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The following was written by Sydney Jorgensen for the Deseret News. To read the full article, click here

Dr. Jeff Baker said he didn’t realize what he was getting himself into when he took the leap of faith to restore a 90-year-old LDS church building and open a medical clinic. He recalled a conversation with his daughter in which he said, “I feel like I took a leap off this cliff and I’m falling. I keep falling, and falling, and falling.”

Baker remembers his daughter’s response: “Dad, don’t you know when you jump, you fly?”

“That was really tender,” Baker said. “That was a lot of faith and a lot of hope. I keep going back to that. I’ve got to fly, I’ve got to make this fly.”

Thanks to Baker and CEO Stephen Loosli, what was once a cherished chapel of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 1930s will once again serve as a place of healing for the Idaho Falls community: a clinic for holistic and integrative medicine called The Healing Sanctuary.

“I’ve always wanted to help people heal, not just give them a prescription or not just do surgery,” Baker said. “I want them to heal — the whole body, the whole person, the mental, the spiritual, the emotional — because it’s all connected.”

While the renovated Third Ward building will seek to restore vitality to its historic neighborhood, it needed the touch of experts to fix and improve it from the inside out — a metaphor for what Baker hopes to do for his patients.

To read the full article, click here