Episode 21: Al Carraway

Al Carraway is an LDS convert, writer, multi-award-winning speaker, and author to best-selling book, "More Than the Tattooed Mormon," and "Cheers to Eternity!".  Originally from New York, she now lives in Utah with her husband, Ben, and her two kids, Gracie and Christian.  Her passion it is to tell everyone that happiness exists, and it comes from the gospel of Jesus Christ.  She has won multiple awards for her work including the 2016 — Woman + Biz Award and the 2014 — Donald C. Sloan Speech Award.  On today's Episode, Nate and Drew chat with Al (once again from a closet) about her recent disastrous trip to the chiropractor (3:30), her day job working for the LDS church (10:00) and her backstory as a very rambunctious child (13:30).  They start to get into her conversion story before Al calls Nate out for asking the most obvious question about meeting the missionaries (16:30).  They talk about Al's life-changing moment and how she initially took the missionaries commitments as a challenge to prove them wrong (24:00).  Her move to Utah proves to be harder than she initially thought (27:00) but through adversity found her calling.  Al discusses the concept of "re-occuring thoughts" (32:00) and how they help her with decision making, and they discuss the role of faith and how it requires action and sometimes patience (38:00).  They toss around the logic of outcome vs the logic of appropriateness and how it can ease the stress of making important life choices, and how Al has become relevant through her gift to crystalize the feelings we all go through with her writing and speeches (43:00).  in our 7 seconds or less segment we learn a TON more about Al (52:00) including her take on the weirdness of Mormon culture (57:00) before finishing with our favorite hot seat question (01:00:00).