Alayna Hannon

My husband was born and raised LDS. He served in the Tucson, Arizona Mission, while I was a convert. A very committed convert. We met and dated and got married in the Draper Temple. I was raised Southern Baptist and I missed Jesus, but I also thought I had more of Jesus in the LDS church.

When our foster children came to us in 2016, they had never been to church. For me, it was important that they learn about Christ, about having a relationship with Him. I thought the church taught that. Many times after Young Women’s, we would ask our foster daughter- what did you learn about God? She would look at us weirdly and say, “Nothing.” Hey apparently did cooking or family search, but never really learned about Jesus. This bothered both my husband and I so much. All I have to offer my kids is Jesus.

In July 2018- we sent our foster children to VBS at the Baptist church. The pastor called in regard to the misbehaving of our four foster kids. Foster kids are not normal and they come to foster care broken with a lot of behaviors. The pastor called to ask if he could come to visit regarding the issue. I was rude to him as I knew he would not understand. I got off the phone and my husband, who hates Southern Baptist pastors, said, “You owe that pastor an apology.” Yeah, I’m sure I do. That pastor never called back, but I never forgot the phone call. We tried to be a good LDS family. We tried to read the scriptures with our foster kids, but our kids didn’t want to read. They would throw tantrums instead. We sought guidance from our bishop. We came to realize that our foster kids didn’t respect my us. The primary reason being that the state was telling them they didn’t have to. We struggled as foster parents, our oldest had turned back to the drugs she had been using with her biological parents. But, still, we endured because that is what good Mormons do. 

We adopted two out of the four children in July 2019 and drove straight to the temple to be sealed. It had been a long and difficult journey, but we felt it was what God designed for us. Even while being in the temple, I believe that God hears our prayers and answers them where we are at. Though our adoption happened in a courtroom, in our hearts (even to this day) becoming a family happened in the sealing room. The reason for this is because of the pain of the courtroom. That courtroom was where they were separated from their parents, where they got broken up from their siblings without any care for their own emotions, the courtroom was full of pain. So even to this day, we became a family in the temple.

In 2020, COVID hit. My best friend, Sara, went to the church that held VBS in 2018. Remember- the Southern Baptist pastor who had called me– yep, I still owed him an apology. Church had shut down in our area, there were no Zoom meetings or calls to see if people were okay. When I did reach out to the Bishop during this time for guidance regarding the behavior of our kids, he said, “Read your scriptures, have family time, prayer time, Sister, endure to the end.” We obeyed but the defiant tantrums continued. One day the tantrum lasted 14 hours– it ended at 2 am. We had no break, we were locked in the house with him. 

Our family and my best friend’s family had Covid together. After a series of frustrating events that occurred during this time, my best friend and I decided that it would be beneficial to “swap kids” for the day. On the way to my house, my friend’s oldest said to me, “I hope you don’t plan on telling me about God, because we go to different churches.” I turned my van around so fast and I parked the van at the Baptist church and I told her about the “Baptist God.” Yep, that is what I called Him. We talked for about an hour and a half and her pastor drove up. He looked at her and said, “I don’t want to know what you did to swap moms.” The next day, as I tried to explain to Sara’s daughter about life and not becoming a teen mom, she had the attitude of WHATEVER! So, we went to visit her pastor. He talked to her about choices. I had heard by this time- he had adopted children and understood the adoption life. I was impressed with how he handled this rebellious teenager’s attitude. 

The following Sunday is when our lives started to change. My husband and I got up and we were still in our bedroom. Our son got up and we heard his tantrum starting. Nobody else was out of their rooms yet. I looked at my husband and I said- I need church. It was July 2020. My husband said “I do too.” Until our ward opened back up, we figured that we might as well go to a close church that is open. So we attended a Sunday service…at the Baptist Church. As we pulled in my oldest daughter said “Mom, this isn’t a Mormon Church.” Later that week, I went into the church sanctuary to pray. Then I talked to the pastor (the one I owed an apology to) and we talked about parenting and he told me horror stories of his adopted son. After I was encouraged about parenting and I thought the conversation was over, he leaned forward and said, “I’ve talked to Sara and I know what church you were raised in. I know what church you go to and I have one question for you: Do you believe in the Trinity?” I said, “I don’t think it matters.” I was there in his office for another hour. I tried to give him proof that I had a relationship with Jesus. At the end of the conversation, I told him that I thought he was a good pastor because he saw me as straying and he could ask me any questions he wanted, but he could NOT talk to my husband like that because if he did, then my husband might not allow me to come back. I NEEDED CHURCH! He said that was fair enough. 

My own foster parents found out we were going to a Baptist Church. They invited us to their Come Follow Me study with them for three weeks. Of course, it was at the same time as the Baptist Church. So we didn’t go to church for those three weeks. During that time of “Come Follow Me,” once again, our son would throw his defiant tantrums. He was 11 at this time. His primary diagnoses are Reactive Attachment Disorder and Oppositional Defiance Disorder. After meeting with my parents for three weeks, we started back attending the Baptist Church on Sundays, work days, youth groups, and Bible Studies. I should mention that my kids had attended the youth group before COVID-19 to learn about Jesus. My friend’s kids came to the LDS church as well.

After three months of going to the Baptist Church, the LDS church decided to open its doors…but to be honest, I didn’t want to go back. So on that first Sunday, I said to my husband that I had a migraine. My husband said “Fine, but we aren’t going to the Baptist Church today either.” The pastor had encouraged me to look into the Trinity. I never did. I was afraid of the unknown. Shortly after, would you believe that God used a clogged toilet to steer us back to him? When it happened, we asked for help from our ward members. None of them a snake. My husband went in search of neighbors to help but to no avail. We did not have money to pay a plumber– our savings had just gone to a recent surgery I had. I called the Pastor and he said “You needed a plumber.” Without hesitation I said, “We don’t have money for a plumber.” He said “That’s what the benevolence fund is for.” I said, “We aren’t Baptists, we are Mormons.” He said, “I didn’t ask what you believed.” After my husband returned home from the neighbors, trying to find help, I informed him that the Baptist church is willing to pay for it. My husband skeptically said, “What must we do for it?” We called Pastor back and asked, “What do we have to do?” His response was just, “Accept it.” And we did.

At that point, the Pastor went on vacation. That weekend was our son’s 12 birthday and the October 2020 General Conference. The men at the Baptist church went shooting and they took my husband and my son. My daughter and I didn’t watch the Conference (nor did we feel guilty about it). Sunday, my daughter and I went to the Baptist church because the youth pastor was preaching. He preached on the Holy Ghost. His visual was milk with chocolate syrup. We got home and my son started telling me what he had learned at General Conference about the Holy Ghost. I shared with him what I had learned at church. Our son started asking questions. A lot of questions. Questions that were not Mormon, but traditional Christian questions. He met that night with his youth pastor. He did not accept Christ because the pastor had to deal with an emergency. After the youth group, the youth pastor said to me, “You can lead him to the Lord.” I said, “But I am Mormon.” He said, “Yes, but you accepted Christ as a teenager.”

My husband and I talked and realized our children would never meet the standards of the LDS church. They couldn’t. They were broken when they came to us. They were on drugs, we believe they had been physically and sexually abused. They were not as good as perfect Mormon children. Maybe if we lowered the standards they would be able to achieve and see blessings. We agreed that I would give our son the option of which church he wanted to follow. The following day on Monday, October 5, 2020, I explained to our son the Romans Road. Just my son and I sitting there, I explained the Mormon version and the Christian version. He accepted Christ that night. I felt something lift from me. I thought it was a mom thing– giving her child to God. But when we came out of the room and sent our kids to bed, my husband said, “He accepted Christ about 10 minutes, didn’t he?” I said “Yes…how did you know?” My husband responded, “The atmosphere in the house completely changed.” This was the thing that I felt in the room when something lifted from me. 

The Pastor of the church called one night and asked if my husband or son needed a ride anywhere. As the call was about to end, he asked, “Do you want your husband to leave the LDS church?” I was taken aback. I didn’t have an answer. I replied to him by saying, “I’ll write you an email.” When I wrote that email, I concluded that we needed the Baptist church because of everything it offered, but we needed the LDS church because it was what we believed. He responded by saying, “Thank you for your honesty. I hope someday you will reconcile with the Trinity.” 

That Sunday, the pastor did not preach on the Trinity, but it is all I was thinking about. I wrote him an email and asked for verses on the Trinity. I promised to read them in the KJV, NIV, NASB, and CSB versions. I started with John 1:1 and I stopped. “In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” I read the rest of John 1 on that first day and I wrote the pastor an email explaining what I thought every verse meant. At the end of the email, I said, “I have no questions or comments. I just need to process this.” Just one hour later, I wrote again and said, “This is what the JST version says, ‘1 In the beginning was the gospel preached through the Son. And the gospel was the word, and the word was with the Son, and the Son was with God, and the Son was of God.’ If Joseph Smith changed it– he’s not a prophet.” The pastor wrote me back and said, “If I spent years teaching you Greek, you still will not find that version.” I studied into the night. I looked into the Greek– it’s more beautiful in the Greek. I read the whole chapter in Greek- the translation was done to English– it was fairly simple. After studying the Trinity for 3 days, I no longer wanted to be Mormon. The next day, I met with the Pastor and he asked if I believed in the Trinity. I stared at him and contemplated, “If I say ‘yes,’ I am be denying my church. But if I say no, I would be lying to him, myself, and most importantly God.” I didn’t answer.

The next day was October 17, 2020, I got a text from my sister-in-law that my brother’s only child had cancer. She was only 17 at the time. Thankfully, she survived. But at this time, this text greatly upset me. I needed to be alone. On the way out the door that same day, my cousin called me, saying that my aunt (whom I was extremely close to) died just a few minutes ago. My life was falling apart. I went to church and just sat there. Pastor drove over and said, “Go home. Tell your best friend/husband everything.” Well, I did. I told him I didn’t want to be Mormon. He basically ignored me for the next 3 weeks, then he decided that it was his job to be my missionary. The first thing he did was prove to me that Joseph Smith was prophesied about in the bible. He turned to Genesis 50:33…which is not in any Bible in the world except for one…the JST version. That doesn’t prove he’s a prophet. Our marriage had crumbled with the one sentence of, “I no longer want to be Mormon”. Our marriage was based on exaltation. My eternal life was tied to my husband and my husband’s eternal life was tied to mine. It had nothing to do with Christ. But the Church was founded on Christ, but yet it wasn’t. Our lives were in turmoil. We needed marriage counseling, but we could not afford it. The pastor gave us marriage counseling for free. He never talked about God. He knew God was working in our marriage and our home and he believed God would win.

Five months turmoil ensued. Our fights were bad. In public we were acted normal, but in private, we used language with no respect for each other. We studied LDS Church doctrine and we studied the scriptures. But every time we asked questions and studied, it only ended with more questions and no answers, causing us more fighting. We both contemplated divorce. April 2021 Conference came and my husband was supposed to help our daughter prepare for her math final. He said he could help prepare her while watching the Conference. After the first session of the Conference ended, my husband turned it off. He did not turn it on again and never explained to me why. That afternoon, we had a FHE lesson about Grace- being a gift only. As I taught it, I could see he was listening with his heart. The next day, Sunday was Easter. We went to Sunrise Service at the Baptist Church (my husband fell asleep). After the regular Worship Service, we went to an Easter party that afternoon. My husband came along. Later that week, my husband told our daughter, “If you don’t want to go to seminary in the morning, you are no longer required to.” She quickly said, “I’m going to start sleeping in!”

April 2021 was awful. We fought so badly. We had the kids crying. I wrote an email to the pastor and I said, “I’m leaving”. He said “You can’t. You’re driving a truck and it’s heading towards the edge. You know what’s at the bottom of the cliff and you are trying to turn the truck around. Your family is in the truck. You almost have it turned around– and now you want to jump out?” I said– “YES! Yes, I really want out!” It was just getting too bad for me. That Thursday night, my husband asked me, “Have you told Maggie we are thinking about leaving the church?” My thoughts were, “I’ve already left…are you thinking of leaving?” But what I did say was, “No, I haven’t. Should I?” This is just what I needed from God. I just needed some hope and I that is exactly what I got that night.

Friday, we had counseling and Sunday we had church. It was the first Sunday in months that we did not argue about beliefs. After waking up from a nap, he suddenly got up and said, “I baptized the kids and it meant nothing!” I didn’t want to start a fight, so I said, “Would you like us to meet with the pastor?” First, he said no, then later changed his mind. During the meeting, my husband said, “I’m ready to leave the LDS Church.” He proceeded with a salvation prayer that day as well, but the Joy of the Lord was absent somehow. My husband went to a Men’s Retreat that Friday and that first night his texts were surprising. I just couldn’t believe it. He then called that afternoon and said that he was ready to be baptized. I cried all Saturday night and had a migraine Sunday. My daughter decided to help me by making a cold frozen coffee drink and the house smelled like coffee. I called my husband, “When are you going to be home?” He said, “In about 10 minutes.” I said, “Honey, I need to be honest with you. I have a migraine. Our daughter was trying to help and made coffee…our house smells like coffee.” Not sure how he would respond, he surprisingly laughed at me and said, “Spoiler alert: I had a cup of coffee yesterday…and I hated it.” My husband accepted Christ on April 30, 2021 at the Men’s Retreat. 

The day he came home, our daughter saw the change in him and wrote the pastor and said “I want what my dad has.” The next day she accepted Christ as her Lord and Saviour. At some point, I finally did apologize to the pastor for my rudeness on the phone in July of 2018. Pastor in turn used it for a sermon illustration when I wasn’t paying attention- and without thinking I said out loud, “Are you talking about me?” He said, “Yes, yes I am!” and everybody laughed.

The reason why my husband turned the Conference off earlier in April was because of the song “High On A Mountaintop.” The last line says, “and save ourselves with all our dead.” Saving ourselves is what Jesus does. God showed this to him. Another thing in April 2021 that helped him see the LDS church as being wrong was Earl Ernskine’s testimony on YouTube. But the final straw was the video “Lost Book of Abraham” on YouTube. It tells the story of the Book of Abraham that we never knew about. If Joseph Smith falsely “translated” a book like that, why would we trust that he correctly “translated” the Book of Mormon? Plus by that time, we couldn’t tell you how he translated the gold plates. Was it with the Urim and Thummim like we had been taught? Or was it with two seer stones that he used as a treasure hunter?

My husband is now in seminary and plans to be a pastor. A Southern Baptist pastor… you know…the people he hated while he was on his LDS mission. God is a God of wonders. He has a plan to prosper. I will tell you I have seen my husband change into a godly man since he accepted Christ. My husband has always been meek, but with Jesus has become a different person. Our verse is Ephesians 2:8-10. Even though we were on the wrong road for many years, in verse 10 it says we are His masterpiece and therefore it is part of our beautiful testimony.