I once dated a girl for about 18 months. We had planned to get married. We’d discussed the wedding, picked out a ring, and I’d even spoken with her dad to ask for his blessing. He gave it. That’s when things got crazy. While I was talking with him in a back room of their house, his wife discovered what was going on. She was furious. She stormed through the house, throwing pans and making it abundantly clear that she did not approve of me marrying her daughter. Why? Because she didn’t believe I would become an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I’m not kidding. That’s genuinely what this was about. She was convinced her daughter was supposed to marry a future apostle, and she’d apparently convinced her husband and daughter of the same thing. On multiple occasions, I was asked: “Do you think you could be called as a prophet of God?” How exactly does someone answer that? The best I could come up with was, “God qualifies those He calls. So I suppose if He wanted me to serve in that capacity, He’d qualify me to do so. But I certainly wouldn’t count on it.” Apparently, that wasn’t a satisfactory answer. The next day, her mother sat her down and told her: “I can’t stop you from marrying him, but when you think about who God wants you to marry, I know you’ll make the right choice.” The conversations continued. At one point, my girlfriend’s sister told me that their mother had chosen her husband for her. She admitted she hadn’t loved him at first, but said she’d grown to love him. Somehow, this was presented as further evidence that maybe her mother knew best about my relationship, too. Eventually, our relationship fell apart. In many ways, this was an incredible family. But in other ways, I think I dodged a major bullet. A year or two later, she reached out to say she was coming to town and asked if she could visit. I declined. I knew where that might lead, and I had no interest in reopening that chapter of my life. She’s since married and has a family of her own. I don’t know her husband or whether he’ll ever become an apostle. Though I did hear he has a tattoo, and I’ve never seen an apostle with one of those. Maybe he’ll be the first! 😂 As for me, I’m now married to an incredible woman, and we have two beautiful children who are my whole world. Sometimes I look back at the decisions I’ve made, the relationships that ended, and the heartbreaks I experienced along the way. It’s remarkable how differently my life could have turned out. But I can honestly say that if I could go back and do it all again, I’d willingly relive every heartbreak, every disappointment, and every difficult lesson, so long as the road still brought me here. To my wife. To my children. To the life I have today. I wouldn’t trade any of it for anything.