Part 1 of 3 · Ep. 2193

Welcome and Episode Introduction

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another Mormon Stories podcast episode. My name is John Dehlin. It is September 10, 2026, and as requested, we have an interview with an everyday Mormon couple. Except every person we interview on Mormon Stories is extraordinary, and they can also be ordinary. But today, we have a couple with us. And the main themes that we're going to be talking about today, at least for starters, are being a Mormon couple in it to win it, experiencing various levels of leadership, including, for Mike, being bishop or bishoprics or stake presidencies, for Michele, being in all the various auxiliaries, being the parents of six children, and then experiencing faith questions or challenges or transitions in your mid to late 40s while you have six kids and even adult children, and then navigating that faith transition in your 50s. So without any further ado, we have with us today Mike or Michael Siemens. Hey, Mike.

Mike Seamons [00:01:08] Hey.

John Dehlin [00:01:09] Thanks for joining us.

Mike Seamons [00:01:10] Awesome to be here.

John Dehlin [00:01:11] And we have Michele Siemens. Hey, Michele.

Michele Seamons [00:01:14] Glad to be here.

John Dehlin [00:01:15] Thanks for joining us.

Michele Seamons [00:01:16] Thank you.

John Dehlin [00:01:17] And we're thrilled to have Margi as co host. Hey, Margi.

Michele Seamons [00:01:21] Hello.

John Dehlin [00:01:22] Thanks for joining us.

Margi Dehlin [00:01:23] Yes, my pleasure.

John Dehlin [00:01:26] And there are lots of other themes we'll be talking about, including LGBT themes again, adult children. Anything y' all want to say by way of sort of disclaimers or intentions or introduction before we dive in to your Mormon stories?

Mike Seamons [00:01:47] I think this is. It's a big step for us. We. We both come from amazing families that have lifted us and made us into the people we are. And. And this story is gonna have some twists and turns. That is going to be different, you know, because it's the story that is what's made us. And we just hope that all these people that we love, we've had this amazing life that we've intersected with people throughout multiple states, in the church and through the church, and we just hope that this story is one that inspires more than creates fear.

Michele Seamons [00:02:23] So maybe a Mormon and.

Margi Dehlin [00:02:26] Mm, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:02:28] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:02:28] A Mormon and story.

Michele Seamons [00:02:30] And the story continues.

Margi Dehlin [00:02:32] That's right. And I also have to put a little insert of wonder, because that was a big part of your outline.

Michele Seamons [00:02:38] Very much so, yeah. Seeking it every day.

John Dehlin [00:02:42] Love it. Love it. All right, well, which one of you was born first? And we can.

Michele Seamons [00:02:51] I am the older one. All right, you'll find out exactly how much older as we get into our story. It's a very common.

Mike Seamons [00:03:00] There's a mechanical reason. She's older.

Michele Seamons [00:03:02] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:03:03] And let me just also say thanks. It's our donors that make Mormon Stories podcast possible. So if you're a donor. Thank you. If you want to become a donor, super easy mormonstories.org donate you can become a monthly donor like and subscribe and all this stuff. And what we are starting to do is splitting these episodes up into two parts because YouTube will auto translate and auto transcribe even in audible format these episodes into multiple languages if they're under two hours. So we're not doing away with the long form but we are splitting them up into two hour chunks.

John Dehlin [00:03:42] So know that this will be part one and then we'll definitely have a part two to this episode. So check that out as well. And yeah, I think that's it. So this will be part one of at least a two part series with Mike and Michele Siemens. So without any further ado, Michele Siemens, where does your Mormon story begin? And I don't think you started out as Michele Siemens.

Michele's Early Life and Family Background

Michele Seamons [00:04:10] No, I was Michele Tucker.

John Dehlin [00:04:11] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:04:12] I was born at LDS Hospital on 28th October, 1969.

John Dehlin [00:04:23] Wow.

Michele Seamons [00:04:24] I didn't want to start here to a 15 year old girl named Julie who lovingly gave me up for adoption. Two loving and deserving parents. And she is much. She has my heart, as do my parents. That story is important because later in life I would be told that my mom received an impression of me the day I was born, unawares that several days later she would receive me into her home.

Michele Seamons [00:05:10] And so I always felt God led as an individual. And that's the language. And what I was taught from my very earliest beginnings is that I was placed by a heavenly parent and that changes the way someone behaves and navigates the world.

Michele Seamons [00:05:34] Two loving parents, Salt Lake City and my extended family is amazing. It's huge. And I couldn't have had a more loving environment and safe. I always felt this enormous amount of safety. And it probably came because everyone was like me and everyone appeared very much the same. I was raised in communities where everyone was the same except for my grandparents, which had very thick Dutch accents. They were immigrants from the Netherlands in the 1940s. And I always thought I was pretty special because everyone was so monochromatic. But yet I had these grandparents that differentiated just the minute they opened their mouth.

Michele Seamons [00:06:28] And I, I really adopted that Dutch. I wanted to differentiate from a very early age. I wanted that difference. I was adopted. My family's Dutch, so it was an interesting place. How that comes into my story?

John Dehlin [00:06:47] Just a couple quick questions. I'm assuming it was a closed adoption at the time.

Michele Seamons [00:06:51] Closed adoption, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:06:53] And to be clear, it's your adopted parents who have the Dutch heritage?

Michele Seamons [00:06:58] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:06:58] Okay. Not your birthday.

Mike Seamons [00:06:59] Correct.

John Dehlin [00:07:00] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:07:00] And I was adopted through LDS Social Services.

John Dehlin [00:07:02] Yeah. Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:07:03] LDS Hospital.

John Dehlin [00:07:04] Were there other siblings in the home before or after your adoption?

Michele Seamons [00:07:08] Not before. Three years later. My brother was adopted also.

John Dehlin [00:07:12] Okay. So two total children with your adopted parents. Okay.

Mike Seamons [00:07:16] Sorry.

Michele Seamons [00:07:17] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:07:17] That's.

Michele Seamons [00:07:19] We received my brother three years later, and then we moved to Sandy, Utah, which, if you've lived in Salt LAKE in the 1970s, Sandy was like. Sandy and windy, and it was like a dust bowl out there. And homes were just going. I mean, it was. It has. It's not the metropolis it is now.

Margi Dehlin [00:07:40] I see.

Michele Seamons [00:07:41] And I loved it. It was a lot of space, a lot of freedom, and a very safe, beautiful place to grow up. And my community adopted me, and I allowed them to adopt me. I think I had this openness from the very beginning, trusting that I was being led by heavenly parents to put me in places where I would be safe. I was going to be in the hands of people that would help me to reach my potential. And they did. They really did. I was raised by a neighborhood, not by just two parents.

John Dehlin [00:08:21] Did your parents. Were they married in the temple? Did they meet at byu?

Michele Seamons [00:08:26] They didn't meet at byu, but my dad was at the U, I think, for periods of time. He was also in the army and my mom was at byu.

John Dehlin [00:08:38] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:08:38] So. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:08:39] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:08:40] And they grew up very near each other, the ninth and ninth area. And Liberty park was where they grew up.

John Dehlin [00:08:47] And you would have been sealed to them after you were adopted, correct? You would have. You won't remember this, I'm sure.

Michele Seamons [00:08:54] I actually do remember being sealed to my brother. So I was part of that ceiling. And so I remember being in the nursery in the Salt Lake Temple and the temple workers and the clothes I was wearing and. Yeah. And being at the altar. And so that is. Yeah. A memory of mine.

Margi Dehlin [00:09:11] Wow.

John Dehlin [00:09:12] Being born in the covenant, you don't have that experience of being sealed to your parents.

Michele Seamons [00:09:17] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:09:18] Or siblings. That's beautiful.

Michele Seamons [00:09:19] Yeah. And so sealing was something that was very. I mean, on the forefront of my mind and bring up questions because it was different than everyone that I was surrounded by. It was a different story. So I've always felt a little bit chosen.

Margi Dehlin [00:09:40] So many layers of chosen. So many layers of chosen significance of this origin story. It feels so real.

Michele Seamons [00:09:49] Yeah. And I had it affirmed to me in many ways, just through people I met. Opportunities to learn and grow through my childhood. I definitely felt of an awareness that

John Dehlin [00:10:08] there was more beautiful.

Margi Dehlin [00:10:10] So I'm hearing safety in Similarity. Like, there was enough sameness for stability and for this feeling of safety. And then you have a little flare. With a little flare, and you kind

Michele Seamons [00:10:23] of bring a little flare.

Margi Dehlin [00:10:24] The appreciation for the grandparents. You're adopted, which makes you a bit different. You have this origin story, which also gives you an identity that not everyone has.

Michele Seamons [00:10:35] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [00:10:35] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:10:37] Yeah. And I can't say enough about the Sandy 22nd Ward. I mean, they were my family. I mean, I could go down the ward list. I knew where they lived, I knew their phone numbers, and I was kind of a wild. I had this bit of a wildness of I was an outdoors kind of kid, so. So my ward family is my neighborhood, and I am there. I'm at their homes, I'm in their yards. I'm playing. Yeah, it was beautiful to have, like, that much space and access to that many people at such a young age that you felt so safe. My parents never said, oh, don't avoid that house, or don't go there or don't go on that street. That was. No, like, this is your universe.

John Dehlin [00:11:35] This is a nerdy question, but around what south and around what east?

Michele Seamons [00:11:38] 8600 south and 13th East. We lived in the back of the Dan's grocery store. Oh, really? It's no longer there.

Margi Dehlin [00:11:48] Right?

Michele Seamons [00:11:49] But yeah, like, it was. Yeah, it was just amazing place. Sandy Hill Crest Ward, Sandy Hillcrest Steak.

Devout Mormon Upbringing and Family Faith

John Dehlin [00:11:56] And were your parents pretty devout and was it a traditional Mormon upbringing?

Michele Seamons [00:11:59] Very involved. Very involved. My mom was and will always be adored for all of her efforts in the church. She has a presence and a way of leading and organizing and delegating. That always gave her opportunities and people were drawn to her and that gave me benefits, gave me access. My dad, when I was in second grade, he worked for Lynn Wilson Mexican Food Production. I don't know if it's even still. Is that. It's still a company. Lynn Wilson.

John Dehlin [00:12:41] Don't know.

Michele Seamons [00:12:41] It was in South Salt Lake. Anyway, they produce tortillas and enchiladas, the whole thing. And he was overseeing that plant and he had an accident where he reached his hand into some machinery and it nearly destroyed his hand. And so from second grade to, oh, probably fourth grade was numerous surgeries and change of jobs. A lot of instability in my young life. So that neighborhood became very important. I lived at my next door neighbor's house from. Sometimes it felt like months because my mom was attending to my dad because they had. Back in the day, they used to sew your arm. Like, if you had extensive injuries, they would sew it as a graft to your body.

Margi Dehlin [00:13:38] I did not know that.

Michele Seamons [00:13:39] I know. I don't know anyone that has that done now. But his arm was sewn to his body, so my mom was in a very much a caretaker role of him and also had a younger sibling. So I give my mom a lot of grace at that period of time. And very grateful to all the people that pitched in and helped raise me through the elementary years and then come junior high.

John Dehlin [00:14:08] That's an area where Mormonism and a Mormon ward can really shine.

Michele Seamons [00:14:11] Oh, I mean, fantastically. I mean, we refer to each other as family. We call each other brother and sister. Like, we've removed. We've added a layer of access, Right?

Margi Dehlin [00:14:28] Absolutely. There's a trust.

Michele Seamons [00:14:30] Yes, immediately. So those many hands that were a part of my raising, I hold them in very high esteem.

John Dehlin [00:14:43] Beautiful.

Michele Seamons [00:14:44] Yeah. Junior high comes and I attended junior high was one of the largest middle schools at the time, I think, in the state of Utah. And it was amazing. I was for the first time exposed to people that were not members of the church, which is crazy to me because. And they were my peers and my friends and I. It was the first time I really heard a different story, which is, to me, shocking. It's definitely not what my kids have experienced in any way, but I was in awe that they had a different story. And I entered junior high gravitating to those people because I wanted to know what makes you different. And I liked it. But then you live in this tension of I'm in this pleasing and wanting to perform for all of these adults that now I have invited as caretakers. I now need to thank them by my behavior.

Margi Dehlin [00:15:56] Right.

Michele Seamons [00:15:57] So I need to be as active in the church as possible, attend everything that is available, and excel in all of it. And I think that changed my approach then to high school.

Margi Dehlin [00:16:17] Is this the time when you had that insight or did you have it as a child at some point? Like, when did this.

Michele Seamons [00:16:25] Seventh grade.

Margi Dehlin [00:16:25] Okay, seventh grade.

Michele Seamons [00:16:27] Seventh grade. I realized, like, I have this. I want to understand and be open to people that feel differently and think differently, but yet I need to stay in line. I need to fill a leader role. If I don't, I might be at risk. Maybe that sounds strange, but that was my experience.

Margi Dehlin [00:16:53] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:16:54] At a pretty young age. That's 13 years old.

Margi Dehlin [00:16:57] That's right.

Michele Seamons [00:16:58] And high school brought here 80% of our high school was LDS. And I then start to see the cracks of behavior amongst a large group of LDS people. And I'm like, wait, I thought we all behaved and acted the same upon the principles and doctrines we've been taught. I'm so confused as to why.

John Dehlin [00:17:24] Because kids were misbehaving.

Michele Seamons [00:17:26] Oh, yes.

John Dehlin [00:17:26] How so?

Michele Seamons [00:17:27] Disrespectful in seminary. How dare they? Like, we're there to learn. This is our opportunity in school. I was that kid. I couldn't quarrel. I could see if someone wasn't taught that or hadn't been exposed to those teachings or behaviors, I gave them all the freedom. But for my LDS peers, I gave them. I did not give them a long leash. And it came with a lot of judgment, which is hard to look back on.

Margi Dehlin [00:18:01] Did you have that judgment for yourself when you fell short 1,000%? Yes.

Michele Seamons [00:18:07] So. Oh, yeah. Isn't that what Sunday was for? The raking over the coals and the starting new every Sunday? I thought that's what the sacrament was for me as a teenager. It was like I did not pray every morning before I went to school and read the assigned chapters that I was supposed to read in seminary. Thus, when I go to sacrament meeting this next Sunday, I will need to repent. That is a shortfall. Or I didn't take advantage of a missionary opportunity, or I misspoke about someone. I judged them, I talked behind their back. Those things as a teenager, which are normal behaviors that you're trying to navigate and learn how to socially behave correctly. I think that we should give them a lot of space. I didn't give myself any of that room to make mistakes.

Margi Dehlin [00:19:04] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:19:05] At all. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:19:08] What were you into in high school? Your interests?

Michele Seamons [00:19:11] And I was a sports kid, and I. It was tricky being in a big high school. I thrived at church sports now. So in Utah in the 80s, church sports almost rivaled. I was having a talk with a good friend from high school last night, and she validated me. Like, it literally was at the same level at times as the high school programs that were offered. It was competitive, and it was for which sports? For the girls? Oh, I did it all. Volleyball, softball, basketball. I mean, come on. And I excelled. I played the key, you know, key roles, and the leaders liked me. The coaching liked me. And we even got to play in the Salt Palace.

John Dehlin [00:20:12] So there's steak. It starts out as a steak thing, multiple wards. Then you go.

Michele Seamons [00:20:17] Go to region and then regionals, and then you can go and play at the Salt palace where the jazz used to play. And we got to play there.

John Dehlin [00:20:27] Oh, wow.

Michele Seamons [00:20:29] It was really defining. And so when it came to high school, I was like, well, I already have these great Opportunities in the church. So I play tennis in high school because it wasn't an opportunity in the church. So I played tennis, really active in

John Dehlin [00:20:50] like, Hillcrest High School tennis.

Michele Seamons [00:20:52] Hillcrest High School tennis. But I. Yeah, I just have active, happy, healthy teenager.

John Dehlin [00:21:00] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:21:00] Lots of friends. And. Yeah, I have no regrets.

Margi Dehlin [00:21:07] During high school, as you think back to yourself, how, like, what was your effort level? Was it difficult for you to do all the things that you. You did at that time, or were you. What did it feel quite like you were invested, merged, you know, how. I guess what I'm saying is just how stressful was it for you to do all the things. You sound highly conscientious.

Michele Seamons [00:21:35] Yes. So funny. The grades part I really didn't care that much about, which is so strange because I came from a mom that was. That's all that mattered. And I probably did it just to make her mad. I did just enough grades wise. Now we talk about everything else. It all mattered. Everything was on the line. I had to perform. But again, I was in the safe, safe situation where I felt allowed to rise and fall because there was this stable, secure community.

Margi Dehlin [00:22:16] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:22:17] You know, I was able to experiment and try different parts of me on what. What does it look like if I try student government? What is, you know, what does it look like if I try to sing in a choir or, you know, be in the musical? I got to try in all kinds of roles, and I think that was really brilliant. Beautiful place to learn.

Margi Dehlin [00:22:42] Absolutely. And kind of rare.

Michele Seamons [00:22:44] Yeah, this is a rarer. Yeah. And I had good boyfriends. Like, they were all safe and good. It was a great preparatory place.

John Dehlin [00:22:57] I love it. Just as a side note, I loved softball and basketball. Church steak. Softball and basketball growing up. It blows my mind that the church got rid of those programs.

Michele Seamons [00:23:11] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:23:12] Even though I know high school sports are so big. But once we raised our kids in Utah, we saw how competitive it was to get on a high school varsity team, which for me is all the more reason to have church sports. But crazily, they just like with roadshows and boy Scouts. Somehow the church decided it was a good idea to jettison those programs.

Michele Seamons [00:23:36] It was a crazy experience for me because I know I was good at basketball. That was like my sport. And I went to all the camps at the high school with our high school coach, who was a phenomenal coach, Coach Wilson, who went on to coach the Cougars women's team. And I truly believe I could have made that team so easily. I didn't want to make the commitment because I had this other thing I could play, and all the commitment was show up three or four times a week, and I got to play. And the competition was phenomenal. So I didn't see the need to make that commitment in high school.

John Dehlin [00:24:14] That's so fun. I don't know that I've ever interviewed a woman on Mormon stories who expressed how important the church athletic programs were to them. So it's fun to hear that.

Michele Seamons [00:24:26] Yeah. I got to be pitcher and catcher and in softball. I. They allowed me to coach the younger girls. I mean, it was just this really great building opportunity that I. And maybe it just thrived in our area. I don't know.

Margi Dehlin [00:24:47] Yeah. It falls in line with your community support, everyone being so invested in your community.

Michele Seamons [00:24:54] Yes. And we had numbers.

Margi Dehlin [00:24:56] Yep.

Michele Seamons [00:24:57] I think there were 12 girls my age in my grade.

Margi Dehlin [00:25:01] Yeah. That's key.

Michele Seamons [00:25:02] And so there's a lot of room.

John Dehlin [00:25:04] That's beautiful.

Michele Seamons [00:25:05] And a lot of room.

John Dehlin [00:25:06] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:25:06] Yes.

Michele Seamons [00:25:07] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:25:09] Margi played church basketball even though she was a runner.

Margi Dehlin [00:25:12] I did. I loved it. It was a lot of fun.

Michele Seamons [00:25:14] It was so good. I mean, we would have the whole ward come and, like, scream and yell, and then you get into high school, and it's like, even now, like, the boys, boyfriends, and the kids from high school are coming, and it was like, I. I felt very supported in that avenue.

Testimony Development and Leaving Utah

John Dehlin [00:25:32] For me, how was your testimony? How did it develop through your senior year of high school, through seminary and church attendance and everything?

Michele Seamons [00:25:42] So in my yearbook, I will never forget, signed by a very dear friend that I knew through junior high and high school, wrote, you are the marrying kind. You will be the perfect mother.

Margi Dehlin [00:25:58] In your yearbook.

Michele Seamons [00:25:59] In my yearbook.

Margi Dehlin [00:26:00] That's so bizarre.

Michele Seamons [00:26:01] In your yearbook. Most girls are just wanting to be hot. I was like, could you just say, I'm hot? And I'm getting, wow. Okay. Now I know. Most likely to have a big family and be a Mormon. Mom. My testimony was I wore it on my sleeve. I wore it as a badge of honor. I carried myself. I dated in my junior year, the seminary president of the year ahead of me. I made sure that people knew exactly who I was, and I think I was pretty true to that.

John Dehlin [00:26:46] Sounds like the idyllic Mormon upbringing.

Michele Seamons [00:26:49] Yeah. So why did I want to run away, John?

John Dehlin [00:26:53] You wanted to run away from home or from.

Michele Seamons [00:26:55] From Utah?

John Dehlin [00:26:56] From Utah.

Michele Seamons [00:26:57] I wanted to get away.

John Dehlin [00:26:58] Okay. That's foreshadowing. Okay.

Margi Dehlin [00:27:01] I mean, that is in line with this adventure and the flair, as well, of yourself.

Michele Seamons [00:27:07] And I think it comes from the safety that I Felt that I could run away because I had a safe place to come back to. So I probably had a little more courage than most.

Margi Dehlin [00:27:17] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:27:18] Or Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. Leaving home as part of the hero's journey. Yes.

Michele Seamons [00:27:24] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:27:24] And then returning with honor, which you're doing today. Yes.

Michele Seamons [00:27:28] And I wanted to do it immediately. So I spoke at seminary graduation. I mean, I was very invested. That community meant a lot of. But. And I left seven days after I graduated from high school.

John Dehlin [00:27:44] Left Utah for where?

Michele Seamons [00:27:47] So all of my friends were going to Ricks or byu. I then learned that I probably wasn't smart enough to get into BYU even at that time, But I got into Rick's and I went up there in February and went.

John Dehlin [00:28:03] No way was it the cold or the culture or both.

Michele Seamons [00:28:07] The fact that I couldn't see the road at all. It was just. I don't think I can do this. And again, this little wanderer lust inside of me said, I'm not ready to go to school. And so I decided I was going to be a nanny. And that's what I did. I took a job in Darien, Connecticut. And seven days after high school, I flew into New York City for the first time across the Mississippi.

Margi Dehlin [00:28:40] Yeah. Wow.

Michele Seamons [00:28:42] And I went running.

Margi Dehlin [00:28:44] Yep.

Michele Seamons [00:28:46] And there's a part that I've left out because I was raised by a community. Something happened my junior year. My father was accused of embezzling and had some very erratic behavior. And my parents separated, but nobody knew, nobody talked about. Was on the down low, you know, And I had to cover. And I did all the way through high school. And I was also covering another situation when I was. My brother was 13. That would have meant I was 15. He was 12. I was 15. He was seeing counseling because his adoption was more complicated. His mother used drugs pretty excessively while he was in the womb, and he struggled with psychotic tendencies and behaviors that he could not control. And the psychologist deemed him unsafe to return to our home when he was between 12 and 13. And he was committed. So it was really sad.

Margi Dehlin [00:30:18] That's.

Michele Seamons [00:30:19] But again, he disappeared. We didn't talk about it. In fact, I talked to this high school friend last night, and she remembers him just disappearing, and no one had a conversation about it.

Margi Dehlin [00:30:34] Wow.

John Dehlin [00:30:34] From your home? He just came from my home permanently.

Michele Seamons [00:30:38] He never lived permanently in our home again.

John Dehlin [00:30:40] Oh, my goodness.

Margi Dehlin [00:30:41] Wow.

Michele Seamons [00:30:42] Yeah. But I'm performing.

Margi Dehlin [00:30:47] Right.

Michele Seamons [00:30:48] But you don't know. As a teenager, I thought that was what I was supposed to do because those emotions were not open to public

Margi Dehlin [00:30:59] that's so interesting, because oftentimes I do feel like in many Mormon stories, there are moments like this where as you're growing up, all of a sudden a situation arises and you split. There's a split. Right. And all of a sudden it's very clear who you are to the external world, how you're showing up to the world, and then there's what's really happening that is oftentimes not spoken of. Oftentimes. And that split can make all the difference, right? Yes. Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:31:34] And I think one of the reasons why I left Utah immediately is because I couldn't hold it and I felt weak and I was in battle with. But I'm chosen, and I can't present as chosen and special if I am in this environment. I need to take myself away from this household situation because this doesn't. This isn't who I want to be. This is not who I want to come across as or come from. Oh, interesting, because that seemed broken.

John Dehlin [00:32:17] So is there a perfectionism theme there?

Michele Seamons [00:32:19] Yeah, of, like, a lot.

John Dehlin [00:32:21] Presenting perfectionism to the world.

Michele Seamons [00:32:24] For sure. Yeah.

Family Grief and Leaving the Church

Margi Dehlin [00:32:26] So that grief. If you were going to. Can we move in just to grief for a moment? What did you do with the grief of a brother that disappears at that time?

Michele Seamons [00:32:38] It did not correlate with the doctrine that I had internalized of eternal families and that there were heavenly parents who put this group together. Like we were actually physically put together intentionally.

Margi Dehlin [00:32:56] Right.

Michele Seamons [00:32:58] And it collided with my specialness. It was like, wait, if it's not working, then the author of this, like, what am I supposed to learn from this?

Margi Dehlin [00:33:09] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:33:11] And I'll never forget from an EFY conversation with a counselor, or maybe it was something I was taught there was that if you have trials and tribulations, it's to test you. And the people that are tested are gonna be the stronger ones. At least that's the. I've pulled. And I thought, okay, that's the lane I'm. This is the lane I'm in. I am chosen. So thus I'm going to have to have trials and work with harder things because I'm being tested for something that's coming down the road. Just a strange behavior for a. Yeah. 17, 18 year old.

John Dehlin [00:33:56] Yeah. And it's probably not just a Mormon thing, but a very human thing. Human to just want to downplay or hide or not talk about the hard stuff and just want to present the good stuff. But it is very Mormon. Right. To have the elephants that you just don't talk about.

Michele Seamons [00:34:18] Correct.

John Dehlin [00:34:19] Yeah. And to just Compartmentalize and. Or ignore the hard stuff.

Michele Seamons [00:34:24] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:34:24] And then sometimes there's a payment plan later.

Michele Seamons [00:34:27] Yeah. And you love your parents? Like, I knew they were going through a hard thing, so I'm protecting them also.

Margi Dehlin [00:34:34] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:34:36] Do you feel like you were close to your brother until he left?

Michele Seamons [00:34:39] No.

John Dehlin [00:34:39] Never close to him.

Michele Seamons [00:34:41] Okay. Mentally and emotionally. Not very capable of making those relationships for him.

Margi Dehlin [00:34:47] I see. I see.

Michele Seamons [00:34:48] Yeah. From the get go.

John Dehlin [00:34:49] Got it. Okay. Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:34:51] Sweet.

Margi Dehlin [00:34:51] But it can make it complicated.

Michele Seamons [00:34:54] Very complicated. Yeah. I mean, if you've ever lived with someone that has psychotic outbursts, it can be very. Feel unstable. You just don't know what you're going to get.

John Dehlin [00:35:06] Yeah. Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:35:07] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:35:08] I was going to just note. I do think it's interesting, you know, we've interviewed a few people where they have these origin stories that are really, like in the beginning, a comfort just like you described. Like this nest of just. And then, you know, I'm just, I guess contemplating what happens when sometimes you have those really large origin stories that in the beginning are quite grandiose. Quite. And then there's a crisis later on, as opposed to if it had just started out like, we love you and we. And then things got complicated later on. But the complicated after this is it literally sets you up for a crisis of that origin story.

Michele Seamons [00:35:56] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:35:56] Right.

Michele Seamons [00:35:57] Or I associated it with fairy tales.

Margi Dehlin [00:36:01] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:36:02] Because I thought, well, I'm gonna be like Cinderella.

Margi Dehlin [00:36:05] Got it.

Michele Seamons [00:36:05] Like, so this doesn't look good. But it's all gonna work out because happily ever after. Happily ever after. I'm gonna meet my parents and actually it's all gonna work out.

Margi Dehlin [00:36:20] Right.

Michele Seamons [00:36:20] Because that's what I'm being set up for this trial that, you know, all of the princesses, the Disney princesses have this trial so true. So that they can rise and, you know, a complicated. None of them have. Oh, maybe a couple. All of them have complicated parental stories.

Margi Dehlin [00:36:39] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:36:40] Half of them don't even have both parents.

John Dehlin [00:36:41] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:36:42] So it's like I was setting myself up and I don't know why I chose that. I chose that behavior.

John Dehlin [00:36:50] And I'm guessing there's a framing where this becomes problematic and is a setup, but there's also a framing that it's like, hey, optimism and hope and resilience. I think we could frame this in multiple ways. Not all negative, some very positive.

Michele Seamons [00:37:10] No, at this point in my life, there is not a negative thing. And it just. By definition, it literally was as if a match was lit when I left Utah. Oh, no, here I go. It's happening. It's gonna happen.

John Dehlin [00:37:27] What's happening?

Moving East and Finding Community

Michele Seamons [00:37:28] So I am a nanny in Darien, Connecticut. I learned that I'm going to be in the New Canaan Connecticut ward.

John Dehlin [00:37:37] Now is this nannying an LDS family?

Michele Seamons [00:37:40] No, not an LDS family, but one that know the lds. Some pretty famous people. My employer worked with Richard Marriott. He was in alcohol distribution and he worked with the Marriott hotel chains and he also worked with him on an amusement park venture. So he knew him well. So he knew. And I was actually chosen to be their nanny because I did not drink alcohol because they had quite a seller and they had had a problem with the previous nanny and having access to that. So it's like she's not gonna be a problem.

Michele Seamons [00:38:18] And I felt again chosen by this family, prominent family who loved me. I was adored and I adored them. I adored their kids. And then add the ward component and the New Canaan Connecticut ward. I would say probably the majority of the CEOs in New York City and of the top five companies were in that ward or in that state who were lds. Who were LDS in that state for sure.

John Dehlin [00:38:54] Yeah, yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:38:57] And I was being exposed to fascinating things. I was given access because again, the church is this place of community right off the bat. We trust each other implicitly right off. And our youth, our young single adult group in that ward was taken in by numerous families and given access to their homes because my day off was on a Monday. They would literally give us the keys to their home and allow us to hang out in their home so that we didn't have to be in our employer's home because they wanted us to have a place of safety. Who does that?

John Dehlin [00:39:39] Yeah, Mormons.

Michele Seamons [00:39:43] Mormons, I know. And they're amazing for it.

John Dehlin [00:39:46] Yeah, yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:39:48] And here I'm 19 years old and in that I was called to be the young single adult advisor over the stake. I was a co chair with a man like I think he's in his 30s, worked in New York City. Like you're really a 19 year old kid from Utah. Oh, I know why. Because I'm chosen. And I was able to. We had the huge young single adult presence in that area and I was able to put together. We did a getaway camp at a Jewish sleepaway camp. We had the young single adults go there for three days and have speakers flown in from Utah. I mean, why are they giving a 19 year old kid this opportunity? And I could only associate. I was. I'm chosen.

John Dehlin [00:40:45] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And sometimes I'm critical. All Mormon stories of this even idea of being chosen because it has implications of selectivity or bias or bigotry. Especially when God's involved.

Michele Seamons [00:41:01] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:41:03] And it can lead to pride or arrogance or overconfidence. On the other hand, it probably helps with self esteem during a time where you could otherwise flounder to feel special. There's probably some good to feeling chosen and special.

Margi Dehlin [00:41:21] Especially at this stage of your story. You're experiencing it like it's giving you a lot of opportunity. You're experiencing the privilege of that particular award and setting up when you're wondering

Michele Seamons [00:41:35] why you're being set up for like this.

Margi Dehlin [00:41:38] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:41:39] And I want to take advantage of if this is a preparation for something more.

Margi Dehlin [00:41:45] Right. Yep.

Michele Seamons [00:41:47] Only Mike will know that I am to balance that. John is. I have a very critical inner voice. Very critical that says, no, you're actually not good enough. You can't do this alone. If there isn't a heavenly part of this equation, it's not gonna work out for you.

John Dehlin [00:42:14] So it's very dependent church. In this case. Church dependent. You're kind of nothing without the church and heavenly parents.

Michele Seamons [00:42:22] Because that's the belief system I was raised up.

Margi Dehlin [00:42:25] I would say it goes hand in hand. The chosenness with.

Michele Seamons [00:42:29] It can't be separated for sure.

Margi Dehlin [00:42:32] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:42:32] Yeah. So that experience in Connecticut gave me access to an hour train ride to New York City, a several hour train ride to Washington D.C. to Boston. I felt like, wow. All of my friends are back at Ricks College. Four things. I am killing it out here. I live with this non Mormon family who I felt like I was going to bring them. I was going to bring them the truth. They trusted me. And it was an amazing experience. That it changed me. Yeah, it really did.

Margi Dehlin [00:43:17] I love that. And I love that you got to see a different part of the country.

Michele Seamons [00:43:22] And the church was true there.

Margi Dehlin [00:43:23] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:43:24] I mean, and the church was strong.

John Dehlin [00:43:26] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:43:27] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:43:27] So it reinforced some beliefs that I had about the church that it was. It was gonna grow. It's gonna be something amazing.

John Dehlin [00:43:39] I can imagine for a girl from Utah, knowing you're gonna be part of a strong, vibrant, supportive ward can make the difference for you. Feeling like everything's gonna work out okay when you're far away from home and on the other side of the country.

Michele Seamons [00:43:56] Right?

John Dehlin [00:43:57] Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just Mormonism at its best. Really.

Michele Seamons [00:44:01] Yeah. And look at these leaders in this wardrobe. They're not only leaders in the church, but they're also CEOs of. So there's trust not only in the Mormon community, but outside that.

John Dehlin [00:44:13] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:44:13] And it reinforced this because we are all chosen.

John Dehlin [00:44:17] Yeah. Church has to be true.

Michele Seamons [00:44:19] Yes, of course.

John Dehlin [00:44:20] Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful.

Michele Seamons [00:44:21] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:44:22] Did you date in those single words out there, or were there single words?

Michele Seamons [00:44:26] A little, but not a lot.

John Dehlin [00:44:28] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:44:29] Nobody met my criteria. And I was writing a missionary that I really thought things were going to be eternal.

John Dehlin [00:44:35] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:44:36] That didn't end up being the case.

John Dehlin [00:44:38] Okay. Anything else you want to say? Like, we can take your story, I guess, right up to meeting Mike, if you want.

Michele Seamons [00:44:45] Well, so I went to BYU Hawaii, after that.

John Dehlin [00:44:47] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:44:48] That was also another. I felt chosen because the demographics of BYU Hawaii are. There are very few Caucasian people at that school. And I was immersed in the culture and the diversity. And again, how lucky I am. God is showing me something. I'm having this other experience now in the Polynesian sector and meeting amazing people. He is preparing me for something really big. Because, again, my comparison were the 12 girls that I grew up with who are Ricks and byu? I'm like, oh, sisters, this is a big, giant world that you're missing out on.

Margi Dehlin [00:45:37] Yeah. And it's interesting because with your story, I'm noticing, like, you're doing some original things to the sort of set formula of, you know.

Michele Seamons [00:45:49] Correct.

Margi Dehlin [00:45:49] You grow up in the church, you go to byu, then you get married. You're altering it. You're open enough to kind of. And you're. You're tweaking it just a little bit.

Michele Seamons [00:45:59] Just a little.

Margi Dehlin [00:45:59] And you're having really fulfilling. It sounds like joyful experience. It's doing that. Yes.

Michele Seamons [00:46:07] Yes. And meeting so many amazing people. I felt like I was. It was just an inundation of new people that were changing, affecting my life for good. And my influence was getting bigger.

Margi Dehlin [00:46:25] Yeah. And it's this balance also. Did you feel like it was this balance of you're expanding your world, you're no longer Sandy Utah. Right. So you have this expansion of the world and the people and the cultures that you're, you know, living amongst.

Michele Seamons [00:46:40] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [00:46:40] But you also have the safety and the rootedness of the church while you do it. Correct. Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:46:48] And the freedom to also be away from my family story. Right. I could kind of tell as much or as little about my family story that I felt very vulnerable about because I was away.

Margi Dehlin [00:47:03] That's right. And you had no control over that story.

Michele Seamons [00:47:07] No.

Margi Dehlin [00:47:07] You had control at least.

Michele Seamons [00:47:09] Right. Nobody knew me in these other spaces from my Sandy Utah.

Margi Dehlin [00:47:13] This is key.

Michele Seamons [00:47:13] Sandy Utah did not follow me to these places.

Margi Dehlin [00:47:16] Got it. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:47:19] And I kind of left Sandy, Utah. In Sandy, Utah.

Margi Dehlin [00:47:22] That's right, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:47:24] Okay, so byu, Hawaii.

Michele Seamons [00:47:26] Byu, Hawaii. Where I became just friends with amazing people and had some best friends that were a little bit older than I was who were like, we're not married yet, we should go on missions. And I was just turning 21 and I'm like, well, yeah, you're the old ladies. But yeah, I'm going to go because I'm going to experience something fantastic. And I happened to be in a townhome in Provo, Utah with a bunch of girls. All but one, I think, were returned missionaries and had gone to amazing places like South Africa and Guam.

John Dehlin [00:48:03] I know where this is going.

Michele Seamons [00:48:04] And I'm like, yes, please. South Africa made perfect sense. Because I'm like, let's speak Afrikaans. And here's where my Dutch. I'm going to learn Dutch. This makes perfect sense. Or I'm going to go to the Netherlands. I'm like, my circle of influence has already gotten this big. Here we go. Let's get the mission call going. And my first friend gets her call. Honduras. I'm like, oh yeah, Honduras. Wow. You're going to be in the jungle. The next one, Toronto, Canada. And I think this is amazing. Sensing a buildup here.

Margi Dehlin [00:48:39] Yes.

Michele Seamons [00:48:40] And I.

John Dehlin [00:48:41] It's Arkadelphia, Arkansas. It's Mud Lake. Mud Lake, Idaho.

Michele Seamons [00:48:45] Well, it wasn't that bad. I actually. And I cushioned it with a belief system that where I was chosen to serve, of course, was very prepared for me individually and the place was.

John Dehlin [00:49:00] Drumroll.

Michele Seamons [00:49:01] Washington D.C. north Mission.

John Dehlin [00:49:03] That's not bad.

Michele Seamons [00:49:04] I know, it's pretty good. Yeah. Murder capital of the world at the time.

John Dehlin [00:49:08] That's true.

Michele Seamons [00:49:09] I mean, most dangerous city.

John Dehlin [00:49:10] Okay, so we're not talking Virginia or Maryland suburbs.

Michele Seamons [00:49:13] We're talking Maryland suburbs.

John Dehlin [00:49:15] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:49:15] Oh, that's where I served.

John Dehlin [00:49:17] I mean that's where the Marriotts in the Potomac.

Margi Dehlin [00:49:20] That's where my parents joined the church, actually.

John Dehlin [00:49:23] In Potomac. Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:49:24] I've served the last four months of my mission in Potomac.

John Dehlin [00:49:26] Oh, okay.

Michele Seamons [00:49:27] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:49:28] So it wasn't just dc.

Michele Seamons [00:49:30] No. Yeah, I served all over. And that is Big Beltway. Yes. And beyond in Maryland, Rural Maryland, where it's vastly different.

Margi Dehlin [00:49:41] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:49:42] Now that was during the time of Hyrum Smith, the mission president, was it?

Michele Seamons [00:49:46] No, my mission president was Robert Wright, the co author of The David O. McKay book.

John Dehlin [00:49:51] Yeah. Very cool.

Michele Seamons [00:49:52] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:49:53] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:49:54] He was character. Yeah, he was a character.

John Dehlin [00:49:57] Okay. Yeah, that's Greg Prince co wrote that book.

Michele Seamons [00:50:01] Yeah. Correct.

Mike Seamons [00:50:02] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:50:03] So very much doctrinally sound mission president and a very Strict mission president who was there to clean house.

John Dehlin [00:50:15] There was a previous mission president, I think, that was excommunicated for, I think, having an affair while he was a mission president in D.C. i don't know

Michele Seamons [00:50:23] the story, but I know that my mission president was there to clean house.

John Dehlin [00:50:27] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:50:27] It was very evident.

John Dehlin [00:50:29] He had been, I think, the starter. Franklin Covey kind of person.

Michele Seamons [00:50:34] That sounds right.

John Dehlin [00:50:34] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:50:35] That sounds like tracking.

John Dehlin [00:50:36] So that might have been the cleanup that was going on, or at least

Michele Seamons [00:50:39] part of it I was mostly aware of because we didn't have the Internet at that time. So being able to make those stories fit.

John Dehlin [00:50:48] Also. Jon Huntsman Sr. I think, had been a mission president out there.

Michele Seamons [00:50:52] Yes. You had to be someone pretty special. I know Robert Wright had run for governor one time. He's an attorney.

John Dehlin [00:50:59] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:51:00] They presented very, very well. And the church loved it.

John Dehlin [00:51:03] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:51:04] Because it had a lot of PR.

John Dehlin [00:51:06] And so what years were you in D.C. 1990.

Michele Seamons [00:51:11] 92. 92.

John Dehlin [00:51:14] So Margaret were married in the D.C. temple in 93.

Michele Seamons [00:51:16] Oh, so.

John Dehlin [00:51:17] Right.

Michele Seamons [00:51:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:51:18] Right around that time.

Michele Seamons [00:51:19] Yeah. I love that area. I love the people there. My experience was so vast because I served in, like, La Plata, Maryland, which is southern Maryland, and then yanked up to Frederick, Maryland, which is like, am I in the same state? Because we're not even behaving as if we culturally, we're on the same planet. And then the final months of my mission in Potomac, like, wow, a state can be this different, like, within a state. And the way the church even ran was very formative for me.

Margi Dehlin [00:51:57] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:51:59] Wow. So that's hardcore. To serve a mission as a young woman at age 21. Back in the 90s, that meant you were really committed to the church.

Michele Seamons [00:52:11] Yes, very. And my mission president also conflated that. Is that the right word? I was told, I am choosing you because I trust you. And I was maybe six months into my mission, that you're going to take very good care of this sister. Like, oh, no. Like, who is my companion going to be? He said, do you speak any Spanish? I said, no. Perfect. She speaks no English. So your companion is from Chiapas, Mexico. She has been living in the United States, but speaks no English. She's 30 years old, and she's going to be your companion.

John Dehlin [00:52:59] Oh, wow.

Michele Seamons [00:53:00] And good luck. She was in the Spanish program, and he felt like she needed to learn English. And we were companions for almost nine months. Mm. And that also changed me because after that, I was called to be what now? I think they have another name for it, but it was called A traveling sister at that time to be live in the mission president's ward, be able to travel the mission and make sure the sisters are doing what they're supposed to be doing.

John Dehlin [00:53:32] You were Sister A.P.

Michele Seamons [00:53:33] yeah, Sister A.P. but we weren't allowed to call it that. We had to keep our place. But yeah. So again, that chosenness carries over. Like, he felt like he could really trust me. And we had a funny relationship, my mission president and I, because of this wildness that Mari speaks of that will always be running through me. And so I only wrote to him in comic form. And so my weekly letters to him were comic strips of what was happening in my area. Yes and no. Because he was a pretty stiff guy, and it took me a long time to break him down. But I think we had this connection because he knew that's what I was doing, and because I wanted to soften him. I really did. So I think I got a little. I got in there.

John Dehlin [00:54:43] That shows some gumption as a young Mormon woman wanting to change or influence your priesthood leader.

Michele Seamons [00:54:53] And I challenged him. The only time I can remember on my mission where I did something blatantly wrong, he called me in and sat me down. And this was at a time where he was really cleaning house. He had just been giving zone conferences about mass groups of missionaries being sent home. And if you didn't even tattle on your companion, you were held responsible for the same sin.

Margi Dehlin [00:55:18] Oh, goodness.

Michele Seamons [00:55:19] That kind of behavior. So when he called me in, I thought, what could I have possibly done? Like, I do so much gatekeeping. There's no way that I could be held, you know, in any way responsible for breaking a rule. And it was because I had written a postcard, a postcard to a person I had taught in a previous area who had been baptized, congratulating her on her baptism.

John Dehlin [00:55:50] And it was a woman.

Michele Seamons [00:55:51] It was a woman, but she was out of my area.

Margi Dehlin [00:55:55] Oh, wow. The level of detail and control.

Michele Seamons [00:55:59] We couldn't open our letters save on. But on Monday, which was our preparation day, we also were not allowed to use any form of. What is it called? Slang of any kind. So P Day. It was preparation day. Like, we were not allowed. Like, if he caught it, wow. It was not allowed at that mission. We had to be very performative and careful.

Margi Dehlin [00:56:27] Careful, vigilant.

John Dehlin [00:56:28] I mean, in a way that sounds very perfectionistic. Like, you were.

Michele Seamons [00:56:32] Yes. So I performed well, but I always kind of just, you know, I'm like, it's a postcard. I mean, you can see what it says. It's not like I'm sending a secret message, but. But I.

John Dehlin [00:56:46] You know, so obedient and perfectionistic with a little bit of sugary edge.

Michele Seamons [00:56:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:56:55] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:56:55] Yeah. The funny thing that influenced my entire mission was the fact that I met someone in the mission training center, and that was him.

Mike Enters the Picture and His Mission

John Dehlin [00:57:10] Oh. So Mike comes into the picture.

Michele Seamons [00:57:15] So my entire mission, I was writing to him.

John Dehlin [00:57:18] Oh.

Michele Seamons [00:57:20] And six months in, what was friendly back and forth. Remember, these are letters. There's no email at this time. These are letters, and I am writing to him. And at six months, it really changed into this amazing bond where we were really supporting each other on our. And he recognized and understood how I felt and thought. And I thought, this is the guy. So in the mtc, he had asked to have a picture taken with me. And it was kind of like the last minute thing. We had our picture taken. Not realizing, again, this is the day when you don't have digital cameras. You wait till it's developed and the picture comes back and it's the two of us standing with our scriptures in our hands. But it looks like we're holding hands with our tags in the MCC together.

John Dehlin [00:58:19] Are you in front of the big global map?

Margi Dehlin [00:58:20] No.

Michele Seamons [00:58:21] But there's no one else in the picture. And I'm like, what a fantastic picture. So I sent it home to my mom and I said, future president and sister Siemens. Because I just saw in him, he recognized my frequency. He understood we're on the same track.

John Dehlin [00:58:40] Meaning you would be mission president and mission president's wife.

Michele Seamons [00:58:43] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [00:58:44] So this so reveals. That is so revealing to me. Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:58:48] I'm planning. Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:58:50] And that's your success. That's what you're wanting for yourself and go, wow.

Michele Seamons [00:58:57] Yeah. He's working on my frequency. I see it. He's been. His letters are confirming to me that we think and feel very much alike. I come home from my mission six months prior to his arriving home. So that means I'm exactly two years older than he is. We've been in our birthdays, and in that six months, I packed in some pretty crazy stuff. I worked at the Deseret Book downtown in Salt Lake City City. And that was quite an experience.

John Dehlin [00:59:38] Was that. Where is that? Right on Temple Square.

Michele Seamons [00:59:40] Right off of Temple Square.

John Dehlin [00:59:41] This is before City Creek.

Michele Seamons [00:59:43] Yes. Correct.

John Dehlin [00:59:44] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:59:48] And I was amazed at what I witnessed in that bookstore because it had access to general authorities, their wives, people that had written the books. All the books.

John Dehlin [01:00:04] Oh, like signings. Author signings and stuff.

Michele Seamons [01:00:06] Yeah, authors. And also access to all those books. And I was like, A sponge. Because on my mission, I mean, I was highly critical of everyone that hadn't read the Book of Mormon like 20 or 30 times on their mission and read all of the standard missionary set that we were handed. I mean, I was like, you haven't read it? Like, how is that possible?

John Dehlin [01:00:29] You mean Jesus the Christ and all

Michele Seamons [01:00:31] faith and then on and on, like

John Dehlin [01:00:32] miracle forgiveness, marvelous work and a wonder.

Michele Seamons [01:00:34] Exactly. The gospel principles. Yeah, I was proficient in all.

John Dehlin [01:00:41] Wow. Dang.

Michele Seamons [01:00:43] So I came off my mission with all the scripture memorization and all of that. And my mission president was big on memorization. So on our mission, we also had access to Jake Garn and Senator Jake Garn, former Astronaut Garn, and the other senator, Orrin Hatch. Orrin Hatch. And they came and spoke to us while we were on our mission. And so I felt a lot of influence, like, okay, so then working at this Deseret book, I'm like, again, here I am. I've been positioned to meet church leaders, to gain more knowledge, to be prepared for something.

John Dehlin [01:01:25] You're going to be General Relief Society president on this trajectory?

Michele Seamons [01:01:28] Well, you know, why not? It's right across the street and I've been inside. I know how they do things. I really was preparing it. But again, same inner voice saying, cool your horses. You know, like, cool your jets. Like, you still aren't there yet. Yeah, you've got your own demons.

Michele Seamons [01:01:49] But on the outside. And then I also worked at the 9th and 9th Great Harvest Bread Company because I had worked at the provost store previous to my mission. And I had this amazing post mission experience of being in Salt Lake City. And nobody was LDS because that little pocket is very. It had changed dramatically from my childhood.

Michele Seamons [01:02:19] And I got into the great harvest world. I became a baker. And I loved the company and I was kind of adopted by some great owners of bakeries who loved and supported me a lot. And I was reading back in some journals that maybe forecasted something kind of funny that I didn't realize I had already been planning because I admired these people so much that I wrote down in my journal, someday my husband and I are going to own a great harvest. And then Mike comes home.

John Dehlin [01:03:01] Okay, beautiful. That is a wonderful Mormon opening and in it to win it.

Margi Dehlin [01:03:09] I have a quick question for you about the chosen kind of aspect. And you know, I'm like feeling your story so hard about just anything's possible. There's a lot of responsibility that's part of chosen too. But I'm curious if. Okay, so this might sound offensive. I'm Actually trying to be offended, like, was there. There's an aspect of chosenness that can form as separateness. It keeps you. It can separate you from other people, Right?

Mike Seamons [01:03:49] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [01:03:49] Make you feel a little less for them or make you feel better than them. And I'm curious how it showed up for you. Did you feel like everyone was chosen? Like, especially in the church, like everyone was similarly chosen, or did you feel a little bit more chosen than other people? And if you did, did it affect your relationships with people at all?

Michele Seamons [01:04:15] Yes. That is a very good question, because, yes, I did feel chosen. I didn't feel like everyone was chosen. And it did give me a sense of separateness, but I took it as a leadership role.

Margi Dehlin [01:04:27] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:04:28] Like, in my family, it presented that I need to take care of my mom because look at the brokenness that she's experiencing. So I must perform and help her.

Margi Dehlin [01:04:41] Yes.

Michele Seamons [01:04:42] And I'm from a very. She's from a. My mom had. I think it's nine brothers and sisters. So I have a lot of cousins, all living in the Salt Lake City area. I felt. And I'm like the third oldest, so I felt enormous responsibility for all of those cousins. To set an example, I was the oldest. No. Second oldest. Girl. Yeah. It was a lot of pressure, but it did lend me to not be a part of. I was separate.

Margi Dehlin [01:05:14] Yeah. Which makes sense. Right? Mission primary.

Michele Seamons [01:05:17] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [01:05:18] Relationship separate. Secondary.

Michele Seamons [01:05:19] Secondary.

Margi Dehlin [01:05:20] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:05:20] Well. And the relationships that mattered were the ones that were going to feed the chosen part. So relationships with my grandparents. Extremely close. Extremely close. Because my parents, my dad, like, couldn't give me blessings and things. So my grandfather would. And he was. They'd served missions. He had served in a temple presidency in Switzerland. He's worthy. He was known in the church. He was a bishop for 10 years, a stake president for 10 years, and then back to a bishop again in the Salt Lake City area. He knew. He freaking did the lights at Temple Square. He was an electrician. He knew everyone. Everyone knew my grandfather. In fact, in the Salt Lake Temple, my grandfather and grandmother were Adam and Eve.

Margi Dehlin [01:06:11] Ah.

Michele Seamons [01:06:12] So they were. For me, I need to be connected to them because they are on the same frequency.

Margi Dehlin [01:06:19] That's right. And they also support your dream and your kind of your narrative. Correct. Got it. Okay.

Michele Seamons [01:06:27] So that makes sense. I did. I connected myself to people. It sounds horrible. To fulfill a need and a direction.

Margi Dehlin [01:06:41] Absolutely. And this is not unusual within the Mormon story, so I just want to be clear about that. But I did want to ask you about it.

Michele Seamons [01:06:48] Correct.

Margi Dehlin [01:06:49] Because I thought it Would be clarifying.

Michele Seamons [01:06:51] Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is. I didn't foster relationships with all of my people from my past. I was really good at fostering my current location because there was so much on the line to go back would have been detouring.

Margi Dehlin [01:07:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:07:19] Beautiful. Well, thanks for sharing your story so far. I'm on the edge of my seat. More care. Yeah. You're about to become a female general authority in this narrative so far. We'll see. Stay tuned. All right, well, Mike, let's jump to your Mormon story. Where does your Mormon story begin, and is it as fabulous as Michele's?

Mike's Southern California Mormon Upbringing

Mike Seamons [01:07:45] It was awesome just to sit here and hear her go through that. I know her story well, but not in a sitting where she got to take the time to lay out all of those dynamics. And, you know, we love. You guys are special in this part of our life because you're so good at bringing people's stories out. And so I loved how you asked questions that I even got to learn some things about, you know, how did she feel as that chosen person? So that was really, really beautiful. And yeah, I have a very different origin story with a very similar kind of cliffhanger, you know, where she and I will end up meeting.

Mike Seamons [01:08:25] And so it's interesting because two people, you know, she's told where she came from and some of the dynamics she was dealing with. I come from multi generations of. Of LDS on both sides. My mom and my dad's side, they're. They mass like the. The Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is like the center of both of my families. Not. And it's not just the center. It's everything else pales in comparison to, like, if. If that is not. Is that if that is not the center, you are completely missing all of it. And so it was very clear to me when I.

Mike Seamons [01:09:04] When I was born that this is the center of my life. And you know, I had. My. Both my grandfathers were priesthood leaders, you know, and. And that the words that they taught me and told me as a very young boy was like, this is the center. There's no other thing to make, you know, a part of your life that's as important. And so I was born into this amazing family I had my mom and dad are the most wonderful. They made decisions when my oldest brother, I'm one of seven, my oldest brother was born, that they just said, we are giving all of our life to our kids.

Mike Seamons [01:09:46] And they just have poured and they continue to pour. They're both alive thank heavens. Because they've just poured and continued to pour everything they have into the seven of us and our spouses and now our own kids. And their love is so full because they love us. And I mean, so I grew up in this idyllic, like a family that, you know, would be in all the magazines because, you know, we looked great on Christmas cards because we were just this really vibrant, very outgoing family that is connected to two very large multi generational families, both sides of my mom's, you know, and dad's family.

Mike Seamons [01:10:28] I have over 30 cousins on each side. So, you know, five aunts and uncles or five couples of aunts and uncles on my mom's side, six on my dad's side. So this is like a really big, beautiful family.

John Dehlin [01:10:39] Were your parents born and raised in California or Utah?

Mike Seamons [01:10:42] In Utah. And then to my. My mom grew up in California. She. She grew up in Pasadena. My dad grew up in La Canada. And so they were California raised, but very Utah. Kind of descended. Like my great, great, great grandmother, she came from Ireland. Her name was Jane Black and was a part of the Nauvoo moving across the river and was actually part of. She was a nurse that helped pull bullets out of John Taylor. I mean, she's a historic figure. And these are just the people that are part of my relatives. And I carried it with such pride, with such, wow. I am a part of this, this noble, you know, generation of people.

Mike Seamons [01:11:26] And. And I was born into that, like, with. With similar confidence of who I was and. And this like, wow, I am, I am born into a family that has. That really God has blessed and God is, is continuing to bless. And so your parents were.

John Dehlin [01:11:43] Temple married.

Mike Seamons [01:11:44] Temple married.

John Dehlin [01:11:45] And you were where in the birth order?

Mike Seamons [01:11:46] I'm number two.

John Dehlin [01:11:47] Two of seven.

Mike Seamons [01:11:48] Two of seven, yeah. And there were six of us that were born to my parents. And then my parents and my family technically in all ways, adopted a seventh sibling, a second sister who is the best friend of my younger, the sister right below me. And she kind of is grafted in and is as much a sister as all of my siblings. So that made seven. And that happened while I was on my mission.

Margi Dehlin [01:12:12] Wow. So you also have this tremendous origin story of family, like this kind of rooted. You have all these roots tying to this family story, this powerful family story.

Mike Seamons [01:12:28] Yeah, I mean, it's so formative when you have that kind of a beginning because you're on a team. Like I'm on the Warnick team, who I've spent so much of my life with. Those cousins, I'm on the Seamen's team.

Mike Seamons [01:12:43] They're giant teams. They have each other's back. You know, there comes some challenge in those big families where it's like, how do you find a voice? Because everyone has so much to say, and everyone's so smart and so talented. You're like, gosh, where do I fit in? And I would go through some of that, especially in my junior high years.

Mike Seamons [01:13:03] But the part that is the most I know to me, kind of as I reflect back on the person that I was, is I had an experience when I was 12 that really shaped me and has continued to shape me. That, and it was my dad's. Both my grandfathers were very. They just wanted to give their grandkids, their kids unattainable experiences. One of them, my. My grandpa Carl, on my Warnock side, he would take us. He'd take first his. His children and their spouses on amazing trips to go see the world and experience the world. And they would take these trips that we would all be so envious of because the kids didn't get to go.

Mike Seamons [01:13:45] But then he started taking us. After my grandma died, he took us to Hawaii as a family. All of my cousins, and he took us to Lake Mead on houseboats and just was such a generous person who was always trying to make experiences that would bond us as a family. We spent a lot of time up in Max Inn, Idaho, was kind of our family compound. We had cabins all over the Snake river there. And. And so that was one family that I just always felt magnetized towards. And we spent. You know, we never went on a vacation that wasn't to a family member's house.

Mike Seamons [01:14:20] It was always family. And then with my dad's side, he had similar. Similar faith and love. But not my grandparents. They didn't take us to these big trips. They took us on backpacking trips. And I'm going to grab a drink of water just to.

Margi Dehlin [01:14:42] But

Mike Seamons [01:14:46] they had established a tradition before this point where it would affect me, where my grandma and my grandpa, they would take their first. Their children, they had six, and they would backpack into the Sierra Nevada mountains up above Bishop, a place called Hilton Lakes. And they would literally, like, backpack in 10 miles, set up a rough camp, fish for a week, and they would stay in these mountains off the grid in this very kind of amazing immersive nature experience.

Mike Seamons [01:15:16] And that became a tradition that then it was bring your spouse and see if your spouse can survive Hilton Lakes. So every year, a spouse would come. My mom had to go through Kind of the audition of going to Hilton Lakes. And, I mean, it's very rugged backcountry camping. And then when I was 12, they said, all of the cousins that are over the age of eight are going to now go. And that was like 20 of us that were all now here. All these years, we'd been told these stories, so the anticipation was just enormous.

Mike Seamons [01:15:48] And as we all got together for this week that we were now going to go into the mountains, we gathered at an outfitter staging place. All the families show up, and it's this big ordeal of we're all gathering for this big, big mountain trek.

Mike Seamons [01:16:06] The younger of us, and I was in the group that some of us got to ride horses in, and it was really, really amazing. But we get all, as a family up. We have mules, pack in all of our food and gear, and we set up a camp as an extended family, like my cousins and all of my aunts and uncles in the middle of the mountains.

Margi Dehlin [01:16:25] Such a huge endeavor.

Mike Seamons [01:16:26] Oh, huge. It was, like, huge. And it happened every other year. This was a massive endeavor. And the whole thing was fishing on the lakes, and we'd catch fish and we'd clean them. I mean, it was like Swiss Family Robinson, and it was magical.

Mike Seamons [01:16:42] And it was on that trip that I began to realize a feeling that I could tune into. That became the guiding feeling of my whole life, and it still is. It was laying under the stars. My uncles would. They taught us, us cousins, that the premium way to experience a night sky is you lay out a tarp, you put your sleeping bags on the tarp, and then you just lay under the stars and you sleep. And it was my five cousins. We were laying there looking up at the stars, and I'll just never forget the first time I felt like I was in the presence of something so big.

Mike Seamons [01:17:21] You're laying under that sky. I just. I looked at it with, wow. Like, I am such a small part of such a giant thing. And I would hold on to that feeling, and it would become kind of the primary operating system inside of me. And that was like, at 12 years old. And anytime I would intersect with that feeling, I would just put it in my pocket as, wow, I am.

Mike Seamons [01:17:51] Regardless of whether I'm chose or not, I am. I am intersecting with a power that. That is so much bigger than me. And I'm doing it again and again and again. And it was. It was such a feeling that I just have never forgotten because it was the beginning of a feeling. And. And then I would go and I had an amazing childhood growing up, you know, in this big family that we grew up in Southern California just outside of, well, where Magic Mountain is. It was called Canyon Country, California.

Mike Seamons [01:18:21] And it happened to be a place where the church was pretty strong. And we moved there when I was five years old. My parents met at byu. They became, they got married really right during, while they were attending school. They had my brother and me while they were still at byu. So I was a BYU born baby. And then a few years after that they moved to Burbank, California and then over to Canyon country where that's where I would spend from 5 until I'd go on my mission in Canyon Country, California. And it was the place that I grew up and that I, you know, as my brothers and sisters continued to fill this house we had, we, we were very, you know, lived in a very middle, lower middle income neighborhood, had friends that most of our friends were all Mormons.

Mike Seamons [01:19:13] And, and that was, you know, there were enough Mormons in that area of California, enough Latter Day Saints, that it was really everything in our life where we went to church, we went to scouts, we went to all the activities. Like the church was a really core part of growing up in this area.

Mike Seamons [01:19:31] And I attached to a second really big thing of why I made choices down the road that I did is I loved the mentorship of being growing up in the church like here now as a teenager, I had a really hard time junior high here. We've raised our six kids and junior high hasn't been good for any of them. And if only somehow we could get into the junior high curriculum and say, look, this is probably not going to be an awesome experience for you, but just hold on because it'll be okay. And junior high was a terrible experience for me.

Mike Seamons [01:20:08] All of my elementary school friends kind of created groups that didn't include me. And I just felt like I was just a complete loner. And I tried out. I was always more. Kind of felt like I was an athlete and I wasn't a great athlete, but I felt like I was good enough that I could make athletics be kind of my thing. But in junior high I didn't feel like I was good enough. And so I was like, what am I going to do if it's not athletics? I went out for band. Like that was not something that I had known anything about. I was just like looking for somebody to, to say, hey, I see you.

Mike Seamons [01:20:43] That's right, I'll look for you tomorrow. And I just never felt I eat out on the Bleachers alone. Like, I just felt like I was really alone when I was in junior high school. And, you know, while that doesn't. It's like, yeah, we all feel that way in junior high school. It did take this person that felt this significance under a sky that made me feel like I am part of something so big.

Margi Dehlin [01:21:10] And.

Mike Seamons [01:21:11] And it really complicated that feeling because I felt so small in my real life. And so I would. I would seek those intersections because my real life didn't feel like the person that I wanted to be. The person that I felt like this power that was all around me wanted me to be. And so I. I kind of just tried to fake it as much as possible to try to figure out, like, how do I be the person that I feel when I feel that feeling, not the person that I feel when I'm all alone and feel so small.

Mike Seamons [01:21:48] And it was hard. I had to grapple with that for a couple of years. And the thing that kind of pulled me out of it, and this is my. I know I've heard many Mormon stories that have a patriarchal blessing in them. And. And when I was 15 years old, I had a patriarchal blessing. So this was kind of in this zone. I just started high school. I was a young freshman. So I started high school when I was 13. I was always a year younger than everybody else. And so I was young at this point too. Everyone in my grade had all had their patriarchal blessings before me, and I was kind of a laggard in it, but I had this blessing and.

Mike Seamons [01:22:30] And it was life changing for me because it confirmed the thing that the feeling was making me experience. And it laid out a really detailed path, which in hindsight I look at it, I'm like, whoa, that is such a powerful thing to put in someone's life.

Patriarchal Blessings and Chosen Identity

Mike Seamons [01:22:56] But it also has so many possible, you know, turns that make it really complicated. My patriarchal blessing. I mean, first of all, it said that I would find a. Didn't say her name, but I would find a worthy daughter of Eve who would, you know, we would have a large family together and raise them in the gospel. I mean, it kind of laid that part out, which maybe is boilerplate in a lot of patriarchal blessings. It talked about.

Mike Seamons [01:23:24] About my positions of leadership in the church. It said I would be a judge in Israel and I would rise to the most senior senior leadership in the church. And it was all for the building up of the kingdom of God and not for my own aggrandizement. And it really cautioned Me, it was like, do not let your leadership positions. Do not let it overtake that.

Mike Seamons [01:23:49] And so as, as I, as the patriarchal blessing kind of continued, it also gave me this, this sense of, of I was. It told me that I was going to be a healer. And, and that was a really important thing because that would shape me later on in my life where it was like I was. I was not only someone who was. Was going to be of, of high impact because of this, you know, kind of laying out, this is your promotion, you know, plan. But it also said I was going to be a healer and that people would call on me from all around, you know, beyond my local community for me to come and heal them and to.

Mike Seamons [01:24:26] And I mean, I'm 15 years old and I'm getting all of this information and I'm like, well, I guess like, similar to Michele, I am chosen. Like, what else, how else do I answer this? I'm chosen. And now, now I need to orient myself towards being the person that I'm now chosen to be.

Margi Dehlin [01:24:48] Right? Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:24:52] Yeah. And in Mormon parlance, judge in Israel means bishop. So it means you're going to be a bishop to me. And highest levels of the church gives kind of general authority vibes. So if I had gotten that blessing, that's how I would have interpreted that if I'm righteous, I might even be a general authority or an apostle some, some days that.

Mike Seamons [01:25:15] Yeah, I mean, that occurred to me.

John Dehlin [01:25:16] I was 15.

Mike Seamons [01:25:17] I just looked at it as. And in addition, I mean, I probably interpreted it through a lens of a family that talked about this all the time. My grandfather was a mission president and a regional authority. My uncle was a mission president and the regional authority.

Mike Seamons [01:25:33] My other grandfather was a sealer. Like every family gathering, we believed in the principle of that the God, or God has his noble and great ones. And his noble and great ones were chosen from the foundations of the world. And, and that if you are one of those noble and great ones, that you have a destiny. And you know, I, and I, I believed all of that because I lived with people who had experienced it and had taught me that this is, this is. And nobody ever says you should aspire. I mean, we use all this really interesting language of the noble and great ones are, are, are the best.

Mike Seamons [01:26:13] But you should never want to be, you know, a noble and great one. You should only just want to passively acknowledge that it exists and then, you know, hope that you are one, you know, through your silence. And it's like, it's really a bizarre thing to try to balance.

Margi Dehlin [01:26:28] Yeah, that is so true.

John Dehlin [01:26:30] Yeah. But. And you know, sometimes when people have had bad experiences with patriarchal blessings, we've been critical of them on the podcast because it can set people up for disappointment or sadness, or they can be just viewed as they can not come true and just be viewed as, like the church projecting onto people what the church, what lives the church wants people to live. Sometimes for the church's own benefit. But in your case, you're this kid struggling to find confidence and meaning and purpose, and it's making you feel like the sky's the limit. There's a perspective where that's a great thing.

Mike Seamons [01:27:10] Yeah. Well. And what followed, like, it sealed it within. That same year, a couple of friends, we were coming home from Mormon Night at Disneyland, which is a real thing.

Margi Dehlin [01:27:22] Wow.

John Dehlin [01:27:23] Where the church rents out the whole Disneyland.

Mike Seamons [01:27:25] They don't rent it out, but the church gives Disneyland the ability to. To market to all the Mormons to come to Disneyland on a special night that is.

Margi Dehlin [01:27:34] That is new to me.

Mike Seamons [01:27:35] Yeah, they do also. Mormon Night at Dodger Stadium.

John Dehlin [01:27:37] Yeah, I was gonna say Dodger Dogs.

Mike Seamons [01:27:39] My dad sang the national anthem there many. And my sister has sung it many times. It's a big thing in our family. But. But Mormon Night at Disneyland is the. The most important part is on the drive home, these. This group of friends. My friend was driving his dad's car, and he.

Michele Seamons [01:27:55] He.

Mike Seamons [01:27:55] We all were just exhausted. It's been a whole night, and it was past midnight. He falls asleep at the steering wheel, and he goes up on the center divider and wakes up, overcorrects, car spins into the fast lane. All four of us are fine, nobody is hurt, but we kind of finish this phase of the accident, and now we're sitting in the fast lane, you know, middle of the night, nobody's around. You know, we're all 15, 16, 17 year olds. So we're like, this is tr. Like we're having this. Is everyone alive? That's the first question we start asking. Well, then there comes a knock on the window, and somebody opens the driver's side door and says, are you okay?

Mike Seamons [01:28:40] You know, and so they had seen this happen, and they'd said, you need to get out of the car as soon as you can. Like, we. You have to get out of. You're in a very unsafe place right now. So we all barrel out of. You know, I think only three of the doors could open. We, you know, found our way out. We get to the center or to the. To the median to the side. And. And no more than a minute after we get to the side, a semi truck is barreling down the freeway and hits this car and absolutely totals it. Like, if we were in there for one minute longer, we would have all died. That would have been the end. And I. Wow.

Margi Dehlin [01:29:14] And.

Mike Seamons [01:29:15] And it was such a huge thing. I mean, that alone would have been enough to go, whoa, someone is looking out for me, Someone's looking out for us. And that group of four, we trauma bonded in this moment. But then in addition to it, we're on now this median. And the police come and this is before cell phones. So somebody. I don't know how the police got even notified, but. But they come and they start asking questions about what happened. And we all look for the person that pulled us out of the car. And we remember she was a woman, kind of middle, but she's gone now.

John Dehlin [01:29:52] I didn't know the three Nephites had a woman.

Mike Seamons [01:29:54] This was.

John Dehlin [01:29:55] I didn't know John the beloved, some new person.

Mike Seamons [01:30:00] I had no other explanation. And neither did the four of us. Like, okay, we just had a guardian angel, you know, intervene on this planet on our behalf and we are alive because of it.

John Dehlin [01:30:14] And that's going to lock your Mormon testimony in solid.

Mike Seamons [01:30:18] Oh, yeah, no, I was, I was. I was locked in. And now, because I'd hear, I'd have a blessing that says, you are chosen. And now a saving, that is you are chosen. And I'm like, what? Yeah, I guess. I guess it's. This is it and

Margi Dehlin [01:30:36] makes all the sense.

John Dehlin [01:30:37] Wow.

Mike Seamons [01:30:38] Yeah. So. So that was, you know, and the

John Dehlin [01:30:41] framing, if you're raised Mormon, and maybe this isn't just a Mormon thing, but you're going to grow up with the framing that when something like that happens, it means God was looking out for you, that the church is true, that your destiny and your patriarchal blessing is all meant to come true. The reverse isn't true. If things don't work out good or there's tragedy, it's going to be because maybe you weren't worthy or, you know, or it's a trial because the adversary is working overtime. But anything positive is going to accrue. Well, both. Anything negative and positive. House always wins. It's always going to accrue to the church being true, which I'm not saying is necessarily a bad thing, but. Yeah, yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:31:21] No, it really, it did. It stacked the house in a way that that was. I have to say it was super beneficial because I then had this shift in my mind. I remember it it was also the time when I got my very first bedroom. My brother and I shared a bedroom our whole lives. And we were not good friends when we were young because we slept three inches from each other. We had water beds that were sandwiched together. So we were so close in life and we were a year and a half apart. We slept so like, everything was just Mike and Ty, Mike and Ty, Mike and Ty. And he's now my best friend in the world. But when we got a chance to like have separate bedrooms when we were 16 and he was 17, I was like, whoa, this is a whole new world.

Margi Dehlin [01:32:10] And.

Mike Seamons [01:32:11] And I, and I turned my bedroom. It's important because I turned it into a shrine. Like here I am now 16 and I should be, you know, having all these like 16 year old thoughts. But I have now decided because of these experiences, that feeling that I'm like, I want to intersect with that feeling all the time. I found I could intersect with it if I listened to Michael McClain. I could intersect with it if I listened to Little Afterglow, you know, I could intersect with it if I had a picture of Jesus, you know, that I always kind of revered in my room. I could intersect with it if my prayers, you know, combine maybe a few of those things.

Mike Seamons [01:32:49] A little instrumental music, you know, praying to the picture of Jesus, you know, and looking, looking through the glass that framed the picture and seeing myself through this Jesus picture and saying, I think I could be a really amazing person if I just simply have the image of Jesus in my countenance. Like, if I am. If I am.

John Dehlin [01:33:17] Have you seen his images?

Mike Seamons [01:33:20] Maybe that song was part of the song.

Michele Seamons [01:33:28] She did find it.

John Dehlin [01:33:32] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:33:33] Oh, I sing it, I felt it. And I let that soak so deeply in that I ultimately decided I am nothing unless I am that at 16. Like, I am nothing unless I am a perfect ambassador of Jesus Christ. And that lit me off on a, like, okay, now I'm going to. How do I live up to this? And at that point I was already looking for visitations. Like, I was like, I am someone who is intersecting with this thing so much, this power that they're going to visit me. I will be the brother of Jared. I'll see the hand.

John Dehlin [01:34:17] Meaning angels will visit you.

Mike Seamons [01:34:18] No. Or the Savior will visit me.

John Dehlin [01:34:20] Oh, like theophany.

Mike Seamons [01:34:22] Yeah. And the angels. I already had the angel like that was on the freeway next is something more significant.

John Dehlin [01:34:30] So God or Jesus.

Mike Seamons [01:34:31] I didn't have words for calling an election and second anointing, but when I did, I Was like, oh, yeah, that's happening. And it should happen. If I'm really on the right track, it should happen before the age of 40.

John Dehlin [01:34:41] So.

Mike Seamons [01:34:42] So, like, I mean, I was so. I was so sure that this is who I was going to be, you know? And it's interesting because then I really leaned in. Like, I mean, I drove my car around listening only to church music. Part of it, I joke with my parents. They never let me go to efy. They. I only got to go to youth conferences. EFY was just starting to spin up there, especially for youth, where people from beyond your local stake got together and they all. I never got to go. And I was like. And my older brother got to go to efy. And I had this prodigal son experience of. But I'm the good guy. Like, I'm the guy that's, like, doing all the stuff, right? And my brother was always pushing.

Margi Dehlin [01:35:26] You read my Patriarchal blessing.

Mike Seamons [01:35:28] Why am I not going to efy? And if my mom was sitting here, she'd say, you did go to efy. And I'd say, no, I didn't. I would have remembered it.

Margi Dehlin [01:35:36] Interesting.

Mike Seamons [01:35:37] I constantly had this, like, this feeling of everything I can do to put myself so deeply into church was good for me. And everything else was second priority. And so I forewent, you know, plenty of things because I was so focused on how do I become this version of myself that I'm not yet.

John Dehlin [01:35:59] So I have to ask. My stake dances in Houston were legendary. I think we grew up around the same time. I remember hearing that Southern California Mormons had pretty bump in stake dances as well, but that you had to have a dance card.

Mike Seamons [01:36:18] Oh, yeah. You had to have a dance card. You had to wear a shirt and tie. Were you guys still wearing shirt and ties to stake dances? Yeah. Yeah. No shirt and tie. It was like.

John Dehlin [01:36:26] Did you have a dance card?

Mike Seamons [01:36:27] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [01:36:28] Wait, what is a dance card?

John Dehlin [01:36:29] I know, right?

Mike Seamons [01:36:30] A dance card is. It's permission to enter the dance floor.

John Dehlin [01:36:33] Floor. Because the temple recommended.

Margi Dehlin [01:36:35] Because I would meet with the bishop

Mike Seamons [01:36:36] or a bishop member. Your bishopric would clear you as. Do you agree to the standards of the dance? It's both a modesty agreement, no substances, and it's a behavioral agreement. And if you did, you carried a card that gave you. And if the girls walked in with too short of a skirt, card revoked, turned around.

Margi Dehlin [01:36:56] Renee. Renee would not have received her.

John Dehlin [01:37:02] And were the dances great?

Mike Seamons [01:37:05] I mean, for me, because I had now chosen church as the center that it's like the place that I Interacted with opposite sex, like with girls. And I was an outgoing person. I had a group of friends. By the time I could go to stake dances, I was in high school. That group would go to the dances together and we all, you know, took, we, we did the fast songs, you know, just to warm up. But the real dance was about the slow songs. So, you know, it's like, it's. How'd you fill the, the slow songs up?

John Dehlin [01:37:38] So any favorite songs to dance to? Is it more, Is it more mental? Is that too much detail?

Margi Dehlin [01:37:43] I'm so curious if they played like similar songs.

Mike Seamons [01:37:47] Gosh, I'm sure I've.

Margi Dehlin [01:37:48] You. Did you get Careless Whisper? We have Careless Whisper all the time.

Mike Seamons [01:37:52] You're the meaning in my life. You're the inspiration bringing out Chicago.

Margi Dehlin [01:37:55] How about lady in Red?

John Dehlin [01:37:56] Oh, yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:37:57] No, that's, I mean, and now when it pulls you out, you know, it's like, gosh, this is like I, I went. This song caused fear and trembling. If it was ever like, because I was gonna ask somebody that I, I was throwing the stakes out for.

John Dehlin [01:38:10] So, yeah, playing Michael Jackson. Forever young.

Michele Seamons [01:38:13] Forever young.

John Dehlin [01:38:14] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:38:15] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:38:15] Okay.

Mike Seamons [01:38:16] I mean, it was a beautiful. I, I. We had a vibrant seminary class and you know, those were, those became my people. You know, we had a reasonably large priest quorum. I did church sports in a similar. You know, we here have all stories of. It was so formative. Like, I remember going to the softball fields and we had snack bars and we'd watch our dads play softball, like with uniforms and, you know, fully kitted out and, and they would play like, like city league level softball lit fields. And it was like everybody showed up, you know, all the war did. And then, you know, that came down to the young men's.

Mike Seamons [01:38:53] We had softball, volleyball, basketball. And in California, they also did, you know, the regional playoffs. And I had a group. The rule was you had to have. The majority of the people on the court had to be Mormon, had to be lds, and so you'd recruit your most athletic friends and then you would barely reach the minimum required Mormon and you just were like, all right, now let's go see if we can compete. And I had friends that were so such great athletes and they really. I was the fifth best player on every team. I was never the best, but it was a place that I went and I felt like I belonged.

Mike Seamons [01:39:30] And we won. You know, we called ourselves the. We got the triple crown two years in a row where we, during those junior senior years, we won all three sports at the stake and the regional level.

John Dehlin [01:39:44] Tell us the word in stake.

Mike Seamons [01:39:45] Again, it was a canyon country, and I was in the. I was in the Mint Canyon ward, but it was the Santa Clarita Valley stake. Is the stake there.

John Dehlin [01:39:55] So this is a total side note, but, like, California, the church is hemorrhaging in California. Like, it's negative growth, and they're shutting down chapels and closing wards and stakes left and right. I don't want to jump there other than just to say it must be hard for you to have had such an amazing Mormon upbringing in Southern California and to see the church just dying in California.

Mike Seamons [01:40:22] I mean, because it is. I mean, we used to say it was the second strongest anchor point in the world was California. And I don't know if they. We still say that, but for me, I mean, all my neighbors were not Mormons, so I didn't have the. I could ride my bike down the street and say, hey, brother, hey, sister. Like they were. Or down and up around, you know, around the corner. They were. They were a bike ride away, not a. Not a walk away. And. But I, I still. When we went to church, my dad was the bishop of the ward. Like, I.

Mike Seamons [01:40:52] I was in the aristocracy of, you know, like, because my parents were very involved and they were. They were very influential, you know, in the area. My dad started a light opera company. Company. He was a. He's extremely musical, and every time my dad sings, he sang the national anthem at the Dodger Stadium many times, but it just. He light lights up a crowd and. And he taught me to love music and taught me to love performance. And.

John Dehlin [01:41:21] Did you put on a production of Saturday's Warrior in your state?

Mike Seamons [01:41:24] We did Orderville. Which order is love? You remember that?

Michele Seamons [01:41:30] That missed that.

Margi Dehlin [01:41:31] I have no idea what that is.

Mike Seamons [01:41:32] It was, you know, we all wanted better pants.

John Dehlin [01:41:36] And you did road shows, right?

Mike Seamons [01:41:38] Well, then we did road shows, and that was. I loved the performing arts so much. I was trying to figure myself out. Like, I wasn't a great athlete, but I loved sports. I wasn't as good as my dad at music, but I loved performance. I wasn't the best student, but I went to school and I was a positive influence. And I was like everything. I was. I was okay at. The one thing I was, like, really exceptional at was being the gospel, being a member of the church.

John Dehlin [01:42:07] Did you do scripture Chase?

Mike Seamons [01:42:08] Yeah, and I was really good at it. I mean, I felt like the more I could perform at church, the more I felt like I was being something. And I mean, I performed because for Me, it was. This is what brought me validation. Like, this is where people said, you're special. From my family to the members of our ward, they said, you are special. Like, it was funny. I was telling my mom just recently, you know, how it felt to be in the body of a person that was. Had these two conflicting views of themselves. I'm no one without God, and I'm special with God.

Mike Seamons [01:42:47] Like, they're actually both sides have consequences, you know, the I'm no one without God means that if I ever do anything that I feel is broken that trust. I am now. I mean, I am in my solitary, why have you forsaken me? Kind of problem. If I, you know, on the other side, where I am significant, I actually am, you know, prideful. And now how do I, like, not be prideful? I mean, it's just there's pressure on all the sides of it that I was trying to figure out how to deal with.

John Dehlin [01:43:19] So there's that line from the Book of Mormon musical. I want to be the Mormon who changes all mankind.

Michele Seamons [01:43:26] We did. So insightful.

John Dehlin [01:43:28] I quote that a lot.

Mike Seamons [01:43:33] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:43:34] Yeah. Which is kind of fun.

Mike Seamons [01:43:35] And it wasn't because I think, you know, we were so. It was because we both, maybe in our different ways, felt God chose us to change all mankind. Not that we had any.

John Dehlin [01:43:48] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:43:48] But any special skill.

John Dehlin [01:43:50] Can't do it with pride.

Mike Seamons [01:43:51] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:43:52] It was like, literally, like, we're going to shock everyone because they will not see this coming because they have no idea. Who he's chosen is a secret to everyone because why would he choose us?

John Dehlin [01:44:04] Because we're awesome and humble.

Michele Seamons [01:44:05] Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:44:10] And the nerd of me has to ask, did you wear OP shorts? Did you wear vans?

Mike Seamons [01:44:17] You must have like. My mom must have written you a. Please ask them this question.

John Dehlin [01:44:20] No, I just. I grew up in Texas, and whenever someone from California would move in, they'd be wearing OP shirts.

Margi Dehlin [01:44:25] Hey, that was true of Florida too. And I'd be like, so I grew up shorts.

John Dehlin [01:44:29] Those are cool. Or vans. They're wearing vans. You wore vans and OP shorts.

Mike Seamons [01:44:34] So we couldn't afford the OP shorts. So my mom would sew the dual colored corduroy short. So the one color front pocket, second color body. And she was. She would stitch OP into your corduroy shirt. And I would go to school with these shorts on. And it was really funny because no one knew, but I knew. I mean, it fed my imposter syndrome so bad because I'm like, oh, my gosh, I am such a fake. You're like, I am not who I appear to be. Yeah, I am a fake.

John Dehlin [01:45:06] I'm not really.

Mike Seamons [01:45:07] Okay.

Michele Seamons [01:45:07] We understood each other because we both had taken the Izods off of Izod shirts and put them on other shirts

John Dehlin [01:45:14] because we were the alligator.

Michele Seamons [01:45:15] I mean, because we couldn't afford them. And it was so significant that you had to meet those appearances.

Margi Dehlin [01:45:22] That is so scrappy and creative, uncreative.

Michele Seamons [01:45:24] Oh, no, this is an Izod. They're like, it's kind of weird how that alligator's kind of offset. So attritive, so attractive. Doesn't feel right. Doesn't feel right.

John Dehlin [01:45:36] What about the vans? Did you wear vans?

Mike Seamons [01:45:37] I had a pair of vans, and I treasured them because I had some knockoffs also.

Michele Seamons [01:45:43] Didn't your parents get some in, like, Asia?

Mike Seamons [01:45:45] No, no, they went. They brought me home Reeboks from Asia. They went to Korea on a trip that my grandfather took. And. But they. It was. It was R E B. Okay. It was misspelled. Oh, man. Those were my Reebok shoes. I mean, I was. I was. My parents gave me everything. My dad had a great career. He was a hospital administrator. Like, we. We had a magical family. And, you know, the. The op shorts that were hand stitched and the, you know, misspelled Reeboks were a small infraction. And, like, it was. I grew up in something that felt like I was constantly exposed to magic.

John Dehlin [01:46:22] One thing I. One thing I may want to say, I don't know if this is a correction, but, you know, you said the second strongest center of Mormonism. I think I was implying you meant Utah was the strongest. My experience is that some of these stakes in what we called the Mission field outside of Utah could actually be stronger and more Mormon and more devout than actual Utah stakes. Because what I learned, and this is something I think, Michele, that you said, sometimes the Utah Mormons were slackers because it was just the water that everyone swam in. Sometimes these Mission Field stakes that were in different areas in California, in Texas, in Washington, Maryland, that's where it's actually most intense, most devout, most committed, and I imagine sought them out, right?

Michele Seamons [01:47:13] We sought them out.

John Dehlin [01:47:14] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:47:15] Yeah, we found those stakes. We found those stakes everywhere we went. And they were.

John Dehlin [01:47:18] Yeah. Like, they're more Mormon than Utah stakes.

Mike Seamons [01:47:22] And Santa Clarita Valley was at this time, it was just. It was bursting with families moving in and really strong families. And. And so it was. I mean. Yeah. And the people, like, this is where I'll return to that mentorship. Like I had so many youth leaders that just, I mean, I had amazing parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles. And so I had all these people that were constantly looking out for me. But I had, you know, a young men's president who changed my life, like, just saw me and gave me so much trust and love and. And he's somebody who I still hold in my heart as one of the most influential people in my life.

Mike Seamons [01:48:03] Like, and many more like that, that I. I was changed because mentors took me in and said, I'm going to help you become the best version of yourself that you. They didn't know about my patriarchal blessing. They didn't know about this, like, thing I was dealing with on the inside. They just saw this young man who. They were like, you have such good intention, like, let me see if I can help you. And. And I just, I benefited from the mentorship and it would be super impactful when I got into my 20s and 30s, because it basically became in the center of why I, I gave the church so much is because I felt so grateful for the mentors that gave me so much that I wanted to pay it forward when I got to be an adult. And it was a big part of my story.

Margi Dehlin [01:48:50] So I feel like that is so how it works. And it feels like that's true for your story.

Michele Seamons [01:48:55] Correct?

Margi Dehlin [01:48:56] Right. As well, Very much so. This idea of, like, when you receive, when you are the recipient so much, what does that naturally build in you? Like, give it back. I owe it. I have a responsibility to sort of share and even that desire for impact, of wanting to. Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:49:14] I've held myself to those. I know all their names. I know where they're at. They don't even know that I follow them, but I know where they're at because they were so influential.

Margi Dehlin [01:49:23] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:49:24] Fill in the sentence. To whom much is given.

Mike Seamons [01:49:27] Yeah. As much as required.

John Dehlin [01:49:29] Right?

Mike Seamons [01:49:30] Yeah.

Reflecting on Two Idyllic Mormon Childhoods

John Dehlin [01:49:31] Really quickly, we're coming up on the two hour pause point for this episode and I'm not fishing for this. I just want to check in about it. Did you have any kind of law of chastity, word of wisdom, worthiness, kind of torments, or did you stay pretty apart from that in your teenage upbringing?

Mike Seamons [01:49:53] Yeah, I was never tempted by the word of wisdom. Like I, I would go to. Whenever I went to a party, which was rare, you know, my friends would have a case of root beer there for me. I mean, I was, I was just so well known that that was not who I, what I was or how I worked. But, you know, I think, like, you know, when I was a bishop and in a stake presidency later, I was one of the many, many boys, young men who. I had a, a, from 14 on, you know, relationship with masturbation that I was trying to figure out how, not how, because I, I had this expectation of myself that was so significant that literally every time I, you know, let that temptation take me or I acted on it, I felt like I was the worst per.

Mike Seamons [01:50:43] Like I, I, I literally would spend the next night, an hour on my knees petitioning my picture of Jesus and, and this, this prayer time to forgive me for this terrible thing that I cannot seem to get a hold of. And, and so, yeah, I spent most of my teenage years, you know, like, wrestling with this and, and like, if I were to lay out all of my sins of my past, like, I, I have, I think that's probably the one that's haunted me the most of all of them. Like, because I really, I was someone who gave so much and spent and was so disciplined.

Mike Seamons [01:51:23] I had learned how to turn it off like a light switch. Like, if anything was, you know, was in my vicinity where it was going to be of temptation, I could click it off. And that was an area that I just felt like I was constantly repenting for. And it, maybe it was a good thing because it kept me so, like, a bit like, I don't want to say hating myself, but it definitely brought me down, you know, from. Maybe if I hadn't have had that, I would have been egomaniac. And because I just kept on facing this same thing, I never became an egomaniac because I felt so terrible about myself. So.

Margi Dehlin [01:52:01] Interesting.

John Dehlin [01:52:01] Yeah. I mean, we, we talk about the downsides of that worthiness. Hamster wheel. But if it keeps you in check and keeps you humble, it keeps you feeling like you've got areas to grow and improve in your character. Maybe that's not always a terrible thing for all people. I don't know.

Mike Seamons [01:52:22] Yeah, I mean, it was, it was heavy because I equated, you know, here I. Now I had that feeling of laying under the stars, and it was a feeling of me directly connected to God. And now I'd equated, I'd started to build a bunch of frame framing in between me and the stars to say that the only way I'm going to have that feeling is if I am living a perfect life.

Margi Dehlin [01:52:47] Right.

Mike Seamons [01:52:47] And so when I, when I, I mean, this is the scrupulosity coming in where it's like, all imperfection equals disconnection.

Margi Dehlin [01:52:54] Absolutely.

Mike Seamons [01:52:55] And so I was managing that always because I wanted the feeling more than anything. And the feeling was guarded by all these things now. And it would just grow. The number of things that I'd put in as barriers to the feeling would just grow from this point. And we called them, they were. The way that we kept ourselves in check is if you want to feel the gift of the Holy Ghost, you know that the way that you feel it is by being perfectly obedient. Exactly. Obedient. You know, you live a life of total devotion and you will feel peak Holy Ghost. And I wanted peak Holy Ghost all the time.

Mike Seamons [01:53:36] And I oriented every decision I made towards it. The music I listened to, I missed the Michael Jackson era because I had Michael McClain on, like, because Michael Jackson. I wouldn't feel the Holy Ghost, Michael McClane, I would. That was just how I sorted things. Which I look at it now and I'm like, dang it, we saw Michael Jackson, the Broadway show, watched the movie, and I'm like, okay, well, maybe I get to be a Michael Jackson fan in my 50s. I missed it in my teens.

John Dehlin [01:54:06] Love it. Beautiful. I think what we're gonna do is save your mission and then y' all meeting and. And everything else for the next episode. Anything else either of you want to share about kind of your Mormon upbringings? I mean, this episode should probably be called, like, the Idyllic Mormon upbringings or the Chosen Mormon upbringings, because it just sounds like you both had golden, beautiful, positive Mormon upbringings.

Mike Seamons [01:54:41] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:54:41] No regrets.

Mike Seamons [01:54:43] And we were trusted. Trusted with things that, you know, and it would. And it would now kind of start to reinforce itself is we were trusted as youth to always, you know, be kind of. Kind of put as an example, trusted as. As, you know, as we got through kind of our. Into college, you know, we both had these experiences that were like. We just kept getting trust and validation everywhere we turned.

Mike Seamons [01:55:09] And I don't feel like it turned me into this egomaniac because I still had all this other doubt and self loathing for the things that I couldn't get right. I never felt like it turned me into this monster. I just feel like it just made me always try harder.

Mike Seamons [01:55:31] But I do think it was idyllic. And I'm so grateful even in the place that I am, because obviously this is going to have a second, you know, part to it, maybe a third. I am so grateful that I am Mormon. I am so grateful that I grew up in that. That I had 20 years of that, because I would not be who I am if I had not had that opportunity and I had not seen myself through the lens of all these people who loved me. And so like I am so much this part of my story as much as I am the next part of my story.

John Dehlin [01:56:06] Beautiful. Well, this is a perfect place to kind of say cliffhanger. Stay tuned because how do Mike and Michele end up meeting? Well, they've already kind of met, but you know, what's it like when they get married? They end up having six kids, serving in all the callings, bishoprics, stake presidencies, young women's really study presidencies and in it to win it.

Closing Thoughts and Preview of Part Two

John Dehlin [01:56:34] So, like, we'll hear more about their idyllic Mormon story and then what happens? Where do the twists and turns develop and what would cause them to start with such an idyllic, almost perfect Mormon upbringing? What would cause them to start questioning and to have what might even be framed as a crisis of faith? And where does that lead them? So those are the cliffhangers that we will jump right to. So if you're watching this, we're going to release these right in sequence. So if you're watching this on the live stream, just wait a couple minutes and we're going to premiere part two right immediately after.

John Dehlin [01:57:18] But also we're going to release these all at the same time, so don't go away. Hope you've enjoyed part one of Mike and Michele's idyllic Mormon upbringing and we hope you'll come right back. Join us immediately for part two and we'll see where this all goes. And of course, Margi, it's been wonderful to have you as co host.

Margi Dehlin [01:57:38] Oh, it's been so fun.

John Dehlin [01:57:40] Yeah. Are you excited to hear where this goes?

Margi Dehlin [01:57:41] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:57:42] All right. All right, well, thanks. Thanks, Mike, and thanks Michele.

Michele Seamons [01:57:48] Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:57:48] And please stay tuned for part two and I'll just say thanks to our donors that make all this possible. If you value this type of content and you want to see it continue, you can go to mormonstories.org donate and become a monthly donor. We found out about this wonderful couple because they applied. So if you want to share your Mormon story, the way you would be able to come on the show would be to go to MormonStories.org apply, fill out your quick evaluation form or your application form, record a three minute video, and we watch those submissions every day to try and find people that are good storytellers with good stories to come on the show.

John Dehlin [01:58:27] So that's how you do it. And we want to thank Brooklyn and Julia and Margi and everyone at the Open Stories foundation that makes all of this possible. So thank you. Be good to each other, be kind to each other and come right back for part two of our interview with Michele and Michael Siemens about their epic, idyllic Mormon story.

John Dehlin [01:58:50] See you right back soon. Thanks. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Michele. Thanks, Margi. I'm the only non m here. I know, Mike. Michele, Margi. And John.

Mike Seamons [01:58:59] And John.

John Dehlin [01:59:01] All right, come right back. Thanks, everybody.

Part 2 of 3 · Ep. 2194

Welcome Back and Episode Introduction

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It's September 10, 2026. What would make the ideal, perfect appearingly Mormon couple? Ever have questions or even doubts about the church? Welcome to part two of our interview with Michele and Mike or Michael Siemens. We just completed part one where they talked about their idyllic Mormon upbringings. Michele Salt Lake Valley here in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Michael in Southern California, literally in the same area as Disneyland. He had a Disney Mormon upbringing. Is that fair to say?

Mike Seamons [00:00:46] Yes, very Disney.

John Dehlin [00:00:47] Disney and Dodgers Mormon upbringing both. And yeah, it was such a thrill to enjoy part one where we basically, we could just wrap up part one

Michele Seamons [00:00:58] and say everyone would feel happy.

John Dehlin [00:01:01] Yeah, it's like all elements. I think we grew up in the golden age of Mormonism, kind of the 80s.

Michele Seamons [00:01:08] It's true.

John Dehlin [00:01:09] Yeah. I'm sure some would say the 60s and 70s were pretty. Pretty stellar as well. But if you haven't watched part one, if you're joining us now for the first time, we highly recommend you pause this episode, go back and watch part one of our interview with Michael and Michele Siemens, and then you'll be able to enjoy part two a lot more. But in part two, we're picking up, we have, we've covered Michele's story up until the point where she gets off her LDS mission in the Washington, D.C. area, where she had met Mike in the MTC.

John Dehlin [00:01:46] And then we heard Mike's story up through the part, you know, where he's still in high school, so we still have his mission to go. And then we're going to learn about their courtship and marriage. And they're raising six kids in the church, serving in all the callings, including for her Young Women's and Relief Society presidencies, and for him bishoprics and even stake presidencies. He ends up working at Microsoft. So we'll have that Microsoft tie and then we'll talk about how the Mormon dream can go sideways or can take a different turn.

John Dehlin [00:02:21] And that's what the remaining parts of their story is going to be. So we of course have Margi here as co host. Hey, Margi.

Margi Dehlin [00:02:29] Hi.

John Dehlin [00:02:30] And without any further ado, Michael, where should we continue? Your Mormon story, last we left off, was just a phenomenal high school experience as a Mormon.

Mike Seamons [00:02:42] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:02:43] So anything else you want to say about high school before we go to mission or. You probably did a year of college.

Mike Seamons [00:02:48] Yeah, I did a year of byu, so that's probably a good segue.

John Dehlin [00:02:51] BYU Provo.

Mike Seamons [00:02:52] I Went to Provo, byu. And it was. I had one other school that I even thought of applying to, UC Santa Barbara. And I ended up. I don't even think I ever even applied to it. I was just like, BYU's went where my parents went, my grandparents went, my aunts and uncles went. Like it's a legacy choice. And it was an amazing choice that I got in. I wasn't the smartest. Kind of like I was the fifth best at everything. And that's kind of. It landed here too. But I got in and I went in with a intention. This will kind of bring back as thinking I was going to be a healer. I interpreted that as I need to be a doctor. And so I went into BYU as a pre med student. My roommate was my best friend from high school.

John Dehlin [00:03:36] 89.

Mike Seamons [00:03:37] This was 89. Yeah. So I graduated in 89 and then went to fall of 89 and then spring of 90.

Margi Dehlin [00:03:44] We were there at the same time. Same.

Mike Seamons [00:03:47] Oh yeah. Did you live in Helman halls or. Really?

Margi Dehlin [00:03:50] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:03:50] Which hall were you in?

Margi Dehlin [00:03:51] May. May Hall.

Mike Seamons [00:03:53] I'm. I met. I knew many people in May, but.

Michele Seamons [00:03:56] Oh, how about that?

Mike Seamons [00:03:58] I was in Taylor Hall.

Margi Dehlin [00:03:59] How about that?

Mike Seamons [00:04:00] Yeah, yeah, I was in Taylor for those, those two we could have. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:04:05] You aid in the cannon soda.

Mike Seamons [00:04:06] You ate in the cannon soda. Walk the hill. Like all of it. Wow.

Margi Dehlin [00:04:11] Anyway, continue on.

Mike Seamons [00:04:12] Wow, that's cool.

John Dehlin [00:04:13] And you would have been one of those California boys for us who didn't grow up in.

Michele Seamons [00:04:17] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:04:18] You know, who didn't grow up in California. There were those California boys that be.

Mike Seamons [00:04:22] I had the hair and the sweater tied around my waist and the pegged pants and I tried to pull it off. I didn't pull it off well, but I. But I did try, but no, I got to BYU and I felt like it was my rite of passage time. Here's all the stories that I'd heard all my life. My grandparents lived five minutes from byu. My dad's parents. I had an aunt and uncle who lived five minutes from BYU with their cousins or with their kids. So BYU is also like home. It's the place that I vacationed more often than anywhere else. Was going to Provo. We'd make the drive from LA to Provo and back and it was. That was. That was the vacation destination of my life.

College Days and How Michele and Mike Met

John Dehlin [00:05:03] So did you have the Frank Fox American Heritage experience?

Mike Seamons [00:05:06] Oh, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:05:07] And the Bill Bradshaw biology parts of Bradshaw Biology 100 experience? All those first 100 ones, yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:05:14] I was in the 101 group.

John Dehlin [00:05:15] Yeah. Was Ty Detmer, the quarterback?

Mike Seamons [00:05:18] Yeah, that was the years that he. And I mean, the football team was. It was like, this is amazing. Like, I am.

John Dehlin [00:05:23] I'm in a. Sean Bradley was the basketball team.

Mike Seamons [00:05:27] I think he would come while I was on my mission, I think is when Sean was there. But yeah, Detmer was there.

John Dehlin [00:05:31] Those are great years.

Mike Seamons [00:05:32] Yeah, it was. And I got there and I was like, you know, it was one of those kind of stories, like when she left for nanny job, it was like, I am going to be the version of me that I've always wanted to be and try to leave behind. You know, the version that thinks you're not good enough. You can't do any of the things that you feel like you can.

Mike Seamons [00:05:56] And so I had this, like, I am going to be this person that I think of when I pray, that I orient myself to, when I have that feeling that has constantly been a part of my life. And so when I got to byu, you know, they have the whole. The freshman experience, where you meet your ward for the first time and then the kind of auditions for what callings begin the year start. And you know, it's another one of these things where it's like I. I get called into the bishop's office the second week and he asked me to be the elders quorum president of the ward.

Mike Seamons [00:06:31] And it was just another one of these validations of. Of here it goes like I'm going to be trusted with responsibility and to. To be a leader. I still carried all the same baggage that I carried before, but I. I felt very seen that now. This was going to be a big step in my. How do I continue to grow into this version of myself that my patriarchal blessing told me about my grandparents, you know, encouraged me to be. And. And I loved it. I made such amazing friends there. You know, I was responsible for two floors of the boys dorm and you know, they.

Mike Seamons [00:07:07] I was the one that they called when they needed a priesthood blessing. You know, somebody was sick. One of my best friends was on the football team. He was the center and he was really sick one day and. And he called, you know, or his roommate came down and said, hey, can you come give him a blessing? Because, you know, he trusts you. And I mean, I just had such a faith because of where I was coming from that I came down, I literally laid my hands on his head and sealed a blessing. I did the second part and told him that he would be healed and that his body would gain its strength and he'd be able to play in the game the next day and I did go back to my room and was like, got on my knees and said, okay, God, now's when you need to make good on that healer thing.

Mike Seamons [00:07:52] Because like, I'm, I'm putting myself out there. But I, I still had like total confidence that whatever I said was God. As long as I was worthy, God would meet me at. And he came down the next morning and was like, it's a miracle. Like I am. I feel completely, you know, all of it's gone. I'm ready for the game. I mean, these are, these were just all reaffirming feelings that I just kept, I kept encountering and I, and I loved because I was trusted by my peers. I was trusted by the adults. I had an uncle who, he had a horse farm. And this was a big part of, you know, because remember, I was a guy who was always in search of a feeling.

Mike Seamons [00:08:32] And then I built a system, you know, around the feeling that is, if I do these things, the feeling will come. And, you know, my uncle gave me access to his horses and it was life changing for me. You know, while I was doing school, doing church, my getaway was once a week I would take three guys from the floor and we would go saddle up horses and we would ride up into Squaw Peak, down the Provo Canyon and we were like just horsemen who saddled up and rode. We rode in the rain, we rode in the snow, and we would spend an entire afternoon on horseback in the mountains.

Mike Seamons [00:09:16] Went for. Throughout my freshman year, my. The whole both semesters. And it became such a big part of. Because it's where I again reunited with that feeling that was the beginning of my relationship with God. It was on horseback. And from that day forward always said, you know, you're close to God when you're on foot, but you're closer when you're on a horse. And it's like, it's just. I've always felt that, you know, this is one of the peak ways to feel the feeling that I, that I called the Holy Ghost. And, and so byu, like it was one of those just really reaffirming lots of great friends, you know.

Mike Seamons [00:09:54] Really felt like I was in my element. I had, you know, things that I tried to, tried to manage through it. I wasn't a great student. I still was trying to figure out if I. What I wanted to be when I grew up.

Mike Seamons [00:10:07] And I knew that a mission was next. So it really didn't matter. I didn't make need to make any decisions at that Point. So. So because I was a young freshman, I was also then the last in my group to go on a mission. And so I would have to wait. I would do both semesters and then a full summer and go in the fall of. Of the next year.

John Dehlin [00:10:27] Okay.

Mike Seamons [00:10:28] Yeah. So I. I put my papers in, similar to Michele. I was like, well, because I am this person who has had all this validation. I'm going to go to Russia. Like, that's where I knew, because that's Cold War.

John Dehlin [00:10:41] The Berlin Wall had come down.

Mike Seamons [00:10:42] This was like, the most noble and great ones are going to Russia, and I'm going to Russia. And I went to Chicago. And. And, you know, it was funny. It took me very little time to go, well, then I'll just have a legendary experience in Chicago. Like, it didn't. It really didn't phase me. It was more, you know, that would have been awesome if I would have gone to Russia. But, you know, this is where God wants me. I'm going to go, like, change the world in Chicago. And I was English speaking. I was just a. You know, I had a stateside mission, but I got in the mission field and that's where Michele and I met.

Mike Seamons [00:11:19] So she kind of glossed onto the story. Like, we. It wasn't the. The picture wasn't the first time we met. The picture was like the third time we met. And we had both come into the mtc. She had a relationship that she had just broken up and said, I'm going on a miss to kind of get away from boys. And I had a girl that I really cared for that I was leaving and saying, I hope that you're there when I get back. And so neither of us were there shopping.

Mike Seamons [00:11:48] We were there with, we are going to be the best missionaries the world has ever seen, and we're going to go change the world. And then it was a conversation. I think I'm guilty of the first crack in that conversation with a couple of the elders in my district, where we all said, who do you think's the most beautiful sister in the npc? And I pointed to her and I'm like, of course. You can just see it. Like, she's not only beautiful, but she carries this aura. And they said, okay, go talk to her. And I'm like, no, I'm not gonna go talk to her.

Mike Seamons [00:12:20] We're missionaries. Lock your heart. There's no romance going on here. And so that kind of laid that down for a few days. And then there was a day where she was sitting. We were in the line for the cafeteria. And she was sitting at a table that I could talk to from the line. And my companion said, okay, now's your chance. You need to just say something. And so as we walk by her, I say. I say, okay, tiebreaker. We need a tiebreaker. Do you like Postum or hot chocolate?

John Dehlin [00:12:50] Postum.

Mike Seamons [00:12:50] That was my line.

John Dehlin [00:12:52] What was the answer?

Michele Seamons [00:12:53] Hot chocolate.

Margi Dehlin [00:12:54] Oh.

Michele Seamons [00:12:56] I grew up in Salt Lake City.

Margi Dehlin [00:12:57] They're very different.

Michele Seamons [00:12:59] Yeah, they're very different. I grew up on sweets. Like, anything that remotely was like, coffee was like, not okay. I didn't grow up in that kind of family.

John Dehlin [00:13:08] I see.

Michele Seamons [00:13:09] Yeah. We had to, like, wait.

John Dehlin [00:13:10] Postum was edgy for you?

Michele Seamons [00:13:11] Oh, edgy. Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:13:14] Like adjacent to coffee.

Michele Seamons [00:13:15] Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's coffee.

John Dehlin [00:13:17] Oh, that's intense.

Michele Seamons [00:13:18] Don't do anything adjacent.

John Dehlin [00:13:20] Postum is edgy.

Michele Seamons [00:13:21] Could look.

John Dehlin [00:13:22] Postum was a cereal beverage. It was basically like a coffee.

Michele Seamons [00:13:25] I mean, it's like barley, wasn't it? It's made of grain. It's really probably very good.

John Dehlin [00:13:30] I love this.

Margi Dehlin [00:13:31] No, it's not sweet. You have to usually add. I get why it's coffee adjacent. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:13:37] Anyway, postum was Mormon coffee back in the day.

Michele Seamons [00:13:40] It was.

Mike Seamons [00:13:40] It was.

John Dehlin [00:13:41] But you. You were hot chocolate.

Michele Seamons [00:13:42] Hot chocolate.

John Dehlin [00:13:43] Okay. Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:13:44] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:13:44] And that was my amazing, you know, first line.

Margi Dehlin [00:13:47] Wow.

Mike Seamons [00:13:48] And we giggled. She giggled. We walked by, you know, and then it was maybe a few days later, because this stateside MTC was like two weeks, so it was a short.

Michele Seamons [00:13:57] Three.

Mike Seamons [00:13:58] Short thing. Three weeks. And so then it was a few days later that I saw her again in the cafeteria. And this time, the sister in my district was like, let's just go talk to her. We'll sit and talk and have a conversation. And we sat at a table and had a very awkward conversation of just like, where you going? Where you're going. We'd meet again in the laundry room, where I had a terrible pickup line of. I just feel like I've seen you before.

John Dehlin [00:14:25] I've seen that smile Somewhere.

Mike Seamons [00:14:28] The song is played like a joke.

Margi Dehlin [00:14:31] Because you had seen her?

Mike Seamons [00:14:32] No, because I was like. I'm like, I. We bumped into each other a couple of times. But you. You seem really familiar. It wasn't like, I've never seen you. It was. I bumped into you a couple times. You seem more familiar than this person.

Michele Seamons [00:14:44] We both had that feeling. We were working on this, and it's very. It's like, on point.

Mike Seamons [00:14:52] I impress you.

Michele Seamons [00:14:53] Stars of the first recorded movie versions of Saturday's Warrior. I grew up with her. She Played what is the main. Julie. She played Julie.

Mike Seamons [00:15:06] Yeah. On the movie.

Michele Seamons [00:15:07] Right? On the movie. So, yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:15:09] So, yeah, the music was rolling through her.

Michele Seamons [00:15:11] Is already there.

Mike Seamons [00:15:12] And it was in the approved music list for me, too. So, yeah. We're affectionate to your Will I wait for you.

Michele Seamons [00:15:18] Oh, yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:15:19] Why Wally Kessler you want to be ashamed of?

Michele Seamons [00:15:23] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:15:24] So the laundry room.

Mike Seamons [00:15:25] Yes, laundry room was kind of that, like, that was meeting number three, and then meeting number four was me slipping a note underneath her arm saying, here's my address. I'd love to write. Can we take a picture? After she sends her copy of the picture that she gets from her camera home and says, president and Sister Siemens, as this announcement to her parents, I send mine home and said, I think I found my future wife.

Margi Dehlin [00:15:50] Really?

Mike Seamons [00:15:51] And that was a picture. And both of us were so not fully attached to it. We were just like, yeah, you're somebody that I've never met. And we're going to write and see how this works. And we didn't talk once. We broke zero rules in our. We wrote. We sent each other tapes, we sent each other gifts, and we basically became each other's kind of therapists through letters and kind of advocates, I would say.

Michele Seamons [00:16:21] I mean, she was the letter your family began writing? Me.

Mike Seamons [00:16:25] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:16:25] My family.

Mike Seamons [00:16:26] I was the second oldest in my family. She was the first, like, maybe girlfriend. And my family just were like, oh, we're gonna go with this girl. They didn't know her, but they meddled, you know, while I was.

John Dehlin [00:16:39] They turned on the seaman's charm.

Mike Seamons [00:16:40] Yeah, yeah. They were recruiting, trying to get close to her. And after. I mean, in the beginning, we only wrote a little. It took us a few months to get a rhythm going. And then we wrote every week. And her letters would come. She wrote the comics to her mission president, but my letters were always covered in art. Like, she's an amazing artist. And so I knew the letter no matter. Like, it could be in when they brought the pouch. And, you know, you'd say, elder Siemens, here's your letters. I knew if I had one from her because it was so obvious.

Mike Seamons [00:17:10] And we. She was the person I looked forward to reading every week. And that was like a whole year of that where we just kept writing. And we. It's funny, we have all of these letters. We wanted to go back and reread them all before this. We didn't, but. But someday we're going to go back and reread them and they're going to tell us probably some facts that we've forgotten. But. But they were, they were innocent. Like, it was two people, like, flirting through letters, but mostly just, you know, reinforcing the amazing gospel that we're both out there, you know, preaching and how fortunate we are to be carrying it to the world.

Mike Seamons [00:17:45] I mean, it was so full of faith and, and full of, like, belief that I. But we got to know each other and we got to know each other so well that, that at the end, you know, we really took it as, okay, we're going to push this. We're going to put the pedal on the gas for this.

Mission Experiences and Early Courtship

Michele Seamons [00:18:03] So you forgot to mention that you were like a Wilford Woodruff in your mission.

Mike Seamons [00:18:09] Oh, you obviously.

John Dehlin [00:18:10] Which means what?

Michele Seamons [00:18:11] I mean, because I was also serving stateside and we had, at that time our peers were serving in South America. And you know, the stories, I mean, it's like they're baptizing by the hundreds and I'm in a metropolitan, you know, I had a successful, lovely mission. I met and saw change in a lot of amazing people, but nothing in that. I mean, I can count the people and I know them. You, on the other hand, had kind of a South American number wise. It seemed pretty epic.

Mike Seamons [00:18:49] That's excessive.

Michele Seamons [00:18:50] But it seemed epic.

Mike Seamons [00:18:51] I had an idyllic mission.

Michele Seamons [00:18:52] You did.

Mike Seamons [00:18:53] I got into the mission field and had an amazing trainer. We had some experiences that scared the heck out of me. I had this one where we were in a Moody Baptist church and we got invited to come share our side of the story. And I'm one month into my mission and my companion gets up and teaches a congregation of Moody Baptists the first discussion. And in that, Hartman rector was our general authority who said, you ask people to be baptized on the first discussion. Do not wait till the second discussion. And my companion invites a congregation of Moody Baptists to be baptized Mormon. And the pastor and like, went berserk, went up, grabbed him by the.

Mike Seamons [00:19:33] By his suit jacket and was like, the devil is in you, son. Get out of this place. I, you know, I'm trying to get this guy off of my companion. I think he's going to beat, beat him up. And he pushes us out the back of the church. And my companion stands at the front door of the church with his arm to the square and dusts his feet to the guy. Like, like, this was my first month where it's like, the stakes are so high. Like, the stakes are so high.

John Dehlin [00:20:00] And for those who don't know, the dusting of the feet is a cursing ritual that's in the doctrine and covenants.

Mike Seamons [00:20:05] Yeah. It says, I will see you at the Judgment Bar and I will be the one sending, you know, pointing the way for you to go.

John Dehlin [00:20:12] And it's not to the Good place.

Michele Seamons [00:20:14] Yeah. And I'm having a front row seat to these experiences that he's having, which are pretty amazing. You were having tremendous success, but you were doing it in your own way and it inspired me.

Mike Seamons [00:20:30] Yeah. We helped each other.

Michele Seamons [00:20:32] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:20:32] Really try to reach a potential. I mean, I was again, I was validated with all. I was made an AP six months into my mission, and then I was put back in the mission field. And then I was made an AP a second time. And I spent.

John Dehlin [00:20:47] Six months is really fast.

Mike Seamons [00:20:49] I was a. We had two kinds of aps. We had. We had training aps. They would just travel the mission and train still fast. And then at a year in. I was a. I was an office AP for the. And so I was in the office for like a year, half of my mission. And it was. I mean, I felt like I was living out the destiny that was written in paper for me. Like, I'm like, well, this is just how my life's going to be. Like, I'll be asked to do things, and if I. If I do it with all of my intention and with all of my faith, then magic will happen. And it. It happened, you know, there, like, it happened everywhere else. I just kept seeing it and feeling it and. And, you know, it was. It was a. I had a great experience.

Michele Seamons [00:21:32] Yes, you did.

Mike Seamons [00:21:33] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:21:34] I have to ask. My sister Gina lived in Lake Zurich and in Cary, kind of Schaumburg area. Were you ever. Did you ever serve?

Mike Seamons [00:21:44] I wasn't in Schomburg. I spent most of my mission in Downers Grove, which was where the mission home was, Naperville. And then I was up in Dekal Brock on the northern border. And I was trained in North Chicago in the city, like on the L train and stuff.

John Dehlin [00:21:58] So we lived in. We lived in Naperville. Our first child was born in Naperville.

Mike Seamons [00:22:03] Oh, really?

John Dehlin [00:22:04] In 94. 94, 95.

Mike Seamons [00:22:06] Yeah. So I was there 1992. That's. Yeah, I love it.

John Dehlin [00:22:11] Yeah, it's a great Chicago. Chicago's a great town.

Mike Seamons [00:22:14] It really is.

John Dehlin [00:22:16] So. Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:22:17] So, I mean, we have these missions that just lit us up and. And somehow we. Because we're just these crazy. We call it volcano jumping. We're like, let's just jump and see. And I talked her into meeting me at the airport, like, met her three times at the MTC Wrote two years. I talked her into coming to the airport when I was here. No, to la. La.

John Dehlin [00:22:43] Oh, okay.

Mike Seamons [00:22:43] Okay. So I was going to be flying home from my mission. My parents came out to pick me up, and she was gonna be there to greet me with my family with the sign that says, welcome home, Elder Siemens.

Michele Seamons [00:22:53] But let's preface this. Your family was at my homecoming.

John Dehlin [00:22:56] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:22:56] Oh, whoa.

John Dehlin [00:22:57] That's next level.

Michele Seamons [00:22:59] I'm in the Garden Park Ward in Salt Lake City ready to give my homecoming. And there is his family sitting.

John Dehlin [00:23:05] There's no way this marriage isn't happening.

Michele Seamons [00:23:09] And I went to education week with his mother. I went. I mean, I did family gatherings with them, so I was very comfortable.

John Dehlin [00:23:16] And y' all had spent like 10 minutes together.

Michele Seamons [00:23:17] Exactly, Exactly.

Mike Seamons [00:23:19] Way ahead of ourselves.

Michele Seamons [00:23:20] Way, way.

Mike Seamons [00:23:24] But we. I came home, I got off the airplane. We have this hilarious picture that is Michele and I shaking hands with my dad, you know, on the background, like, in this position of utter joy, like, my son has found, you know, an ultimate woman, a righteous woman.

Michele Seamons [00:23:42] Shaking hands.

Mike Seamons [00:23:42] Shaking hands coming off the airplane. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:23:45] I want to see that photo.

Margi Dehlin [00:23:47] Most chosen.

Mike Seamons [00:23:48] Most ch.

Margi Dehlin [00:23:49] The most beautiful in the mtc.

Mike Seamons [00:23:52] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:23:52] Well, I'm glad one person thought that.

John Dehlin [00:23:56] I want to see that photo.

Michele Seamons [00:23:58] That would be fun. And we both doctored it up, which is actually. Makes sense.

John Dehlin [00:24:02] Send it to us. I'll have Julia put it in the thumbnail.

Mike Seamons [00:24:04] It's pretty fun.

Margi Dehlin [00:24:05] It could be fun.

Michele Seamons [00:24:06] It's hilarious.

Mike Seamons [00:24:07] I mean, so that was like a handshake. And then I went and I was released. And we sat in the backseat together while we drove to the. Me being released by my stake president.

John Dehlin [00:24:18] Wow.

Mike Seamons [00:24:19] And we drove back from the stake president's office holding hands.

John Dehlin [00:24:23] Yeah, you couldn't hold hands. Couldn't hold hands until you were released.

Michele Seamons [00:24:25] Exactly. Couldn't even hug. You know, it's like, let's wait.

Margi Dehlin [00:24:30] Really? Wait.

Mike Seamons [00:24:31] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:24:31] That's the rules, Marty.

Michele Seamons [00:24:33] That's the rules.

Mike Seamons [00:24:33] Oh, boy.

Michele Seamons [00:24:34] He had it to name tag. I couldn't do it.

Mike Seamons [00:24:37] Couldn't break the barrier.

John Dehlin [00:24:38] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:24:39] I couldn't break the barrier.

Engagement, Marriage, and Early Married Life

John Dehlin [00:24:40] That's the rules.

Mike Seamons [00:24:41] Yeah. And then we spent a week. She just stayed at my house. She slept on a trundle bed next to my sister, and I was in the bedroom next to her. And for a week, we got up at 6am and read scriptures together and talked about how much we love the scriptures and, you know, and we would then pray together. It was like. I don't know what we thought we were doing, but we did photo Albums. And I had planned five dates that were like kind of the week of my homecoming. It was like let's. We went to Disneyland. We went to see Phantom of the Opera. We went to a really special restaurant and Victoria's Square.

Michele Seamons [00:25:18] Victoria something station. Anyway, he had really won my heart because it was like all the romantic side now is part of it. The story. And it was like, oh, this fits. It just fits. And his mother so kindly had us take engagement photos that we're J.C. penney.

John Dehlin [00:25:40] Engagement photos.

Michele Seamons [00:25:42] Matching sweaters.

John Dehlin [00:25:45] You had engagement photos with matching sweaters? A week off of his machine.

Michele Seamons [00:25:49] We're not officially engaged yet. And they come. Our official engagement pictures. But we do have pictures from that week from JCPenney's in matching sweaters.

Margi Dehlin [00:26:00] That is something.

Michele Seamons [00:26:01] So cute. It's pretty cute.

Mike Seamons [00:26:04] Yeah. I mean, it was like. I don't know what. Like we have lived a life where it feels like we have been running to the next thing as fast as we can. And I. And we got home and we both had this mindset of, well, the only way we're going to progress is if we get married. And so like that's the next step. Like the longer we wait, the less we progress. And. And so we just had this like, well, let's. We know we want to be married.

Michele Seamons [00:26:30] So.

Mike Seamons [00:26:30] So we were engaged. We were formal, technically engaged a month later. We. We had talked about marriage before the week was up. And we were engaged with a ring one month after I got home. Married two months after that.

John Dehlin [00:26:47] So married three months off your mission.

Mike Seamons [00:26:48] Married three months off my mission.

Michele Seamons [00:26:49] I got home when he came up to byu. So I went down at month two of you being home about that. Down to California again. And we went to every temple from Los Angeles to Salt Lake to St. George and Vegas. Privileged because we were asked to be the witness couple several temples. And we thought that was for sure a sign. For sure. But that's like. That was our orientation. It was like, build this on the right things and the right things will happen.

Mike Seamons [00:27:26] Magical happen.

Michele Seamons [00:27:27] Yeah. Magical thinking. Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:27:31] So, yeah, we got married.

John Dehlin [00:27:32] You've been married 30 years, right?

Mike Seamons [00:27:34] Yeah. This was 93 February.

John Dehlin [00:27:35] So 33 years.

Mike Seamons [00:27:37] February 13th, 1993, we got married.

Michele Seamons [00:27:39] Yep.

Mike Seamons [00:27:41] And three months later we were pregnant with our first child.

John Dehlin [00:27:44] So it was married before me and Margi were. Even though we're older. Because you got married sooner.

Mike Seamons [00:27:50] When did you.

John Dehlin [00:27:50] What we were December of 93.

Mike Seamons [00:27:52] Oh, yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:27:53] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:27:53] Like at the end of my senior year.

Michele Seamons [00:27:55] We work pretty fast.

John Dehlin [00:27:58] You leapfrogged us.

Margi Dehlin [00:27:59] Yes, we did.

Mike Seamons [00:28:00] And we were in it to win.

John Dehlin [00:28:02] We thought we were ready to win. Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:28:03] We saw people that took your kind of time and said, really not.

Margi Dehlin [00:28:06] They were like, why?

John Dehlin [00:28:09] You're like scrubs.

Michele Seamons [00:28:11] We got a lot to do. We had a lot to do. Wow.

Mike Seamons [00:28:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:28:14] So you probably, your. Your oldest is probably older than our oldest because our oldest was born in 95.

Mike Seamons [00:28:19] He was born in 94.

Michele Seamons [00:28:22] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:28:23] It's awesome. Yeah, this is awesome.

Mike Seamons [00:28:25] It was just a rocket ship and. And now we were a team, but we were still kids, you know, I mean, her 21. I'm 21. She's 23. And we were like, had no future. Like, I didn't even know what I was. I'd gone on my mission thinking I was going to be pre med. A month after we got married in February, this was now March, I had a motorcycle was how I got around. And I was hit on my motorcycle. And I again, this was another life experience where God saved me because I was going 50 miles an hour up Provo Canyon Road, passing the BYU Stadium, hit a guy who made a left hand turn in front of me, flew over his car, and 30ft beyond where the crash happened, I land on my feet. I'm in shorts and tennis shoes and no helmet. I should have just been splayed out on the pavement.

Margi Dehlin [00:29:19] You landed on your feet?

Mike Seamons [00:29:21] Landed on my feet. Had no scratches. The only thing is my. The break of the motorcycle shattered my right hand, like, broke all of these, all the middle bones, the carpal and metacarpal bones. And I went to a hand surgeon. So this was another big, affirming thing. I felt invincible.

Margi Dehlin [00:29:43] I can't die.

Mike Seamons [00:29:44] But I didn't. I will, but I didn't die.

John Dehlin [00:29:47] Two times.

Mike Seamons [00:29:48] I was like this.

John Dehlin [00:29:49] Why?

Mike Seamons [00:29:50] How is it this happening? I am destined for something because I keep being saved. But it would then turn a massive kind of curveball because the doctor who worked on my hand and rebuilt it said, you're never going to use that hand again.

Mike Seamons [00:30:07] So going into medicine is not. At 21 years old, I was told, you should probably think of a different career. I don't know if I just wanted to hear it because I had met an amazing church education teacher on my mission that I ended up just like I wanted to be him.

Mike Seamons [00:30:31] He's just an amazing thinker and taught the most electrifying lessons. His name's Tom Valletta. He taught up at Weber. And I just loved listening to him. And. And he really took me under his wing. And so I came home from my mission.

Mike Seamons [00:30:48] This was My priority, second priority was what do I do to make a living? And then I get in a motorcycle accident. And I think when all of that kind of passed over, I said, you know what? I'm going to teach church education. That's what I'm going to do. Because I'm really good at it. It's actually a great way for me to kind of grow in the church. I think I could be a huge instrument in God's hands in this. And so I basically created my own kind of history degree with a church history emphasis because they didn't exist. You couldn't graduate with church history. But I took 34 religion classes from every religion teacher that was at BYU. I just kept taking classes.

John Dehlin [00:31:29] 34 credit hours.

Mike Seamons [00:31:31] 34 credit hours of the time that

Michele Seamons [00:31:33] BYU is going through some pretty significant changes.

Mike Seamons [00:31:36] It was 1995.

Margi Dehlin [00:31:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:31:39] Well, Michael Quinn had just been excommunicated in 93. He was in the history department.

Mike Seamons [00:31:46] When you. You guys have.

Michele Seamons [00:31:47] Oh, yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:31:48] I was there taking classes from all those teachers when that was all happening, and I had no idea.

Michele Seamons [00:31:54] You were completely unaware.

Mike Seamons [00:31:55] I had no idea. I wasn't tuned into any of that. And I was a student in those classes. I don't understand. I don't know how I missed it.

Michele Seamons [00:32:03] I don't either.

John Dehlin [00:32:05] The bubble's real.

Michele Seamons [00:32:08] If you're reading the right material, you won't see it.

John Dehlin [00:32:10] Yeah, yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:32:11] I just didn't see any of it.

John Dehlin [00:32:12] Yeah, of course.

Margi Dehlin [00:32:13] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:32:14] Most didn't.

Mike Seamons [00:32:15] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:32:15] You had to be, like, reading the student review.

Michele Seamons [00:32:17] It makes me physically sick.

John Dehlin [00:32:18] Oh, really?

Michele Seamons [00:32:19] It really does. That that was happening and it was so close. I had two. An aunt and an uncle that taught at BYU in one of those departments that was heavily affected. And I think.

John Dehlin [00:32:32] Can you say who or can you not say who?

Michele Seamons [00:32:33] Louise Plummer.

John Dehlin [00:32:34] Oh, what department?

Michele Seamons [00:32:36] She was in the English department. But how did I not know?

John Dehlin [00:32:40] So Eugene England would have been there

Michele Seamons [00:32:41] while you were there? Exactly.

Mike Seamons [00:32:43] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:32:43] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:32:44] So, I mean, this was all happening while we were there, and we were so focused on all things church, and it just never even got on our radar.

Margi Dehlin [00:32:53] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:32:55] So you wish you could have been aware of the liberal, controversial stuff.

Michele Seamons [00:33:01] Is very sad that I could have been in a place where people were hurting and not being affirmed and seen for their feelings. I was definitely on rails. I was on a track that I was incapable of having compassion or seeing a different perspective.

John Dehlin [00:33:25] And as someone who was aware and paying attention to all that, it put a dark cloud, a little bit of a dark ring on the cloud. And I could, you know, you would have been so happy, positive, glowingly Mormon. Why would you want us to darken that cloud? You would just have no reason to want to plug into sadness and to suffering. I can see why you would want. Now, looking back, but in my Mormon mind, I'm like, no, no, no, let's not pollute this pure, beautiful, happy, positive Mormon story.

Michele Seamons [00:34:02] No.

John Dehlin [00:34:04] You know, young Michele Siemens, just don't pay any attention to that sad, dark scene.

Michele Seamons [00:34:09] It does sound like he now is teaching at the mtc.

John Dehlin [00:34:13] Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:34:17] So anyway, I taught at the mtc. We taught together.

Michele Seamons [00:34:20] We taught the.

John Dehlin [00:34:21] We both taught at the mtc.

Michele Seamons [00:34:22] We taught the Sunday school class, the large group. And it was crazy because we started in just a little room. Cause they test you. It's a proving ground. And so we'd maybe have 60. We ended up our final class in an auditorium and we're like, they hear us, they see what we have the power to do with the gospel.

John Dehlin [00:34:51] Who were you teaching?

Michele Seamons [00:34:53] All the missionaries.

Mike Seamons [00:34:53] It was Sunday school.

Michele Seamons [00:34:54] It was their Sunday school. Sunday evening class.

Mike Seamons [00:34:56] Yeah, it's the large group meeting, Sunday school that they did. They used to do it back then.

John Dehlin [00:34:59] And this was as MTC instructors.

Mike Seamons [00:35:02] I was an instructor. I taught the 48 year old. She came in as a kind of my. As our team teacher.

John Dehlin [00:35:10] Okay, okay.

Michele Seamons [00:35:11] A lot of trust.

John Dehlin [00:35:12] But you weren't on the CES trek yet.

Mike Seamons [00:35:15] No, that's when I taught at the mtc. I had already kind of moved to church history. I'd started that path and I would spend. I basically would graduate with a history degree. I took the intro to teaching seminary class and then I did an internship as a teacher at that time when I was still at byu. And it was then that I was the first told how much money a CES teacher would make. Literally, I'd gone through pretty far before hearing that their starting salary was like $24,000.

Michele Seamons [00:35:50] And I'm like, you didn't believe it.

Mike Seamons [00:35:52] We had already had one child. We had our first child the day after our one year anniversary. So we were married on the 13th of February, at our first son on the 14th of February the next year. And so like I was. I could not drop the ball on I need to be a provider. You know, we had. We were obviously still dual income because we had a baby and she was working at the bakery. I got a job. BYU Bakery at the Provo. I got a job there to as. As really therapy to start my hand, you know, because I had broken my hand in so Many places that the doctor said you should go knead bread. So the two of us are working at the bakery. She's like, the star of the bakery. Every. You know, she runs the whole place.

Michele Seamons [00:36:36] Not really.

Mike Seamons [00:36:36] And we were.

Michele Seamons [00:36:37] I was adored, and.

Mike Seamons [00:36:39] And we had a baby. And so, like, I'd get up at 4 in the morning, and I'd go bake bread, and then I would come home and watch Cameron watch our son. She would then go to the bakery and work the 12 to 4 shift. Then I would go to school from, like, 4 to 8. I mean, it was just like. Like we were stacking everything, and she was trying to finish her, you know, educations. Like, we were just trying to make it all fit.

Margi Dehlin [00:37:01] That's right.

Mike Seamons [00:37:02] And running as fast as we could, you know.

John Dehlin [00:37:04] And back to the income thing. Your patriarchal blessing had said you'd have a large family. It's hard to raise six kids on 25,000 a year.

Michele Seamons [00:37:13] Both of our blessings said we would have all of our needs and we

Mike Seamons [00:37:17] have all the luxuries and the luxuries in it.

Margi Dehlin [00:37:21] This is.

Mike Seamons [00:37:23] But remember, it's all for the building up of the kingdom of God.

Michele Seamons [00:37:28] I had been working at Great Harvest, and the owner was a mentor to me. I loved their family. Their family enveloped me, enveloped Mike. And I said, look, we might have an opportunity here to own a bakery and look at their life. And if we're running a bakery like this, you're gonna have plenty of opportunities to teach, because look at all the free time they have. So you could do both.

Mike Seamons [00:37:56] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:37:56] So like a bowl thing, you could do this. And I see that. I'm like. And then we're set.

Building a Business and Starting a Family

Mike Seamons [00:38:02] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:38:04] So, okay.

Mike Seamons [00:38:05] And this. The owner of the bakery, he had been in, he'd been helping other couples like us to open their own bakeries as kind of a 50, 50 partnership. And so he kind of extended that offer to us, and we. We. I was four classes shy from graduating from BYU in. In April of 95, and we just

Michele Seamons [00:38:26] left and said, yeah, because the opportunity struck, and we had to.

Mike Seamons [00:38:29] We were like, we're gonna go start this bakery. The lowest performing bakery in the franchise was in Reno. And there was a guy who was just, like, fire selling it, you know, And. And our partner put up the money. We had nothing. We moved there on credit cards, lived across the street from the bakery, did a full, like, gut, and we were the remodel of it all by ourselves and turned it into. The first year we opened the bakery, we tripled the revenues that it had Done before. Like, it was. We did really well. Like, we opened this thing up. We had this massive community support. I mean, we just saw again, with God, everything is possible. Like the universe is behind us in some way.

Michele Seamons [00:39:17] Well, and that Reno Ward supported us wholeheartedly. And the steak and it really supported our business. And they saw us as this young couple with a baby. Like, let's lean in, let's help. This is a good product. And we rose a lot of cinnamon drop bread.

Mike Seamons [00:39:36] Yeah. We baked and baked, you know.

Margi Dehlin [00:39:40] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:39:40] And it was pumpkin. We were really young, though. We know. This was 95. I was 24. 24 when we opened the store. And she was 26.

Margi Dehlin [00:39:51] And you're working together.

Mike Seamons [00:39:53] She. She ran the afternoon, I ran the morning.

Margi Dehlin [00:39:55] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:39:55] And we lived in an apartment across the street where we would put our baby down for a nap and turn the nursery monitor on and take the nursery monitor.

Michele Seamons [00:40:03] We did things like that in those days.

John Dehlin [00:40:05] Yeah, it gets arrested today.

Margi Dehlin [00:40:07] Exactly.

Michele Seamons [00:40:08] Things have changed.

Margi Dehlin [00:40:09] No go time change.

Michele Seamons [00:40:12] Wow.

Mike Seamons [00:40:12] It was magical. Like, we.

Michele Seamons [00:40:13] It was.

Mike Seamons [00:40:14] I mean, we were living the dream.

Michele Seamons [00:40:15] And we loved Reno.

Mike Seamons [00:40:17] 25 years old, we bought our first house. And we were like.

Michele Seamons [00:40:20] And a boat.

Mike Seamons [00:40:21] And a boat. I. I was. I found a junk boat. Like, it cost me a thousand dollars. And I. It was. It was at the bottom of Lake Tahoe. And. And I was like, we are going to be a family who. Boats. Like, it just was. My last name is Siemens.

Michele Seamons [00:40:36] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:40:36] I've had. I will find a way to get back to the ocean.

Michele Seamons [00:40:40] And our families were not raised with boats. And we both loved it. So we always tried to keep ourselves adjacent to families that had boats because it was like, I need this access. So for us to get a boat in our first year was huge.

John Dehlin [00:40:56] Living the dream.

Michele Seamons [00:40:57] Yeah, we were living the dream.

Mike Seamons [00:40:59] But we got greedy. No, we just built that up. We had our second child in Reno. So now we had two boys who were now two years apart. We were living in this bedroom community up in Sparks, Nevada, north northeast corner and super engaged in the church. I was the young men's president of the ward. And you know, within the first couple months, I was the young men's president. And I was. One of my favorite stories is this group of boys. When I was 25 years old, 26 years old, I wanted to take this. All of the. All of the teachers and priests, the 14 to 18 year olds, I wanted to take them on a 50 mile high adventure because I had done multiple of them as a child when I was a scout and I Loved high adventures.

Mike Seamons [00:41:47] I thought that these were amazing. And so I'd set up a whole how do we take this group? So we had 16, 16, you know, 14 to 18 year olds coming and I couldn't get another adult leader to join me because it was, they, they just timing wise and other things. I could get people to drive us out there, but I ended up taking, I got my 18 year old brother and my 18 year old brother and I. When I was 26, we took this group of 16 boys up into the Ruby Mountains in Elko, Nevada and we did a 50 mile hike together. And it was there that I, that I returned to this.

Mike Seamons [00:42:22] The reason I'm doing all of this is because I love the feeling of intersecting with the power that I felt when I was doing those kind of things. And I just wanted to give it to these boys. It's like I know how to go find this feeling. And I always knew that I could create the feeling more in these immersive experiences outdoors than I could in the building. And so I was like, we need to get out and get out into the middle of the mountains where we sit around campfires and we talk as we'd hike. And I was 26 years old and this is where that kind of mentor thing flipped on me, where it's like, I love that I get to now spend however, the next decades of my life just helping young people become the best versions of themselves.

Mike Seamons [00:43:09] I just loved it. It felt so gratifying. And I gave those boys everything, I gave those young men everything I had. And at the time Michele was also leaning in like we, I was in

Michele Seamons [00:43:20] the primary presidency but our leader saw us. And then we were asked and called to be the leaders of a 3 Stake youth conference in Reno. 26 and 28 years old in Reno, Nevada. Who asks someone that are parents to a 1 and 3 year old to lead a 3 Stake youth conference where we had to actually rent out a high school to facilitate how many kids this involved. They actually sent the general young women's president to speak at this conference.

Michele Seamons [00:43:53] And many times during the process we just kept looking at ourselves like, is this real? I mean we're sitting in the room with stake presidents and young women's, Stake young women's presidents and us and young men's presidents. Should we question why we were the ones or should we lean in?

Michele Seamons [00:44:16] Because this seems right on brand and we just, we went with it and it was amazing. It was a very affirming experience for us that we're like, oh hey, here we go this is where it's going.

Mike Seamons [00:44:35] Yeah. So yeah, we kept, things kept falling in place. And then I was saying it would build up to obviously life is never this trajectory. It's not all rise, rise, rise. And it was at about the same time I came home one day.

Mike Seamons [00:44:56] How could of that like two kids at that point. We had two bakeries. The bakeries were doing well enough in Reno, one in Sparks, one in Reno. We bought a, we had our first house, we had a boat.

Mike Seamons [00:45:09] And I saw an ad when I was getting my haircut for a 10 acre piece of land with a little kind of cabin on it in the middle of the Tahoe National Forest. And I came home, I brought the flyer home to Michele and I was like this is where we need to go. Like this I, I, I was being called to the mountains and I'm like this I'm gonna go, let's go live in the mountains off the grid, no power, no sewage, no, no water.

John Dehlin [00:45:35] And I said you weren't prepper.

Mike Seamons [00:45:37] I well no, not really.

Margi Dehlin [00:45:40] He went nature. You went like to your odds experiences of like nature.

Mike Seamons [00:45:45] And we would drive a three mile dirt road up into the middle of the mountains through a forestry gate. And in this little valley called the Logan Meadow up in Thomas Creek Canyon we had a little, a frame two bedroom, two bathroom home that was totally off grid and and we would, we, we bought it, we lease optioned it at the time and thought we've arrived like we, this is our 10 acres of total like wonder and we are just gonna, we're gonna become settlers up here. There were like 10 other homes in the valley but they were all summer homes. You know we were, we were, there were two of us that lived there in full time and we a three year old and a one year old living in the middle of the, of the mountains.

Michele Seamons [00:46:31] We moved in with four feet of snow.

John Dehlin [00:46:34] Can I say y' all are beaming as you talk about this time.

Mike Seamons [00:46:36] We loved was we.

Michele Seamons [00:46:39] We loved it.

Mike Seamons [00:46:40] We I built a energy system. I learned, I went to the library and learned how to wire batteries in series and how an inverter works and how to create power. I had a generator that we had a propane tank that I would, we could get propane delivered and so I could make power like we I, I learned how to put up a microwave antenna where I could beam you know a communication line to a mountain, you know a mountain ranger way. And I could get faxes from the bakeries so that I could then use my dial up modem you know, across this microwave connection, you know, we learned how to, how to take a spring that was gravity feeding and to pipe ourselves into a spring and, and to provide water, you know, from the mountain.

Mike Seamons [00:47:25] You know, we had a septic system that would. That was pretty basic. But we had a six wheel ATV that we would strap our two boys in car seats in the back of the bed and we would drive to the top of the mountains and watch sunrises and sunsets.

Michele Seamons [00:47:41] Amazing.

Mike Seamons [00:47:41] And we were like 26, 28 years old.

John Dehlin [00:47:43] Eating homemade bread.

Mike Seamons [00:47:45] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:47:45] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:47:46] Everything was all.

Michele Seamons [00:47:47] And if we weren't there, we were on a lake somewhere.

Mike Seamons [00:47:49] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:47:50] Oh, wow. Yeah. Why would you ever leave?

Michele Seamons [00:47:52] Right? Why would we ever leave?

John Dehlin [00:47:55] Oops.

Mike Seamons [00:47:55] There were two. Two things that tried to push us out. One, this was, this should have been the one that we should have left. But we stayed for another hot minute. But one night, the power system had failed. You know, my, all of my systems are 90% good, 10%, they, you know, require intervention. This is one of the 10% times we got home from a late night. So we have no power. It's only flashlights. And we're putting the kids to bed. Michele and I get in our, you know, get in bed. And a couple hours later, Michele wakes up and goes, do you hear that?

Mike Seamons [00:48:26] And I said, do I hear what? And she said, there's something trying to get into our house. This is a bear. We get flashlights on the side of her bed and we go to this kind of. We have a shop behind the house that's connected to the house. And she shines a flashlight through it and There is a 500 pound black

Michele Seamons [00:48:43] bear coming through a window.

Margi Dehlin [00:48:45] Oh my.

Mike Seamons [00:48:47] Once it's in the window, it's in our house. And now it's like the only way to let it out is through a door. Like. And so this bear is coming through the window. There was some trash that we had left because we have to take our trash down the mountain. And he wanted that food. And Michele grabs pots and pans. I'm the flashlight guy. Because it was a little further away from the bear than the pot and pan person. She took the pot and pan job. But trying to get this bear to back out, out the window. He finally backs out and then we're like, wait, where, where is he now? Like, he's just not there.

Off-Grid Living and Mountain Adventures

Michele Seamons [00:49:23] Tom is surrounded by a chain link fence. So he's in the chain link fence. So he has to go through one gate and one gate only to get off our property. That would be really smart. Bear.

Mike Seamons [00:49:35] So we. Michele sweeps the flashlight and right at our kind of the main windows, the big sliding glass doors, this bear is on his hind legs trying to get in through another access point that we are now, like staring at him on, you know, in full standing. And it, I mean, we. Yeah, this was like how rugged it was like how, how far in the mountains we were with a 3 and a 1 year old and we got the bear out and that was okay. And you know, we have a story to tell that's now like our hearts still beat when we think about the bear being in our house. And, and. But it was like.

John Dehlin [00:50:10] But the Lord protected you.

Mike Seamons [00:50:11] Yeah, yeah, fully protected.

Michele Seamons [00:50:13] Yeah, fully.

Mike Seamons [00:50:14] In all of our terrible decisions, we still had protection.

Michele Seamons [00:50:17] But we always say we're either a good example or a terrible warning.

Mike Seamons [00:50:21] Yeah, yeah, both. But it was a few months later, though, that we had humans break in while we were away for a weekend. And they spent a lot of time in our house and took everything that we owned. Cause it was so. We hadn't thought about this part, like the human part, the bear part. We were like, we can deal with the animals and the mountain lions and that, but the humans came and took everything from us. And it was like we lost everything. And we had committed ourselves so completely to this was going to be our life that the loss was like. And it happened at the same time as the partnership that we had gone there to build this bakery had come crashing down.

Mike Seamons [00:51:09] Things that were because of things that I was doing. I was a 27 year old trying to figure out how to run a business and pay taxes and everything. And I had done things that I should have given a draw that both of us received, but I gave myself a draw and then said, I'll give my partner a draw later. So, I mean, I definitely was.

Mike Seamons [00:51:30] I could have been more clear in my communication in this, but because of some things that I did and the way that the partner reacted, who was somebody who had been a mentor this entire friendship went from mentorship to antagonistic family. And he then made it his primary objective to not just shut us out of a bakery that we owned 49% of, but also chase us out of this city.

John Dehlin [00:51:57] Two bakeries, right?

Mike Seamons [00:51:58] Two bakeries at that point.

Michele Seamons [00:52:00] And shut us down in our future endeavors.

Mike Seamons [00:52:03] Yeah. Was really like, I've never felt malevolence before. And this was malevolent. Like, it was just like. And. And I, I have to give him some like, grace of. Yeah, he. He was dealing with somebody, was trying to figure out how to Run businesses. And. And I. And I had heard him talk about the way that he ran his. And I was like, oh, that's how you do it. And. And so I'm accountable for a part of it. But. But like the. The way that he chased us, you know, with this little tiny.

Mike Seamons [00:52:33] Out of something that was the only thing that we had, and then chased us, he would re emerge again twice. He would inject himself somehow into the insurance claim we had on trying to get anything back from our robbery and said he thought that we staged the robbery. And he then would, a few months later, get involved in me trying to get back into church education as a teacher and would call the church education department while I was teaching at Hillcrest and say, he's not worth. You should not have this guy. He's a terrible person. You shouldn't have him. In church education.

Mike Seamons [00:53:09] He chased us to make sure that we were dead. And it was really. It was such a formative, hurtful time because, I mean, of course I was having this. I deserve some of it, but I was also having this. But there's nothing. How can this be? You know, what I've deserved. Like, this is so punitive.

Michele Seamons [00:53:32] Yeah. And we. Other than hello, hi, and how are you? We haven't spoken to this person since who helped me be a father figure for me, because my father ends up not participating in my life at all. And he was aware of that. And we spent a lot of time with his family. So, yeah, it was a big change.

Mike Seamons [00:53:54] And then we would watch him change. We would watch that person rise, you know, in a system that we believed was perfect and only rose people that

John Dehlin [00:54:03] rise in the church to higher levels

Mike Seamons [00:54:05] of leadership as a stake president and as a mission president, and then as a work in the temple, a temple president, and then as the general young men's president, and then as like, I mean, he just rose, rose, rose.

John Dehlin [00:54:17] And it's like googling the founder of Great Harvest.

Mike Seamons [00:54:23] It just was hard because we had such a frame framework of the people that are in those callings are godlike people are people that. It's everything about how they treat other people. And we just felt like we felt a very different energy from that experience.

Michele Seamons [00:54:41] It didn't compute because again, going back to even my high school, where it's like, no, this is not what we've been taught. And where does the forgiveness, healing, moving forward, where does that happen? This is not what I expected from you. I had a very poor understanding of obviously how our human relations work because

John Dehlin [00:55:10] I was young and I don't know how Mormon this is, but definitely Mormon business owners are an issue for those who live in Utah, especially.

Michele Seamons [00:55:20] Thank you. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:55:21] There's just. There's fraud, there's deception, there's abuse. Mormon going into business with the Mormon in Utah is a risky endeavor.

Michele Seamons [00:55:31] Yes. And so if the Mormon judgment is true, I get to be a part of that one. And I look forward to that day when I can have that conversation.

John Dehlin [00:55:43] But I have to note that, like, up until your late 20s, you're kind of having the perfect Mormon experience.

Michele Seamons [00:55:50] Exactly.

John Dehlin [00:55:51] So this must have been. You were kind of golden.

Michele Seamons [00:55:55] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:55:56] Kind of invincible and golden up until then. So this must have been interesting to have your first kind of Achilles moment.

Michele Seamons [00:56:03] No, it's a trial, John. It's a trial. And we are gonna come up like the phoenix rising.

John Dehlin [00:56:08] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:56:09] We are. Cause we know this is what we're made for.

Mike Seamons [00:56:13] Michele, at the time, is pregnant with our third child.

Michele Seamons [00:56:16] Yes.

Mike Seamons [00:56:16] While we were now driving. She's driving a U Haul and. Or one of our cars, towing a U Haul trailer with the last of our remaining things. I'm driving.

John Dehlin [00:56:26] You literally lost everything.

Mike Seamons [00:56:28] Another car with the boat.

John Dehlin [00:56:29] You lost your businesses, everything. You lost your home, lost all the

Mike Seamons [00:56:33] videos of our children, like. And we drove, and we would move into the basement of her mom's house in Salt Lake. In Salt Lake? Yeah, By Liberty Park.

Michele Seamons [00:56:46] Whoa.

John Dehlin [00:56:47] And because you were business owners, owning

Mike Seamons [00:56:49] your house in a boat, living in the basement of her mom's house.

John Dehlin [00:56:54] Oh, gosh.

Mike Seamons [00:56:55] While I was, like, trying to reset with three kids.

John Dehlin [00:56:57] Two. Two or two. Three kids. Two.

Michele Seamons [00:56:59] And one on the way. And I'm now a waitress at the Roof Restaurant in the Joseph Smith I worked at.

Mike Seamons [00:57:07] And I'm a finished carpenter just trying to make money while I'm trying to figure out how do I now. How do I now put food on the table for our little family?

Margi Dehlin [00:57:18] This does feel. This feels big. This is enormous. This is a turn in your reality of how things work.

Michele Seamons [00:57:26] Yeah. Humbling. And also kind of a reckoning of the Lord's going to test his elect.

John Dehlin [00:57:33] Yeah. I was going to ask how that played out in your relationships with your Heavenly Father, respectively, in terms of what your understanding was with Heavenly Father, what you expected from him, what you expected from life and being faithful. Was that a trial of your faith or not?

Faith Challenges and Community Support

Michele Seamons [00:57:53] For me, no. Because all the people that knew us and loved us kept giving us the affirmation and the support and the love. So we were like, nope, we're on track. Okay.

Mike Seamons [00:58:03] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:58:03] We're on track.

Mike Seamons [00:58:04] I mean there was, we cried and were broken and you know, we had both of the cars that we owned repossessed or that we had loans on. Yeah, we had our home repossessed.

John Dehlin [00:58:14] Dang.

Mike Seamons [00:58:15] We went through a seven year, like black hole of, you know, of credit

John Dehlin [00:58:21] and so bankruptcy basically.

Mike Seamons [00:58:23] We didn't, we didn't, we didn't declare bankruptcy. We, we would have, probably could have, should have, but we held on and we lived in her mom's basement. And then I was like, well, because that's when I thought, well, I'm going to go now. Here's my chance to go teach church education.

John Dehlin [00:58:40] Now that you're poor, you may as well be poor.

Mike Seamons [00:58:42] I engaged with the Utah Institute, got to know the director there. He was like, he loved me. He's like, let's get you in teaching at Hillcrest High School. I taught there for a couple months until this person emerged back into the scene and somehow had heard that I was teaching and said, you shouldn't have him teach. And so they, they said, hey, you know, we don't know, we don't know who, which one of you is right. But just, let's just like, you know, part ways just amicably. And I'm like, this is like the only thing that I know how to do. And, and, and I, and I wanted to do.

Mike Seamons [00:59:17] And, and so I was like, well, if not that, then what? And at Thanksgiving that same year, this is, it all happened in like literally a two year period that we went through this massive crisis. I was like, well then I should go back into medicine. Like that's because I'm a healer. And so we actually moved from her mom's basement to a bedroom in my parents house in Whittier, California. And, and I was now going to try to go and get my EMT and my ER tech and work in a hospital to kind of prep me to go to medical school or physician's assistant school.

Michele Seamons [00:59:56] Yes.

Mike Seamons [00:59:56] And Michele was going to, you know, take on another set of things to try, just to try to pay the bills. And, and we just were like in survival mode, like trust. How do we pay the bills? How do we not let the kids die? And it was heavy, like, but we were still optimistic.

Michele Seamons [01:00:13] Our parents saved the day, literally. And we can't thank them enough. There was no shame or, you know, you got it wrong attached to that. It was like, no, you've got this.

Margi Dehlin [01:00:28] I love that.

Michele Seamons [01:00:29] It was very supportive and encouraging an environment for us and our kids.

Margi Dehlin [01:00:33] And just a moment for that because I think within Mormonism, there is this. Really. There's a way of thinking, I think, from the beliefs and that it's all transactional.

Michele Seamons [01:00:45] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [01:00:46] So on a level, yes, there are trials, but also. Also, you kind of get what you deserve. It's sort of like. But if you prayed and if you were reading your scriptures and if you. You would be protected and this would not have happened.

Michele Seamons [01:00:57] And we were doing all those things.

Margi Dehlin [01:00:58] Right. And so it's tricky. It can come back. And so I. I mean, parents can sort of reflect some of that. Like, well, what'd you do? Kind of. And so to not have to hold that, in addition to all the loss that you're already feeling, that. That's really.

Michele Seamons [01:01:19] Guilt and shame was no part of it, which was phenomenal. They saw the work and the effort and the total commitment we had given to that experience, and they supported us.

Margi Dehlin [01:01:32] Yeah. And what a thing. I mean, that's some fixated energy vindictiveness. I want to say, really, to follow you, that level of effort.

John Dehlin [01:01:44] Like, why not let you rebound after you'd lost everything? Why chase you down to then wreck?

Mike Seamons [01:01:50] I mean, and I had to grapple with that. Cause it's like, maybe I am as bad as he thinks I am, that he needs to pursue me.

John Dehlin [01:01:56] But this is Javert level.

Mike Seamons [01:01:58] Yeah, this is Javert level.

Michele Seamons [01:02:00] Yeah. I'm reading Les Mis and going boiling, I bet. Boiling. Because I am, like I said, I'm an 8 on the 8.

John Dehlin [01:02:08] I had a dream that life would be.

Michele Seamons [01:02:10] I want justice and I want things to be made right. And that didn't feel right. And I didn't have access to any way of making it right. So the only way I could cope with it is to then double down on my religiosity.

Margi Dehlin [01:02:24] Okay. So that's kind of where it went.

Michele Seamons [01:02:27] Yeah. It went from a fire to a bomb.

John Dehlin [01:02:30] You coped with through righteousness. Hyper righteousness.

Michele Seamons [01:02:34] Hyper righteousness.

Mike Seamons [01:02:36] Yeah. Let's get back to being chosen.

Michele Seamons [01:02:39] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:02:39] You know, we. Somehow the chosenness kind of got sideways for a little bit. Now let's kind of resume the chosen path and.

Margi Dehlin [01:02:47] Interesting.

Mike Seamons [01:02:48] And we, you know, we. And it was. It was a mass. It was a year. What. We would have our. While we were in California, we'd have our third child, who's our daughter, or we have five boys and one girl. She'd be born there, and. And we would then kind of get ourselves to a. Okay, now we're ready to move forward. We went through this like, I'm going to go to medical school. Because that's my patriarchal blessing, says I'm a healer. And we went to a pre meeting that said this is what the consequences and all of this will be. And Michele looked at me and she said we're having our third child in a month. How are we possibly going to do this?

Michele Seamons [01:03:27] Yeah. And financially we had. Now we were even negative. Well even at that point and establishing so that we could at least make the next step. Step. I'm like, no, that's a step backwards. We just came from the ashes. We can't.

Mike Seamons [01:03:45] And so I had a friend who was part of a startup here in Utah. There was a tech startup. I had no tech background. I built my own computer at byu. Like I was tech, tech savvy. I was a tech enthusiast but not trained. I was a history guy, teacher. And so I somehow got. It was 2000. It was that I would start with this like 1999. So right before 2000 they were just looking for bodies. And I had a friend who knew them. They brought me in for an interview. They said, yeah, you're smart, like you can do this. And we moved to Utah with a one month old daughter and we rented a house in Cottonwood Heights. And I would work for this. It was a high speed Internet company that was trying to. It was before there was wireless Internet. Now it's called stsn. Now it's called ibon.

John Dehlin [01:04:38] Okay.

Mike Seamons [01:04:39] And it was people that I ended up becoming incredible friends with. And I rose in that. Like I became one of their most dependable leaders that they then gave me a bunch of responsibility.

John Dehlin [01:04:51] And it was an ISP.

Mike Seamons [01:04:53] Well, so this was before ISPs. Like we would take large data lines into hotels,

John Dehlin [01:05:01] ICN lines.

Mike Seamons [01:05:02] As those things came in, you know, DSP else didn't exist. We had used the copper wiring that went up to the rooms to run kind of our own version of dsl. And then in the rooms you'd have a little box you'd plug into. But it was a way to get high speed Internet in a hotel room. And it was super novel at the time. Marriott signed a contract with us to do every Marriott in Ritz Carlton. I ran the Ritz Carlton account and I just, I just started traveling all over the world to Ritz Carlton's to kind of prepare for the installation.

Margi Dehlin [01:05:32] Wow.

Mike Seamons [01:05:33] While she's back with, with three little kids, you know, going what, what kind of a thing do we have going on?

Michele Seamons [01:05:39] It was good. It was good. And you were, it was like the secret of your success, like you were rising and it made. It made sense. It fit.

Margi Dehlin [01:05:48] Right? You're back on track. You're kind of like back on track.

Michele Seamons [01:05:51] It's right, yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:05:52] And are you still living with his family?

Michele Seamons [01:05:55] No, we are now in it.

Mike Seamons [01:05:56] When I started that job, we rented

Michele Seamons [01:05:58] a house in Cottonwood Heights.

Margi Dehlin [01:05:59] Heights.

Michele Seamons [01:06:00] We're in Cottonwood Heights.

Margi Dehlin [01:06:01] Okay. Sorry.

Michele Seamons [01:06:03] Yeah. And then they moved you to California.

Mike Seamons [01:06:07] I was traveling too much and we just couldn't keep that up. And so they said, well, how about you go run the California region and just pick a spot in between La Palm Springs and San Diego and you can just run it from there and just drive. And so we moved to a little town called Canyon Lake, California, which is in the near Lake Elsinore, just north of Temecula.

Michele Seamons [01:06:29] It's a private water ski community. Really important because we remember, we were boating, family, we had a boat.

Margi Dehlin [01:06:36] You are back on track.

Michele Seamons [01:06:38] And the church was exceptionally strong there. I mean, one of the greatest wards in that county. Stakeholder Riverside, Riverside County, Canyon Lake Ward, Riverside.

John Dehlin [01:06:52] Is that Orange County?

Michele Seamons [01:06:53] No.

Mike Seamons [01:06:54] What was it?

John Dehlin [01:06:55] Riverside County.

Mentors, Ward Family, and Growing Influence

Mike Seamons [01:06:56] I think it was called the Menifee State.

Michele Seamons [01:06:57] Menifee State, Yeah. It's just north of Temecula.

Mike Seamons [01:07:00] It's the Inland Empire, they call it.

John Dehlin [01:07:01] Okay, Inland Empire.

Michele Seamons [01:07:02] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:07:03] Got it. Okay.

Michele Seamons [01:07:04] And they loved us.

John Dehlin [01:07:06] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:07:06] And we. We were adopted again.

John Dehlin [01:07:10] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:07:11] Quickly.

Michele Seamons [01:07:11] Quickly.

John Dehlin [01:07:12] Mormon words for the win.

Mike Seamons [01:07:14] We went there. Pregnant again.

Michele Seamons [01:07:16] Yeah, pregnant again.

Mike Seamons [01:07:17] She was pregnant with our fourth at this move. Yeah. You can see we were in. We were just in chaos.

John Dehlin [01:07:23] Mormon wards are the crown jewel of Mormonism, right?

Mike Seamons [01:07:26] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:07:26] Aren't they?

Michele Seamons [01:07:27] Yes.

Mike Seamons [01:07:27] Well, because we'd move. I mean, we tested them. I mean, we'd move into places and we had nothing. No one. And all of a sudden we had 200 people.

Michele Seamons [01:07:35] It's a formula. If you. I always say if. If you are in Mormonism, you can go anywhere. And if you do it right, you will be adopted in quickly. But you have to do it right. There is a formula.

John Dehlin [01:07:49] Yeah, yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:07:50] We have to show the signals.

Margi Dehlin [01:07:51] Do you think that's still true? Like for me, I'm trying to figure out if it's an era. No, an era.

John Dehlin [01:07:56] It can be true in some places.

Michele Seamons [01:07:58] I think we tested it in 2021.

Mike Seamons [01:08:02] That was our last test.

Michele Seamons [01:08:03] That was our last test. You're researching it worked then? I can't guarantee anything.

John Dehlin [01:08:08] There's plenty of places where Mormon words are still strong.

Michele Seamons [01:08:11] Yeah, well.

Mike Seamons [01:08:12] And you show up and you show them the signals, and the signals then say you're trustworthy, you know, and we knew how to say all the right words to be in that trusted group. And within. Within months, they would just trust us and say, okay, here. You know, I was called first month to be the young men's president there, and she was the. What were you? Primary president there?

Margi Dehlin [01:08:35] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:08:35] I don't remember. Oh, no, I was Emily Society presidency there.

Mike Seamons [01:08:38] I mean, just so quickly, like, we were just brought in as we trust you here.

Michele Seamons [01:08:43] Oh. And then that's not good enough. He was put in the bishopric.

Mike Seamons [01:08:46] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:08:46] You know, I'm with these little tiny babies and the word would just.

John Dehlin [01:08:49] Late 20s, early 30s.

Michele Seamons [01:08:51] Yeah, late 20s.

Mike Seamons [01:08:51] This was in 2000, 2001. I was 29. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:08:57] You're getting back on track because bishopric in the 20s, that's back, you know, kind of in line with your 18.

Mike Seamons [01:09:04] I have recovered.

Michele Seamons [01:09:05] Maybe we felt that way.

Mike Seamons [01:09:07] Yeah. Canyon, like, felt like recovery.

Michele Seamons [01:09:10] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:09:11] Great harvest. Homeboy can't reach his tentacles into something. California.

Michele Seamons [01:09:15] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:09:15] We didn't have no power here.

Mike Seamons [01:09:17] That was the last time. We kind of had an intersection there. But. But it was. We had so many. Like, this is where then we. We became so grateful for mentors older than us. Like, because all of the people that we really loved and connected with were. They were a few years older than us, a phase older than us. And. And that helped because we would then use them to help us, like, build the kind of family that we wanted

Michele Seamons [01:09:41] to have and help us get it right.

Margi Dehlin [01:09:43] Yeah. I mean, mentoring is so, so valuable.

Michele Seamons [01:09:49] And I really saw that if I link to someone five to 10 years older than I, I can eliminate some of the mistake making with my children, with my marriage, all of it. Absolutely. Because they can teach me. So I was very. I was a willing mentee.

Margi Dehlin [01:10:11] And you're so. You're during these years, pregnant or postpartum or like. Can I just check in? How's this going for you?

Michele Seamons [01:10:21] And I am thriving.

Margi Dehlin [01:10:23] Okay.

Michele Seamons [01:10:24] I am feeling so good. Like, I am fulfilling the measure of

John Dehlin [01:10:27] my creation and having joy therein.

Michele Seamons [01:10:29] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [01:10:30] Okay. So no question, I'm not a working

Michele Seamons [01:10:32] mother for the first time. And I am having a little day, like preschool in my home. And my kids are cute and doing everything on point. And I have every Richard and Linda Iyer book that was published. And I was living it to the law.

Margi Dehlin [01:10:51] Yes.

Michele Seamons [01:10:51] I was living it to the law. I thought they had all the answers.

Margi Dehlin [01:10:55] Joy School.

Michele Seamons [01:10:56] They were doing Joy School. So I thought I was in the good days. I thought it was.

John Dehlin [01:11:02] You and Markie are vibing.

Michele Seamons [01:11:03] Yeah. I mean, joy school was phenomenal. It Was a great program.

John Dehlin [01:11:06] Who doesn't want joy more than joy?

Michele Seamons [01:11:09] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [01:11:09] Can I say you can optimize the optimization program. The heirs were like that. Optimize this parenting already.

John Dehlin [01:11:17] I can see the photo of the whole family on that big log long tree. Like the whole family.

Margi Dehlin [01:11:23] That's right.

Michele Seamons [01:11:23] You've seen the book.

John Dehlin [01:11:24] And he went to Harvard.

Margi Dehlin [01:11:25] He went to like Harvard and then.

Michele Seamons [01:11:27] Yeah. And they just. And they had such pivotal things that helped me even just in the day to day operations of my home. Like it was not just emotional and religious. It was practical and my kids to this day would like to burn it down. Yeah. Because I had to adhere so strictly.

Margi Dehlin [01:11:51] Yes. The book.

Michele Seamons [01:11:52] And it wasn't mine.

Margi Dehlin [01:11:54] Yes. The teaching your children responsibilities book.

Michele Seamons [01:11:57] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [01:11:58] It's no joke.

John Dehlin [01:12:00] What do you mean?

Michele Seamons [01:12:01] I had a communal closet for my children because they didn't have. They hadn't earned the responsibility to take care of their own clothing in their own closet. So I needed to teach them.

John Dehlin [01:12:12] Is this where timeouts came from?

Margi Dehlin [01:12:14] It was hardcore.

Mike Seamons [01:12:15] Hardcore.

Michele Seamons [01:12:16] And so my kids had to earn to have a closet where they could keep their clothes and take care of them appropriately. Because I was modeling that for them.

Margi Dehlin [01:12:26] I really like teaching your children joy.

Michele Seamons [01:12:30] That was more my bucket. Yeah. I told a responsibility. Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:12:37] But anyway.

Michele Seamons [01:12:37] Yeah, yeah. They seemed happy. So I thought that's the direction. So I was in a good place and he was allowing me through his work to have the freedom to be at home. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:12:52] On the, on the dream. Living the dream. On the Mormon train.

Mike Seamons [01:12:54] Yeah. Canyon Lake was a good chapter. I would. The dot com bubble would hit and it would start sinking this company and they ended up, you know, kind of resurging again. But during the, the sinking time, a lot of people were leaving and I kind of was. I was super nervous. Like I. I had been without a job and been like, how do I get another job? And. And I wasn't super qualified even for the job that I had. I did really well and rose, but I kind of, three years into this company, I had to start looking and had to start going.

Mike Seamons [01:13:30] This isn't gonna keep us going and I've gotta figure something else out. And it was part of this crazy mindset that I had that God's behind me. I started getting really interested in home automation and like making smart homes. And this was in 2001. So it was like there was no Google home that was controlling lights and things. There's no Alexa to, you know, tell it to change your thermostats, like digital media wasn't there. Was TiVo, wasn't there yet. Like, it was all, this is all like early days. And, and so I called a guy who I'd read. I read an article he wrote in one of the magazines that had started, had had a company that he'd had for like 20 years in Temecula that he served kind of the, the LA San Diego, Palm Springs area.

Mike Seamons [01:14:17] And I said to him, I said, hey, I'm really thinking I'm gonna, I wanna get into this business. I think I'm somebody who you would like more as a partner than as a competitor. And I said, so if you're somebody who's interested in having a partner that can bring a lot to the table. Like, I really love to talk. And for some reason this guy called me back and he said, well, let's meet and have lunch. And.

Mike Seamons [01:14:44] And again, I can only attribute it to. I walk through the world thinking that the universe is going to conspire in my favor. And it just kept happening, even though it would tear me down. Sometimes it's such a bizarre story because I would get torn down and then I would come back and go, I'm back, all right, you're ready to go. And then I'd. There's another tear down. That will happen later. But this was one of those moments where it's like, like, okay, let. And, and he op. He gave me half of his company. I became the president of his company. We, we built a really, you know, interesting and profitable business that we put these super smart techy homes in.

Mike Seamons [01:15:25] We did them all over the world. We kind of, it was, the business was consultation design and, you know, some installation. Like we would bring in other contractors to install it, but I loved it. I mean, I was dealing with people on the cliffs of La Jolla and in Rancho Santa Margarita. They were like a Rancho Santa Fe. Like, they were all these beautiful homes. And I was designing technical systems that I had never been trained to do. I was making it up as I went, but I was really, I was really a fast learner. And I just studied and studied and studied and tried to figure it out.

Mike Seamons [01:15:59] And so we ran that together until while we were in Canyon Lake. And it would then kind of, this was still, I was in this, I was still just trying to chase how do I provide for my family? And, and I, I, I felt like the thing that we had started, this partner and I, that we could have turned it into a multimillion dollar company and we could have both benefited from. He was, he didn't want to go that big. He was like, I just don't. I, I, I'd rather stay in the lane that we're in. I don't want to go that big. And because I was this guy who thought I was, you know, the universe was conspiring in my favor, I was looking for something bigger.

Mike Seamons [01:16:36] And, you know, and I found it. One of our client customers, who was a very wealthy guy, he said, I want to start a bigger business with you. And. And that would then kind of be my entree into the next chapter of our life. That got painful again, because it seems

Michele Seamons [01:16:53] like whenever I did giant leaps again. So moving.

Software Ventures and Life in Redmond

John Dehlin [01:16:57] Where'd you go?

Michele Seamons [01:16:58] 36 weeks pregnant. To Columbus, Ohio.

John Dehlin [01:17:02] Oh, to, To Dublin, to.

Michele Seamons [01:17:06] It's very close to Powell, Ohio. It's to Powell, Ohio, but very close to Dublin, where literally, it felt as if we had moved to Utah because the church strength was so strong there. Down the street from us was a street called Deseret with a big beehive on the gate. We found the Mecca real, truly. And it was amazing.

Mike Seamons [01:17:31] Well, it was. Until it wasn't. It was hard. Like, I partnered with a person who was a near billionaire, and his way of deciding how to run things was very much more aggressive than mine. And, I mean, it was. We built something that we thought we were going to make a massive sell to HP or Microsoft. And we were swimming with. With the giant fish in the, in the sea, flying Gulf Stream jets. Like, I was, I was living this altered reality. You know, I'd go home and we'd have, you know, four kids now five. And, and, And I would be home on weekends. And then I would get on a Gulf Stream and fly to some business meeting, you know, for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

Mike Seamons [01:18:14] And then it was just. I was traveling 70% of the time trying to, Trying to break, like, have this massive. What do you call it? This was going to be my moonshot. And so we started a software company that we swam in all the big Cs, and we almost got acquired. Like, we almost made it. And then everything fell apart and, and including almost our family fell apart because it was, it was just leading to another one of these, like, almost the same thing in Reno. Like, push, push, push, push, blow up, you know, and it just happened again. It was like, we're gonna make it, make it, make it, make it.

Mike Seamons [01:18:54] And then it just all imploded of. I was working at such a speed. The church was. I was, I taught seminary for part of it, but I didn't even have time to Even think about, you know, church, because I was so consumed with trying to start this.

Michele Seamons [01:19:09] But me, on the other hand, juggernaut. I'm the young woman's president with six children, one of which is a nursing baby.

Margi Dehlin [01:19:17] Wow.

John Dehlin [01:19:17] While your husband's gone.

Michele Seamons [01:19:18] While my husband is gone.

John Dehlin [01:19:19] Wow.

Margi Dehlin [01:19:20] That is gone huge.

Michele Seamons [01:19:22] So I'm doubling down, and I'm saying, like, he's actually not holding his side of the bargain on our religious side,

Mike Seamons [01:19:31] because, you know, I wasn't watching all five sessions of general conference.

Michele Seamons [01:19:36] Yeah. I'm like, you're not taking notes, like, what you feel like you're failing here,

John Dehlin [01:19:40] like, and you'll do. Although he is trying to provide for a family of eight.

Michele Seamons [01:19:44] Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:19:45] But not to defend him.

Michele Seamons [01:19:47] Yeah. But we're in a ward, again, where very successful families are getting it all right, like, on both sides of the coin. And it's like, okay, what can we learn and how can we be like them?

Mike Seamons [01:20:02] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:20:03] So keeping up with the Mormon Joneses.

Michele Seamons [01:20:05] So I was unfortunately the one that put my foot down and said, okay, first of all, we have moved too many times. Our oldest child had been to seven different elementary schools in all different states. I said, you need to find something that will provide some stability for what we're doing here. And he did.

Mike Seamons [01:20:27] Yeah. My last customer was the CTO of Microsoft that we put our software in his house.

John Dehlin [01:20:33] Craig Mundy.

Mike Seamons [01:20:34] Right, Craig Mundy. And I. I'd sit and have dinner with he and his wife one night.

John Dehlin [01:20:37] You weren't living in Breadmill?

Mike Seamons [01:20:39] No, I was living in Ohio. I was, like, trying to figure out a way out, and I just didn't know how. Again, I'm a scrappy street fighter. I don't belong at a company like Microsoft that hires MBAs and things. Like, I'm just a street rat. And I had gotten my way into, though, a lot of relationships with Microsoft because we built our software on Windows Media Center. It was all based on their technologies. And Microsoft just loved me.

Michele Seamons [01:21:07] They called him Mr. Microsoft at a CES conference before he was even hired.

Mike Seamons [01:21:13] Yeah. I was a great kind of advocate for their world.

John Dehlin [01:21:18] I remember when I was at Microsoft, there was this thing called the Executive Briefing Center. I think it was called the ebc, where executives would come and we would not just sell them the current software, but we would sell them on the visions for the future. And I remember being with Jeff Raikes or Ballmer or whatever.

Mike Seamons [01:21:36] Jonathan Cloud. He was the guy running that.

John Dehlin [01:21:38] Yeah, yeah, yeah, Jonathan.

Mike Seamons [01:21:40] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:21:43] And we would talk about the home of the Future. So you were building what we were. The vision we were selling.

Mike Seamons [01:21:49] Yeah. When I was there, while I was there in my company working with Microsoft, we would sign a deal with Disney, Microsoft, our company, and hp. And the deal was we were going to make the home of the future at Disneyland. And I was the.

Michele Seamons [01:22:05] Remember the old hall of the Presidents that used to go around. He had the home of the future in that.

Mike Seamons [01:22:09] And I was the lead, like, visionary because we landed the deal, because I brought the Disney executives to our house in Ohio and our kids demoed the home of the future that we lived in. They demoed it to the Disney execs and they were like, you're the guy. We want to do your. You tell us what to do and we'll just build it.

Michele Seamons [01:22:30] And it was really a. I mean, it was amazing. Disney is a really good company to be a part of because they took our whole family and put us in the penthouse at the Grand America, or Grand California. Grand Americans treated our kids like royalty.

Mike Seamons [01:22:48] Just fast passes. That was cool.

Michele Seamons [01:22:50] Toys every night. I'm like, Mike, you got this. Like, we. And this is the crux the of is I believed that that part needed to be in line in order for the church. The prophecies that I felt were coming for them to come to pass.

Mike Seamons [01:23:11] You got to be wealthy to.

Michele Seamons [01:23:12] You have to have this financial freedom. You have to appear to have all the ducks in line to get the callings, to get the trust at higher levels.

John Dehlin [01:23:24] To put it briefly, tell me if this is right. To become a mission president and a mission president's wife, you gotta become wealthy at a young age and be able to retire so that you can then go serve a mission as a young couple so that then you can become, you know, general relief study president or general authority in your 50s or 60s. Right?

Michele Seamons [01:23:45] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:23:46] So there's a prosperity gospel element to it.

Margi Dehlin [01:23:48] Right.

Michele Seamons [01:23:48] It wasn't selfish. It was, we're doing this.

Mike Seamons [01:23:51] We're going to try to make ourselves available.

Michele Seamons [01:23:53] Yeah. And we were. I mean, we were consecrating everything.

John Dehlin [01:23:59] And Michele, you must have been torn. Cause on the one hand, you're impatient and frustrated that it's taken him so long to become wealthy and successful. And you're raising six kids largely alone, while you're serving as young women's president. And he's in the trajectory of potentially becoming that wealthy, successful young provider. So it's got to be hard for you to figure out how much do you put up with and then how much, you know, how much do you suck up and put up with, versus put your foot down. Right.

Michele Seamons [01:24:33] Yeah. And I wanted him to be doing both roles. I wanted perfect perfection.

John Dehlin [01:24:39] This can be where men or women can develop unhealthy addictions or even a breakdown.

Margi Dehlin [01:24:44] I think in the mirror mental health.

Michele Seamons [01:24:48] We were like hanging by a thread.

John Dehlin [01:24:50] Mental health wise or marriage wise?

Michele Seamons [01:24:53] All of the above.

John Dehlin [01:24:54] Living the Mormon dream.

Michele Seamons [01:24:55] And I felt every answer was going to be in a conference talk or in the scriptures. And I dedicated every spare minute, which I had very few, to that because that transactional. It needed to come through. And I became hyper fixated.

Mike Seamons [01:25:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:25:17] So kind of scrupulosity.

Michele Seamons [01:25:19] Oh, to the max.

John Dehlin [01:25:20] It is if you're perfect.

Mike Seamons [01:25:21] The volume was going to. It would reach its peak in the

Michele Seamons [01:25:24] next chapter because wait, I'm doing the Ayers. I'm the young women's president. I have these beautiful six kids that are falling in line. We read our scriptures every day. We have family, home, evening. And I'm also doing all the work myself. I'm only reading church books. I mean, I couldn't fit another thing I'm looking for. Oh, I was a best friend, a good friend to the mission president's wife that was in our ward. I mean, I was seeking out actively people that are going to influence me for good. It was not healthy. And he could see it, he could see this. This is not sustainable. Not sustainable.

Mike Seamons [01:26:08] None of it was.

Michele Seamons [01:26:09] None of it was.

Mike Seamons [01:26:10] And, but it kind of opened the door. Like I, I would never have expected it, that sitting with the CTO of Microsoft and him saying, why don't you. I, Because I, I was a bit vulnerable with him. I'm like, you know, I have this family that's. We're struggling and we're trying to figure out how to, you know, kind of. I, I feel like I need more stability than what I have in my startup world. And he's like, why don't you come work for Microsoft? And I'm like, because I'm not your. I am not Microsoft material. Like. And he goes, yeah, you are.

John Dehlin [01:26:40] He's like, I'll be the judge.

Mike Seamons [01:26:41] Let me make a phone call. And he. And, and I've met enough people that he was able to get me an interview. And they offered me the job on the spot. Like it was, it was almost too easy in 2008. Like, this is when the market was dying. You know, everybody was panicking. And I started Microsoft on April 1, 2008. And all of a sudden our Ohio chapter is now moving to Seattle.

John Dehlin [01:27:07] So you moved to Redmond.

Mike Seamons [01:27:08] So we moved to Redmond in 2008, in the summer of 2008, and to

Michele Seamons [01:27:15] the Mecca of Mormonism. Knowing that area as well as I do, there was no ward that was as tight as ours. We were a two minus.

John Dehlin [01:27:28] Was this Redmond First Ward or the Redmond First Ward?

Michele Seamons [01:27:30] Redmond First Ward. That was our ward. Ward.

John Dehlin [01:27:32] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:27:33] Two miles square.

Mike Seamons [01:27:34] It was Education Hill. Like Education Hill is shared by two wards, the Redwood first and the Red Ward.

Michele Seamons [01:27:40] It was walkable. Like, I. Like I have a.

John Dehlin [01:27:43] This is like Michael Murray and Richardson kind of territory. I think my brother was in this ward for a long time.

Margi Dehlin [01:27:49] That's what I was gonna ask you.

John Dehlin [01:27:50] Yeah, yeah. My brother lived in Redmond.

Mike Seamons [01:27:53] I mean, such a.

Michele Seamons [01:27:54] It was magical. It had the stake center and in the ward.

John Dehlin [01:27:59] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:27:59] And then. And for me, it had the elementary school, high school, and junior high school and all the recreational facilities all in a 1 mile radius. I'm like, this is where we're gonna shine.

Margi Dehlin [01:28:13] Do you know that was very much like Issaquah?

Michele Seamons [01:28:15] Yeah, yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:28:17] Issequa.

John Dehlin [01:28:18] Just right down the road.

Margi Dehlin [01:28:19] Included the elementary school and then the high school. And we're just right.

Michele Seamons [01:28:23] The grocery store was part of our. No. As a mom.

Margi Dehlin [01:28:26] And.

Michele Seamons [01:28:27] And it all makes sense.

Margi Dehlin [01:28:29] Planned community.

Michele Seamons [01:28:31] Yeah. It felt really good.

John Dehlin [01:28:32] And everybody's got stock options at Microsoft. Everyone's super wealthy.

Michele Seamons [01:28:36] Yeah. Well, I remember my 8 year old went to 4th grade at her elementary school there on Education Hill. And she came home. Mom, Mom, There's a girl in my class that's wearing a CTR ring. I said, oh, well, maybe, but maybe not. Because I knew all the kids that were from our ward and there were like four or five in her class. I thought I would know if another child was lds, but for sure. Well, no, there were four or five more in her immediate fourth grade class because they were in the adjoining ward. So here's my fourth grader, has 12 kids that are LDs in her class. I'm like, we're in the Mecca. Here we go. This felt right. Yeah, it felt right.

John Dehlin [01:29:23] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:29:23] And when we knew something was coming,

Mike Seamons [01:29:29] I mean, we. We had this mindset that.

Michele Seamons [01:29:31] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:29:32] That we would know that we're on the right track. When the Lord said, all right, let's go, let's go to the next step. And it was a crazy thing. Like in September of That same year, 2008, we moved into our house. Our house was under construction still. We'd. We took a three month, like mass, massive gut remodel where we.

Michele Seamons [01:29:51] We didn't even have Stairs to the

Mike Seamons [01:29:52] door, get to our front door. And the stake president called and said, can I come visit with you? It was two months after we'd been to the ward four times, five times.

Michele Seamons [01:30:02] Yeah, maybe.

Mike Seamons [01:30:03] And he came and visited with us and he called me to be the bishop of the ward, of the Redmond First Ward. And here we are, six kids, like, literally arrived here two months previous. And. And you know, for some people, they would question it and go, boy, I don't know if this is a good time. And, you know, for us, we looked at it as confirming. It's like, well, let's go. Like, now, now is the big game now. Now we're playing the big game, the one that's been in the patriarchal blessing. Like, this was super affirming of, okay, you know, we've just come into a place and now we're gonna. We're gonna do something significant there.

John Dehlin [01:30:41] And this would have been after Prop 8, but this is the type of warden stake that the church would have tapped for donations to support Prop 8. A lot of wealthy, super wealthy, high educated Mormons in it to win it long term. Microsoft lifer kind of people. BPs, general managers.

Mike Seamons [01:31:01] Yeah. And lots of super smart people that were lds.

Michele Seamons [01:31:06] Yeah. And our kids are thriving. Our kids are meeting and exceeding and all the things did.

John Dehlin [01:31:12] General Curtin, Hetty Carpenter. No, no. Okay. But you knew the Richardsons knew their kids were.

Michele Seamons [01:31:20] Yeah, their kids were in the world. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:31:23] Okay.

Mike Seamons [01:31:23] And there's so many amazing families there. I mean, we just. We felt like we. Again, we have this. Here's another place that we've moved in, applied kind of the right signals and gained trust and were pulled in and so deeply, like, we were pulled into the inside, you know, the inner circle. And we felt amazing that this is like the place now that we're going to thrive and flourish.

John Dehlin [01:31:50] And your bishop. So clearly the Lord is anointing your path.

Mike Seamons [01:31:54] Yeah. Now I'm really back on track. Like the Ohio thing, I almost fell again. And then Redmond was like, oh, you are now right on track. And. And it was. We had. I mean, being a bishop was magical, but I was. I want to go back. Like, the things that mattered to me as a bishop were getting people to feel the spirit and mentorship. And so I loved every minute I got with the youth. And I really tried to avoid all the time that a bishop needs to take with adults just because I was like, I don't have the answers. I don't know how to help marital problems.

Mike Seamons [01:32:34] I don't know how to help domestic violence. Like it was, was so scary for me. Like, I remember the first year just being literally like depleted of. I don't have the answers required to be this person. And so I even had to start a ritual that every morning I would get up and I would run and I would listen to general conference and like BYU speeches and anything that I could consume from priesthood authorities and I would listen to them and I would take notes. And I kept this journal that I have kept for 15 years now, that is, I called it my cup filling thoughts journal because it's.

Mike Seamons [01:33:14] How do I have enough in my cup to pour into everybody's cup that keeps coming and asking for me to pour into it? But I figured it out. I figured out how to try to help. I felt so far out of my league in so many things, but. But I think I was really. I had really good motivation. Like, my intention was good, but I started to see a part of the. A part of the church that I had not seen yet. This was the first time I would really dip into the administrative side, which I had to do disciplinary councils and I had to do things that I was like, whoa, this is not what I.

Mike Seamons [01:33:54] This is not what church is for me. And it was while it was this amazing high energy thing that I felt the spirit constantly. And I felt this engagement with young people, it would start to be heavier than it was before because I was now carrying the weight of discipline and being a judge in Israel. And the judge part I did not feel good about. It was really, really hard for me.

Mike Seamons [01:34:21] But I kept doing. I had a. A really awesome stake president who loved me and who like mentored me. And he kept encouraging me, you need to be a judge. Like, you're not just there to heal. You need to be the judge.

Mike Seamons [01:34:35] And I would go, okay, okay. But it was every time I had to fill that part of the role, I felt like I was not doing something good. I don't know. It's hard to explain. I just felt really uncomfortable.

John Dehlin [01:34:55] Yeah. So what happens when your Mormon dreams come true? And.

Michele Seamons [01:34:59] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:35:00] And Michele, like you were struggling with him, as perfect as the life y' all were living, Mormon wise, him becoming bishop must have been validating for you and validating of all your efforts as effectively a single mom raising six kids, serving in the church, but also rewarding your scrupulosity with sort of validation that that scrupulosity was what helped your family arrive at the place it needed to be.

Michele Seamons [01:35:28] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:35:29] Is that right?

Michele Seamons [01:35:29] Yes. And so the first year of him being bishop, I was like, I am all in. I can do this. I can do this role. I have trained for this. And we had a ward family that supported us. I mean, again, day, our dearest friends. And then something started to break. I couldn't carry it. I couldn't. I saw the weight he was carrying and I started to see things maybe differently. And so I found different coping mechanisms for my scrupulosity. And one was a healing mechanism and that was Christian music. Oh yeah. I let the devil in and I wait.

John Dehlin [01:36:23] Some would say that's A lot of Mormons would say that's very compatible with Mormonism. Mormon's a Christian.

Mike Seamons [01:36:28] It's a modern view.

Michele Seamons [01:36:28] Yeah, yeah. At that time it wasn't really as accepted. I seemed a little edgy, but it was healing me.

John Dehlin [01:36:40] Name some of the bands or singers.

Michele Seamons [01:36:41] Oh, my goodness, cope. So Amy Grant was my.

John Dehlin [01:36:44] Amy Grant. Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:36:45] All time, lifelong Michael W. Smith. Then that led to an opening of Matthew West. Mercy Me, Jeremy Camp, Casting crowns.

John Dehlin [01:36:57] I've never heard of Christian music, popular music being a gateway.

Michele Seamons [01:37:01] Oh, yeah, yeah. I went to. So in the Washington area, which is kind of a funny thing because it. I think it's a pivotal place because it's a very liberal place. And I think when these two. When you have a very liberal place, you also have the opposite.

John Dehlin [01:37:20] Well, this is where Mars Hill. Was that Mark. Mark.

Michele Seamons [01:37:22] What's his name? I can't remember, but I read his autobiography.

John Dehlin [01:37:28] I'm just basing on his name.

Michele Seamons [01:37:29] So it's this funny little intersection that Seattle is having because it's combating the grunge era and this very liberal city. More Driscoll liberal thinking. And then you have these very heavy evangelical Christian thinkers and you've got this heavy Mormon community. But I found a bit of my people in the Christian. And I went to every concert that came to town. Everyone, this is a story. And I didn't just. Yeah, I didn't just listen. I went to the concert and I sat down, sat on the front row. I was. I'm making eye contact, like. And I am being healed and I feel like I'm being seen. And my Jesus started to change.

John Dehlin [01:38:21] Oh, my goodness.

Michele's Spiritual Searching and Healing Journey

Margi Dehlin [01:38:22] Can I ask you, like, when you say you're being healed, what was wounded?

Michele Seamons [01:38:30] That's a good question. I didn't know at the time. I had a birthday and I knew Amy Grant was going to be at a church in Redmond, 10 minutes away from our house on my birthday. I mentioned it to him, thinking, of course he's Going to buy a ticket because it's my birthday, and it's Amy Grant. She is the background music to my life.

Michele Seamons [01:38:54] And he was a bishop that was struggling. It was young men's night and bishopric. I don't know. You had all sorts of things going on. And he failed to get the tickets. And I said. I called him. I said, I just want you to let you know the kids are taken care of. And I'm going to the Amy Grant concert tonight. It's my birthday. Have fun at the church. Good luck with that.

Michele Seamons [01:39:18] And I get to the concert hall, and as we're waiting in line, hoping that there's tickets available that night, a woman comes to me and says, do you guys want to go to this concert? It looks like you don't have tickets. I said, we don't. She said, I've got front row. You want two tickets? Who was.

John Dehlin [01:39:38] Who were you with again?

Mike Seamons [01:39:41] She missed the part where I dropped all the meetings.

Michele Seamons [01:39:45] He was a good husband. He dropped everything. He met me there, and this woman hands us two tickets. And I'm like, oh, this is affirming.

Margi Dehlin [01:39:53] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:39:54] It's just the language I speak. I'm like, this is how God works in mysterious and miraculous ways. Here's your front row tickets. And then she happens to sing a happy birthday song to an adopted woman that had put her child up for adoption. And it broke me. I'm like, so not only am I supposed to be here, I'm now getting a message that I know God knows it's my birthday, and this is where I'm supposed to be. My butt is in the right place.

Margi Dehlin [01:40:28] And it's not a Mormon chapel.

Michele Seamons [01:40:30] And it's not a Mormon chapel. And so my view of Jesus starts changing through music. I'm taught about something that feels bigger, more inclusive, and kinder because I needed that kind healing. Because the Jesus that I had chosen to worship was not. It was very judgmental and needing me to require significant part.

Margi Dehlin [01:41:05] There you go. This is the wounded part. This is the thing that. That's what I'm hearing. And even maybe also a buffer to the voice in your head, too.

Michele Seamons [01:41:16] Exactly.

Margi Dehlin [01:41:17] Yeah. A softer, gentler.

Michele Seamons [01:41:20] And my kids needed it, too. My kids now are entering high school, and they need a softer mother, a more compassionate kindness, you know, they need the kindness.

Margi Dehlin [01:41:32] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:41:33] And he's gone. I mean, he had to be.

John Dehlin [01:41:35] Oh, Microsoft is a job, and he's the bishop.

Michele Seamons [01:41:38] So I know this is my role, and I'm. I've got to figure out. I got to get my act together.

John Dehlin [01:41:46] Couple quick questions. So if I had sat next to you on a plane at this time in your life and had been nosy and said, well, okay, wait a minute, you like Christian gospel music, but also you're Mormon. Is that. Cause something's not working in your Mormonism, what would you have said to that type of question?

Michele Seamons [01:42:09] Oh, I had an answer.

John Dehlin [01:42:10] How conscious was it?

Michele Seamons [01:42:11] I was an evangelist Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:42:12] Okay, so you were just synthesizing.

Michele Seamons [01:42:14] Oh, I just announced myself. I would just announce myself to my friends and to my acquaintances. I'm an evangelical Mormon.

Margi Dehlin [01:42:22] Because there's that flare again.

Mike Seamons [01:42:24] She's not a normal Mormon.

Michele Seamons [01:42:26] All the rest of the Mormons are going, oh, my gosh, this makes me so uncomfortable.

John Dehlin [01:42:30] Would you have framed it as something isn't working in the church or just that you're supplementing with something else at the. The time?

Mike Seamons [01:42:38] I don't think in Redmond, I hadn't quite. It hadn't broken.

Michele Seamons [01:42:41] Yeah, it hadn't quite broken. And then while we were in Redmond at this time, we had the grand idea to apply to be in the

Mike Seamons [01:42:49] Nauvoo pageant in 2012.

Michele Seamons [01:42:53] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:42:53] Back when there were pageants.

Michele Seamons [01:42:54] Yes. Back in the.

Mike Seamons [01:42:55] Well, they still do the Nauvoo Pageant.

Michele Seamons [01:42:57] You have to apply and, you know, the best of the best get chosen. They're looking for people that are fitting the mold and will dress up like pioneers for two weeks. When we explain to our kids, this will cost us what a Disney. The best Disney vacation will cost for two weeks in Nauvoo. What do you want to do? Nauvoo.

John Dehlin [01:43:21] They wanted Nauvoo.

Michele Seamons [01:43:22] Yeah, we trained them really good. Yeah, we trained them really good.

John Dehlin [01:43:26] What year is this?

Mike Seamons [01:43:27] About 2012.

Michele Seamons [01:43:28] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:43:29] 2012.

Mike Seamons [01:43:29] Yeah. I was four years into being a bishop. It was the first time I. I ever had a beard ever in my life.

John Dehlin [01:43:35] Okay, wait.

Mike Seamons [01:43:36] I had a beard as a bishop because I was in the novel pageant. I had a beard card from the pageant director.

John Dehlin [01:43:43] Did you play someone specific?

Mike Seamons [01:43:44] No, we were in the cast. We were a family cast.

John Dehlin [01:43:47] Okay. Okay.

Mike Seamons [01:43:48] Yeah. We didn't.

Mike Responds to Michele's Evangelical Exploration

John Dehlin [01:43:49] Let me. Let me ask, Bishop Siemens, how did you feel seeing your wife flirt with evangelical Christianity? Were you nervous? Were you excited?

Mike Seamons [01:44:01] You know, were you disturbed? I loved how it lit her up. Because at this point, you know, I mean, poor woman has followed me all over the country trying to, you know, to be. To figure out how to make money. And, you know, here, now we're in Redmond, and, like, I just wanted her to thrive. I wanted her to. I knew that she was holding what you've identified as the wound. She was holding something that at some point was either going to blow up and my whole life would be blown up, or at some point it was going to find a place to start to change.

Mike Seamons [01:44:38] And so when she found Christian music, I was like, she's lit. Like this is really lighting her up. And she comes in from listening to it, feeling a connection. Like the wonder in the awe was flowing again. It didn't flow a lot in Ohio. Our life was just too chaos. And so it was flowing again. And I'm like, bring it on. Like, that was. I saw nothing concerning because it was like bigger Jesus, you know, like beautiful stories. I would actually sit in the. I'd go to the concerts with her because I love music. And I would take notes in the intermissions.

Michele Seamons [01:45:13] Because you also get preaching.

Mike Seamons [01:45:14] Yeah, there's like.

Michele Seamons [01:45:15] There's for sure preaching.

Mike Seamons [01:45:17] And I would take notes on how to pastor in the Mormon Church more kind of. With more openness and a bigger Jesus kind of pastoral character.

Michele Seamons [01:45:26] So we are adopting. We don't maybe realize it, but we're adopting some softer doctrine. And I think that when we were given so much access to the youth in this area, the youth loved it. The youth loved it.

Margi Dehlin [01:45:44] I'm sure.

Michele Seamons [01:45:45] So our home was full of kids,

John Dehlin [01:45:48] by the way we speak. A.B. griffin. If these walls could speak.

Michele Seamons [01:45:52] I met her. I told her that she's the background music to my life. I love her.

John Dehlin [01:45:58] You that. I'm sorry.

Margi Dehlin [01:45:59] The thing that's super interesting about it, too, for me is that it seems like it has the ability to change your energy state.

Michele Seamons [01:46:09] Oh, yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:46:09] Like where you were really restrictive and kind of evaluative of yourself. And also.

Michele Seamons [01:46:17] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [01:46:18] You know, your partner.

Michele Seamons [01:46:19] Oh, yes.

Margi Dehlin [01:46:19] That it's like widening you, softening you as you listen. Right. Would you say that?

Michele Seamons [01:46:26] Oh, 100%.

Margi Dehlin [01:46:27] Which kind of reminds me of your story in high school where you made the shrine in your bedroom and you were trying to have experiences that allowed you to feel kind of that awe and that now you have your own form of that.

Michele Seamons [01:46:45] And we were pretty dynamic.

John Dehlin [01:46:47] There's a grace element to evangelical Christianity that Mormonism can lack.

Michele Seamons [01:46:51] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:46:52] Right. Or not.

Michele Seamons [01:46:53] Oh, a thousand percent. And we became so warm. I think not everyone knew the whole why, but people trusted us. Not only our peers, but people older than us. And so we had a listening ear and they gave us access.

Margi Dehlin [01:47:15] I would imagine that's true.

Michele Seamons [01:47:17] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:47:17] Yeah. They could sense it.

Michele Seamons [01:47:19] Yeah. We were alive.

John Dehlin [01:47:20] And weirdly, the Mormon church in 2026 is totally moving hard in this direction. But you were ahead of the curve for sure.

Mike Seamons [01:47:29] When you say heading in which direction?

John Dehlin [01:47:31] Well, they're putting a statue of Jesus holding. Holding a cross.

Mike Seamons [01:47:36] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:47:36] And Mormon youth. And Mormon young adults are wearing crosses.

Michele Seamons [01:47:40] Oh, yeah, I was wearing a cross,

John Dehlin [01:47:41] but that was forbidden when I was growing up.

Michele Seamons [01:47:44] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:47:45] So, I mean, you're a bit ahead of the curve there.

Mike Seamons [01:47:48] Yeah, well, because we had six kids who were starting, you know, so I was released as a bishop in 2013. So I was a bishop for five years, 2008 to 2013.

Michele Seamons [01:47:58] Our oldest son is on a mission

Mike Seamons [01:47:59] in Chile when I was released. Yeah. And we kind of had this moment where we were like, okay, this is one of our. One of our challenges.

Michele Seamons [01:48:11] Welcome to the wild.

Mike Seamons [01:48:12] We just like to do really unusual things. And so this is. Maybe Margi will point to Michele and say, this is another one of her edges. But maybe I inspired it a bit. I was kind of at a place in Microsoft where I was like, I don't know if I can keep doing. Microsoft was not lighting me up. I was feeling it was a. A negative culture, and it was part of this. The CEO brought a lot of negativity, and at least to me.

John Dehlin [01:48:36] What, Steve Ballmer?

Michele Seamons [01:48:37] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:48:37] He was tough. He was tough. And I.

John Dehlin [01:48:40] And he's in the news now, by the way.

Mike Seamons [01:48:41] Oh, yeah, The Clippers just.

John Dehlin [01:48:43] He just got. He just got banned for a year from the Los Angeles Clippers.

Mike Seamons [01:48:47] You can't go to the games.

John Dehlin [01:48:49] He can't. Yeah. I can't do anything for fraud.

Michele Seamons [01:48:51] He's a rough guy.

Mike Seamons [01:48:52] Oh, for fraud. I mean, basically not for being an excessive cheer for fraud. Huh?

John Dehlin [01:48:56] Yeah. And I. I worked with Ballmer. I. I presented with him. So I. I knew him as well. Very intense. That Microsoft culture was as intense and as toxic.

Mike Seamons [01:49:06] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:49:06] As a culture can be.

Michele Seamons [01:49:07] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:49:08] And that's partly why we were trying to balance it. Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:49:10] So we had a grand idea.

John Dehlin [01:49:11] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:49:12] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:49:13] Being a bishop, a Mormon bishop, and intense with six kids. That's a lot. Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:49:18] Yeah, it was. And I was like, I have gotten. Got to reset and. And so I had this dream of kind of went back to my living on. In the mountains. I was like, let's be commercial farmers.

John Dehlin [01:49:30] What? What?

Michele Seamons [01:49:32] Because. Why not?

Mike Seamons [01:49:32] I had a cousin who has a very successful farm up in Canada, 5,000 acres. He does cows and he does crops.

Michele Seamons [01:49:40] He does everything.

Mike Seamons [01:49:41] We went up that. That fall and did harvesting with him. I drove combines and harvest. Harvested white northern beans. And it was magical. Like the Feeling was flowing. It was so, like immersive of this is life. And I said to her, I said, let's sell everything and buy a 5,000 acre farm and let's go learn how to raise cattle and crops.

John Dehlin [01:50:07] You made it, so let's mess it up.

Michele Seamons [01:50:09] Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:50:10] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:50:10] It's like once you have a full foothold, leave the foothold.

Michele Seamons [01:50:14] And we're obviously not afraid of burning it to the ground and rising it up again.

Mike Seamons [01:50:19] So Michele was the one that dialed it down.

Michele Seamons [01:50:22] I did dial it down.

Mike Seamons [01:50:23] I went like, if I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do it at 10. And she said, how about if we do it at two?

Michele Seamons [01:50:28] Yeah. So we bought a farm just out on the border of Redmond, Washington, in a place called Duval, Washington, right on the Snoqualmie River. The most picturesque valley I can imagine. It was beautiful. 15 acres. And we were going to live both the lives. Now we're going to manage both farming and Microsoft.

Mike Seamons [01:50:55] But the farming wasn't going to pay the bills. I would still work at Microsoft, but the farm became her kind of. This was her dream of. She wanted to use a farm to grow. She'd always grown all the fruits and vegetables of our life. And this was her saying, I think I can do this commercially. Like, I'll start, you know, contributing to the back end with farm goods. And it was this. We had this amazing. This piece of property was breathtaking. Like, you would just look out our kitchen windows and see the Cascade Mountains and the sun rising over it over a river valley that was our backyard. And, you know, and we just said,

Margi Dehlin [01:51:37] so awe every day.

Mike Seamons [01:51:39] This is constant awe. Like it really, that's all. Like, we bought it on a feeling. We didn't buy it on anything.

Michele Seamons [01:51:46] High schoolers from Redmond High and said, here we go. We're going to the country.

John Dehlin [01:51:50] Different stake?

Mike Seamons [01:51:51] No, same stake, different ward. What was the ward?

Michele Seamons [01:51:54] So the stake was.

Mike Seamons [01:51:55] But I was released as a bishop and now I was moving across the stake to the Duval ward and. And we'd be in the same stake, just a different ward. Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:52:03] And the stake pivoted and called us to stake callings.

John Dehlin [01:52:08] What was yours?

Michele Seamons [01:52:09] So I was actually the young women's president in the Duval Ward, but in our stake callings, we were the high adventure girls leaders. Best calling in the church ever. Best. Because it's like, oh, yeah, all the scout camps and all the things you've missed. We're gonna go do it, girls. We are gonna go on whitewater rafting. We're gonna go in the ape caves. We're gonna go climb mountains.

Margi Dehlin [01:52:35] Can I say I've never heard of that calling.

Michele Seamons [01:52:37] Oh, it's the best.

Margi Dehlin [01:52:39] Is that universal or is that because that area is cool? Or maybe agitated.

Michele Seamons [01:52:46] The juniors going into their senior year, we're having this four day, three day, four days.

Mike Seamons [01:52:52] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:52:53] Amazing experience.

John Dehlin [01:52:54] This is wealthy Mormonism.

Mike Seamons [01:52:56] Yeah. I mean, we still had the same crazy budgets as everybody else for girls we fundraised.

Michele Seamons [01:53:00] Great. Yeah, it was great. And they. We had no supervision. Like, literally, like, whatever you want to do, do it.

Margi Dehlin [01:53:09] So is this young woman age?

Michele Seamons [01:53:11] Yeah. So women, senior, junior, senior to their senior year. So very pivotal time for these girls. And they know who they are, and it was awesome. And then we got called as the missionary.

Mike Seamons [01:53:26] They called it the high school senior fireside, or that's what we called it. It was mission prep.

Michele Seamons [01:53:31] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:53:31] And we were like, look, if we're gonna get everyone, like, we want everyone to go to this. And if we call it mission prep, only people that want to go on missions will go. If we call it the high school senior fireside, we'll get all the high school seniors to go. And so we turned it into this. Like, it was a ritual, you know, that we taught once a monthly or monthly. Monthly. And we would gather all the seniors and we had them for two hours. Nobody ever came to, like, see what we were doing. And we created a place for these kids to come and to just bring all of their questions and all of their excitement for life and for God.

Mike Seamons [01:54:11] And I mean, it was almost like a young life gathering. Like, it was very. It was very different in the middle of it. Like, we'd spend the first half teaching the missionary discussion, helping them see this

Michele Seamons [01:54:21] is what they didn't know what they were being taught, but that's what we were teaching.

Mike Seamons [01:54:25] And in the middle, she did a cooking class and it was like a TV show where she would be. She would bring, you know, the seniors up to help her prepare a meal that they could cook. You know, when they're in college, it's food involved.

Michele Seamons [01:54:38] And they're thinking, oh, this is preparing us for the next step in our life where we actually have to provide for ourselves and cook. And so we made really simple ingredient, you know, things that they would eat and we would. Then the second half was role playing, role play. And we would mix up the boys and the girls.

Mike Seamons [01:54:56] We made them role play with each other. And it was really fun.

Michele Seamons [01:54:59] And they loved it.

Margi Dehlin [01:55:00] It was really creative.

Mike Seamons [01:55:02] They loved it. It was like almost dating.

Michele Seamons [01:55:05] So this steak it was a really fun. And we did that for a couple years.

Mike Seamons [01:55:10] Yeah, we did. We did three years of senior fireside and three years of young women's high adventure, which it was awesome.

Margi Dehlin [01:55:16] Those are original calling.

Michele Seamons [01:55:18] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:55:18] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:55:19] And we're thriving on the farm and our community.

Mike Seamons [01:55:21] And she's becoming more evangelical. Like, she's now gone from music to podcasts.

Michele Seamons [01:55:25] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:55:26] And she's. And she is.

John Dehlin [01:55:28] Rob Bell.

Michele Seamons [01:55:29] I'm getting there.

John Dehlin [01:55:30] Okay.

Margi Dehlin [01:55:33] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:55:33] In this season, I was still pretty certain she had released a lot of her certainty because she's like, look, there's too much of this that is not helping my children. It's not helping me. It was in this timeframe in 2015, that our. So we had our oldest son, went on a mission. He went to Chile and served a mission. Didn't talk much about it. Came home and kind of. He was, okay, I'm ready to keep going. Byu, then Mission, then back to byu, found a girl that he married. You know, so he was kind of doing our. Our path. Trying to do our path.

Cracks Begin to Show in the Ideal Mormon Life

Michele Seamons [01:56:10] Yes.

Mike Seamons [01:56:10] Our second. Well, that's what he should do, too, right? Like, you know, BYU mission. You know, back from mission, marry somebody in the temple. And he. He said he trusted us enough to let us push him onto a mission.

Michele Seamons [01:56:26] Right.

Mike Seamons [01:56:26] Right out of high school and senior

Michele Seamons [01:56:28] in high school with him.

Mike Seamons [01:56:29] But he only lasted, like, three months where he said not even that. This is not.

Michele Seamons [01:56:32] I think, a month, maybe two.

Mike Seamons [01:56:34] He did the MTC plus, like a month in the field.

Michele Seamons [01:56:37] Houston, Texas.

John Dehlin [01:56:38] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:56:38] And he said, I can't do it. And I didn't have a place to process that. Like, what do you mean you can't do it? Like, this is not even an option. Like, you do it. And he came home, and I'll never forget, we sat with him the first evening of him being home. Like, we went and picked him up at the airport. We drove him home in silence. We didn't even. Like, we hugged him and we told him we loved him, but he knew we were not happy with this. Like, this was. This was weakness exposed.

Mike Seamons [01:57:09] And we sat him down and we said, you have 90 days to figure yourself out. 90 days. And we think you should actually, in 90 days, be back in the mission field. But if that's not what you choose, here are the resources that we'll give you. And it was the beginning of a total meltdown of this child.

Margi Dehlin [01:57:27] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:57:28] And he was a really good kid.

Margi Dehlin [01:57:30] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:57:31] Let's. This is. I'm on the edge of my chair. Let's use this as A cliffhanger for part three.

Margi Dehlin [01:57:38] See what he's doing.

John Dehlin [01:57:39] Part two will be, you know, becoming the perfect Mormon family. Part one was the perfect Mormon childhoods. Part two is becoming the perfect Mormon family. You're about to become a man member of a stake presidency, right?

Michele Seamons [01:57:51] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:57:52] And so part three is going to be the unraveling of the perfect Mormon family. In air quotes or something. Whatever it is. Yeah. Let's have this be the cliffhanger. Is that okay?

Mike Seamons [01:58:01] Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:58:03] Well, this has been amazing. I'm just loving. This is like old school Mormon stories where you go six hours and you just let someone tell their full story.

Margi Dehlin [01:58:14] He's going like long, long.

John Dehlin [01:58:16] I'm loving it. So thank you so much, Mike and Michele Siemens for everything you've shared so far and I can't wait to hear the next part. And Margi, it's so lovely to have you. This is the end of part two of our three part series with Mike and Michele Siemens. Hope you've enjoyed it. Thanks to all the donors that make this possible. If you want to support us and you value this type of content, mormonstories.org donate is where you become a monthly donor. Please like and subscribe and share. Please comment. Email us@mormonstoriesmail.com if you want to apply to be on the show. MormonStories.org apply is how you apply.

Closing Remarks and Preview of Part Three

John Dehlin [01:58:54] And please don't go away. Come right back for part three, which we will share immediately on the livestream or wherever in the feed because you'll get to hear. How does it happen that the ideal six children, bishop, you know, young women's president, eventually Stake presidency, Microsoft Mormon family experiences some challenges and it sounds like it begins with some Christian Amy Grant music

Michele Seamons [01:59:26] opening the door and a son

John Dehlin [01:59:27] who comes home early from his mission. So don't go away. Come right back. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other and we'll see you again for part three of our series with Mike and Michele Siemens on Mormon Stories podcast. Don't go away.

Michele Seamons [01:59:42] Hi.

Part 3 of 3 · Ep. 2195

Welcome and Recap of Michele and Mike's Story

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host John Dehlin. It is September 10, 2026 and today we're in part three of our three part series with I'm kind of code labeling it the perfect Mormon family. No one's perfect.

John Dehlin [00:00:16] But we are here in part three of our epic interview with Mike and Michele Siemens. In part one we talked about their idyllic Mormon upbringings. Michele in Salt Lake county and and Michael in the LA area. We call it the Disney Mormon dream. We talked about their lives up through high school admissions in part one and then they meet on their missions. And then in part two, we just spent two good hours talking about their idyllic Mormon families where they have six children and have lots of entrepreneurial rises and falls in Reno and in California and in Dublin, Ohio and eventually at Microsoft. And as we left them at the end of part two, they are, you know, he's working at the top levels of Microsoft.

John Dehlin [00:01:12] They not only had lived in Redmond, Washington but had graduated to a farm life like a Microsoft farm life in Duval where he's about to get called into the stake presidency. In the Redmond Stake, she's been serving young women's president, you know, stake callings, all the callings.

John Dehlin [00:01:33] It's looking like they're about to be called as mission presidents and eventually general authorities or temple presidents. That's the trajectory that this family's on with two small exceptions. We left off part two with Michele listening to Christian popular music and that's a little edgy. We're talking Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith here. It's a little sketchy. And then their second oldest child ends up coming home early from a mission to Houston of all places.

John Dehlin [00:02:08] But he's also about to get called in a state presidency. Will they. So will they or will they not become mission president, mission president's wife? Will they or will they not become general authorities, temple presidents? You know, we'll see. But, but you're in for part three and basically this is going to be how do the wheels come off the wagon of an idyllic orthodox in it to win it? Mormon family of eight.

John Dehlin [00:02:35] And you know, how do they deal with that and when the wheels come off the wagon, how do they reconstruct and what type of life do they reconstruct? So I'm here with my co host Margi. Hey Margi.

Margi Dehlin [00:02:47] Hello.

John Dehlin [00:02:48] Thanks for joining us. If you haven't listened to parts one and two, please go back and watch part one, then part two and then you can enjoy fully part three really quickly. Please subscribe and like donate@more MormonStories.org donate and we love your feedback on the channel. So with any further ado. Without any further ado. Michele and Mike Siemens, welcome back to part three of your epic Mormon story.

Mike Seamons [00:03:15] Thank you for giving us A Part 3. It's an important part.

Michele Seamons [00:03:18] If you liked us before, you're gonna like us more now.

John Dehlin [00:03:23] I will say that this is giving kind of Donna Showalter, Leah and Cody young vibes. Like every once in a while we interview these golden Mormon famil that also have a deconstruction and a reconstruction part to their story. And this is like old school Mormon stories. Super long form with the family, the golden Mormon family, where something has a twist. So where do we go from here? Last we left. You're at a farm. Are you farming, Michele?

Michele Seamons [00:03:52] I'm farming, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:03:53] Is it organic or not organic?

Michele Seamons [00:03:55] Organic.

John Dehlin [00:03:55] It is organic.

Michele Seamons [00:03:56] It is for sure organic.

John Dehlin [00:03:57] Did you see the movie? What is it, the flu?

Michele Seamons [00:04:00] Cried. Do you not like cried? I sobbed because I wanted it. I mean, I wanted to. I did. I actually did. My farm was idyllic. And so you live in a bothel. The perfect Duval.

John Dehlin [00:04:15] Perfect Duval. You live in a Duval.

Michele Seamons [00:04:17] Perfect place to safely unravel.

John Dehlin [00:04:20] Okay, wait. So, yeah, last we left it, you were about to get called into a stake presidency. Your first son had a successful mission in Chile, and now your second son goes to Houston, of all places. What's not to live about? Houston comes home a couple. Only a couple months in. And the way we left it is y' all were very disappointed because that doesn't fit into the Mormon dream.

Michele Seamons [00:04:45] Right, Right.

John Dehlin [00:04:46] So let's pick up there. I'm sure that wasn't fun for him.

Michele Seamons [00:04:49] Talk about to have that reception to help ease that reception with the ward

John Dehlin [00:04:56] because the ward is invested.

Michele Seamons [00:04:59] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:04:59] In your family.

Michele Seamons [00:05:00] Yeah. Yeah. And we have a perception. So you bore your testimony. Do you remember?

John Dehlin [00:05:08] You'll have to tell a story. You'll have to carry it.

Michele Seamons [00:05:10] He bore his testimony about how much he loved our son and how he did not want our son to face what he had seen with other kids that had come home.

John Dehlin [00:05:24] Because. What was that? What did you see?

Michele Seamons [00:05:27] Kind of a Mormon shunning and just so much disappointment and an inability to trust this person because of their lack of, you know, conforming and adhering to the commitment they had made. And he basically begged the Lord to not do that, to be gentle with it, to be gentle and to love our son.

John Dehlin [00:05:52] And I'm already struck by that because in the last episode as we're ending, I was sensing a lot of disappointment on your end for him coming home early.

Michele Seamons [00:06:03] I think we had prepared ourselves to see things from two different perspectives that are both right. And initially we handled it completely wrong.

Mike Seamons [00:06:19] And I think we pretty quickly realized we would choose him always.

Michele Seamons [00:06:25] It wasn't an easy, it wasn't a quick. But I think he always felt we loved him.

John Dehlin [00:06:32] But he probably also felt like he was disappointing you on some level.

Michele Seamons [00:06:34] For sure. Because he has family and friends and a ward family and you have to go to church and they say, well, didn't you go on a mission? Yeah, that was a quick one. You know, and even to this day he'll say, yeah, I served a Mormon mission in Houston. Which I'm like, yes, you did. It was a short one, but you did it. You saw and you said, no way.

John Dehlin [00:06:59] When he came home, did he tell you why he came home early and what did he say? Or do you want to share?

Michele Seamons [00:07:07] He was dating someone that was not a member of the church and he loved her and he wasn't ready. He wasn't prepared and not in the way that other than through our family teachings. I mean, he had all of that knowledge. But personally, I don't think he was invested.

John Dehlin [00:07:27] He was in the mission for. Maybe for you guys and for social reasons.

Michele Seamons [00:07:31] For sure.

John Dehlin [00:07:32] Not because he really wanted to go.

Mike Seamons [00:07:33] No, for sure. That for sure.

John Dehlin [00:07:35] Okay. That's important because in Mormonism, it's not really an option to not go.

Mike Seamons [00:07:41] Not in our family. I mean, it's. He was. He's one of the first grand. He's the second grandchild on my parents side and he's the only grandchild, you know, second grandchild on her side. And it's like this is like you

John Dehlin [00:07:56] have a duty, what you do.

Mike Seamons [00:07:57] Yeah, duty. We learned at this time that duty is not an effective motivator for our kids. Somehow it was for us. And it kind of. Yeah, it kind of genned out. Like it's not an effective motivator.

Margi Dehlin [00:08:13] It gened out.

John Dehlin [00:08:14] I've never. It gened out.

Michele Seamons [00:08:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:08:17] So what year did he come home early?

Mike Seamons [00:08:19] 2015.

Margi Dehlin [00:08:19] 2015.

John Dehlin [00:08:20] Okay.

Returning Home and Early Faith Doubts

Mike Seamons [00:08:21] So he'd come home and we would still have two years before I would be called in the state presidency in 2017.

John Dehlin [00:08:27] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:08:28] Did we go to New Zealand before?

Mike Seamons [00:08:29] That was 2018. So it was. I was in the state presidency when we went there, so. And this is when Michele was already heavily evangelical Mormon. The farm was this place that she. It was a haven for her. Like, this is the first time also in our marriage that all six kids left the house for enough hours of the day that she had a life. So we have to also put that into. This is the first time we had all six in school. And here she had a farm. And we didn't just do a farm where we were, like. We like to look at it, like, within the first six months, we had four horses, we had three cows, we had 20 chickens, we had three goats, two pigs. Like, we were, like. We were all in, like, the same way. We were in it to win it. What were you farming, a family?

Michele Seamons [00:09:23] Yeah, we were farming. No, we started with vegetables, and I turned to flowers. Commercial flower farm.

Margi Dehlin [00:09:30] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:09:30] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:09:32] For the essential oil companies, basically.

Michele Seamons [00:09:34] No, just bouquets. We sold to Met Market.

Margi Dehlin [00:09:37] Yep.

Michele Seamons [00:09:38] So, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:09:39] Oh, fun.

Michele Seamons [00:09:40] Yeah. So at first, but that was a long time coming. It took us a long time. Farming is a. It's a trial by error.

John Dehlin [00:09:47] It's its own thing.

Discovering New Perspectives Beyond General Conference

Michele Seamons [00:09:49] But I had my next speaker on eight hours a day, and I was taking in, for the first time, different content. And it wasn't. It wasn't General conference.

John Dehlin [00:10:02] What was it?

Michele Seamons [00:10:03] And I was the young women's president at the time, and it was podcasts.

Mike Seamons [00:10:11] Were you doing Faith Matters at the time?

Michele Seamons [00:10:12] I was doing Faith Matters.

John Dehlin [00:10:14] Liberal Mormon podcasts.

Michele Seamons [00:10:16] Yeah, it was pretty edgy.

Mike Seamons [00:10:18] And Annie Downs.

Michele Seamons [00:10:19] Annie Downs, who is a Christian podcaster. Yeah, a lot. I just was very open.

John Dehlin [00:10:24] I don't think Faith Matters. Did it exist back then in 2018?

Mike Seamons [00:10:28] No, I think it started 2015.

John Dehlin [00:10:30] No, it didn't. Not that Morning Matters, maybe with Dan Witherspoon.

Mike Seamons [00:10:33] She didn't listen to that.

Michele Seamons [00:10:34] I just opened myself up.

John Dehlin [00:10:36] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:10:37] And I filled my time with other thoughts.

John Dehlin [00:10:41] So was it Evangelical Christian podcasts?

Michele Seamons [00:10:44] Anything?

John Dehlin [00:10:45] Okay.

Michele Seamons [00:10:45] I literally opened myself to anything.

John Dehlin [00:10:47] Okay.

Mike Seamons [00:10:48] You started doing a lot of audiobooks, too.

Michele Seamons [00:10:50] Yeah, I started listening to books that, you know, I read along with my children as they were growing up. But the first time I felt like I'm reading for me, and I read Orson Scott Card, and boy, oh, boy, did he put a crack in that.

John Dehlin [00:11:05] Which book?

Michele Seamons [00:11:05] Oh, My Seventh Son.

John Dehlin [00:11:08] Oh.

Michele Seamons [00:11:08] It's a series that he literally writes about kind of Joseph Smith. Yeah, That's a series that all Mormons should read.

John Dehlin [00:11:19] Oh, okay. Did that challenge your testimony?

Michele Seamons [00:11:22] It did.

John Dehlin [00:11:22] Why?

Michele Seamons [00:11:23] Because he's a fantastic writer, and he wrote about something when I went, oh, interesting. This is a different way to look at this. And it wasn't negative or derogatory. It was just a Different way. So I had to change my lens and I took off the lens that I had kept for 40 plus years.

John Dehlin [00:11:45] You took off the orthodox lens?

Mike Seamons [00:11:46] Yeah, Just a very kind of orthodox narrative. I think it gave you the first time. You were like, maybe that narrative has some different twists and turns. Yes. Like, we hadn't gotten into the LDS essays, the gospel topic essays yet.

Michele Seamons [00:12:04] This is not great.

Mike Seamons [00:12:04] Saints wouldn't come out for a couple years. Like we were. We were still obviously in it to win it. But she was starting to.

Michele Seamons [00:12:12] I was feeling my way into, like,

John Dehlin [00:12:16] wow, your eyes were being opened.

Michele Seamons [00:12:18] They were. They were being opened and in fantastic ways. And I was feeling joy. I was joyful.

John Dehlin [00:12:26] And it wasn't all in the correlated Mormon no areas for the first time.

Margi Dehlin [00:12:30] Well, isn't it such a big aha to realize it's a lens?

Michele Seamons [00:12:34] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [00:12:35] Like there is. Because otherwise it's reality. A lens is just reality. So the minute you're talking about it, like really quick, I just put down the lens. But it's a big moment to realize

Michele Seamons [00:12:47] it's a big moment.

Margi Dehlin [00:12:48] Wow. This is something.

Michele Seamons [00:12:49] Because as a young women's president, it's the first time when my bishop says to me, wait, you and I are not on the same page. You should pray until you see it the way I do.

John Dehlin [00:13:00] Oh.

Michele Seamons [00:13:00] And I went.

John Dehlin [00:13:02] You had a difference with your bishop.

Michele Seamons [00:13:03] Yeah. The first time over.

John Dehlin [00:13:05] What do you want to say?

Michele Seamons [00:13:06] It was about service project. Service project. I mean, it was so non important and I was not used to being challenged because I was trusted. And this new lens said, no, no, no, no, no. I've got this. I'm capable of figuring out what. You've actually set me apart to be in charge of these young women. I can figure out the service project or it was a fundraiser or something. You don't need to get in the weeds of this. And he was a little taken back that I had such a. It was starting to give me a voice and. Yeah, yeah. Then it's all Mike.

John Dehlin [00:13:51] Okay.

Mike Seamons [00:13:51] It's all me.

Michele Seamons [00:13:52] Yeah, it's all you.

Mike Seamons [00:13:55] No, it was. I mean, then we were kind of getting into 2017, so we'd been on the farm for four years and, you know, we'd had it like our family was growing up on a farm. Like that was. The goal is how do we. And we. Like the farm. During this period of my life was how do I create the most awe and wonder on a piece of property that is humanly possible? And we got really good at curating experiences of wonder and awe. Like, really good at it. And we even got so good that we would bring in, like, my siblings and their kids would come every summer.

Mike Seamons [00:14:30] We'd call it the Seattle Summer. And they would come and experience all the things that we had created for our family. We shared it with all of our nieces and nephews and their families where, you know, we lived on a river. And every year I would use my bobcat to grade in, like, a massive beach experience on the river, the Snoqualmie River. And sometimes I get stuck and I'd have to, you know, pull myself out with heavy equipment. But the whole purpose of the. Of the grading it was so that I could put a water slide in, like a farm water slide in that was 300ft long and shot into the river.

Mike Seamons [00:15:06] And I was just looking. I made motorcycle tracks for the kids to ride their bikes and to jump and do things. Like getting the animals was. It was a huge thing because now we had all these lives to take care of. And we were like, well, we're not going to take care of them. Because the whole reason we bought the farm is to teach our kids to love the outdoors more than the indoors. Because we were. I mean, this was. They were all teenagers. They all wanted to be on. You know, I worked for Xbox previous to this. I had moved on into the commercial side by this time.

Mike Seamons [00:15:38] But they wanted screen time. And we're like, that is better than screen time. Go outside. It's way better. And we got them to believe it. Like, they would go out and they would saddle up the horses. They would be with the goats.

Mike Seamons [00:15:54] They were immersed in the nature of the farm. And the farm required a lot of work. So they were chopping BlackBerry bushes off the fence lines all the time and mowing pastures. We just watched our kids grow from these children into people that were taking care of things that were big, like, huge. And we did it. We broke our chores up into. One of our kids did Good Morning Farm every morning. And their job was to go and start the day all the animals.

Margi Dehlin [00:16:25] Oh, my gosh, I love that so much. Good Morning Farm.

Mike Seamons [00:16:27] And it was. They'd feed them, they would love them, they would turn them out. They would get the farm into daytime operations. And then somebody did Goodnight Farm, which was reversing it, putting all the animals to be bed, you know, giving them love, food and water. And. And there we had times where somebody forgot to do it or they didn't muck the stalls as part of Goodnight Farm. And it. But the fun, the amazing thing is, is everyone in the family felt it when somebody didn't do their part because somebody would come in the next morning and say, the stalls are not mucked. This is anarchy. Like, they would. They were really very passionate about. I'm not doing your job, you know, because I've got a job that I've got to do already.

Michele Seamons [00:17:11] Work as a team.

Mike Seamons [00:17:11] So they worked as a team. And it was like we. We just filled the farm with magical things. And, you know, and. And we. We would host a. Every Third of July, we'd host a farm fireworks that we'd invite all the. Mostly members of the church. We'd have 200 people on the farm, and we would put on the biggest extravaganza, Fourth of July, you know, love of the country, and a fireworks show that we learned over the years how to. How to buy and curate the best fireworks that we could. And we'd put on a big show on the farm. And it just was like. It was constant wonder. We really felt like people saw it

Identity as a Golden Mormon Family

Michele Seamons [00:17:48] and they thought we were pretty fantastic, and we thought we were too.

Margi Dehlin [00:17:52] Well, and this kind of ties back to the, ah, like, I feel like theme in your story.

Michele Seamons [00:17:59] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [00:18:00] And it also connects to where you're headed. Like, it's a taste. It's almost. I mean, I know it's been all the way through, but you're getting back to it. You're getting back to wanting these times and places in nature and providing it for not only your kids, but it also. So it's interesting because it's a little reconstructing, but you haven't actually deconstructed, but it is part of your reconstructing as well. So this is interesting.

Mike Seamons [00:18:29] Well, because we started like it was all about the feeling, like every. Everything we did on the farm was how will this. How will this create energy? And I call it the feeling. I'm not trying to be cryptic. I called it the gift of the Holy Ghost. My whole life, like, this was the Holy Ghost. The way it felt in my body is all of these moments where I would feel awe and wonder. I would feel the Holy Ghost in my body. It was the warmth in my chest, the feeling of total confirmation and contentment, the, you know, chills in my spine.

Mike Seamons [00:19:03] It was a feeling I was so familiar with. I had felt it my entire life, and I'd felt it constantly guiding me and leading me and bringing things to my remembrance. Like, I felt like I was very, very in tune with the Holy Ghost. And the farm made me even stronger. Like I could get the Holy Ghost to show up on the farm all the time. And I could bring people over and without. We didn't sit down. Like when I was a missionary and I didn't go through the identifying the spirit step, but I would just, I would expose them to. We, you know, harvested apples and we were all surrounding a apple cider press. That's an old fashioned press. And together as families, we would press apple cider.

John Dehlin [00:19:46] This is Margi porn.

Michele Seamons [00:19:47] This is what this is. It was pretty awesome.

Margi Dehlin [00:19:51] This is true.

Mike Seamons [00:19:52] Like, we, when we had people over, they ate food that she grew. Like, and all of the food that we ate, we grew, including the beef and the turkey and the chicken.

Margi Dehlin [00:20:02] Like, we, how long was this era? How long was the farm?

Mike Seamons [00:20:06] 2013 to 2021. So it was eight years.

Margi Dehlin [00:20:09] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:20:09] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:20:10] That we learned how to, how to do this thing and how to make magic and how to, how to make the Holy Ghost show up, like on command. Like in this space that we loved and that everyone that we brought to it, felt it and they walked away going, this is magical. Like, this feels so magical. And then they would go and we would then have to do all the work to make sure it was good the next day. Because it doesn't all happen by itself.

Michele Seamons [00:20:38] Yeah. But I think that's also where people had a view of us, that they wanted to hear more from you. And that's I think what led to the next.

Mike Seamons [00:20:48] Because I was very not normal. Now like I'm the farmer guy, you know, who takes kids, takes young women on high adventure to amazing places and gives them like the young men's high adventure experience. Plus and I'm a guy who, who teaches high school senior firesides every month. And the youth come to our house like constantly because we're now their confidence and their mentors and across the whole stake. And so when they were looking for a new stake presidency in 2017, like it was an easy shoe because I'd just given a talk previous. I was now, I was now edgy, but I was very, I'm going to change this from the inside edgy. Like I knew what we were getting wrong in the church and I knew how to fix it.

John Dehlin [00:21:29] Wait, so you haven't talked about that at all? So what did you from as you're getting called into a stake presidency? Having served as bishop in one of the most elite wards in the church, frankly, wealthiest, most elite. What are you noticing isn't right in the church? You haven't talked at all about that.

Mike Seamons [00:21:46] Yeah, it was because of all the exposure I had with the youth, they were not picking it up. Like, they, they were not feeling it. They were not. They were not impacted by it the way that it had impacted us. And we could feel it and see it. And we. We would then go and say, so what we're gonna like, let's leave all of the kind of the structural system and we're just gonna go create experiences to help them feel an intersection with this power that's bigger than them. And. And they would come and they would feel that, and then they would say, yeah, but why this or why that?

Mike Seamons [00:22:23] And they now trusted us because we had experiences of awe, wonder, and the Holy Ghost with these kids constantly. And so they trusted us because they had felt these things with us that they then told us what wasn't working and why it wasn't working and that their friends didn't believe. And as Joseph Smith, really, the Saints books were coming out at this time. This was now kind of in this, you know, 2017 timeframe.

Michele Seamons [00:22:50] They have access. They have access to way more information than we exposed ourselves to at that age, and definitely not our parents. And so we were adapting. And we probably gave the most epic law of chastity talks in the chapel of that Stake center to the youth. And we had them in stitches and cheering. And the Stake Presidency is like, bring it down. But they were like, no, these people up there, they are speaking our language. And we brought it home and we taught it in ways that didn't make them feel less than or not normal for having the feelings and the thoughts and the things, which is where the

John Dehlin [00:23:40] church is now in its messaging. This 2017, you were ahead of. You were ahead of the crew.

Michele Seamons [00:23:47] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:23:48] I gave a talk in. To the priesthood leadership, the Stake priesthood leadership in 2017. They'd seen all this work I'd done with the youth, and she wasn't allowed to join me because she was not in the priesthood leadership group. But I, I went and I. My talk was called the why Generation. And I, I went through all this data that I had done to research, you know, what was happening with the rising generation. And, and I said, look, you know, through the world, you know, one in three people between 18 and 20, you know, nine are, are not staying with the church that they were born into. And in Washington, it's one in two. Like, it's like we are losing half of the people that we want to retain. And this was already. The data was already starting to show itself in this time frame.

John Dehlin [00:24:32] You were noticing the hemorrhaging.

Michele Seamons [00:24:33] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:24:34] The Mormon Church was losing its.

Mike Seamons [00:24:36] I mean, these kids that we would do, these high school senior fire firesides, only half of them would go on missions.

John Dehlin [00:24:40] And again, you've already kind of said it, but if you had to say what it was, was it the Internet?

Mike Seamons [00:24:46] Yes. Yeah. I mean, they just. They had. They had too much information and no one answering questions.

John Dehlin [00:24:52] So, like CES letter?

Mike Seamons [00:24:53] No, they didn't get into that.

Michele Seamons [00:24:55] But I think there was enough that didn't. I think it just emotionally and socially didn't sit well with them. I don't think all of them went that deep.

John Dehlin [00:25:07] There's like a cultural ethos with the new generations that the Transformers, they weren't interested.

Mike Seamons [00:25:13] And my whole punchline in that talk was they are not motivated by duty. I'd done. I was also working in Microsoft on a kind of a Gen Z product that we were doing with Hololens. And we were trying to get them to, you know, we were focusing on kind of young people at this time. And so I'd done a lot of research, just in my job too, of what this generation is motivated by. And I said, they're motivated by cause. And the cause that we need to motivate them with is the cause of Jesus Christ, not the cause of all this other stuff that we keep throwing at them.

Mike Seamons [00:25:45] Just, let's teach them how to want to be like Jesus. And that was my whole talk. But it was enough to stir people to go. They saw the problem. Nobody was talking about the problem. This guy's talking about the problem. Maybe he can help. And so when the stake president was called, I was called as his first counselor, as. As the guy who would then kind of lead the stake with the youth and how to help our youth. And I wrote a manifesto that was kind of what the stake operated under for 2017-2021. When I was released, that was called Save the Rising Generation. And it was.

Mike Seamons [00:26:24] It was my words in our collective stake presidency mission of if we don't do something, we will lose them. We need to do something. And we kind of created a here's all the stuff that we want to do to make, to help these young people feel a connection to something bigger than them.

Mike Seamons [00:26:43] And it became kind of the rallying cry of our stake. It got a little annoying because people felt like, what about the adults? And it was like, no, we're focused on the rising generation, the adults. We'll figure it out. These are the ones that we need to really figure out, we need to pay attention to. And then it became Kind of the mission of the Redmond stake for that, you know, the youth is always important.

Michele Seamons [00:27:05] You even changed because he listened and they trek. It was trek year. And he's like, these kids do not want to do trek. I'm listening. This is the last thing on the planet they want to do. And so. And even though that stake, they took trek to the next level, we would be in the Cascades with horses, and they set up an amazing experience for our kids. But you heard them. And he did a global pioneer experience for the youth in that stake, where

Mike Seamons [00:27:40] every family was a different country, led by a couple who have an affinity to that country, either mission, or they were born there.

Michele Seamons [00:27:48] And that the pioneering is happening all over. It's not just the pioneers. In the days of 47, you know, he opened it up, and so you started pushing some boundaries.

Mike Seamons [00:28:00] And it was a very global. I mean, Redmond is one of the most global cities that we've ever lived in. It's full of so many different nationalities. And so it was a good place and a good time to have this very kind of global approach.

Michele Seamons [00:28:15] Yeah. And our daughter gets called to Melbourne, Australia, on a mission, speaking Mandarin Chinese.

Mike Seamons [00:28:24] She was the next that would go.

Michele Seamons [00:28:25] And then our next son was called to Colombia speaking Spanish.

Mike Seamons [00:28:29] Well, so this kind of.

Michele Seamons [00:28:32] Yes.

Mike Seamons [00:28:32] This part of the story is, yeah, I am thriving in a stake presidency where I am being given a lot of leeway to help this stake, you know, save the rising generation, and a lot of support and a lot of trust to put on things that we've never done before, make them do them differently in ways that we can really reach these kids, help them feel this connection to this bigger thing.

Michele Seamons [00:28:53] You also let the women come into the stake meetings. Remember the stake auxiliary women.

Mike Seamons [00:28:58] I was like, why are the women not here every week? Why do we have high council meeting where there's no women? And then state council once a month? And so we flipped it where we had the women in three weeks of the month and then not one of the weeks.

Mike Seamons [00:29:14] I got us to put women into the speaking circuit. Usually it's monthly high council speakers, and it's all men. And I was like, why are the women not speaking? So we'd have the primary president and the Relief Society president and the young women's president, and the stake, they were in the rotation with the high counselors, and they would be the keynote speaker on those Sundays where most people tune out anyways.

Mike Seamons [00:29:40] I mean, it's just we were trying to do things that were, how do we help? How do we do it different? And I just had this. I mean, here I still felt chosen. I still felt like I am God's noble and great one, and I can help this organization change and change in such beautiful ways. I only saw all the positive of change. I didn't see any of the, how does change actually really work? I just saw, we can do this better from the inside. And I just kept working at it and working at it.

Giving a Talk on the Covenant Path

Mike Seamons [00:30:14] And it was hard, though, because I gave this talk in state conference, kind of halfway in. It was called what is the Covenant Path? Because President Nelson had come and had coined a term that didn't exist before

Michele Seamons [00:30:28] he came to Mariners. Before he came, he filled the stadium.

Mike Seamons [00:30:32] And I was like, I don't think we've all talked about this well enough to look each other in the eye and know what we say when we say, are you on the Covenant Path? And so I created all these images of different paths and, like, the markers on the paths that I was like, is this the Covenant path? Is this the Covenant Path? And one of them was, you know, being Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts and get your Eagle Scout and go on a mission and then, you know, go to byu, go on a mission, come home, get married, kind of the Mormon path. And so I was just being provocative.

Mike Seamons [00:31:05] I'm like, is this the Covenant Path? And then I did another one, like, is this the Covenant Path? And because I was just trying to say, do we even know what we're saying when we say these words? And what I. And the kind of the punchline of the talk was, the Covenant Path is real. If it's going to be helpful to any of us, it has to be a very simple set of things that lots of different paths can intersect with. And I just focused on, like, intersection points and said, there's a lot of ways in. There's a lot of ways to the next point.

Mike Seamons [00:31:38] The only points that matter are the points that the intersections happen. And I was just trying to create a lot of space for. There's lots of ways to do this. We can't try to put everyone on the path that I was trying to put my son on, that I broke him. And it's like, did your son lose

John Dehlin [00:31:57] his faith after coming home from his mission?

Michele Seamons [00:31:59] He never really went back to church.

Mike Seamons [00:32:01] No, he did because he loved us.

Michele Seamons [00:32:03] He came with us.

John Dehlin [00:32:05] But did he tell you he didn't believe anymore?

Michele Seamons [00:32:07] Sporadic periods of time, I think mostly to please his parents.

John Dehlin [00:32:11] Were you able to talk about that, or did he just keep it to his head?

Michele Seamons [00:32:14] No, Very, very open minded.

John Dehlin [00:32:15] So he said mom and Dad, I don't believe anymore.

Michele Seamons [00:32:16] Yeah, no. And we said it was very cultural for him. It was a community that he knew, he's comfortable with. It's a great place to meet friends. So he kind of just kept a cultural. I'd show up with my parents or when I wanted to and we gave him the room.

Mike Seamons [00:32:35] We had to.

Michele Seamons [00:32:36] Sometimes he needed them.

Mike Seamons [00:32:38] He demanded the room.

Michele Seamons [00:32:39] He demanded.

Mike Seamons [00:32:39] And if we didn't, if we didn't learn how to give him space. Yeah, we would have. We wouldn't be in relationship with him anymore.

Margi Dehlin [00:32:48] That is.

Michele Seamons [00:32:49] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:32:49] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:32:50] We've experienced. Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:32:51] I mean, the amount of trust that you lose by trying to get someone to do it your way.

Michele Seamons [00:32:57] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:32:57] It just wasn't worth it for us. We just said, we, we need him more than we need our certainty. And somehow we got through it, you know, it was hard.

Michele Seamons [00:33:07] Yeah. But then would you say Logan getting his mission call?

Mike Seamons [00:33:12] Yeah. I mean then 2020 happens. And so this was all 2017 to 2020. Our daughter, she was on a mission and just returned. Just returned in 2019.

John Dehlin [00:33:21] And you're in a stake presidency.

Mike Seamons [00:33:22] I'm still in the state presidency.

John Dehlin [00:33:23] Are you attending disciplinary councils at stake level.

Mike Seamons [00:33:26] And I, again, the work would come

Michele Seamons [00:33:28] home crying from them. I was so sickened.

Mike Seamons [00:33:31] I participated in excommunication of multiple of my friends.

Margi Dehlin [00:33:35] Oh, God.

John Dehlin [00:33:36] For a process or for, for reasons

Mike Seamons [00:33:39] that would put you in front of a 15 person council. Like I just. And there were friends. Oh, yes.

Margi Dehlin [00:33:45] That would be so hard.

Mike Seamons [00:33:47] And to feel like we were.

John Dehlin [00:33:50] You got your judge in Israel prophecy. I don't mean to make light of it.

Margi Dehlin [00:33:55] It was.

Mike Seamons [00:33:55] I, it. I just kept feeling more and more distant from this thing that I felt was so good.

Michele Seamons [00:34:03] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:34:04] And the one there. There were a few things that just started me on this path of. I have to turn the volume up on being a change agent because this is getting crazy. We had. The presiding bishop came and he was. He was going to speak to the youth and he asked us to collect all the questions our youth had about, you know, the gospel. And he was going to answer them. And I took this as yes because I've been hearing all these questions and now I'm going to hand them to you. I collected 200 questions, categorized them into. These are all the different things they're interested in.

Mike Seamons [00:34:37] Sent it to him ahead of time, said, this is what we want you to talk about. He comes in our training meetings before he says, yeah, oh, thank you for giving me all Those questions, I'm not going to answer any of them. I'm just going to teach them the tools of how to find the answers themselves through scripture. And I'm like, that is not gonna work. They went through all this effort because

Losses and Struggles Within the Stake

Michele Seamons [00:35:00] they have real questions at a meeting before state, like before state conference, they had to get up early, right? Yeah, 8am in the morning on a Sunday morning and not be heard.

Mike Seamons [00:35:12] Proceeded. And he was a well spoken person who had good intention, but he left them all like wanting.

John Dehlin [00:35:19] The problem is they don't have answers.

Mike Seamons [00:35:23] And his answers to me, he didn't give. It was like I was then pushing on him saying, what about this one? What about this one? He goes, well, that's old prophets. Old prophets, Old prophets. And then I brought up, we were in the middle of the, you know, 2015 way we treated people of LGBT in the 2018. And we were in the middle of like that was happening.

John Dehlin [00:35:42] The November 15 policy had happened.

Mike Seamons [00:35:44] Yeah, yeah. And then the reversal of it had already happened. But I said to him, what about that? And he's like, we follow the prophet. The prophet said, that's what we do. We follow the prophet. I said, so if it's a prophet that's dead, it's optional and we can change. But if it's a prophet that's alive, that says it like we just do it.

Mike Seamons [00:36:07] And it was hard for me to hold because I was like, I had started seeing fallibility everywhere. And I had come to this place of, through all thousands of temple recommend interviews, sitting with people and them saying, I love the gospel. I'm struggling with the church. I heard that so many hundreds of times. And I would use my temple recommend interview just opportunity to say, tell me why, Tell me what is hurting you? And it was always this really difficult culture that you had to take in order for you to take the gospel. And I just was like, we can do this better. We can do this better.

Michele Seamons [00:36:48] No, your temple recommend interviews would be like an hour because you took the time.

Mike Seamons [00:36:54] I just.

Michele Seamons [00:36:55] People were hurting. No, I've never been an hour long temple recommend interview. It's usually just all he hears all the questions say is.

John Dehlin [00:37:01] But not because he's grilling people.

Michele Seamons [00:37:03] No, he's actually listening. He's listening. And I'm like, yes, we're going to change the church from the inside. Here we go, here we go.

Mike Seamons [00:37:13] And then 2020 happened.

Michele Seamons [00:37:15] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:37:16] And we were revved and going. And then Covid. And Covid started in Kirkland and yeah, Washington. And three things happened at the Same time that just like literally broke the world. And one was Covid, the second was our son. Our fourth son now got his mission call and he was going to go to Columbia, but he hadn't opened it yet. And the night that he got his mission call, the day he got his mission call, his BYU roommate took his own life. And previously a best friend in high school had taken his life. Now his roommate at BYU took his life and in the following first kid LDS. The first one was not LDS.

Michele Seamons [00:37:57] A basketball player on his second was LDS.

Mike Seamons [00:37:59] And then two of our other dear friends lost 18 year old boys in that same one year period.

John Dehlin [00:38:07] LDS.

Mike Seamons [00:38:09] Three were LDS, one was not.

John Dehlin [00:38:10] So you experienced three LDS deaths by suicide.

Mike Seamons [00:38:14] One suicide and two that were. But these 18 year olds, I mean, were just, they just were traumatizing to all of us because they were all our, our sons. Like, we, we loved these boys, like, and, and all these boys. These, these boys were like two of them were, they can't find themselves in a world that, that doesn't make room for them. And you know, just really terrible, tragic accidents that just broke everyone.

John Dehlin [00:38:44] Are you thinking the first two were lgbt?

Michele Seamons [00:38:48] No.

Mike Seamons [00:38:48] Yeah. Not that ever became a part of it, but yeah, but that just was. And so our 19, our then 18 year old, he like this. We didn't know how. I didn't have answers for this.

Michele Seamons [00:39:01] And he has a mission call on

Mike Seamons [00:39:02] his hand and he decides to go ahead and open it and get a call to Columbia and decides the faithful thing to do is to push and to go do a mission because that's how he's gonna show Ben, show his best friend how much he loved him because he was gonna serve a mission. And his life, you know, stopped because of him feeling like that he couldn't for some reason.

Michele Seamons [00:39:27] And he's the first group of kids that did the MTC online in their

Mike Seamons [00:39:32] home during COVID our fourth son. Yeah, and it was hard.

Michele Seamons [00:39:36] It was hard because we had all the kids that were at byu, a son in medical school, all in our home. So we had nine or something. It was crazy. All at the farm, trying to make sense of the world.

Mike Seamons [00:39:52] And I hit a point where I had earned a sabbatical at Microsoft years before.

John Dehlin [00:39:58] Seven years.

Mike Seamons [00:39:58] Yeah, seven years at a certain level. And you get three months or two months, plus you can use your vacation. And I said to Michele, I said, we need to get out of here. Like we just need to go and have a massive reset. We need to get Logan out of here. And she was like, okay, I'M in. And Covid had happened. All the kids were homeschooling, so. And I said, I want to see. I think I have a plan. The plan is we'll figure out how to get on a sailboat and let's get on a sailboat and disappear for three months. And at this point, I had never been on a sailboat. I'd never seen.

Michele Seamons [00:40:32] We were lake boaters.

Mike Seamons [00:40:34] I'd had a lake boat weekends on

Michele Seamons [00:40:36] Lake Sammamish and Lake Washington. We had no idea what a sailboat, even.

Mike Seamons [00:40:39] But I had this crazy idea, crazy dream. And she was crazy enough to say, sure, let's see. And so I went and I took a sailing class in the end of June, two days, 2020. In July of 2020, we rented a sailboat for a week in the San Juan Islands and brought an instructor on with our family, and he taught us how to manage the boat ourselves. And then in September, we flew all of our family to Raiate Tahiti, and we moved on to a sailboat, and we lived in Tahiti. September, October, November, December. And we just lived on the ocean. And we'd never done anything like this, but it was, like, for us. And I was still in the state presidency, and I was doing stake presidency meetings, you know, sunrise, you know, and sitting on the deck of my boat, virtually dialing in.

Michele Seamons [00:41:31] And, I mean, we're not letting our kids swim on Sundays. We live on a boat. Like, I would wear a dress on Sunday. Yeah, all Sunday.

Mike Seamons [00:41:42] Yeah, yeah. So it was a little. It was this hybrid thing where we were doing some of the same behaviors and we were introducing a whole new set of things. And I mean, talk about the awe and wonder. Like, we experienced our first moonrise together as a family the third night in and had no idea that the moon rises when it's full. It rises right after the sun goes down. And it's like a dual unbelievable event that happens every 28 days. And we had no idea. And the next night, we went out to watch it the second time, and it was an hour late, and then it was an hour later, and we're like, wait, what is happening?

Michele Seamons [00:42:21] We didn't realize the moon's on a

Mike Seamons [00:42:23] schedule, that the moon rises, like, at a different time, you know, 28 days, and then it comes back. And, I mean, it took us all of this for us to, like, look in the sky and not see just dots, but, like, find constellations and be able to track Andromeda. And we had binoculars that we would stargaze as a family. And I Mean, we jump in the ocean and swim with the most magical reefs you could ever see. It was like wonder at a level 10 for four months.

Margi Dehlin [00:42:55] Presence, presence and present to the world around you.

Michele Seamons [00:42:59] Leave the moment. We couldn't press the church the same way. So we opened up, we read the story of Jesus. It was like a novel. It was a novel, a narrative of the new New Testament because we have a 13 year old to a 22 year old on the boat at that time, up to a 25, 4 year old anyway. And we knew we needed to adapt and we did. The virtual church. But outside of that, we weren't.

Mike Seamons [00:43:39] There were no activities. There were no seminary.

Michele Seamons [00:43:41] We just were making up our own thing and it was pretty loose. And our kids felt freedom to ask questions. And when those questions started pouring in, I cracked on that trip. And then I started.

John Dehlin [00:43:58] Tell us more.

Michele Seamons [00:43:59] I started reading other. Heavily reading other churches like Richard Rohr and Brian McLaren. Brian McLaren.

Mike Seamons [00:44:09] Christian Oracles.

John Dehlin [00:44:11] But I am so liberal Christianity.

Michele Seamons [00:44:14] Yes. And I am feeling this mystical side of Christianity that is so in line with the experience I'm currently having on the sailboat. And this is what I want. And I don't want to go back and my kids don't want to go back. And we feel good and we feel whole as a family unit. And we're praying still and we're respecting that there's something bigger than us. But we're grappling with what are we gonna do when we go home.

Mike Seamons [00:44:53] And I. In the last month, there was a. They merged the Kirkland and the Redmond Stakes because both stakes had shrunk so much during COVID and previous. Oh, it bled out that we couldn't maintain two stakes. So we made one out of Kirkland and Redmond.

John Dehlin [00:45:10] They just sold the Kirtland Steak Center.

Michele Seamons [00:45:12] That area is not the same place we raised our kids post Covid. It's just not the same.

John Dehlin [00:45:18] It's been eviscerated just like California.

Mike Seamons [00:45:21] Because of that. I was heavily involved in how do we kind of build a new stake out of two because I was still in the Stake presidency.

John Dehlin [00:45:29] Your program wasn't working like you were trying to stop the hemorrhaging, but it was hemorrhaging anyway.

Michele Seamons [00:45:34] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:45:35] For all sorts of reasons.

Michele Seamons [00:45:36] We can't even meet.

Mike Seamons [00:45:37] Yeah. And then, I mean, Covid. Covid increased the hemorrhaging because of all those things.

John Dehlin [00:45:42] Like, if God wanted the church to grow, Covid wasn't the way to grow the church. Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:45:47] It was really, really challenging there. And in a Lot of places. But I was still, like, really advocating, like I. In all of those boundary discussions with the two stakes and all the general authorities involved, because that's a pretty big deal to merge stakes. Church doesn't like to do that. And we were like, well, then let's have a principle that all the wards will be drawn on high school boundaries. Wards will not cross high schools because we are going to focus on making our kids connected, and that is a way that we can make it more connected. I was still advocating for all those things, but at the same time, I knew this idyllic Mormon, you know, kind of life.

Mike Seamons [00:46:29] I had seen enough of the administrative side to realize the feeling of awe and wonder in the spirit. And the mentorship was becoming less and less, and the administration and the. The judge side was becoming more and more. And I knew that if I kept going, I would get less of the stuff I wanted and more of the stuff I didn't. And I just felt. I could feel it because it was. It was just increasing one volume and decreasing the other.

John Dehlin [00:46:58] My. My memory is that Phil and Kathy Bussey, who were our bishops, at one point, they became area. He became an area authority at some point. Would you have worked with Phil?

Mike Seamons [00:47:07] Yeah, he did trainings for us. We weren't. We were in the Tacoma area or the sales. He was covering the Seattle area or something.

Michele Seamons [00:47:15] But, yeah, they split.

Mike Seamons [00:47:16] But we were in trainings all the time, you know, with him. And.

John Dehlin [00:47:19] Okay.

Mike Seamons [00:47:19] And yeah, I mean, they were great leaders, but. But still, I was like, we are missing a huge, huge mark. And I was so passionate about what we were missing that I just kind of said, look, if we aren't going to take what we're missing more seriously, number one, we were now deciding to leave Washington at this point. Microsoft had said Microsoft employees could live anywhere. Doesn't have to be in Redmond. I was now a partner at Microsoft, so I was a very senior leader there. I had teams in Redmond. Like, before I got on the boat. Leaving Redmond was not an option. While I was on the boat, leaving Redmond became an option. And our kids were starving for. You know, they. We loved the farm, but it was a farm. The farm was so, so much work. Like, we jump into these things and then we go, holy mackerel, this is

John Dehlin [00:48:14] a lot of work.

Mike Seamons [00:48:15] And. And then we start going, how do we make it not so much work? Yeah. And so we had.

Michele Seamons [00:48:20] We sold it all.

Mike Seamons [00:48:21] We had started in kind of the end of being on the boat. The kids were pushing it where if not Redmond, then where. And it was all these, like, Zillow presentations of places we could go live. And so I knew we were not going to come back to the same life. We were not going to come back to a place where I could resume, you know, being a member of a stake presidency or even the stake president. And so when I was interviewed virtually for this, we were sitting in Bora Bora, and we're on anchor in Bora Bora, and I'm talking to the general authority that's there to call the new stake presidency. And I said, yeah, I'm not your guy for.

John Dehlin [00:48:55] So you were being evaluated for state president.

Mike Seamons [00:48:57] Yeah. Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:48:58] But I knew everyone.

Mike Seamons [00:48:59] I knew what I was. It was not gonna. I gave him the reasons. I'm like, I. I love the. I have so much passion still in this, but we have some decisions that we're making as a family that are potentially going to take us away from Washington. And. And so I gave. You'll diet this. I gave Stake conference. When they released the old stake presidency and put in the new one, I'm on Zoom. The background is the. Is Bora Bora Bora. And I'm in a shirt and tie with shorts on and flip flops that you can't see. And I give my closing address and talk about anchoring and how anchoring is so important in our life.

Mike Seamons [00:49:37] And I'm doing it from a state conference in Bora Bora. I got so much hate mail from our friends saying, this is November. It's like the worst time to be in Seattle. And you're telling us. It's like you're talking wanting them with

Margi Dehlin [00:49:54] COVID That's so true.

Mike Seamons [00:49:56] But it was, you know, we got off the boat and. And it became kind of now our mission of if not there, then where. And, you know, we were ready to kind of put the farm, you know, into somebody else's hands because we'd. We felt like we'd gotten what we needed to out of it. Our kids were still, like. All of them were just in such that. Our son, who, you know, he started the mtc, then got reassigned to Provo, where his roommate had taken his life. He said, I can't do that. So he then called off the mission. He did home. MTC didn't go any further.

Mike Seamons [00:50:31] But then he got off the boat because he was still listening to his parents that he loved, and he's like, I'm going to get off the boat, and I'm going to go right onto my mission. And our stake President had got him a reassignment to Phoenix, Arizona. And so he literally, a week after he got off the boat, he went to Phoenix, Arizona, directly. Didn't go through the mtc, and he ended up for, like, two months, quarantined in an apartment with two other elders who had no ability to help him with this emotional trauma. And he, two months later said, I can't keep doing this, and came home.

Mike Seamons [00:51:06] And his coming home was the beginning of the end for me because my first son coming home was, this is broken. Not working. My second son coming home was. Or no, he is broken. My second son coming home was, this is broken. And that is when I just was like, I will no longer push my kids into the mission field because it's too broken of an experience. It works for a lot of people. My son's experience was exceptional. With all this death in his life, it's not that. It's not for anyone, but I could no longer say, this is for everyone. Like, everyone should go. I couldn't do that anymore.

Margi Dehlin [00:51:47] Yeah. Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:51:49] And now we only have two kids at home, and we're like, let's go. And they pick Florida.

Margi Dehlin [00:51:57] They picked Florida.

Michele Seamons [00:51:58] And we live on the ocean, and we bought a home on the ocean. So literally went from one coast to the other.

Mike Seamons [00:52:05] A hundred feet out our windows was the ocean, and we watched the sunset every night.

Moving Away and Stepping Back from the Church

Michele Seamons [00:52:10] But what did we do? We followed the pattern that we'd always done with moving, and we jumped right back in the ward, kind of, I think, thinking, for me, this is Florida. It's gotta be different. It has to be different. And we actually hadn't ward shopped or done any preparation on this one because we were different people. We didn't actually feel like we needed to have that perfect ward. And, yeah, this ward didn't feel the same.

Mike Seamons [00:52:45] They didn't like our edginess. We were too edgy for.

Michele Seamons [00:52:49] Yeah, we had experienced things in Washington that they weren't prepared for, and we had experienced things personally that they were not prepared for. And we were still kind of loud and still felt chosen. So we came in there with guns ablaze, and I got called into the Relief Society presidency, then the Young Women's presidency, and wasn't wearing my garments. I told them, I'm not going to the temple, but still I'm holding these callings, and I could see this is not going to work. This isn't going to work for me.

John Dehlin [00:53:31] Okay, I have to ask. There's this stage that many go through as they're going down this path. Where it can be kind of the Terrell Givens. Terrell and Fiona Givens. Patrick Mason, Faith Matters.

Michele Seamons [00:53:46] Kind of. Yeah, we read all of it. We listened.

John Dehlin [00:53:48] She did that.

Michele Seamons [00:53:49] All of it. I mean, restoration is that Patrick Mason, Restore. Restore. That book was like, oh, Restoration.

Mike Seamons [00:53:59] Is this book implanted?

Michele Seamons [00:54:00] Restoration was the first.

John Dehlin [00:54:02] Right. The yellow one.

Michele Seamons [00:54:02] It became my new scriptures.

John Dehlin [00:54:04] Your Bible? Yeah.

Michele Seamons [00:54:04] I mean, literally, I read Patrick Mason like it was scripture.

Mike Seamons [00:54:09] The givens.

Michele Seamons [00:54:09] We read the Givens. We read everything.

Mike Seamons [00:54:11] The God who Weeps was, like, life changing for us.

Michele Seamons [00:54:14] Faith matters. We were leaning in the podcast felt like we were hanging on with our fingernails because they kept trying to make all these accommodations, and it didn't sit with the rigidity and of the doctrine and the teachings that I knew that's what the church was. So how can we be both? It didn't make sense.

Mike Seamons [00:54:38] We couldn't hold the paradox.

Michele Seamons [00:54:40] No.

Mike Seamons [00:54:40] I was called as the Gospel doctrine teacher, and at this point, I had lots of things that I wanted to try to help as adults. Let's learn how to do this better. So I would teach lessons where I'd use the stages of faith, and, you know, where I'd talk about, there is such a thing.

Mike Seamons [00:55:02] Simplicity, complexity, perplexity and harmony. And I'll never forget I taught one of the last lessons I taught that got me fired from the Calling because I was just, you know, when I taught about the Amalekites in the Old Testament, I'm like, how can we all make sense of what is clearly genocide? Like, I mean, I just was like, this is not a group of people that are coming in and trying to make peace with their neighbors. They're saying, we are chosen. You are not. Therefore you die and we take your land.

Mike Seamons [00:55:31] I just was trying to create. Enough. Let's not think that this is all just a bunch of historical information. Let's at least make some moves as a people. That this is a complicated story of people trying to hold their view of God as long as humanly possible, at all costs. Like, and it was. I just. I was seeing it so. So significantly. And so when the stages of faith. I put that in a lesson where I was like, you know, we all might be at different stages, and therefore, we might answer questions a little differently based on what stage of faith we're in. And there was a guy at the back of the room who always liked to try to be the last comment of my lessons.

Mike Seamons [00:56:16] And he said, you know, he had a degree in philosophy and law, and he was like, this is all baloney. There is no such thing as stages of faith. There's only one. It's simplicity. And anybody that cannot see the world through that lens is wrong. And I said, if that's the case, then there's no room for me in this building.

Michele Seamons [00:56:36] He said it to the whole. I mean, a chapel full of. And a member of our Stake presidency was there, and it was like, drop the mic.

Mike Seamons [00:56:48] Yeah, that was it. And then we had a closing prayer, and I was like. I got released two weeks later because I was. You know. But then I got called as the young men's president, which didn't even exist, but the bishop was like, I can't do young men's. And he's like, can you do young men's? And I was like, yeah. I had two. Two boys in it. So I'm like, okay, I'll do. I'll take on the young men's program again. And I tried and I tried, but it, you know, then, you know, Michele was now in young women's, I was in young men's. We were now trying to redo. How do we create experiences of wonder for all these k. But when Michele would pray.

Michele Seamons [00:57:23] Yeah, I prayed to heavenly. Our heavenly parents. And that did not in church.

John Dehlin [00:57:32] Yeah, y' all are off the rails at this point.

Michele Seamons [00:57:35] Young women. I prayed to my parents.

Mike Seamons [00:57:37] We have the doctrine.

Michele Seamons [00:57:38] Why can't we. I just didn't use the. I just. I refused to use the pattern of prayer that I had been taught. I just said, this is how I pray and I'm going to be authentic if I'm going to be here. And we started to feel. And our youngest boys were being raised differently and given more freedom, and they were like, saying, no. And so we start doing seeker Sunday. We start saying, okay, guess what, kids? This is how it's going to look. We're going to go to church maybe three weeks a month.

Mike Seamons [00:58:12] No, twice. Twice.

Michele Seamons [00:58:13] Twice.

Mike Seamons [00:58:13] Whenever it was youth.

Michele Seamons [00:58:14] Oh, yeah, yeah, we go twice.

Mike Seamons [00:58:15] This is when youth church was every other Sunday.

Michele Seamons [00:58:17] Yeah, they did it.

Mike Seamons [00:58:18] So when it was youth church, we went to the elder, to the LDS building, young men and non youth Sunday, Sunday school. We went to the Buddhist temples, the Baha' I temples, the Hindu temples.

Michele Seamons [00:58:28] We could get our hands on.

Mike Seamons [00:58:29] Like, we. Because we believed, you know, general authority told us that. Not here. Then where? Like, where will you go?

Michele Seamons [00:58:36] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [00:58:36] And it's like, well, we better figure out where we're going to go before we decide not to be here.

Michele Seamons [00:58:41] And we had never exposed ourselves to other religions other than that lovely correlated manual that you see at byu, which is World religions. World religions.

John Dehlin [00:58:51] I took that class.

Michele Seamons [00:58:52] I did, too.

John Dehlin [00:58:53] You know, I love that class.

Michele Seamons [00:58:55] I love that class. But I felt like it had encapsulated it. Put everything so nice and neat. And then we were.

Mike Seamons [00:59:01] And all fingers pointed to the restoration.

Michele Seamons [00:59:03] We were actually attending other congregations. My son starts attending an evangelical congregation, and we're going to Baptist and Buddhist Baha' I and Baha'. I. And he's working with people from India, and we go to Varanasi in India, and we're like, teach us. Teach us. Which is, like their Vatican, all about Hinduism. And we're just being filled. And there is no turning back. There is no turning. This train is on the rails to a different location.

Mike Seamons [00:59:38] But it was all the feeling, though. We'd go to the Buddhist temple. We did a silent retreat at the Thai Buddhist temple in Titusville. And Michele and I just looked at each other and said, do you feel it? And I was like, yeah, do you feel it?

Mike Seamons [00:59:53] This is it. Like, we are feeling the spirit here. And then we're doing a walking meditation. And then the regional temple president, you know, is brought in to teach us at the end of this retreat, and he is treated like a stake president would be in a Mormon church. Like, all this, like, veneration and this, like, oh, you know, we need to listen to him because he has all the answers. And Michele and I, after that are like, wait a minute. We felt that. But now we're like, the triggers of a hierarchy back in action again. Then we went to the Vietnamese version of Buddhism because they're supposed to be different. While we loved their potlucks, the.

Michele Seamons [01:00:33] Their food was amazing.

Mike Seamons [01:00:34] It was the same. It's like, well, Buddhism's got interesting things, and we feel the spirit when we go to a Buddhist temple. So then we were like, but maybe it's probably not Buddhism. And then we went to the Baha' I temple, and they told us stories of how this. We embrace all religions. And then they start telling us, but we have somebody in 1800s who wrote scripture, and all of the right answers are in this person's version of scripture. And we're like, no, we can't do that. See you later.

Michele Seamons [01:01:02] This was nice, but we're hearing the same story. And we start, as we're exposing ourselves, seeing something very different.

A Brief Evangelical Christian Phase

John Dehlin [01:01:15] What happened to your megachurch Christian phase? You were the evangelical Christian.

Michele Seamons [01:01:20] I'm still going.

John Dehlin [01:01:21] In fact, did you try a megachurch like a non?

Michele Seamons [01:01:25] One of our sons was attending a megachurch in Orlando every January. It's called Rock the Universe. And all of the best Christian bands come. And for two days.

John Dehlin [01:01:37] Hillsong.

Michele Seamons [01:01:38] Yeah, all of them. And you go to the Universal theme park, and it's all concerts. And so I made my kids go. I mean, I was there.

Mike Seamons [01:01:48] We went three years in a row.

Michele Seamons [01:01:49] Yeah. The third year, it didn't hit. It just didn't hit.

Mike Seamons [01:01:55] Because now we brought in the Buddhist stories and the Hindu stories and the Taoist stories. We brought in narratives that we're like, isn't it interesting that these people are so content with their narrative? We have been so content with ours. None of us actually exchange narratives in a lifetime. It's like the one you're born with is the one you usually keep. Rarely does anybody do a narrative, a narrative swap out, but yet nobody feels like they are missing something. The way that, like, we'd spend our life thinking we need to bring the world as truth because they don't have it. Well, then you go out and you actually just ask them what they think they have, and they're like, well, we're not looking for anything else.

Mike Seamons [01:02:38] Like, we got what we need. And yet we were trying to bring the truth to everyone, and it just flipped on its head where we're like, like, you know what? There's. This is all just narrative. Like, all of it is narrative. And it's narrative that is answering the most. The biggest questions, the most pressing questions. And it's beautiful. Like, we loved the Hindu stories of Shiv and Brahma. And, you know, we went to the. To the holy river Ganga and watched people cremate their loved ones and put them in the river, and we ritualized it with them. Like, and we felt the spirit there. And then we went to the Buddhist temple and we felt the spirit there. Like. Like, we felt it everywhere we went.

Michele Seamons [01:03:16] Yes. And for the first time, we had had a lot of world travel, but most of our world travel involved visiting a temple, going to church, an LDS temple. Yes. And connecting with Mormon people in that area. Wherever we traveled, it was always that. And for the first time, we gave ourselves freedom to say, okay, we're here. Let's actually listen to what people are saying. Let's be open to what they think and feel. And we, in this short time frame, traveled pretty extensively to Africa and India and were exposed to some things that we went, wait. And these aren't even the most populated of places. I mean, there's China. Something's. We're in a 1%. Like, it all of a sudden hit us like, wait, we've been told we're the 1%.

Mike Seamons [01:04:17] The stone is rolling and gathering.

Michele Seamons [01:04:19] I'm like, wait. And we heard that teaching that we believe in one God, but that means basically, we're choosing not to worship the other 2,500. And I'm like, wait, there's 2,500? I mean, whatever. The possibilities are endless. And we're choosing one, and it's the only right one. My worldview was rocked, and my heart was too big to allow it to close. I wasn't gonna let it happen. And we called our bishop and said, please do not contact us again. We will not be attending. And it went from attending twice a month. We literally went for three months, four months. We went from full activity to attending twice a month to asking to not attending, please.

Mike Seamons [01:05:20] And that was June of 2023. We stopped attending, and we kind of were. Then we did still more seeker time because we were still trying to be

Michele Seamons [01:05:30] like, yeah, what do we. Wow.

Mike Seamons [01:05:32] Like, because. Because it's interesting. I mean, and we've heard a lot of people on. On here talk about, like, you go through these phases, you know, that you can feel very much like, hopelessness of, well, gosh, now there's not a, you know, a God that's chosen me watching out for me and making sure that my life is, you know, is perfectly unfolding based on his plan for me. Like, you would think that's a pretty impossible thing to try to put down, but we had to put it down here. You've heard two episodes of we felt seen, chosen, and powered by God for 50 years, and we walked away from it because what we were finding is actually the narrative didn't matter.

Years of Gradual Transition Out of Belief

Mike Seamons [01:06:20] There is a far more fundamental thing happening with the way that we interact with this power than the narrative of who are the people that brought us the truth, and what is the truth that they've brought us? And how do we all hold on to the truth as tightly as we can?

Mike Seamons [01:06:38] We were able to say, you're missing it. It's actually the feeling if you are no longer intersecting with the power, the energy, and the energy is fading because you're just going through motions and ritual. And it doesn't mean that everybody that stays in their same church for their life is not feeling it anymore. But for us, the constraints of a narrative that is placed over a thing, a person or an energy that you worship became a scarcity creator. It created scarcity of the feeling that we did it all in the first place for. And it even started to create scarcity in how much Mentoring we could do in trying to help people kind of find their way through.

Mike Seamons [01:07:25] And when we let it go in the most unexpected way, it started to fill with abundance. Like, we literally started to feel it more and more frequently in more ways. And it's the only. Like we have this very odd Mormon story that is we did it because of the feeling and we left it because of the feeling, which is not normal because, number one, you're taught the feeling is only available to those with the gift of the feeling.

Mike Seamons [01:07:58] Even the power of the Holy Ghost is not as good as the gift of the Holy Ghost. The gift of the Holy Ghost is only given to the baptized, worthy, living all of the commandments. And yet we had a lifetime of evidence that said that's actually not how it worked.

Mike Seamons [01:08:16] And that when we removed a lot of that scaffolding, the feeling stayed. And not only did it stay, but it became a more direct experience, that we were no longer trying to go through someone for it or something for it. We were just going direct to it.

Michele Seamons [01:08:32] And then we wanted to share it because we'd always been sharing it.

Margi Dehlin [01:08:36] I wonder where you got that from.

Michele Seamons [01:08:38] Yeah, I know. We were taught very well. All of a sudden we started hitting roadblocks. If we're like, wait, people aren't going to listen to us. They actually don't want to hear our perspective. And I realized right there and then that I'm going to need some psychological help. And we reach out to Valerie and Nathan Hamaker through latter day struggles.

John Dehlin [01:09:02] Had they been excommunicated?

Michele Seamons [01:09:04] No, we actually were part of their group during that process. So it was very enlightening. And we had already stopped attending, but we realized that was the easiest part. It was now the navigating our relationships with the thousands of people in our past, in our present and our family.

Michele Seamons [01:09:30] The work's gonna. It's just beginning. Yeah, it's just beginning because it doesn't make sense to them. But they didn't want to listen. They didn't want to hear it. So we were going to have to just live in this place that feels so uncomfortable.

Michele Seamons [01:09:48] And we were ready to do the work. We're like, this is not the end of our story. We're going to heal. We are going to come up again from the burning to the rising like a phoenix. And they definitely helped us with that. They helped us learn that we can listen to ourselves, we can create our own community.

Michele Seamons [01:10:10] And we did. We went outside that Mormon ward and we laid into that community. And we have friends that I never thought it was. I literally was taught it couldn't happen, and it is. And they support and love our kids just the same way we felt within the church.

Michele Seamons [01:10:40] And so now we have this loving community, and we're getting a voice, and we're actually learning to listen to ourselves. And we are hitting brick wall after brick wall after brick wall with our family. And it hurts.

Mike Seamons [01:10:59] And all of our past, all of our past.

John Dehlin [01:11:00] You don't mean your children. When you say your family, you don't mean your children.

Margi Dehlin [01:11:05] This is family of origin.

Mike Seamons [01:11:06] This is like, extended family.

Michele Seamons [01:11:08] Extended family.

Mike Seamons [01:11:08] Extended family.

Michele Seamons [01:11:10] There are two kids at BYU who are out, and they are just covering.

John Dehlin [01:11:16] They're not believing, but they're still, like, their senior year.

Michele Seamons [01:11:19] They're, like, holding on. Like, every bishop's interview is like. And my daughter even spoke at her graduation. I mean, they were struggling, not wearing their garments. Like, they were beyond. And that's where the truth claims. None of that ever was a part of. Like, we had no desire to ever prove the church wrong or get into the weeds of the past or the present. I didn't want to go there.

Mike Seamons [01:11:52] We felt like we had found something better, and it was like, well, let's just focus on the better thing. But it was hard because it's hard to have such a strong. Like, this is the only way to see it.

Michele Seamons [01:12:06] It was visceral.

Mike Seamons [01:12:07] The truth claims part for us was a very short. At the very end, right before we said, we're out, and it was really us having to go through this. Do we trust ourselves or do we trust the church? Like, we had to kind of go through this. Who do we. Do we trust? This thing that we've now built up inside of ourselves that. That is. Has steered us pretty well. Or do we trust the church? And. And that's where, you know, I mean, we. We had your LDS discussions, you know, were so pivotal for us for that brief period of time, that's where we were, because it just gave us this.

Mike Seamons [01:12:44] This way to hold those claims, at least in. Like, there is a wide range of ways to map the story. It's not one. The one that we had been taught, the one that I was a, you know, church history, you know, bachelor's degree, because of, like, it was. There wasn't one narrative. There were a lot of different narrative possibilities, but all of the possibilities gave us this permission to say, you know what, let's just put it down for a while and see what happens without dealing with all the narrative.

Finding a New Spiritual Community

Mike Seamons [01:13:19] But we also had to pick something else up and it was at that time that I read this book. That's the reason I use this word wonder a lot. Have you ever read the New Science of Everyday Wonder by Docker Keltner?

Michele Seamons [01:13:32] It's amazing.

Mike Seamons [01:13:33] It's a must read. It gave me language finally. And I read this in like 2023. Anyway, he's a Berkeley scientist, PhD, who has spent 25 years teaching happiness. That's been his focus. And he's come to this, like, as he was teaching how to find happiness, he's like, happiness doesn't seem like it's the right thing to focus on. Like, it's too fast.

Margi Dehlin [01:13:59] Burn.

Mike Seamons [01:13:59] It's too. It's. It's just too fragile. And so we started studying and an emotion that kind of sometimes gets confused with happiness, he calls awe. Or not he calls. It's awe. And awe is an emotion that has a physiological experience. And he studied how people felt awe. And they feel a burning in their chest. They feel the, you know, the chills on the back of their neck. They. They feel a contentment or a. Or a. Like he just.

John Dehlin [01:14:26] He.

Mike Seamons [01:14:26] All of the words that I've described my whole life. What it means to feel the Holy Ghost. Keltner says this is what it feels like to feel awe. And he. He actually puts monitors on people's brains to identify where in the body this is coming from, how the body reacts to this, what neurotransmitters and neurochemicals are actually happening in the body when you feel this.

Mike Seamons [01:14:48] And then. And he calls odd. Just the simple definition is anytime you are in the presence of something vast and mysterious and you feel it, it's that we've all had it. It's so universal. Hindus have it, Buddhists have it, daoists have it, Mormons have it. We all have these overwhelming experiences of awe.

Mike Seamons [01:15:08] And it's a feeling we can all talk about because it's a universal feeling. But then he takes it one step further and he breaks it into the eight ways people feel awe. The most commonly across 25 countries in the world. And he brings up things, and it's life and death. You know, when you are in. When you're with someone who's dying or with someone that's being born, or the experiences that surround that. Like, we've all felt that music. You know, from a Christian next speaker to whatever. Like, music moves us in that way. Nature, epiphany. When you hear something that is just this. Like, I've never heard that before.

Mike Seamons [01:15:51] And your mind lights up, you feel this mystic experiences Spiritual experiences, miracles, you know, collective effervescence. When you with a group are doing something ritualistic or like, you know, halftime of a. Of a sporting event, it's a group experience where you all feel this. I am in the presence, something vast and mysterious. He lays out this beautiful framework of. This is what this feeling is that I've been chasing my whole life. Here is what your body is doing to feel the feeling. And here is what.

Mike Seamons [01:16:30] What most people are doing when they engage with this feeling. And it changed. It gave me a whole new way to think about the whole way I've. I've tried to construct religion in my life and. And it gave it to me without any additional narrative.

Mike Seamons [01:16:48] Like, I didn't need a Brahma story or a Buddhist story or a Joseph Smith story. It doesn't require a narrative. It just says, pursue one of these different doors of awe with a softening of I am curious and I want to intersect with this.

Mike Seamons [01:17:07] And you'll feel it. And it's been a lifetime of now. It's like, well, that's everything that our story is. We were intersecting with awe and wonder. And here's the crazy thing is it hasn't made us any. Like my belief in a bigger power is more significant than it's ever been. I just don't care what his name is or her name is, what planet they live on, what star they're closest to on that planet. You know, I don't care about any of it because. Because it's such wasted energy that, like, I would much rather talk to people about what they're feeling and where they are when they feel it, because I can talk to anybody with any narrative about that.

Mike Seamons [01:17:51] But if we have to get into who's behind it and why they're doing it. Well, now I am not allowed to talk to you because, you know, your narrative is different than mine or my narrative offends you. And I just. I think we have complicated something that is so fundamentally human by putting all of these things on top of it. And I think we're losing touch with it more than we're gaining touch.

Michele Seamons [01:18:17] Yeah. So then we decided to call ourselves on our own mission, because now we have our own internal power and voice, and we can hear it.

Mike Seamons [01:18:28] And we prepared to be mission presidents and save our money so that we could retire in our 50s. And we were like, well, we still have all of that, and we still are on track to retire and go do good in the world.

John Dehlin [01:18:40] So what's the name of your new church?

Michele Seamons [01:18:42] It's Called Wonder Way.

Mike Seamons [01:18:44] That's not the church, that's the boat.

Michele Seamons [01:18:45] What's the name of the boat?

John Dehlin [01:18:47] Boat Church.

Michele Seamons [01:18:48] Boat Church. And through our boating, it's been about two years that we've spent on a boat since Tahiti, living on a boat. And we have intersected with wonder and people better than anything I ever imagined as a mission president or a missionary. It's like a collection of stories and people and love and community that I never imagined. It's so big, it's overwhelming and we can't get over it. It's there and the boat is. We've lived on it full time for the last year and a half. We can't contain. We can't contain the people that we've met. We can't contain the love and the stories and the support. And we're having to take a little detour because we now are expecting two grandchildren. So our. Our children are changing our life a little bit because we want to be involved. And so we're going to balance.

Mike Seamons [01:20:01] We have six kids, 35 to 2020, and we have no grandchildren until January and March of this next year.

Michele Seamons [01:20:10] So we're going to balance our land life and our boat life. But we are now passionate to create wonder opportunities for people. And we will. We're doing R and D in the next couple years to find ways to gather people and to allow them to recognize the access is for everyone.

Michele Seamons [01:20:39] And we shouldn't be isolating into communities. There's still room to believe how you want. There's still. There's so much room. My son always says, are we a contradiction, Mom? Because we were so Mormon, I'm like, no way. And we answer it back with no. We contain multitudes because we truly do.

Michele Seamons [01:21:05] And that multitude makes room for everyone. And if people need community, we are. We're going to be there. We're going to find ways to gather people and help them feel seen, heard, chosen, special, taken care of, growing, growing. They'll be allowed to navigate through their own emotional growth and not be stagnant because of a teaching that holds them back. It's now my mission. So forget needing to be called to be a mission president. This is so much better.

Margi Dehlin [01:21:44] So much better. I have a question. I feel like community is one of the hardest things we hear over and over for people who are kind of reconstructing. What does it look like? So you're talking about, hey, our relationships with people. People who've joined us on these adventures can't be contained. How do you find them? How have you Created. Is it around sailing? Is it around boating?

Michele Seamons [01:22:14] Is it everything? We talk to every person we come in contact with. We talk to everyone, and we ask them questions. We're so curious. It's like, tell me why you're here. What are you doing? What do you love? And people are like, wait, what? It's the old commitment pattern. It's just better because we're not going to actually hold them to some commitment. We're actually going to allow us to be together in this moment. I mean, we're not gonna try to come up with a prescribed narrative. There's an openness or gatekeep.

John Dehlin [01:22:51] Right, or gatekeep. Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:22:53] Which we've done.

Michele Seamons [01:22:54] And we found it through. There's lots of ways we found it through playing sports.

Mike Seamons [01:22:59] Pickleball, practically pickleball.

Michele Seamons [01:23:00] We play pickleball.

Mike Seamons [01:23:02] Have you guys played pickleball yet?

Michele Seamons [01:23:03] Oh, my goodness. It's the best.

Mike Seamons [01:23:05] It's the greatest. Kind of. Of award has always been an interesting thing because there's 200 people and you're not. You don't have frequency matching with all 200. You have frequency matching with like 10. And, you know, our frequency matching was usually the people that were a lot like us and had the similar pursuits and. But every community we've ever looked at has a similar thing. It's like you get on a pickleball court, and we have 100 to 200 people that show up, you know, at least once a month and play pickleball on a court together. And. And, you know, it's this big kind of social experience.

Mike Seamons [01:23:39] But within that, we have found our 10 people that now kind of are a circle closer to that. And those 10 people are from Colombia and from France and from Illinois. From Illinois, Michigan. And they have such different stories.

Mike Seamons [01:23:58] And now when we get together with these 10 people, which we spent a lot of time with 10 people in a lot of places, like the things that we walk away and go, oh, I've never thought about it that way. I host this. I mean, it'll all sound so too familiar. Every Thursday night, I do a fireside chat, and I invite.

Mike Seamons [01:24:19] I have a WhatsApp group of 15 men. And I just say, I'll have the fire ready. Anybody wants to come over and just sit and talk. And, you know, but they know that it's not. This isn't let's talk sports and kind of politics. It's, we're going to go deep and we're going to help each other.

Mike Seamons [01:24:37] Sometimes we call it the Council of Dads, but it's like an elders quorum, but yet the parts that we've left out, the parts that weren't working and just made it into. How do we actually get a group of people together that have a motivation to grow? And when you sit around a campfire, somehow the wonder is volume up. Because the way that your body interacts with flame, the way that it's unpredictable, it softens you and allows you to open yourself up to people that you normally wouldn't.

Michele Seamons [01:25:10] And these men cry. It's a place where it's safe to be vulnerable.

John Dehlin [01:25:20] Is this in Florida?

Michele Seamons [01:25:21] This is in Florida.

Mike Seamons [01:25:22] Just in our backyard.

Michele Seamons [01:25:23] Yeah, we're just, I mean, we're not doing anything special other than we literally talk to every person we meet and we invite them in because I, you

John Dehlin [01:25:31] know, I could hear maybe there's some viewers or listeners out there who are, with reason gonna be skeptical and they're gonna be like, well, we're not wealthy. We don't live on a boat. You know, we can't travel the world. We're not in Bora Bora. You know, we didn't cash out of Microsoft with stock options. We're just living a middle class life somewhere, struggling to get by. So you're living some fantasy dream because you're wealthy and privileged. This isn't applicable to the rest of us. What would you say to that?

Michele Seamons [01:26:04] Yes, but our friends are not that. Our friends are none of those things.

Mike Seamons [01:26:09] And if you listen to the first two episodes, you know, none of that applied. Like we, we, we worked every second of our life to try to put ourselves in a better place than we were the day before. And we fell and fell and we're still going to fall again. Like we're not done falling, but yet.

Michele Seamons [01:26:29] Well, and we also sold like we sold the big house on the ocean. We now live in a 1800 square foot home and we don't care.

Mike Seamons [01:26:38] It's a little concrete beach bungalow.

Michele Seamons [01:26:40] I want the people, the experience matter more. All of that posturing and reaching for something that was expected are gone. They're gone.

Mike Seamons [01:26:55] We really resonated with, you know, all the writers that talk about first half and second half of life, you know, Richard Rohr and falling Upward and David Brooks and Second Mountain. Like there's so many great Carl Jung.

Michele Seamons [01:27:05] Yeah, exactly.

Mike Seamons [01:27:07] But you know, it's interesting because, I mean you've, I'm sure it's been set on Mormon stories before. Like the LDS Church is the greatest system for first half of life potentially on the planet. Even Richard Rohr says this, it is terrible at the second half of life because it's all about container and maintaining, you know, the container and. And yeah, there's tons of. There's tons of giving and service and. And that's what a lot of people equate second half of life is. But it always has cash back to the provider. Like, my service always has cash back, you know, to me. And so it's. It's still building me through my service.

Mike Seamons [01:27:46] And that's been the part, like, as we've hopefully, you know, kind of found our way to not needing all of that, you know, what we're really focused on. And yeah, we do have this. We got lucky at our timing in Microsoft. But more than that, we saved and saved so that we don't have to get up every day and think about how do we just keep food and clothing going, but we get up every day and go, how do we help the people we love experience wonder today? How do we experience it ourselves? What can we create to bring more of it into the world?

Mike Seamons [01:28:20] And it's not. There's no. It doesn't cost anything. All it is is an invitation, you know, the four of us, if we could have our dream date with you. It's, let's just take four beach chairs out to the sand and watch the sunset and just talk and take a picnic. Like, it's not complicated. There's no cost to it.

Michele Seamons [01:28:38] Yeah. And let's lay it there. Let's lay all the things there. What hurts? What do you need help with? Is there something we can do? It just takes one person just saying, hey, I'm willing to hear it and I'm willing to lift.

Margi Dehlin [01:28:56] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:28:57] And all of a sudden, when that ripple, you know, starts rolling and you start hearing everyone's doing it, like everyone can do it, and the fear falls away. All of my fear that held me so hostage for so many years is gone.

Releasing Fear and Embracing Wonder

Margi Dehlin [01:29:21] Tell me about that fear. What did the fear look like? What did it say to you?

Michele Seamons [01:29:25] Doing things correctly, doing it right. A fear of what I thought I knew, which is a heavenly father and mother and a hereafter that was already planned out. Where am I going to go in that situation? I'm knowing all of the things that I have to know. I'm going to go out and I'm going to learn and I'm going to grow. And my expansion has just pushed the fear right out the door.

Margi Dehlin [01:30:01] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:30:03] I don't feel it anymore. I really don't.

Margi Dehlin [01:30:07] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:30:08] And I am not afraid of other people. I mean, that's huge. I'm not afraid of my children. I'm not afraid of the choices that they're gonna make. I love them, and I have raised them to be capable individuals, and now they are capable adults.

Margi Dehlin [01:30:25] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:30:26] They can do it. I know they can. They're my. I'm their biggest cheerleader, and they are fantastic.

Margi Dehlin [01:30:33] Right.

Michele Seamons [01:30:34] And I'm seeing they don't also don't need the structure. They are learning the first half of life things that we thought only the church could teach in a million other ways. And it's working.

Margi Dehlin [01:30:47] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:30:48] Now, do they struggle? Yeah, because they also know there was this other thing called Mormonism that we lived in that made it so easy.

Mike Seamons [01:30:58] You just had to show up.

Michele Seamons [01:30:59] Yeah. Like, I can't say that. My kids have at times said, when they've moved to a new city, maybe I just go to the ward. Like, I'm having struggle meeting people. I'm like, hey, that's what you need. Go do it.

Mike Seamons [01:31:14] And then they find other ways to meet people that, you know, or it could have been that, or it could be a different way. And we, you know, have six kids. And our unique part of our story is in the time frame that we were going through the deconstruction and then reconstruction, all six of our kids have gone through their own journey at different times. Like, some ahead of us, some behind us, some with us, you know, so as a family of eight, we have.

Mike Seamons [01:31:43] Have all taken a journey from a very idyllic Mormon family to. We call ourselves wonder junkies. That's our pet name for the seekers of wonder. And we just are like, look, we're just gonna. We're gonna orient ourselves around this energy, and we're gonna make our family be seekers of energy and bring all of your ideas, like, where have you found it? What are you doing when you find it? What's.

Mike Seamons [01:32:13] Tell us about it. Like, we talk about everything because there is no. There isn't a. Well, that's not right. Or that's not right. There is all just. Now tell me about it. Because if you're making it up, like, I don't want to hear a fictitious story. I want to hear a real story. And so therefore.

Michele Seamons [01:32:33] And let's critically make sure it's real through it, us together. Let's be in committee. Teach me, and let's think about it together. I want to be taught. I want to learn more. Maybe there's something I'm missing.

Mike Seamons [01:32:44] Every Sunday night, we have family home evening on Facebook.

Michele Seamons [01:32:48] We still do it.

Mike Seamons [01:32:49] We still do it. And all six of our kids. And now they're many of their spouses and significant others. They all join and we talk about, what have you been doing this week? But then we get into books. Usually it's a book that we read and talk about together or a podcast. But it's just a way. I mean, these are all adults. Like, we're no longer raising them. We're trying to help them through our experience and through the life that we've been able to live. But we also fully respect their. You've got to figure it out your way.

Mike Seamons [01:33:25] We thought that the best way was to inherit it, to live it, to hold it, to never let it go. We don't think that's actually the best way anymore. We think it's to give you the freedom and the support and the love and maybe a little bit of wisdom because of the way that we've found our path and let you go and surprise us with the way that you figure it out. And we'll be there to catch you if you fall.

Mike Seamons [01:33:53] And we have done that a lot. But nothing is in the closet. And it's the most beautiful way to be a family because nobody puts on costumes when they come home. And we have a son who is non binary. And, you know, he feels like he has had a transformation in him that we love they. And we're trying to learn how to say right pronouns because we're learning with him.

Margi Dehlin [01:34:19] It was very new. It's very recent. Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:34:22] But, you know, we have kids that are making decisions that are across a beautiful set of dimensions, and we just look at it all as, wow, what is our life gonna look like five years from now, ten years from now? And like Michele said, and not having the fear that we're not doing it right.

Michele Seamons [01:34:41] And therefore there's gonna be empty chairs

Margi Dehlin [01:34:46] that.

Michele Seamons [01:34:46] No empty chairs like that. I have all of those Mormon things. I am in an emptying stage. I used to have probably 50% of the hymnal memorized. I prided myself in being able to sing at church without having to open the hymn because I had to facilitate six kids and I wanted to sing with the congregation. So I just said, well, then I need to learn all the songs. I mean, I have so much information embedded that to let it go is amazing because what's coming back is also amazing.

Michele Seamons [01:35:29] There's. It's a beautiful thing. And I guess I want for anyone that. Because I didn't feel like I had anyone to tell me. I had Mormon stories, I had people that I didn't know That I kind of clung to their stories that there can be light at this end of this tunnel of being Mormon and something different now. That was amazing. And now I have. I'm feeling it. I'm at peace. That's all I can say.

John Dehlin [01:36:05] It's beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. I believe. Let me ask you another question that comes from me seeing tens of thousands of people venture into this. Similar waters, but different waters. The one set of traps I often see or sometimes see is, you know, you could call it, you could call it wonder, whatever. What do you call it? Wonder warriors?

Michele Seamons [01:36:37] Wondered and awe.

John Dehlin [01:36:38] Wonder Woman.

Michele Seamons [01:36:39] Wonder junkies.

John Dehlin [01:36:40] Yeah. But you can see people, let's just say, in a positive way, healthily educate themselves and. Or experiment with sexuality. And you can see people get lost and sometimes really harm themselves or others in unhealthy explorations in sexuality. You can see people find healthy ways to explore psychedelics that they say is really healing and transformative. And you can see people sort of chase that to the point where it almost becomes its own religion, but also sometimes its own addiction, you know, so you can see it. You can see people say, oh, I just love wine and I just love wine with dinner. And I don't.

John Dehlin [01:37:30] I only have one or two drinks. And then you can see people that become alcoholics. And so I want to, I'm trying to frame it positive and correct or, you know, people get into raves and they really love the music and they really love the friendships and. But then I've seen people end up in really, really dark places where they would have been saying everything you said up to some point about awe and wonder and self fulfillment and no control and no patriarchy. And then for some it goes really, really dark and their marriages blow up. And sometimes a marriage should end and it's. It should be a celebration.

John Dehlin [01:38:12] Other times they just, just blow up their lives and their marriages and not in a happy ways ways that. And I've had several friends, and I don't mean to put a real dark spin on this. I've had several friends who could have sang some of these praises very similarly as you who have died by suicide because these same paths you guys are talking about for them ended in very dark places. So there could be a negative way of framing this, of adrenaline junkies or dopamine junkies or risky behaviors or epicureanism or selfishness, where all these wonderful things you paint this beautiful vision can also for some.

John Dehlin [01:39:01] And I'm not trying to yuck your yum at all, like, I love your vision and I want to join this. Margi and I are both like, yeah, how do we sign up? I do want to say some of these things I've heard before, and for some people, I've seen it end very darkly.

Michele Seamons [01:39:17] Right.

John Dehlin [01:39:18] Do you have. Are you just new to this? And so you haven't seen the potential of some of these things to be very dark? Or do you have thoughts or guardrails? Because sometimes people aren't good at implementing their own guardrails. Any thoughts on any of that?

Michele Seamons [01:39:39] We have a hundred percent. I mean, you did an episode where

John Dehlin [01:39:46] Britt Hartley.

Michele Seamons [01:39:47] Yeah. Who I love, did, like, the eight things that Mormons are gonna do when they leave the church. And I'm like, eight things not to do or not to do.

Margi Dehlin [01:39:55] Well, she did both. Things to do and not to do.

Michele Seamons [01:39:58] And I seen it all. I mean, you know, and have I participated? Probably because guardrails are down. Have we seen people get hurt? Yeah. Loved ones. Yeah. But for me, I think it comes down to this fear again, and a belief in good humans and the goodness.

Michele Seamons [01:40:29] I think there's more good than there is bad. I had this one. I'm going to bring it back to a sailor that I met. His name was Craig White. We met him up in Port Washington. Port Washington, Long Island.

Michele Seamons [01:40:45] And I was asking him about. He sailed the world for 14 years. And before that, he was a cameraman for a major news source film, Tom Broca. All of the big ones. He's traveled the world. He's filmed the interviews of presidents and leaders.

Michele Seamons [01:41:07] And he would say during those times of filming, he saw only dark. He saw only the bad things that could happen. And in his 14 years of sailing around the world, he said 99% of the world is good and it's going to work out for every 99. He really believed in the number and that the other percent has a microphone.

Michele Seamons [01:41:37] And that's not to dismiss in any way the hurt and the pain of anyone that is going through something hard and they're navigating what is best for me and what is not. Because I will never proclaim to be their spiritual guide or teacher or moral authority. But I'm going to side with Craig White.

Mike Seamons [01:42:04] And.

Michele Seamons [01:42:04] Yeah. Do people have risky behavior and do they make mistakes and does it leave them down dark paths? Yeah. But I believe as humans, we can help people either come off that path, support them, love them. I also believe in them coming out of it. Does it happen for everyone? I don't think so. I'm a product of a dad and a Brother, that didn't work out for them. And I can't justify why those are those numbers. I don't like that there are numbers that get lost and hurt and it doesn't sometimes doesn't equate. But I like that fear. I'm not gonna let it stop me from believing what Craig said.

Mike Seamons [01:42:59] And I think there's guardrails just in like we have this experience of half of our kids grew up in abstain or Die. Like the Strength of Youth had all the answers and, and it gave us the list. I counted the number of do nots and dos and I spent a lot of time in the Strength of Youth in my life. And we raised our first four kids with that is every rule that we expect out of you is in that book. And then we've raised two boys where we said we're going to talk about everything.

Mike Seamons [01:43:31] Abstain is no longer the requirement. It's like figure out how to moderate and. And then we've extended that same thing to our older kids and what we're finding and to ourselves. It's like, I don't think it's a healthy experience to simply say all of these things are bad because I was told they're bad. Therefore I avoid everything and I live a life managing a list of avoidances versus like, we have a lot of friends who they have very healthy relationships with alcohol and healthy relationships with all. All of the things that have been on the abstain or die list.

Mike Seamons [01:44:07] And so we're far more motivated now to number one, not have anything be in a closet. Because it's like, look, the minute something goes in the closet, it's numbing and it's escaping a life I don't like. And therefore that is something we need to help pull out of it and say, let's talk about what is it that you're missing that's making you feel like you need to go into a closet and do that this thing or not. And we watch all of our friends and many of our very still participating Mormon friends, they are having a really hard time managing this because their kids are doing things that they're not talking about.

Mike Seamons [01:44:47] And it's all very hush hush and it's almost like if we don't talk about it, it didn't happen, but it did happen. And it's getting worse and you're not talking about it because it scares you to talk about it. And talking about it, it makes you afraid that it's going to make more of it.

Mike Seamons [01:45:03] We at least have. And you asked how long? Like, you know, we've been living kind of towards a different orientation for six years, since 2020. Like we, we started reorienting, then we stopped, you know, a way of doing it, you know, in 2023. But, you know, we're seeing that really open communication, total dedication to each other and how to orient yourself towards something bigger than you. Because the last thing we want is a bunch of narcissists in our family that think they know everything and selfish. Especially in a world where I spent the last few years of Microsoft building AI with Microsoft. And I think we're entering a phase where we have got to really figure out what it means to be human because we are going to those who are easily fooled by human just means I know things like no, human means I feel things.

Mike Seamons [01:45:59] Human means I experience things with emotion. And if we cannot get more in touch with our emotions and more in touch with this emotion, which I love, wine, therefore I drink wine is not awe. Awe has a very specific kind of rhythm to it, which is I feel small in something vast and massive. It's an energy that you find and it's not about me, it's not about my ego. Gets smaller in experiences of awe. And yeah, we can stretch it in all the places that we want and say, well, that's awe. Well, that's all. Well, that's all. But maybe if we start talking about it more and you tell me your experiences and I tell you mine, maybe we'll walk away going, I like yours more.

Mike Seamons [01:46:46] Like, I'm going to go after yours because yours are really interesting ones. And yeah, you could call it adrenaline or like, I've studied neurochemistry enough to have a, you know, a paper that somebody writes that said he knows something about neurochemistry. But I know nothing other than all the things that. Because I'm now. I'm now left with this. I have a lifetime of miracles and a lifetime of a God who chose me and who made my life magical. And yeah, it gave me a lot of trials that were really hard and now I don't.

Reorienting Toward a Non-Personal Spirituality

Mike Seamons [01:47:21] I'm no longer orienting myself towards a person. I'm orienting myself towards an energy. And now I have to answer the question of, if not a personal God who chose Mike and Michele and put us on paths to put us into every good thing, then what is going on in the universe?

Mike Seamons [01:47:41] And it's the most exciting way to wake up every day to go. I'm going to find out a little bit more about what is really happening because it's magic. I believe in magic.

Michele Seamons [01:47:51] We believe in magic, but it's not free of trial. I mean, you were diagnosed through a friend, kind of accidentally in 2024 of kidney cancer. And so he's gone through two surgeries at the Moffatt Cancer center in Tampa.

Michele Seamons [01:48:16] And how do you do that with a different philosophical, religious hat on? And I watched him understand his body, be in tune, pay attention to ways he was healing and ways he was not healing, which we would have avoided all of those things because a blessing would have fixed it.

Michele Seamons [01:48:41] And I watched it at that cancer center. I heard it in other rooms where they have their pastor and they're praying and they're fasting, and it's going to heal the cancer. And I'm like, what if it doesn't? And we didn't know what the outcome would be for him and for me.

Michele Seamons [01:49:05] He taught me in that I can do those hard things without relying on only spiritual outside power. There's something within me. I'm a part of this. I don't know if all the healing comes from me. I don't know if I have all that power, but I'm taking some personal accountability and responsibility in this process.

Michele Seamons [01:49:34] And whether it goes right or wrong, I'm in it. And I learned so much because prior to that, it was magical, thinking it was someone else. There's a plan. There's a plan for me, and if I die, then that was preordained.

John Dehlin [01:49:53] Heavenly Father needs you on the other side.

Michele Seamons [01:49:55] Right, Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:49:57] Versus, like, well, listen and pay attention to your body. See if you can be a part of your own healing.

Michele Seamons [01:50:03] And that's how we teach our kids. With all of those things that you said about the guardrails we're currently teaching them, do you know yourself? Do you ask yourself the questions, Is this good for me? Am I heading in a direction that leads me to peace, abundance, and goodwill toward men, or am I hurting myself? And all we can do is ask the questions, and they have to figure it out for themselves. And I've been pleasantly surprised at the conversations we have with our kids. And they're six very strong individuals. They do not think the same. They are not a uni mind.

Mike Seamons [01:50:48] They.

Michele Seamons [01:50:48] They've got this. So, yeah, we're not afraid. Whether it turns out, like I said, we could be a great example or a terrible warning. So you take your pick.

John Dehlin [01:51:03] But what I'm hearing is you feel alive.

Margi Dehlin [01:51:05] Oh, exactly.

Michele Seamons [01:51:07] If you liked me before, you're going to like me more, because I know how to love better. I Know how to live better, and I know how to do better for the right reasons.

Margi Dehlin [01:51:17] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:51:21] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:51:22] What a powerful testimony.

Michele Seamons [01:51:25] No one's letting me come to the pulpit.

Mike Seamons [01:51:27] Whose name do you say in the name of Michele.

Margi Dehlin [01:51:31] That's right, you own it.

John Dehlin [01:51:34] Well, we've got, like, five minutes left. Margi, any final questions?

Margi Dehlin [01:51:37] No, I've just really loved. I've really related to, I think, a lot of what you.

John Dehlin [01:51:44] Margi doesn't stay. This is the longest Margi's ever stayed for Mormon stories.

Michele Seamons [01:51:48] Hanging in there. Margi.

John Dehlin [01:51:49] She must really like what y' all are putting down.

Margi Dehlin [01:51:51] Stay. From time to time, she pieces out.

John Dehlin [01:51:53] After four hours, we invite you to

Michele Seamons [01:51:55] our commune when we get up and running.

Margi Dehlin [01:51:58] But. And I think, like, one thing that I just really celebrate is, you know, this shift to connecting with the actual experience of life. I think so much of Mormonism is the end. It's the result. It's always, like, future kind of things. And this shift to just how it feels to live, how it feels to experience, you know, each other or intimacy or what's hard, you know, that's. For me, the awe balances. It would be for me, going back to John's question, one thing. If you're using awe as an avoidant technique.

Michele Seamons [01:52:43] So it's hard.

Margi Dehlin [01:52:44] Right? I'm just gonna. Then, you know, I can see that. But as long as it's this partner to, like. No, I see it all.

Michele Seamons [01:52:53] I feel it all. We're having harder conversations than we've ever had because we now give ourselves freedom to actually say the things, express the feelings that we suppressed.

Margi Dehlin [01:53:07] Absolutely.

Michele Seamons [01:53:08] And we're not afraid of that.

Margi Dehlin [01:53:09] Yes.

Michele Seamons [01:53:10] We're not afraid that it's hard.

Margi Dehlin [01:53:11] It's connection to your experience. It's this connection to presence. It's connection to yourselves. And then that completely changes the experience of connecting to one another. Because if you're connecting to yourself and that gives you a whole I just feel, like, that fear aspect. When you fear things inside you, you fear things outside you. You can't hold another person's pain or suffering. You're too afraid. You have no tools. Right. And so I just see this shift in quality of the way you live and the way you connect with all things that are living.

Michele Seamons [01:53:55] It's true.

Mike Seamons [01:53:56] One of the biggest things we've learned is is this feeling that we both have been pursuing since children that we've talked about. All this is. It's. It's better together. Like, it's not. It is a shared experience. I mean, one of the things we've learned is like you don't, you don't get as much of it as frequently and at the intensity if you are by yourself.

Margi Dehlin [01:54:17] Right.

Mike Seamons [01:54:17] And it doesn't mean it's, you can't have an experience like that by yourself. But.

Michele Seamons [01:54:21] And it doesn't mean you have to be married to this person. Like, you know, it's expansive, it's like

Mike Seamons [01:54:26] a witness to it. You together experience something and that's what like we get up every day going, how do we intersect with people like John and Margi? Like we really genuinely, you have given us so much that we have not been able to give back to you. Because you tell us stories and help people tell stories that we sit on the other side of this screen going, oh, that feels familiar. Oh, that's different. I haven't thought of it that way. And you bring that out and then you share like those kind of insights where it's like, yeah, I mean you've spent years just trying to help people.

Michele Seamons [01:55:00] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:55:00] You've find something beyond where they are. Yeah. And what an amazing gift it is just to sit in a room with you. And we hope that someday we can have you on our boat or you know, sit on a beach in chairs and continue it because this is like, we hope this is just the beginning

Michele Seamons [01:55:19] and everyone listening just, just look us up and join us.

John Dehlin [01:55:24] Which city in near Miami? Near Boca?

Michele Seamons [01:55:27] No, we're just south of Cocoa beach and the best kept secret of Florida, Satellite Beach.

John Dehlin [01:55:34] What part of Florida?

Mike Seamons [01:55:36] East Coast.

Michele Seamons [01:55:36] East Central. Central East Coast.

John Dehlin [01:55:40] I was just in Palm Coast.

Michele Seamons [01:55:42] Oh yeah, that's south.

Mike Seamons [01:55:44] Yeah, that's where we're further north.

Michele Seamons [01:55:46] Yeah, like think of Orlando. We're on a diagonal line right out to the, I mean like just go straight out to the coast from Orlando.

Margi Dehlin [01:55:53] That's so good to know.

Mike Seamons [01:55:54] So it's close. We fly in and out of Orlando,

Michele Seamons [01:55:56] we watch all the rockets go off from Cape Canaveral.

John Dehlin [01:55:59] It's so you're right east of Orlando.

Mike Seamons [01:56:01] Just east. An hour away from Orlando.

Michele Seamons [01:56:03] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:56:03] It's like I thought about going straight east to see what was out there.

Michele Seamons [01:56:07] It's like walking back.

Mike Seamons [01:56:08] We watch rockets all the time because that's where they launch.

Michele Seamons [01:56:11] NASA's there, it's untouched special place in Florida.

John Dehlin [01:56:16] I was in Palm coast three days ago.

Margi Dehlin [01:56:17] Go.

Mike Seamons [01:56:17] Oh well, okay. Next time our boat's not there, our boats.

John Dehlin [01:56:21] I was in Orlando.

Michele Seamons [01:56:22] Orlando's pretty awesome too.

Mike Seamons [01:56:25] But we do hope like we. You've you Taco.

John Dehlin [01:56:27] Have you been to Bar Taco?

Mike Seamons [01:56:28] Bar Taco.

John Dehlin [01:56:29] It's A really good restaurant in Orlando.

Michele Seamons [01:56:32] Okay, we'll go. We'll go.

John Dehlin [01:56:34] They just have tacos.

Michele Seamons [01:56:35] Yeah, yeah. We're always up for tacos and amazing

Margi Dehlin [01:56:37] guacamole and chips and.

John Dehlin [01:56:39] And no hitos. We have no hitos. Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:56:42] No hos.

Margi Dehlin [01:56:43] They're delicious.

John Dehlin [01:56:44] We're still warm in that one.

Michele Seamons [01:56:45] Yeah, that's okay. That's okay.

Reflections and Closing Gratitude

John Dehlin [01:56:48] Well, today was beautiful and we've only got like two minutes left, so I just want to say to Mike and Michele Siemens, thank you for sharing a beautiful, six hour, epic, enormous story.

Michele Seamons [01:57:01] I hope our friends stick around. I mean, that's a really long time.

John Dehlin [01:57:07] The ones that are worth being around will stick around.

Margi Dehlin [01:57:09] That's right. This is a conversation.

John Dehlin [01:57:12] This can be. We call this filtering, a sifting.

Michele Seamons [01:57:14] I've only had one person ever ask my Mormon story. 1. A dear friend and I sadly tried to record a Mormon story for her and it cut off at one hour.

Mike Seamons [01:57:26] And you spoke for one hour and

Michele Seamons [01:57:27] I spoke for three.

John Dehlin [01:57:29] Well, now you got six.

Michele Seamons [01:57:30] Now I got six. Now she has some content that she won't.

Margi Dehlin [01:57:34] Well, it's beautiful.

John Dehlin [01:57:35] Thank you so much for coming and for sharing your story. If people want to get a hold of you guys, how do they get a hold of you?

Mike Seamons [01:57:41] We. I write a substack on Seek Wonderway. I love your substack. If you go to seekwonderway.com you'll see S-E-E K wonderway.com. it's. I started it when we moved onto the boat and, you know, it's really where we talk about wandering on.

John Dehlin [01:57:58] We'll put that in the show notes.

Michele Seamons [01:58:00] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:58:00] Okay. That's the way you want people to reach out.

Mike Seamons [01:58:02] Yeah.

Michele Seamons [01:58:03] Come if you're ready to seek and find it. We're always open. The door is always open.

John Dehlin [01:58:09] Fun.

Margi Dehlin [01:58:09] Or you could always go to Satellite beach and go to the local grocery store. You never know, maybe Michele will be there and start chatting you up, all sorts of questions.

Michele Seamons [01:58:19] Or the beach or anywhere.

Mike Seamons [01:58:21] Wherever you are, we'll find you.

John Dehlin [01:58:23] Or Mike's little fire.

Mike Seamons [01:58:24] That's right.

Margi Dehlin [01:58:25] You'll see a fire.

Michele Seamons [01:58:26] We're there. Yep.

John Dehlin [01:58:27] All right, excellent. Well, thanks so much again for joining us. Margi, thanks for being with us today.

Michele Seamons [01:58:33] Sticking it up.

John Dehlin [01:58:34] You always make our episodes better.

Michele Seamons [01:58:36] So much better.

Margi Dehlin [01:58:37] Thank you.

Michele Seamons [01:58:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:58:38] Yeah. And thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. I'll be quick if you donate. Thanks. We couldn't do it without you. If you want to support this type of content, mormonstories.org donate. Become a monthly donor. If you want to apply like these fine people did. MormonStories.org apply is how you apply. Email us@mormonstoriesmail.com subscribe, like and share. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. Find wonder. Seek wonder. You can do it.

Michele Seamons [01:59:05] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:59:05] It's everywhere.

John Dehlin [01:59:06] It's everywhere. It's rich, poor.

Michele Seamons [01:59:09] Yeah. It doesn't matter.

John Dehlin [01:59:10] It's everywhere. Any color doesn't matter. Young, old, sickness and in health, you can find wonder where you are.

Michele Seamons [01:59:17] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:59:18] Yeah.

Mike Seamons [01:59:18] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:59:19] It's beautiful. In the name of Mike and Michele.

Michele Seamons [01:59:22] Mike and Michele.

Mike Seamons [01:59:23] Amen.

John Dehlin [01:59:24] Amen. The three L's, Margi, Mike and Michele.

Michele Seamons [01:59:28] Yep. We all agree.

Margi Dehlin [01:59:29] Mmm.

Michele Seamons [01:59:29] Jane, I was going to say in the voice of three witnesses, all things will be established. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:59:37] Take care, everybody. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. We'll see you all again soon. On another episode of Mormon Stories podcast.

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