17. A Season of Deliverance II

© 2020 Daniel Yordy

January 1988 - September 1988

The Spring Semester
The entire year, from September of 1987 until the end of August, 1988, was inside this same season of deliverance, yet we have covered only four months. The remaining eight months, however, contain so much that is of importance to my life and to the deliverance of God. Deliverance times did continue after August of 1988, but they stood in second place to something far more important to me.

In other colleges, the courses I took were peripheral to my life. At least half of the courses I took at Blueberry were central to my life and to my knowledge of God. Besides the second semester of New Testament with Brother Ernest, I also took “Learning and Evaluation” from Sister Mozelle and “Understanding the Adolescent” from Sister Charity. Both of these courses were key to my knowledge of how to enable my students to learn.

From Sister Delores, I took “Library Skills,” more English Composition, and “Writer’s Workshop.” I will share more from these in a bit. Second to Sister Jane’s role in my life, however, was a “Speech Workshop” in March, conducted by Bill and Bettie Grier from the Whitestone Christian community in Alaska. Bill and Bettie were leading traveling ministries in the move. This Speech Workshop meant so much to me and to others.

Continuing Deliverance 
Before we get to the Speech workshop, I want to share the experience I had, probably in February of 1988. After Sister Jane had gone on elsewhere, the services at Blueberry continued in similar levels of anointing and power. It was a season of wonder.

In one such service, during the praise, there seemed to come upon each one personally, and thus all of us together, the same levels of anointing for deliverance we had tasted with Sister Jane. I found myself so caught into God. – But in that place, suddenly, I saw those eight long hours of terror when I was sixteen, lying on my bed overdosing on LSD. The moment I saw that, something let loose inside of me. I felt as if a huge swarm of hornets were swirling around in desperate anger just above and back from my heart.

I shot my hands up into the air and cast myself utterly upon the Lord Jesus. As I did so, I felt a great snap or pow as that angry horde left me, with the sensation of their departure right behind and above my voice box. 

Most every day for fifteen years, in spite of all the deliverances and revelations of God, that tormenting fear had gripped my guts. From that moment until now, I cannot remember such a thing, what it was or meant. I know of it only as something that was once true, but it is utterly gone from me, never to return.

I want to explain how this all works. You see, a natural health practitioner knows that, if someone has a significant health problem, cancer, say, you cannot just start treating that condition. Rather, other health problems are sitting on top of that larger problem, one might say, and those less significant problems must be dealt with first. To treat the large problem without removing those lesser issues, could jeopardize the life of the patient.

It is the same for God as He brings spiritual healing to us. The terror of being lost was the larger issue inside of me. But God could not remove that until He had first touched and healed some other things in my life, including forgiving my father. Once those “lesser” things were healed and gone, then God could break the greater thing without destroying me.

The same thing is happening as I write this account of my life. Except this time, it is the final little things that God is bringing such wondrous healing to, filling up all the remaining crevices of my memory with joy and goodness. I could never have given an account like this before, not until so many much larger things had been healed, even all through this present season of speaking Christ my only life.

Speech Class
Bill and Bettie Grier had been leading ministries in a move of the Spirit called “the Walk” under John Stevens. In that fellowship, they lived in a community with their congregation in New Hampshire. Then, in 1980, they, with most of their congregation, switched over to being part of “the move.” (That sounds silly, I know, but what else do we call what God is doing among His people.) Most of that congregation then moved up to Alaska to a property southeast of Fairbanks. Their community was called Whitestone, which also held a branch of Covenant Life College. Bill Grier had been accepted as an apostolic ministry of our fellowship, but his wife Bettie was certainly his equal.

Apart from being strong and leading ministries, Bill and Bettie both were speech teachers. As such, their speech team in the high school at Whitestone won the Alaska state speech competition over and over. They often went on to the national competitions and won the best high school speech team in the nation more than once. What I mean to say is that for eight jam-packed days, from dawn to well-after dark, we were immersed in one of those wondrous experiences in life that come seldom, but which were my privilege to be caught in.

All the college students were in this eight day course, as well as a number who were not students including Brian Dwyer and David Randolph, a brother about our age who had come to Blueberry that spring from the Yukon. The course itself was held in the science room, but we practiced our lines all over the school and throughout the community. For eight days, the whole community was caught up in our speech practice. 

Bill and Bettie alternated as they taught us speech fundamentals and practiced us in various impromptu speech exercises. They worked together perfectly, back and forth, through this whole time. 

Now, let me tell you, speech, and acting on a stage and “performing” in front of people was NOT me. I would almost rather have gone to the dentist! So, when I had to stand in front of the class to give a little prepared spiel and NOT be distracted, while everyone hooted and hollered (that was the drill), was bad enough. Except that Mike Pelletier and Ken Geis had been assigned to be my chief distractors, which Mike fulfilled by climbing on my back and Ken by blocking between me and my audience in every ridiculous pose! Needless to say, I did not do too well on that exercise. (I am laughing as I write this.)
Each of us was assigned two major things. First was a two-page reading, which we were to perform in front of the class for a major part of our grade. This reading had to be memorized, eloquent, and fully expressive, that is, we had to be the characters we were expressing. I chose a piece from Roots, when the older slave couple learned their daughter would be sold away from them. I had to speak the dialogue of five different individuals, the narrator, one white and three black, four of them Southern and all highly emotional.

The second was a reader’s theater presentation of The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, which we would present to a packed audience on the last evening of the course, that is, the end of the seventh day. My part was the dead Anglican priest, living out from his theological intellect, come out from Hades to view a distant heaven. My conversation was with a human, played by Lena Pacy, whom I had known when alive, coming out from Christ to convince me that intellectual theology was worthless and that we should just love Jesus for real. My character was not persuaded.

Again, this was not something I did, yet there I was, being coached by two of the best as well as by several of their top students from Whitestone who had come to assist. 

To explain what this great press was for all of us, I want to focus on Monica Rotundi; indeed we all were focused on Monica Rotundi because, for some reason, Brother Bill went after her with everything he had. Monica was a little mouse of a girl, bright and warm certainly, but acting outwardly in this way was harder for Monica than for any of us.

Monica’s personal reading was from the Jesse Owen story when his mother had to cut a tumor out of him herself, because they could not afford a doctor. Brother Bill made Monica repeat her piece over and over in front us, never accepting her performance because it was not good enough. Bill and Bettie were fierce, but they were also anointed of God and knew exactly what they were doing. They together were master creators. All of us wanted to protect Monica, but we did not dare. And the worse thing was that Monica’s personal presentation was to be given to the whole audience. She also had a part in the reader’s theatre presentation of The Great Divorce.

Then, as we were rehearsing the reader’s theater (which means that you are expressive as the character, but you remain standing in one spot without moving around as one does in acting). As those of us who were ghosts arriving up out from hades, Monica was sitting behind me in our “train.” She lost it, in full panic mode. I wanted so much to comfort her, to tell her it was okay. But Brother Bill was nearby, and when he saw Monica panic, he became too angry to speak. He called Bettie over, and she said, in stern command, “Monica, snap out of it.”

To my compete astonishment, Monica did. She went completely to peace. Let me tell you this, though, such an approach is almost always false; this time, with these two, it was true. When Monica gave her Jesse Owen’s performance the next evening to the entire crowd, she did it better than any time of practice. She had us all completely mesmerized.

I gave my presentation from Roots to the class in the Science Room the afternoon before our final presentation. This was difficult for me, but I had worked hard on it with help from Whitestone students. So I stood and did the best I could, not knowing how it would be received. Brother Bill was sitting just in front of me, but Sister Bettie was in the back corner behind the teacher’s desk. When I had finished, Brother Bill was in tears. He stated that he had been unable to mark my points because he had been too deeply moved. They had to rely on Bettie’s marks for my grade. I did not expect this, but his response planted something deep inside of me that would change my teaching career.

We performed The Great Divorce to a packed house. I remember that Sister Jane was also there, having been ministering in a nearby community. Lena Pacey and I had practiced our characters together quite a bit. When I spoke my lines in what I hoped was an Anglican intellectual voice, the whole audience laughed, including Brother Bill. This was amazing – I had made people laugh. Wow.

Someone had taken a video of the performance, and so in our final day of the course, which was a debriefing of what we had experienced, we watched that video together in the science room. This was the first time in my life I had seen myself on video. I was astonished and overwhelmed; it was almost too much for me. I had never before known that I had an outward appearance that people saw. As an Asperger’s individual, I had been completely oblivious to such a thing, something typical of us. This was a major moment in God bringing me out of my bubble of happy but hurtful oblivion.

One more element of this speech experience lodged itself in my mind. David Randolph and Kathy Lewis had done their personal presentation together, a piece from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. And so I heard this line from the white witch, over and over as they practiced and presented, “Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep.” Of course, in the presentation, that was the voice of the enemy. I took the meaning of that false voice to heart and have stood against it consciously from then until now. It’s not part of this story, but I can show you just how much those words rule over the lives of too many believers in Jesus, “Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep.” Pure and perfect rest is Christ; ‘go to sleep’ is the enemy.

Monica was never the same after this experience. From then until now, she was much more expressive and free towards others outwardly. The same was true of me, but mostly inside the arena of my teaching classroom. My older son and daughter, Kyle and Johanna, will tell you that, while I am not typically expressive outwardly, in two places I am, in my reading out loud to them and in the classroom. This is a gift both Monica and I owe to Bill and Bettie Grier. Thank you.

Issues Coming out from Writing
I took three writing courses this semester – four, actually, if I were to count a Vocabulary study I did on my own. You have read some of my homework from the English Composition course, my character descriptions of Henry Miller and Sam Fife. (That’s funny, two more opposite individuals could not be found.)

We also took a Library Skills course that consisted primarily of a field trip to Edmonton and the writing of a research paper. My choice of topic was “Lexicography,” or the history of the writing of dictionaries. I am weird, I admit, but this topic was absolutely fascinating to me. In fact, before I took Sister Delores’s course on the History of the English Language, I had never thought before that the English language had a history. A great love for something I had not known awakened in me then, and continued on in this course – What are words and why do they mean what they mean?

There were only several of us in the van trip to Edmonton. I know that Mike Pelletier and Kathy Lewis were along, and I think that Lois Mack and Terry Miller were as well, and, of course, Sister Delores. I don’t think Peter Bell was on that trip. There might have been a couple of others. We had a wonderful time together. 

The primary purpose of our trip was the library at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Except that Delores had gotten permission for us to access the graduate library, not the regular college library. I like books; I like libraries, I have never seen such a wonder before or since. The entire college library at the University of Houston (where I have taken my students several times) was the same size as the regular college library at Edmonton. The graduate library was more than twice as big, five full and large floors, crammed with books. To give a for-instance, in the history section, every monarch of England occupied a seven-to-eight-foot width of shelving, floor to ceiling. I had learned in my study that the first person in English history to write down a list of English words was a guy by the name of Wynken de Word, in the 1400’s, just as modern English was coming out of the fusion of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon. How on earth could I find books on Wynken de Word? Yet there were two whole books just on this one obscure fellow whose only claim to fame was that he wrote a list of words!

From writing this paper, I learned that there is no such thing as any “original” definition of any word. A word means only what the one using that word intends in that context and moment, and it means nothing else. And so all dictionary writers simply take various sentences in which authors or speakers use a particular word and deduce what they mean by that word out from context clues. That’s why you have several definitions for each word, because different individuals meant something different when they used it. Let’s not get sidetracked, however.

I’m not a big-city person, but I liked Edmonton. We did a lot more than just visit the library. We spent a few hours in each of two other places, the Royal Alberta Museum of Natural History and the Muttart Conservatory, “botanical gardens in pyramidal biomes.” Both places were wondrous, especially the gardens. This was northern winter and snow covered the ground outside, yet we walked in tropical and subtropical vegetation all around us.

The other course I took with Sister Delores was “Writer’s Workshop.” One of the assignments I did would be a critical milestone in my life and of utter importance to the revelation of Jesus Christ through us, His church.

The first assignment I did in that course, however, was a short story which I titled “Conflict with Conscience.” During my first times up to Graham River, back and forth, my friend, Andy Wyatt, had found a home with my parents for a few months. During that time he decided to join the army to serve the Lord as a chaplain. My dad counseled him against such a thing, explaining to him that the entire institution was only about killing and nothing else. Andy went anyhow, but returned from boot camp several weeks later, a broken man, though holding an “honorable discharge.” I remembered Andy’s story in full, for he had told it to me. Then, at Blueberry, I learned that Eric Foster had done boot camp at the same Fort Dix in New Jersey. From Eric, then, I learned all the outward details, the buildings and drill inside of which Andy’s story took place. My story is a true story, then, of just how anti-Christ the militaries of this world really are.

The other big assignment in this writing course, then, was to write a play. Since we had just completed the Speech course, I had a much better idea of how a script for the stage should read. I chose A Tale of Three Kings by Gene Edwards. As my assignment, I turned the core of that story into a play that could be presented on the stage.

I believe I had been introduced to Gene Edward’s books while living at Bowens Mill. John Jeffries had started his course on Church History at the beginning of my college experience with The Early Church by Gene Edwards as our initial text book. I had gone on, then, to read A Tale of Three Kings; both books marked some deep understandings of God and His ways inside of me. I recommend that you obtain and read both; both are critical to your life in God as well.

That action of turning A Tale of Three Kings into a reader’s theater script meant that I immersed myself in the meaning of David’s life and his conflicts with Saul and Absalom. David demonstrates for us the utter refusal of “Christian rebellion.” The story of Korah in Numbers 16 is the most explicit portrayal of Christian rebellion in the Bible, but David is the one who shows us the opposite, first towards Saul above him and then towards Absalom, a wannabe’ below him.

The great question of Edwards’ book and of David’s story is this. What do you do when someone throws a spear at you? Not what do you feel, but what do you do? Before you will ever be a part of the revelation of a God who humbles Himself as He steps into His creation, you will give God your answer to that question, not with words, but in the hard reality of life. And, of course, David’s response from beginning to end was, “Touch not Mine anointed and do My prophets no harm.”

What I mean to say is that these things did not go into me as ideas, but as the very Seed of God planted in me, and I pondered them in my heart for the next few years until they had become the proof of my own life, keeping me inside of confusion and grief.

Some Days of Sadness 
Two sadness’s happened in my life through this Spring semester. The first was Richard’s story, which is mostly not mine to tell, except that part relevant to me. Richard’s friendship with Elizabeth was enjoyed and witnessed to by everyone. They had walked out their year and were approaching and preparing for a wedding. Then something happened inside of Richard, and he began to doubt his up-coming marriage with Elizabeth. I don’t know what was truly going on inside of him, or even, in the long run, if the Lord wasn’t using this time to challenge Richard’s commitment (something He would also do with me). 

I do know what Elizabeth has shared with me, that the next few months became difficult for her and her family as Richard was unable either to let go or to commit. And, as Richard’s good friend, I was sometimes caught between. 

Sometime later that summer, then, Richard was hammering a fence staple into a post. The staple ricocheted off the post and went right into Richard’s eye. Since Terri Rehmeier was a nurse, she knew what to do and that was not touch the thing all the way into the emergency room in Fort St. John. Richard lost that eye, and the losing of it was agonizing pain. He has worn an eye patch since. 

Not long after, Richard finally ended his relationship with Elizabeth and went away, eventually ending up at the community in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. This was a great sadness for everyone, something no one understood, including, I think, Richard himself. After coming up to be my best man in our wedding, Richard eventually ended up back at his home town of Denver City, Texas.

Then, one day, near the end of the school year, John Austin came up to me just outside the Tabernacle with sadness on his face. “Daniel,” he said, “Brother Victor has been killed in a car wreck.”

I want to back up a bit, now, and share some more about Brother Victor and my relationship with him in our home. I mentioned that Brother Victor had prayed for me at the beginning of the deliverance times. A few days later, however, I found him at home instead of in the deliverance and, in fact, I did not see him there very much. I could see that he was deeply troubled by something, but I did not know what.

Then, over the next several months, Brother Victor began to share with me as a confidante some troubling things about his disagreement with some of the elders. I had no idea what he was sharing, and it became a bit of a weight to me, even though he always treated me with kindness. Eventually, his speaking against become so troublesome to me that I shared of it with Brother John and Sister Nathel. During that time Brother Victor shared a word in the services from one of the prophets – “the winter is come and we are not prepared.”

I do not and did not know what was troubling Brother Victor. As I look back now, I see him for real and I know his heart. I do not know if what troubled him was what would eventually trouble me just as much, but I do extend my heart out over him, that he would be comforted, even now. Death causes no separation in the spirit; neither is death any sort of answer for us. It is a time of waiting.

We did not have money for expensive materials, but Terry Miller and I designed and built a beautiful coffin for Brother Victor. Andrew, the blacksmith, made nice wrought-iron hardware for it. After the burial service, Brother Victor’s older son came up to us and expressed how much the thoughtfulness that went into the coffin meant to him. It told him that his dad had been loved.

Shock and Agony
Brother Victor’s death was not the only shock I was to experience as that school year came to a close however. One day I was busy taking off my outside shoes and putting on my inside shoes before entering the dining room, a daily ritual, after which I stood back upright and found myself looking right into the eyes of Claude Mack. And right next to him were Roberta and Maureen Mack. This is where we say – OMG!

Though I was stunned, I greeted them briefly. Then, over the next several days, it seemed to me that, whenever or wherever I was doing something, I would look up, and there was Maureen, entirely by coincidence, yes, but I felt as if I could not get away from her.
Maureen had done two years at the Covenant Life College branch in Brussels, Belgium, then had spent a year back at the Ridge, teaching in the school again, and was now planning to finish her final two years of college at Blueberry.

All I could think of was the pain of God not speaking to her, the agony I had lived in and then rejected when I left Bowens Mill. (God does have a sense of humor in His dealings with our sometimes tricky hearts.)

Maureen returned to Bowens Mill with her parents after a week or so, but I was left, then, through the next two months, planning to leave college, Blueberry, and the move, for I could not bear to return to that awfulness. 

What God will do to get right at the core and heart of a man is overwhelming. I was in agony, rolling around in my mind, over and over, the impossible scenario of a return of what life had become for me at Bowens Mill and my inability to stay. Until one day, God spoke to me. 

I don’t quite remember how His voice came to me and so let me paraphrase it in present words that show what I heard. “My son, do not be afraid. Be of good cheer, for I am with you. My Spirit is good, and I would never do anything to torment you. What happened for you at Bowens Mill will not happen again.”

Even though I did drive down to Oregon to spend a week with my mom and dad, I was at peace in my return. I had no idea what would happen or how, but I knew that God does not play games with us, but He is good all the time.

An Awesome New Project
As our second school year ended, it had become clear to Terry Miller and to Delores and Charity, that teaching school would not be part of Terry’s future. But Terry was deeply earnest in his desire to learn and to complete his college degree. The thing that did interest him and towards which he had some aptitude, was construction, house design, and woodworking. There was, of course, no such courses offered by the college.

Terry’s dilemma came to me in two complimentary ways. First, I cared about Terry, and it did not sit right with me that he should be excluded from his desire to learn in a disciplined way. And second, the idea of creating an entire college degree program, a construction degree, and designing and teaching all the courses in it was like me being let loose “in a candy shop” with endless “cherries on top.”

Whenever an idea like that comes to me, I run with it with all my might. And so I pencilled out the degree program as well as the initial courses. I took my ultra-bravado proposal breathlessly to Charity and Delores and to my utter amazement, they agreed. In fact, the entire construction degree program was included in the next Covenant Life College handbook and someone at the Haines, Alaska branch signed up to teach there the courses I developed.

This was FUN – designing and teaching full college courses. And they were. I gave to Terry over the next three years a fully credible degree program in construction. We started together in the fall of 1988 with the first of four semesters of Architectural Drafting and the first of four semesters of Applied Construction Techniques. I treated every scheduled classtime with Terry as if I had a room filled with students in a regular college. We started at the correct time and continued for the set period. Since Terry lived at the Austin’s through this time, we set up a drafting table in their half-attic, which was open to the living room below. I went up there with Terry every class time for two years, going through every objective I had penciled out for the course. There were quite a number of other courses as well, including four semesters of kitchen design and fine woodworking.

I have not thought about it until now, but now I realize just how much this time with Terry meant to me. It was much more than my own arena of fun, it was an imparting of myself to my brother in the goodness of Christ. And as I think of it now, there is no question but that I received back the same from him in return.

The Summer Work
I worked construction on all Saturdays and any days there was not school. I worked on almost every building in the community over the years, either remodeling or adding on or building anew. I had remodeled the little cabin just above the Tabernacle for Richard and Elizabeth, but when Richard left, that cabin would go to Eric and Lynn Foster. Later on, it would be Maureen’s and my first full home. 

This summer, our primary project was a portable camp unit for the logging business. We made it in sections that could be taken apart, put flat on a truck, and transported to the next logging site. Part of the job was to assemble it for the first time, a central hallway between two modular bunk houses. My design worked, but it was a bit clumsy. They used it for several years until it was no longer easy to put back together. If I had done it again, I would have changed my design just a bit.

Then, when I returned from visiting mom and dad, we started a brand new cabin for Dave Smillie. His old cabin was too far gone to remodel it, so we tore it down. Brother Dave’s new cabin was my first double-walled project, two layers of insulation all the way around to make it much easier to heat through the long winter months. We continued working on it even after school started – there were a number of men on the construction crew who were not students, and I continued to direct them as I could. The roof was on before it got too cold, so we were able to continue working on the house through the winter. 

In August, I took part in a major college course held in the upstairs of the school where we had lots of room with all the dividers moved away. The course was on using The Writing Road to Reading to teach children to read. This was a very meaningful course for me, an innovative method of learning to read by phonics, except with the children writing the sounds before they learn to read them. My wife has used this method to teach many children to read, and it is the only approach I would recommend to any mother teaching her own children.

A young lady came to college at Blueberry that year, in time to be part of this summer course, by the name of Noemi Maldonado. She was from Lawrence, Massachusetts, but before that, from the Dominican Republic. The thing about Noemi is that she had three younger brothers, fairly close in age, and all out of high school. These three brothers had no idea of allowing their beloved sister to travel far away without them accompanying her to make sure she was safe and provided for. The three brothers were Dani, Ezekiel, and Paul Maldonado. 

And so these three fellows became a big part of my life. They were the most generous, kind, and giving young men I have known. Dani wanted to learn building, and so he joined my crew right away. Paul wanted to work in the fields with big equipment, so that’s the direction he took. Ezekiel wanted to do both, so he worked with Dani, Terry, and I only some of the time.

I mentored Dani Maldonado through the next five years, but when I returned to Blueberry in 1995, I worked under him. We became good friends. Although Noemi returned to Massachusetts after she finished school, her three brothers stayed, eventually marrying daughters of Blueberry. Dani and Ezekiel still live at Blueberry with their families.

Positioning Ourselves
As I am writing these several letters covering my college years at Blueberry, I have found myself back in that same feelings I knew then. There, inside that mind, I think about the confusion and grief that are yet to come. And there, inside that same mind, I seek to give answers to all of that, yet I find no answers, but only a return of the same voices of condemnation I once knew. 

In order to know this word of Christ that I share, it is necessary for you to walk with me inside this mind through these first four years at Blueberry, and so we will continue, knowing that we are utterly carried inside of Jesus, regardless. I am, in part, giving an idealistic view of my Blueberry experiences, but only in part – for they were indeed real and true. Nonetheless, all of these things were found inside a way of thinking, that is, Nicene theology, that always left Father Himself out in the cold and resulted in our own hearts alienated from God and from one another.

Then, once this narrative has taken us past graduation from college, we must change our view. That is, at that point we will interject the present mind of Christ, here and there through the narrative, so that we might see all things clearly, and not only as I saw them then. Even so, my personal view as it was then remains of vital importance.

As we work our way, now, through my second two years of school at Blueberry, keep in mind that I have once again immersed myself in my present mind into the thinking and feeling of those days. 

~~~

I wrote the last little bit a few days ago. As I have continued working on my account of Blueberry, I have been in communication with some who lived there with us in order to get some of my details right. In that communication, the thought was conveyed that some of the elders whom I knew through these years, who lived/live at Blueberry, might want to read my story. At first thought, this sounded great, but soon that thought plunged me into horror.

I will not try to explain things yet, not until I have finished the next letter, which will take us to graduation from college. After that, I have inserted a letter titled “In the Womb of the Church.” I wrote the first part of that letter this morning, yet I was writing it in fear. I will keep some of what I wrote, but I must have time to bring my Father into this conflict inside of me, knowing that He shares all things with me, and that He is inside of Christ inside of me, reconciling all to Himself. Our travail together is for the sake of each one whom I have named.

When I do write this critical explanation, then, I must be able to write it in the full joy of Father with me, so that you might receive life and not the confusion into which I have fallen momentarily. This present confusion, however, is an essential part of the placing of Christ Jesus upon myself, upon every moment of my life. I know that once I have passed through these next few months and have completed that portion of my story that was inside the move of God fellowship, I will know the strength of God poured out in me as I have never known.

I want to give you briefly the three opposing issues of which I will write more in "In the Womb of the Church," so that you won’t be as confused as I was living through these years. 

The first issue is the gospel of the serpent that looks for and finds sin in the flesh instead of Christ our life. Because we had no knowledge of Christ our only life, deliverance became just ever more of “getting rid of” in order to “someday know Christ.” Out from this false way of thinking, so many dark things were spoken into me over the years, words that brought only death. When I speak of standing firm against all the wailing cries of accusation, it is these voices against which I must stand. 

The second issue is the dealing of God with my own heart, that I would not accuse or find fault against others or against myself. If I had done so, I would have become a blackness that none of these precious brothers and sisters in Christ ever were. This is what God meant when He said to me, “Son, you passed the test.”

The third issue is God’s commission upon my life as a pathfinder, a mapmaker, one of the spies sent into the good land of Christ, that I might carry to you the wondrous and rich fruit of that land as well as the outlines of the giants and fortified cities that are found inside of Church life.

So many, upon leaving the communities, as Jesus put it, pulled up all the good wheat and threw it away in their vicious effort to root out all the tares. Indeed, very much inside the precious seed God gave me to carry out of these years of darkness and confusion just ahead are to be found these same brothers and sisters, dear to my heart, who spoke such awfulness into me.

You see, here is what was happening to me from the fall of 1987 on. Bit by bit God was bringing me out from my autistic shell where I had been safe for many years. I was oblivious to the fact that I had any outward appearance or that these “others” would see only that outward appearance. I could tootle along inside my zone, with all my blinders on, giving myself with all bold confidence in doing the things I loved to do, yet without any repercussions coming back through my impervious shell.

I have begun to trace this “stepping out” of that shell and will continue to do so, until that moment, just after college graduation in May of 1990, when I found myself blinking in the glaring light, now fully out in the open, with NO protection at all. 

I now know exactly why God made me the way He did and why God set the exact course for my life as He did. And in knowing, I am humbled to my core, and I place my forehead upon the ground in worship of a HOLY and a MIGHTY Father.

God is good all the time. Father and I together synergeo all things towards goodness.

Giving Thanks
"Lord Jesus, I want to place You, now, upon every moment of these four years of college at Blueberry. And I want to do so by giving thanks.

"Lord Jesus, I thank You for each individual person in the Blueberry Community and in the school whose lives became so precious to me. I thank You for all their contribution to me and for the joy of being a small part of their lives.

"Lord Jesus, I thank You for all the college courses and teachers from whom I learned so much. My life and teaching was greatly enriched by them. 

"Lord Jesus, I give You thanks for the mighty times of deliverance, both in my own life as well as having the privilege of being part of such an outpouring of Your Spirit. I give You thanks for the Church at Blueberry and how much I learned of what Church life is and means. 

"Lord Jesus, I give you thanks for each thing that was difficult or disturbing to me through these years. I know that You carried me through all, that it was You proving Yourself in my life. 

"I thank you, Lord Jesus, that I can place You upon every moment and circumstance You were living me through. You did not always intend the difficulty, but You always intended me and You always intended my brothers and sisters in Christ with whom I walked. Lord Jesus, together with Father, You and I turn every moment, good or difficult, into the outcome of goodness through our confidence in the victory of our Holy Spirit."

The New School Year
On the afternoon before the next school year began, I went into the school to pick up my schedule from Sister Charity. As I left her office, scanning over the courses I was enrolled in, I noticed a sister there also looking at her schedule. On the spur of the moment, in this environment that was fully safe for me, I did something very, very brave. I asked her what courses she was taking.

What happened next was the most wonderful thing I have ever experienced in my life.