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And I’m panicky and realized I was kind of going down that bad path again

And I can’t move. I was going out and getting drunk every night and I was drinking a fifth which is an obscene amount of alcohol. And I was doing that nightly for a long time. And I’m like, “If you get me up off of Termos de serviГ§o La-Date this floor, I will change my life.”

Of course, I didn’t. I got up off the floor with the help of several EMTs and firefighters and got treated in the hospital. And but I did start to shift away from the club scene and my friend Ravi at the time.

And I’m laying there on the floor paralyzed

I told him I couldn’t be a part of his life anymore and started thinking about religion again. There weren’t really any good church-related podcasts at the time, but I was already a big podcast listener. But I started looking at the churches monthly magazines again. And then a few years went by and I started going to church again.

I was now 30, 29, 30. And I was able to just be the wallflower. Then I start going to my ward again and I’m hanging out and I’m like, okay.

So I’m going to these mid-singles firesides, which involved three stakes, a stake is kind of the equivalent of a state. And then a ward is kind of like your town. So you go to a ward, but then several wards make up a stake. And for mid-singles out here in Indiana, there’s not a whole lot of us.

So three stakes that probably had, I don’t know, 30-ish, 25 to 30-ish wards meeting would have 20 people show up that were single and in the mid-single ages. And at one of these, there were three stake patriarchs, which it’s a calling in the church.

And you can go to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints website, and just type in patriarch or patriarchal blessing and you can kind of get an idea of what they do. And they were talking about the importance of your patriarchal blessing, which is a little bit of a revelation.

And I entirely went into it thinking, just adamant that I was going to be asked a bunch of questions and then it was going to be a cold reading. And then they would tell me what I wanted to hear. And I even got the paper back after he told me things and I had the impression while he was saying it, when patriarch Hammond was saying these things, I’m like, “Oh, you got this from what you told me. This is baloney.”

And then I got the paper in the mail. They mail you a transcript. They record it so you can have it to look back at over your life. I sought the same thing, but it’s basically these are the things that if you live a good life and you do what you’re supposed to do in the church and accept your callings, these are the things that are probably going to happen to you in your life.

Some will say it’s just a cold reading

And I’m like, “Yeah. Right.” He made all kinds of promises and I’m like pfffhah!. Well, one of them was this crazy idea that I would marry one of Heavenly Father’s young daughters. And she would be my wife. And I’m like, “Oh, you’re full of it.” These people that show up to the mid-singles are all divorced and have a bunch of kids and I have nothing in common with them.