About the Nothing Doubting Podcast
There are moments in life that make you feel like you’ve lived a thousand lifetimes. At least that is how I was feeling as I sat alone in a quiet hospital room, finally facing the extent to which my life had fallen apart. Life is complicated, feelings are complicated, grief and tragedy are complicated. And faith through it all - is complicated. It took an eternity to hope and to dream; and one single selfish person to shatter an entire life. It took an entire childhood to forge unbreakable bonds of love; and a single text message to replace it all with unbearable loss. It took a decade for my faith to unravel. I contemplated constantly the concept of certainty. I would hear people say that nothing is certain. But that’s not true because tombstones are certain. Can anything be more certain than that?
And it took another half decade to put my faith back together. The miracle of it all still fills me with wonder. The fragility of renewed faith existed precariously alongside each successive tragedy, each dancing in incomprehensible paradox with each other. And yet, this time, unlike the other times in my life when I had tried to believe, the quiet voice guiding me spoke constantly of certainty. How much certainty? More than a tombstone’s worth? Did that much even exist? I continued to follow the quiet voice, until one day I came upon a level of certainty I was not prepared to experience. It takes a lifetime to learn to walk the path of faith, but only a moment to recognize that, without a doubt, now you know.
But certainty brings its own challenges, at least it did for me. I found myself thrown squarely into a crisis of an existential nature. I found myself frustratingly dysfunctional. Day by day I couldn’t get over the issue of viewing all of the normalities of my existence as disappointingly less real as the certainty I experienced; swinging wildly between an entirely new level happiness from the memory of certainty and garnering an increased ability to manage the grief, to crying tears of frustration and rage that I still had to spend each day in this less real place; watching people I love endure such pain, endlessly looking for lost shoes, making scrambled eggs, trying to remember why any of it even mattered. My days were filled with a deep sense of loneliness at not being capable of adequately explaining myself to anyone and immediately getting angry when a well-meaning person failed to grasp the enormity of what I needed to say but couldn’t. I found myself immediately prone to blasting people with unwanted conversations I could tell made them uncomfortable. I would get supremely annoyed over social pressure to view the concept of God as, at best, a pleasant possibility, or a story that gets one through hard times rather than my blaring and admittedly problematic reality. I alternated between oversharing with complete strangers to clamming up and retreating for long periods into my own private world. I was stricken with fits of terror in random moments when I remembered that I was still in this place, and not in that other, safer, more real one that belonged to that Person full of love. The whole of it brought enormous existential shock, strained relationships, deep breaths, wall staring, unexpected tears, and late night conversations with myself over what I even am, what my existence even means, and what even matters now. And somewhere along the way, I stopped paying attention to my own ability to tolerate it all and I ran out of steam. And now, here I was, listening to the silence of a hospital room, in desperate need for better coping mechanisms. I wasn’t going back to the person I was before, to the person who didn’t know, to the person who had still not experienced certainty, that kind of certainty, at least.
My big sister, always the guiding star in my life, suggested that I look for a forum of expression outside of out my calling teaching Relief Society. She came up with the brilliant idea of creating a podcast. My husband was equally supportive and urged me forward. I proceeded cautiously into the idea, at first, But as I have put in the extensive effort to get this venture off the ground, my need for an outlet of expression and the urgency to create it have increased exponentially. Everywhere I turn, I see more and more discussions about faith crisis, more and more supposedly faithful members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints downplaying certainty as a possibility; claiming that the true purpose of religion is the beneficial lifestyle and the increased opportunity we might have for hope. As helpful as these conversations are supposed to be, they just doesn’t cut it when you are staring at a tombstone.
I cannot transfer what happened to me and what I learned about certainty to anyone. But I can describe. I can teach. I can highlight the observations I have made. At first I worried that people might not listen. Or that people might not believe me. But these days I feel pretty devoid of the need for anyone to believe what I say; nobody else was there that afternoon when certainty became my reality. Or any of the other innumerable moments when God taught me along the way. But I know what it meant and still means to my life; I know Jesus is real.
This podcast is for anyone who is struggling to believe, for anyone who feels stuck, for anyone who cannot try anymore. Here we will talk about God in His present and real form and talk about how it is possible to truly know that He, and all that He offers, is real.
“…And he had faith no longer, for he knew, nothing doubting.”
Ether 3:19
About Rosalie Carollo
Hi! My name is Rosalie. I am the creator the Nothing Doubting podcast. I was born and raised in Utah County as a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. My parents joined the church as young adults and made the gospel their highest priority as they raised me and my eleven siblings. This had the effect of entrenching me in the culture and beliefs of the church, for better and worse.
I am a graduate of Utah State University, the first time with a bachelor of Cello Performance and the second time with a Master of Business Administration. I served a mission to the Porto Alegre South Mission in Brazil after graduating; and upon returning home, settled into a career in public accounting as a certified public accountant. My husband, Jeff, and I started our lives together in Redmond, Washington but eventually moved to the California Bay Area and finally found our current permanent home in the South Bay near Cupertino.
After being an average Relief Society president, a terrible Relief Society secretary (twice now), I started teaching Sunday School and then Relief Society and found true passion. I have now served as a Relief Society teacher for seven years and work hard at understanding the complexities of real time faith and helping people who are dealing with crises of faith.
I spend my free time engaging in competitive Silicon Valley parenting at the expense of my four beautiful children whom I adore. I’m an obsessive gardener who geeks out about California native wildflowers and a beekeeper that maintains honeybee hives throughout our community. Our family of six shares our tiny home and garden with four terribly behaved cats, hundreds of thousands of bees, and a number of chickens that shall remain unnamed.
(Caught me a little red fish out down on the Bayou.)
