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LDS Podcast "Latter-Day Lights" - Inspirational LDS Stories
Popular LDS Podcast "Latter-Day Lights" gives members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints the opportunity to share their stories of inspiration and hope to other members throughout the world. Stories that members share on Latter-Day Lights are very entertaining, and cover a wide range of topics, from tragedy, loss, and overcoming difficult challenges, to miracles, humor, and uplifting conversion experiences! If you have an inspirational story that you'd like to share, hosts Scott Brandley and Alisha Coakley would love to hear from you! Visit LatterDayLights.com to share your story and be on the show.
LDS Podcast "Latter-Day Lights" - Inspirational LDS Stories
Addiction, Deception, and Living a Double Life — But God Never Gave up on Him: Martin Onken’s Story (Part 1)
What happens when bad choices and "small sins" spiral into life-altering consequences?
Martin Onken's raw testimony reveals how a single decision at age 16 to "sin a little" led to decades of deception and a double life that impacted countless people.
Born to Dutch-Indonesian parents who survived Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, Martin's childhood was marked by emotional disconnection and a desperate search for love.
Finding temporary solace in Catholicism, he developed a relationship with God that provided the affection his family life lacked. But everything changed when teenage Martin convinced himself that balancing sins with good deeds would keep him spiritually "in the black."
This distorted thinking created the perfect foundation for addiction and self-deception.
From a toxic first relationship to eventually becoming an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints while secretly maintaining a 30-year extramarital relationship, Martin shares the painful progression of his choices with unflinching honesty.
The most powerful revelation from this first half of Martin's story isn't the depth of his deception, but the persistence of God's love.
Despite deliberately turning away from divine guidance and ignoring multiple opportunities to change course, Martin testifies that "Heavenly Father will not give up on you, no matter what you have done."
For anyone who feels beyond redemption or trapped by their own choices, Martin's journey offers a glimpse of hope.
His testimony stands as both warning about the danger of small compromises and promise that divine love remains constant, even in our darkest moments.
Join us next week for the conclusion of Martin's remarkable story of repentance, healing, and finding his way back.
*** Please SHARE Martin's story and help us spread hope and light to others. ***
To WATCH this episode on YouTube, visit: https://youtu.be/8IvvCcAoGWc
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To READ Scott’s new book “Faith to Stay” for free, visit: https://www.faithtostay.com/
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Also, if you have a faith-promoting or inspiring story, or know someone who does, please let us know by going to https://www.latterdaylights.com and reaching out to us.
#LDSPodcast #ChristianStories #LatterDayLights
Hey everyone, I'm Scott Branley.
Speaker 2:And I'm Alicia Coakley. Every member of the church has a story to share, one that can instill faith, invite growth and inspire others.
Speaker 1:On today's special two-part episode, we're going to hear how one man lived a double life, battled a 30-year addiction and realized the power our choices have to affect the lives of others, even years after making them. Welcome to Latter-day Lights. Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Latter-day Lights. We're so glad you're here with us today. We're really excited to introduce our special guest, martin Onken, to the show. Welcome, martin.
Speaker 3:Hi, hi, thanks for having me yeah, of course.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for reaching out. We had a um a few minutes where we were able to talk to you a little bit more about your story and we decided it is just. There is just so much to it that we're going to put two parts to your story so that you can truly just get everything out in a way that doesn't feel rushed, where people can really understand like all the different things that led to the different things. And I, I'm just, I'm so excited. And, martin, I'm going to give a little spoiler. You shared with us that you haven't ever really shared your full story with anyone before, that this is going to be the first time that you haven't ever really shared your full story with anyone before. That. This is going to be the first time that you're you're just, you're just going, you're just ripping the band-aid off.
Speaker 2:There's no like you're just diving right in, right so we're so honored that you, that you found our, our podcast and that you chose to let this be the platform where you share your story first, and we're just we're very excited to hear about your testimony and how it's grown and just the way that all the things you went through helped you to become who you are today. So before we get into that, though, we need to know who is Martin Alkin Like? Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 3:Sure, sure. So I'm an immigrant to the United States. I'm of Dutch Indonesian heritage and we immigrated here when I was five. I lived most of our life in Southern California. I'm married there, I have a family of four children that I have there, and I have a small business that I operate. I'm a convert to the church and I jumped in with both feet in activity in the church and I'm really grateful for it. It was one of the best decisions of my life, so I'm glad to be here, thank you.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. So you have a small business. What's your business? Can I ask?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I rent RVs to people that are going on vacations. Oh, it's a really fun business. Everybody's in a good mood, you get to share stories with people and the good and the bad and you get to be part of people's lives as they try to do things together with their family and their friends, to create bonding experiences, and so we're a part of that. I love that. Yeah, it's a great business.
Speaker 2:So you rent RVs, I rent a venue space.
Speaker 3:So your people can get in their.
Speaker 2:RV and come, travel to my venue and then have a big old party and then, scott, I don't know you're going to have to do something with their computer or their Google reviews. Scott's businesses are nerdy and helpful and super important, but I can't even explain them, if I tried.
Speaker 1:It was close. I can collect the reviews for the party.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:Perfect. Well, I know your story. There's a lot to it. Some of it is kind of more on the adult side, so if you have kids watching this, you might want to just watch it first maybe.
Speaker 2:Yeah, nothing inappropriate. But no, there's just some adult themed content that might be a little hard for kids to understand and yeah to fully grasp.
Speaker 1:So, um, but we want, we want you to be able to share your story. That's why I'm just giving that little disclaimer out there, because I want you to be able to share it the way you want to share it, but I don't want anyone to have any surprises. So, yeah, um, yeah, we, we look forward to hearing what you have to say and I think this is going to be a great episode. Thanks for having the courage to yeah, yeah, the first of two episodes, but thanks for having the courage to actually come on and share it. A lot of times, when people go through the things that you're going to talk about, they don't want to share it because it's hard, people don't want to admit that they've made mistakes in life, and but actually, by sharing it, you give other people courage and you give them the ability to maybe make different choices in their lives, and, and so I appreciate that you're willing to do that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you're welcome. I'm uh, I'm eager to do it, but I'm scared to death to do it because, yeah, it is my first time, and one of the effects of the kind of choices I made and the lifestyle that that led to was that you conveniently forget many things because they're just too painful to remember and carry with you. And so through my journey, I have forgotten a lot of things, probably deliberately, psychologically and so I am to this day, you know, 10, 15 years later still trying to piece stuff together. So I definitely still am in a process, but I have come a long way. I am grateful that I've made better choices now than I had earlier in my life, and so, as it comes together, I'm sure that my memories are going to come back. It's going to be a lot better, yeah, a lot better. But yeah, my story really started with my parents, because my parents are immigrants and I just want to give you a little bit of a background because it kind of will help you understand how I got the way I am.
Speaker 3:So both my mom and my dad lived in Indonesia, which is a colony of the Netherlands. Well, during World War II, indonesia because it was rich in natural resources, especially oil, was invaded by the Japanese and both my mother and my father were placed in Japanese prisoner of war camps when they were teenagers and because of that they didn't really have a chance to grow emotionally very well, and so they both are suffering from PTSD. After the war they finally get out of prisoner of war camp. They're now living in Indonesia again, but they have only the clothes on their back. Everything that their families have is taken away. Because they weren't purebred Indonesians, because they also had the Dutch colonial blood in them, also had the Dutch colonial blood in them, they were kicked out of Indonesia because Indonesia at that time became communist and only wanted to have pure Indonesian people living in the country. So they were forcibly made to leave Indonesia only with their clothes on their back, so to speak, and they had to go to their mother country, which was the Netherlands. Well, they moved to the Netherlands totally different climate, totally different culture. They had no idea what. That was Very traumatic for them, just exacerbated their PTSD. And after a few years in the Netherlands I was born there and then they were forced to leave the Netherlands because of the great amount of prejudice against the Indonesians, who they were looked at as inferior people and so again they were forced to leave. So they immigrated twice to the United States and then, at the age of five, we arrived here in the United States a week to maybe two weeks after.
Speaker 3:I am here in the States, I am enrolled in a public school. I don't know the language. I look different, I smell different, I dress different. You know everything about me is different. The kids there, the teachers there, think I'm really weird and really strange. They've never seen an Indonesian. They have no idea anything about me. I don't know what's going on, I don't know where to go, what to do, and so I become very, very, um, introverted and very shy and I also become the object of a lot of prejudice.
Speaker 3:So this is in the early 1960s and so prejudice was pretty common and um, yeah, so um, together with my parents being, you know, like, suffering from PTSD and this also being a new country for them, they really had a hard time emotionally bonding with me and being sensitive to my needs. They brought a lot of the Indonesian culture, the Dutch culture and their interpretation of the American culture into our home and tried to act like the best parents they could, and they tried really hard but they had no idea. Especially having gone through the war, where they were so protective of their feelings, they had no idea how to express their feelings. So, for instance, in my home, my parents never said I love you. Home, my parents never said I love you. My father especially never hugged me, and my mother very rarely. There were always a lot of rules, there's always a lot of structure, but there was no affection. There was no real conversations other than giving instructions. This is what you have to do. This is what you have to learn. So it was a really difficult home.
Speaker 3:How it affected me was that I had a hard time feeling any love from them and that I carried on into my early years in grade school. I have a brother and sister. They're both younger than me. They rebelled and they suffered, suffered terribly. They both have passed from leading hard lives, a lot of drug abuse and stuff like that, and so they passed as a consequence of that behavior. My behavior was I tried to be the good kid, I tried to be obedient. I tried to do what they wanted to do. I wanted to try to earn their love. I figured that if I followed all the rules and I said the right things and did the right things, that I would get their love. So from a very early age I really wanted to get their love. My brother and my sister didn't really care because they just fought it and rebelled. So that's the kind of background to what I was like psychologically was a lot like other kids.
Speaker 3:I think One of the good things that happened to me when I was in the third grade is that my parents put me in Catholic school and so we started going to school, catholic school, we started going to church and I started learning about God and his love for me. And I'm triggering on that word love and I'm saying, okay, all right, maybe they can't do it for me, but they're putting me in the right place. You know they're going to do it and the priests are going to do it, you know, and I'm learning about God's love and I really, to heart, I just gravitated to that. That was my thing. I was going to develop a relationship with God and it did happen. As I went through school and I went through all the classes and went to church and stuff like that, I really considered, you know, god and Jesus Christ to be my best friends and I could talk to them about anything. I could just share everything and in doing that I could really feel their love and that really worked for me for a long time.
Speaker 3:It saved me in those early years. So I didn't. It saved me in those early years so I didn't have a lot of hatred from my parents or anger or anything like that. I was able to accept them for what they were. They were doing the best that they could do with what they had and that I could compensate for that by a relationship with God and Jesus Christ. And that worked out really good, and in fact it kind of worked out too good, because what was happening now was I was getting friends and like they were doing all kinds of stuff that was fun, you know, in high school and junior high. You know they were getting a bottle of Spaniada wine and going out in the neighborhood mortuary and having a good time and I was sitting at home, you know, thinking about God and talking to Jesus and I was like leading a kind of a boring life. And as a 16-year-old I was just like thinking, okay, I'm doing good, but I'm feeling love, but I'm not really happy Because I see all my friends doing other stuff and they seem just fine. They're going to the same church, they're going to the same school and they're doing stuff that I'm not doing. So that's when I made a big turn in my life, and I would say that this is probably one of the top two or three events well, maybe not two or three, maybe four or five events in my life.
Speaker 3:And at the age of 16, I clearly remember getting in the car and it was an old Buick Special that my parents bought me for $400. And I drove it up to the local canyon near my house and I sat there and I was thinking and I was praying and I finally made this decision. I told myself you know what? I don't have to be that good, martin. You don't have to be good all the time. You don't have to try to be good all the time. It's okay to sin sometimes. God will forgive you, you'll survive it. It's okay to do that. And I remember saying that to myself and I remember thinking to myself ooh, that could be a little dangerous, you know, playing around with sin, but that's about as far as I went as a 16-year-old. I didn't really think about it any more than that. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to do that, I'm just going to be cautious, I'm just going to sin a little bit, but God will still love me and my parents are fine and my friends are fine. You know, I'm going to get a little bit more relaxed than the friends I have and I will just start picking, you know, a bigger variety of friends that can take me to parties and, you know, get me my bottle of Spaniada and, you know, get me in the R-rated movies and stuff like that. And so I made that decision.
Speaker 3:Little did I know at the time that that decision would change my life, and I forgot about it for a while and I just started doing things just like normal teenagers in high school. I would go to a lot of parties and I would drink and I would get drunk. I tried marijuana. I wasn't really bad, but I was just playing around with that stuff you know as enough so that I could tell myself, yeah, you're still really a good guy. Yeah, you're still, you know, jesus's best friend. Yeah, you know, you've kind of broken some rules, but it's not that bad because you're always going to the right side.
Speaker 3:At the same time, I was learning something in school that I'm not sure if the nuns meant to teach me this or if that's just how I interpreted it, but they told me, or I heard. Maybe what I wanted to hear was that if you sinned and did bad stuff, then that would be one thing, but yet you could offset it by doing more good stuff. So it was kind of like a counterbalance or a balancing scale. Also, you've got the sins over here, but you've got a lot of the good stuff over here, and I was really good at doing a lot of the good stuff. So I thought, okay, you know, so if I do sins as long as the scale is still in my favor, then I'm good, you know.
Speaker 3:And at the end of my life, you know, and I meet God or whoever is going to be the judge in heaven, they'll open my book of life and they'll see all my sins on one side and all my good deeds on the other side and they'll say, oh, you're in because you did way more good stuff than bad stuff. You know what? I really believe that? And you know what I really believe that. In fact, I hate to admit it, but I told that later on, after I joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I told some other people, church leaders, that that was what I believed, that they just started laughing at me. You know as like what? You know, where do you get that? And that's when I finally started thinking about well, that's not right. But up until that time, which was in my 30s, I really believed that if I could just balance the good and the bad, everything would work out fine. Little did I know that those two events in my life were Satan starting to try to take control of my life.
Speaker 3:And he led me to these just two little things that seemed like, you know, innocent enough decisions, but that if I had spiritual eyes to see later in my life, I would have seen that they were probably two of the most dangerous things that I've ever done. And those two things changed the projection of my life because now I felt I had a license to do more sin if I felt I needed to or wanted to, and all I had to do was try to do more good stuff in order to tip the scale in my favor. And I taught that to my children and I'm just ashamed that I did that, but I did because I was just so convinced, you know, that I believed everything the nun said. So of course that was right and so I did that. So now that's the attitude that I carry on into high school. It's not really a big problem.
Speaker 3:I was an athlete in high school so I tried to take pretty good care of myself. So you know, I didn't do a lot of drinking or a lot of marijuana or anything like that. I didn't smoke a lot but just dabbled a little bit. I didn't, you know, get involved with girls. I went to an all-boys Catholic high school, so didn't have too much opportunity for that. Of course, that led to another series of problems later on, but I graduated and did fine, and so I thought, oh, I've got it made. I graduated from high school. I got a soccer scholarship to play soccer in Hawaii, the University of Hawaii, the University of Hawaii. I got it Another scholarship offer to go to Loyola Marymount University, here Academic scholarship. So I was like my life is good, the decisions I've made so far in my life are good, so I'm just going to keep working those decisions and I'm just going to keep this balance in my life. And so I always started this balance and I was feeling good about myself. But as I got older I started to want and need love again, especially love from females from the other sex, because I was getting romantic and I was becoming attracted to girls and stuff like that. And so this attraction and this need to feel affection and love from women came into my life and so I applied the two to my life and so I applied the two laws or the two guidelines that I had in my life in my relationship with women, and that then exploded into some terrible decisions. So the first decision was that I met a woman.
Speaker 3:I was in college, I turned down the University of Hawaii scholarship and I took the academic, went to Loyola and was doing homework in a library one time and I met this girl. She's older than me, she's attractive, she's outgoing. We started talking there in the library, come to find out she's also Dutch-Indonesian like me. There's like two of them in all of California and I met her there at the library and my mind of course, not having dated a lot in high school because I went to an all-boys school I thought, jackpot, this is it, you know she is it. And we started having a relationship and the relationship quickly became very intense, quickly became very intense.
Speaker 3:I kind of wanted intensity because I wanted to feel a lot of love, because I got like next to no love from my parents and I was trying to get something that would break through the rules and really touch my heart and just really give me that kind of happiness. It's hard for me to explain, but I started this relationship with her and it became very, very intense. My parents saw that happening and they tried to put on the breaks right away, but but of course I interpreted that as being you know more rules. I'm trying, you know, more and more strict with me. So I I ended up breaking up with my parents and and um, telling them, hey, because they told me, uh, you know, it's either us or her, but she's poison for you. And I said, well, you know, I choose her. And so I cut off my relations with my parents. Now that was really difficult, and so I became even more emotionally involved with this other woman and I moved in with her. I lived with her.
Speaker 3:We had a very intense relationship that had Mount Everest highs and had the lowest abyss that you could think of. But every time I was thinking, well, if this is a bad time we're going through, if I'm just good enough, then it'll balance off and I could earn her love. And so it became this thing of you know, real high highs and real low, lows. And then we got into other issues. In that love, in that relationship, jealousy became a real real. She became super, super, super jealous of me. In fact it cost me two different jobs because she was just, you know, calling me all the time at work like call me, hang up, call me, hang up, call me, hang up, that kind of thing. It just got crazy. In fact I do. You, you know, refer to her as my crazy girlfriend, but I found that very exciting. In addition to um being a lot of trouble, it was exciting because I felt wanted right, I felt like her jealousy was that she wanted me because she loved me, and she loved me so intensely that she would drop all her boundaries in order to have me and to possess me.
Speaker 3:So that's the third big mistake that I made is I decided to drop my boundaries, my safeguards, the rules that I had been taught by the nuns in the Catholic Church and by my parents. I decided that I could live on and make decisions based on my feelings alone and not have to have a structure of boundaries or rules. And not have to have a structure of boundaries or rules. And not having that, of course, allowed me to have lots of really intense love-like or love-imitating experiences with this other woman no-transcript. And so I just now have really nothing solid to lean on in making decisions in my life and, because my parents or I had cut things off with my parents, I didn't have really anybody to talk to about this, and that was my fourth big mistake was that I isolated myself because everybody that knew about it was against this, and so I isolated myself and I did not talk to anybody about it. I did not let anybody know what was going on, and she was really happy with that because now she had me all to herself and she would reward me accordingly. And so this relationship just kept growing and growing and growing in intensity. More and more boundaries dropped, more and more I was relying just on my feelings, especially the feeling of love. You know, through physical contact and through all these mind games, that that intense feeling of love, of being wanted, of the attraction, of the chemical attraction, that that was all good and that the price for that was that the people who didn't like it just you know, had to go away. And so I was in that relationship for four years.
Speaker 3:And when I got out of high school, you know, into my early 20s, it cost me my college education, cost me my, my uh scholarship, you know.
Speaker 3:I had to go to work and some jobs that I couldn't keep because she would always, you know, show up over there or call or do all kinds of crazy things that would interfere with my work there, and so I'd get fired from them. So I quickly ran into debt really, and for a young guy in his 20s, you know, I didn't have much education, much work experience, right yeah, but I kept spending money because I wanted to police her. So if she wanted to go out, if she wanted to do something, I did it, and I just found a way to not pay my bills so I could afford to please her. Yeah, at that time too, and it was a sign that I just ignored was that she became a hoarder, that she just self-abused herself. Number one and number two would hoard everything. So the little single apartment that we had together was just filled with more and more junk and I'd clean it up and then she'd just get more into it, and so it just became unbearable into it and so it it just became, became unbearable.
Speaker 2:So it sounds like you both had like some deep trauma. That was really kind of playing into all of your decisions, Right? And it's like and she's feeding yours and it's just making it a terrible situation for you both.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was like you know her, you know our fit if you want to call it a perfect fit was maybe like the perfect storm. Yeah, you know, we both fed into each other's weaknesses or traumas, or whatever you want to call it, and it really just became crazy making and, um, I didn't know what to do. You know, I didn't have anybody to talk to because I I have cut off my parents and my family, and my brother and my sister they kind of had their own issues too. So so that was it. I was focusing mainly on my feelings, and she knew it, and she knew how to work my feelings, you know, and I knew how to work hers, so that I could get that kind of love that I thought that I needed or that I wanted, and so I was willing to do anything to get that. So that was the beginning of my addiction.
Speaker 3:so I had the start of a sexual addiction or an addiction to a person yeah so I would go later on, um, I would go to arp meetings and stuff like that, and I couldn't really. I didn't really relate to the pornography guys because I had a different thing, and so I had a little bit of a difficult time in recovery from that. But I didn't realize that I was becoming addicted. And now, looking back on it, you know, and saying, okay, well, what did I learn from all that? You know, besides the four big mistakes that I just told you about? I learned, or I started thinking, where did this change happen and how could I have made that decision to start sinning and be okay with it, to start sinning and be okay with it? When did I start deciding that I could counterbalance a sin, no matter what it was, with good stuff? Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, and I did have this thought, that sin comes from Satan. I had learned that in Catholic school, and so I thought it must be Satan.
Speaker 3:I had learned that in Catholic school and so I thought, yeah, it must be Satan. And I thought, okay, now that I know it's Satan, I can fight it. And just to kind of show you how crazy my thinking was at the time, this movie the Exorcist came out one time Right right, I remember that. So it had just come out. So I take this girl I mean we go to see this movie the Exorcist and I get this thing about, oh, satan can like the devil can like control you and possess you, and stuff like that. And so my mind said she's crazy because she's possessed. That must be why she has that. I didn't have the maturity to think, oh, she has these emotional problems or whatever. And so that night, okay, she has another. I'm going to call it a crazy episode. And so here's what I did. I said to myself okay, satan, you are controlling her and I love her so much and she loves me so much that I am strong enough. I want you to come into me and I will take that. And I tell you what.
Speaker 3:That was the most scary night of my life. My body started shaking. It started getting really hot. I felt like I was starting to lift off the bed. I quickly shut that off and I said no, I changed my mind, I'm not doing this anymore. Yeah, that was really dangerous. You know, I didn't really realize at the time. You know what Satan was all about. I definitely have a strong testimony now of Satan's power and Satan's cunning and Satan's intelligence, and you know that understanding now has served me well because he continues to tempt me and test me almost every day, and so I'm glad that now I'm more able to see it and understand what's happening. But at that time I didn't. At that time I was too caught up in my addiction and I needed to explain that woman's craziness to make it okay, because the scales were really during this time, they were really out of balance. I wasn't going to church, I wasn't doing any good stuff because I was totally immersed in my relationship with her. So the sin part now really outweighed the good part.
Speaker 2:And were you already a member of the church at this point? Sin part now greatly outweighed the good part. Were you already a member of the church at this point? No.
Speaker 3:I was a member of the Catholic church. A non-practicing member. I quit after high school, going to church, because everybody had it all figured out right.
Speaker 2:You knew everything at 18.
Speaker 3:You knew everything already, you know. So I was like aye, aye, aye. Anyway, I lived through this for four years at that level. Finally it just got to be more than we could bear. It became a matter for me of survival. I could not survive that relationship. I feared for my life. The love wasn't enough. I certainly still felt the love. It certainly was intense, it certainly was everything in that. But the crazy part just got too crazy and so I feared for my life and so I broke it off with her. Just as kind of a sidelight, we didn't really. I broke it off with her pretty suddenly. It was really difficult. So we still had some unfinished business. Well, to make a long story short, we break up. She leaves to go to Holland again to be with her parents and recover. She's gone for about six months. She feels she's recovered, she feels she's back, she's normal. Now she comes back and, because we have some unfinished business, we make contact again with each other. Within a week we're back into the same relationship over again.
Speaker 2:Wow, that really is like an addiction, yeah, and for those who haven't been in it, they don't understand it and they just think why are you so dumb? Why are you? They don't understand it and they just think, well, why are you so dumb, why are you doing that? Don't you know? Whatever, whatever. But when you have that, when you have that person that, you're like what, why is this person? My kryptonite? And yet I still keep going back and I still, you know, there really is something, something, some hole that they fill, some need that they fill on a weird level that makes it so, so hard to be logical and to use common sense. And you're like it's don't. I don't know about you. For me it always felt like an out-of-body experience, like I would watch myself make a bad choice in being in a relationship with someone I shouldn't be with, and I just couldn't stop doing it and I'm like what are you doing, alicia? Like, I'm like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Was that similar to you or?
Speaker 3:That's so true. Yeah, because the you know the dopamine you get I didn't know that was what it was at the time, but the chemical thing that goes on in your brain, just you know, recreates reality for you, and I really believe that that's what addiction does is that your mind gets reprogrammed to create its own reality, based on whatever its traumas or its needs are Love.
Speaker 2:that explanation. That is the simplest, most accurate explanation I've ever heard. Ever. The addiction recreates a reality.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it really does.
Speaker 2:It's so so instantly too.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so it justifies the addiction. It's like, okay, so that's what it is.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's reality.
Speaker 3:I'm good with that. Wow. And that reality is twisted not only by your emotional needs or whatever, but also because chemically your brain now gets rewired right. I learned that later on that your brain then gets reprogrammed and rewired. So you've got both the psychological and emotional side and now your chemical in your brain.
Speaker 3:Your physiology has changed, so the addiction is just really, really difficult, and I didn't really understand that at the time. And so, anyway, we're back together again Within two days. Her recovery has gone to heck and my recovery, whatever it was, didn't last any, and we were back into it. Luckily, within about six months or so we both realized that it wasn't going to work again, and so we did split up, and that was one of the best decisions of my life. And that's when something else really great happened in my life, which, looking back on it now, is Heavenly Father interceding in my life. He's let me go on this long and he's just kind of let me work it out and learn it on my own, because I was really stubborn about it. I was just so convinced I was right. So here's what happens I break up with my girlfriend, she leaves and I haven't to this day spoken to her.
Speaker 3:Two days later, my dad is at my doorstep. My dad is at my doorstep. He knocks on the door, open the door. He says hi. He says, can I come in? And I said, okay. I'm still mourning this loss. I feel totally out of whack because my addiction, love source, all of that supply is gone. And my dad comes in and he says can we start over? And he gives me the biggest hug. Oh wow, that's all he says can we start over? He's never hugged me while playing. He's, you know, kind of giving me bear hugs, but he's never hugged me out of affection. He's always been judgmental you're doing this right? You're not doing this. You can do this better. You should do this. That's what prisoner of war was rules and following rules, and if you don't, you get punished. So that was his way of running his life. He didn't judge anything, he just said can we start over? Can we forget everything in the past? Can we start over?
Speaker 2:Now, who does that?
Speaker 3:That is a Christ-like thing. That is a Christ-like thing. That is a Christ-like thing. I didn't realize it at the time. I just thought it was my dad just wanting to start over.
Speaker 3:But now I realize that somewhere, somehow I don't know how that happened but Heavenly Father stepped in and said I know you're hurting right now. I know you're lost. I know you need your family. Your family is important. That's what he said to my dad. And then my dad said your mom doesn't know that I'm here, but I want you to come over in an hour for dinner.
Speaker 3:And so I did. So I said okay, he got back in his 64 Chevy station wagon, drove home and an hour later I showed up at the door. It was a surprise to my mom.
Speaker 2:How did she take it?
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh, she just started crying. She couldn't move her legs. She was standing in the kitchen just making dinner because my dad said somebody's coming over, so of course the Dutch thing is to make a big meal for everybody, right? And she couldn't move her legs, she just started crying and so I walked in and I gave her the biggest hug, and then my dad came in and we had this group hug and it was wonderful.
Speaker 2:Wow, had your siblings passed away at that point.
Speaker 3:My siblings? Yeah, no, my siblings were still alive. They were still alive, yeah, but they were not very close to my parents. They both were heavily into drugs and that lifestyle. And my sister had married a guy and was living in Arizona. My brother had married a gal and they were living somewhere else in Southern California, so they didn't have too much contact with them. So that was Heavenly Father to the rescue. It really was. That was a great thing. That was really a great thing.
Speaker 3:So that started to help me heal and I didn't realize at the time that. And my friend, to this day, he tells me he says god's in charge. You know, there are no coincidences, even though I wasn't a member of the church, even though I had this modified catholicism going on in my head, um, god is in charge. When need it, when we really are down, we need it, he will step in with as much influence or as much force or whatever it is to get our attention. I believe that If we need a little whisper, he can give us a little whisper. If we need a pop on the side of the head to get our attention, he'll do that and I'm so grateful that that's the God that I worship, and he did that for me when I was not deserving. So I had a great relationship with my parents after that until the days that they died. They're both passed now and it's wonderful. It was really, really wonderful. And I got back on track with my life. I got a better job to work for Walt Disney designing rides for the amusement park. Really, I got like, ah, I've got a good job, you know, in this.
Speaker 3:Went back to school this time, went to a local Southern California university there Met another woman there in the political science class, there in the political science class, and this woman was like okay, she's not crazy, that was like the first criteria. And so that worked out. Great, she wasn't crazy, she was smart. She, you know, was a legal secretary. She was beautiful. We clicked, you know. We felt a lot of affection, attraction, I mean, it all was like the perfect formula, except there wasn't the craziness.
Speaker 3:And so I met this woman at the beginning of the semester in September and by February we were married and so that was like, okay, my life is going in the right direction. Now, you know, I've got, you know, a woman. That isn't crazy that we click on so many levels. We both were about 25 at the time, so we both had been in other relationships. So we kind of thought that we knew what we wanted and we just got married. And she comes from a great family and they didn't practice any particular religion, but they were a good family and so we were married in February. The next January we had our first child. The next January after that we had our second child. So we ended up having four kids in five and a half years.
Speaker 3:That took years, cloth diapers, right. So we were in cloth diapers, you know, up to here for five years, you know, because they didn't really have too many years for diapers those days. So I was like you know. So we did that. But my addiction started to pop up during that time. We were married. When our third child came, we joined the church, or I joined the church. He was already an inactive member and I joined the church. After a really long conversion process, I joined the church. After a really long conversion process, I joined the church and immediately became really active in the church.
Speaker 3:But this addiction thing came up again and so I kept feeling this need she was giving all her attention to the kids. She really didn't want to have kids to begin with. She was a professional, you know. She was a legal secretary, she had a professional career. She didn't really want to have kids. If she did, maybe one, maybe two, but she didn't feel that traditional motherhood was really her role. And so when we had kids so quickly, they all were a big surprise. Especially the first one was a really big surprise. You know, she had a hard time with it and I had a hard time not with the kids so much, but that she became depressed and we had all these kids together at the same time and so it was really difficult for her. You know her affection, the chemistry that we had just started to go away With each subsequent child.
Speaker 3:I felt that that love that we had was starting to dwindle on her part. I felt that she was forced into motherhood, that she didn't really want, that she had to give up her career, that she didn't really want to give up, that she worked hard to achieve, and that those two things and several others. We ended up having some intimacy issues at the time and stuff that I started feeling like, hey, she's changing. She's not the woman that I married. That was a big mistake. I started focusing. It's like I did a really cruel thing. It's because it's like, okay, we're married now. We didn't have any children or newlyweds. We were really happy. We had our first child.
Speaker 3:It was a surprise, my oldest son, we had our first child. It was a surprise, my oldest son and she started changing as her body changed and stuff, and so, you know, the relationship started changing. So the cruel thing I did was that I said, okay, she'll get back on track, so I'll give her a year, get back on track. So I'll give her a year. And I just made this kind of an you know internal clock or you know a deadline, so to speak, and okay. But then what happened was the second child came, you know, 13 months later. And so, guess what? She was back in the same thing there. And so, guess what? She was back in the same thing. Yeah, so it's okay, I'll give her another 12 months.
Speaker 3:So, of course, me in my mind, I'm suffering through my addiction, isn't getting fed, I'm suffering through this. I am the victim, right? I love these children, but my wife is gone, no-transcript, and when we had the second child, I was almost totally convinced that she was a totally changed person. I didn't realize that she was going through depression, or maybe it was postpartum depression or something. I had no idea that was happening. I did know that she felt terrible and felt resentful and somewhat angry for having to give up her career to be a mother, which she didn't particularly want to have, especially when we didn't plan these children. And so we talked about it and we decided that what she should do would be to go back to work, and so we arranged for her to go back to work as a legal secretary, okay. And we got a babysitter to take care of the two kids and that worked okay.
Speaker 3:For a while she was starting to feel better about herself. She was getting out of the house, she was getting more dressed up to go to work because she was working for a law firm again and stuff. So she was feeling better about that. And then, boom, third child comes, and so after a short while she's forced to quit again, and so it spirals back in the same way and this time I'm sure like she's changed now because she could have, in my mind, she could have, you know, either not gotten pregnant the third time or she could have, um, continued in the job longer. She could have realized that the that, you know, this was a temporary thing and she would eventually be able to go back to work.
Speaker 3:So I just had all these things going through my mind of what the possibilities were, of what she could do so that I could get, and I never, during that time, really looked at myself as to what my part in this was. Why didn't I? Well, guess what? I was really active in the church, okay. I was the elders quorum president. I was a member of the bishopric. You know, I visited the poor and the needy, I gave people blessings, I taught all these classes and I did all this good stuff. So my personal scale was that, oh, the good stuff was really high and the sin part now was really low. So I was feeling good about myself in that respect, like I don't have to change, I have a right now to get what I want. And so that was like the start of the end really, because at that point I had started to really started writing the relationship off.
Speaker 3:I remember we hung around with some other families in the church and we became really good friends and one of them would tell me he was aware of some of these issues that were going on. He kept telling me divorce is not an option. Divorce is not an option. You will not even mention that word and that helped me for a little while. But I didn't know what to do with that. You know I started interpreting that like okay, you have to suffer through this for the rest of your life and I'm like and I'm like what I'm not going to be able to get any love for the rest of my life. I have a wife now who's resentful, who's angry, who's depressed? What do I do? And so I just started going to a really bad place.
Speaker 3:I started trying to do more and more good stuff. I tried to be a good husband. I figured maybe if I do more things, she switched professions later on to be a nurse and so I would take her lunches in the middle of the night and take the kids with me in the car and we'd go do that. I would do a lot of things to show her how much I loved her, to try to rekindle that. But it didn't seem to happen and I didn't really take enough effort to try and understand her side of it. I was just focused on my side and what a good guy I was. Because I was doing all this good stuff in the church and everybody loved me. All the people in the ward loved me. All the people in the stake loved me, especially the older women, because I would always take care of them. I would always take care of them. I'd give them front seat at stake conference, you know, so that they could be close to whoever the visiting authority was and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:And everybody loved me except my wife, that's where you really wanted it from, huh.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. And so I felt stuck and so I started more and more thinking divorce. The fourth child came and I was like, okay, almost unbearable. Then I was more and more convinced that she didn't love me anymore. She had changed, she was just going through the motions and now she felt trapped in the marriage. Maybe I was projecting because I was feeling trapped and so I started let me back up a minute, so anyway. So this is where we were.
Speaker 3:I'm super active in the church. She's marginally active in the church. She would do things like ditch out in the second hour or the third hour and go to Taco Bell with her friend after sacrament meeting and come back when the kids and I got out of the block, that kind of thing. And anyway, I was everybody's hero, I was the spiritual guy. I gave the best blessings and the best prayers and all that stuff, and I didn't really try to see her side of it. Later on she would tell me, as we were getting divorced, she would tell me Martin, you don't get it, you don't get it. I kept telling her what don't I get? What don't I get? I'm doing everything I possibly can to be a good father and a good husband what don't I get? She goes you don't get it. Still to this day I'm not 100% sure of what I didn't get. I wish I could. I think about that every day. What didn't?
Speaker 2:I get.
Speaker 3:Because I didn't get it, our marriage fell apart. To prevent that marriage from going to divorce, my brain made big mistake number five. What I thought I could do was that, if I needed that love and that physical expression of love and that excitement and that dopamine and addiction and everything like that, there was a woman that expressed interest in me and I responded and I started a relationship with another woman. And I started a relationship with another woman and so I figured okay, I have a wife at home and a family at home and my church life and all of that. I have that, but this one hole that I didn't have filled I could fill with this other woman and I thought that all I would need to do would be to do it, you know, for a month or so, just temporarily, when things would get better. Well, it didn't. And so that's what started a 30-year relationship with this other woman, concurrent with all the other stuff I was doing, concurrent with all the other stuff I was doing. And my wife, when she finally found out, she says well, how did you have time to do all that? And I was a really good liar and I was a really good cheater and I kept trying to do more and more good things to offset the bad things, and so that's where we ended up.
Speaker 3:So this woman that I started this relationship with I can't even call it an affair, because it was much more involved than that.
Speaker 3:It didn't really involve a love relationship other than the physical love I felt from her and the desire that she had for me.
Speaker 3:I interpreted that as love, but I didn't feel that same desire back and so I used her. I just used her. You know, she was willing to come at my beck and call, so to speak, and as long as I gave her her hour a week or whatever you want to call it, she was happy with that hour a week or whatever you want to call it. She was happy with that, and that fit right into the convenience slot that I had in my life. I didn't have more than you know, theoretically an hour a week, but that was enough to satisfy my addiction and still keep my regular life intact. And by being such a good guy at church and at work, I was developing some reputation in my RV rental business and stuff like that in the industry that I felt like, okay, I'm doing all this good stuff and so that's justifying it. My next big mistake was that during this 30 years, heavenly Father reached out to me many times.
Speaker 3:Many, many times and I knew it at the time because now I'm smart enough in the church. I've been in the church now for 20 years or so and I'm smart enough in there. I know the doctor now. I know that Heavenly Father reaches out. I knew he was reaching out to me. I'll give you a couple of examples. One time I had a birthday. This woman that I had the relationship with she gets tickets tickets for his and her spa massage. I walk into the the day we decide to do this. I walk into the spa. Guess who's at the reception desk? A girl who was in the seminary class that I taught just a few years previous. Oh, oh, my gosh. I ran out of there so quick. I pretended I was a doctor that got an emergency call and had to leave. There was another time. There was another time that this other woman became pregnant and we had a daughter together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how did that work? Did you see your daughter? Yeah, did you see your daughter? Yeah.
Speaker 3:During that hour a week I would also see the daughter, and of course there were some times when it would be an evening or something like that, more time, but it was on pretty much the same kind of arrangement and the same schedule. Of course, now there was a lot of tension between her and I because she wanted me now to be the father of this daughter. She wanted both of the families to blend together, or for me to leave my wife and my family and be with her and the daughter, and so there was this. You know, anyway, all that tension was a little exciting to me because of the addiction, because of the desire that she had for me, which I would interpret as love, even though I was trying to push it away. The fact that she wanted me and would do just about anything to get me made me feel really intensely loved.
Speaker 3:So another time Heavenly Father reached out to me. So I agreed one time to take this daughter, who was probably three, maybe four years old at the time, to Disneyland four years old at the time, to Disneyland. So I took a day off and fabricated some story that I told my wife and I went and took them to Disneyland. I'm at Disneyland and I run into a member of my ward and his family there. Wow, you know it's like each time. I know this is Heavenly Father. Now he's stepping up his game to try and touch me, try to wake me up and say Martin, what are you doing, you and your other life, with church, people right in your face while you're sinning? Come on, now, wake up.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 3:I didn't.
Speaker 2:So did you feel guilt, like while you were having this relationship with this other woman, or did you just kind of feel numbness, or did you feel totally justified, like what was, because like did you compartmentalize it? Yeah, how do you? How do you, you know, feel the spirit and go to church and do all the things and, like for 30 years, have this whole secret life? That is very not in line with the gospel.
Speaker 3:I violated every covenant that I made. I made every temple covenant, everything, and I knew it at the time. But I would just stuff it away in a compartment Saying I have to do this in order to keep my family together. That's how twisted the addiction had become over 30 years. Because when I was 16 years old I made that decision that it was okay to sin a little bit. Well, there's nothing like sinning a little bit.
Speaker 1:Wow yeah.
Speaker 3:It got so bad one time.
Speaker 3:So I was driving to meet this woman and I was. You know, there was so much stress between us because of her wanting to be the father of this child and be with them and the family that I was praying for Heavenly Father to help me get out of it. I couldn't get out of it For the last eight or nine years of the relationship. I really wanted to get out of it but I couldn't. Eight or nine years of the relationship, I really wanted to get out of it but I couldn't. And I remember at that kind of a junction time I was going to see her. I hadn't seen her in a while and I was praying and I was talking to Heavenly Father and I said I know I tipped the scales in the wrong direction. I know that this is wrong, I know this is bad, I've got to change this.
Speaker 3:And then I remember in a split instance saying I don't care, I don't care if I go to hell, I don't care, I don't care if I go to hell, I don't care. Wow, and I meant it at the time. I didn't care Because the addiction, the sin, which is addictive in and of itself, had twisted my mind that I could compartmentalize stuff, I could rationalize stuff that I'm doing. I'm having this relationship with this woman to save my family and my marriage. I'm doing it for my family. I mean, how much more twisted can reality be?
Speaker 2:I'm violating my covenants, but it's okay because I'm doing this for my family wow it's so layered, like the emotion and the tying, the trauma from your childhood and into this and bringing all of the problems that were occurring in your marriage. And then now you have this other relationship. It's like there's. I know it's easy for an outsider to look at it and just be like, oh, what were you thinking? Why would you do that? That doesn't make any sense. I would never. That's the thing that always gets me is when you go, but I would never do that. Well, you don't know. You don't know until you get to that point what you wouldn't do. And you don't know how subtly satan is working on you, for how long he's he plays the long game. Yeah, he really does. He plays. Well, he plays both. He plays long and a short game. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2:like yeah it doesn't matter to him if he gets you right now or if he gets you in 100 years. Yeah, it's you, that's all, that's all he cares about, you know. It just seems like incredible to me to think, even if you could compartmentalize, just having such a big secret for so long, and even it's not even just your wife and your, your kids with her, that you had to keep it from everybody because you're a business owner and you're in the church and you're you know, like, like, and I'm I don't know how close in town you guys were, or like you know, like how, how far were you and the other woman Like was she local to you or?
Speaker 3:She lived about an hour away.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you had a little bit of separation there or maybe like you guys wouldn't really run into the same people as much, but even still not. That's not like a crazy huge distance either. So I can see how that would just be like emotionally draining to carry something all the time, to constantly be checking your lies and checking your like what story did I tell someone and where did I say it was going to be and what's the excuse? You know, like you have to constantly be creative and think of something new in order to continue to perpetuate the relationship with the other woman and that I just my mind was so messed up.
Speaker 3:I'll tell you so. When these instances happen, like the family at Disneyland or the girl in the spa, you know what my mind would tell me. Burlap in the spa you know what my mind would tell me, and I take full responsibility for it because it's my thoughts. But I thought this must be okay.
Speaker 1:It must be okay with Heavenly Father, that I do this or else I would get caught. Wow, so not getting caught was justification that you was, that you were okay to do it. Yeah, in my mind I think there's there.
Speaker 1:There must have been some type of a twisted sense of, uh, integrity for you to not walk out from the other lady and her and your daughter right right well, yeah I did, you had like this morality and integrity on both sides, because now you had kids on both sides and this you've made commitments on both sides yeah, and so leaving either one made you the bad guy for, for that person in there in those children, right?
Speaker 3:so and being the bad guy was really I. I hated that thought of being the bad guy. I had to be the good guy. I had to have more good than bad. And so to be the bad guy, to be honest, to confess it all, to come out with it I couldn't comprehend surviving that. I just couldn't. My life would crumble and I just couldn't. I literally couldn't survive that. It literally would cost me my life is what I thought. And so, when I was trapped in both relationships, I was relying on this addiction to give me any relief or joy or happiness or love or affirmation that I could find, because I was making all of these bad decisions everywhere else. And so that's where I got myself.
Speaker 2:So can I ask? There's going to be people, and probably a lot of listeners, who were in the position where your wife was at, where they've been cheated on, and there's a lot of trauma that comes from that right, from being cheated on finding out or having your spouse leave you for someone else. There's all I mean. It's just so complicated, right.
Speaker 2:And so I what I've heard from some of my own friends who have gone through a situation like that, where they they've been cheated on. They've said things like I just don't understand. If you know, if he didn't love me, why didn't he just leave? Right, or he must not have loved me or he wanted to hurt me. Like they, they turn the cheating in on themselves. Like they like what what their spouse did, they did to them, right. But on the flip side, I have another friend who was the cheater and they have told me they said the funny thing is it actually had nothing to do with my spouse, it had everything to do with what I was going through.
Speaker 2:Where do you like? Where's your perspective of that? Like, do you feel like you were being malicious towards your your wife at the time, or vindictive? Were you trying to hurt her? Or vindictive? Were you trying to hurt her? Did you hate her? Like what was kind of the? Or did it? Or was it just? You just were so focused on what you needed and what you were lacking and you didn't know where else to get it. How did how was?
Speaker 3:that for you, I guess? Yeah, there were. There were a lot of mixed feelings. I wasn't angry with her. I didn't want to hurt her or get even with her or anything like that. I still loved her kind of living on that initial love that we had. I still had a lot of those feelings, but I was really disappointed. I don't know, I wouldn't say I felt betrayed, but I was heartbroken that she couldn't love me the same way anymore and that I just had to accept that she was a different woman now.
Speaker 3:And that was my perception. That may not be true I'm still trying to figure that out, but that was my perception. She's changed and I can accept that was my perception. She's changed and I can accept that she's changed. She has a right to change. But now we have these children and it affects my life, and so I'm staying in this relationship now for my children. Did your?
Speaker 1:relationship with your wife get any better over the years, or did you kind of just keep that compartmentalization and that emotional separation from?
Speaker 3:that, you know, it did have its times when it was good, but it's because we were very compatible intellectually and for some of our values we were compatible, and so those times when we focused on those kinds of efforts, we had a great time. There wasn't really any intimacy there, but there was intellectual stimulation, there was social stimulation that carried us through those times, or carried me through those times, but as far as the you know, the intimate love, the kind of heart-capturing love, intensity wasn't there. And so those films when I was working for that, it wasn't. And so I felt like, okay, I have to accept her as she is, but I have a hard time being totally immersed in love with who she is. So you know. So you know I didn't. So that's why I started.
Speaker 3:That relationship with the other woman Lasted 30 years, 30 years. Okay, at the end of the 30 years, towards the end there, I was about ready to just do whatever it takes to get out of the relationship. My relationship with my wife was deteriorating and our family. We went on a vacation to Cabo and we had a great get, great time down there. My wife and I still were really distant from each other during that time, but we had a great time with the kids. The other woman, um, got really on me that I took them to Cabo, so she wanted me to take her someplace. So I fabricated a big story for my wife I got to be a really creative liar, that's for sure and I took her to Hawaii.
Speaker 3:During that time in Hawaii, she used my laptop to register for a class of some kind or other. And come home from Hawaii, life back to normal. My wife gets into my laptop. She never gets into my laptop. She never does because she has her own and blah, blah, blah my laptop. She never does because she has her own. And blah, blah, blah. She uses my laptop and the first thing that pops up is that registration screen with the other woman's name and boom, everything now explodes how did that come out?
Speaker 2:like like? My first thought wouldn't be he's cheating. I'd be like who is this woman and how like? Why is this stuff? Who are you confused?
Speaker 3:but we know that, we, um, we know that woman because she used to babysit our kids when we were younger, yeah, and my wife had suspected that I might have had something going on with her and so she wanted me to cut things off with her. And so she wanted me to cut things off with her. And in fact I think that she did catch me one time doing something with her, with the other woman, and she forgave me for it and we started over. But I went right back into that relationship and so she knew who she was, and so the minute that she saw that on my computer you know when it was dated, right when I was in Hawaii that blew it wide open.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Did that feel like a burden or a relief, even though it was like big and bad and crazy and horrible? What were you feeling then, when it all came out, when it was all in the light?
Speaker 3:Well, the first thing I felt was just like okay, I give up, I can't do this any longer. I'm getting older, you know, and it's been a long time and I just can't keep doing this. I wish I could say my conscience was killing me. It wasn't, but I just knew that I couldn't keep doing this. So the first words out of my mouth were okay, you're right. Words out of my mouth were okay, you're right. And then after that, when I said those words, it was like there were big boulder was taken out of my gut and I felt much more open about sharing everything with my wife. Because then I kind of figured out okay, I can't control this anymore, I can't manipulate her anymore and I just have to let go and if I die, I die. I was sure I was going to die, I was sure I was going to die, but I couldn't carry that any longer. I wasn't able to carry that any longer.
Speaker 3:Of course, my wife thinks that her finding out and seeing that laptop was Heavenly Father making it happen. And Heavenly Father stepped in and said Okay, you've gone too far, I will not let you die, I will not give up on you. You need to be saved now and in some respect, I hope that that's what happened. I want to wish that that was what happened, because I was the vilest of sinners. I was the vilest of rebellion. I was a vilest of rebellion. I told God I don't care, I could go to hell, I don't care, this is what I want. I couldn't imagine surviving that. I couldn't imagine Heavenly Father cutting me any slack. It's like okay, you crossed the line and that's it. Even with all the supposed knowledge of the gospel that I have, I just felt like nobody has ever sinned as bad as I have sinned and I have broke the mold. And so, whatever was going to happen to me, if I was going to die, I was going to die.
Speaker 1:What happened with the other woman and the daughter at that point?
Speaker 3:Kind of jumps into the second section a little bit. But I cut it off cold turkey with the other woman. She kept calling me and calling me and I didn't answer the phone. Didn't answer the phone, she would drive by my house and stuff like that and I'd see her car and she'd drive by my work, but I wouldn't answer her calls and I wouldn't come out to see her or talk to her or anything. So I had to promise that, of course, to my wife right away, that whether we stayed together or not, whether I died or not, they had to be cut off cold turkey. And so I had to do something. So I said, okay, I just gave it up, I was just going to do whatever I needed to do. So I cut it off cold turkey A year, almost a year, to the day I later find out that she had a personal appointment with my state president.
Speaker 2:Your wife or the other lady?
Speaker 3:No, the woman that I was having the relationship with. She went almost a year to the day to my state president and said I've been having this relationship with Martin. At that time I was serving as a bishop.
Speaker 2:Wow, so was she a member of the church then too. She just knew you were.
Speaker 3:She knew I was. She had a friend who was a member of the church, inactive angry member of the church, yeah. So as soon as this happened, I'm sure that friend told her Go tell on them. And yeah, Sure, because it was obvious I wasn't going to have the relationship with her anymore. I couldn't. I had to make that choice.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so the stake president calls me. I'm right in the middle of a bishopric meeting. Calls me and he says I need to meet with you right now. I'm coming over. I'm in the middle of a bishopric meeting. Calls me and he says I need to meet with you right now. I'm coming over. I'm in the middle of a bishopric meeting. He says I don't care. End the meeting wow.
Speaker 2:So your wife didn't talk to the bishop or anything like that when she found out. You guys just no so she kind of like forgave you and swept it under the rug.
Speaker 3:No, the first thing that we did was that we decided that we needed to take a year before we made any decision about anything. Wow, and that during that year we got that counsel from several different people, because she went and told all her friends right away and that's counsel that we got. So we decided to not do anything for a year and we went to counseling during that time and she didn't really finish up on the counseling so much because she didn't really feel like she had that. This was my problem and it sure was my problem. I would have appreciated it if she would have gone a little bit more so she could understand my problem. But I could understand why she didn't want to. She had her own journey to go through from that.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah, ok the story does end up with something good in there, I can tell you there from that part of the journey. At that point my mind was so jumbled and even the reality that I had created that was my own perfect creation just crumbled and fell apart. So I was a mess. The creation just crumbled and fell apart. So I was a mess. But looking back I do remember that Heavenly Father never gave up on me, and in the second portion I'll tell you some examples of where I got confirmation of that over and over again. But even during that time when I rebelled, when I was a vilest of sinners, when I couldn't forgive myself, when I couldn't look anybody in the face because of the shame and the disgust that I felt for myself, I know Heavenly Father was reaching out for me and I ignored it every time but I know he Father was reaching out for me and I ignored it every time.
Speaker 3:But I know he was there and so I can tell anybody. I'd wrestle you to the ground and tell you Heavenly Father will not give up on you, no matter what you have done. It's not going to surprise him, because he already knows you and he's going to be crying for you, but he will never, ever give up on you. I know that. Because of that, I know that the gospel is true. I know that during all this time I grew to love the prophet and the apostles and the priesthood, and I've seen priesthood power in action and I had felt it at times that power being exercised in my behalf.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Wow, wow. I feel so bad for our listeners because we're stopping right here. You guys are going to have to wait for the part two to see how and affect everyone around us. Right, like so many people were affected by the decision that you made back when you were 16, just to be okay with a little sin. It's just a little sin, it's just a little this, a little that.
Speaker 2:And you know, I, I do want to preface, I do want to say a heavenly father knows this, he knows it's going to happen, but it's. It's a little different when you intentionally make it happen, right, like when you like purposely open the door and you purposely like go looking for it. It's a little different than when you get yourself in a tricky situation and then you make a bad choice and they're like, oh, I shouldn't have done that. So in, in the sense, you, you are kind of right that you know there's, I believe, going to be some form of a scale. But I think intention, trauma, experience, relationships, I think Heavenly Father takes all of that into effect. And so it's not as easy as good choices versus bad choices. It's like, why are you making the bad choices and why are you making the good choices too, because the scriptures talk about a gift given grudgingly. It's like no gift at all. So sometimes we can make good choices for all of the wrong reasons and it's like do we really get all the points Right? Sometimes we make bad choices for all the right reasons and maybe we don't get deducted as much. It's so complicated.
Speaker 2:But I love what you said about no matter what Heavenly Father is there for you. He might cry for you a little. He might be a little sad watching you go through what you said about. No matter what Heavenly Father is there for you. He might cry for you a little. He might be a little sad watching you go through what you're going through. But I love that, even in this long three decades worth of double-lifing and just complicated situationship, right that you recognized that you had a heavenly father who still loved you and was watching out for you and who was not going to let you fall too far, like I mean. It seems like you fell far right, like anyone would. How, how much? You still there. You know he still trusts us to try to work through things and so I. I love that.
Speaker 1:We're ending on the dun, dun, dun, but, but then we're also ending with remember this, that even in your dun, dun, duns, heavenly father's never done with you, you know he's never so yeah, wow, I just I I'm trying to wrap my head around just the the decisions you had to make, that the inner battles, the constant just struggles that you had, that the difficult choices and and things that you had to make most of your life. But I agree with Alicia, I think the thing that I'm getting out of this, too, is that, even when you think there's no way that God could ever forgive you or ever love you because of all the bad choices you made, he's still there and you're living proof of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah he could have smitten me with a bolt of lightning, you know, and he didn't, you know.
Speaker 2:He didn't.
Speaker 3:Right, he just let me survive until I got to the repentance side of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Got over that hill of the confession and the truth and getting out in the open.
Speaker 3:And then when I was in the confession the repentance side he came out with both barrels, going about blessings and, you know, revelations and inspirations and people in my life, and it was just overloaded with his giving me his personal attention, his one-on-one attention.
Speaker 3:My appreciation for the atonement now that I've felt on the repentance side of this process has just changed so much the love that is given to me. When I was the worst of the worst, when I hadn't a pure thought in my mind, it seemed, and the Savior still atoned for me Every nail, every thorn, every whip that he took, each one he took for me, knowing what I was going to do, and he still took it and took it gladly. He didn't regret it, he wasn't forced into it, he took it eagerly. And I see that now from the repentance side of it. I didn't see it in the middle of all of this hell that I created for myself. But I do now and so I do things much more out of gratitude today and humility than I did then and I don't really use those scales anymore.
Speaker 2:They're gone Wow.
Speaker 3:Wow yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a lot more to your story. So we, yeah, we appreciate you sharing up to this point, but there's a whole, nother second part of what happened after you told your wife. So I think we're going to wrap it up at this point. Part one, but everybody stay tuned for part two next week and we're going to have Martin back on and he's going to share the other half of his story. Alicia, do you have anything else you want to say?
Speaker 2:Just stay tuned, guys. I I'm really looking forward to hearing the rest of the story. Um, and I, you know, I think about uh, that there's like a cute little slogan or saying that goes around and says something like um, just remember, if it's not okay, it's not done, right, everything will be okay. And if it's not okay, it means God's not done yet.
Speaker 2:So we're just going to leave that with our listeners and invite you guys to make sure that you tune in for our part two next week with Martin Guys. We love when you reach out and when you are wanting to share stories with us, so we're just going to thank you guys for listening and ask that, if you have a story you want to share, be sure to email us over at latterdaylights at gmailcom, or you can visit our website and there's a contact form, latterdaylightscom, at the bottom of the page that you can fill out. You can get in contact with us and you can just let us know what your story is. Um, martin is a beautiful example of bravery, coming and sharing his story for the very first time. Uh, this is a huge story and we definitely want to keep giving it the the attention that it needs and the time that it takes to tell it. So, um, yeah, let us let us know what you've thought so far. Let us know in the comments.
Speaker 2:You know what part, what part kind of resonated to you and what. What questions do you have for Martin Cause? I'm sure I'm sure everyone's got questions too that are like wait, but what about this, what about that? We would love to hear from you guys. Just want to make sure you guys tune in next week.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you next week with the second half. Stay tuned, Take care everybody. Bye-bye.
Speaker 3:Bye guys, bye, bye guys, bye.
