Episode Script
(Note: the final episode will not follow the script verbatim, but it will be pretty close. )
Welcome to the Thinkering & Tinkering Podcast. I’m Fickle Father.
Introduction
[Music: Ladies First]
In this episode of the Thinkering & Tinkering podcast, I’m going to talk about a time I took a big leap of faith, [trump impersonation] like a huge leap of faith, probably the biggest leap of faith anyone has ever taken.
Yeah, that was supposed to be Trump.
But my leap of faith ended in a way I didn’t quite expect.
If you want to hear about it, keep listening.
This is the Thinkering & Tinkering Podcast. I’m Fickle Father.
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Part 1: Where We’ll Be in 10 Years
Welcome back to the Thinkering & Tinkering Podcast. I’m Fickle Father.
[Continue: Ladies First ~ 0:29 or 0:36]
My wife and I started dating when we were both sophomores in college at BYU – aka the Harvard of the West, aka the Stanford of the slightly more East.
When we were dating, we’d play this game called “Where do you see yourself in [x] number of years” sometimes it was 1 or 2 years, sometimes 5, sometimes it was 10, or 11, maybe 12, or, hear me out now … 13 could be a possibility. Just any number of years you wanted to ask about.
But the game is that you just share what you think your future might look like.
In those days as a college student, the future always seemed bright. We shared the same vision of the future: we’d have a nice, 1950s style, leave-it-to-beaver-like family, with 6 kids. Our house would have dormer windows with a little bit of land. A picket fence. Flowers in the window sill. Our kids would ride their bikes, collect tadpoles in the nearby pond, tromp through the fields gathering whatever those plants are that kids make hats or crowns out of. Maybe we’d have a dog – one of those dogs that will come get you if a kid ever gets trapped in a mine or stuck down a well. I think the dog would probably speak English.
I couldn’t quite see what I would be doing for a job, but I would be reading the paper – yeah that’s right – the paper – and the rotary phone on the wall would ring.
“Honey,” my wife would say. “It’s Mayor Dixon. He needs your help again.”
I’d put down my paper, then switch out of my slipper and into my dress shoes, “Okay, hon,” I’d say as I put my coat jacket on. “I better go help them get this sorted.” I’d give her a kiss, pat the kids on the head, and find my way out the door.
Then I hop in my car, which was a not-too fancy convertible – like the one George Banks drives in Father of the Bride. And I drive away through a tree lined street. The leaves are just starting to change for the fall.
Again, I don’t know where I was going in this view of the future or what I was doing exactly, I just know that someone needed and valued my input – that I would be the one to help them solve some problem only I could solve.
It was a very picturesque view of the future.
We were married the summer after our sophomore years and started our family right away. I really felt good about life and felt like I was following the covenant path about as good as one could do it.
However, when I was coming toward the end of my college degree, it slowly dawned on me that I had no idea what came next on my life’s path.
[Music fades – Cut ~ 2:15 – 2:34]
I felt like I had prepared for some great adventure. I had all my bags packed and organized. I had my passports and everything ready to go.
All I needed was to know where I was going.
I felt like that’s how it worked my whole life up to that point. You kind of always knew where you were going next on the path of life. It was laid out for me. I graduated from primary into the young men’s program. I advanced in the priesthood as you are supposed to do. I earned my duty to God and my almost Eagle scout. I graduated from seminary with honors. Up next was a stint in higher education until I turned 19 and could serve a mission. I served my mission in Seattle – because that’s where I was told to go.
It was the same growing up with school. You do elementary school. Then move to the assigned middle school. You take the required classes and select some electives. Then you go to the assigned high school and do the same thing.
That’s just how it worked. The next step was always laid out neatly before you.
After my mission, I knew the next step was marriage. Finding my wife was fairly easy too. She just appeared in my life like she was always supposed to be there.
And I was expecting the same thing to happen for my future. I expected something like a letter:
“Congratulations, Mr. Fickle! You have been called to start a media empire, or an internet based retail store, or to run a health care facility, or anything…! At least something please!?”
But that letter never came.
Part 2: The Bus Stop
Let me see if I can paint a picture of how it felt. It felt like this…
[fade in sound: 100 People Crowd, Neutral Mood]
I didn’t know where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to do exactly. All I knew was I had to go somewhere and all I could afford was a bus ride. So I said, “Okay, at least that’s something.”
The bus comes. And I load my wife and two kids on the bus.
Eventually the the bus drops us off at some unknown bus stop. It’s dark outside and foggy. The only light comes from the faint streetlamp above the bus stop bench.
We step out and someone tosses my briefcase out the door. I pick it up as the bus drives off. The bus disappears into the mist and I can barely make out a glowing, blinking yellow sign on the back of the bus that reads in plain lettering “Endure to the end” as it fades off into the distance.
[Music: tenuous waves]
Now, I’m standing there with my briefcase, squinting to see if I can identify anything out there. I can’t. I kind of brush myself off and look around. I look behind me and I see my wife and kids settled up on the bus stop bench smiling at me. They’re wearing their Sunday best. My wife is looking at me confidently, knowing that I’m about to do something amazing. So I try to look confident too because I can’t let her down. I can’t let them down.
But I’m really just wishing I had gotten that letter.
I fiddle with my briefcase and pull out a map. It’s not a map I recognize. I study it and pretend that I can see something there. And I actually do see something, I just didn’t recognize it then.
I do now, though… It’s fear.
[Music fades]
Fortunately when you are in undergrad there is always a solution when you encounter this unknown landmark of terror. It’s called law school.
Don’t get me wrong, for some people law school is exactly what they want to do. And I’m very happy for them. But I think for many people law school is actually less scary than the fear of the unknown. It feels safe. And it sounds smart.
It feels better to say, “I’m going to law school” than it does to say, “I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. I’m so lost. Is there anyone out there who can help me?”
[restart music]
The problem is that once you finish school. You’re right back at that bus station. The fear comes back. Only this time it has a sinister scowl because it’s now bulked up on your mounting student loans.
And at that point, you have no choice but to enter that foggy mist.
And that’s what I did. [music fades]
I went down into the fog, praying that I would find that path I was supposed to take. That I would get some direction. That someone would help me know exactly what to do next, just like when I was a kid.
This is not to say that I didn’t have help or support. I had a ton of help. My parents, my family, friends, community – we had a lot of great connections and met wonderful people.
It’s just that I never really felt that I knew what path I was on. It was like my path was just wherever I happened to be.
And I just wanted to know if I was doing the right thing – the thing that God had in store for me. Even if I was grateful for what we had – and I think I was – I just felt like I was still searching for the validation or direction that I felt was supposed to come from God.
And I thought I got it.
Part 3: The Personal Revelation from General Conference
[Music: Morning Breeze]
In the October 2014 General Conference. Elder Carlos Gadoy gave a talk entitled “The Lord has a plan for us!” – with an exclamation mark!
When I heard this talk, I was like, “Yes, this is the one for me. I’ve been wanting to know the plan! Maybe this is it!”
The talk is in Portuguese, so I don’t have it in his voice, or I would play it for you.
But he starts off saying that we all have great decisions we have to make in our lives… such as careers, whether to serve a mission, who to marry.
He notes: “the difference between happiness and misery in individuals, in marriages, and families often comes down to an error of only a few degrees.”
So I hear this and I’m thinking, “Ah, shoot. That’s why I could really use some more direction!”
Then he says he will share how we can avoid making these errors. He says we ask ourselves, even if our lives are otherwise good, “If I continue to live as I am living, will the promised blessings be fulfilled?”
He said we need to have an end goal in mind through personal revelation. Then we need to leave our comfort zones and trust that God will help us overcome challenges. He counseled that we share our vision with others.
He concludes by stating: “Just because things are going well does not mean that we should not from time to time consider whether there might be something better…”
As I considered this talk, all I could think about were those discussions with my wife about “where would we be in 10 years.” At this point, we would be celebrating our 10-year anniversary and we didn’t have the dormer windows, the space, the fields, the ponds, or the impact or lifestyle I thought we would have.
This may sound silly to say, but this idea was the closest I felt to a personal revelation or a vision of what maybe God was telling me my life should be.
Just like Elder Gadoy suggested, we were doing fine. Things were going well enough.
I thought, as Elder Gadoy suggested, “If we continue to live as we are living, will this vision for our lives be fulfilled?”
My answer was “No.”
And I thought, “Shoot! If I should be pursuing that vision and I’m not, then maybe I’m off by a degree and will end up bringing misery to my family.”
So I started looking more seriously into making changes necessary to follow that vision.
I’ll tell you what we did next, after this break.
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Part 4: Following the Vision
This is the Thinkering & Tinkering Podcast. I’m Fickle Father.
I sincerely believed that I needed to follow the counsel of Elder Gadoy – that this talk was for me; that we needed to take steps to achieve the vision of our future.
So I made a plan, I researched, I ran numbers. I showed it to my wife, my parents, and others we trusted.
We would move to a more rural area where we could buy some land and raise our kids in this lifestyle where they could roam, explore, learn to work hard, and get a little dirty.
A little over one year after hearing this talk, in July 2016, we moved our family from Henderson Nevada to Idaho Falls, Idaho.
We bought a house with dormer windows that sat on 4.5 acres near a working potato farm. The property had a field, a pond, and was bordered by a canal.
I didn’t know exactly how we would make the money we needed to support it, but I believed that if I took this step and made a play that would stretch me in following the counsel of the Lord, He would provide a way that this vision could be fulfilled, even if there were some challenges.
Well, there were some challenges. There were a lot of challenges.
[Music: Freezing Hands Meet Piano]
First of all, I did not know how to take care of 4.5 acres of land. I was a suburbs kid. I mowed our little lawn for a while but eventually that got hired out. I never had a well or a septic system or a sump pump.
I had about 2 acres of grass and a push mower.
Secondly, the path still never revealed itself. At the time, I was really trying to make it with a business podcast called Small Business Stories. I was interviewing business owners about how they got started, overcame challenges, and found success.
I thought I could leverage the podcast to start a business coaching service or even just do a publication like Entrepreneur magazine. My other thought was I could create online legal offerings for small businesses, kind of like Legal Zoom, but apparently a little worse.
I feel like I put in a lot of work to make these ideas happen. I had interviews with the owners of recognized companies like Dollar Shave Club and Cotopaxi. And I did get one local client…kind of. But the problem was that I needed money. I need more money pretty much right away.
Oh yeah, and during this time we had a little 3 week lapse in health insurance and that just so happened to be the time I came down with appendicitis and we racked up a $22,000 hospital bill.
What made matters even harder, though, was my third problem. Things at home were getting a little strained too.
I was getting more and more frustrated and more and more overwhelmed.
We weren’t particularly happy. In some ways, I felt like I had brought on the misery I thought I was avoiding.
One day I looked at our bank account and we were down to $800. I did have some money coming in from contract work, but it was always just enough or a little short. We did have some home equity and some money stashed in a 401k, but that was all the money left in our bank account.
Before I saw that, I knew, like Elder Gadoy explained, there would be challenges. But I just assumed that with God’s help, we would overcome them. We would realize this vision.
When I saw that, I knew it was over.
We put our farmhouse up for sale. And with it, i said goodbye to the vision of what I though my life could be.
Part 5: Post-Vision Clean Up
I began praying for guidance on what to do next. I wondered if this happened because I wasn’t faithful enough – because I was too worked up about that rock-in-a-hat and all the questions that came along with it.
I did a lot of searching and applied for law firm jobs. I even got an offer in Salt Lake but we decided to turn it down.
As I was thinking about all of this, I watched a documentary called Touching the Void.
[Music: Augmented Waves]
This is about two friends that go to climb this snowy, dangerous mountain. I don’t know why people want to do that, but that’s what these two did. During the climb, one of the friends, Joe, falls and breaks his leg.
Now they need to get off the mountain. To do this, they tie themselves to each end of a rope. Simon then helps lower Joe down the mountain, one rope length at a time.
Well, things did not go well. They lower Joe off this ledge and they don’t realize there’s a big lip. Joe slips down off the lip and ends up stuck, just dangling on the rope.
Meanwhile, Simon at the top is stuck holding him up. He has no idea what happened to Joe. He just knows that he’s holding this rope that has the full weight.
Simon is stuck holding this rope for a long time. He’s bearing all the weight on this snow pack that is also slipping. He sits there long enough that he’s wondering if Joe is even alive. Eventually he knows that he’s going to die if he doesn’t get moving.
So he cuts the rope…
Joe falls down into a crevasse to what seems like should be his death. But he doesn’t die. He lands on a narrow ledge.
Simon climbs down and sees the giant cravasse and after calling and looking, he believes Joe has died.
When Joe wakes up and realizes his predicament, he thinks about his relationship with God.
And here’s what he says:
[play clip]
And he does climb out. On his own.
[Music: PAUS]
For some reason, this documentary, and particularly this part, hit me like a ton of bricks. I’d never really considered whether I was on my own. Whether I had to climb out of my mess without God guiding me each step of the way – just relying on myself to pull through.
When I had this thought, it was both surprising and scary because the main feeling I had was …
Relief.
And it’s like it freed a voice in my mind, which said, “I’m out of time. I’m out of options. I don’t have the luxury of waiting for help anymore. I’m just going to do what I think needs to be done so I can provide for my family and I’m not going to worry about what God thinks, or if he’s there, or if he’s going to help me. I don’t care anymore. I’m going to do this alone.”
And you know what, I did it.
[Music: [something happy and exciting]]
I started my own law practice in Idaho Falls. I did well enough that we could buy a house and create a nice little life for ourselves – all on City water and sewer, which felt great. The suburbs are awesome. I worked hard pretty much everyday.
I would joke, “It’s great time working for yourself because you really only have to work half days. And it doesn’t matter if it’s the first 12 hours or the second 12 hours of the day! It’s the best!”
But joking aside, for the first 2-3 years it was exciting. I felt upbeat. I was in business. We were making it.
We made great friends. We rode our bikes to the local ice cream parlor and through the empty main streets when they shut them down for the big 4th of July Parade. We waded rivers, planted a garden (that only ended up growing one pepper). We sledded down the big hills on an old-school wooden toboggan and then went home for hot chocolate.
In the summer we played in rivers and lakes. We ate smores in the firepit in our backyard.
For work, I would literally get those calls: “So-and-so told me to call you because you’re the only one around who takes these cases.”
I’d give my wife a kiss and tell my kids I had to go.
I didn’t drive down a tree lined street though – I walked down it, instead. I walked to work most days.
It was pretty picturesque.
[Music fades]
But as things got more comfortable, or maybe after the honeymoon phase, I started having the luxury of feeling like I should be able to relax a little and take a break. But the work became relentless. I started to wear down and then I started to burn out.
It’s like I fought my way out of being backed into the corner. Now I wanted to get out of the corner and take a break. But I couldn’t because, again, I couldn’t see the path forward and no one was sending me that letter that told me what I needed to do next.
And before I knew it, I was back in the fog of the unknown path.
This is the Thinkering & Tinkering Podcast. I’m Fickle Father.
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Part 6: Avenging the Vision
You’re listening to the Thinkering & Tinkering Podcast. I’m Fickle Father.
[Mood music]
It’s now been a few years and I’ve reflected back on this experience a lot.
I call it my angry phase.
You know the scene in Avengers where the giant alien creatures are descending on NY and Captain America tells Bruce Banner, “Now might be a really good time for you to get angry” and Banner responds, “That’s my secret captain, I’m always angry.” And then he transforms into the hulk and goes to town demolishing the bad guys?
I understand that so much. I was working angry.
Angry at God. For not being there.
Angry at the church for letting me believe a false narrative.
Angry at the holy ghost for being, at best, a fair weather friend.
Angry at the idea that once things are feeling okay, I’m supposed to look back and say, “See he was there all along because you can see all the stepping stones that got you where you are today.”
But to me, that’s not satisfying. That’s retroactive construction. Of course I can see the path once I’ve walked down it. I can remember how I got here.
Or I feel like I’m supposed to think: “it’s like that footprints in the sand poem. You know, the one where there was only one set of footprints in the sand and the man asks, ‘God, why did you abandon me here at the hard times?’ And god says, ‘Son, those are my footprints. There is only one set because I was carrying you.”
I hear things like that and I’m like, “Screw you! Mister.” I know those are my footprints. I literally walked that path. I know you weren’t there because I looked for you. I wanted you to be there. You weren’t there. And do you see the blood on that rock, that’s my blood – I have the matching scar. So get outta here with your revisionist bullcrap!”
And that’s the PG version. In my mind, and maybe in my prayers…I’m not sure – it’s the r-rated, profanity-laced version. I just don’t want to put that on my podcast. I feel like that’s between me and God.
But even through my anger, I never quite felt like I lost at least that mustard seed of faith. Like, even though I took the position that I was alone in fighting for my survival in this world, deep down I believed – and I still do – that there must be a bigger picture.
Now, with the years gone by, I feel less angry. Still a little – and sometimes maybe more than other times – mostly when I have a financial set back, I think “Here we go again, man, where the heck are you?” (Again, that’s the PG version).
Candidly, I’m still in the middle of processing this part of my life.
Conclusion: You Have to the Hero of Your Own Story
Here’s the closest I’ve gotten:
I tell my kids that no one wants to read a story where there’s no struggle, where there’s no action or stakes. And guess what, your life’s a story with stakes, and you’re going to have to take action. You’re going to have to be the actual hero of your story.
During this time in my life, I battled like a hero. I hulked out. I learned I can do hard things.
Even without that letter.
Even without God carrying me every step of the way.
To borrow another concept from the Avengers, even though I wasn’t able to protect my vision of what life would look like on that farm, I at least avenged it.
As I sit here talking to you today (and by “you” I mean that younger me), I feel grateful that I had this experience, that I learned these lessons, and that I took that Giant Leap of Faith, even if I’m still trying to figure out what it means.
This is the Thinkering & Tinkering podcast. I’m Fickle Father.
Post-Credit Commentary
I want to provide some acknowledgements at the end here.
I mentioned a number of times in this episode how I felt alone or did things alone. But the truth is I didn’t do any of this alone. My wife was with me the whole time.
And it wasn’t an easy time for her either.
This is why at some point I’m going to share her part of the story.
Episode 5 is entitled: The Time my Wife Said, “I just wish you’d be honest with me.”
And then I’m hoping to have her share some of her views and experiences on what I’ve covered so far in Episode 6.
Since my audience is a younger me and my kids. I know you’re really going to like her. And I think you’ll find her view of the story to be really interesting as well…
That’s assuming, of course, you even think my version is interesting.
If you do, feel free to send me an email to hi@ficklefather.com. That’s the best way to get in touch with me because I am not on social media.
Okay, until next time. This has been the Thinkering & Tinkering Podcast. I’m Fickle Father. I’m coming at you from my bedroom closet. So, if you’re listening to this, in a strange way, your ears are about, I don’t know, two feet away from my underwear drawer.