ToddTalks--Spirit By Design: Your Weekly Survival Guide

Send us Fan Mail If you’ve ever felt guilty for saying no, even when you’re exhausted, this conversation is for you. We’re digging into one of the hardest tensions in Christian living: how to show real charity without being taken advantage of, and how to love like Jesus Christ without losing yourself in endless demands.  We start with a simple but freeing idea: charity is not people pleasing. The...

Send us Fan Mail The world feels like it’s accelerating, and not always in a good way. Wars flare up, families strain, truth gets treated like a preference, and technology races ahead faster than our ability to process it. When you feel that tension, it’s easy to ask, “Are these the signs of the Second Coming?” I take that question head-on, and I frame the signs the way the Savior does: not as a c...

Send us Fan Mail Comfort isn’t always a blessing. Sometimes it’s the quiet condition that puts our spiritual life to sleep while we’re busy feeling “fine.” We dig into a danger that rarely announces itself: spiritual apathy that grows through ease, distraction, and just enough routine to keep us going through the motions without real connection to God. We walk through the Book of Mormon pattern of...

Send us Fan Mail Truth didn’t get weaker, but the pressure to treat it like a preference has never been louder. We sit with a hard question: why is it so difficult to stand for eternal truth in a culture that keeps insisting truth is negotiable? I walk through why objective truth matters, why “your truth” can quietly become a trap, and why aligning our lives to truth is the opposite of the modern...

Send us Fan Mail The hardest seasons of life can make you wonder if God has gone quiet or if you did something wrong. We go straight at that fear by walking through the Book of Job and the idea of the refiner’s fire: what if your suffering is not proof of abandonment, but a setting where God is shaping something holier in you? Job is called “perfect and upright,” yet he still loses nearly everythi...

Send us Fan Mail A tiny spiritual nudge can feel easy to dismiss, until you realize it might have been the exact help someone needed. I’m Todd, and I’m digging into a principle that has shaped my life: when we act on promptings from the Holy Ghost, we become more able to receive personal revelation. When we postpone, rationalize, or ignore those impressions, we can miss specific blessings and slow...

Send us Fan Mail When your “instruments” fail in the clouds, your body can swear you’re level while you’re actually turning into danger. I open with a real C-130 cockpit moment where two attitude indicators disagreed and the only way to survive was to trust the right reference. Then I connect that to modern spiritual life: identity confusion, anxiety, outrage culture, distraction, and dopamine add...

Send us Fan Mail Memorial Day can feel like a holiday on the calendar until you’ve watched a grieving unit file onto an aircraft and stand over flag-draped coffins. I’m Todd, and I wanted to slow down and treat this day with the reverence it deserves, drawing from my time flying C-130s and carrying fallen service members on their first leg home. Those memories shaped how I see the American flag, w...

Send us Fan Mail What if one of the clearest lessons about God doesn’t come from a pulpit, but from a battlefield? We take a fresh look at George Washington and the word he returned to again and again: providence. Not luck. Not vibes. The steady belief that God’s hand can guide outcomes even when the situation looks impossible. We connect Washington’s story to LDS doctrine and modern revelation, e...

Send us Fan Mail “Tithing is fire insurance” might be one of the most repeated lines in Latter-day Saint culture, and also one of the most misunderstood. I’m not interested in a fear-based reading of God that sounds like “pay up or burn.” I want to get honest about what the scriptures actually say, why the language is so intense, and what that phrase is really pointing to: a life that’s already al...

Send us Fan Mail Self-doubt is getting louder, and it’s not just a confidence problem. When your worth feels tied to comparison, followers, likes, and constant evaluation, anxiety and impostor syndrome start to feel “normal” even when something deep inside you knows it isn’t. We go straight at the real issue: when you don’t know who you are, you’ll doubt everything you do. We talk about self-doubt...

Send us Fan Mail “When you know better, you do better” sounds like a gentle nudge. I argue it’s something far more serious: spiritual light changes you, and once it shows up, you’re accountable for what you do with it. That’s the uncomfortable mercy of clarity. Light reveals what’s true, what’s off, and what direction your life is actually moving, whether toward life in Christ or slow spiritual de...

Send us Fan Mail Faith doesn’t usually break in a dramatic moment. It drifts, quietly, one distracted thought at a time, until we look up and realize we’re nowhere near where we meant to be. We want a practical way back, not just a motivational quote, so we walk through a simple framework for building faith intentionally: meditation, prayer, and vision boarding, used together and anchored in the t...

Send us Fan Mail Your mind can argue forever, but your soul often knows in an instant. Todd sits down with Shane Murphy and Myles Treanor to explore the Soul Alignment Method, a practical approach to remembering your soul's purpose by learning to listen for a the sense of lightness and/or clarity within life force. We talk about what happens when modern noise drowns out intuition, why “alignm...

Send us Fan Mail Part three of our Moral Agency discussion.  Chaos doesn’t break most people all at once. Drift does. One skipped prayer turns into a week, one “I’ll handle it” turns into relying on willpower, and suddenly the old patterns are back. We apply a framework to spiritual growth and moral agency, aiming for the kind of discipleship Helaman describes as “firm, steadfast, immovable.” We d...

Send us Fan Mail There’s a point in every battle where you’ve stabilized after the first hit and you finally have space to choose your next move. That’s the moment we focus on here: shifting from being acted upon to acting with spiritual agency. If you’ve ever felt like a negative habit, an anxious thought loop, or a dull “I’m fine” season keeps pulling you away from God, this episode will show yo...

Send us Fan Mail Losing control and losing your agency rarely happens all at once. It happens the way a pilot gets off course: one small degree at a time, until you look up and realize you’re heading the wrong direction. That’s why we start with a dogfighting lesson about initiative and translate it into spiritual terms, because moral agency works the same way. When you’re acting, you’re positione...

Send us Fan Mail Spiritual collapse usually does not look like a sudden break. It looks like getting comfortable, skipping the small things, and slowly taking off spiritual protection piece by piece until peace is gone and God feels far away. I walk through the seven stages of spiritual decline so you can spot the pattern early, name what is happening, and stop drifting before it becomes disconnec...

Send us Fan Mail Mercy is often expressed like it means “accept everything,” and tolerance gets sold like it means “approve of everything.” That confusion sounds harmless until you try to lead a family, keep covenants, or make a hard call with your conscience awake. I’m drawing a clean line between mercy and tolerance, then pushing deeper into what Christ actually models: love that tells the truth...

Send us Fan Mail Self-doubt behaves like a thief: it steals your peace, shrinks your courage, and convinces you that your future is already decided. We tackle that head-on with a spiritual approach to overcoming self-doubt that’s built for real life, not just good moods. I walk through an “Pattern” you can actually follow, grounded in the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and the idea that doubt fad...

Send us Fan Mail In commemoration of Easter I delve deep into the Atonement of Jesus Christ. I weave in several aviation metaphors because that's what I do. The opening aviation sequence mirrors what many of us feel right now: moral fog, loud voices redefining truth, and the temptation to fly by emotion alone. So we center on the one doctrine that stabilizes everything, especially at Easter:...

Send us Fan Mail The world feels louder, faster, and harder to know the truth and that pressure is not just political or cultural, it is spiritual. I use a pilot’s lens to explain what it means to live in a “contested environment,” where GPS spoofing can quietly pull an aircraft off course, and your spirituality can be spoofed as well. That same kind of drift can happen to us when we stop listenin...

Send us Fan Mail This is a rerelease with a much better recording. The law of attraction works, but it can also leave people stuck in frustration when life doesn’t “manifest” on schedule. We wanted to slow the conversation down and ask a deeper question: is the law of attraction actually a gospel principle, and if it is, what does Jesus Christ add that self-help never can? We walk through scriptur...

Send us Fan Mail Organized corruption rarely looks like a movie plot. It looks like “normal” political or societal actions: insiders protecting insiders, the rules changing based on who you are, and the pressure to stay quiet because loyalty matters more than truth. That’s why I keep coming back to the Book of Mormon and the Gadianton robbers. It is one of the most detailed scriptural descriptions...

Send us Fan Mail An ancinet warning specifically for our day! In this episode I walk through Moroni’s urgent spotlight on the Gadianton robbers—a network that infiltrated courts, commerce, and government—and draw a clear line to the subtle ways corruption seeps into modern life. This isn’t fear-mongering; it’s a field guide to staying free in an age where truth is contested and loyalty is for sale...