:48:27] Right. But then, but that didn't take.

Paul Cardall [00:48:30] No, I had a neighbor, it was, it was by ear, but I had a neighbor, Craig Kalin, that taught people in town and I would go to his home and he became a mentor in challenging me to use my ear to arrange certain hymns. So that's kind of how I developed my hymn arrangements and my style. I listen to a lot of Mozart. He, he does a lot of arpeggio, which is your left hand moving all over the place. Combined Mozart with Rush and Yanni and David Lance Deep Ray lynch, all the new age George Winston. And then, you know, obviously there John Schmidt emerged from the piano guys, and he used to just pound that piano. And it was so amazing to watch. I wanted to do that, and it started to happen.

John Dehlin [00:49:34] So this is all pre mission, where you're really starting to compose and arrange and perform in front of people.

Paul Cardall [00:49:40] Yeah. I even got a job at age 18 at a restaurant called the Mark Twain Restaurant. I thought it was a 19th century restaurant. I later learned, because I went on vacation and I came back and it closed. It closed down. I was like, why is it gone? Well, I guess Warren Jeffs had asked the family that owned it to come back down to the St. George area, to move the restaurant down there. I didn't know that it was owned by a polygamist family. They were the. They were the greatest people. They were so kind, so good. I had a tip jar I was making. People were paying me to play the piano. Like, the thought of it was insane. And it was a lot of fun. You know that around that time, I was. I'd been recruited to Salt Lake Community College on a scholarship. I ran their fine arts board. I was able to, as part of that fine arts board, they gave me a budget of almost a million dollars. I was 18 years old. I was in charge of booking people from all over the country. I brought in acts like Carrot Top. We had Harry Connick Jr. Come. We invited John Schmidt a lot. Got all the guys I wanted to meet. Kurt Bester, Michael McLean. We had them all come to the college. I organized this big thing for everyone to watch Schindler's List. Because the film had come out, I was able to find a Holocaust survivor. And the reason I tell you about that is because it was a rated R movie and it was controversial to show Schindler's List of college kids. But I pushed really hard for everyone to be able to see that film because I felt it was so important to see what had happened. Um, so these experiences help shape a lot of leadership in me and management in me, so that later in life, I could run a successful business as a musician, because you don't just go get a job as a pianist and provide for the family. Especially if you have a heart problem, you got to get insurance. There was no preexisting condition insurance at the time. It was very stressful, and I didn't know if I was able to go on a mission because of my heart defect.

John Dehlin [00:52:13] Right. Well, the one part of your story that seems really remarkable to me is If I think about anybody who is performing in front of audiences by 18, the profile is usually like, has been taking piano lessons for eight to 12 years, has been performing all that time, is kind of classically trained, probably was in band, you know, and you know, it's a 10 plus years of training that leads someone to get to that point where they're performing. And it sounds like you were picking this up at 15 or 16, kind of self taught with the mentor and was kind of performing pretty quickly in a way that probably wasn't normal. Is that, is that fair to say? Do I understand your story right or.

Paul Cardall [00:53:04] No, it's, it's not normal at all.

John Dehlin [00:53:06] Yeah.

Paul Cardall [00:53:08] You know, today in Nashville, when I interact with people and I hear about all their training. You know the thing that's interesting, John is in the music business. Majority of the people who are very successful never received formal training. The people that receive formal training and usually work for artists like me because we need help scoring for the orchestra, we need people to help write it down, transcribe. And so the people that have trained really well, that's who you hire. But you know, you take people like Jimi Hendrix and Paul McCartney, they're left handed like me, they don't play the guitar correctly. They are self taught. So I kind of learned like a rock and roller. Just sit down, play, play what feels good. You can tell if it's not very good. And the main reason I kept doing it was because people were asking me play it again. But if people aren't asking you to play your music again, I don't think it's wise to traditionally go into music to be an artist. But you can still go into the music business and help support artists.

John Dehlin [00:54:23] So was it fair to say that by 18 or 20 your, your sight reading abilities were pretty low?

Paul Cardall [00:54:31] Oh, I, I still don't read music very well.

John Dehlin [00:54:34] You still can't read music. So it's all by ear for you now?

Paul Cardall [00:54:39] Because it's been in front of me enough, I just don't use it. And I've never really. I do what's called I chart. I used to call it my own reformed Egyptian. You would chart what it is and other musicians that play by ear would understand the root notes. There's a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 system in Nashville for songwriting that everybody knows because there's only, you know, so many notes in a chord or a scale. And so you have to figure out how to communicate that if you don't know the actual original writing. So we had to come up with my own type of writing. And you can see, John, why I felt such a connection to Joseph Smith. I was fascinated by the fact that he had a gift and all of a sudden he could do these amazing things. And I felt such a connection. I didn't feel a connection to Jesus Christ because I hadn't really dove into the New Testament yet at that time. I'd taken a lot of seminary. Like I sat in front for seminary. I was, I got to know my teachers, I wanted to know everything. And every conversation I had was church history that I had been taught. At 18, I was reading the Journal of Discourses. I had read the Book of Mormon several times. I'd read A Way to Perfection, Keys to Theology by Parley P. Pratt, which is Parley P. Pratt's book. Keys to the Science of Theology is one of my favorite books. Even now. I think it's fascinating. It's a fascinating read and still quite prophetic because in there he talks about how at the time we won't be satisfied traveling a certain mileage per day, that we would come up with a way to use the air. And so you read those types of things at an 18 year old and you go, parley P. Pratt envisioned airplanes. Well, he didn't envision airplanes. He just knew there was a need and was really intelligent and could process that out and write it down For a young, impressionable 18 year old to go, wow, that's. Yeah, that's another vindication of these men are very special, very important. I read conference talks, I read Mormon doctrine, I read answers to gospel questions. I mean, you name it, I was obsessed and loved it. Found my identity, understanding church history. Right, that church history.

John Dehlin [00:57:41] So I'm curious if you at all were like me or not. You know, for me, I love the church. I wanted it to be true, but I needed that witness because I'd been taught that you're supposed to get a witness. And so the whole Moroni's promise thing, for me it was really important to pray and try and get a witness that would let me know for sure it was true. Did you have any of those types of battles or struggles prior to your mission of like, wait, I'm not sure it's true or were you one of those where you just always felt like you knew it was true

Paul Cardall [00:58:16] at age 13 and 14 with those surgeries were when I knew that all of this, everything, that God had ownership of it all, that there is a kind, loving God and at that time it was my heavenly Father and I felt such a connection to him. But as far as the Book of Mormon, I just accepted it because I didn't know anything else to question it. And if it was just part of the process of growing up as a member of the LDS faith. I didn't care for the, the war. I thought the book was very violent. I thought that I didn't care for reading about these guys going to battle. I didn't like a lot of things, but I also loved a lot of things like Second Nephi chapter two helped me understand that we're supposed to have joy. Men are that they might have joy. So I was waiting for that fruit to come into fruition and understand what really joy is. I thought if I read this, I'll be happy. But as far as like, the only time I felt the spirit really strong was when I read that scripture in Nephi. If you keep my commandments, ye shall prosper in the land. It was a reward system that was deeply ingrained into my mind and my heart because I wanted to survive, I wanted to live, so I needed to do that. I love the chapters in at the beginning of 4th Nephi, where there was peace and no war. And I, I, I really was into Captain Moroni. He didn't want to go to battle. And he compared battles, the war, to the battles we face in life. So I connected with that. But I never felt like that was anything like the Old Testament or when we did study the New Testament in seminary, I didn't think it was like the New Testament, but I don't know that I ever got a real shot at the New Testament or the Old Testament. Because in seminary when you study the Old Testament, you're studying the Pearl grade price, you're studying the Book of Abraham, and then you kind of reference the Old Testament. But CES has a format of how you learn, of how you learn. So it was carefully crafted so that we wouldn't ask too many deep questions. But then same with the New Testament. Like Joseph Smith had re translated parts and there was all this commentary. So we didn't really get a chance to dive in verse for verse. Everything was out of context in a beautifully crafted way to help us because the agenda was to help us live a beautiful life, to be happy, to, to avoid evil and to prosper in the land.

John Dehlin [01:01:59] Right. Okay, so anything you want to tell us about your mission before we kind of jump into post mission life? We can dive in a bit or just kind of, you can tell us where you went and how it was.

Mission, Marriage, and Life After Mission

Paul Cardall [01:02:11] Overall, the mission had a big impact on me, because I didn't know if I was able to go. They let me go. I went to California, San Bernardino, and I was assigned the former manager of church curriculum, Calvin Stevens, who was key in writing church history in the fullness of times. And that is the institute manual that the church used for such a long time. He was instrumental in working with President Packer, everyone on church curriculum and articulating what the Gospel of Jesus Christ in terms of the restoration means, teachings of the living prophets. He was involved in that. He went to school with Bruce R. McConkie's son and would tell us that there would be these difficult gospel questions come up at BYU. And after class, I don't know which McConkie it was, but he would tell President, do you want to know what my dad has to say about that? And his dad was Bruce R. McConkey. Do you want to know what my grandfather had to say about that? And Bruce R. McConkie had married the son of Joseph Fielding Smith, who was the grandson of Hiram.

John Dehlin [01:03:34] He married. Wait, Bruce Armaconki married the daughter of Joseph Fielding Smith?

Paul Cardall [01:03:39] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:03:39] Joseph Fielding Smith was the son of Joseph F. Smith, and then Joseph F. Smith was the son of Hiram Smith. Is that right?

Paul Cardall [01:03:47] Yes. Joseph F. Smith, the cousin of another Joseph Smith iii. Great, weren't they?

John Dehlin [01:03:55] Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so a lot of doctrinaires on your mission.

Paul Cardall [01:04:02] Yeah. And if we were zone of the month, meaning if we had baptized more than any other zone, we were allowed to have a special discourse at the mission home, and the president would unlock the meaning behind parts of the book of Revelation and Isaiah, particularly Isaiah 49, because Isaiah 49 is one of the most important chapters that the restoration movement uses to talk about the gathering of Israel and the coming of the millennium and the role of the tribe of Ephraim in that.

John Dehlin [01:04:43] And that's. I'm just dying to know whether teenage Mormon boys and girls, or even teenage orthodox, you know, young adult Mormon boys and girls have the same fascination with. With doctrine, with theology, with, you know, the sign of the times and the. The last days. Like in the 80s. Growing up, that was such an intense part of my own identity, my own curiosity. I wanted miracles. I wanted special spiritual experiences in the temple. I wanted. I. I thought we were in the last days and we were Saturday's warrior and we were here to usher in the millennium. And we were reading Bruce R. McConkey as if that was even more scripture than scripture. Right. And. And we were. I was just. My conference talks were almost more important to me than the scriptures themselves because the. It's the words of the living prophets. And I wonder if young adult and young teenage members of the church today have that same level of intensity because when you're describing this idea that if you get enough baptisms, you get to sit at the feet of some really intense Mormon spiritual giant scholar that will expound to you the truths of the restoration and, and dig into the meat of the second Coming, like that's all. That was all what fed me back then. So I really relate to that well.

Paul Cardall [01:06:16] It's the same scenario with me. It was like, I think though they were more bold in their approach at the time because they were also still writing books instead of having their talks compiled into published works. But keep in mind, John, my dad, he was on the front lines. My father was my hero and still is. Still. He's still my hero. My father was on the front lines. He broke the story that in 1978 that every worthy male could receive all the blessings. That was a big day for our family. I was only five years old. He was in the tomb with Spencer W. Kimball, asked, you know, is this president where Jesus was laid? And President Kimball said, it doesn't matter, he's not here. And he was with President Hinckley in England. President Benson, when President Benson gave the Queen the. The anniversary edition of the Book of Mormon, my dad was on the. He would come and tell these miraculous, amazing stories. These were my superheroes, these amazing people. And to some extent, because of the dedication and the loyalty of who they are, I have so much respect for them as well, even to this day. And. And so, you know, my entire life my was centered on my identity as a member of the tribe of Ephraim in the household of faith. And this unlocking of scripture that our mission president would gave us. I mean missionaries, we'd be like, wow, this is kind of like a foreshadow of receiving a second anointing where maybe for the faithful down the line we'll get that second anointing. You know, I was thinking about that when I was 19. I remember finding a. As missionaries, we had to move into a mobile home that some former missionaries lived in. And we went into a closet. These missionaries that had lived there were off doing. They were enjoying themselves. And we reopened this trailer home. And in the corner all dusty was every conference talk from Bruce Armaconki. So what we do, we ordered pizza, Mountain Dew stayed up all night. And we read every talk from, from, from him and underlined, cross referenced with the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, other prophets, and it. We were on fire.

John Dehlin [01:09:26] So, yeah, we. We kind of had a testimony of God and Jesus, but we really had a testimony of Bruce Armaconki. Right?

Paul Cardall [01:09:34] I love Bruce. Yeah, I love Bruce. And, you know, people are tough on Bruce, and I get it. But the one thing about Bruce R. McConkie that I really admire is that he admitted he was wrong. He apologized for what he had put in Mormon doctrine. He was one of the first. We know when that revelation came, which pretty much is the brethren coming to a. A decision that this thing needs to happen now, because they've been, you know, they'd received authority from the laying on of hands. They hold the keys. So whatever they do is the voice of God. It's not like they receive some mighty. It's not like Jesus is telling them exactly what to do. It's whatever they do is revelation because they act for him. So, yeah, I mean, it was like we were that close to God because, you know, it's not to joke, but it's like 2 to 6 degrees from Kevin Bacon. You know, some of us are 2 degrees from Kevin Bacon now. You know, having this connection, but to God, to Heavenly Father, you know, I do kind of feel like Jesus was kind of pushed to the side a little bit at that time. It's not like it is now. He was kind of a third party. He helped get you to the Father the way these prophets would get you to the Father. Like, in my mind, I remember kind of putting them on the same level because they were brothers, they were high priests. And President Benson at the time was the high priest. He was the guy in charge, the mouthpiece. And, yeah, so it was interesting. I still remember wondering, why don't we have more of a focus on that second discussion, which was all about Jesus, Because I thought that was the heart of the message, that this is not just good news, it's the best news ever, you know, that there's a God willing to redeem you. I was wondering.

John Dehlin [01:11:59] That's what I'm trying to say is that I think maybe a criticism that some will have of Mormonism, and I know we'll get into this later, certainly a criticism that many traditional Christians have and a criticism that some actual Mormons have is, is that maybe, you know, we're named after Christ and we certainly consider ourselves Christians and we certainly teach about Christ and believe in the Bible. But I think especially when you and I were growing up, there was much more of an emphasis on Joseph Smith. And even on modern day prophets, like whoever the current prophet is or, or the Book of Mormon or Joseph Smith, you might hear Joseph Smith's name mentioned eight times for every time that Jesus name is mentioned. If you don't count the prayers. Right, right.

Paul Cardall [01:12:45] Because you would stand up and you bear your testimony. I know this church is true. I know Joseph Smith is a prophet. I love my family. In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

John Dehlin [01:12:54] Right? Yeah, yeah.

Paul Cardall [01:12:55] And even back then I would sit in testimony meetings as a missionary and go, is somebody going to mention Jesus today?

John Dehlin [01:13:07] Yeah.

Paul Cardall [01:13:07] Is anyone going to mention the guy that actually did, did the job to, to redeem us? But then you start to hear quotes like from my ancestor John Taylor that Joseph Smith has done more for the salvation of man than anyone except Jesus. Like Jesus got a little bit of, a little bit of attention right there. And then in the Book of Mormon they give him, you know, a couple chapters in Third Nephi and everything's obviously a culmination up to that. And they're living the law of Moses even though they're the tribe of Ephraim. And technically they're not supposed to live the law of Moses because only the tribe of Levi is. So that's one problem, but that's leading up to Christ coming. And so I was always, I thought we, we couldn't, I didn't want our investigators to have a testimony of Joseph Smith. I wanted them to have a testimony of Jesus Christ, the guy that actually did the job because Joseph had died and there were successors. And you know, it was great that he'd restored things, this information, given us the Book of Mormon. And I love Joseph and I preached Joseph and testified to Joseph, but Jesus was, I, I wanted more of that, but I, I, I didn't know how to get it.

John Dehlin [01:14:38] So let's talk about how your life progressed from your mission to, to the point where things start getting complicated.

Paul Cardall [01:14:48] Well, I came home and I went back to college quickly and started dating and I dated everyone in our family. Pretty much married somebody within two or three miles or another high school over the oldest. We all married. A couple of us married within the stake. So I, I was taken by this girl in the neighborhood who was much younger than me, friends with my brother. And part of the attraction was because she loved piano music and her brother played the piano and he became kind of a mentor as well. I would sit and watch him play the piano and it was just fascinating and we just were connected. And over a four year period we, we dated and then eventually got Married. My grandfather sealed us in the Salt Lake Temple. It was a beautiful day. She decided to become a nurse because I couldn't get insurance at the time. There was no insurance for people with pre existing condition. It was really expensive. I had to pay as a college kid twelve hundred dollars a month on the COBRA plan from the state of Utah. And so to do that I was another. I was a student leader at the college. Back to managing the fine arts council, I was. By then I had gotten a job in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. Because when I was on my mission it was Hotel Utah. Came home, it was the Joseph Smith building. And I went in that building and there's that beautiful piano that says with the sign that says don't touch. So I got permission to touch it. And the manager asked me if I wanted a job at the top of the restaurant. So I thought that was cool because I'd made it to the top of something at that point and was able to bring in money. They were paying me. I had a tip jar. I was making a thousand bucks a weekend playing music at the roof. And that's the restaurant that overlooks the temple. And that would, I'd continue to do that. Playing at Nordstrom's during the holidays. I started doing firesides. By the time I was married, I had done probably 3, 400 firesides. Spoken to half a million Latter Day Saints all over the country. I'd been an EFY counselor for Brigham Young University. Very plugged in.

John Dehlin [01:17:37] How did you get on that circuit? Because that's probably not an easy circuit to get on. I mean, you get off your mission, how do you start getting on the circuit of doing firesides?

Paul Cardall [01:17:47] So I never solicited. I never solicited. Somebody just asked me, I really like your music. Will you play this? Will you come play a fireside? Will you come talk and share your testimony? They knew I was a returned missionary. Some people would hear me at the roof and just word of mouth. And then I'd go into a ward and the relief society from the other ward president would be like, can you come to our ward? So I got to the point where I could only go out and do stakes. And then I got to the point where it was multi stakes because I was doing so many. But keep in mind, John, you know, I needed to prosper in the land, I needed to provide for my wife. And I thought if I just go out and preach and, and share my music, I'm part of God's army and I'm going to be provided for Everything's going to work out. I'll get the insurance. I'll be able to have kids. I'll be able to feed my kids, pay the bills. I was deeply worried about all this stuff.

John Dehlin [01:19:04] So would you have. When you were dating your wife, your. Your first wife, when you were, you know, planning your life with her, would you have said to her, I'm going to be a professional musician. I'm going to get recording contracts. I'm gonna, you know, play to play, to sell at crowds? Was that kind of in your. In your mind, as. As your vision, as your dream for yourself, as your aspiration?

Paul Cardall [01:19:32] In. In a roundabout way, because I was one that just believed you could do whatever you set your mind to do. You know, I. I, like, went back at the college. I'm gonna get Carrot Top. Carrot Top was new. I called. I made it happen. I just make things happen. But part of the reason I in that marriage was she'd come from a pretty tough situation. Her mother had passed away, and her father was a widow. And there was some discouragement to her, some warning that, you know, your husband might die. Do you really want to do that? And I wanted to prove to her, to everybody, that God still performs miracles, that I can move a mountain. And when I say move a mountain, the way I think is I'm going to hire the largest construction firm, and we're going to start literally picking up soil and moving it to another location. I don't think mystically, like, I'm gonna, you know, be like a superman and move it. I literally think things can happen. It's all about perspective, but it was about proving to people. And she'd had a couple of siblings that were musicians that struggled to make money. And so there was a lot of doubt that I could pull it off. And when someone says you can't do it, like you're going to die because you have a heart problem. I'm going to prove that God is a God of miracles. And I still believe that. But our minds are so powerful, and what we think is what we are and what we become. And I'm big on power of intention, kind of the law of attraction, manifesting not in a new age or mystical way. It's just common sense. Move a mountain, Hire a construction company.

John Dehlin [01:21:47] Right. Okay. So how did. How did your life and your career progress? Sounds like you're about to hit it big.

Breaking Into the Music Industry

Paul Cardall [01:21:57] So I was playing at Nordstrom's, and a woman heard me play the song I'd written for my friend that had died the first song and she's very emotional, came over just crying. She asked me the name of the song. And she had a husband who's also name was Dave, and he had passed away four years earlier and actually used to own the store before they sold it to Nordstrom's. And she introduced me to Richard Paul Evans, who wrote the Christmas Box that was brand new. And Richard reached out because his wife Carrie really liked the cassette tape that I had made called Sign of Affection that I was selling at the roof and at Nordstrom's. I had the girls at the makeup counter send people to buy, to buy my album. And I would give them a cut if they got somebody to buy it. So a lot of the business techniques happened early, but I, I was starting to understand the business aspect. I read Billboard magazine, I wanted to know how the music business worked. VH1 had behind the Music. So I watched all the crash and burns of Def Leppard, Metallica, everybody, and knew what not to do and what to do from a lot of that stuff. So when Richard Evans called me, he wanted music inspired by his book. And so that was kind of an introduction into working with somebody that had a large audience. And I would travel the country with him. He would give firesides and I'd play. And that's when more firesides started coming my way. Institutes of religions had me come and I went all at my own expense. I paid for my flight, I paid for my hotel because I was donating my time. I'd made a covenant in the temple to donate my time and talents. And I was always blessed. We always had what we needed. Faithful tithe payer, all that stuff. Principles I still believe in. You have to really be aggressive in the music business and understand how it works before you can go into it. Richard Paul Evans became my mentor in how to produce product that was meaningful, that was purpose, had a purpose that would make the world better rather than numb it with, you know. So my music became a source for people that had experienced grief. And I began to get email after email because the Internet started to happen. Letters of people going, you know, my child with cancer, we passed away. Listening to your music in the hospital, or my wife gave birth to your music. So my music became a soundtrack to people at the most monumental moments of their lives.

John Dehlin [01:25:09] So was that first song, the first one that kind of hit big Life and Death, was that the first song?

Paul Cardall [01:25:16] It was called Dave's Farewell.

John Dehlin [01:25:21] That was the first one. That was before you'd recorded hymns or anything like that.

Paul Cardall [01:25:25] Yeah. So I started you know, I started it, so pretty much just. If you want to jump forward a little bit.

John Dehlin [01:25:30] No, no, I just want to. I just want to. We can't play that then, can we? Or can we play that?

Paul Cardall [01:25:36] Life and death came several years later, So I don't know.

John Dehlin [01:25:41] But. No, but I'm saying Dave's Farewell. Is that something we can play?

Paul Cardall [01:25:46] I think. Yeah. I think you could pull it up there on YouTube somewhere. Just a couple minutes of it. You know, when you listen closely to that song, you'll hear influences. You'll hear some Utah influences, like Kurt Bester. You'll hear Mozart and Kurt Bester kind of were my two go to with the music.

John Dehlin [01:26:10] So you don't have a video of that? It's just the music, right?

Paul Cardall [01:26:12] It's just the music. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:26:14] Okay, I'll. I'll go ahead and just play a little bit of that, just so that people can get a sense of it. Is that okay? Is this it?

Paul Cardall [01:26:20] Yeah, that's me. That's me trying to be like John Schmidt at the beginning. It's very meditative.

John Dehlin [01:27:02] We have a comment from a listener that I'll show while. While the music's going. Charlotte writes, I love Paul Cardall's Life and Death. Now that's coming. That's the song we're going to play in a bit. She plays along with her Native American flute. She says, we'll come to that song in just a second. But. So this is the first song that you kind of recorded and that really was a hit, Is that right?

Paul Cardall [01:27:25] Yeah, I just was playing this everywhere, and people would ask me to play it again. At the very end. I put I hope they call me on a mission because I was giving the analogy through the song that Dave had his farewell early with that funeral, that even though he died before age of 19, he'd been called to the spirit world.

John Dehlin [01:27:50] Right. Well, that's beautiful. That's beautiful, Paul. I'm loving it.

Paul Cardall [01:27:56] That's so old and painful to listen to.

John Dehlin [01:27:59] Okay, well, I like it. So there. Okay, so that was your first. That was. That was your first kind of hit, so to speak, that got you really on the circuit with Richard Paul Evans. And that really got you kind of a bigger and a bigger name.

Paul Cardall [01:28:15] Yeah. And with Richard Paul Evans, he was, you know, I spent a couple years with him, and then he gave me the rights to the Christmas Box. So I was able to go out and do a deal with Virgin Records. And I was signed to my first major label, Virgin Records. I remember going into Virgin Records and Janet Jackson, the Rolling Stones. And here I was, this Mormon kid from Utah with a couple piano cassettes and the Christmas box album and they had me do another album. But then Napster happened and the Internet just transformed the music industry. So I knew something good was coming for the independent musician. So I grabbed an attorney, got out of my contract, started my own record label, Stone Angel Music, started releasing hymns, the Hymns Collection, arrangements of hymns and signed another artist, a cellist that played everywhere with me named Steven Sharp Nelson, who's now in the Piano Guys. So I was involved in convincing him that cello music could sell well within our, our culture.

John Dehlin [01:29:38] Really, really quick like this, that, that, I don't want to jump over that too quickly. Although you may or may not want to talk about it. But when you're on, when you're on a label with like Janet Jackson and you know, really, really well known famous people, it's kind of gutsy to bail from that label, right? I mean so many people never get that, that initial deal with the label.

Paul Cardall [01:30:04] Well, record laborers are vultured capitalists. And I knew what the labels knew from studying on my own Billboard Magazine. All you need to know about the music business. So I ran into problems with labels because I had to guide them. Plus my music was personalized, it was Christ centered, it was LDS restoration songs. And even though a lot of my audience were not Latter Day Saints, I knew what it needed. But everything was evolving into smooth jazz. I don't know if you remember all the smooth jazz that happened. I, I, I just, I could not stand the smooth jazz. And that was part of my decision because they wanted.

John Dehlin [01:30:54] Is that Kenny G? Is that Kenny G?

Paul Cardall [01:30:56] Well, it started with Dave Cos Hankini and Kenny KG does, but he's more beautiful melodic adult contemporary versus the white man jazz.

John Dehlin [01:31:14] Right? Well, I still think that's, I still think that's gutsy to get out of your contract and to start your own record label. That's all really gutsy stuff. Especially if you're, you know, worried about money going out on your own. I mean, yes, yes, the record labels can be in our vultures, but like you can go out on your own and make nothing, right or just lose your shirt, right? That's kind of risky.

Paul Cardall [01:31:38] Well, you know, as a member of the church, I was going on promptings and I felt led and I still feel led in what I do. I felt that just because it was Janet Jackson that didn't mean anything to me other than maybe we could sell a lot of records. But when you have a Royalty, that's like a dollar per record. They have to sell, you know, a lot of records for me to make what I'm making. If I only sell 10, 20, 30, where you get $10 a record the way it was back then. So why stick with something unless you're vain and there is some vanity in there. But I wanted to start my own label. I was passionate about providing good quality product for the Deseret Bookstore. I had developed a relationship with Deseret Book. Finally that took a lot of time. I had to prove I could sell to get on the shelf. And Deseret Book for those that are not from Utah, Deseret Book was like the local music because majority of people back then were lds living here. We'd shop there for our music and that's where your music needed to be. So you either fit in that box or you didn't. And there was, you know, there was a local company that would distribute to the Walmarts. But what that did was end up solidifying me in the the marketplace. And when I started my label, we had convinced Deseret Book. Even Jeff Simpson, who started to run Deseret Book, finally got them to report to Soundscan and Soundscan reports to Billboard. So I started to have Billboard charting albums. My first album after that debuted in the top 10 on a new age Billboard chart. I was up there with Yanni and Jim Brickman and George Winston and I was getting places where not a lot of the les musicians had ever been.

John Dehlin [01:34:02] You said the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Paul Cardall [01:34:04] Yeah. So on my product, my music and the Tabernacle Choir, we were on the charts and other artists started to show up on the charts as we began to teach Tezra a book they knew from working in the industry. But I, we spent a lot of time talking about the importance of reporting to SoundScan the way that their books report to the with the ISBNs so they can get on the New York Times bestseller list. Because I was passionate that we can fulfill a prophecy that President Kimball talked about in 1977. And that prophecy talks about how because we have the fullness of the gospel, we know where the three act play pre existence, this life and the next, that we should be creating music that is so beautiful and gorgeous that it transcends everything else above the Janet Jackson's and all that stuff. So. So that it's like Mozart and Beethoven and that it's classic, that it's not classical, but that it stands the test of time. And Kimball would say in that BYU talk that Imagine if Mozart had the fullness of the gospel or Rembrandt. Could they have? What would they have given us? So I was on a mission to fulfill that. Passionate. Every musician who I've ever interacted with knows. Knows my passion for God, but every LDS musician knows my passion for helping them get on the charts to bring some notoriety to Utah. And you started to see a slew of. I mean, the classical chart, Billboard chart is dominated by members of the LDS Church today. Lindsey Sterling Gentry, Jenny Oakes Baker, Josh Wright, the piano guys, the Five Browns

John Dehlin [01:36:21] a few years ago, at least, right?

Deseret Book, Record Label, and Music's Healing Power

Paul Cardall [01:36:22] Yeah, the Five Browns, all of this. The Deseret Book is. Deseret Book is so powerful. I saw them as competitive to Sony with their distribution power, and they're an amazing resource for getting quality product into people's homes. And I saw the value of what they're doing. Plus, I was passionate about the mission and purpose of Desiree Book, which is to enrich our lives and make the world better through art and books and music. So I was on a mission to help fulfill President Kimball's. Ironically, President Kimball's prophecy. He's just repeating a talk that John Taylor gave in the Journal of Discourses, who talked about. He wanted everyone in Utah, you know, after Brigham had died. And Brigham was the first to. Brigham Young was the first to bring culture to Utah. I mean, well, they were the first to come here, but a theater, and there used to be all these dances and parties and, you know, Joseph Smith used to throw parties in the temple. And. And then John Taylor was like, we need to be a very cultured people. So we take the arts very serious and have used music as a powerful communicator to point back to here so that our missionaries can go out and tell the world. Oh, you've heard the Tabernacle Choir. Oh, you know Donny Osmond. Oh, you've heard of the piano guys. Oh, you know, and so, yeah, let's

John Dehlin [01:38:11] go ahead and play a song from the hymns collection. Is that okay?

Paul Cardall [01:38:15] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:38:16] So is. Is. Is that okay to. In your chronology, is this an okay time to play?

Paul Cardall [01:38:21] So Joseph's First Prayer was one of the hymns that went viral in streaming radio. There are more Islamic people who have streamed Joseph Smith's first prayer than Latter Day Saints. There are more people in Egypt that have streamed Joseph's first prayer than in Provo, Utah. Yeah. I mean, so my interpretation of the first vision, or as my president of my mission would call it, the first Visitation, not a vision. This is. Yeah, this is Joseph Smith's first prayer on my hymns collection.

John Dehlin [01:39:04] Is that one of your first albums or one of your earliest albums?

Paul Cardall [01:39:07] Yeah, the hymns collection was my third album. It was the hymns, and then I did hymns too, and created the hymns collection later.

John Dehlin [01:39:18] When we think about the albums that maybe the most missionaries would have played, the ones that my audience might be most familiar with. Would it be this one?

Paul Cardall [01:39:30] Yeah, it would be this album because the church specifically asked to play it on Temple Square, so we licensed to them. I gave up the license. Right. Technically you're supposed to pay for the right, but I just gave it to them. And then they use this in the MTC today for missionaries that have depression, they send them into a room and they listen to music to help them. And so this is a very important. And missionaries are given this album by their parents. So it's. It is part of Mormon culture and a soundtrack to the mission life.

John Dehlin [01:40:10] Well, let's go ahead and play a little bit and if you want, you can. You can kind of talk a little bit about anything you want to talk about while it's playing.

Paul Cardall [01:40:24] Yeah, just an interesting scenario because I, I made this video later. This video is about about a year old when President Nelson wanted everyone to be prepared for the anniversary of Joseph's experience. I put this out because for me, John, that experience answered a question, and that is that God answers prayers. But because of the number of people that listen to this worldwide that don't know Mormonism, I've always treated my music that. It's not just for Mormons, it's for everybody. So. So you don't see God or Jesus in this. It implies unexperienced. All the scriptures are from the Bible.

John Dehlin [01:41:31] So you really wanted your music to be universal, not just Mormon.

Paul Cardall [01:41:36] I never wanted it to be just for Mormon because God has more children then the 0.25%. I blend in a lot of nature. It's very therapeutic. And because it's instrumental, it crosses all kinds of languages, barriers. Majority people that listen to this don't know my name. I don't know who I am. And I kind of like that because they just hear it streamed on Pandora, Spotify, in playlists or.

John Dehlin [01:42:23] It's beautiful. It's beautiful cinematography. It's, it's. It's beautiful music. Sarah Ann, one of our listeners just right now, she writes, love your music, Paul. It has helped me through some of the darkest moments of my life, including what I'm going through right now. You are such a blessing to us all. Thank you, Sarah Anne. And. And that's beautiful stuff. And I. Now that I've. No, now that I'm hearing it, I know that I've listened to it because I. I've always loved Mormon music and, you know, Sounds for Sunday and. And all that. And. And I know I've listened to your music quite a bit.

Paul Cardall [01:43:03] No, I appreciate that. And, you know, there's been a lot of health studies, and I've been quite effective at communicating what the music is and what it does, because Harvard Health has been very clear that if you listen to this type of music, and the reason people are having these experiences is because music clinically lowers your immune, boost your immune system, reduces anxiety. This is a Harvard Health women's study. They did also McGill University. They're. They're proving that certain types of music decreases the chances of dementia. There's all these health benefits. The reason they've had to do that is because music has been removed from a lot of public education. But if you can prove clinically that it is going to help our physical body, like physical education, then we can put those courses back in school. So that's been part of my work as well, is music therapy and working with a lot of medical people to communicate the importance of patients, anyone with chronic illness, to listen to music as a tool. And the way we've promoted the music is. Is exactly what it is. We produce music to help you create an atmosphere of peace for whatever. Whatever that source is, whatever that divine power that you try to access. This music is to help prime you, get you in that mindset to feel more joy and peace. And it's been universal. Universal. And probably the most significant was after the first Iraqi War. After the first Iraqi War, I got an email from some gentleman in Baghdad who was a native Iraqi who said he worked on a military base even though the American military killed his family in a bomb. And he was really angry and he wanted to kill himself. He was depressed. He was going to commit suicide. He said he was sweeping the halls and he heard music, you know, kind of like the Pied Piper that leads people. He was drawn to it. He went down the hall, looked in to this officer's office who was listening to Spot Pandora radio for the military. And he writes me and said in that moment he felt Allah tell him, you gotta live. You have a beautiful world. Even though there's a lot of pain, Stay alive and I'll do the best to help you. So he would. But the song was Redeemer, an arrangement I had done called I Know My Redeemer.

John Dehlin [01:46:21] Lives.

Paul Cardall [01:46:22] I had done a version of that called Redeemer that I put out in 2003. This was about six years into my marriage. And at that time, John, I had reached out to another artist, local artist, who was not a Latter Day Saint, who went to the Rock Church in Draper, Utah. His name is Steele Cross White. We became friends and I was fascinated by him because he was a rock and roll guy that went all over the world in a band called Silver Crush that started here in Utah, used to play all the bars. And he was on the road with Charles Crow Creed. His father passed away and he was with his sister, depressed. And he'll admit this, he'll tell you, addicted to escorts. And he'd come home with glitter all over him and drunk. And he's having a. Just a fantastic time. And when his dad died, he went back to the church that he'd grown up in and knew he needed to change his lifestyle because he wasn't happy. So we became friends. And I saw this transit. I saw him from the time he was addicted to this relationship with this higher power, credited as Jesus of Nazareth, who became Jesus Christ. And his obsession with Jesus changed him, gave him purpose. And he ended up going to the Rock Church and helping create the Rock Church. And the Rock Church. A lot of addicts, a lot of people that need recovery, that are Latter Day Saints, would find comfort there because there was no judgment. And there used to be a big thing on the freeway in Utah that said, if you hate religion but love God, there's a place for you. And so that was the Rock Church. And we did an album together. And that album was a way to bridge gaps. It's called Songs of Praise. And I put that Redeemer on there. And that's where it made its way all the way to Iraq after the war, the second war, even though the song was 10 years old, the second war and changed that one person's life. And that was. I mean, I get stuff like that weekly from people who have contemplated suicide that for the time being, have felt loved. Through this music that has no word. Through the music that has no words.

John Dehlin [01:49:25] So

Paul Cardall [01:49:29] a lot of purpose and meaning behind what I've been doing.

John Dehlin [01:49:33] I love it. Well, so let's. Let's keep going with your story. That's beautiful and inspiring stuff, and I'm really glad you're able to share some of that with us because music really does inspire and uplift and heal and transform lives. And I bet you have a million of those stories. Let's continue with The. The narrative of your story up until the point where. Where we play the next song we're going to play, which is life and death.

Living with Heart Failure and Personal Struggles

Paul Cardall [01:50:03] Sure. So in. In my personal life, my marriage was. It was. It was a good marriage. We struggled with my health. I was in and out of the hospital. Several miscarriages. We're not. We're really struggling to have children. This was another scenario where the church gets in your business because you go to the church for guidance, for help. You try to prove to your spouse. I was trying to prove to her that miracles happen, that she ought to have more faith. I was a real jerk about it.

John Dehlin [01:50:44] So you were trying to have kids, but you couldn't. You're having fertility problems.

Paul Cardall [01:50:48] Well, they just weren't coming. No, we were having miscarriages.

John Dehlin [01:50:52] Right.

Paul Cardall [01:50:54] We would. You know, we ended up in. Our marriage had up to nine, I think, nine miscarriages. Where my wife. It required a dnc. Not the Doctrine and Covenants, but a dnc. Ironic that that was the name that they came up with after the Book of Commandments. So anyways, the dnc and we lost twin boys at the er. And that was the most excruciating thing I'd been through. And I would. I would go through a hundred heart surgeries of having doctors saw me open versus losing those twin boys. But it took a toll on us, really. But, you know, you soldier up, you're being tested. God gives you these experiences so you can man up. And, you know, you go to work to get your mind off us. You serve. You know, I. I got deep into the elders quorum. I was elders quorum president, young men's president, secretary to the bishop. I was on the fireside route. I spoke probably three firesides a week, really spreading myself thin for the sake of the call. Even though I was not set apart to do firesides, I felt a responsibility because people were having an impact on the music. And I would hear these stories. I would get these emails daily. But it ties back, John, to my friend dying, because why is he perfectly healthy and he dies in an accident? Why are people deeply depressed and killing themselves? And I'm fighting like hell to live. Can I constantly, I'm in the hospital being told, here's this medication, that medication. And my health really started to get really bad. And that's when I went into heart failure. But ironically, as I went into heart failure, we finally had a child, a beautiful daughter, and that was my life.

John Dehlin [01:53:32] How many years in your marriage was that?

Paul Cardall [01:53:34] 7.

John Dehlin [01:53:35] Seven years into your marriage, you have your first child after many, many, many miscarriages.

Paul Cardall [01:53:42] Yeah. And that really was an answer to prayer. She. Anytime you have kids, you know, kids. Kids have a way of reconnecting you to the divine, to something much greater than yourself, for me, to God. Because they're a beautiful distraction from our own pain and suffering because we're able to love them unconditionally and be with them. And you want to give them. But I had this fear in the back of my mind that, oh, my gosh, I might die on this person. How am I supposed to love her and prepare her at the same time? So I ended up having some anxiety about it, and, you know, it would make me a little short in my conversations, frustrations. And, you know, my wife at the time became more of my best friend than a spouse. Yeah, we struggled just to really connect emotionally, romantically, and a lot of other little things that. But she was an amazing. She's amazing. So I was struggling deeply, and obviously we're both struggling, but I don't want to speak for her. But then I started to go into heart failure and met with my transplant team. And my transplant team was Dale Renlund, who is now an apostle in the quorum of the 12. And keep in mind, at the time, when you grew up with a heart defect, you're going to Primary Children's Medical center and Primary Children's. When you turn 18 years old, you have to leave. So I had to go to a hospital that didn't understand my illness. So my surgery was going to be very complex. But we had a team of people in Utah to try to figure it out. But it was Dale Renlund, a member of the quorum of the 12, who listed me for a heart transplant. And that was difficult to accept because that was the last resort. If I didn't get a heart, I would die. But if I got a heart, it puts a time clock inside of you, because most people with transplants don't live the first year, they don't live the first five. And then if they survive 10 years, they're very lucky, and maybe they'll live longer. Not very many people have survived longer than 25 years. So I knew, getting that, that. And I used to think like this, okay, I'm 37. If I get my heart 25 years from now and it's a success, I'll die. When I'm in my 50s again, I'm not thinking about retirement. I'm thinking about death and resurrection. So it was very. It was very difficult. The other thing that was hard for me to live meant it would be somebody else's heart going in my chest. Someone else dies for me to have new life. And I struggled with that. And I prayed like, lord, I don't know how to accept the heart of one of your children. Because somebody loves them. I don't want them to go through grief. This is a very selfish desire. If I get a heart, maybe it could be from someone who unfortunately doesn't have any family or friends who you can bring home and spoil. That was my thinking.

A Brother's Tragic Death and Its Aftermath

John Dehlin [01:57:42] So

Paul Cardall [01:57:45] I was on the list dealing with all these emotions. Meanwhile, my brother, My brother Brian, who was finishing up his PhD at Northern Arizona University to be an ecological geneticist, the field that he created, he had such an impact on me because he was one of my closest siblings. I used to go up to Utah State when he was up there, and I'd watch him play the guitar in coffee shops. And I. I love the fact that I got a kick out of the fact that he would drink coffee. He'd come home from a mission and decided not to continue in Mormonism. And anytime there were discussions at home with family, he would withdraw to be with the kids because there were not a lot of discussions there. He was just this amazing, very Christlike person, very caring, very giving. But when it came to deep doctrinal stuff, he just kind of left the room. Because that's what you do, really, in Latter Day Saint Holmes, you talk religion and politics. And so he struggled. And when he was doing his master's, had his first episode, was diagnosed as bipolar. And so I had been waiting for hurt for nine months. And this was a Tuesday, my brother was with his wife in St. George and they were heading home to Flagstaff, Arizona to wrap up his PhD dissertation. And this was a Tuesday. And I got a call from my dad and he had told me that there was an accident outside of hurricane, that 911 had been called to try to help him. But instead, two officers from Hurricane showed up and pulled out Tasers. And my brother had been hallucinating and it was hot, so he was not himself. And instead of trying to help him get back into the car because he was running everywhere in and out of traffic and there's not a lot of traffic on that Highway 89. But they tried to help bring him. They didn't try to help. Instead they pulled out brand new Tasers that the police department in Hurricane had just received from Taser International, didn't do the training. They pulled out their Tasers and they shot him in the chest. He fell to the ground. The second. And then the other officer, because my brother started moaning to get up, shot him, killed him. He died. My brother. My dad called and said, your brother has been killed. There's an accident. Your brother's died. Here I was waiting for a heart, waiting for a tragedy. My brother is killed. He can't obviously can't be my organ donor. He's got another blood type. Some people go, well, do you have his heart? No, I don't have his heart. That was the furthest thing from my mind. My brother was killed. He had died our answering machine. Because my dad was a prominent figure in Utah, everyone had heard that I was sick in the news because the Deseret News ran all these articles about my story. It was very public. And we started getting phone calls. And I couldn't answer the phone because I was hooked up to oxygen. You can kind of tell my voice how I start to lose my saturation levels. So my voice changes. It gets a little hard to talk energy wise, even to this day. So I started hearing what people would say to my wife in the event that I had died. It was the most ironic, crazy experience. And there's such. And I wrote this blog that had been read by over a million people. And I talked about the irony in life and death. There had been a talk from elder Maxwell at BYU in 1974, shortly before he became a 70. Talks about all these things are but for a small moment. And that talk resonated with me. But that took the wind out of me. And that's when I started composing that piece of music. John Life and Death. And I think you have a little video to show a little around.

John Dehlin [02:03:06] What year was this, Paul?

Paul Cardall [02:03:08] This was in 2009.

John Dehlin [02:03:10] Okay, so this is how many years into your marriage about.

Paul Cardall [02:03:17] This is. We were married in 1997. So this was now 12 years into your marriage? Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:03:26] Okay.

Paul Cardall [02:03:27] And are you playing a minute of this or.

John Dehlin [02:03:30] I'll play whatever you want.

Paul Cardall [02:03:32] Okay. Why don't you go ahead and play the entire thing?

John Dehlin [02:03:36] Okay.

Paul Cardall [02:03:37] Okay. And I'll be right back.

John Dehlin [02:03:42] All right.

Paul Cardall [02:05:27] Sa. It. Me in the cowboy hat.

John Dehlin [02:06:31] Who are these photos of, Paul?

Paul Cardall [02:06:33] So that's me and the cowboy hat. And that's my brother Brian. He's the one passed away. Yeah. My mom was amazing. She was a good, amazing mom.

John Dehlin [02:06:55] And so did you compose this before your heart surgery but after. Before your heart transplant, but after your brother had passed away? Yes.

Paul Cardall [02:07:04] So this is an arrangement of an actual. Of a 30 second team from Micah Giacchino. It's a theme from the TV show Lost. Every time someone died in that TV show, they played this theme. And I took it and expanded it. Five minutes.

John Dehlin [02:07:26] And that's you putting flowers on your brother's casket. Is that right?

Paul Cardall [02:07:29] Yes. He was incredible. Very intelligent. And a lot of his work that he did at Northern Arizona State revolutionized the way we take care of our forest service. He found solutions to why the Virgin river is so dry, how to get more water flowing through there.

John Dehlin [02:08:11] We have a listener who writes. Knight Rider writes, some people can play an instrument or sing a song, and you can feel their soul. I used to think that was the spirit. Turns out it's not. It's a person giving you their whole self, exposing it all. Thank you, Knight Rider. What do you think about that, Paul?

Paul Cardall [02:08:32] Well, I think in the perspective of what she's saying, I'd like to replace the word spirit with love, because the spirit is pretty much, to me, my opinion, the essence of pure love. And so when you feel something that's. That's. It's almost like everything is. I'm going to say that that's God telling you how loved you are, that they're cradling you. But for a lot of people, it could mean you're at one with the universe. You're fully associated and not disassociated. So the spirit feeling. The spirit, I wouldn't maybe just find another word for it, because it is a powerful experience. We all enjoy, we all want. I think what happens is, because we've been hurt within the religious institution that we've been part of that, we tend to take that feeling and. And now we are mad at that feeling because it's associated with something that we have a different perspective of now. But if you can take that feeling and channel it through something different, love. That, for me, is really what's trying to happen. I think it's God. We were at one with God in those moments, feeling the divine presence of love. Because you have to understand, my belief of God is God is love. He is love. That. That, in essence, is what I've come to understand.

John Dehlin [02:10:33] Love it. So we have a. We have a listener asking about your heart donor. Do you want to talk about the. The. Your transplant a little bit? Just tell people kind of how that happened and what that was like.

Receiving a Heart Transplant

Paul Cardall [02:10:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:10:48] About the donor that you want to say.

Paul Cardall [02:10:50] I can't because of the rules with hipaa. You can't talk about your donor. But I can tell you that my donor was a remarkable person. He was a state amateur boxing champion. He was from Mexico. And I used to say I have the heart of Manasseh, but I'm from the tribe of Ephraim and I was trying to gather Israel. But, yeah, I think about him every single day. And the way I've been able to wrap my mind around having a donor is the idea of Christ sacrificing himself for all of us and that he died and donated himself, that we can have new life. Not in the new life sense of Mormon theology, where it's resurrection down the road, it's now we can have renewal of life. We go through periods of darkness and sadness and pain, like the seasons where winter comes, but then we know spring is coming, so we have hope that it's going to get warmer. And so my donor, yeah, I think about him every day. Every day, every day. And ironically, so much would not happen had he not selflessly decided to sign up to be an organ donor. It's a huge deal for those of us that have received the organs of our brothers and sisters. And you don't have to be Mormon to say brothers and sisters.

John Dehlin [02:12:44] So it must have been amazing for you to hear that someone had you, you had found a heart, right?

Paul Cardall [02:12:51] Yeah. I'd been waiting 385 days. They came in the hospital. I was living in Primary Children's Hospital. I was like the biggest baby up there. And it was a profound experience. They came in, I'd been waiting and waiting and waiting. You know, I had to go through, through the process of trying not to grieve my brother. I needed to be strong for my mom. I didn't want her to lose two sons. And then they came in and said there was a hurt. Now, if all of you are told you're about to go to a surgery and you might not survive, what would you say to family? What are your words? I mean, what, what's going through your mindset? If I am. If I pass out an envelope to everybody and it's your birth certificate, but it has an expiration date, like, would you want to know? And that's like the predicament I've been in so many times where they give you an expiration date, so you're excited, but you're also nervous. But I'd come to the point then where I was totally submissive to God, to whatever happens, happens. I had like, unlike most kids with heart defects, I'd grown up, I learned to drive a car, I kissed a girl, played the piano for people. I got to do these Amazing things. So up till then I was in that mindset of been a really good life and I'm going to prove to my wife that God still performs miracle. But I was more concerned about my daughter not having her father and having to deal with grief because I know what my wife had gone through, losing her mother. So.

John Dehlin [02:14:55] What a miracle. Someone's asking if you knew or had any connection with what with your donor or if they were totally, totally unfamiliar

Paul Cardall [02:15:02] to you, a total separate scenario. But it was miraculous because they were such a healthy individual. You have to have the same, you have to have similar weight and blood type for a donor heart to come your way. Ironically, my organ donor, and this is, I don't take this for what it is, signed up on his 19th birthday, which happened to be the day after my brother had died. And then I got that heart 90 days after my brother had been killed on September 9th, which is the ninth month, 2009. And I'm not into astrology and numbers, but I found it ironic and interesting the number nine, because my transplant was at nine o' clock as well. And if you look up the number nine, it's, it deals with being made whole new life. So I've always thought that was kind of fun.

John Dehlin [02:16:13] I love it. And clearly the, the surgery was a success.

Paul Cardall [02:16:17] Yeah, they, they weren't sure I would survive the surgery because they couldn't just cut me open. They had to create a new idea. My, my surgeon, Dr. Kaza, he was from India, but he grew up in Oklahoma and loved Hank Williams. And he had just gotten married. His mother said, now that you're married, you're a good moral boy. But he had married a blonde white woman and had this amazing honeymoon, he says. And on the honeymoon he knew it came to him exactly what to do this. And I gained so much respect for my doctor, who was a Hindu, who was receiving information, inspiration to save my life. And that was a big hint to me. There's no monopoly on revelation or the spirit. And so he knew what to do. He went in and used, hooked me up to the, the heart lung machine. And that heart lung machine. What's interesting about that, I wouldn't be alive had Russell Nelson, who's now the president of the church, not worked in Minnesota, on that team that developed the heart lung machine that saved millions of lives. So pretty interesting. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:17:53] I was going to bring up the fact that Russell M. Nelson was involved in the development of, of heart transplant, the science of heart transplants. Correct.

Paul Cardall [02:18:03] Yeah. And, and, and it's interesting, John that it's during. I've loved President Nelson be primarily because he's a cardiac. Cardiac thoracic surgeon. A thoracic surgeon. And because of that, I've always loved him. All of his colleagues have worked on me and I find it ironic that this, this transition happens on his. Yeah,

John Dehlin [02:18:37] okay, so that was 2009 and successful surgery.

Paul Cardall [02:18:44] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:18:44] What. What comes next in your. In your story?

Paul Cardall [02:18:48] So I kind of had to relearn all my music because I had struggled. I'd lost a lot of weight, but once I got that heart, I mean, it was like I was driving this truck, beat up old grandpa's truck. We all love grandpa's truck, but you don't want to go get gas because super expensive. And it's just this beat up old truck. And it's like they handed me the keys to a Porsche. I started to feel alive and I accepted opportunities to travel to be part of these tour LDS tour groups where I was the guest celebrity and I would travel and go to China and all over the world. And I was exposed to other faiths, going into Hindu temples and mosques. And I started to see people worship with such sincerity that it made me appreciate other faiths in such a profound way that I started to wonder why we claimed we were the only living church when living things are happening in other faiths, people's lives, receiving experiences. And for example, I went to a Hindu temple in Sri Lanka and I saw this beautiful couple and there was a baby blessing. They presented their baby. They were dressed in all the temple ritual clothing for the Hindu faith, and they presented their. Their newborn child to the priest. And I felt that spirit. I felt love, the divine love. And I was like, I'm watching a baby blessing in Sri Lanka with this beautiful couple that are not Mormon. And this is like God's putting his stamp of approval on it. I saw so much of that stuff that it started to make me wonder about some of the bold statements that Mormonism has, like we are the only true and living church on the face of the earth, that there's only one car to jump in for salvation, only one packaged plan or presentation. So I started to see that there's a lot of ways to access God, and if God is. If God is interested, he's going to pay attention. And obviously he pays attention in everybody's lives. So those were things that started to dawn on me and. But I would come home and go through the. The challenges of still feeling like I need to give back to God, I needed to repay him. I Used to have this quote from Carolyn Pearson. And if I serve him every day that I live with all the love that I give, still I'd be in his debt forever. And it was all around my. My room as a teenager that I just need to work and work and work, do everything I can to help. So I started doing firesides, like so many firesides. It took a toll on the marriage because we weren't. I wasn't romancing, wasn't taking my wife on dates. I became kind of one of those priesthood men that. But the church ahead of my spouse. And I think sometimes there are those who enjoy it because they're able to escape in the name of Christ. And I began wondering if I'm taking the name of God in vain by not focusing on what mattered most to focus on the higher agenda, which was to gather Israel. So it really took a toll on the marriage. And I started to struggle emotionally, mentally, the death of my brother. I began speaking a lot of funerals and then friends started committing suicide. One of my friends worked for President Packer. He came out as gay and took his life. Another friend of mine.

John Dehlin [02:23:37] Is that. Is that a story that's. That's known someone who was close to Elder Packer, who was gay, ended his life. Is that a story that. Well, there's any information about. For those who are curious.

Faith Crisis, Marriage Breakdown, and Church Discipline

Paul Cardall [02:23:49] Chris Beers, the advocate, talked about him years ago. He was with me as he. As an EFY counselor. Chris was the life of the party. Loved Joseph Smith. His patriarchal blessing Told him to pattern his life after Joseph Smith. And I always used to say, Chris, I wonder why they said Joseph Smith and not Jesus. But he was the friend to everybody. Used to enjoy listening to him imitate President Monson. I know a lot of your listeners know Chris Pierce. He was a light. He had so much love in his heart. But anyway, he worked in the travel department of the church with a lot of other homosexuals that work in the church that nobody knows about. Because the idea is if I get plugged in, I get involved, I'll be okay. I won't have to think about the same sex attraction that the church is not happy about. He was deprived of a relationship. He was deprived of that human affection we all long for and deserve that God wants to give us. So he went through some. Some made some choices, started to feel the shame, the guilt of that left the church missionary department, went to go work for the University of Utah. And then I got a call that he had taken his life. And

John Dehlin [02:25:33] did you ever find out if he had ever talked to Elder Packer about his situation,

Paul Cardall [02:25:41] I know that he had spoken with a couple of the brethren, and they were very kind to him. They were hopeful. They never asked him for conversion, the conversion therapy. They just adored him and loved him and accepted him as is, just as long as he didn't act out. But I don't know the details of what happened. I imagine something dead. And so, yeah, he took it, took his life, but it was one of those tragedies. He's one of those early tragic stories that just really, I think, provoked a lot of anger in the community.

John Dehlin [02:26:32] And around what year was that?

Paul Cardall [02:26:35] I would think that's about 2010.

John Dehlin [02:26:41] Okay, and did that. Did that affect your. Your testimony, your faith at all? Did that?

Paul Cardall [02:26:48] It didn't affect my faith in God. It. It made me angry that we put limits on who can have a covenant relationship, because this is all about containing morality so people don't hurt each other. You know, you step out on a spouse, you're going to hurt the spouse. So if two men, two women, whatever, want to have a covenant relationship, they're not hurting anybody. In fact, I've seen more happy LGBTQ marriages where they really get along and really enjoy each other, versus some of the relationships I've been around that are heterosexual. And so it's. It's perplexed me because, you know, people get into the Bible and they say, well, it's in the Bible, and I. You'd have to show me, because it implies homosexuality. But it never says the act of homosexuality, is it never. It doesn't say that anywhere. It talks about being moral, people being chased, whether you're a heterosexual or a homosexual. People were sleeping around with everybody. So that's what the conversation was. I see. And I believe in the scriptures that it's all been misused for the agenda of the organizations in an effort to control their authority.

John Dehlin [02:28:46] So as. So as we kind of follow that chronology, then you. You have your brother dies, you have the heart transplant, you have your friend take his life. How. How does that lead you in terms of kind of the story of. Of your faith or your relationship with the church or your marriage? How do those things start progressing in the story?

Paul Cardall [02:29:10] So there's some details I can't share because I'm under contract with that novel that's coming out. The book will talk about some of this, but some events happened that led to my divorce, and I ended up having to go to a disciplinary council because I was high profile, because I do firesides. People rely on me to be faithful. They rely on me to give answers to their deepest questions because they feel so much love from the music that they associate that with the Spirit, which I believe it is the Spirit. It's love that I had to go through some church disciplinary action.

John Dehlin [02:30:02] So you know, what year was that?

Paul Cardall [02:30:05] This was in 2012. And I looked through the Scriptures, John. I couldn't find anywhere in the Scriptures other than the Doctrine and Covenants where there's nothing in the Old Testament, the New Testament, where councils were held in order to cross examine an offender of the faith. The only person that ever had a council shoved in their face was Jesus of Nazareth. And I find it ironic that he never had a council. There's no report anywhere in those scriptures that have been taken in vain for the sake of Doctrine and Covenants and Book of Mormon to say we need to have counsels to defend the church, defend the victim, but pretty much try to help this sinner or get rid of them. Fortunately, because I know the scriptures and I, I used doctrine and covenants 42 to defend myself. And so all I got was disfellowshipped for a couple months for getting divorced. And I just got bad, bad advice. My priesthood leaders were not one of my priesthood leaders ever. This is all looking back now. Not one of them ever mentioned Jesus Christ and his love and grace, compassion, because it was all man. You know, my wife gives me a hard time too. And I don't know that I'm just starting to learn to love my wife. And there were these egos about their wives and I was quite a upset the way women were talked about behind closed doors with priesthood. But that's, that's in general, that's in comedy, you know, people bashing on their spouses. I, I hate that stuff. I don't think anybody should bash on their spouse. So I was getting bad advice. And then they would tell me in the council, there's so much work you have to do to save this, to rescue this, but you can do it. But at that point my wife and I mediated. We came to the conclusion that things were going to work out, that our daughter would still have all the love she needed, but we needed to go these different paths. So that was a, that was a tough time. I had scored a soundtrack for T.C. christensen's Ephraim's Rescue, a film about the rescue of some of my ancestors. The Willie Hankard Company so Deseret book. I was under contract with them, so they kept it off the shelf during that period. That was Hurtful, but I get it. I understand is business. They have to protect their business. So I'm not mad at it. I was just frustrated that I didn't get any. No one was giving me any good advice. No one was saying, how are you doing? How can I help you? No one suggested a therapist. Why? Because I had the priesthood. Why get therapy? I have revelation. So I put all that off.

John Dehlin [02:34:04] Let me, let me ask. I guess I have at least two questions I want to ask. One is, when you think about the marriage failing, oftentimes people draw different conclusions. One is we should have never been married. We never really were a good fit, you know. Another one is we, you know, we grew apart. And then another one is I blew it. Or they blew it. They were, they were bad or broken in some way. Or I was bad and broken in some way. You know, obviously one thing people could ask is if you're, if you're kind of a celebrity and you're traveling all the time and, you know, maybe you neglected the marriage, you didn't give it what you needed. Where. That's the first part of the question. Then I have a follow up. But as you've tried to piece together why the marriage failed, what, what sense have you made of that? What, what conclusions have you drawn?

Paul Cardall [02:35:00] I think everybody neglects their marriage. Marriage is not an easy thing. We're allowed to fail at everything except marriage, particularly within religious institutions. How dare you end something? But I don't see it as marriage. I think it's a beautiful way to lose yourself and make sacrifices because you're no longer free when you're married, but you're also much happier when things are going well than if you're single and have all that freedom. So we just progressed to a point where I knew she was not happy. She loved me, but she was not happy with this ongoing drama, all this trauma in and out of the hospital. And I was tired of watching her suffer and deal with this. So suicide was not an option.

John Dehlin [02:36:23] So.

Paul Cardall [02:36:24] But ending the marriage was a form of suicide. So that she could continue on because I thought I was supposed to die. Instead, I got the new heart. She thought I was going to die. And she was a nurse, so I mean, common sense, the statistics. You look at my heart on an mri, I mean, it's insane. We held my heart in a lab. Who holds their heart? And we saw all the flaws and all the problems. And I have to say, when I was looking at my human heart with her at that moment, I said to myself, to the lab, Technician. How in the world does the human heart work? Because that is the source that kept me alive. And he goes, we have no idea how it works. We think we know. We don't know that. To me, right there was evidence of something way beyond ourselves, way beyond all of it. And for me, it was God right there in my hands. Not God the person, but what God does, creating life. And yeah, I mean, I wanted to just set my wife free, to finally have someone who had a 9 to 5 job who could give her 100%. Musicians are, you know, we're a little bit narcissistic because it's a very competitive business. It's a little bit vain. There's a lot of adulation. People are constantly telling you how amazing you are and you know, keep it coming, but it's like you come home to reality. So nobody trained me, nobody taught me. There was no manual on how to be married. And it, we just. So I set her free.

John Dehlin [02:38:42] So what I, what, what I kind of hear you saying is you, you guys weren't happy. You felt like all your health conditions were kind of traumatizing her, that you were kind of hard to live with as a artistic, creative musician guy that had some celebrity and was probably hard to live with. And it kind of sounds like you're saying you, you sabotaged the marriage, did things that you knew would kind of end it as a way to set her free.

Paul Cardall [02:39:14] In some respect, yes, we both, we mediated. So in some respect it was mutual. She was struggling. I mean, we had a bottom line. We did have a happy marriage. We had a great relationship and we're still very close. And out of that. Yeah, I mean, she ended up with exactly what she always wanted because she would make these comments, you know, this isn't the life that I expected. It's not turning out the way I wanted. And those kind of hurt. But I said things too. We all say things in a marriage that hurt the other people. And just because you are doing firesides or you're out, I mean, you guys all know it's hard to be a latter day saint, keep that level up when there's not an emphasis on grace, it's all works. There's not an emphasis on God's love, unconditional love, because we put so many boundaries on what we have to do to be happy, that we put so much pressure. So in a way, John, I kind of blame the, the institutional responsibilities that take a toll. I was Young Men's president, I was involved. I needed to spend time with my Wife and just quit my job, quit callings and, you know, do like what you do. Be a spouse and make that your top priority.

John Dehlin [02:41:15] But you, but you didn't. Is that what you're saying?

Paul Cardall [02:41:22] I made the church my top priority.

John Dehlin [02:41:24] So you feel like you neglected your marriage?

Paul Cardall [02:41:28] I had an affair with the LDS church.

John Dehlin [02:41:34] Okay. The, the other question I was asking is, I, Obviously, when you have a disciplinary council, you know, usually means you, at least by the church's judgment, you did something wrong. You, you went right into, you know, the fact that you don't. And by the way, that's something you and I share. I've been through a disciplinary council. I was excommunicated. Not just fellowshiped. I know what those things are like. I hate them. I think they're barbaric. I think they're medieval. I, I think they're the farthest thing, one of the farthest things from Christianity or from, like, one of the least Christlike things I've ever been involved in is a, is an LDS disciplinary council. So I'm with you on that. But, you know, I'm imagining yours wasn't for starting a controversial podcast. And so I'm guessing that there were some mistakes that you had made that would have led to that, but you, you went right into talking about the problems with the process and, and the scriptural basis for it. Is there anything you, you know, was there contrition there? Was there guilt there? Was there remorse there on your part, you know, as a part of that process as well? Yeah.

Paul Cardall [02:42:59] You know, I, I, I can't, the only reason I can't tell you is the legal contract with the novel.

John Dehlin [02:43:04] Yeah. Yeah. I'm not asking you to tell anything. You can't tell.

Paul Cardall [02:43:10] Yeah. I've spent the last. This is why I resigned. I have been desperate to find healing peace for being human. You can fail algebra and take it again. You can, you know, you can lose a job and get another one, but when you end a celestial marriage, when you break covenants, which is so ironic because the, the Jesus Christ I've come to know is. He is the covenant. We're, we're, we're, he's necessary because we can't keep covenants. I don't know anyone that's literally kept their covenants, and yet we have to stay on a covenant path. It's really confusing language. It puts Jesus grace and what he did, the first chapters, first 11 chapters in Hebrew. I mean, it counters everything I was taught. There's so much love. Had, I had that knowledge that Love that exudes from the New Testament only because Jesus is talked about in the New Testament, I believe my marriage would have continued. So. It's complicated. It's really complicated.

John Dehlin [02:45:01] When you went. When you went to the disciplinary council, it wasn't like, man, I really screwed up. And, man, I. I really. It was more like, this isn't a council.

Paul Cardall [02:45:09] This.

John Dehlin [02:45:09] This shouldn't even be here. And, you know, that sort of thing. What's that?

Paul Cardall [02:45:14] I was never mad. This is in the last five years that I started to recognize what was really going on. Okay, so then, no, I was sobbing like a baby. Okay. I was like. I was grieving my brother. I was grieving the fact that I couldn't bring happiness to my spouse. I was grieving that I had let people down. I've let a lot of people down. And honestly, I didn't even. And. And sorry. So the bottom line, though, in that council, there was a ton of remorse. And I knew all these guys. I had served with them. I knew their addictions. I'd been their elders, corps president. Many of those guys had come to me on how to conquer pornography, because that was something that I understood how to do, and I didn't. Because of my heart problem. I didn't have the hormones that a lot of people dealt with. So I was there for everybody. And a lot of the guys on the council, good guys, and I never saw them as, oh, my gosh, I know what you were doing yesterday. It's like, man, you're trying. We're all trying here. We're all just trying to be good people, fathers, husbands. And we're trying to tell the world that Christ is coming and that there's salvation available through the baptism to get him to the temple.

John Dehlin [02:47:05] What was it like, the shame factor of, like, all of your sins kind of being public knowledge in your warden stake and adding on that you're. You're like a. You know, you're a celebrity. And so, like. And there's always a stereotype of, like, oh, you get too famous, you get too rich, you get too popular, you're gonna. You're gonna do bad things. Like, how. How were those layers of shame and of end of a public knowledge? What was that like?

Paul Cardall [02:47:36] It's interesting, you bring up the fame and the money, because I've had one family member write me what I call an epistle calling me to repentance, implying. And this is a person that I've known my whole life, but they don't really know me. We don't really have a Relationship outside of family, saying that I had gotten wealthy and I needed to turn over my heart back to God, make sure I pay my tithing, which I've always done. You know, I did get wealthy off my business because the music is helping people. And so I was accused of making too much money. But that money's never been an issue for me in terms of. I've always said, I guess what I need. There's been moments where I've really struggled in that marriage. We struggled financially because I couldn't work. But in the council, it was. There was no accusations. There was no shaming, There was no guilt. It was just the process. They wanted to help me. They wanted to have the marriage stay intact. But they told me they're like, oh, my gosh, you're married to so and so. And in a way, it almost was like they kind of liked her. And it was a little awkward. One Bishop had told me, you're crazy. Your wife is gorgeous. Which let me in on what he thinks about his gorgeous women. So. And that's not. Nothing wrong. But I was like, why are you giving me this advice? I don't need to hear that. She's beautiful. I was trying to figure out how to love myself so I could love others. Because I didn't love myself. I hated myself. Not because. Not because of something I did, but because it's. You're an artist. You're like Picasso. You're like Beethoven. You know, show me a picture of Beethoven where he's smiling, but look at his music. We go through these painful things, and we obsess over them because that's how we squeeze out the beauty that is to emerge from the pain that exists. You know, we are going through these chrysalis, these, you know, a butterfly. You can't just become a butterfly. You become. You're a caterpillar, and you go through this process to become a butterfly. I was a moth. Everyone loves butterflies. They're the ones that keep all the rules. You know, there's a fantastic book that changed me a lot called the Prodigal God by Timothy Keller. And he talks about the unfinished parable, which was the Prodigal Son. And, you know, the prodigal son wanted his inheritance now. And in that tradition, for his father to give him the inheritance was kind of insulting. The father would have to go sell some of the property, which would then decrease the value of the property for the elder brother, who would receive his father's inheritance when the father's gone. So the younger son goes and gets you know, his inheritance. He goes off and enjoys freedom and the world, and just. He runs out of money, runs out of things. And he is so desperate to be restored and have peace in his life again that he's willing to be a slave to his father. But what does the father do? The father goes out and throws a party for him because he's home. What does the older brother do? He's pissed off at his father, at his dad, and he's angry at his brother. They've ruined everything. This elder brother was expecting his inheritance in full, and he doesn't go to the party. Jesus leaves that parable unfinished because he's talking to the Pharisees who Christ had said to the people, you know, do what they say, but don't act like them. Because the Pharisees and the older brothers, they didn't go out and help the younger brother. They were focused on what they have and what they've got and that they're going to do all this work to get the inheritance. Neither brothers were right. They wanted what's theirs. They didn't want the father. They didn't care for the father. They just wanted what's theirs. And what's amazing in this story is the father just wanted his sons. He would sell everything for his sons. And that's the Prodigal God by Timothy Keller. But in that, there's this analogy that we put in the broken miracle of moths and butterflies. Moths are seekers. They're the people that want to travel and see the world and understand different cultures. Butterflies are the moralists. They do everything right. They follow rules. They look beautiful on the outside. Everything's perfect. And it's interesting, John, because moths can't survive the darkness, but moth or butterflies can't survive the darkness. But the moths, they live in the darkness. They thrive in the darkness, but they're obsessed with the light. But if they get too close to the light, they die. And my brother was a moth. He struggled with, you know, should I go back to church? And it would kill in these low moments where I want to please my parents because they've taught me, and I. I don't want to break their hearts. So he talks about going back and seeing the bishop and going through a disciplinary council himself. So I went into that council not knowing I was a moth, not knowing my true identity. So, you know, we talk about LGBTQ and these people that discover their identity. How many people have left the church who have discovered their identity? And it's not sexual of any nature. It's just who we are, and we don't fit in. So

An Unexpected Relationship with Elder Bednar

John Dehlin [02:54:51] beautiful. So. So you had a deal with the church to. I guess you said you had. You'd done a score for a movie or something, and. And they pulled it from the shelf. And so how did you go from that and from being disfellowshipped to. To co writing a hymn with David A. Bednar. Tell us. Tell us how you made that transition from kind of prodigal son to, you know, posing with David Bednar for photo ops for this special hymn that he needed someone very special to write with him, and it's you. How did. How did you make that transition?

Paul Cardall [02:55:35] You know, I think. I think your audience is going to fall off their chairs because Bednar became the father in the prodigal son story, in the elder brother story, the way he treated me. Because what happened was in the transition between the divorce and get. And. And dating my wife, who Tina, who I married, I did. I'd done a score for Ephraim's Rescue. Now it was Deseret Book Company, and Desert Book Company is part of Deseret Management. They're a subsidiary. You know, they're. They're there to basically provide culture, and they've done a fantastic job at it. They've been very good to me. Customers have been very good to me. I love Deseret Book, but they decided it would be best to just pull for a while my soundtrack, Ephraim's Rescue. They kept my other product in the stores because I continued to just sell and was making money for them. But the Ephraim's Rescue soundtrack was pulled, and I had spent a lot of my own money to make that, and I lost a bunch of money. And that's fine. I took a loss that year. It's fine. But I stuck with them and continue to thrive with them. But when I got married, I married out of the church. I married a Catholic who's from Slovenia, born in Cleveland, but all of her family immigrants to Slovenia. From Slovenia. She's first generation Slovenian. She had worked on Wall Street. She was there on 9 11. She smelled the ash and the smoke. She had friends that died. And at that time, her husband was supposed to be in the tower. She decided at that moment that money wasn't everything. She started going to a church and turned her heart over to God for purpose and meaning, got into health and nutrition. Her husband went off and found comfort in the arms of other women, and they ended up getting divorced. So I met her and we connected, and I thought she was Mormon because she doesn't drink coffee and she doesn't drink alcohol and she doesn't cuss. And I thought she was Mormon, so I was surprised she wasn't. So my agenda was to convert her and get that temple insurance that I had lost because my wife remarried and asked for the ceiling to be canceled. So I obviously, ceilings don't work anyways if, if you're in that faith, ceilings don't work if you've left the marriage anyways. So all this worry about who's going to be with who and all that stuff. So I want to be with my Catholic wife. And she came. You know, she'd never been to Utah. She lived in California for a while, working for Rick Warren, who's the pastor at Saddleback Church, which is a mega church. He's famous for his book, Purpose driven life, a 40 day journey on how to develop a relationship with God. And when she came to Utah, it was very strange for her because people were so nice on the surface, but they all had. They wanted her in the church, I wanted her in the church. People cared about me. They wanted her to know she's loved and accepted within those, those terms. And I thought she joined the church. She made it very clear she is not joining the church because she already has a relationship with God and she doesn't have to earn that. And I was really struggling because I thought I needed to have that identity of a temple marriage. And I was going back to the temple at this time and I started doing her genealogy. I. I got 9,000 Slovenians from all the villages that are deceased. I had all their work done in a large organized effort so that everybody who ever lived in the village where all of her family is from has received their temple blessings. And around that time I thought that might help, you know, the influence of the dead. And that's about the time I was asked to do the missionary fall social. This was 2013, so I'd only been had that divorce and that disciplinary council a year prior. And by then we were all remarried. It happened quick. And at that fall social, I gave a presentation on how the church is progressing with members using their talents to benefit lives, to enrich lives, and it's bringing some notoriety to the church. I played that night, and afterwards Elder Bednar and his wife sat in line to talk to me, to meet me. And I was nervous because he was an apostle. President Nelson was there that night. We sat with Bishop Clausse. I mean, I've been around these guys a lot. And Elder Bednar approaches And he pulls me aside, he's like, hey, I have an idea. There's a message I feel very strongly about that the Lord wants me to deliver, but he wants me to do it through a song. And I have no musical talent. And we laughed about that. He goes, how do you write a song? And I said, well, it's a fairly simple, simple process. He goes, oh, well, do you want to come help me? So we set up a meeting and I went down to the church office building, went through security, and I met Elder Bednar. And it was an amazing experience because in that room he was David. And when I would ask a gospel question, he was Elder Bednar. And I thought back to church history, where people talk about the face of Joseph Smith, illuminating when they. When he would teach or reveal something. And I think what they were seeing is the intellect, you know, where you lighten up a little bit because you're excited to talk about theology. And he's excited to talk about theology. And we talked about the divorce. He knew everything. But. But you know what? I was amazed because he just loved me. He was the only one of every priesthood leader that I spent time with that said, the Savior will take care of it. By then it was too late. I was like, where?

John Dehlin [03:03:37] Too late for. Too late for what?

Paul Cardall [03:03:40] For my first marriage to be rescued? Oh, I didn't. He was the only one to tell me what I needed. So was that pretty much that I don't have to fix it, that I can get help. That's what people should gain from this, is not that, you know, Jesus is going to help you that, get some therapy, get some counseling, get. Go talk to somebody about your problems. Don't escape in your responsibility. You know, I think it was Elder Holland that said the way out of depression is work. That's because in my opinion, he doesn't understand grace. And the Book of Mormon is a distraction from reading the New Testament, where you really see the love and compassion of Jesus of Nazareth. So that is being buried under the Book of Mormon in modern day revelation and all the responsibilities. The heart of Christianity is buried and they're trying to bring that up, they're trying to pull that out of the ground because they're acknowledging slowly that the plates never evolved out of the ground either. So they have during the shift. And in a way it's taking his name in vain. But I'm hopeful that it becomes more of a resource for people that are really struggling to focus on that love of Christ, that love which is the spirit and love.

John Dehlin [03:05:19] So really quickly, Paul, like I have to say, just in the modern era, there are always like apostles that are loved and that are popular, and then there are others that are not so loved and not so popular. And within orthodox Mormonism, you kind of have to love all the apostles, I think. But in liberal or post Mormonism, there's certainly apostles that are loved and then there's some that are kind of hated or detested. And you know, other than like Boyd K. Packer and maybe Dallin H. Oaks, there's probably no apostle more unliked than David Bednar to progressive and post Mormons because there's a perception that he's very rigid, very stern, very faced, and he's just, he's just not liked by, by many. And so I'm, I'm curious what. And I, and I'm not, I'm not asking you to talk good or bad about anybody, but, you know, it's one thing that's obvious is that we don't know these guys. We just know their public Persona. But you got to actually know one of them and you got to know one that's frankly detested by a lot of, you know, people. Listen to this podcast. Not all, but some. What do you want to say? Share, other than what you've already shared about those perceptions versus what, what your personal experience was.

Paul Cardall [03:06:54] Before I, before I get into Elder Bednar, you know, I, I kind of mentioned Elder Holland and, and something I didn't agree with. But let me tell you what Elder Holland did. The day my brother was killed, he called my family. And on his drive, after their meetings in the temple on Thursdays, Elder Holland calls people who've gone through horrific things. So to his credit, he reached out to say, we love you. And most members never get that because the church is so large. How can they? But in that moment, he called. And that meant the world to my parents who were going through an excruciating process. So I gained great respect for Elder Holland, though many disagree with the doctrine. Elder Bednar.

John Dehlin [03:07:55] Now, did you, did you get that call because you were a world famous recording artist or because your dad was a journalist for KSL and had known all the prophets and apostles for all the decades or because of some other personal family connection? Why did you guys get that call?

Paul Cardall [03:08:14] My dad. Well, my dad and him are friends. They've spent many years on the road from being with President Kimball to President Benson to President Hunter to all these prophets. And Elder Holland was always there. My dad was right there in on the Mount of Olives when The Jewish leadership approached Elder Holland and picked up stones to almost try to kill him for wanting to build the BYU Jerusalem center there. My dad was there. And every time I run into President Holland and Patricia, they remind me that your father was right there in the thick of it when they tried to have violence on Elder Holland. And my dad's got tape of that. I've seen the tape that never went on the news. But he was friends, just a nice, respectful. He didn't have to do that. But as I got to know. But transitioning over to Elder Bednar, when I sat in his office, he made me feel like a million bucks. Now a skeptic would say he knew I had fame, he knew I had a following, he knew I had celebrity status because there was some things in that conversation that are confidential because I signed a contract that the sacrifices he has to make to be an apostle blow my mind. Because

John Dehlin [03:09:49] they,

Paul Cardall [03:09:52] even though they receive their salaries, as you've discussed many times, they take a huge pay cut for what they've been used to. They don't have any freedom. They really don't. They can't be where they need to. Bednar will bend over backwards all he can to be to a funeral. But if his seniority tells him where he's got to go, he can't. And it kills him. And I saw this in his heart. He really struggled trying to meet everyone's needs. And so he told me about how he wanted to focus on this message that he had learned from President Monson, which is the individual ministry to God's children, one by one, that there is a. That each of us are so valued by God, that it's a one by one process. He talked about how the straight and narrow gate, it's narrow because we go through one at a time. By going through one at a time, we have this oneness with God, which is at one mint. The atonement was meant for us to be one with God, not so that all of us can be one body with God, but individually, like the Father and the Son, like us and the Father, us and God. So he wanted to convey this message. The theme of the Book of Mormon that's more prevalent in the New Testament is that Jesus encountered those who were irreligious. He encountered those that were the misfits. He encountered the scum. He encountered those that were struggling. Jesus went to the woman at the well. The apostles would not be seen with the woman of the well because she's a Samaritan. Jesus healed the guy that sat outside the temple that everybody walked past because he cared about that person. These individual, one by one stories, Bednar was saying, this is the message we need to get to. So I think a lot of this Christian shift and effort comes from Bednar, even though he's limited in what he can do, just like President Nelson was limited in what he could do until he became the president of the church. What would Bednar do? I don't know. Bruce R. McConkey surprised us by some comments he made later on in his life after things went down with Mormon doctrine and all that stuff. So these guys may have strong doctrine and opinions now and policies, but I. It is. They will change because if they don't, there'll be no church. There's too many people that are seeing a lack of blessings given to everyone, you know, and it all started with women having no power, even though they gave him the Relief Society, which was, as we know, to keep everyone quiet and then to help people and to be the listening ear of what's going on to the blacks with the priesthood, you know, to the LGBTQ community and so on. And we don't even know what's coming next. But if they truly want to change and be Christlike, they need to approach it the way Christ approached one by one. So he wanted to get this message out. And I started writing that song and we spent a lot of time back and forth. His secretary was involved. She was really good at helping as a musician. And I asked her, you know, of all the apostles, who does Elder Bednar reminder of? And she had worked for President Hinckley and she said, the style and the style. He's more like President Gordon B. Hinckley than any of the other apostles. And I thought that was interesting. She couldn't. She thought the world of him and David. I think the world of. We were invited to the mtc. Keep in mind I'd been disfellowshipped. Desiree Book had removed one of my products. People were mad that I had gone through a divorce. And then now I was married to a non member. My family was disappointed she wasn't going to join the church. That puts up a wall that makes it very difficult for us to have normal conversations. I have to go to church alone because people would gang up on her, invite her to temple dedications and then be like, oh, well, but you got to get baptized. It would hurt her feelings. And I try to help her understand that it is the gospel of Jesus Christ and they mean well. And this I was. I made so Many excuses that. It got to the point where I was done making excuses. But we were invited to the mtc, and I don't know if Elder Bednar strategically did this, John, to bring attention to the fact that he helps the individual, because he was helping me, but he presented the one by one, and it was on a missionary broadcast, and everyone saw the Elder Bednar come down and give my wife a hug. You're not supposed to hug people, really, in the mtc, he wrapped his arms around my wife, and then he hugged me. And it was a public display of. I don't care what other people have done. I care about you. You're important, and this is your moment. Let's enjoy this song, this message. The missionaries sang it, and I. It wasn't a feel the spirit moment. It was. It was the father killing the fatted calf, putting the robe around me and the finger on me. You know, it's. It's interesting too, because Elder Bednar, his aunt was a nun, and majority of his family is all Catholic, So he's one of the first, and he grew up in California, first apostles to have come into that quorum, not having any Utah ties and knowing Catholicism very, very well. So it was a beautiful experience. And I think the world of him. I. I struggle with, obviously, my friends in the LGBTQ community. I struggle with the racism that existed. But my biggest problem is the way women are treated ironically, because I went through this divorce, but I wanted to give her her freedom to find and be with somebody that she would have been with had I died. And ironically. And I say that a lot ironically, because there's life and death, the bitter and the Swede. So we ended up presenting one by One in the tabernacle later with the Lyceum Philharmonic. We brought in Nathan Pacheco, a member of the church, used to tour with the Yanni. And Elder Bednar, Elder Cook, some of the 70s all came to this unusual scheduled concert for the premiere of this song that was not commercially advertised for tax reasons. The song was on New Life or was on a new creation. It went straight to number one on the Billboard charts. I think it's the first apostle to have a provided lyrics for a number one Billboard song. And I'll tell you, the church, he didn't want any money. No money. He said, just do. Here, you can have it. He wanted money. Normally you put the. Everything they earn goes straight into the missionary department. They can't take a proceed or a profit from the sales. So, you know, those were some deep, powerful Experiences. So I think you have. Do you have some of that one by one?

Collaborating with Church Leadership on Music

John Dehlin [03:18:51] Yeah, let's go ahead and play some of it. And this is Poor card Paul Cardall and Elder David A. Bednar. And one by one.

Paul Cardall [03:19:03] Yeah, my name's a tongue twister. Say it six times real fast, John. Let us do this at the tabernacle. And the Mormon Tabernacle Choir refused to do it too. Jesus.

John Dehlin [03:19:53] From the beginning.

Paul Cardall [03:20:19] Come on to me, John. Yeah, you know what's crazy? This process, this experience of writing. This was a major trigger for. Leaving, for resigning to join with a, with the global Christian movement.

John Dehlin [03:20:57] Okay, wait, before we get into that, let me just ask you a quick question. Is that okay?

Paul Cardall [03:21:02] Yes.

John Dehlin [03:21:03] Okay. So I was going to try and craft my own question, but maybe a listener crafted it and you've already kind of addressed this a little bit. But here's what Mary writes, you know. Okay, so the first thing she says is he's talking about the Bednar who said that wearing two earrings is disobedience. Haha. So she's basically saying Bednars, you know, and this is, I alluded to this earlier. There, there are many people who associate with Bednar, kind of like Sadduceeical or pharisaical rules that aren't important, that are superficial, you know, and that's one of the reasons that he's hated, because he's associated with, you know, oh, two sets of earrings is bad kind of Mormonism. But then she goes on to say, of course Bednar is going to be nice to this guy, meaning you, Paul, because you've contributed so much to the LDS Church and I'm an addiction. Because, you know, you've done all these firesides, all these people's, just like Paulie's done. All these people's testimonies are going to be wrapped up in the music of yours that they listen to on their missions and the firesides and all this stuff. And she adds, because you're not actively opposing what the church teaches, or at least you weren't back then. And so what she's alluding to is sort of the cynicism that you alluded to at the beginning of this segment of the interview, which is he asked you to write this hymn, he embraced you, he did this huge public display of love for you and for your new wife because the last thing he wants is another Dan Reynolds or another Tyler Glenn or another, you know, Mindy Gledhill, these Mormon pop artists that had all this fame. And then if you lose, if you leave the church. If you lose your faith, it's this huge embarrassment to the church. So, you know, you know, she's basically saying from a bit more of a cynical perspective, he only showed you this love and kindness as a way to keep you from leaving the church and embarrassing the church and causing a bunch of people to lose their faith in the church. And I think your response to that be.

Paul Cardall [03:23:22] I think that, yeah, that was my Martin Harris moment. That was, that was kind of a, that's, that's me as Orson Pratt sitting on a log crying because my situation has gone really bad because somebody's doing this to me or whatever. I, I think she's right in the sense that there's David and there's Elder Bednar. If science camp happened today, he'd probably win. He's very loyal, he believes it, he loves it. It's. And I don't know him that well, but I do think there is some of that. And I appreciate what she's saying. And you know, my wife worked on Wall street. She knows about publicity, state things and she, she's mentioned to me the, the pageantry that exists within Mormonism that's kind of like the wizard of Oz. You know, you see these things that are grand, but there's really a couple people behind a curtain pulling strings, you know, and no, they don't want me to leave. They don't want me to, to, to speak against anything. And those are all my friends you mentioned, you know, Tyler and Mindy. And when I was sick in the hospital, Mindy glad he'll came to see me and spend time with me. And she was perplexed by a lot of the things I was saying because I wasn't mad at God for my situation. But yeah, I think clearly there's some of that. But you kind of know when people are blowing smoke and there may have been a little bit of that, but I'll admit as an artist, it's very entertaining, but it was also very sincere entertainment. And those missionaries, The reason I felt good about it was they were learning a side of Jesus Christ that has not been taught in Mormonism, that he's a very one on one personal relationship that you can cut out the middleman, as Paul so boldly declares. And, and really that's the New Testament, is that, I mean, do you want to get into this right now? John of the.

John Dehlin [03:26:19] Well, I mean, I guess so what you're saying is, is it's probably somewhere around 50, 50, that there were probably PR agendas and bolster the institution Agendas with Bednar and this reaching out in this pageantry. But you also are saying that you felt like he was sincere guy. A sincere guy that was. Was actually. That actually cared about you and wanted to help you heal and. And do well. And it's both.

Paul Cardall [03:26:52] Yeah, because I can pick up the phone and call him. I still have his cell number. I mean, I. I don't have like a day to day relationship with him, but he's treated me fairly. He's been very kind to my entire family. He doesn't. I see what he says, I hear what he says, and sometimes it's a little heartbreaking. But he's following his senior authority. When after we finished the song, he was nervous because he said to me, you know, now I have to share it with my brethren. And I have to see if my quorum president is okay with this. Because this was an idea he came up with. He had to take it to the quorum. And his quorum prison at the time was president Nelson. And President Nelson plays the piano in all their meetings. So he was nervous. President Nelson's classically trained, but he was nervous that they would want or even allow Bednar to have a hymn. And I saw that that vulnerable side of Bednar, which was the David side, he was nervous about it going over to the building that the 70s and the whole departments are in because they kind of run the church and the apostles are more the. The board and they have a ministry to go out one by one, but the system is in place. It's like a wheel that keeps going. And the entire apostles have to be unified for anything to change. But you've got all these other people running the show that when you have a cruise ship, I mean, think of how long it takes to dock a cruise ship and get everybody on board versus a speedboat. Like a lot of these pastors of other Christian churches or other churches. You can get a lot done with individuals, but the church is growing so much they're trying to control the cruise ship.

John Dehlin [03:29:20] Right.

Paul Cardall [03:29:21] And protect the passengers from drowning.

John Dehlin [03:29:27] Sure, sure. Okay. But you love the guy, right? So he's not for the people that want to make Bedner out to be this evil, bad, awful, terrible, mean guy. That's not what you experienced?

Paul Cardall [03:29:43] No, no. I've never had a bad experience with him or Holland or. You know, I was in prison, Hunter's home after my. He had lost his. You know, this was when I was 14. His wife had died. You know, he was busy taking care of her.

John Dehlin [03:30:02] You're talking about Hunter now.

Paul Cardall [03:30:04] Yeah, Howard Hunter, years ago, because he gave me a blessing at 14. So I made him this ceramic mug. I took it to him. We went to his house, me and my dad, and he was, like, spent three hours with me. He used to be in a band when he was a kid. We talked about when he was in a band, playing the piano, playing trumpet. He was real cool. So I've had beautiful experiences. The only apostle that really bothered me, mainly because of the way he treated my father, was Packer. Because our family, our entire family, was up at church headquarters because my parents were being called on this amazing mission. Back at Washington, D.C. 's visitor center, President Packer was sitting in his chair, waiting for the car to pick him up. And, you know, my dad had run into him many times, and my dad's there with his family, and my dad said hello to President Packer. How are you feeling? President Packer said, well, I'm not going to tell you because you'll put it in the paper. And I thought, what a jerk. My dad has been faithfully promoting you as a special witness of Christ. Christ never treated anyone like that, never made a snide remark like that. I saw all this going on, and I felt bad for my dad, and I thought, that's not fair. So I started to be really frustrated with that particular apostle and just considered that he was born and raised in one town and always had never really got out, other than the war, which would have dramatically changed people and given them ptsd. But he was not a nice guy at that moment and felt bad for my dad.

John Dehlin [03:32:21] Right. And back to Bednar for a second. What I think you were saying when you went from Bednar to Hunter to Packer was. And Holland, that you've had really good experiences with the apostles, except for that conversation with Packer. So what you're saying is that you found better to be a great guy, basically.

Paul Cardall [03:32:42] Yeah. Yeah. See, because I have not resigned as a result of who apostles are.

John Dehlin [03:32:49] I'm not talking about that. I'm just talking about your experience with him. That's it.

Paul Cardall [03:32:52] Yeah. I mean, yeah, he was nice, okay. But for my friends who are, you know, pointed fingers at, yeah, he's been a Pharisee.

John Dehlin [03:33:04] Okay. You're saying that the people that have criticisms of him, you know, you can see the merit in some of those criticisms. But he treated you well, that's all. I'm just, you know, I like to dispel stereotypes or to, you know, and I. And I'm not looking for dirt. I. I like to humanize these people. That's all. Right.

Paul Cardall [03:33:23] I don't think he's going to say everything right. Not all of us are going to like what they say, and some stuff hurts harder than others. But Joseph Smith was really good at putting in the Book of Mormon that if you don't like it, it's probably because it's true, but that's not really true. We know. But. No, he was. He was great.

John Dehlin [03:33:53] Okay.

Paul Cardall [03:33:53] Had a great experience. You know, I don't know that he knows now where I'm at in my walk with the Lord, but he will soon.

John Dehlin [03:34:05] He will soon.

Paul Cardall [03:34:06] Happy to welcome him to the Rock church.

John Dehlin [03:34:09] If he doesn't know now, he will soon. Okay, so. So how did you go from writing a hymn with David Bednar to leaving the church and talk about the evolution of your faith and what caused you to lose your faith in Mormonism and. And then we'll end with your. Your continued faith in. In God and Jesus.

Evolving Beliefs and Relationship with the Church

Paul Cardall [03:34:38] Yeah. I think the bottom line for me

John Dehlin [03:34:41] has been take us through the journey of that.

Paul Cardall [03:34:44] Okay. Well, there's been hundreds of things, so it's not like I can just dial in a couple, but let me share. You can?

John Dehlin [03:34:55] Yeah.

Paul Cardall [03:34:55] Yeah. I have on my phone a list, you know, I think.

John Dehlin [03:35:03] Was there something that started it after a Bednar?

Paul Cardall [03:35:06] Well, it started with the heart transplant because I died. My. My old heart died, and people would say, you're not the same person. You're different. And. And I struggled as young men's president because I felt like scouting was not going to help the young men, that they needed to learn how to do their taxes, how to just basic, fundamental things that could really benefit them in life. I started to the loss of my friend Chris Beers, you know, a homosexual who kills himself, who loved Joseph Smith, and then my friend Stoney, a heterosexual who killed himself because of a sex addiction. And I thought it was ironic that one goes out and breaks their vow while the other one is just trying to get a vow. So I was, like, very heartbreaking. You know, I'd watch my friends like Minnie Gladhill and Tyler, Glenn and Dan and talk about their frustrations, and it didn't really resonate. The LGBTQ thing resonate. Until I moved to Nashville. When I. When I moved to Nashville, my career just really exploded. I was the first Latter Day Saint to get a gospel music award. A lot of stuff started to happen, but people treated us differently in Nashville than when we were in church. And it didn't matter if we were in church in Utah or everyone likes to stereotype Utah. But if we were in church in Ohio, where her family's from, or California or anywhere, people always treated her like an outsider that needed to join. And so when we were in Nashville, they didn't do that that much in the LDS church out there. It was more cultured, everyone was artistic. But I also started attending other churches because I love worship music and a lot of my friends are in major worship bands. But I started listening to worship music a long time ago. And you know, I hate that this is kind of all over the place. But traveling was a big component. Seeing people practice their faith in churches all over the world. I've been in Muslim Islamic temples, I prayed with them. I've been in. And they didn't treat me like I was a stranger, like I was a stranger. They were. They would walk me into the, into the mosque, show me where to put my shoes, teach me how to clean my hands, and then kneel and I would pray. And it was an experience that was beautiful. And I felt that spirit, I felt that love. And to me that was God saying, this is a great thing here. And then I was in a Hindu temple and I saw that baby blessing and I saw the tears in the parents eyes and I got emotional. Catholic church, I attended a lot of mass. I've been to a lot of mass and seen people weeping because they recognize there's something beautiful in this world and they are seeking healing and they're receiving it. So I'm seeing people receive life changing moments and experiences that I thought only Mormonism had the monopoly on. And I'm, I understand the doctrine pretty

John Dehlin [03:39:12] well

Paul Cardall [03:39:15] and the history, but the other thing was the prosperity gospel documentary on Netflix about how churches are miss Are abusing the New Testament in a way to build up a church with wealth beyond all means, like the Joel Osteens and the. I mean these guys that are buying jets and basically telling you if you do this, you'll get wealthy. If you give to the church, you'll prosper. So then again, that scripture in the Book of Mormon resonated. The way my dad was treated is part of it. Music the church restoration narrative. I started to uncover that stuff 15 years ago and I always kind of knew that it didn't literally happen because I've always seen the scriptures as stories that we're supposed to apply, pull principles out of rather than historical facts. Because Jesus, if you notice in the New Testament, never, never, he always told stories, parables. He never got on the high horse and started telling people what to do. Except to love. And you can't, you know, get upset at a guy who's telling you to love each other unless you're a jerk, you know, so there's countless things. But in Nashville, I. The first party I was invited to was from Type by Ty Herndon. Ty Herndon was the first openly gay Grammy nominated country artist who came out in 2014, who the country music scene just destroyed. He. They really turned their back on him. And I saw the way the country music folks treated him and I saw a lot of parallels with the way they treated my friend Tyler Glenn. Others that aren't even vocal, just the fact that they can't have a covenant relationship, but that men can have covenant relationship with not just one woman, but like President Nelson has a covenant relationship with two. You remove the veil. He's a polygamist. So these things started to affect me, the way we're treating people. And I dove deeper into the New Testament. I started really reading the New Testament. Not just what we have, but I went to the Vatic, the Vatican code. It's the Codex Vaticanus. It's the earliest translation that predates St. Jerome from 300 AD. It is finally online and you can read it and it's probably the most transparent. But when you start reading the letters from Paul and everything, it started to conflict with Mormon doctrine. And a lot of the things that Joseph Smith taught seem to align with what a person needs for their own selfish gain, like prospering in the lamb versus how to share that with everybody. Not prosper, but love, unconditional love, acceptance and find beauty and diversity versus in just red roses. You know, if God wanted us to all be red roses, there'd only be red roses. But there's beautiful flowers everywhere. Some people don't want, you know, roses from their spouse. They want tulips. So there's a, you know, there's countless things. But for me, John, it became a doctrinal issue more than they practice polygamy and Joseph polyandry and the Kinderhook plates, the book of Abraham. You know, rough stone rolling was great because I saw that finally they're accepting that it's not a historical fact, that it's a narrative. And I liked Terrell Givens approach with the weeping God, a God that weeps. But then again, I started to see they're making excuses, they're explaining this, but now the apostles are quoting them. So when apostles are quoting scholars, that tells me that they really don't have monopoly on revelation. They're not speaking to God, they're speaking to scholars and then they come together and make that decision for God. So from a biblical standpoint, in a way that's taking God's name in vain because they're invoking the name of Jesus Christ in everything, but keeping him as a third party. Because the New Testament is very clear that Christ came to fulfill the law and become our high priest. And there was no longer a need for high priests. And instead of being in that dispensation of the fullness of times, according to the New Testament, we're in the dispensation of grace, which is the last dispensation. And that there was never an apostasy. The church has just continued to grow in that church. Being anyone who is a believer, you don't have to be a bat, you don't have to get baptized to believe or to be in the church. You don't have to take sacrament to have salvation. These are just acts of beauty and you need to see beauty in them versus requirement. Because God, through Christ fulfilled the law and the need for the prophets. He sent prophets. They Christ reminds him in the New Testament. They stoned them, they killed him. Israel didn't want to do anything with them. You know, the story goes on and on. God gives it promise to Israel. Israel breaks the promise, but God keeps the promise. Like the Father and the prodigal Son. Finally he sends his son, It's Christ Jesus. Jesus, to be the high priest, the final, last high priest. And that there's a one on one, one by one relationship with that

John Dehlin [03:47:03] being

Paul Cardall [03:47:04] who took your place. And ultimately to heal the effects of all the pain in the world because you know, there is pain. We hurt each other. And how do we apologize to people who are dead and gone? You know, if there is an afterlife, how do we reconcile if we see them again, do we see them again? How do we make everything new and cleanse it? And just because you die, does that mean you're all of a sudden a good person? Or are you still going to do something to hurt somebody's feelings? How do we heal? And so through Christ, who is love. Once we learn how to love and we understand love, that's what Christ is. So when I say I believe in Christ, it's I believe in love. When we need Christ in our hearts, we need love in our hearts. Because Jesus says, I am the way, meaning love is the way. And that's why when I met Ty Herndon, I went to this party, it was a pride party and we were supposed to turn off all our phones, because everybody that was at the party were the writers of gospel music. And some of the biggest gospel songs are written by the LGBTQ community and nobody knows it. A lot of our hymns in our hymn book are written by LGBTQ plus people that nobody knows that that's their heart. And they've had their own personal relationship with God without all these classic ecclesiastical leaders. And Ty Herndon taught me that because he had a very beautiful relationship with Jesus as a gay man in a healthy partnership with his husband Matt. Anyways, at this party, they outed me as a Mormon, so it was fascinating. And then he invited me to write a song with him and perform at Love Loud. And I. He didn't know that I was from Utah and New Tyler or knew who Tyler Glenn was, knew who Dan was, knew Steve Young and his wife. He didn't know that. He just wanted me to be part of Love Loud because I was Mormon. He just didn't know I was from Utah, know all those guys. So going to Love Loud was a big deal for me two years ago, and a lot of my eyes opened up because that's where I met Tyler and Dan. Yeah. And I'd spent a lot of time with Steve Young and Steve. Steve's an amazing person for me because he helped take this scales off my eyes that was blinding me from fully embracing 100% that the church is wrong on their policy, that it's Antichrist.

John Dehlin [03:50:40] Steve Young. Steve Young convinced you of that conversation

Paul Cardall [03:50:45] I had with him because he still

John Dehlin [03:50:49] presents as an active, orthodox believing Mormon.

Paul Cardall [03:50:53] Yeah. And he is. And, you know, like Dan, it's hard to move the needle from the outside. I think, you know this. It takes inside. You can have as many people as you want leave the church, but when everyone wants to join the church in Africa, and we're starting to see that in India, it kind of doesn't matter because the church is going to survive anyways. Religions don't go away, they just grow.

John Dehlin [03:51:29] So you're saying Steve is. Is trying to fight from within to. To make Mormonism better?

Paul Cardall [03:51:36] I don't speak for Steve. I don't know his heart on that. What I know is that his love and compassion is a. Is opposite to the policy. I don't think he agrees with it, but I think that there's. There's too many people that he cares about that care about Steve that he doesn't. He's about not hurting people, and his wife's doing plenty good with trying to help people. So I think it's a Good, balanced marriage in the fight to have covenant marriage between LGBTQ plus for those that want to stay within a church that is slowly putting that third party as a second party, and then maybe eventually they'll make him a first party.

John Dehlin [03:52:34] So the, your story is different than a lot of the people. I mean, you know, there's Sandra Tanner, there's Sean McCraney, there's Grant Palmer, there's Kathleen Malonakis. I, you know, I interviewed the people at South Mountain Church. You know, I, I've interviewed plenty of people who have turned more to Christianity after leaving Mormonism. So that's not new. But I'm still going to highlight the, the fact that your story is different from probably most of the people that lose their faith in the Mormon Church in the sense that, you know, it's, it's. The way it usually happens is it's like, oh, my gosh, I believed in this with all my heart. The church betrayed me, Joseph Smith betrayed me. The Book of Mormon betrayed me. All my feelings betrayed me. And so I'm not just going to stop believing in Joseph Smith. I'm not just going to stop believing in the Book of Mormon. I'm not just going to stop believing in the LDS Church. But now, you know, Christ has been infected by all this. God has been infected by all this. The Bible has been infected by all this. The same critical eye that you turn towards the Book of Mormon, you can turn towards the Bible. And in that sense, you know, what can you really rely on anymore? And do you even need all this religion stuff anyway? And so, so many of the people that I interact with, and not all, maybe 60%, they just lose all faith altogether, lose any desire to follow Jesus or God or the Bible, and they pretty much become secular. So what do you think it was that allowed you to maintain your belief in God, maintain your belief in Jesus, and to become even more into the Bible and sort of become a real devout follower of Jesus. How do you think that happened?

Paul Cardall [03:54:35] I, I feel like I've always had a relationship with Jesus Christ of the, the, the God who unconditionally loves, doesn't judge who is not a middleman, but that he comes and rescues you. He comes to you. He was not interested in organized religion. He came to fulfill the law, meaning to break it down so that he can just be one with us. The challenge in a lot of Christian churches is they put their faith again in their pastors. They go to a church based on who the pastor is. They're not going based on the good News which is that you have this father figure comes to sacrifice everything for you, to give you love, acceptance. You know, we see all these encounters in the New Testament and there's a. Let me read this quote. Timothy Keller is a big influence on me and Eugene Peterson. Eugene Peterson is who? Bono. Bono from U2 in his faith journey reads all his works and we talk about not needing an organized religion, but gathering in communities with fellow believers who don't agree all the same. We don't agree all the same, but we're there because we want to love other people. So Timothy Kello in the Prodigal God says the crucial point here. In general, religiously observant people were offended by Jesus, but these estranged from religious and moral observance were intrigued and attracted to him. See, I've been offended by the observance of not allowing people to have the full measure of their creation. But that's not who Jesus is. We see this through the New Testament. In every case he meets a religious, where he meets a religious person and a sexual outcast or a religious person and a racial outcast or a religious person and a political outcast. The outcast is the one who connects with Jesus and the elder brother type does not. Jesus says to the respectable religious leaders, the tax collectors and the prostitutes will enter the kingdom before you ever will. So if Jesus is saying prostitutes, then even adulterers who are kicked out of the Mormon Church should not be held accountable. Well, they should be able. There should not be a council that's pretty much ruins their family. It's not the way of Christ. And who are we to say what the Bible really says? You know, and it's a personal thing. I can be in a room with people who are Buddhist, who are Islamic and if they have love that is Christian. And we go back to Nietzsche. I mean if you want to get into like the philosophy of Nietzsche, who started out as a Christian, who became agnostic and then at the end of his life, the end of his life, Nietzsche says if you believe in feeding the poor and taking care of another, you're pretty much a Christian because you have those values. Because those concepts didn't hit the Western world until after Christ. Christianity brought that compassion to the world in the way that it's a one on one help people experience loving your neighbor. The other thing is Nietzsche, near the end of his life was greatly disturbed by the loss of, by the loss of belief in God. And he says that the death of God will lead not only to the rejection of cosmic order, but Also to doubts concerning whether anything has value in the universe. So, you know, because I can't think of any good reason why God allows suffering. Sometimes we walk away from God because we assume we know the answers based on our cultural surroundings. And we are spoiled because we have everything at our fingertips. So much information, it's difficult to make clear decisions. So what I'm saying is that organized religion prevents and derails a full, meaningful relationship with Jesus Christ. And why is that important? Because I wanted to be cleansed. I wanted to heal. I want that shame and that guilt to go and you can leave the church and feel that freedom. But my life, I fought my entire life to live. Having Christ at the center gives more meaning and depth. And he's a role model of how to love. I don't need to be told by a pastor how to love. It's right there by those who knew him. And obviously they're, you know, skeptics will go. And even, you know, National Geographic and all these documentaries I've watched and the, you know, that the sages wrote it, their stories, their folklore, whatever. Point is, look, it is so powerful when you just get rid of everything else and imagine him as your high priest. You report to him, him alone, and you are unconditionally loved. That is what the grace of Christianity is. And that's the only reason why the church is having a hard time being considered, you know, a full Christian church. We do the acts of Christianity within the church, but he came to break down so you could spend time with your family, you could date your wife, you could be a better father. You can have everyone at your table who is black, who is gay, who is Islamic, who is different from you. Everyone belongs at my table. So that's the Jesus I've come to understand. That's my Christianity.

John Dehlin [04:02:11] So I love it. Can I ask you just a series of questions where I, you know, we probably won't have time for extensive answers, but I'll just kind of take you through kind of many of the things that I've struggled with and you give sort of like, you know, 30 second or one minute responses just without, you know. Well, maybe we can have you back to go into more detail, but to just kind of address some of the biggest issues. I and others have had a really high level. Is that okay?

Paul Cardall [04:02:47] I'll try.

John Dehlin [04:02:48] Okay, so, yeah, and just summarize. Okay. So to begin with, the idea that you can't know if there's a God, all you can know is what other people tell you. And if you can't trust our current leaders in the church. How do we trust Moses? How do we trust Peter, James or whatever? It's all. It's, you know, there's not enough evidence to believe in a God, and so why not just wait and, you know, if you die and there's a God, that's great. But. But there are a lot of people that are just like, I don't have enough evidence to know for sure if there's a God, so why even bother? I can just live the best life that I can, and we'll find out later.

Paul Cardall [04:03:32] Well, I think there are very few people. There's very few people who actually know, John, how to pull that off. Because the bottom line is, if you don't believe in God, there's a problem with meaning. Because meaning you'll create for yourself will be too hard to manage when the suffering comes. And anyone who's been to the 12 steps knows that when you get to that step three, you have to find something outside of yourself. And, you know, it becomes this. Where is your source? Who is your source to help you manage your suffering and give meaning to your suffering? Which is why CS Lewis wrote the Meaning of Pain. You have a God that comes down and suffers for you. You have a God suffering with you. You can. And that's the thing is I can run on a treadmill and shout at the top of my lungs to God how mad I am. And I know that he's listening and going, I got your back. So that we all need a source. And for me, it's Jesus.

John Dehlin [04:04:51] So. And this isn't a debate because I don't believe in debating. I think beliefs are sacred. Yeah, but one of my listeners, Bobby, he wrote, I am my source. And that's not. Again, this isn't to debate you. And I'll just say that I agree with you and I disagree with you. And this is what I mean. I counsel. You know, I coach people sometimes when they reach out to me and ask to be coached. I'm not, like, looking for clients. But if somebody's really in a tough spot, they reach out to me and they say, I want to talk, I talk to them. And I have had many, many clients over the years that struggle with what's the purpose of life, what's the meaning? What about all the suffering? And it's really hard. I can't force or teach anyone to find meaning. I just know that I've found it. And so I'm going to agree with you on the one hand that people have a really hard time sometimes finding meaning and purpose and a reason to endure the suffering in life, and that God can be a very easy, convenient, useful way to fill that void. So I agree with you on that. And I just want to say, and maybe you'll agree, maybe you won't, I don't think it's true to say that everybody needs God to fill that void or to have meaning in my case. I don't identify as an agnostic or an atheist. I'm open to there being a God. I'm open to there being an afterlife. But because I don't believe it's really knowable, the only thing I feel confident of for sure is that there's a life right now. And I am thrilled. Just, just, you know, and I've had suffering. I, I've, I haven't had the suffering you've had in the ways that you've had. I've had suffering in other ways, but I've had suffering. And, and for me, so far it's been okay just to say, hey, I don't know what's coming next. I like to alleviate suffering. I like my wife. I love my kid. I love my life. I love my kids. I enjoy my life, I enjoy my job. I think life is fantastic. And I'm just saying that for me, I, and I think for a lot of people that I meet, they, they, they, they feel like they're able to find meaning and purpose and fulfillment without there needing to be a God there. Now, I'm not saying that you're saying that everybody has to have that, but I mean, I guess I'm asking you do acknowledge that there are lots of people that don't feel the need to have that, right?

Paul Cardall [04:07:38] I think part of the problem here is that for those that have been in Mormonism and raised Mormon, we tend to think of God as a, a physical person because Joseph tried to elevate himself and unelevate Jesus by bringing him down to our level. But. I don't, I think everybody is going to have their own experience with what that is. I, if this was a debate, I would suggest to that individual that what he's discovered within himself is God, because God is within us. And one thing the brethren of the L Church say is that God is not in us, that we are, you know, like spiritual DNA. So God is in us. And when you love somebody and you connect with that person, you just experienced God. So we tend to package him into something we can physically see and experience and witness. But, you know, you and I are talking and we can't see the elements that have to go to space to send this signal into the homes of everybody that's listening. So there are things we don't know. But I'm just putting a face and a person of history who I do believe is God as my source. And for those that say, well, I am my source, I think that's wonderful. The bottom line is I want to be happy. I want you to be happy. I don't want to force any of my faith on you. I just want to be a good person and not be a jerk. I want to love you, and I want you to love me. And Jesus teaches me how to do that. So I need him. Maybe you don't, but I know that he'd like to be that source for you.

John Dehlin [04:10:02] Beautiful. Okay, thank you. A couple other questions. So some have a. Some have a challenge. Like, I. I've never had a challenge with the teachings of Jesus. I think they're beautiful. I love the idea of forgiveness, the idea of service, the idea of sacrifice, the idea of patience and love and kindness, if that's what it means to be a Christian. I identify as a Christian in those senses, although I don't think Jesus is the only person in history to have ever taught those things. I think people before and after him have taught those things as well. But that stuff I've got. I'm totally cool with the idea of Jesus. The literality of Jesus is a stumbling block for some. The idea that he's the Son of God, but he's also God. But that he came to earth and that he was born of Mary, but it was an immaculate conception, and that he performed miracles. But there aren't really a ton of those types of miracles nowadays that are, you know, don't have, like, doctors, you know, performing the miracles. And then that he. He dies and he has to suffer for all our sins and then get resurrected on the third day. There's a point where that starts. There's a point where it's like this great moral philosopher and teacher that helps us all be a better person. And then there's the point where it starts to feel. And this is blasphemous to some, like a conspiracy theory, like something of a superhero or something supernatural all of a sudden is like, wait a minute. Nobody resurrects after three days. And how can he be the Son of God? And how can he also be God? And why did he need to be punished for all of our sins? Why couldn't have God just made that right. Somehow. So there's kind of this literalness and kind of the supernatural deification of Jesus that for many is just like, that's too much. That's all speculation. It's, it feels supernatural, it feels far fetched. And that's not, that's not what I see in my everyday life. And so how do you, how do you stand and, or believe in those more supernatural claims again about resurrection and God and atonement in a very literal sense and superpowers to heal? Where do, where do you stand on all that?

Paul Cardall [04:12:45] Well, you make some very valid points. I remember lying on the operating table at one procedure and they were bringing me back from this procedure and I was suffocating and I couldn't breathe. And they came in and started bagging me. They cardioverted me and they were bagging me with that bag. And I thought I was going to die. And in that moment I started thinking, I don't know why, but I saw Jesus on the cross and you died from suffocation. And I started thinking about him suffering. And why would he be suffering? Why would he dying? And you know, for me at that moment it was. He was trying to teach everyone how to love each other in this story. He was trying to teach everyone how to love each other and got killed for it because he disrupted the religious organization of that day by claiming he was the Messiah. So whether it was real or not, that figure in that moment brought so much power to me to help me to hang on and keep going as far as like, the purpose and the meaning of that. Like, I don't understand calculus. And I know this is one of those arguments where people go, whatever, I don't understand calculus. But calculus works. We don't understand the universe, but we're starting to see order and disorder out there. What having faith in God does is allow you not to have faith in doubt. I don't want to doubt. It's exhausting. I've fought too long to live. And I like the idea and I believe it, that this life has meaning and that God is our Father and that we are his creation. And if doctors can come to a point with our knowledge and you know, they've learned how to take human hearts out of people. My heart. I was on an operating table. My heart died. They learned how to create machines to keep me alive long enough to put another human heart in me. They temporarily raised me from the dead. So the idea that we can be raised from the dead in some future should not be ignored because cutting edge of Science is how do we live longer? Everyone is trying to be healthier in the nutrition because they want to live longer, they want to get rid of the parasites, the bacteria, they want to thrive, you know, so the only way to do that is we have to come together, work together. Eventually we're going to end up on Mars, we're going to end up on Jupiter, we're going to keep going to maybe learn how to preserve life longer and dive back into our ancestry and start bringing people back. So what's wrong with that notion through science, that we become conquerors of our own death? That down the line, millions of years from now, in the progression of the universe or whatever's going on, if this planet dies and the star dies, maybe somewhere else there's a, this process going on. And you take these elements, these are elements that exist, you can create. We create life, we have children using these elements. We are sending a signal to space using these elements. We know nothing. So we think we know everything because we're very comfortable in what we have. And we keep getting more and more stuff in our laps that we don't even know how to. You know, I got the new Apple update today and I'm, I gotta go learn it because it's new and improved, it's getting better and better. So I mean, in that perspective we can't discredit a God idea because at some point, if you take that word God, it's pretty much a creator and a ruler, someone who is worshiped and adorned like a father. I just think it takes, I think it takes faith to doubt. It takes work. Because then you start digging deeper into why, why, why, why, why, what's going on, what's happening, who said this, who did that. It's a lot of work. It's very exhausting. Keep you up at night. I, I like the comfort of knowing this person in the New Testament who said he was Jesus, who said he was God, who claimed to be, because he's teaching me how to love my neighbor and Gandhi. You know, there's another individual who taught us how to love and how to approach war. And we have all these amazing people, but Jesus, the claim there is that he rose from the dead and that was the proof and the evidence. I don't remember my heart surgeries, but I have a scar to prove to me that, to remind me that I went through something, that I don't remember every detail. So I can't say that, I can't say that. The possibilities. So for, for atheists and you know, Agnostics, I would say, don't give up on the idea that we are going to reach a time where there will be a God or accept the one that already exists.

John Dehlin [04:19:12] All right, thank you for that response and thanks for being good natured about kind of this exchange. What about people that say, look, we've all deconstruct, you know, as progressive and post Mormons, we've all deconstructed the Book of Mormon. We know that it's not true. You know, we know that it's not historical. You know, we know that it's basically Joseph. It's basically Bible fan fiction that Joseph knew the Bible and, and from his knowledge of the Bible, plus mixing his perceptions about Native Americans and a bunch of 19th century Protestant teachings, he created the Book of Mormon as kind of Bible fan fiction. But it was really Joseph. And I'm guessing that you believe that about the Book of Mormon, that you don't believe.

Paul Cardall [04:20:01] It wasn't just Joseph. It was all of them. It was Lucy was involved and Oliver. They all knew each other in Vermont.

John Dehlin [04:20:10] But you don't believe that an angel delivered golden plates to Joseph Smith and that he translated that into the Book of Mormon, right?

Paul Cardall [04:20:20] No.

John Dehlin [04:20:21] Okay. So there, you know, we've interviewed like Bart Ehrman, we've interviewed David Bachavoy and Mormon Stories Podcast, and what they've said is the problems don't end with the Book of Mormon. The Old Testament's got a plethora of historical problems that the Old Testament, a lot of the teachings in the Old Testament didn't originate with the Old Testament. They're traditions from civilizations prior to the Old Testament just being rewritten into the stories of the Old Testament. And of course, there's the genocide and all the brutality in the Old Testament, but even the New Testament scholars like Bart Ehrman will, will say that, you know, the, the New Testament was, was actually written down two or three or four generations after Jesus died, that the, the Gospels weren't written by the people whose names are on the Gospels, that these were oral traditions passed down and names were assigned to the traditions of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And we don't even know who really wrote them, and that they have so much contradiction between them and so many historical problems and that if you line them up consecutively, that the story grows and grows kind of like Joseph Smith's first vision for from the earliest Gospel to the latest gospel, it's like Jesus goes from being a moral philosopher to the Son of God and God himself. And basically, just to summarize that the Bible's. As someone who's using the intellect to dissect the Book of Mormon can just as easily use that intellect to dissect the Bible and find that it's just as problematic, if not more so. How do you. And that's been some of my criticisms of, like my interview with Sandra Tanner and Kathleen Melanagas and others. It's that, well, they use their intellect to dissect Mormonism, but then they throw that intellect away when they're looking at the Bible and Christianity. Somehow they suspend that same critical judgment. What are your responses to people that would say the same thing to you, Paul? You just got to keep applying that critical thought to the Bible and Jesus, but you've suspended it. What do you, what do you say to that?

Paul Cardall [04:22:38] Well, there's no question the Book of Mormon was created. And it's recent, very recent. So it's pretty easy to prove. But even when you have proof, you have to prove the proof because everybody has an opinion. But when it comes to the, the Old Testament, the Jews know who they are. They've got these stories they've been telling for a very long time. They have significant impact on who they are as people. And I have not taken the Bible ever literally because Jesus taught parables. And these are stories that we're supposed to draw principles out of in order to help manage our lives and the way we treat other people. And it brings order to civilization. The Constitution wouldn't exist without the Bible because that was the moral compass for creating the United States, obviously built on a lot of racism, anti Protestantism, anti Catholicism. We can dig and find problems with everything. We know that the sages in England wrote much of the New Testament based on the papyru that was passed down. So, no, we do not have evidence. But this is another question of faith. And for me, when I read scripture, I don't go, oh, my gosh, the earth was created in seven days. No, seven is Hebrew for Shiva, which means perfect, meaning it took a bunch of time to create a perfect place to have life and creation. I. The Ark of the Covenant. This is a story to talk about how God keeps his promises and people break their promises. Moses, Elijah, all these stories. I do think that there was an ancient Israel. I do believe there were prophets among them. There is new evidence coming forth, and I don't. I've never focused on evidence. Even when I was a devout Latter Day Saint, the Mormon geography used to crack me up. The fact that people are literally trying to find archaeology remains. So I would Joke, too. I'd be like, well, I was just in Chile. I feel like this is the place. Or you're over in Missouri at the Mounds and, you know, nobody knows. But with the New Testament, I trust more because there is actual papyra from the New Testament, the Book of Mark. We do have the signature of some of these people. These people did exist. There are historians, five, I think, that talk about Jesus of Nazareth and a miracle worker. And these are not religious books, from Josephus to a couple other. And why would Josephus write about Jesus if it's a Roman story and he was a, you know, a Sanhedrin historian? So you can pick it apart and all that stuff. But again, it goes back to when you're having a beautiful spiritual experience and you're feeling that love and that unconditional thing that's, in my opinion, God comforting you, healing you, trying to help you. He is in you. He is loving on you. You know, the Old Testament, like the Book of Job, we know that was a play that the ancient Israel used to put on, that it was not a real person. So archaeology is yet to unearth a lot of amazing things. Will that determine if the Bible has any validity to. Doesn't matter to me, because this is about a spiritual journey. This is about having something divine be with me to help me, comfort me, and help me be a better person. So I'm not a jerk. And so I use the Bible to guide me as a road map. But when it comes to going, oh, well, they don't deserve this, or they don't do that, because people say the Bible puts limits on stuff. And I've seen some of these interviews where they say, well, oh, yeah, well, it says right there in the Bible that you can't be gay. I mean, do a little further research. And I would encourage those that have examined Mormon history to dig deeper instead of just discounting, if you become a Christian, discounting what it says about LGBTQ plus, because that's not. That's not Jesus. Jesus brings people together. He wants. He's the first to come to your party and make sure everyone is safe and loved and that you can feel that innocence of a child again. So biblically, some of it I take literally, and some of it I don't.

John Dehlin [04:28:32] And just. Just to be clear, like, so for you, the Earth is billions of years old. It's not 6,000 years old, correct?

Paul Cardall [04:28:41] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [04:28:44] Are you okay with organic evolution?

Paul Cardall [04:28:46] Absolutely. My brother. My brother was a ecological geneticist. And when you read there's an Old Book by John Witso. Joseph Smith, the scientist. There's a hint of that, that Joseph, that Witso believed in evolution. Talmage believed in evolution. Henry, Irene's father, believed in evolution. There's nothing wrong with evolution. It says in the Bible, taken from the dust of the. I mean these are the elements. Everything in the earth God used to organize, create. We come from the earth, from dust we are to dustery return. You know, so, yeah,

John Dehlin [04:29:31] so the, so the global flood, you don't need to believe in that literally or that the, the ark, Noah's ark, had all the two of every animal. Like you're, you're loose on all that in terms of taking all that super literally.

Paul Cardall [04:29:46] When it comes down to it, John, what I'm reading, does this make me a better person or am I getting worse? And the Bible empowers me like I never felt before to not be so hard on myself with what I've experienced. And I feel so much love and freedom in the grace of Christ and who he was and the women that were surrounding him and around him. We learned from them more than we learned from the apostles, in my opinion.

John Dehlin [04:30:27] When somebody, when somebody says Christ is the way, there's, you know, there's the stuff Joseph Smith got tripped up on where it's like, oh, you have. That means you have to be baptized as a Christian and join a church and which church? And who's got the authority? And, and oh no, someone died without a Christian baptism, therefore they're going to hell. Like all that stuff, you know. And of course the problem is there's people in China and India that have never heard of Jesus or never in a way, or their culture would never allow them to join a Christian church and they're going to die without a Christian baptism. So how does your version of Christianity, you know, what does it require to get to heaven? And how does it deal with people that may never have the altar call or may never, you know, in their brain use the words accept Jesus into my heart or they may never get a Christian baptism. Where, where are they going in the afterlife? In your, in your beliefs around Christianity? And how's that all going to work?

Paul Cardall [04:31:32] That's a great question. And I tell this story about a. There's this village and there's all these people and there's a dragon flying over the village and there's a sign that says, watch out for the dragon. People are going in these buildings wearing suits and ties, dresses. They're white buildings, they're beautiful. But a couple people just don't feel like they fit in. And here comes this dragon and picks randomly picks people up. And everybody's like, you idiot. Didn't you know there was a dragon? You're a moron. And they pretty much just forget about it. They don't go after that person. They just assume they're gone. So then you're walking along and dragon picks you up, and you're like, oh, you're screaming, and everybody's like, yelling at you. You're an idiot. You know better than that. We've told you what to do, and you're scared, and you go with this creature that's scary. And they. This dragon drops you at the mouth of a cave. And you go in this cave, and all of a sudden it's, like, beautiful. And then you see all these people, and there's a table. And you can't see the end of this table because it's amazing. And there's plates at the table. And, you know, you notice there's a place for you at the table. And a lot of preachers talk about the table, but you found your place at the table, but you're still wondering what you're doing at that table. And then all of a sudden, this figure comes in, the dragon who's transformed as a God figure, and ask before anyone is seated, do they have anything they want to say? And I take up the courage in that. And I look at him, and I look around the room, and I see that there's a lot of people that I love who are missing that are not there. And I look at him, I'm like, I can't be here. I don't want to be here because I need my friends and my family. And he's like, well, let's go get him. Well, let's go get him. So we all kind of turn into dragons, and we eventually go and snatch people up and bring them to the table, and we're not satisfied until everyone's there. Some people don't want to go, and that's okay. We wait. We wait. There's no timeline on when people accept Christ. We're all gonna die. I mean, I've died before. We're all gonna die. If you read the New Testament and focus on who, what Jesus is saying rather than what, wipe everything off the table that other people have told you. Just focus on how Jesus treats people. That is the God that I adore, that I worship, that I love, because he will come to you. He will come to you. You don't need to go to him. He wants to love you. He wants to love the hell out of you. I don't believe in some, you know, place of fire or whatever, because fire is used to purify things. Fire actually is love. Some people don't want to be loved, and it takes time to embrace that love because we can't love ourselves what God does. Like this gentleman that says, I need myself. When you start, you'll start to love yourself, and then you can love other people. But it's hard to love yourself when you feel shame and guilt and not acceptance. But Jesus in the New Testament provides that assurance. Not just intellectually, but figuratively, emotionally. You all know when he comes to you, and that's the reason I resigned mainly is because I feel like he finally came to me and helped me and cleansed me, and I want to pursue him more and understand that more. And so, yeah, I mean, you can say that's mystical. That's still going down the, the religious path. But I'm not interested in organizing religion because again, if you read the New Testament, Jesus didn't want anyone to organize. He just wants a personal relationship with you. That's all. So for everyone who's thinking, you know, I'm gonna die and I, I'm gonna live my life, you can live your life and be happy and don't be a jerk and love each other and accept each other. And then I, I believe that in the afterlife, eventually you'll come to know who that, that being is, because he is the Father in the story of the prodigal son that was waiting for the good, the bad, the ugly, you know. So again, it's a matter of faith. It's a matter of how you want to live your life, who you trust, who you don't trust, what you want for yourself. But the minute we start imposing rules on other people, it's Antichrist. The minute we start telling people how to live, it's Antichrist. Unless you want to come and learn and really listen and try those things as an experiment in your life, you don't really know.

John Dehlin [04:37:36] Got it. Okay.

Paul Cardall [04:37:40] It's never, you know, it's never convincing to. No, that's a thing.

John Dehlin [04:37:45] No, I'm just saying that's, that's the, that's the type of Christianity, a brand of Christianity that isn't off putting to me. It's not exclusive, it's not judgmental. It's very universal. And it's focused on being kind. And that's the type of Christianity I can get behind.

Paul Cardall [04:38:09] This is the type of Christianity that The, this is the Christianity that I've learned out of attending hundreds of churches of all kinds and knowing the Jesus of the New Testament. That's, that's what I see. And I hope Christianity can evolve where, where it's organized like that, because there's no progress when we divide ourselves. It's Antichrist.

Resignation, Spirituality, and the Path Forward

John Dehlin [04:38:47] Yeah. And you've. You've resigned from the LDS Church, is that right?

Paul Cardall [04:38:53] I did. Out of principle. I could have left my records there, but had a principle that of the, the problems with the history and the fact that the doctrine doesn't line up with Christ

John Dehlin [04:39:11] and the, and just super briefly, the main ways the church is not lining up with the, with the Christ of the Bible. From your opinion, just like top three to five, don't even go into detail, just kind of list, list them.

Paul Cardall [04:39:25] Christ said he'd come to fulfill the law. Love fulfills the lie. He was the greatest act of love. There's no need for prophets anymore. He is the high priest. We come to him and none else. That's why we have in, in the church. There's a Masonic order that we have to go through to get love and acceptance and, you know, everything from, hey, what's your calling? You know, our identities are wrapped up in the church and not in our kindness and our goodness. And I'm a hypocrite too. I've been a jerk, which is why I'm excited about this, you know, step to this other Christianity because it, it's all inclusive. It doesn't mean you can't, you know, you still gotta not be, you know, so it's still kind of new for me, John. But I, and I, I know there's a lot of Christian churches where I won't be accepted because of my support for lgbtq. But again, if a church is saying that they. It's not the Jesus that I know.

John Dehlin [04:40:50] Okay, so in Mormonism, you're saying it's too much about leaders being. Whether it's the prophet or your bishop or whatever. There are too many bureaucratic layers between you and the Savior or God.

Paul Cardall [04:41:05] Doctrinal, it's all doctrinal.

John Dehlin [04:41:07] So it's the priesthood, it's the patriarchy. It's all that layering. It's even the existence of a prophet. You're basically saying you don't need any of that. You don't need the Book of Mormon, you don't need the Doctrine of Covenants, you don't need modern day revelation. You need a relationship with the Lord, and that's all you need. And Anyone who adds anything, you don't need this authority. You don't need these ordinances. You just need to have a relationship with the Lord, and that's what you need.

Paul Cardall [04:41:36] Yeah, because it's very clear in the New Testament, Christ is the authority. He is the high priest. He says you should have no other gods before me. He also said he was the temple, and there's no more need to build temples. So these temples kind of set us up for idol worshiping in a way, and we kind of worship our prophets more than who they're supposed to represent. And. And granted, anytime you have organized religion, there is pure intention, there is good intention, and it's helping a lot of people, but I think it's also preventing a lot of people from progress with a full relationship that Christ intends to have with you.

John Dehlin [04:42:27] Yeah. Okay. I can see that you were recently baptized, Is that right?

Paul Cardall [04:42:33] I was. And. And when you're baptized, you're not baptized into a church, because Christ already came to me through my. You know, is that individuals, through my conscience, through everything, and started pulling me 10 years ago to. To just put him as the center of everything instead of everything else, because everything else was distracting me from truly loving the people around me. I needed him. So. So, yeah, I was baptized to publicly express my new commitment to Christ. And then obviously, coming on, this is going on the record to express to people that there's a lot of happiness and freedom, and that freedom is from that healing that comes because I have felt the overwhelming feeling that comes when you are restored to new life, to feel joy again and not feel shame, not feel sad, not feel depressed. So, yeah,

John Dehlin [04:43:52] beautiful. All right, well, I'm happy you found joy and happiness, and I love that you're teaching be kind, because if we just all taught that, I think we'd be in a better, better position.

Paul Cardall [04:44:06] Well, that's why he said there's really only two commandments.

John Dehlin [04:44:09] Love, love God, love your neighbor. Right?

Paul Cardall [04:44:11] Yeah. And that fulfills the law, right? That fulfills it. That's it. So why create all this fuss about that little thing of just be nice and people can go, oh, that's crazy. You can't. How do you get everyone to be nice? How do you get everyone to love? Gandhi did a pretty good job trying to explain through his actions Martin Luther King marched was not violent. We have to be loud in our love and our compassion for people. That's what Jesus did. He was loud in telling the Sanhedrin that they are hurting people. They are taking all the money instead of Helping the poor. You know, they're. They're the first one to walk into a banquet and everybody praises them. Anytime a pastor or preacher walks into a building and you're all standing, that's a form of idol worshiping. Right.

John Dehlin [04:45:20] So. So there are a couple other songs we wanted to play. We want time to get to those, but I wanted to play the one with Tyler Glenn. Is that. Is that all right if we end with that?

Collaborating with Tyler Glenn and Closing Reflections

Paul Cardall [04:45:34] Yeah. So Tyler and I wrote a song recently that'll go on the Broken Miracle. It doesn't come out till February, and I had to give a lot of permission to show you what Tyler and I wrote. And a lot of my decisions have been as a result of having that friendship with Tyler because he's got such a good heart and such a lovable man and deserves so much joy and happiness. And so, yeah, we wrote. He came up with this lyric after listening to me talk like this for. For hours. You know, this is longer than the three hour block. Yeah, you set a new standard. You've made Mormons talk about church for more than four hours.

John Dehlin [04:46:27] This is short for me. We're only going to go about five hours. That's. That's a little short.

Paul Cardall [04:46:31] Well, and. And my. My voice and my. I get really tired with the heart transplant. After time, it's hard to keep my.

John Dehlin [04:46:39] You're doing great. You're doing great.

Paul Cardall [04:46:41] You know, so.

John Dehlin [04:46:44] So you're saying Tyler wrote a lyric.

Paul Cardall [04:46:47] So I wrote the music and Tyler wrote the lyrics. So this is going to come out worldwide in February and there's going to be more next week about the album. We have David Archuleta on the record. We have Thompson Square. We have a lot of amazing artists, very diverse group of people. Because my point is everyone is welcome to the table and we can all have a good time. So, yeah, this is.

John Dehlin [04:47:20] So what's this song about? What, What. What's the song getting at? We're just going to play about a minute of the song, but what should we know about what this song's trying to get at?

Paul Cardall [04:47:30] How we were let down by a system that should have loved us and been there to rescue us and that it's cold on the church floor.

John Dehlin [04:47:43] All right, and the name of the

Paul Cardall [04:47:46] song, I Know it Hurts.

John Dehlin [04:47:50] All right, so this is Tyler Glenn, singer, you know, lead singer for Neon Trees. Amazing human. Tyler recently had a stroke and he's healing from that. So, Tyler, we love you. We think you're amazing and you do have a good heart and you are a super kind and Thoughtful and brilliant. Human and creative and talented. So we're. We're giving our love to Tyler tonight in hopes that he has a speeding full recovery. But this. This. This is Tyler, Glenn and Paul Cardall. And again, the song is entitled. What?

Paul Cardall [04:48:36] I know it hurts.

John Dehlin [04:48:37] I know it hurts.

Paul Cardall [04:48:38] From the broken miracle.

John Dehlin [04:48:40] From the broken miracle. Here it is, everybody. This is a powerful song. I have heard it already, so you're gonna love it. So here it goes.

▶ Video Clip 1

Video Clip 1 [04:48:49] Graveyard.

Video Clip 1 [04:48:50] There were crosses?

Video Clip 1 [04:48:51] There were stained glass window doors?

Video Clip 1 [04:48:54] And the church bells rang? And angels sang?

Video Clip 1 [04:48:57] But the symbols were not ours? Dear God, is there not more? Cause it's cold on the church floor? Oh, here you find yourself a new road? And they wish that you could stay? There's a faint light at the end? And it's calling you away? Dear God, I hope there's more? Cause it's cold on the church floor? Oh, And I know it hurts.

Video Clip 1 [04:49:35] 5.

Video Clip 1 [04:49:36] Finding your worth I know it hurts? You've been through words Feeling so small in a big universe? I know it hurts And I know it hurts.

John Dehlin [04:49:59] Okay, that's almost, like, abusive to play that beautiful song and not let us hear the whole thing. But it's also a teaser because we want everyone to support you and Tyler and the work you guys are doing. So we're just all gonna have to suck it up and wait till next year.

Paul Cardall [04:50:17] Yeah, well, not too far. It's February. But if people.

John Dehlin [04:50:22] Beautiful. It's a beautiful song.

Paul Cardall [04:50:26] This whole album has been my memoir

John Dehlin [04:50:28] of

Paul Cardall [04:50:32] what I've been through, and I think everyone who's listening will connect and relate. Even though I consider myself a follower of Jesus, this album doesn't necessarily go to that. It focuses on the different challenges of being unique and different and an outcast, because I had felt like an outcast. But if the broken miracle.com is where you can learn more about it in the novel, because our goal with this whole project is just to reiterate that there is a place there should be. Everyone should be welcome at the table. Doesn't matter who you are. So, I mean, I've got. When you have David Archetta and Tyler Glenn on the same album, and you have Matt Hammond from Sanctus Real Big Christian band, Rachel Yamagata, who helped Rayla Montaigne become a. Helped Rayla Montaigne get off heroin. Rachel's an amazing artist that lives in Woodstock, New York. Very open, a lot of beliefs. So it's very. It's a good balance of artists.

John Dehlin [04:51:46] It's.

Paul Cardall [04:51:47] And there's a lot more artists on there, so it's all songs and some instrumentals.

John Dehlin [04:51:53] So you just did a song with Chris. Christine. Kristen Chenoweth. How do you pronounce. What's her first name? Christina. What is it?

Paul Cardall [04:52:01] Glenda? The good witch from Wicked.

John Dehlin [04:52:03] Yeah, but what's her.

Paul Cardall [04:52:05] Kristen Chenoweth.

John Dehlin [04:52:06] Kristen. Kristen. Yeah. That's a big name, right?

Paul Cardall [04:52:09] Yeah. Kristen's boyfriend is Josh. He's a friend of ours. He is Ty Herndon's guitar player. And Ty Herndon, who is an openly gay artist, reached out to me when Kristen was considering coming to do the Tabernacle Choir because she's a big supporter of lgbtq, the communities, and she was nervous about going to the. To the choir because it was the LGBTQ community that was mad at her being willing to go and do that with the Tabernacle Choir. But she said, how are we to move the needle unless we do this, unless we are present and still vocal? And after the concert, she spent a lot of time at the Encircle group with the kids, and it was really beautiful. But, yeah. Orphans of God is a anthem for those that believe in God, that are LGBTQ plus or have ever felt. I've ever felt like an outcast. There are no orphans of God is what it's trying to say. You can't kick somebody out of a house for who they are. There are no orphans. So that's kind of the concept behind that. And that's such a fantastic song. And that's out. That's been out couple weeks, and so that's been fun.

John Dehlin [04:53:41] Well, Paul Cardall, you're. You've done really important work, and your art is super powerful and meaningful. It's touched the lives of literally tens of, if not hundreds of millions of people. And I. It's been a real pleasure to get to know you and to develop a friendship with you, and I'm just super excited to follow your career and the good things that you do in the future. But I'm also just really honored that you would be willing to come on Mormon Stories and bless us with your story and that you would entrust with us your story so that we could help you share it. And it's been a beautiful story, and it's been meaningful, and a lot of our listeners have been sharing really kind comments along the way, and I know that lots more are going to really enjoy this story once it's out there. So thank you so much for being willing to come on. It's been wonderful.

Paul Cardall [04:54:47] I really appreciate the work you're doing, John, because you've helped Me, it's fascinating, the reporting and the way you share information that's helping a lot of different people come to a realization that there is a big world full of people who want to love you and that, you know, sometimes it's really scary to jump ship, but when you do, there's a tremendous amount of joy and freedom and the weight that is off my shoulders. It's unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable. When they say there's no happiness, it's a lie. It's a total lie. So thank you. Appreciate all you. And you know, obviously I hope that you'll, you'll take another look at the New Testament and just focus on the principles and what Jesus is saying about love and how to treat people and the way he interacted and the way he scolded those who were religious and self righteous. So that's my hope and takeaway from my Mormon story.

John Dehlin [04:56:06] And I. I'm. One last question I'm throwing at you. It's always difficult to do a Mormon Stories episode because, you know, orthodox believing Mormons maybe aren't always going to like it. And even if it's not, with Mormon stories, you know, you've got a lot of orthodox believing family members that still love the church, still believe in it, still believe in it, literally. I imagine it's really hard for you. You might feel torn that you want to tell your story, you want to even witness, but you also don't want to offend or hurt your loved ones. Is there anything you want to say about or to your loved ones who may or may not be super thrilled that you came on the podcast or that you're talking publicly about leaving the church. And this will be the final.

Paul Cardall [04:56:56] Sure, I am. I'm grateful, strangely enough. I'm so grateful for my experiences in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It's taught me leadership. It's taught me how to manage a lot of things. It's led me to where I am now. I don't think, I don't think things happen. I mean, I think we can carve out our path. Sometimes I feel like it's a divine design. But the bottom line is that I think we need to respect those who don't understand and try to give them the benefit of the doubt. I was in those shoes and I'm so thankful for my family. My parents have sacrificed a lot for my health and well being. My story was always used in Family Night as a testimony builder that God performs miracles. And that's true. It's absolutely true. It still is. True God does amazing things through his children. And so I'm grateful for my family. I wish I could put my arms around my mother and help her feel what I feel, help my father feel what I feel. But they're very, they've been amazing. I haven't had too much slack but I've also been very personal, very private about it. I'm not one to get online and start bashing things. I don't think that's very productive. And obviously my kids, I have two kids, my youngest would not be alive had I not get a gotten a second chance at life with that donor. They are being raised in the church. My daughter calls me because she not feeling the spirit. So it's great because I'm able to help her recognize that she has tremendous value and that you shouldn't be worried too much about meeting certain requirements. Just be who you are and I'm here for you. And it's been great because since I've transitioned out, I think I'm a better father. I'm able to really love without an agenda and it's been amazing. And my wife who is my rock, who is as open minded as I am, who thinks like I do and a lot of this love. Everybody kind of evolved out of meeting her family in Slovenia, Oliver family that's Catholic and living that faith not because they have to but because it brings family together and tradition and those things and that there's joy there and everything. So. But then I have a lot of extended family and fans who are hurt and you know, we can't please everyone if there's no persecution, there's no progress. So you need to be you, be bold, be respectful, but above all be kind because kindness is the key for them to recognize how valuable you are. We can't convince people, but you can certainly love the hell out of people.

John Dehlin [05:00:39] I love it. Paul Cordell everybody. Thank you so much Paul. It's been great.

Paul Cardall [05:00:45] It's been great, John, thanks.

John Dehlin [05:00:47] You take care of yourself and keep us updated on your progress. If somebody wants to follow you or your work, where do they, where do they follow it?

Paul Cardall [05:00:55] So I'm kind of everywhere but. Paulcardall.com P A U L C-R-A-L L.com and if you want to hear some songs, just ask Siri or Alexa. They're working for me 247 so. And I have a big diversity of music. It's just not, it's not all the hymns. I have a lot of other stuff that's not cultural based but yeah.

John Dehlin [05:01:25] All right. Thanks, Paul. You're awesome.

Paul Cardall [05:01:29] Thanks.

John Dehlin [05:01:30] Stay in touch.

Paul Cardall [05:01:31] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [05:01:33] Listeners, thanks so much for joining us today on this episode of Mormon Stories podcast. It's been great. Thanks to everyone who's joined us online on the live stream. We could not do this podcast without our donors and supporters. So if you are a donor, I just want to personally thank you for your support. You literally keep the lights on and make this possible. The harder news is that less than one out of a thousand of my listeners actually donate. And every year I have to ask, can I continue into the next year? So far, every year we've been able to continue, but every year we lose donors, people move on, people lose interest. And we've lost some really big donors this year. Not for any other reason than that, just they moved on. And so we really need ongoing support to keep this podcast going. So if you valued this episode, if you value other episodes like this, I just want to beseech you, plead with you. Please become a monthly donor. Go to MormonStories.org click on the donate button. 10 bucks a month, 50 bucks a month, whatever you can afford. 100 bucks a month, one time donations, annual donations, all those are possible, but it's all tax deductible. We're transparent in our finances. It's tax deductible in the US we're 501c3 nonprofit, and every dollar that you spend goes towards bringing programming and support for people like you. So please pay it forward, please donate to the podcast and we'll be able to do many more cool, exciting things in the weeks, months and years ahead. So thanks for that. Thanks everybody. Happy Holidays, Happy Thanksgiving weekend in the U.S. merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah and all the other positive and secular events, Festivus, Yuletide, whatever it is, have a great November and December. Please stay in touch and we'll see you guys all again soon on another, another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everybody.