#1 - Brett

Join me for a conversation with Brett. This episode is about real-life application and empowerment. We talk about the importance of the laws of obedience and sacrifice, how they can transform our lives, and the lessons learned from embracing hardship. We discuss difficult topics such as culture restraints, abortion, leadership, and submission in marriage. Tune in to experience how we are working to align with God's will and the growth that we see working in our lives exponentially. 

Find Brett here:

https://linktr.ee/brettlds

Transcript

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Stephanie Cardozo (00:01)
Great.

We are officially recording.

⁓ I would really like to open with a prayer if that's okay. Okay. ⁓ Are you okay if I say it?

Brett The Revelator (00:11)
Of course.

Sure.

Stephanie Cardozo (00:19)
Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for this opportunity to come together and to have a conversation. We ask that the Spirit be here to guide us and that your will for this conversation be done. We ask you to guide our thoughts and our words and we say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Brett The Revelator (00:31)
Amen. ⁓

Stephanie Cardozo (00:40)
So I have a question for you. ⁓ What does Revelator mean to you?

Brett The Revelator (00:42)
Okay.

⁓ well, so there, there are spiritual senses. We have our physical senses. We have our, our spirit and it has senses also. and one of those is hearing the voice of the Lord, hearing revelation through the spirit. So revelation, revelator to me just means someone who can hear through the spirit.

So then seer would be someone who can see through the spirit, see vision, And then ⁓ prophet would be someone who can just speak what the Lord says that is prophetic that would come true.

Stephanie Cardozo (01:40)
Okay, so Revelator is hearing the spirit or hearing God. And a seer is someone that sees the spirit or sees God.

Brett The Revelator (01:53)
sees what is being shared through the spirit.

Stephanie Cardozo (01:58)
Got it. And a prophet is someone who can speak

what they see.

Brett The Revelator (02:04)
Yeah, who shares what they see, what they hear, what they're told to share.

Stephanie Cardozo (02:12)
So what distinguishes a prophet of God, like we have Oaks being the prophet of God here on the earth, from a prophet that is just sharing what they see and hear?

Brett The Revelator (02:13)
Thank

Mm-hmm.

In Numbers 11, Moses says he would that all the children of Israel be prophets. And I think that's still true today. So we can all have that same, or here I'll quote it exactly.

Numbers 11 verse 29, and Moses said unto him, Envious thou for my sake, would God that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them.

Stephanie Cardozo (03:07)
I love that. I have run into difficulty sharing some of the stuff that I've experienced on the spiritual side of my existence. And it's because there's a huge stigma in the church about sharing revelation.

Brett The Revelator (03:20)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, or having revelation even.

Stephanie Cardozo (03:31)
Yeah, which

is very contradictory to the belief. Yes, the very beliefs that we hold because literally in our articles of faith, which are a huge foundation to our religion, it discusses how we believe in prophecy. It discusses how we believe in revelation. I wonder if I could read it word for word. I don't have it memorized.

Brett The Revelator (03:34)
So, I'll you next

Yeah, profits words.

Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (04:02)
the Articles of Faith.

It is article of faith number...

Brett The Revelator (04:12)
I used to have them memorized, but it's been a while.

Stephanie Cardozo (04:16)
I believe I had

most of them memorized at one point in my life. Article of faith number five, we believe that a man must be called of God by prophecy and by the laying on of hands of those who are in authority to preach the gospel. ⁓ that's the wrong one. And administer the ordinances thereof. Okay, that's the wrong one. It's.

Brett The Revelator (04:34)
That's true. That's also called God by prophecy.

Stephanie Cardozo (04:38)
Here it is.

OK, it's article number seven. We believe in the gifts of tongues, prophecy, revelation,

visions, healing, interpretation of tongues and so forth. So. Prophet can be a both a name and a title. So the prophet as the prophet of God, the prophet of the church holds that in both name and title.

Brett The Revelator (04:51)
Mm-hmm. ⁓

Thank you.

Stephanie Cardozo (05:09)
whereas a prophet only holds that in title.

Brett The Revelator (05:09)
it.

I don't know. don't know. The prophet of the church is the president of the church. He has stewardship over the church, under the direction of the Lord. And so in that responsibility, he has the same right to revelation that we have in our own lives, in our own stewardship, in our own responsibility.

So as far as a prophet goes, I think it's the same. We all have the exact same amount of revelation. As far as priesthood authority, priesthood keys, stewardship over the church, obviously that's different. I don't have stewardship over the entire church. don't have, the Lord's not going to give me revelations for what the prophet should be doing, right? That would be outside of my stewardship.

but we should all be able to receive revelation for ourselves and also for others. This is something that I get pushed back onto, but then I say, well, what if someone asks me to give them a priesthood blessing? Am I able to receive revelation on behalf of that other person? And they're like, yeah, I guess so. So, and the same is true with any of the gifts of the spirit. You can receive a vision for someone else. You can receive revelation for them.

The Lord can speak prophetic words through anyone who has the Spirit as long as someone asks for that revelation from another person, you can receive it for them. I think what I find is the problem is when people assume that their revelation is

something that they can use to compel others. And I think that's something we have to be very careful of. And that tends to be my rule of thumb for how to tell people who are either being deceived or lying to themselves, or not actually receiving revelation. As soon as they try and put themselves in between me and God and say, I'm the only one who can receive revelation from God, that's...

that tends to be people who are not actually receiving revelation. But if they lead you to the Christ, they lead you to the Lord, they teach you how to receive your own revelation, then ⁓ we can recognize them as true messengers in that case.

Stephanie Cardozo (07:36)
think a good word that popped up on X recently was unrighteous dominion. So to sum it up, essentially, is people that are receiving revelation but are trying to impose that revelation and control you through the revelation they receive without authority to do so are using the power they deem that they have unrighteously.

Brett The Revelator (07:42)
You hope.

Yep.

Stephanie Cardozo (08:02)
And so that falls in line very well with a lesson that I learned. It's actually part of why I took down all of my podcasts from last year was because I started and I was trying to do things my way instead of God's way. And I had to learn the lesson of using unrighteous dominion and speaking in a way where I had authority when I didn't have any authority.

Brett The Revelator (08:04)
Thank

Yeah.

Yeah, we all kind of tend to do that. I notice people when they start to receive revelation. And that's Doctrine and Covenants 101. ⁓ He says that we find by sad experience that it's the disposition of almost all men as soon as they get a little authority, as they assume they'll immediately be into...

Exercise unrighteous dominion. So that that's just kind of natural tendency the way that's the way the world works that's the way, you know your Manager in your job is going to say I have dominion over you and I get to tell you what to do The Lord's way is the exact opposite who's greatest among you is the servant of all We can't implement the Lord's ⁓ Program in

Satan's way we can't override.

agency we fought a war in heaven over the right to personal agency but yeah we're so quick to try and override that especially as soon as we feel like we're revelation we get excited and that's normal but we got to learn how to deal with that

Stephanie Cardozo (09:39)
Yeah.

Yeah, getting excited and wanting to share and wanting to scream it to the whole world. But really what we have to do is be vulnerable and open and share it as a piece of knowledge that we have, that it only applies to us and that people are open to interpret what they experience from you sharing through the spirit.

Brett The Revelator (09:51)
Yep.

Hold it. Hold it.

Stephanie Cardozo (10:18)
what we say is not law but our own personal experience and that we hope it inspires other people to have their own personal experiences and their own personal revelation from God and that edifies all of us.

I like that.

So ⁓ I want to talk a little bit about my podcast. Just kind of just share with you what this is. I have known about this podcast since before COVID. And I immediately tried to do it my way and failed.

Brett The Revelator (11:03)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (11:04)
And throughout the years, I've always tried to start and get moving, and I've always been stalled. And after I had my son, I felt all of this momentum, and I was like, I'm gonna start again. And I started, and I actually got some stuff published, and went back and took it down because I realized I hadn't edited all of my son's name out of the episode I shared.

Brett The Revelator (11:29)
yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (11:30)
And so then I started again last year and it consumed me and I got up to 10 episodes and ⁓ everything in my life fell apart because all I was doing was focusing on this podcast and my grounding.

Brett The Revelator (11:40)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (11:47)
was rocky. ⁓ And so God taught me that

I needed to really be grounded as a wife and a mother and that my home needed to be taken care of and that I needed to be taken care of so that I could reach out and do this also.

Brett The Revelator (11:57)
you

Yeah, can't just hyperfixate on one thing.

Stephanie Cardozo (12:06)
Yes, he's teaching me very strongly ⁓ that everything in my life is a rolling stone.

It all has to start off with a very strong, firm foundation, and it's going to start slowly, and it's going to backtrack a little bit. And eventually, it's going to get off the ground. And the more consistent I am, the more exponentially it will grow to where I want it to be. And I can't start with exponential growth.

Brett The Revelator (12:34)
Yeah. And exponential growth starts slow, right? It's flat for a long time. Incremental growth is going to go up incrementally. One after another, it's like stairs going straight up. And it looks like it's better because it's going up faster. But exponential growth is going to be flat for a long time. But then once it turns upwards, it goes up real fast.

Stephanie Cardozo (12:43)
Yeah.

Yes, so that's kind of the pattern I'm seeing being focused in my life and the pattern that I'm shifting my reality to because I think my ADHD brain and my ability to hyper focus wants it all to happen now.

Brett The Revelator (13:23)
Yep.

Stephanie Cardozo (13:24)
And I think part of that comes from like procrastinating a little bit throughout school. Like you procrastinate and then you have all this work and you have to do it all at once. And they seem like big tasks and big projects, but in reality to what the world's.

Brett The Revelator (13:30)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (13:45)
requires for big tasks and big projects to be accomplished, it is not a good comparison, but it taught my brain, at least that's what I'm seeing, is that school taught my brain to not function the way the world actually functions.

Brett The Revelator (13:57)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's hard to Lord does things completely different than the world does. And it makes no sense if you're in the mindset of the way the world thinks things need to be done.

Stephanie Cardozo (14:04)
Yeah.

Exactly, yes, and I'm

learning that in a lot of aspects of my reality are shifting as I try to base things on how the Lord wants me to learn them versus how I've learned them from the world.

Brett The Revelator (14:35)
Yeah, I learned that from sacrifice. So, of the things that I first did when I started, what I call my second conversion.

So I was praying about sacrifice and I thought, I was actually praying about all of the temple covenants. And I was like, what, how do we do these? And then I thought, how does sacrifice even work? I mean, I know what it is to give something up, right? That's not unfamiliar, but how do you offer up sacrifice? What does that even look like?

And I thought, my whole life I've been in the church and I've never questioned what the law of sacrifice even is. How can I move on to consecration or these other higher laws if I haven't even understood sacrifice? So I was praying about that and the Lord didn't answer me. And I was like, this is really weird. Cause I had kind of been receiving revelation and had answers to my questions.

come to my mind kind of immediately as I'm asking them and I'm like, this is really cool. And I started asking about sacrifice and nothing. It was like, this is weird. Why are you not answering me? So I was like, okay, well, I'll just.

take a stab at it, you know, walk into the water a little bit and see if the Lord will part the Red Sea for me. And so I did. So I just said, okay, well, here's a bunch of afflictions that are going on right now. these are a handful of things that I'm feeling resentful over. I'm doing chores around the house. I'm doing whatever. And I'm kind of feeling burdened. And I'm like, well, let me offer that up as a sacrifice. And I will.

bear these burdens patiently and then I'll offer it as a sacrifice and pray that it may be accounted unto me as righteousness. And then that's when the Lord started teaching me.

He allowed me to continue to do that and I kept offering up basically anything that came to to me that felt like a burden. I was like, I'm offering all this stuff up. And it was nice because it changed my perspective to from I'm doing this out of duty because I have to. And now I'm what I'm doing. I'm giving that to the Lord. It's a sacrifice that I'm offering up to the Lord. It's my way of showing love to him that I'm doing things I don't want to do.

But then the spirit came to me and said, don't offer what you want to offer anymore. I need you to ask what the Lord wants you to sacrifice. I was like, oh, that's really interesting. I didn't even think about that.

So then I prayed, what would you have me sacrifice? And the Lord gave me a little sacrifice to do. But each one of those were things that I did not want to sacrifice. They were things that I did not want to confront in my life. ⁓ But it improved my character. Like the Lord recognized rough patches and...

asked me to sacrifice so that he could help polish those areas. And as I willingly submitted Mosiah 319 to whatsoever the Lord sees fit to inflict upon us, when I allowed him to inflict upon me what I didn't want to face, then he also gave me strength to fulfill what he asked me to sacrifice.

and those weaknesses became strength, kind of like Ether 1227, things that I couldn't overcome on my own, favorite sins that I kept.

Those ended up being things that I had to confront with the help of the Lord and only yoked with him only When he asked me to confront them was I able to accomplish it and it felt like I wasn't making any progress like it was just one hard Gruelling awful thing that he made me face after another until finally

I was frustrated and I was praying and asking the Lord, like, when am I going to start seeing fruits of all this work? This is just grueling and I'm discouraged. I feel so kind of...

not effective and like I'm not accomplishing anything but the Lord told me this will be an exponential growth that it'll start slow but when it starts to go up it'll go vertical very quickly and so he taught me how to be patient. So it wasn't what I wanted to do, was what the Lord wanted to do and that was his program for sacrifice. That's how that works.

Stephanie Cardozo (19:23)
So as.

Yeah. And so I have an experience that I have from sacrifice that I actually started understanding once I talked to you about it. But I'd love to hear more as well about the blessings you've experienced. You mentioned that your weaknesses turn to strengths. But did you experience other blessings as well in your life from that?

Brett The Revelator (19:56)
Okay.

Yeah, so what I say is ⁓ obedience brings blessings, Sacrifice magnifies those blessings. It multiplies them. So when you are not just compelled to be humble, when you're not just being obedient out of duty, doing it because you're supposed to do it, when you sacrifice, I found that overcomes the problem of fatigue.

So I see a lot of members in the church who are doing all the right things, but they're just tired, right? They're just fatigued. Like being a perfect member of the church is too much. And I know a lot of people who end up...

frustrated and discouraged and can't continue in the church because they haven't learned that lesson of sacrifice. still trying to live. They're wanting the behaviors of that higher principle, but they're not actually understanding the spirit of those higher laws. So you can't overcome the behavior. The Lord doesn't teach us

how to fix our behaviors and then he fixes our heart. He goes the other way around. He starts from the inward, inside out. So he solves our heart first, our perspective, our mindsets, and then the behaviors become easy when you learn the principle or the higher law. And that was true with sacrifice too. Things that I couldn't.

I couldn't do because they were stressful and frustrating. Like just simple things like ⁓ family home evening, ⁓ know, ⁓ come follow me lessons. Those were hard. I could do it for a week or two and then I would struggle. And it was like, I'm I'm fatigued from trying to do this over and over again every week and I can't keep it up.

But when I applied the law of sacrifice and the Lord was like, I want you to teach your children the gospel and I want you to offer it as a sacrifice, then not only did he give me a goal that I knew was impossible, like I've tried over and over again to be consistent with those things. And it's beyond my personality. It's a weakness that I struggle with.

And there's a handful of those. That's just one example. But the Lord will say, want you to do as a sacrifice. I'll submit patiently to that and I'll say, okay, I'm going to be willing to do this program in your way, Lord. But I want it to be accounted to me as righteousness. And I'll suffer it patiently. I'll bear that burden patiently. And I'll work on it. And what the Lord actually does is he kind of makes it harder.

which is seems backwards. like, I like to use the analogy of weightlifting. If you're trying to lift weights, you don't want to have the easiest weight possible. You you want to put kind of as much weight as you can. And the Lord's that way with our with our spirit to our character. He's going to put as much burden as we can as we can lift. He's going to be wise. He knows how much we can carry.

And he'll give us a relatively easy load, but a heavy load. And then he'll want you to push and push and push until you can't anymore. And then when you get to that point where you have exercised your agency, your spirit, your willpower to the maximum, and you have nothing left in you, then he makes you equal to that task. He either teaches you a principle and says, here's

I need you to understand this. Think about this differently. Or he'll give you added strength so that you can accomplish it. And then it's almost like muscle memory. Once you've done it a few times, then it becomes easy. It's like, I don't know why this was hard before. I still remember struggling for years to accomplish these things, but then the Lord gives you extra strength through sacrifice that you would not have before.

Stephanie Cardozo (24:39)
I am edified by what you discuss because it's exactly my own experience. I have tried for years to have systems and organization in the home and to have routines and I have failed. It has felt beyond me. And after I talked to you about sacrifice and I

Brett The Revelator (24:42)
Thank

Stephanie Cardozo (25:08)
It was really interesting because I talked to you about it and then we had the Cain and Abel lesson a week or two after. And so I learned it from you and then I was repeating what I had learned by reading the scriptures. And it's so obvious how sacrifice is in the scriptures that we have missed and we just don't talk about it. We just brush over it. But it discusses how

Brett The Revelator (25:15)
yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (25:38)
Cain gives a sacrifice and Abel gives a sacrifice and Cain's sacrifice is essentially denounced by the Lord as not being a worthy sacrifice and Abel's is a worthy sacrifice and it's not because they didn't both sacrifice good things it was both the labors of their hands but Cain sacrificed something he wanted to sacrifice

Brett The Revelator (25:48)
Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Yep.

Stephanie Cardozo (26:09)
something that was easy for him to sacrifice. Exactly. And pain, because he sacrificed what he wanted to sacrifice, it wasn't a sacrifice. And it wasn't working. And Abel sacrificed what the Lord wanted him to sacrifice, something that was hard for him to give up, something that God wanted him to give up. And so as I approached this and I prayed,

Brett The Revelator (26:12)
You already had it on hand. Yep, you it from his abundance.

Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (26:38)
and I asked Heavenly Father what he wanted me to do, I was very shocked when my revelation was to have breakfast first thing in the morning.

Brett The Revelator (26:48)
Yeah, I know, isn't that weird? It'll tell you things and you're like, well, what are you talking about? That makes no sense. A hundred percent experience,

Stephanie Cardozo (26:51)
It's...

It's so odd.

Why? Why do you want me to have breakfast first thing in the morning? First of all, I hate mornings. Getting up is very hard. I usually like to meander and have a slower morning and, you know, sit in bed and take care of myself and do my scripture study. you know, just the kids kind of my son just kind of is in bed and

Brett The Revelator (27:11)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (27:25)
makes it really hard for me to do those things. So mornings haven't been super peaceful or what I want them to be, even though I keep pushing in the direction of what I think I want. But then at the same time, I've also been praying for these routines and for these systems in our home and this organization. And so I'm like, OK, I'm going to have breakfast first thing in the morning. And I start doing breakfast first thing in the morning.

Brett The Revelator (27:37)
Yeah.

Thank

Stephanie Cardozo (27:55)
And all of sudden, all the routines I've been trying to make happen fall into place. My house is more orderly. I'm more productive throughout the day, which I've also been praying for. I have more time, my body. So I have had a very long health journey. And I don't know what it is about eating breakfast first thing in the morning.

Brett The Revelator (28:03)
See you.

You have more time,

Stephanie Cardozo (28:23)
but it has completely eliminated the constipation TMI that I have had, that I have been trying to overcome for years. Years I have been praying to overcome this constipation and my gut issues. And for the first time in my life, I am moving my bowels by myself.

Brett The Revelator (28:28)
Yeah, I think so.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (28:49)
without having to stimulate it or think about it or worry about it and it all happened all of these many things I have been praying for all of these blessings just fell into place by sacrificing to the Lord breakfast first thing in the morning.

Brett The Revelator (29:03)
And he didn't explain to you why that was important, right? He didn't say, if you will do breakfast, all these cool blessings will happen. He just says, this is the sacrifice that I want. And you're like, makes no sense. I don't understand it. OK, fine.

Stephanie Cardozo (29:08)
No.

Yes, it makes no sense. I don't understand it. I don't want to do it. But look at all of the blessings. Me and my husband are more on the same page. We have more time to spend together in the mornings. We like I'm merged with their schedule more and their natural systems and what my son needs and what my husband needs. And it just so turns out what I needed and I didn't even know it. And it's

Brett The Revelator (29:24)
This is help.

No.

Stephanie Cardozo (29:50)
just from that one simple sacrifice in my life that I give to God every morning. And here I'm thinking, he's going to ask me to do more scripture study or ask me to pray or he's going to ask me to, you know, go to the temple more often. No breakfast.

Brett The Revelator (30:00)
Nope.

Yeah, yeah, it makes no sense. that's the point. These laws are not meant to be incremental changes. They're exponential changes. Each law is an entire paradigm shift. Once you see sacrifice, it's everywhere in the scriptures.

So that was another huge blessing. Like all of a sudden I started understanding sacrifice through revelation. The Lord's telling me, here's how sacrifice works. Here's what I need you to do. Here's an example of something I want you to sacrifice. It's not ⁓ a perfect lamb. It's not a blood sacrifice or these things that we learn in the scriptures. It's a broken heart and a contrite spirit, but...

But I offer that broken heart and a contrite spirit through just a simple thing the Lord asked me to do. of mine was the Lord said, I want you to stop drinking Dr. Pepper. I drank two or three cans of Dr. Pepper. was not excessive by any means. He was like, I want you to stop drinking Dr. Pepper. And I was like, okay. And I kind of complained and said, well, what am I gonna drink? I want something, like, you know, water is great, but I...

but I need something sweet to drink. And he said, go find something else. And so I went to the store and I found some generic brand ⁓ flavored sodas that were not caffeinated and they were not Dr. Pepper. And I was like, are these okay? And he said, yeah, sure. So I started drinking those and then, ⁓ and I got really good at not drinking Dr. Pepper. I kind of treated it like this. Okay, this is.

You know, this is bad now. This is sin. Stop drinking Dr. Pepper. And I offered that as a sacrifice. And then like a few weeks later, the Lord said, OK, I want you to start drinking Dr. Pepper again. And it felt wrong. It felt so wrong. And I was like, why are you asking me to do it again? He said, OK, I want you to drink Dr. Pepper. But I want you to ask me every time you go to drink Dr. Pepper. This is really strange. I said, OK. And I did that.

For a few days, I was asking every time I drink a Dr. Pepper, most of the time he would say, sure. And then sometimes he would say, oh, you've already had one today. Don't drink one. And all of this is just kind of in my mind. I'm thinking in my head, is it OK if I drink a Dr. Pepper? And the thought comes to my mind, yeah, it's fine. Or sometimes, no, don't drink it right now. And then one time I was pouring the Dr. Pepper, and then I realized, oh, shoot, I forgot.

to ask. And ⁓ so I, you know, said a quick prayer. Is it okay if I drink this Dr. Pepper? And the spirit said, no. I like, well, I already like poured it. I'm sorry. What do I do here? And I was like, well, I don't want to waste it. And so I drank it anyway. And the next morning, I got chastised by the Lord pretty heavily.

He was like, that was the worst thing you could have done. And I was like, why? Because I drank a Dr. Pepper. And he said, no, because you rebelled against me. You asked me what I wanted you to do. And you did the opposite of what I asked you to do. And that's rebellion. And that's one of the worst things you can do. And I was like, my gosh, I didn't understand that. And ⁓ so he taught me that it wasn't the thing itself.

He said that it wasn't the Dr. Pepper itself, it was my attachment to the Dr. Pepper. And I was kind of caffeine to supplement my energy, my dopamine, all sorts of things. And I was using it as kind of my pacifier, just something to, you know.

to calm myself down, to deal with emotions or whatever. Once I broke that connection, then he's like, okay, you can reintroduce it again. And it was a real strange thing for him to ask me to sacrifice. And I like to use that example because it sounds like such a simple thing for the Lord to ask, but the point was not the thing that he wanted me to sacrifice. It was my broken heart and contrite spirit. It was something in my character that he wanted me to improve on.

And through that sacrifice that he asked of me, that was how he taught me several really cool lessons.

Stephanie Cardozo (34:51)
So, what blessings did you see in your life after experiencing that lesson of not rebelling and of having a contrite and a broken spirit that you offer up to the Lord by giving up something that most people would see as menial?

Brett The Revelator (35:11)
Mm-hmm. I don't tell people that that's what the Lord will expect of you. And I notice it's really funny because the amount of people that I've taught the law of sacrifice now is kind of interesting how different the things are that the Lord asks of us. And the scriptures don't really talk about how sacrifice works in our modern era, you know, since the law of Moses was fulfilled.

We sort of act like sacrifice kind of went away well, but we have this broken heart and the contrite spirit, but it doesn't specify how it works. But once you start to learn through revelation or through other people who've received revelation, see, Lord still has a program of sacrifice. He just requires us to go to him and ask him what he wants us to sacrifice. And when we do, amazing blessings happen. So it's little things like I said.

being able to deal with my family responsibilities improved immensely, being able to have kind of the right attitude, dealing with difficult people or conflicts. ⁓ But sacrifice is weird because it simultaneously magnifies blessings, it multiplies blessings. So I've seen blessings that are kind of insane.

people probably won't believe me even if I tell them. But at the same time, sacrifice is kind of brutal in that it asks of you the one thing you don't want to give to the Lord. It requires of you to descend below and to humble yourself in a way that most people are not willing to even do. I, growing up, I rebelled against all of the sort of superstitious

⁓ Beliefs that I see kind of in the culture of the church there were a whole bunch of families in my neighborhood who were not allowed to use face cards for example. They were not allowed to have sleepovers. I had a friend who was grounded for a month because he watched Superman 4 and it was PG-13. There were just these kind of unnecessary, fariseical...

burdens that I saw around me and I'm like, these are wrong. And caffeine was one of those. Caffeine is not against the word of wisdom. It's not specifically called out. It's not even a hot drink, but there are a lot of people who are like, no, caffeine is against the word of wisdom. They're creating a law of something that's not a law. So then when the Lord asked me to give up Dr. Pepper and essentially caffeine, because it was the only really caffeinated drink that I drank.

To me, I bristled against that a little bit, because I'm like, this is not a commandment that we as a church should have been given. But yet, the Lord gives me the one thing that I struggle with, and he requires me to humble myself. ⁓ So to answer your question, blessings are amazing. ⁓

And you won't even understand, like with your breakfast, for example, you won't even understand how many blessings can come from the simplest thing the Lord asks you to do. It doesn't even make sense. The math just does not add up with sacrifice. Once you go through a few rounds of sacrifice and the Lord asks you to do a few things, you're like, my gosh, I can do amazing things. The Lord can ask me almost...

something that's insanely impossible and I feel like I can do it through the law of sacrifice now because I've seen him ask me tiny little impossible things and you know amazing miraculous blessings come from it but it's also difficult and it's humbling in kind of the most excruciating way you can think of because the Lord will ask the one thing you do not want to give your favorite sin

He'll ask it of you even if it's a small thing.

Stephanie Cardozo (39:25)
I've experienced that wristling

of having a paradigm one way and being asked to shift it. And it's so hard because oftentimes they happen in pendulums. ⁓ And to explain that more, it's my opinion is one way and then I swing all the way to the other end of the pendulum.

Brett The Revelator (39:36)
to break it, yeah.

Yeah.

or no.

Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (39:55)
And then my view ends up in the middle. So like with your soda, I've had, I've had very similar experiences. I used to drink a liter of Dr. Coke a day. And I, through my health journey, completely quit drinking soda. And I still don't drink it, but I do have a sip of it every once in a while. And I mean like a sip or two, like out of my husband's drink. And...

Brett The Revelator (39:59)
Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (40:25)
Then I kind of was shifted from one extreme of drinking all the time to not drinking at all to drinking a sip now and then and finding alternatives. Like I really like the Ollypop sodas. And so that's kind of been my experience in a lot of areas. Another one was like how I viewed the medical field. You know, I grew up completely vaccinated. I grew up...

Brett The Revelator (40:38)
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Cardozo (40:54)
going to the doctors, you know, if you're sick you went to the doctor, that's just what you did. And then my paradigm through being sick and doctors not being able to help me swung to the complete opposite end of the spectrum of doctors are bad, never go to the doctor. ⁓ You know, just do everything you can at home. Exactly. And for now, it's in the middle. My pendulum has went into the middle of, okay,

Brett The Revelator (41:08)
Yeah. They're all poisoning you. They're all killing you.

Stephanie Cardozo (41:23)
There are good things and there are bad things. And it's up to me and my husband to discern what is good and what is bad for our family. And to understand that there's not just one way of doing things and the way that is right for us to do it for our family isn't necessarily right for another family or even right for us in a different time of our lives.

Brett The Revelator (41:47)
Yeah, and that's really hard too, because you want to, again, you want to convert everyone to your way of viewing things, right? So you notice the people who are anti-everything medicine, they really want to convert everybody else to that viewpoint too. And, you know, I had my pharmacy tech license for a while. I worked for a retail pharmacy.

on their kind of insurance side. So I deal with a lot of clinical pharmacists. I know a lot about medicine from the, from kind of the inside. I know a lot of the dangers of, of.

of how it can go wrong, but also the history of what medicine, what blessings medicines have brought us over time. I kind of struggle with both ends of the extreme. Doctors are not gonna solve everything. They're gonna gaslight you half the time, but that doesn't mean that all medicine in general needs to get thrown out with the bath water too. There's a lot of great things there.

Stephanie Cardozo (43:00)
Yeah, and I'm of the strong opinion that sometimes things need to be broken down to have new foundations built up. But that doesn't mean that we can't take pieces of what was there before to make things whole. And, you know, that's essentially what the Savior did is he told the Pharisees, look at these wicked traditions that you have, that you've adopted from your fathers.

Brett The Revelator (43:23)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (43:27)
and look at the truths that they've perverted and he broke it down and he took what was true and what was right and he fulfilled the law of Moses and he added more. And I think that's a really good thing to bring into our lives like with this podcast. I've started now two, three times. So this is my third or fourth.

Brett The Revelator (43:41)
Yeah. ⁓

Thank you.

Stephanie Cardozo (43:55)
time starting and

seeking consistency. And every time I have started, I have had to break it down and completely begin anew. But yes, a rebirth, but I bring with me the truth and what is good from what I learned before. And we have to...

Brett The Revelator (44:00)
We'll go through that in a minute.

Yeah, rebirth. ⁓

Stephanie Cardozo (44:23)
We have to do that. We have to cast off what isn't working and what isn't true to what we need for what we're doing in life and for what we're trying to build in our lives. And we have to take with us what God wants us to bring and we have to cast off what he wants us to cast off.

Brett The Revelator (44:41)
Yeah, it's hard when people are at different places, spiritually, intellectually, because especially as you grow spiritually, you learn all of these things. But there are just a lot of people that are not ready for that level of information. I've kind of learned.

that it doesn't matter how well you teach a principle. If people are not ready for that principle, it will just wash off them like water off of the back of a duck. Like it just doesn't stick no matter what you do. And I realized I stopped. At first, I thought, oh, well, maybe I just need to explain it better. And I would learn better and better ways of explaining things.

And the more you sort of push and you try and get someone to understand something that they're not ready to understand, the more it just makes them angry. And they don't want to listen to you. So I found kind of the opposite happens if you push people beyond where they're willing to understand. They take that truth to be hard and then they kind of rebel the other direction. And you've kind of ruined your opportunity to teach someone.

So I'm a lot more mindful of where people are in their journey and I'm like, okay, what's going on? Like, what are you trying? What are you, how are you trying to grow in your, in your spiritual journey or like your, understanding of medicine or society in general? And what is, what is kind of the next step? And then I can teach them something that's, that's

still accessible to them, but not something that's so beyond their understanding that it kind of blows their mind. And I think God's that way too. So he'll give you a revelation on something and you're like, okay, this is the word of the Lord. And then you'll come back to him six months later and he'll tell you something different. And you're like, well, wait, why was that not true when you told it to me before? Like, why is it different now?

And I've kind of learned that he'll do that, where he'll teach us what we're willing to understand, what we're able to digest, and then he'll give us more light and knowledge as we go. That doesn't mean that what he told you in the first place was wrong, but you just weren't ready for the full truth. He just gives you a puzzle piece here and there.

Stephanie Cardozo (47:17)
I agree with that and actually I'm working on the same thing as well because a lot of what I have been given that's really sacred to me and really special to me and in my understanding of a lot of principles of the church and of the doctrine and even of the history ⁓ completely falls on deaf ears. Pearls to swine.

Brett The Revelator (47:41)
Yeah. ⁓

Stephanie Cardozo (47:44)
or ⁓ you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink type of situations. so meeting people where they are has been a huge part of, it's a huge principle that I'm learning. As well as meeting people where they are has been involved in my personal repentance journey of forgiving people that have harmed me and

Brett The Revelator (47:47)
Mm-hmm.

No.

It's hard.

Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (48:13)
realizing that you can only know yourself,

you can only know other people as deeply as they know themselves. And it kind of falls into the same line of discussion of you can sit and talk to someone and share deeply about yourself, but they're not going to understand any of it and it's going to fall on deaf ears because they don't know themselves that way.

Brett The Revelator (48:42)
Yeah, they don't have a place in their heart for it. ⁓ Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (48:43)
so they can't remove.

Yeah, they can't understand it. And I think that goes into...

discussing doctrine and sharing a lot of things and finding the people that are ready to hear it and also being able to explain it in a way that...

Brett The Revelator (49:01)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (49:11)
people can grasp it and starting with foundation.

Brett The Revelator (49:17)
Yeah, yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (49:19)
starting with the foundations of understanding.

see a lot of like, my dad explained this to me when I was in high school. I had a peer who was helping me with flashcards as I was memorizing. ⁓

the Living Christ for a personal progress, for a personal progress project. And he started asking me questions about what I was memorizing. And we had him over for dinner and I started talking about deep doctrine and he wanted to hear about the deep doctrine and was asking questions. And my dad pulled me aside and he said,

Brett The Revelator (49:41)
Mm-hmm.

Thank

Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (50:05)
Hey, be careful sharing a lot

of this deep doctrine because it's really hard for people to understand and to get a hold on and it actually will scare people away because really what they need is the milk before the meat. They need the simple principles that the church teaches and once those simple principles are understood and testimony is gained, then it's a lot harder to get lost as you seek for those deeper revelations and those deeper understandings.

Brett The Revelator (50:14)
I'm not sure if this is right.

Mm-hmm. ⁓

⁓

Yeah, yeah. And I like to kind of overwhelm people too, so I'll overshare. I'll get excited about something and I'll go on a long rant and I've lost them like 10 seconds in. I'm a lot more careful to find people that are ready for that information and then giving them enough that they can understand it. And following the spirit too is huge.

Stephanie Cardozo (50:38)
at the same time.

Brett The Revelator (51:06)
You know, because we're not the judges of what they can learn and what they can't. It really needs to be God who tells us what we need to share. And sometimes the Spirit will tell me to be bold about stuff. And I'm like, my gosh, are you sure this person's ready for that? And sometimes they just are like, OK, cool. Other times they're like, wow, that's really interesting. You need to tell me more.

Stephanie Cardozo (51:31)
Yeah,

I have a hypothesis and this is totally my own personal belief, but there's discussion in the Bible about ⁓ harvests and discusses separating the wheat from the terrors, but there's I'm gonna butcher remembering it perfectly, but there's like a barley harvest and there's a...

Brett The Revelator (51:35)
And this is the end of the video.

Yeah.

you

Yeah,

wheat harvest, barley harvest, and olives.

Stephanie Cardozo (52:06)
and the olive harvest. Yes, thank you. And if you actually look into the traditions of ⁓ Israel harvests, there's actually a lot of symbolism to separating the wheat from the tares, the barley harvest, and the olive harvest. And I can't remember all of the symbolism, but these harvests are significantly different, and they come with their own trials.

Brett The Revelator (52:18)
Thank

Stephanie Cardozo (52:35)
And just like one example is like the olives, they actually have to be like pressed down under so much pressure that they then can become the olive oil. And that's the last harvest we see. And right now ⁓ we're in separating the wheat from the tares. And I hypothesize that part of these future harvests...

are actually going to be showing people some of the meat of the doctrine and some of the bigger concepts so they can then realize that they need the milk. Essentially trying some meat, knowing that it's good, throwing it up and knowing, I need to partake of the milk first.

Brett The Revelator (53:17)
Could be.

I used to be scared of the tribulations, the end times, and all of that. Like, scary, how are we going to survive? And the more I've kind of learned about it through revelation and through study, the more I realized the whole point of the tribulations is to help people to come back to God, back to Christ.

There's a pre-harvest too before separating the wheat and the tares, which is called the gathering of the elect or the gathering of the jewels. And so there's a calling by the Spirit, by the Holy Ghost. ⁓ There's the, which one is it? Is it Ezekiel?

where he says that there was thunder and there was lightning, but the voice of the Lord was not in the thunder and the lightning. He lists a bunch of things. And then finally it was in the still small voice, was the last one.

And the end times are going to be very diverse. The still small voice is the first one. And those of us who can hear the Spirit and who can take the Holy Spirit as their guide will be called out and taught and given revelation. But then those who can't will have increasingly clearer and clearer signs.

that they'll have to choose to go, ⁓ you know what? The Lord's doing something here. I need to get myself in the right place. So I think those harvests are about that. If we don't hear the Holy Spirit, then we'll see the destructions going on. We'll see the tribulations happening around us, and we'll go. The whole point of those is for us to recognize where we are and turn ourselves to God.

Stephanie Cardozo (55:28)
Yeah, turning the hearts of the men to their fathers.

Brett The Revelator (55:32)
Yeah, that's a huge topic.

Stephanie Cardozo (55:36)
It is. It's a huge topic. I had a sweet girl in my primary class when we were talking about turning our hearts to our fathers. She thought that we said ripping out the hearts and planting them in the ground. Yeah, she took an Aztec approach, but...

Brett The Revelator (55:56)
She took the Aztec approach.

I love it.

Stephanie Cardozo (56:04)
But it's funny because she will never forget, she's not in my class anymore, but she will

never forget that scripture and she brings it up to me in the hallway. And I don't know why, but that stuck with her in such a deep way from her mishearing it to understand the importance of turning our hearts to our fathers, turning our...

Brett The Revelator (56:19)
Any

Stephanie Cardozo (56:29)
hearts to our ancestors. And I feel like the pattern of looking back to our ancestors is so important and is a huge part of this harvest, these various harvests that we're going to go through and that we are going through and that the world is going to go through as we prepare for the second coming of the Savior.

Brett The Revelator (56:51)
I found the scripture, 1 Kings 19, 11 and 12. says, he said, go forth and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And behold, the Lord passed by and a great and strong wind rent the mountains and break in pieces the rocks before the Lord. But the Lord was not in the wind and after the wind an earthquake. But the Lord was not in the earthquake and after the earthquake a fire. But the Lord was not in the fire and after the fire a still small voice.

Stephanie Cardozo (56:52)
⁓

Brett The Revelator (57:20)
My one of my beliefs is that this pattern is going to be reversed in our day. the last will be first, first will be last. Still a small voice will happen first and then a fire and then an earthquake and then a wind that breaks the breaks and pieces of the rocks and the mountains and then the coming of Lord and glory will happen after that.

Stephanie Cardozo (57:45)
Yeah, as I've...

Brett The Revelator (57:46)
each of those kind of represents

one of those harvests, like you said.

Stephanie Cardozo (57:50)
Yeah, as I've prepared and as I've worked spiritually to hear the Spirit and to hear God and to seek what He wants from me, I've been prompted also to become physically prepared. ⁓

And a lot of that came last year as we were studying the Doctrine and Covenants. And there's a lot of scripture in there that discusses being spiritually prepared and being temporally prepared.

And ⁓ I can't remember if it was, it wasn't the last conference that we had, but I can't remember if it was the October conference or the April conference of last year. But the parable of the 10 virgins was discussed so many times. And it just sunk into me that there was a temporal component of.

the parable of the ten virgins. And to me, how I've come to see that parable is not only as a parable to teach us, but also a prophecy of a future event. And all of the ten virgins, they're sitting and they're waiting for the Savior. They're waiting for the bridegroom. And they're spiritually prepared. They believe the bridegroom is coming. They're earnestly awaiting.

Brett The Revelator (59:01)
Yeah.

for us to look at the question.

Stephanie Cardozo (59:17)
coming and the five unwise virgins they run out of oil and I see that as they run out of the temporal ability to

persevere through the long wait and the trials that come from waiting for the bridegroom. And so as they're scrambling to get that temporal preparedness to match their spiritual preparedness, they can't go off of the wise virgins who I've come to see as elect. They're not only...

spiritually prepared and waiting and enduring the trial of waiting, the labor pains of waiting for the bridegroom, but they're also temporally prepared and stable enough to make the wait and overcome the trials that come from waiting for him, for waiting for the bridegroom. And when

Brett The Revelator (1:00:03)
Yep.

Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:00:24)
The bridegroom finally comes.

They're ready to accept his invitation.

And I read this book, ⁓ it's called Dreams and Visions of the Last Days. And it is dreams taken from, I think it's mostly the United States, but all over the United States. And it's very interesting because they're different people.

⁓ Some even dreams from children who are seeing very similar scenarios of being called away with their preparations of food and survival gear to be protected from some of these tribulations. And I don't know if you've had any inspiration spiritually to prepare temporally.

But that has been a huge focus of our life recently, is really focusing on the food storage aspect of ⁓ being obedient. And it's kind of interesting though, because the church used to put a huge emphasis on food storage and they still have an emphasis on it, but I haven't heard a prophet or apostle speak on it for a very long time.

Brett The Revelator (1:01:46)
Nope.

Yeah, my personal take is that there's, this is another one of those principles that we all want everyone else to agree with what the Lord has told us. But I think depending on our circumstances, we'll have different challenges during the tribulations. And we have different sort of callings and work that the Lord will have us do.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:01:57)
But if you

Brett The Revelator (1:02:24)
And so my kind of thing is if the spirit is prompting you to have spiritual preparations, then you need to have spiritual preparations. If the spirit is prompting you that you need to have physical preparations and you need to be prepared physically, then you need to be prepared physically and temporally for those things. But I don't think the same answer is for everyone.

And I think to some degree it's a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy for where we are spiritually and it'll change as we grow spiritually. ⁓ temporal preparations are important, but also are so and following the spirit if the spirit tells us to do that, but also relying upon the Lord. I do feel like the

Exodus of our people will be in a lot of ways similar to the Exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt. We'll have to rely on the Lord for a lot of those physical things. And perhaps that means we'll rely on people who have been prompted all this time to be stockpiling things. I don't know, but I'm just one dude. I'm not the...

arbiter of everything that's true.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:03:54)
Well, and I agree with you. I agree with you. think some people are very strongly prompted to do as I have done and to temporarily prepare, and some are not. And I think it is because we have different jobs and we were sent here to do different things and be in different roles. And also that some of us...

Brett The Revelator (1:03:55)
So, thank you.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:04:21)
not only have different roles and different purposes, but I think some of us have different desires for what we experience or limitations for how long we can experience certain hardships. I think, yeah, exactly.

Brett The Revelator (1:04:28)
Yeah.

through how much we can suffer temporarily

and how much we can spiritually rely on the Lord to like the Lord's asked me to pass through some pretty insane trials but I don't expect other people to be able to to deal with that level of stuff so I wouldn't I wouldn't say

you know, that the way the Lord is preparing me is the same as the way the Lord is preparing other people. And the other thing that I have that is kind of contrary to a lot of people's opinions is I think a lot of the dreams about the last days are... ⁓

Stephanie Cardozo (1:05:05)
Yeah.

Brett The Revelator (1:05:21)
visionary in nature and that we need an interpretation to understand it like Lehi's dream of the tree of life. He told the dream to his children and they believed it and they really liked it. But only Nephi went back to the Lord and said, okay, what's the interpretation? Tell me what the interpretation of this dream is.

I think a lot of dreams that people are having today, we assume them to be literally true. We assume them to be prophetic dreams that are actually going to happen. Like we're watching on camera what's going to happen in the last days. But so many of them, when I hear them, I'm like, my gosh, I know what the interpretation is. This matches the spiritual phenomena that I've been taught.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:06:09)
Thank you.

Brett The Revelator (1:06:09)
And

I'm like, dream is a perfect analogy for this spiritual principle that I've been taught. But we're not taking that extra step to say, is this A, is it just my fears manifesting? B, is it something that's literally going to happen? And is it revelatory? And then C, is there an interpretation? Is this an allegory for something that's going to happen in the last days that I need to understand? And I don't know what the answer is to all of those obvious

Obviously every dream is different, but we need to be asking those questions.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:06:43)
Yeah, I think that is a really good approach. I think sometimes our imaginations like to take hold and help us fill in the gaps because God doesn't always give us the full picture. He just gives us those puzzle pieces so we can be taught precept upon precept. Yeah, yeah, he only gives us pieces so we can be taught that precept upon precept and

Brett The Revelator (1:06:45)
I'm sure.

Mm-hmm. We make assumptions about what that means, yeah, without taking it to the Lord.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:07:13)
line upon line and as we're given those pieces sometimes it doesn't it's not enough for our human minds and I know at least my imagination likes to run away you know and and discerning that is is hard you have to make the mistake of not seeing it and you have to discern that it's there after you've made that mistake and for me you know I've had my personal revelation of

Brett The Revelator (1:07:22)
Yep.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:07:43)
being inspired by the things that I've seen as I read those dreams and I read Isaiah and I read Revelation. Are those things necessarily going to happen or are they just inspiring me to prepare the way that God wants me to prepare? I don't know.

Brett The Revelator (1:07:43)
Yeah.

Thank you.

It's a little bit like conference talks. You listen to a conference talk and the spirit will tell one person one one thing. Spirit will tell the next person sitting right next to you something completely different. And they're both true. And they might not, neither one of them might not be exactly what the conference speaker actually said. That doesn't mean that they're not true.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:08:20)
And it just so happens to be this spiritual education and nourishment that those individual people need.

Brett The Revelator (1:08:25)
Yeah, yeah. Well, it could be us

jumping to conclusions, like you said. Sometimes we do that too, but it could be us being taught by the Spirit. It's hard to discern.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:08:37)
Yeah. It's fun to talk about it though and to wonder and to at least have it out there and to understand that people see and understand it differently than you do.

Brett The Revelator (1:08:49)
Yeah,

especially people who are being led by the spirit. Like getting together with people who study and study and study and never come to a true understanding. those conversations are kind of maddening for me. like, oh my gosh, you guys, you need to stop studying. You need to start praying as hard as you're studying. But then you'll get in a group of people who

will tell you revelations that they've had and I'm going, oh my gosh, I can hear the Lord's voice in what you're explaining to me here. can see principles that he's taught me before through the Spirit and I'm edified by those conversations. It's amazing. We just need to find more of those people who...

through whom the Lord is speaking. It's not that the people themselves are amazing or that we all need to find those prophets and follow them and give up our covenants with the church and with the Lord and the temple and our stewardship in the church. But no, the Lord is doing the work. He's got a whole bunch of instruments that he's moving around.

We're not going understand the full breadth of what he's doing, but we can start to see bits and pieces as we talk to people who are receiving that revelation or those dreams or visions. It's pretty cool.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:10:25)
bits and pieces. I ⁓

went through this program called BU. It's kind of like a mental health training program. I learned very intimately about people who study and study and study, but don't ever, ever...

Brett The Revelator (1:10:32)
you

Never gone to the standing,

yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:10:51)
feel the spirit and I've learned

that for some, and I don't know if this applies to everyone, but not everyone that experiences it, there might be different mechanisms behind it, but I've learned that a lot of it is over logic. So they overuse logic as a protection against feeling.

Brett The Revelator (1:11:09)
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:11:19)
And so the Holy Ghost, the Spirit, it speaks to us through feeling. You know, it's that warm, fuzzy blanket. It's that that light fire that lights up in our hearts that confirms to us that what we're hearing or what we're saying is true. It's it's feeling. And.

When you have a defense mechanism up to prevent you from feeling because emotion or anything that you can't logically wrap your mind around is dangerous for some reason and in some way to your existence, then all you're left with is logic. And when all you have is logic, you end up with

being deceived and not having the full truth, because I found that truth likes to be in the middle of feeling and logic.

Brett The Revelator (1:12:16)
Thank you.

Yeah,

and you build your whole model of how you think the world works based on assumptions. And when one of those assumptions ends up being not correct, your whole structure collapses. It's the whole build on a sandy foundation or up on the rock.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:12:44)
Yeah.

Brett The Revelator (1:12:45)
We can have all this logic that all supports one another and it's all, you know, it all fundamentally agrees with one another, but it can still be false and that's scary. But then you have other people who can rile people up and, you know, make, them scared. Like your whole medical establishment, I see so many of these. ⁓

Stephanie Cardozo (1:13:01)
My

Brett The Revelator (1:13:14)
Companies who have a vested interest in us thinking that our medical system is broken right and highlighting what is broken but also sort of bending the truth and Creating Yep, they're they're fear-mongering they're they're outright lying a lot of times just in order to sell their Product which isn't even a cure. It isn't even

Stephanie Cardozo (1:13:29)
and emotional fear-mongering.

Brett The Revelator (1:13:42)
beneficial, you know, they're just... And it's sad because it's all based on fear and it's all based on emotion and so many people are giving up the truth for madness and it's sad.

⁓ And that's scary. And so we have logic that hopefully helps us to avoid that. We have processes to help us figure out what's true, not just for one person, right? And anecdotal truth might be true, but that doesn't mean that that principle applies to everyone else. I might have a specific experience.

You know, and if, but if I tell everyone that they need to, they need to follow that exact same experience, you might cause a lot of harm to people. ⁓ in that case, I think that, that you have the right idea that true emotion and logic are two, two things. And they're, they're interrelated and the spirit's kind of in between the two. ⁓ my way of thinking about it is, ⁓

scribes and lawyers and revelators. So you can have, in Jesus' day, scribes and lawyers had built this huge structure of laws and ways of helping the people, giving them processes that they could depend on, that were reliable, that would help them to not fall into sin.

and they built this huge structure, but it was based on lawyers and scribes using reason as their only motivation and kind of mingling philosophies of men with scripture. And then you have someone with authority, Jesus, who tells them that it's okay for him to eat corn on the Sabbath, or it's okay for him to do all these things to heal on the Sabbath.

that they were just so upset about. And I see that kind of pattern happening with scribes and Pharisees of our day too, who built these kind of academic structures, manuals in the church that are based on principles that have been taught for generations. But they're...

A lot of them are not even based in truth, they're just based on tradition and the more the Lord reveals his truth to his prophets, not just his presidents of the church, but prophets in general.

the more we'll kind of as a people grow spiritually and learn and see. I think if you have scribes, they have, I think there's this actual spiritual gift of being a scribe, of following spirit to study things.

in a certain way, but that has to be paired with more of a spiritual gift of revelation because you can have one person on the one end learning something that's true, but not knowing how to build a logical argument to explain that truth, or even an emotional argument to explain that truth. And then you can have a scribe and a lawyer who can create an emotional argument

or a logical argument that they can get people to believe things that are not even true, you put those two together and they kind of balance each other out.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:17:29)
Yeah, and that's exactly the point I'm making is you have the over logic, you have the over emotion, and the combination of the two is where you find the truth. ⁓ And when you have like the scribes, that might be a little bit different from what I'm saying. But I find that

Brett The Revelator (1:17:49)
Thank

Stephanie Cardozo (1:17:55)
the marriage of two extremes is usually where the truth is found. Usually. It doesn't apply to everything. But I do see that, ⁓ like my favorite example of this is actually a pretty controversial topic. And it's actually abortion. Because when you take pro-choice arguments and you dissect them,

Brett The Revelator (1:18:12)
⁓ Okay.

Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:18:25)
They are either completely logical or completely emotional. And you never find a marriage of the two within the same argument. But if you take pro-life arguments, they always combine both the emotional side of conception and pregnancy and motherhood with the logical side.

Brett The Revelator (1:18:30)
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:18:50)
of anatomy and biology and the formation of human beings in all life. And that marriage is where you find the truth. And so it's when the emotion and the logic aren't married that you find people are able to deceive themselves.

Brett The Revelator (1:18:59)
Yeah.

that's not in the future.

Yeah, and you have to be careful of the solution too. ⁓ You can have a situation where you say, yeah, life is important. It's, elective abortion is horrible. But then you can use that emotional and logical foundation to create a system that doesn't allow for.

for medical exceptions, for risk of the parent, the child, of the mother. Yeah, there's all sorts of scenarios. And you talk to these people, and they're sure that, well, pro-life is the only moral choice. And I'm like, well, yeah,

Stephanie Cardozo (1:19:51)
for miscarriage care, for, you know.

Brett The Revelator (1:20:05)
But an absolutist view of pro-life is not a moral choice either. Like that's not truth either. You have to have a law that has reason that isn't going to be putting women in prison for having a medical situation and choosing to.

allow themselves to continue to live at the expense of a baby that probably was going to die anyway. Not that that's a choice that I know the right answer to, but I don't think that's a choice that we can make in advance in absence of the patient and the medical professionals that are involved and assume that our laws can solve that problem.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:20:36)
Yeah, I think there's...

Brett The Revelator (1:20:59)
and just air on the side of the baby 100 % of the time. I don't think that's right.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:21:02)
Yeah,

I think that.

the argument stands with the logic and the motion having the truth in the middle, yet that people can take that argument and turn it into that absolutist mindset without allowing for ⁓ things that don't apply. Like there's octa...

Brett The Revelator (1:21:07)
So, we'll see you in a bit.

Mm-hmm. Reasonable exceptions, yeah. And I see

a lot of people on the left who are arguing for reasonable exceptions and being treated like they're murderers because they want a law that's rational and makes sense and is not absolute in extremity.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:21:44)
Yeah,

and I don't disagree with that at all because, you know, there is some of the laws that have been put in place, especially in Texas, that I've seen that have limited the ability for women to get care in the case of a miscarriage or to get care in the case of even complications that happen during normal, natural, wanted childbirth.

Brett The Revelator (1:22:02)
is over.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:22:09)
that because of the similarities of the products and the drugs used in both abortion and birth, there are complications and delays because those substances become so heavily guarded.

Brett The Revelator (1:22:24)
Yeah, yep, and you might end up causing people to die because you're so strict and fair say goal about something you care strongly about and that's fine. I'm okay with people caring about babies, but we should also care about the children once they're born too. Like, okay, we need an adoption system that's fair and equitable. need.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:22:33)
Yes.

Brett The Revelator (1:22:49)
you know, to care for these children who are in foster systems that are, you know, kind of not amazing. I agree with all these things and I don't know that elective abortion is the...

is the only one that's moral. I could spend a lot of time making arguments for other things that are also immoral that we have in our society that we need to improve on. But you try and make that argument to people. It's met with, well, you shouldn't be a member of the church if you have any stance that's not absolutely against anything that has to do with, or even the vicinity of elective abortion. It's like, okay.

We need to have a more just and ⁓ balanced perspective.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:23:43)
Yeah, and I think that applies to things like, you know, IVF and ⁓ infertility in some ways that people, you know, look to conceive kids when they're struggling to. I feel like there's a lot of answers out there.

Brett The Revelator (1:23:51)
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:24:03)
alternative to IVF that people have access to that they won't consider because of the current paradigms we have as a society. But at the same time, I also see how people can only use the information that they have and the knowledge that they're capable of.

Brett The Revelator (1:24:22)
My view is that the government is not the arbiter of morality. As soon as it is, it's beyond it. It's the arbiter of causing harm to other people and justice, but we try and force people to be moral. Whose system was meant to compel people to be moral? That immediately is a Luciferian.

principle that's being taught in our society. We have to have laws to force people to be moral. That sounds like Satan is behind that, whenever I hear that.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:25:03)
Yeah, it's interesting because I agree. Like that is Satan's plan to take away our agency to force us all to be perfectly moral so that everyone makes it back to God. And then at the same time, it's how do you as a moral person mitigate and understand and

have a role in a world that is immoral.

Brett The Revelator (1:25:34)
Yep. Well, how does the Lord do it? Does he solve the behavior or does he treat the heart? If our society is meant to only treat the behavior and not to tend to the heart, if we're not teaching people the truth, if we're not trying to...

Stephanie Cardozo (1:25:35)
And it's.

Brett The Revelator (1:25:56)
help people to learn true principles and then to govern themselves and all we're trying to do is to set up a government that ensures that they can't govern themselves. We're implementing the Satan's process. So I just don't think that the government is the right solution to a problem that might be true. We have people who are making poor choices, who causing harm to themselves or to other people.

But that needs to be taught through teaching true principles through, you know.

Talking to people one at a time, helping them to make better choices, going after those lost lambs, not by creating a society that enforces what we believe to be right.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:26:49)
It's slowing down to see the individual as the Savior would see them. It's...

Brett The Revelator (1:26:55)
We're not,

demonizing all these individuals and we're saying we need to penalize them, we need to imprison them, we need to create laws, get them out of society that prevent them from doing so much harm to our society rather than, we need to love them, need to wrap our arms around them, we need to help them.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:26:59)
Yeah.

rather than.

Brett The Revelator (1:27:14)
know how what they're doing is harming, but also what caused them to be in that situation in the first place. You go to these people who are doing terrible moral, immoral things, and you talk to them about their life circumstances, you realize we have a society that's generating these immoral people, not the other way around. We need families who are more supportive.

We ways to help and support the parents who are absent for these kids who are growing up and learning the wrong way to do things. We're never going to have a just society if our only solution is to imprison people who are unjust.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:28:00)
or to further segregate ourselves from what we see as unjust.

Brett The Revelator (1:28:06)
Yeah, yeah, well, let's

just put them all in another place where I don't have to see it. Let's just deport them to another country so they can deal with it. That's not a solution.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:28:17)
Well,

and that's not the example the Savior gave us either. The Savior had meals with sinners and slowed down enough to understand and forgive and to truly see people enough that He caused immense change in the people who He...

touched the lives of. He slowed down and he cared about the people that no one else wanted to slow down and care about. And as he did that, their lives were changed for the better. And I...

Brett The Revelator (1:28:50)
Let's go.

Yeah, yeah, we won't love

the people that we see as our political enemies if we can't love the people that our political leaders are demonizing in our society. We're not followers of Christ. We're not disciples of Christ. That's not the way he does things.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:29:12)
I full heartedly agree with you and

it's shifting into focus something that Heavenly Father's been teaching me and that's to understand myself and why I do the things I do so that I can turn around and understand others and why they do the things they do so that I can have compassion and patience.

Brett The Revelator (1:29:33)
Yeah. How can we expect the Lord to give us grace if we don't give other people grace?

Stephanie Cardozo (1:29:35)
and.

Exactly. And I think a lot of people

are not capable of giving other people grace because they cannot give grace to themselves. Yeah, it's...

Brett The Revelator (1:29:47)
It's foolishness to them. That's why I don't have political

conversations on X. You cannot have a reasonable conversation with people. Everybody's sure that their political beliefs are right and everyone else is immoral. You shouldn't be a member of the church if you believe any different than my ignorant absolute beliefs. You continue doing what you're doing because I don't think if I talk to you it's going to change your...

Stephanie Cardozo (1:29:56)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Brett The Revelator (1:30:17)
mind unfortunately.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:30:20)
My political stance

is that both sides are corrupt and neither are from Heavenly Father and that, at least on the leadership perspective, and that we need to turn to the Savior and seek His guidance through this world because neither party is going to be the saving grace.

Brett The Revelator (1:30:28)
Thank you.

No,

they are not. We need the Lord to be the party of truth, not... We need to pray for good leaders to be lifted up. I believe the Lord can save us from our oppressions, our burdens, just like he saved the children of Israel from their bondage and their slavery. But we need to trust him to do so.

and not just assume that what we're being told is true. I see both sides doing a lot of ⁓ straw manning, doing a lot of, you know, taking the worst examples of the other side and saying, if you believe this, you're horrible. It's like, well, the other side doesn't believe that.

They're doing the same things that, you know, our anti-Mormon, anti-Christ people are doing against the church.

and people are falling for it even in the church and it's sad.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:31:50)
And it brings us back to prophecy in the Bible that talks about how the church will be cleansed. that happens through immense... Yep, from the exact people you're discussing who feel moral but are immoral in their actions as they condemn other people rather than forgive and extend grace.

Brett The Revelator (1:32:00)
Right? What's it going to be cleansed from?

This is a video of

Stephanie Cardozo (1:32:21)
you know, it's scary to think about the hardship that it entails because, you know, we're talking about the Israelites and how they've been saved and how we're going to experience similar things. And you look at them being saved and how hard it was and how much they murmured. A lot of Deuteronomy is a lot of Exodus and Deuteronomy is the Israelites complaining and rebelling and

Brett The Revelator (1:32:27)
Yes, yes.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:32:50)
fighting against being saved.

Brett The Revelator (1:32:53)
Yeah, and human nature has

not changed since then. We still do this.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:32:57)
No.

Yes, we do. We do the same thing and we're fighting against being saved. And it brings me to a point that's been brought up in conference consistently and that's ministering. How many times do the brethren bring up ministering every conference? It's a continuing theme of importance that is emphasized and re-emphasized and

Brett The Revelator (1:33:24)
⁓

Stephanie Cardozo (1:33:25)
still we seem to be

Brett The Revelator (1:33:26)
So, we'll see you next time.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:33:28)
failing at it and I think in part that is because of all of these things that we're pointing out the immorality of segregating and condemning rather than extending grace and essentially just ministering to our fellow man the way that Christ ministered.

Brett The Revelator (1:33:49)
It's my favorite form of missionary work too. It's just ministering to other people. We had a family that ⁓ we were friends with that were not members of the church and their son was in the hospital one time. And so I was like, let's bring some food to him. So I barbecued some chicken or something. I don't remember what it was. Took it over there and the dad was home and he looks at me really suspicious. like, he goes, are you for real?

I just kind of laughed. I was like, yeah, this is what we do for our friends when we know their kids in the hospital. He was like, okay, we have to have some ulterior motive. It just made no sense to him why we were just, hey, we know you're alone and your wife's at the hospital with your son. me bring you some food.

It seems so crazy to people, but the same things we should be doing to our administering families, we should be doing to other people in the ward. We should be doing to other people who are not members of the church too. And if we can do that, we'll see greater missionary work, see greater blessings.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:35:02)
I think a lot of people bring up that the lack of ministering is because of selfishness, but I truly believe that it's actually a lack of ability to minister to ourselves the way that Christ would minister to us.

Brett The Revelator (1:35:18)
Yeah, not coming from a place of abundance is hard.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:35:22)
Well, I think most people are living

in a place of lack of abundance because they're...

Brett The Revelator (1:35:28)
Yeah, scarcity,

Stephanie Cardozo (1:35:30)
They're living in a mindset based on a subconscious reality that they're not enough and they're not worthy of love. A lot of people say that people are selfish, but really pride and vanity and judgment are all founded on a lack of self-worth, a lack of true knowing, our divine worth, and our position as children of Heavenly Father.

Brett The Revelator (1:35:50)
Mm-hmm.

It's out of fear,

Stephanie Cardozo (1:36:01)
It's out of fear of not being enough, of not being worthy of love, of not... Exactly. And those things, the vanity, the pride, the judgment that, you know, stand up and use that insecurity and that lack of self-worth, that lack of self-love, they look like selfishness.

Brett The Revelator (1:36:07)
insecurity, ⁓

It's an event mechanism.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:36:26)
It's a defense mechanism.

It's truly people hurting and functioning on a lack of abundance on a paradigm where they know they're supposed to be children of God. They know that they're supposed to be divine, but they don't actually feel love from their Heavenly Father even though they know it's there. They don't actually feel love from the Savior even though they know it's there.

Brett The Revelator (1:36:49)
Yeah, they don't even believe it when it happens

sometimes. Yeah, lot of people stand up and be like, I don't know why this person ministered to me, why they did such a nice thing for me. And it's like, maybe because they love you, maybe you're worth being loved. I don't know. Why is that hard to understand? I have zero neuroticism, so it doesn't make sense to me, but you know, I see it.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:36:54)
Yeah, and well, I learned this personally.

You know, I understand it, it's because I went through it personally, and I think Heavenly Father showed it to me because I needed to understand it see it in others.

I went through that BU program that I mentioned and before I went through that program I didn't realize that I actually hated myself. ⁓ I didn't feel worthy of love. I knew that God loved me. I knew that the Savior loved me but I actually didn't feel it and I actually was denying the love my husband was giving me. Like here's him trying and extending out love and I couldn't even feel it because I couldn't

Brett The Revelator (1:37:52)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:37:58)
accept that I was worthy of that love. And I realized that foundationally I was living for other people rather than living for myself. But that left my foundation weak because God doesn't want me to live because I'm doing it for Him.

He gave me the choice to come here and he wants me to do it for myself. He wants me to want more. He wants me to make it back to him.

Brett The Revelator (1:38:26)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:38:30)
He wants me to love myself the way that He loves me, not in a selfish way, not in a way of vanity, but in a way that I understand that I'm a daughter of God and that my place in this world of being His daughter is divine and is true and is a purpose that gives me direction that aligns me with Him and His will.

And as I do that and as I take care of myself and as I love myself...

As I take care of myself too, and taking care of the home, and creating those foundations of the home that create order and routine, and as I eat healthy food, and as I drink enough water, as I take care of myself, I'm more capable of extending myself outward to take care and to truly minister to other people, and to actually see other people because I'm not consumed by my lack of abundance foundations of not feeling

Brett The Revelator (1:39:31)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:39:32)
like I'm worthy enough.

Brett The Revelator (1:39:35)
It's weird because the Lord kind of has us do the opposite of what seems to make sense. So sometimes the Lord will tell us to serve other people even though we are in scarcity. He'll ask us to sacrifice our widow's might out of our scarcity, out of our lack.

and then he'll bless us with more abundance which is kind of it makes no sense logically how that would work how you give up the kind of one thing that you feel like you need in order to be whole and be secure but like we're holding on to these pacifiers these blankies these comforts

and the Lord is asking us to give them up as a sacrifice of love to Him. And then when we do and we're blessed more abundantly.

it helps. don't know how... I think there's truth sort of to both directions. Like we need to learn how to love ourselves. ⁓ The first commandment is to love thy God. But then the second one is to love thy neighbor as thyself. Like it's not just love your neighbor, you gotta love yourself too.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:41:09)
Well if the commandment is to love thy neighbor as you love yourself and you don't love yourself then your standard, yeah your standard for loving your neighbor is based off of something that you don't have and it's interesting because it seems opposite of what we're supposed to do like we're not supposed to be selfish we're not supposed to look inward but as we do it

Brett The Revelator (1:41:16)
How can you love your neighbor more? Yeah, you're not meeting that.

Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:41:37)
not in a nature of self, but in a nature of I'm a daughter of God and how does my Father in heaven want me to treat myself? How does my Father in heaven want me to view myself? And as we align that paradigm with His paradigm of us, then all of a sudden our paradigm of other people and our

ability to funnel love from our Heavenly Father and from our Savior to other people is magnified because we understand what that love actually feels like and looks like and we're more capable of extending it outwards and you bring up having a little, you know, that that widow's might.

is as I have gone through this, it has been prompted by me wanting to help other people. It's been prompted by me wanting to implement charity as a part of my internal character. And as I've sought to help others and I've failed over and over and over again, I am...

Brett The Revelator (1:42:42)
Thank

Stephanie Cardozo (1:42:48)
I am pitiful at ministering and I am just starting to actually get to a point where I'm like, okay, I'm starting to actually get this ministering thing down and I'm not perfect at it, but I've improved tenfold and it came from Heavenly Father prompting me to first look inward and to view myself aligned with how God views me.

Brett The Revelator (1:43:17)
Right.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:43:18)
And that has allowed me to, like we talked about this earlier, is with the political divide, it's allowed me to see people as you discussed, okay, why do they believe that they have to do that? Why do they believe that their only option is to end life?

Brett The Revelator (1:43:42)
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:43:42)
Where's their arguments coming from? Do they have any validity?

Is there an answer in the middle that we're missing because we are too stubborn to see their perspective? Is there...

Brett The Revelator (1:43:52)
Or are they not

arguing for that? But that's the view that we're being given by people who want to distort the truth. We're seeing the other side through these, you know, political lenses of seeing our enemies, but we're all children of God. Even the people that not in our...

Stephanie Cardozo (1:44:00)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Brett The Revelator (1:44:15)
country or children of God, we need to start seeing ourselves as on the same team and not finding every excuse to contend with one another.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:44:25)
Well, and I'll even take it a step further because there are a lot of abortions performed. And my mom is actually an abortion survivor. And...

Brett The Revelator (1:44:33)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:44:40)
What did my grandmother go through that led her to try and abort my biological mother? I have two moms.

Brett The Revelator (1:44:49)
Yeah, what are the

root causes? We're not even asking that. We're just saying we need to imprison people who do this thing. We need to stop allowing this thing from happening. Nobody's saying what causes people to get to the point where they feel like an elective abortion is the only way out. I don't hear anybody talking about that. That's way more important. Like you got to solve the right problem if you don't know what the root cause is.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:44:58)
And so.

Yeah.

And no, no one's talking about that. And no one's talking about.

Yeah, and so my, you know, people would say my grandmother should be in jail and she should be condemned and she never should have been able to try to have those abortions and...

Brett The Revelator (1:45:27)
Yeah, throw

her in prison. That's gonna solve the problem.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:45:31)
She had many

abortions, sadly. But what got her there is that she was the youngest of eight children. And my great-grandmother had married an elder gentleman who, after them having kids and her taking care of kids that were not hers from a second marriage, now her husband passes away and they grew up in Ukraine.

Brett The Revelator (1:45:53)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:46:01)
So my grandmother, living in a one room hut on a dirt floor, the youngest of eight grew up starving. She grew up starving and seeing her mom trying to do everything she possibly could to feed her children and to not let them starve. And no matter what her mother did, she could not feed her children and she could not manage to have enough and...

Brett The Revelator (1:46:28)
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:46:29)
they suffered immensely

and my grandma grew up with the paradigm that having children led to hardship and that she couldn't have children because no matter what she did it was never going to be enough. And I'm not saying that that changes, that my grandma shouldn't have done that. I should clarify I have two moms. I have an adopted mom and I have my biological mom and so this is my biological mom's story but

That doesn't change that what she did was evil and it was bad, but that also doesn't make her a bad person. It makes her a suffering person who saw the options that she had and chose what she thought was best for her. Even if it is...

Brett The Revelator (1:47:10)
We all make choices

that are evil and that are bad. Like who are we to throw stones without having any compassion?

Stephanie Cardozo (1:47:14)
Yeah, exactly.

And who am I, even though I know that hardship is not necessarily a bad thing, hardship is a good thing because it helps us grow and it helps us stretch to become more. With that paradigm of hardship that Heavenly Father has given me, I understand that that hardship that they went through is not necessarily all bad, even though it is hard and that hardship and that suffering is hard.

and a lot of people view it as bad and to be avoided. But hardship is really something that if you embrace it, it becomes beautiful.

Brett The Revelator (1:47:57)
Yeah, you have to do it with your agency. You have to do it by choice. When you see that hardship is being inflicted on you, it's a lot harder.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:48:01)
Yeah.

It's a lot harder and I'm not saying that what my grandma did was okay, it wasn't. It put a lot of scars on my mom. It put a lot of scars even on me through my mom. And those scars though I've been able to overcome in a lot of ways by healing some generational trauma that was passed down to me. And...

And that to me is a good thing. It took a couple generations for us to get there to be able to have healing happen. But by overcoming those trials and even talking to my biological mom about overcoming those trials, we've freed ourselves from some really heavy chains.

Brett The Revelator (1:48:58)
Yeah, yeah. And those blessings can apply. Like my wife said, convert to the church. And so we will take a bunch of her names to the temple and do temple work for them. And her blessings, her choice to change the cycle.

is affecting eternity in both directions. It's affecting her children now are having truths and values that they wouldn't have had. And then it's also bringing blessings to our ancestors in the past, I think.

That's not just true of conversion. That's true of all truth. As we gain truth, it ripples in eternity in both directions. As we grow, as we make choices that are hard but are the right things to do, those blessings ripen just like iniquities ripen.

time and those fruits start to show in our lives.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:50:05)
And I think that's part of turning our hearts to our fathers is literally understanding them and the hardships, the iniquities they've passed down to us.

And as we break those iniquities and we heal them within ourselves and we give them a chance to accept that same healing through our temple work that we do, the work we do for our ancestors, we are turning our hearts to them and we're understanding them, we're forgiving them, we're communing with them in their hardship.

Brett The Revelator (1:50:39)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:50:39)
and connecting with them and then we're turning our hearts to them even further by offering them the chance to heal the way that we've been able to heal through the Savior's sacrifice.

Brett The Revelator (1:50:51)
Do you know the version of that turning of the hearts that was given to Joseph Smith? The angel Moroni changed it slightly.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:51:03)
I don't know if I do.

Brett The Revelator (1:51:11)
Yeah, here it is. Doctrine and Covenants 2, or it's also found in Joseph Smith's history. But he says, behold, I will reveal unto you the priesthood by the hand of Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he shall plant in the hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers. And the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers. If were not so, the whole earth would be utterly wasted in his coming.

So it's not just turning the hearts of the children to the fathers and the fathers to the children, but the hearts of the children to the promises made to the fathers. So there are promises that have been made to ancient prophets all the way back in history.

And those promises are meant to be fulfilled in our day by either their literal, lineal, bloodline children or covenant children who've made covenants and who've been sealed for them through covenants. Like we're adopted into the house of Israel as Gentiles when we're converted to the church and when we receive temple covenants.

That's us being grafted into those lines.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:52:30)
It kind of reminds me of like the iniquities. They're kind of like chains that link us through the generations. And we're taking those chains and we're healing them and we're turning them into positive relationships and connections through looking backwards to the blessings and to healing.

Brett The Revelator (1:52:48)
Yeah,

Stephanie Cardozo (1:52:54)
and

to the promises, and to healing, to connecting the full line in a positive way that shakes off the chains, but that leaves us connected as a family and as a tree.

Brett The Revelator (1:53:05)
Yeah, yeah, Jacob five, the whole parable of olive trees, natural branches and wild branches being grafted into this mother tree. If we think of that as a family tree and us being grafted into those blessings and those promises made to those fathers.

then our question becomes, A, how do we graft it into those lines, those family lines? And then B, how do we fulfill the covenants and promises that were made to those fathers? How do we ensure that we qualify for those promises and those powers and those blessings to be given to us? Because we don't know what they are. Like the Book of Mormon came because the Lord promised to Nephi and Lehi and others, Enos.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:53:48)
the lava.

Brett The Revelator (1:53:57)
that he would bless his descendants ⁓ with this record in our day. What other blessings has the Lord promised in our day that haven't yet come to pass? Because we don't know what those blessings are. We're not seeking to know who those covenant fathers are and connecting ourselves to them and fulfilling those promises. So that's my kind of...

high level turning the hearts of the fathers principle.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:54:32)
I love it.

It's a very cool principle and understanding what it means, accepting the blessings that they were given and healing and sending that healing down for them to be able to accept and shaking off chains and connecting through God's means rather than iniquity.

I don't know, the whole concept is very beautiful, but I do agree that I don't think we're necessarily seeking out those blessings actively. It's not...

Brett The Revelator (1:55:11)
And the promises

are specifically cut out of the Malachi version of that prophecy. So it makes you wonder why that was the thing they didn't include.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:55:18)
And that's.

And that's interesting. There's so many spots in scripture.

where the writer is told you can't write anymore.

Brett The Revelator (1:55:30)
Right,

right, right.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:55:36)
We see that in Isaiah, I believe. We see that in Revelation. We see that in 2 Nephi. Or is it 1 Nephi? I think it's 1 Nephi and 2 Nephi. ⁓ And I'm sure it's in other places I don't know.

Brett The Revelator (1:55:51)
third knee file,

Jesus's words. Maro and I wasn't able to write them in third knee file because he was forbidden.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:56:03)
Yeah, there's a lot of places in scripture that seems to be a common theme and I think that falls back to Heavenly Father is giving us things line upon line and precept upon precept. He's giving us the basics so that we can seek out with the skills and the tools we learn from the basics the more complicated and deep doctrines that require the basics as a strong foundation to be understood.

Brett The Revelator (1:56:24)
No.

Yeah, and I actually think ⁓ there's a priesthood principle here too. The priesthood was passed down by the fathers to the children, the children of Aaron, the children of Levi were given the priesthood by lineage by their.

birthright.

we assume that priesthood has to be something that is you're ordained to by someone, which is probably true, but also there's this lineage part of it too.

How do we reconcile those two? Does lineage have to do with the natural branches and the ordaining, conferring priesthood have more to do with the grafting in of the wild branches, the Gentiles, because that's what the church does, is it's grafting in all of these wild branches. Is there something more about priesthood that we don't understand because we just have this Gentile wild branches perspective?

Stephanie Cardozo (1:57:48)
I would say there is a lot to yet be restored. And I think it's been interesting. I've had a very big paradigm shift in the last couple years of my life. When I was in high school, I have this dear friend and I told her that I did not want to be alive when the second coming happened. I told her that just end my life in the tribulations and... ⁓

Brett The Revelator (1:57:49)
you

Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:58:18)
I just don't want to be a part of it and I think I just subconsciously knew how much hardship and trial and work it was to truly want to survive to do more and to wait for the Savior through all the hardships that are to come. And my point of saying that is that I think with this paradigm shift I'm having, I'm finding that the reason I'm here in this day and age is because I love

fighting for the Lord and that I want to be a warrior for Him, that I want to be a tool for Him in these trying times and I want to do what He wants me to do and I truly want to merge my will with Him and do it His way. And as He gives me the tools to do that, as He gives me the tools to accomplish His will and merge my will with His,

Brett The Revelator (1:58:56)
Thank you.

Stephanie Cardozo (1:59:19)
I find that I actually want to be here and I actually want to do these things. And I find it very exciting that the church has been restored. But that there's more to be restored and higher laws still to be given that we're waiting for.

Brett The Revelator (1:59:27)
Yeah,

greater power is also something that I'm interested in. Not just, know, stewardship in the church, but true power to bless and protect those that we love.

Zion, no weapon formed against Zion will prosper, how is that possible? How is it that the whole world can basically war against Zion and not succeed? Something's gonna happen. The power's going to come upon the people.

There's something about that principle that we don't yet understand because in the church we don't have that power. I don't see it. We see miracles, we see faith being demonstrated. I'm not discounting that there are miracles and there's priesthood authority. But I think there's an opportunity for greater power to come to the saints as we learn what those greater things are.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:00:38)
Well, and I think that is

I agree. And I think that's even prophesied of in in the Bible and in the Book of Mormon that there will be greater miracles and greater power. And I think that at least personally, my experience is that things have sped up. And, you know, prophesies of that in Doctrine and Covenants, talks about how things will be sped up for the elect's sake. Yeah, and.

Brett The Revelator (2:01:02)
Florida's painting is work. Yep.

I'm going to start again.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:01:07)
And I think

that with that hastening comes greater miracles and greater powers. And I mean, I know in my life I've experienced immense miracles, especially in my health. And I hope that we see that.

more widespread and throughout the world and I think in part we have. I think there are people out there who have overcome immense physical health obstacles because I'm not alone in my recovery story.

But I agree with you, I think there's more to the priesthood, I think there's more power to be unveiled. I think the world is rapidly changing and God is at the helm of that change. I think we're gonna see a lot of deconstruction to build things up on stronger foundations, not just as a church, but as a world.

Brett The Revelator (2:02:06)
exciting. I like change. I'm a big fan of it. That's what I like to do. I like to figure out things. I love uncertainty. I love learning new things, being kind of at the bleeding edge of what's possible. And we need more of that in spiritual religious realms.

as much as we're growing in our kind technological abilities, I think we have a spiritual revolution that's happening, spirits being poured out upon people all over the world, not just members of the church either.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:02:41)
I think...

I agree with you. think that really there is a spiritual revolution coming and I think that comes with spiritual medicines. It's my personal belief that we're seeing the medicines that God deemed and put in this world coming out as actual medicine. And even though I think everything we

Brett The Revelator (2:03:08)
Yeah, I can't wait for real healers to

be healing with spiritual priesthood power. That's going be cool.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:03:16)
Yeah,

yes, I think so too. I think there's also like a feminine side to that, ⁓ like the female role as a healer. And I strongly believe it goes hand in hand with ⁓ male priesthood. think that as women we're...

Brett The Revelator (2:03:34)
In the temple, both

men and women are clothed in priesthood robes and officiated in the priesthood in the temple, I think. Just because we don't see it in the administration of the church doesn't mean that there's not power for it.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:03:50)
Yeah.

Brett The Revelator (2:03:51)
or men

and women, if anything, can kind of make an argument the other way around. Men have to have to be ordained to the Melchizedek Priesthood. If I go through for the dead, that person has to have been ordained to the Melchizedek Priesthood before they can be clothed in the robes of the priesthood, which is interesting, but the women don't. They don't have to be ordained to.

priesthood order or priesthood authority in order to be cloaked in robes of the priesthood.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:04:23)
Well, and I think that speaks a lot to the nature of men and to the nature of women. And you mentioned it earlier, ⁓ when we first started talking about sacrifice, you talked about having to willingly submit to the Lord. And I think the world has kind of twisted the definition of submission into a negative thing that almost is equivalent to slavery, which I think is...

the opposite of what submission is, is slavery is, you're not willing to do it and you're forced to do it, it's what the devil wants us to be. Exactly, and submission is willingly submitting because you know it's what's best for you. as a woman, I got married at 19.

Brett The Revelator (2:04:59)
Involuntary compulsion, yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:05:16)
And I totally took the leadership reins from my husband. And I remember the exact moment that I doubted he was capable of leading us. And I took control. And I literally stunted us. I stunted him. I stunted myself. Because I was trying to take ownership of a role that I, number one, didn't really want to do.

Brett The Revelator (2:05:25)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:05:42)
Number two, thought I was good at and actually I really sucked at. number...

Brett The Revelator (2:05:47)
And was it out of faith

or was it out of insecurity? Right? Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:05:51)
It was out of fear. Yeah,

it was out of fear because I chose not to trust my husband and I chose not to have the patience to let him make mistakes and learn.

Brett The Revelator (2:06:02)
And maybe he didn't include

you as in that kind of counsel of what's right, what we need to do as a family. I see a lot of kind of unrighteous dominion in the church, especially, I don't know, my generation. There's just tons of it and it's really sad. In families specifically, it's like, okay.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:06:12)
Well, it was...

It, yeah.

Brett The Revelator (2:06:24)
lot of women are

submitting to these husbands who are not worthy of their submission. They're just domineering over their spouses and that's not right either.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:06:36)
Yeah, and that wasn't necessarily our position. And so I guess I could go further in depth on that, but I agree with what you discuss as men being unworthy. ⁓

There is a lot of unrighteous dominion and the dynamic of marriage and having a leadership position and someone who chooses to be more submissive, someone who is more submissive and willingly does that. It's a complex dynamic that the world has manipulated in great ways and so it's really hard to understand it but...

Brett The Revelator (2:07:08)
Yeah.

Even our language

doesn't fit because my understanding of leadership and what you call submission is leadership is service. He was the greatest among you, he's a servant of all. And then, so then submission is just receiving a service, it's not.

⁓ So it's kind of backwards. Being served is what submission really probably means. And serving is what leadership is.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:07:46)
What?

So to me, leadership is... So God is the ultimate leader. He leads by example. He leads by giving us structure. And He leads by teaching us obedience. You know, if we're not obedient, there are consequences to our lack of obedience. And He teaches us more. You know, there's more that goes on top of obedience. Like we discuss sacrifice and there's even more above that.

Brett The Revelator (2:08:08)
justice.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:08:17)
He gives us the structure necessary to climb and become more, just like a parent should be for a child to learn the basics and to grow to become more. Submission to me is willingly following. And as a woman, to truly submit, you have to feel safe. And that's kind of a trick question because safety is a choice.

Brett The Revelator (2:08:34)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

You can't provide your safety

if you don't have emotional safety.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:08:51)
Exactly. So submission is a choice. You know, I go and I drive in the car and

Brett The Revelator (2:08:56)
It's also faith, right?

You have to have faith that he's going to provide in a way that will serve you.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:09:07)
Yeah, well, so in our circumstance, it was we had a choice to make. We had to we had to move and we didn't know where to go and we didn't know what to do. And I was kind of trying to put it into his lap and we were very newly married. Of OK, what are we going to do? And he didn't know. And I didn't really push him and say, hey, I want you to lead. I really want to. ⁓

to trust your decisions and I want to let you make mistakes and I want to let you figure out how to lead so you can lead our family. I didn't express, I'm kind of feeling some doubt because you don't really seem sure about what we should do. ⁓ I didn't say, I'm feeling like I can't trust you because I don't feel like.

you know what to do and I don't know what to do either, which isn't really fair. I didn't talk to him about these concerns that I had. I didn't even realize I had concerns at the time, if I'm being honest. I just instinctually felt like I was unsafe trusting him because I instinctually felt like he didn't know what to do, which neither of us. And I remember taking the reins and doing the research and figuring out where we were moving and

Brett The Revelator (2:10:17)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:10:27)
We moved there and in the grand scheme of things, is where we were supposed to be because we had to be there to end up where we are now.

Brett The Revelator (2:10:33)
To learn things.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:10:39)
But at the same time where we moved was very wrong

for us and ⁓ both of us really struggled. I struggled a lot more with my health and that's really where my health began to decline and part of that was because of the weather and ⁓ just everything that was there and my husband really lost himself. He gained a lot of weight and ⁓ really, really got depressed.

And I'm not saying that those trials were my mistake for leading us there. But I'm also saying that there was probably another choice where I chose to submit to my husband and pushed him and lift him up to lead, where we ended up somewhere where we were able to progress faster as people and to learn lessons in different ways. I'm just saying that there was.

Brett The Revelator (2:11:34)
But if you're

pushing him to lead, is that submission?

Stephanie Cardozo (2:11:41)
So submission for a woman is picking up the leader and holding them up so that they can lead and willingly choosing to follow where they direct. So what I wish I had done in that moment is say, hey, here are some of my ideas. This is what's important to me. This is what I want. I want to go back to school. I want to be able to afford rent. I want to be close to my family.

Here are some options I think might work and I wish I had held him up to make that decision instead of making it for us.

Brett The Revelator (2:12:17)
Yeah, to me that sounds like the council, right? Counseling together. Whether it's one person taking the reins and the other person saying, going along with it, I think kind of both are wrong. Like, either you or he taking the reins and saying, I'm going to decide where we're going to go and you're just going to have to deal with that. Neither one of those is right. We should be counseling together. I learned that from, uh, from, uh,

Stephanie Cardozo (2:12:21)
And yeah.

Yeah, and that's not what leadership is.

Yes.

Brett The Revelator (2:12:48)
as a young second counselor and a bishopric. I remember one of our first bishopric meetings. know, the bishop who's like in his late 50s, early 60s, he's an older guy. He goes, okay, here's this problem we're trying to solve and here's what I've been thinking about it.

And he turns to his first counselor and is like, what do you think? And then he turned to me and he goes, what do you think? How do you feel about that? And I'm like, I don't know anything. I didn't even know how to respond to that. I'm like, I'm just 29 year old idiot. I don't know anything. I'm here to learn. But he kind of didn't take that. was like, I want to know what your perspective is and I want your input here.

And I was kind of taken back by that. Sometimes I would just respond, well, I'm OK with that. I don't have a problem with that direction. But it taught me to kind of realize that I needed to speak up. And my perspective was valid, even if I didn't have a lot of experience. We were a council, and we needed to make decisions with input from everybody. And even when we were all kind of

in alignment with what needed to be done, would say, okay, I want you guys to all pray about that and then come back and we'll, if we all feel comfortable, the spirit is agreeing with that decision, then we'll move forward. But if not, then we'll reevaluate.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:14:26)
Yeah, and that's how it should be in a marriage too, is you know in your council there's an obvious leader, you know, that's how bishoprics work. There's the bishop and he has his council, he has his counselors, and the bishop obviously has the last say in what direction they're going to go, but everyone gets a say in that direction and what's happening in their opinion and what they would like to see.

Brett The Revelator (2:14:30)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, but I think our perspective on how leadership works is colored by our experience in the world, which is kind of backwards. I think even in the church, there's a little bit of that.

Like I said, my bishop was a really good example, but I've seen kind of unrighteous dominion from bishops, from other leaders in the church, where they're like, they'll even have a council. They'll have everybody say what they want, and then the bishop will be like, this is what we're going to do. And it's sort of a unilateral, I've made the decision, now we're going to move forward with it.

rather than deferring to the Lord, what does the Lord want us to do? Rather than having the group come to a unanimous decision, if the group is divided, the bishop just says, well, I'm gonna choose this one and we're gonna go forward. I think in the world,

you would say, the husband's leader, the wife is supposed to submit to him. And then if you disagree on something, then the husband can overrule the wife. But I think that's unrighteous dominion. think we need to be working towards something higher, which is common consent, where we need to come to a unanimous decision. We need to do it with the spirit and as equal partners.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:16:19)
And I think that I agree with that, but I think there's also a middle of no to that.

Brett The Revelator (2:16:22)
I think I'm not disagreeing with the fact that

there's a submission element that's important here ⁓ and providing serving element that's important too. But it's really hard to divorce that from how we see leadership in the world, which is really unrighteous dominion. I don't even know how to use the right words because I think it's all sort of colored in that.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:16:36)
Well, I think.

Yeah.

Brett The Revelator (2:16:49)
I'm in charge, which is not in Lord's way. He didn't do that with his own rules. He didn't do that with his people that he was teaching. He's the example.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:16:53)
Well, and I agree with that.

Yeah, and I agree with that and I think that the devil likes to change our definitions of words and really mess with what words mean. And so if we define some words here, I think it clarifies my position and lines it up with exactly what you're saying is it's very easy to have righteous dominion, unrighteous dominion. And I think there's also a middle ground that

Brett The Revelator (2:17:07)
Yep.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:17:30)
And just for an example is, you know, we're trying to do really good on spending money and we're trying to have a really strict budget and be aware of the money we're spending and really avoid purchases that are unnecessary even though we want them and they would make life more convenient. And so I'll bring a purchase to my husband and he'll say no. And.

Brett The Revelator (2:17:36)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:17:54)
I either go with that no and like, yeah, he's right. Or if it's really important to me, what I do is I stand up for myself and I say, hey, you know, this is really important to me. This purchase is important for this reason. And I'll give him all of my reasons. And then I choose to lay it on the table as a choice for him. And even if he says no again,

As long as I feel that he understands my position and he truly saw what I was saying and he's validating and he sees me and he knows it's important.

Brett The Revelator (2:18:31)
Uh-huh.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:18:35)
I'm going to trust him to make the right decision and to communicate with me why he said no. And he's probably going to have a perspective that I didn't understand before and that I'm going to see now. And he's probably going to give me an alternate route or something else that we can do, like save up for it more slowly over time or get it next month or get it next week. And we come to a conclusion together.

Brett The Revelator (2:18:40)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:18:58)
So I think a lot of that too is I ⁓ think women tend to be submissive in nature to the point of being abused and I think a lot of that comes from insecurity and a lack of self-worth and the inability to stand up and say, hey, this is important to me or hey, I'm worthy and I don't deserve to be treated this way.

Brett The Revelator (2:19:20)
Yeah, enabling that unrighteous dominion is something I see a lot.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:19:24)
Exactly. And so there's always two sides to the story, right? There's the man with the unrighteous dominion who's obviously in the wrong, and there's also the woman who's enabling him and who's not standing up for herself, who's also in the wrong. They're both at fault and it's creating the wrong situation together.

Brett The Revelator (2:19:34)
won't stand up for herself, yep.

Yeah, you have to be careful that you're

not pendulum-ing the other way around here too. But maybe that's what you need to go through to get to that middle ground. I don't know. Maybe you have to go kind of to the either end of the extreme to understand what's there and then find the citrus center.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:19:48)
Yeah.

And I...

And I think that's true. I also, I want to define leadership. To me, leadership isn't domination and ultimate say. It's not a dictatorship. What it is is the lead horse in, so there's, if you have a yoked team of horses, right, we talk about being yoked with the Lord.

Brett The Revelator (2:20:25)
No?

Stephanie Cardozo (2:20:27)
So in this scenario, the Lord is the one who is guiding the horses and has, and they've yoked themselves together in marriage. But even in a pair of yoked horses, there's always one horse that goes slightly ahead and leads the pace or the force with which is being exerted to do the work. So.

Brett The Revelator (2:20:45)
Yeah.

is the

Stephanie Cardozo (2:20:54)
You always have a leader and that leader leads by example and they set the pace and they set the trajectory based on the farmer they're yoked with, based on the Savior they're yoked with. So to be worthy we have to be yoked equally with our partners but leading them in trajectory and towards the common goal which is where the Savior is leading us, which is where God wants us to go.

Brett The Revelator (2:21:23)
Yeah, which is where our submission really needs to be, is with the Lord. And even if he asks you to do something to the other end, to the other extreme, and says, I need you to completely sacrifice your submission here to be to the point where you're enabling yourself to be kind of unrighteously dominion, if he asks that of you as a sacrifice,

Stephanie Cardozo (2:21:28)
So for.

Brett The Revelator (2:21:49)
then we need to be able to trust that even if that's not the final ultimate truth of what's right. It might be what's right for you in a particular moment.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:21:57)
destination.

Yeah, and I think that...

Brett The Revelator (2:22:06)
which is scary. Most people would have a hard time with that. Like, wait, that's not right. But if the Lord asks of you, it is right. It doesn't matter.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:22:11)
Well, and I think I'll...

Yeah, I think a lot of women...

really have a hard time with submission because the world tells us we can't submit. The world tells us that we can't be soft and we can't be feminine and we can't be safe because no matter where we are, are not safe. You know, they lie to us and they tell us that we're not safe in marriage because what if we get divorced or what if our husband cheats on us or what if, you know, we have an abusive relationship and we don't have access to money or we're constantly being told and bombarded that we're not safe.

that we can't be soft and feminine. We have to be on our guard and we have to become more like men and that's the only way we can be safe.

Brett The Revelator (2:22:59)
Yeah, and they're proposing a solution which is wrong even if the problem that they're highlighting is right. I see that a lot in society. Like, this thing is bad, therefore you should do this thing. And I'm like, you're right in the first case, you're wrong in the second. Just because that's bad doesn't, you know, just because you can be stuck on the hook if you...

Stephanie Cardozo (2:23:08)
Yeah.

Brett The Revelator (2:23:25)
rely on your husband and he's a complete deadbeat and and and you you put off everything you don't have any education on any work skills I my neighbor had that problem and he was a complete narcissist and cheated on her and divorced her and left her kind of to fend for herself and she had no skills and no education and she was doing the right thing by submitting to him but he was the wrong guy

And I'm like, that's obviously not the right way to go. being the provider instead of the nurturer and putting off having kids and not doing the things that we should be doing, starting our families and enabling mothers to rear their children in love and righteousness, we're not doing that. That's wrong too. So I don't know the right answer to that. You can't.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:23:56)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Brett The Revelator (2:24:23)
plan for every possible horrible thing that could happen to you. But so many people in my generation, my gosh, so many people, the guys just were complete deadbeats and the women were sort of doing the right thing and they just divorced them and left them stranded. it's so scary and sad to see because it's not just one or two. It's like, I know dozens of.

my age that that's what happened to them.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:24:54)
Well, and I might come in and play a little bit of Devil's Advocate on this point. ⁓

Brett The Revelator (2:24:56)
I

don't have given up their motherhood and their submission and they were doing the wrong thing. I'm just saying that that was a scenario that caught my peers off guard and I don't know. Obviously having better men is an even better answer to that problem. So then you can have both.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:25:16)
Yeah, well, and I...

Well, I think that, again, I think this is the devil kind of sneaking in and twisting things because as women we're very capable. But what we tend to do, at least what I tend to do and what I've learned to see in others as I've learned it in myself, is that as I took control, I wanted all of these things to happen.

I wanted our house to function a certain way and for us to be a certain place in career. And I wanted to dictate what my husband did. And I wanted to force him into a career because he was having a hard time picking one. And I wanted to have him act a certain way. And I nagged and I nagged and I nagged because he wasn't living up to the expectations that I thought he should live up to. And in my eyes for a while, I actually saw him as a deadbeat, as you describe.

Brett The Revelator (2:26:12)
Yep.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:26:21)
And I realized as I was praying, I was actually praying and asking Heavenly Father to help me divorce my husband. And Heavenly Father kept coming back and he kept saying, no, no, do not divorce him. That's not what I want you to do. And I finally broke down and I was like, okay, if I can't divorce him...

Brett The Revelator (2:26:28)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:26:43)
then I need you to, I'm giving it to you, I'm putting it in your hands and I'm asking you to guide me and tell me what you need me to do because I can't go on like this. And there was other issues in our marriage.

And it was not pretty. But at the same time, we loved each other. even though we'd kind of lost friendship, we still were very close. And I did not want to leave him. And he didn't want to leave me. And he didn't want me to leave him. And so what I did is I followed God, and I ended up working on myself. He pointed me to...

towards my own problems and he told me to stop casting the stone at my husband and to work on myself. And I started changing how I communicated with my husband. I started changing how I acted. I realized that what I wanted to do was submit in the relationship but that I didn't feel safe to do it and that I didn't trust my husband. I realized that I...

Brett The Revelator (2:27:46)
Yeah. Which is the chicken and the egg problem,

because how do you trust your husband? How does he lead you and earn that trust when he already doesn't have it?

Stephanie Cardozo (2:27:53)
Exactly.

And that's what I told him.

I communicated honestly with him about how I was feeling, I was thinking about divorce, what God was telling me to do, what I was working on. I stopped nagging him and instead I started telling him how I felt and that I wanted to feel like a team and that I didn't. I started telling him that I wanted to be able to follow him and to submit to him and what I wanted that to look like and how that would give me so much freedom to be more available to him and how that would give me so much

Brett The Revelator (2:28:17)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:28:32)
more freedom to worry about the things I actually wanted to worry about rather than leading and worrying about all these things and having my brain move a million miles a minute trying to control every aspect of everything which was unrealistic and exhausting.

Brett The Revelator (2:28:36)
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:28:49)
And as I made these changes, the change in him didn't happen immediately, but he noticed that he was losing me and he didn't want to, and he chose to change it. And he brought me that BU program I've mentioned a couple of times and he started doing therapy and he actually did ketamine therapy, which changed him drastically for the better.

Brett The Revelator (2:28:49)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:29:17)
And then we did BU together and it was really hard and we focused a lot on ourselves and working on ourselves and finding ourselves after, you know, kind of using ourselves in marriage and

Then we came together and we had the same tools and we worked really, really hard. And we came out on the other side stronger and having saved our marriage and being a team. And he wanted to be worthy of me and he wanted to be.

in a place where I felt safe to submit to him. And so he started to work on his relationship with God. And all of the things that I had been trying to push him to do and I'd trying to been forcing him to do and tried to dictate that we did, started to happen and to fall into place. All because I chose to do it God's way and my own way. And I chose to submit to God. And I chose to, even though I couldn't fully to begin with, submit to my husband.

Brett The Revelator (2:30:11)
it.

Yeah, yeah, that's great. And I think that's the way that it should work. we should, ⁓ especially as a woman, think providing the direction of what you need in order to accomplish what you need to accomplish is important. And then the man should be able to and willing to

Stephanie Cardozo (2:30:23)
none.

Brett The Revelator (2:30:50)
try and provide those things for you. They're not that you should dictate what he should do. I agree with that for sure. But I also don't agree that he should be dictating what you do either. He should be trying to provide what you're asking for and seeking. ⁓ I see it more as a providing ⁓ relationship rather than a directing.

relationship if that makes sense.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:31:23)
that makes sense, I guess for us, and maybe this is different case by case, right? For us, it's like an umbrella. So I have, when I surrender to God, I surrender under his umbrella, and I surrender to the structure that he deems that I need to be safe and to become accomplished and to make it back to him.

Brett The Revelator (2:31:28)
Maybe, yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:31:51)
and to reach my full potential. And then I see myself surrendering to the Savior and that further deepens the path of being able to make it back to Heavenly Father. And it provides me even more structure and security and safety as a woman to direct the power that I have as a female to do good and to help myself and to help others.

Brett The Revelator (2:31:55)
little.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:32:19)
And then I see my husband as another umbrella. And before, I felt like he was stalling me and he was stopping me from being able to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish in life because I was carrying his dead weight. Really what I was doing is I was stunting him and I was stunting myself.

Brett The Revelator (2:32:34)
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:32:43)
because I was trying to fly so high, I kept burning myself on the sun and crashing and bringing us both down in misery. But as I've learned, even when, even when I didn't feel safe to surrender to him and to submit to him,

I was working to feel safe and I was communicating with him what was making me feel unsafe and a lot of it was I didn't feel like he had a good relationship with God. A lot of it was I feel like you're gonna lead us in the wrong direction. And so as.

Brett The Revelator (2:33:03)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's hard to do.

Yeah. And you have to be able to question

what the other person is doing. ⁓

Stephanie Cardozo (2:33:19)
Yes, you can't

follow and submit blindly. With God we can because we can trust Him fully and we know that He's perfect. But we still have to discern is this the right path? You know, we still have to discern and learn to trust God through faith and through practicing faith and through building of testimonies. And that's what we have to do.

Brett The Revelator (2:33:44)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:33:50)
Not the same, but similarly, as a woman with my spouse, I had to hold him up. I had to choose to let him try, and I had to choose to let him make mistakes. And I had to choose to discern, hey, you're leading in this direction, and I don't feel comfortable with it, so I'm not going to follow.

Brett The Revelator (2:34:03)
Yeah.

Yeah, in my work we call that responsibility and accountability. They don't necessarily overlap. You have someone who's responsible for doing something, but then you might have someone else who's accountable for making sure that that thing gets done, which is kind of unrighteous dominion. But ⁓ I see it kind of as the reverse. like, ⁓

He might be responsible for making sure that you're provided for financially, or he might be responsible for making sure that ⁓ you're being taught and fed spiritually, your family's being fed spiritually.

you as a wife would be accountable for making sure that that's getting done. And there's nothing wrong with going to him and saying, hey, we're not living up to where we need to be. We need to figure out a way to, you know.

provide for our physical and spiritual needs better, what can we do, counseling together to figure out what that is? Like you should be able to raise those issues and problems as an accountable person, because it impacts you if he's not fulfilling what he needs to be fulfilling and vice versa. I think it's the opposite, right? Like when...

Stephanie Cardozo (2:35:48)
Great.

Yeah, we both

have to be worthy of the position that we're playing in our marriage and we do that by putting God first.

Brett The Revelator (2:35:59)
Like I dumped all of the household chores on my wife because I worked full time and she was the stay at home mom. So she was in charge of all the household chores. I would do like mowing the lawn and doing some of outside stuff. But most of everything else she was responsible for because she was home all day. And then eventually having three kids.

I remember one time where she just crashed out. was like, we got in a big argument. Nobody's helping and all these messes and I have to clean everything up after everybody. She's like, I can't do this anymore. And the spirit was like, ⁓ she's overwhelmed and she needs help and you're not doing anything, any of this stuff around the house.

And I was cleaning up after myself. was doing, you know, throwing some laundry in every now and again. I was doing dishes once in a while. managing three children and all the household chores was not reasonable anymore. And we needed to reevaluate those terms. And so I finally said, you know what?

It seems like you're overwhelmed with how much work there is to do around the house. Is there one chore that you dislike the most? What is that one chore? Is laundry? Is it dishes? Whatever it is, I will take full responsibility for that chore. Make sure that it's done. You can still do that chore if you want to, but I'll consider it a favor to me if you do that chore. And she said dishes. So then I took over dishes from that moment on.

And it was important for two reasons. One, I was now responsible for making sure the dishes were done. It kind of didn't matter how many times, even if I did the dishes all the time, having the responsibility for the dishes was a weight on her, even if she was only doing it once in a while. Does that make sense?

Stephanie Cardozo (2:38:09)
It makes a lot of sense.

Brett The Revelator (2:38:12)
And so just taking the responsibility in addition to the accountability, now all of a sudden that was an emotional burden that I took off of her shoulders. And we added, we added other things to the list. wasn't just the dishes and now she goes to school full time and works. And so I do almost all the household stuff and I'm not great at it. And she has to call me on my, on my laziness more, plenty often, but it's taken a while for me to.

build up that responsibility to be able to do those things and the expertise to be able to do them well, it's taken me years to kind of get to the point where I feel like I can do the chores as well as she did, having done them for most of our marriage. So it's weird shifting that responsibility back and forth. And I think that's great that you guys did that.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:39:05)
Well, and I think that that's a beautiful example of leadership. And I know that you don't like that word, and I totally understand, I'm-

Brett The Revelator (2:39:11)
No, I

love the word leadership. My complaint is that yeah, it's colored by what we see in world.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:39:19)
the world.

Yeah, but I think that that's a beautiful example of leadership is someone you're in charge of providing for and protecting and of guiding so that she can reach her full potential. As a wife, she came to you and said, hey, in trying to pick you up and pick the family up so that we're functioning, am, and correct me if I'm wrong, but...

Brett The Revelator (2:39:44)
And she didn't

say it nicely, right? Like this was a full out argument. Like we were in dire straits and she was not nice. But I recognized that, hey, even though she's not explaining to me to this nicely, and even though she's not coming to me with clear expectations of how I'm to solve this, yeah, I recognize the problem.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:39:49)
Yeah.

Yeah.

And you led your family to the solution. And you led it not by telling her to change something, you led it by changing something yourself and leading her into a more supported and safe place so she could continue being the mother and the nurturer and the creator of her. Yeah.

Brett The Revelator (2:40:14)
Yeah.

Yeah, to focus on the things that were more important, which were the nurturing tasks

and not the chores.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:40:37)
Exactly.

And now I see you being an amazing husband and leading by taking a step back and holding her up to reach her full potential in school so she can do more. And that's a perfect example of leadership. My husband...

Brett The Revelator (2:40:49)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:40:58)
has worked me through all of my undergraduate and all of my graduate work and now is working me through my second postpartum as a mother. And through, which is so hard, and through the beginnings of what is gonna be my own personal practice. And that's a lot, but he's held me up so that I could do those things. And so even though we haven't had this...

Brett The Revelator (2:41:08)
Yeah, which is hard.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:41:27)
perfectly figured out, which no one in this life does, we're figuring out that when I don't try to lead and instead I come to him with my problems, and I maybe give him some ideas of solutions, but I let him lead through example and through doing what direction we're going to go in, with my input involved, we end up in a much better place.

Brett The Revelator (2:41:36)
Yeah. Council together. Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:41:55)
than we were when I was trying to make everything happen.

Brett The Revelator (2:41:59)
Yeah, I love that. And being responsible, yeah, taking responsibility for all of it rather than sharing that responsibility equally and having roles that fit appropriately. Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:42:02)
And I really...

What?

Yeah, and I think the world,

like, I choose to give the last say to him. And that's what submission means for me in my relationship. And if it means a lot to me, I stand up for it and he knows it means a lot to me. And he changes the direction that he's going in based on my needs.

Brett The Revelator (2:42:36)
Yeah, and if you can trust him, that's great. I ⁓ remember with the whole kind of... I can't remember what it was. There've been a bunch of different like sort of feminism or arguments online and I went to my...

Stephanie Cardozo (2:42:41)
Mm-hmm.

Brett The Revelator (2:43:01)
sister and my mom and I was like, what, does this work for you? Like, how do you feel or are we, the church kind of oppressive to women and how does that work? And I was actually surprised at their responses because they said that when you have ⁓ a righteous priesthood holder, a righteous

father figure, righteous husband in your family, a righteous priesthood leader, and you look to them for leadership and you, like you say, submit to them, it's great. Like there's nothing wrong with that. It's fantastic. But the problem is when you have bad

leaders when you have people who don't have your best interests at heart. That's when it fails. It's not that the principle itself is wrong to, like you would say,

Stephanie Cardozo (2:43:59)
and

Well, and I don't mean to say like

everyone has to do it the way that we've done it. I have a dear friend who had to get divorced and that was what was right for her to protect herself and her kids. ⁓ Because she couldn't find a middle ground and there was no way out for her and she was in an abusive situation that she needed to be safe from.

Brett The Revelator (2:44:35)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:44:37)
And, you know, there's been points in my relationship where I look at it and I want to call it abusive. But when I look at it in perspective to how good my life has been and how supported I have been, really, it's just been pendulums swinging around that we've had to communicate through and find stability. And.

Brett The Revelator (2:44:47)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:45:03)
What has been really beautiful is as I've done it Heavenly Father's way and as I've learned the communication skills that he's taught me as I've held up my husband to make these decisions and given him these choices to make. And the first choice was like, I can't continue on like this. If things don't change, I have to leave. Him choosing, ⁓

Brett The Revelator (2:45:27)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:45:29)
I don't want you to leave, I'm going to work on myself and him actually putting the work in. Most relationships, that doesn't happen. The person will say they're going to put the work in and then they don't. And I think a lot of that comes down to the chains of iniquities that prevent people from progressing and we have to see those. But we also have to see the other person in the relationship. And we just have to love them despite...

Brett The Revelator (2:45:46)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:45:56)
maybe thinking that they're doing things the wrong way and that we wouldn't agree with the way that they're doing it. It doesn't matter. It's not our story and there's multiple right ways to do things and even if it is quote unquote wrong, that person is still learning what God needs them to learn in this life.

Brett The Revelator (2:46:01)
Thank

with your questions.

in this.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:46:17)
but, going back is my husband chose to change. He chose to do the work. And as we followed God's path, we had bright spotlights, bright spotlights shined on all of our cobwebs. And together we chose to clean up those cobwebs and he chose to start working towards becoming a man that I could be safe trusting.

Brett The Revelator (2:46:36)
Yeah.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:46:46)
in a spiritual sense, like most of this is spiritual related because he's

Brett The Revelator (2:46:50)
Yeah, yeah, and that's a big deal,

you giving him the freedom to do that is hard work too.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:46:56)
Yeah, well, and

he's new convert and, ⁓ you know, we're on different spiritual levels. And so really what it is is when it came to it is I felt like I couldn't follow him because spiritually he was going to lead me in the wrong direction. ⁓ So I told him I wanted to feel spiritually safe to follow him and that I needed my life to be aligned with God.

And that's what I needed to feel safe. so he started working on that because he wanted what we were discussing for our life and for our future. And as he did that, miracles started to happen in our lives and are still happening. And it's been really beautiful to see him grow and rather than tearing him down to be picking him up and rather than feeling like we're not progressing, seeing more progress happen, even though

I feel like I'm slowing down. Truly trying to submit to him and picking him up has been a superpower to me and to him because it's lifted him up to achieve his full potential and it's slowed me down to achieve my full potential without flying too high and burning myself on the sun repeatedly.

Brett The Revelator (2:48:10)
Yeah,

that's amazing and that's a hard thing to explain to people because it's very far off of the normal tracks of how things tend to go. That's great. I love that the Lord gave you a solution that...

Stephanie Cardozo (2:48:24)
It's,

Brett The Revelator (2:48:28)
that works for your specific situation. And that's what I find always happens when we put him in the right place and seek revelation and not our own will. I do need to go.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:48:31)
Yeah, what?

Yeah. Okay. I was gonna say,

I think we should probably end the conversation. We've been talking for a while. I really enjoyed the conversation though, and I just wanted to appreciate you sharing the beautiful examples from your relationship with your wife and how things have shifted and how you guys have supported each other. It's been a beautiful conversation.

Brett The Revelator (2:48:48)
you

Yeah, thank you. I'm happy to do it again if you have other topics you want to cover. yeah, thank you.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:49:10)
All right, ⁓

Yeah.

Yeah, I would love to do it again. Absolutely. I'm going to do one a month for the foreseeable future until I can do more. So I'd love to get you on the schedule again.

Brett The Revelator (2:49:32)
Okay, yeah, let me know. Thanks Stephanie. Bye bye.

Stephanie Cardozo (2:49:34)
Okay, bye, Brett.