19. In the Womb of the Church

© 2020 Daniel Yordy

Including March 1990 - June 1990

The single most unpleasant experience you and I have ever endured is when our mother’s body decided it was time for us to leave the womb. At that moment, that which had been so protective and comfortable suddenly became our great enemy, forcing us out with pain and even violence into the cold cruel world. “Get out of here; this is no longer where you belong.”

This pressure of travail is not only a metaphor of God, but the best way to frame, not just my own experience, but for you to understand what God would take you through as well.

Being expelled from the womb is one of three metaphors I will use to understand the next eight years of my life. Then, these next two topics follow  right after the topic of “My Final School Year.”

My Identity – (and Whispers of Darkness) 
In my layout of this time period, November of 1988 says this, “Sister Jane comes again; I receive a greater deliverance.” Then, in the entry for January of 1989, it says, “I am prayed for again for further deliverance.” The difference between these two entries, separated only by three months, is critical.

The time with Sister Jane could easily be called a completion, which means that the “deliverance” prayer in January of 1989 was the first of many desperate attempts to become something different than how God made me. Why? Because, obviously, “there was something wrong with me,” or so I had begun to imagine.

When I read the stories of others who are Asperger’s, I see the exact same struggle and difficulty that I endured, and the same responses to it from others. I am so glad that no one knew anything about “autism,” however, for this sect, like many evangelical and deeper truth sects, would have seen the autism as neither Christ nor human, but a “demon to cast out.” Yet, it is pointless to ask – What if? Very simply, it is God who made me and not I myself, and He is the one who directed my path entirely for His good purposes.

Up until around 1988, I was just me, tootling along inside my blinders, inside my mildly autistic shell, seeking God and giving myself to the family in the only ways I knew how. I was one person in my identity. But through my college years, by some of the things spoken into me and by the general force of Nicene and Calvinist doctrine, I was becoming two, or even three. I would not become one person again, in my identity, until 2008, a period of twenty years.

During my first year at Blueberry, the concept of the four “humors” was a bit of a fad, passing around inside the family – which one are you – sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic. That is, until the elders decided it was distracting us from Christ and asked that it cease. I fitted completely all the definitions of a melancholic. 

I was sitting on the porch of the school one day, visiting with Sister Charity, and I mentioned that I was a melancholic. She said to me that Jesus was not melancholic, therefore I could not be like Him so long as I remained as such. The terrible thing is that I believed her, that I must be something different from how I found myself to be in order to, somehow, become like Jesus.

Before continuing, however, let me draw a very severe line. Through all the years I lived in move community, any correction that came my way, concerning specific shortcomings in acting towards other people, was good and wholesome. Certainly, I didn’t like such corrections; no one does. Nonetheless, even if such corrections may have been partly off-based, they did not affect my identity in any debilitating way.

That statement from Sister Charity, that I could not be “as Christ,” so long as I remained the “way I was,” is a fundamentally different kind of word, a word that goes to the core of one’s being with the speaking of not-Christ. And so began the speaking of “not-Christ” into me – “Christ is not your life; you have a life not-Christ.”

Nonetheless, nothing has ever come close to me through my entire life except that it was Father with me, carefully shaping me for His purposes through those circumstances and preparing my heart to know Him. You see, it was twenty years of living inside the delusional horror of “there are two lives in me” that gave me the great incentive to run with all my might into Christ my only life the very moment I saw such a wondrous thing.

My purpose is to set a distinction between the good things of God shaping my identity, even inside of painful difficulties, versus the speaking of not-Christ into me with all the confusion that it brought.

Basically, Asperger’s meant the whispered view towards me that “there is something very wrong with Daniel Yordy.” A view that was never overtly spoken, but was acted out from by others, especially the elders, only on occasion, actually, but always leaving me with no idea why.

I realize now that a shift came, somewhere midway through my college years until by the time of my graduation, I felt at times that I was looked upon and treated out from a certain suspicion. I never understood why, nor do I to this day.

Yet through these same years, God was also performing a critical “cutting away” inside my identity, the story I told myself about myself. I was intelligent, yes, even intellectual, but that was not my identity. I was melancholic and even obsessive, but that was not my identity.

My identity was that I was all alone, a frightened little boy inside, hoping that someday I might become real. And inside of that frightened loneliness, I clung to those things that were familiar to me. More than that, succumbing to sexual desire in my own bed created a tremendous underlying sense of shame and guilt.

Rebellion is nothing more than standing forth with a hard forehead in a desperate clinging to a fake identity. I was not rebellious outwardly, regardless of what some may have imagined, but God was after the root deep inside of me, the need to cling to things of identity that were not real.

I mentioned having read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which had planted the question of rebellion and accusation against God inside of me prior to coming to Blueberry. During my first year at Blueberry, Sister Barbara James gave a series of teachings on the life of Job. God gave me some profound answers through Job and through her teaching regarding giving thanks in the midst of suffering in contrast to accusing God.

But I still had some books and some tools towards which I believed God had told me “No,” but that I had kept anyway. My friendship with Maureen, however, was something God used to get His knife right at my core. And so, at the beginning of that friendship, and in the midst of this deliverance time, I gave all the rest of my books and tools away, as to the Lord. I gave my tools to Terri Miller and most of my remaining books to the school. (I did retrieve most of those before I left move community, thank God, one of which was my wonderful Webster’s 1926 Dictionary.) But I had a large set of books on American history which I perceived to be “beyond the pale,” one might say. And so, in great agony of soul, I went through the process of putting those books into the stove and burning them. 

I now know that the problem was never either books or tools, but rather my identity. God was after the rebellion deep inside of me common to all. (You see, identifying one’s self as an “elder” or an “apostle” is no different. Those become false identities that always take the place of Christ.)

There were two other confusing things Sister Charity spoke into me through these college years, things that struck against the core of my identity. In the “Family Life” course, I had raised my hand to share that, in all my years I had never once heard my mom and dad speak an ill word to each other. She immediately corrected me, that such a thing was impossible. When I insisted, she became stern, that I was wrong in my perception of my parents. Then, in “Understanding the Adolescent,” I wrote in a paper that through my teenage years, there was no one to guide me; that I looked for help, but no help came. She called me into her office and explained to me that I was reading my life completely wrong, that there was most certainly “help, but my problem was that I had refused it.

I had no idea what to do with these “corrections,” but they buried themselves deep inside with the whispers that “there is something terribly wrong with me.”

I want to share a couple more things that were central to my identity through these years, from 1988 through 1993. First, I’m not any good when it comes to personal “prayer,” nonetheless, I sought the Lord with dedication as my “prayer.” Brother Alvin Roes would get up early most mornings to go into the school to pray before the day began. For awhile I joined him. But being on my knees did not work much fruit in my knowledge of God. And so I took my “prayer time” in a different direction.

Here is a terrain map of the Blueberry Community and the area straight to the west, which was “crown land.”

My Prayer Walk


The Blueberry family, as well as the college students as a group, would sometimes hike over to the other side of the Oxbow to have a picnic on the grassy slopes above the quiet water. Once, we went over the top of the Ridge, but usually, we hiked along the river past the footbridge and along the base of the Ridge just below the blue line on the map. That blue line is not a path, however, but rather the boundary of what became “my prayer walk.” 

Starting soon after Brother Victor died, I often went over to that tongue of land of a Sunday and walked its meadows and woods, and along the creek all the way around, speaking in tongues and seeking God, at least in the stance of prayer, even though my mind is too energetic to stay long with “prayer.” Yet that was the intention of my heart, and so I brought my mind always back to my longing to know the Lord. These times were just during the summer months, of course.

If I were to list the things most precious to me in my years at Blueberry, this time and this place would be near the top of my list. I came to know its paths and the layout of its woods and meadows and terrain. I am an explorer, you see, and my heart is all tied up in the land and its shape. Living in Texas all these years has been, in that dimension, a quiet sorrow.

Another thing I hold is the love of growing things. I always had my own little garden growing up, next to my mom’s larger garden. In move community, because the shared meal together was the center of our life and the communion of Christ, we did not grow any vegetables in private plots near the cabins. And in the early years of move community, growing flowers was considered to be entirely “of the flesh.” Thankfully, that absurd thinking was disappearing during the eighties. In fact, at the Ridge at Bowens Mill, I had created a series of flower gardens around the men’s dorm trailer. But since raspberries grew in the cold north and since they were not grown in the community gardens, I was free to create my own little raspberry garden. I also grew some peppermint and other herbs. I spent much happy time shaping the bank below the Raja cabin into terraces, walled with stacked stones. The bank itself was maybe six or seven feet high with a moderate slope. My terraced garden was at three levels, maybe five by eight feet in size. My raspberries even bore a bit of fruit while I still lived at the Raja’s. 

Since my terraced little garden was just inside of the view out the Raja cabin windows, Maureen and I were free to sit there among my raspberries and herbs to visit. This is a small thing, but it goes deep into my heart. I remember sitting there sharing with Maureen that my commitment was to knowing God and to community, and that would never change. I thought at the time that we would never have a “house of our own.” That was not true because I did not yet know the Lord as He is, but the rest was true.

Here is a picture of Maureen and I sitting in front of my little terraced garden. The Raja cabin is behind us on the left of the picture, and we are facing towards the greenhouses.


"Contrary" to God
I want now to come to the final semester of school and to a course that added greatly to my confusion, “The Christian Teacher” taught by Janet Randall. But to explain the dark things that came into me through this course, I must explain a bit more concerning the doctrine that had become the strong center of what Buddy Cobb taught in the move. 

Brother Sam Fife had taught that Christ is inside of us. Even though I know that Brother Sam had a personal relationship with Jesus, nonetheless, this “Christ” was us as mature sons of God, separate from Jesus. But Brother Sam had also taught the exaltation of the flesh, common to Nicene Christianity, that the “flesh” was opposed to Christ and typically triumphant over Christ. And that only “the anointing” AND the “covering of the ministry” enabled us to walk in Christ and not in flesh.

And so I saw the elders as anointed, which they were, and therefore as Christ to me.
But then Buddy Cobb increased the meaning of “you have a life not-Christ.” And so, Romans 5:10, we are saved by His life, became a requirement of obligation that we “get out of our own life” and “get into Christ life.” And there was only one way we could do that, and that was “hear and obey,” successfully and consistently.

I was just no good at that; the elders seemed to be very good at that; and so I was left very confused. I did not “hear,” and when I thought I heard, I typically short-circuited inside and was too frightened to do anything. As an Asperger’s man, I am left with the disability of being unable to pretend. When I perceive that others whom I respect “expect” something of me, I short-circuit inside, my mind goes blank, and I am like a deer caught in the headlights. To act the way it seems they think I should act is far outside of my ken; neither am I able to respond with any words.

I must insert here a line from Galatians 6, from the Jesus Secret Version. – Whatever indeed a man might sow, that also he will reap. For the one sowing into flesh will reap decay and rottenness; the one sowing into Spirit, however, out of Spirit will reap age-unfolding life.

When you sow not-Christ into people’s hearts and lives, then not-Christ is the ONLY thing that will be reaped. Planting words of not-Christ into the Christian is the central practice of Nicene Christianity, resulting in the continuation of Adam’s delusional world of death contrary to the redemption of Christ. The move fellowship was no different, except in one way; in the move fellowship, everything common to Nicene thinking was amplified in our lives.

It is not my purpose to judge to condemnation, but to life. Nonetheless, judgment to life, in its going forth, must sometimes be severe, especially towards a placing of one’s self “above” God’s people as a “vicar” or a go-between of “Christ.” Those who speak not-Christ into others are not, by that, acting as ministries of Christ Jesus, but of the destroyer.

There were many good things in the course Janet Randall taught, but four not-good things marked themselves deep into my identity. 

First, Sister Janet clarified a teaching that was common in the move, but that became much more defining for me, since I was, at the same time, stepping out from my autistic shell of protection. That teaching was that God’s will and my will were utterly and irreconcilably opposed and that I would be doing God’s will ONLY when I was opposing my own will.

It is this teaching that threw me into years of terror, of living frightened out of my wits.
 
You see, the words of Jesus, “Depart from Me, for I never knew you,” were words I held deeply personal to me, words that I MUST NEVER hear. And so this schizophrenic doctrine of “there are two lives in you” and “you must hear and obey Christ life (which is not your life) and refuse to obey your life (which you will never actually accomplish)” created in my identity of myself, a third little guy, this “me” that must “choose” running back and forth, desperate, confused, and afraid.

This horror is the driving essence of the words of the serpent in the garden, but I believed, with all my heart, that it was the “gospel of God.”

We were also given the assignment of writing an essay about how God spoke to us to be classroom teachers. I wrote that God had never actually “spoken to me” that I was to be a teacher, rather, that, upon stepping into the classroom, I had found an environment and a task which made my heart sing. Sister Janet made it clear that if God had not “told me” to teach, then I had no business being a teacher. – Yeah. What do you do with that?

Third, we were given the assignment to write a Bible study on a selected topic from a list of “Christian teacher qualities.” Part of the clear instructions was that we were to develop a meaning of our term ONLY out from what the Bible says, and not from what we knew in Christianity and, specifically (these were the exact instructions) that we were even to disregard what might be taught by the move ministry. I chose the word “conscience,” wrote out every verse in the New Testament containing the Greek word, syneidesis, and then wrote an extended definition of that word using ONLY the context clues I found from every passage where it occurred. 

The problem was, very simply, that the New Testament teaches nothing about choosing between good and evil, but that our consciousness is either ALL good or ALL evil, with no mixture of the two. I got in trouble with that one, in spite of the assignment directions, because what I wrote contradicted what Buddy Cobb taught on the subject. This dilemma was significant to me, for I had committed my life to submit to the ministry of the move and to the word that they taught. 

Finally, Sister Janet instructed us to spend the next couple of days between classes, carefully seeking to “hear,” obeying what we heard, and then reporting back what we learned. In the next service, then, as we were waiting for someone to get up to lead praise, a time often filled with singing, the thought that I should get up to lead the praise came strong into me. It arose from my heart, but getting up to lead praise was not inside my safety zone. I struggled, but I remembered our assignment, and so, with my heart beating strongly, I got up to do just that. It went okay. The Blueberry family was enthusiastic in praise, and they cheerfully supported me.

But back in the classroom, I was again rebuked before all. “That is NOT what I meant.”
This is a very important twist that I must somehow convey to you, for this underlies all my confusion through the next three years. It’s very simply this, that if another had felt to get up to lead praise, that would have been appreciated and honored, but since it was me, or so it seemed, the only motive there “could have been” was arrogance and self-promotion.

Now, Sister Janet, if she were to read this, would have every reason to be deeply hurt. I intend fully to bring a balance, to separate her as a dear sister in the Lord from my perception of things at that time. That balance will come in a bit, but for now, I want to leave this stark and direct, for this is, indeed, how I heard these things that became fear in my life.

I can share these things clearly with you now, but then, I did not understand at all. I perceived an underlying accusation against me coming through, not only in these responses, but in other responses from elders and from eldership “decisions” toward us, a seeming charge that I was arrogant and self-promoting. This charge was never spoken to me directly, not until the last year I was at Blueberry, in 1996, but it seemed to be the unspoken basis of many responses towards me.

I was very confused. Not only was I innocent of this charge, regardless of any outward autistic inability, but I admired these elders and had committed my life to submit to their direction and to the things they taught me. I trusted them, and I trusted and believed their responses to me.

More than that, our year was coming to an end in May, and Maureen and I were looking towards marriage. At the same time, I found myself no longer inside the protection of being oblivious to everything. I was about to step into being a husband and a father, of raising my family, within the underlying horror that there was something TERRIBLY wrong inside of me, a horror that was not true at all.

Graduation
I will share only briefly of our graduation from college; it marked a milestone and a significant change in my life. There were ten of us who graduated on May 27, 1990. – Paul Mandry, Gail Young, Mike Pelletier, Maureen Mack, myself, Jill Shapiro, Peter Bell, Darlene Symes, Freda Raja, and Monica Rotundi. 

Our graduation was a major formal occasion. The dining room was packed. We graduating seniors gave a presentation (which became long and boring). Then, Brother John Clarke and Sister Charity Titus gave us our diplomas.

In fact, in looking at the picture of Sister Charity giving me my diploma, I see the full expression of honor and joy towards me. I graduated Covenant Life College with a Bachelor of Science in English Education.



It would be a huge mistake if you were to gain the impression from some of the things I must share, that I was mistreated in any outward way or that my time at Blueberry was not, for the most part, a sharing of life together with a most precious family of God. 

As I look at the pictures of our community times and the first years of our children in the communities I see joy and goodness. Our children had a happy childhood, and as I look across the faces of all, including the elders, I see nothing but a precious and kind group of people. 

I also see many whom I have not mentioned at all, which is sad, but I cannot include everyone and everything, at least not until we share our lives again in the resurrection. 
Regardless of any difficulty, real or even imagined, I lived in and have come out from a wonderful heritage, indeed, I have lived inside the womb of the Church.

Positioning the Next Eight Years
It is not possible for me to present my life through the next eight years without honesty. At the same time, I will not give an account that allows accusation against anyone. My problem is that when I am immersed in writing any of these chapters, I find myself inside of the feelings and fears of that time. That cannot be otherwise. Yet for both my sake, the one giving an account, and your sake, as a reader, and especially for the sake of all these who belong to Jesus, what I hope to do in this letter is to cast guy wires, one might say, out over the void, so that we might hold onto these critical understandings as we pass across the turbulent waters.

In “A Season of Deliverance II,” I gave three issues that seem to work against each other, but which are vital for our safe passage. Let me state those again briefly.

The first issue is those words of a theology of separation, of a mighty wall of opposition between the heart of a believer and the Lord Jesus Christ, words that dig in deep to create the fear of the evil one that “God is far away from me.” The second issue is the true dealings of God in a person’s life, including why these contrary things are happening. And the third issue is the critical task of coming through this passage with the good things of God intact. And those “good things” very much involve the individual brothers and sisters who were part of my life. 

Writing the first  chapters of Blueberry was one of the hardest things I have done – not the writing, of course, but the re-living. It plunged me into all the emotions and fears that would come later in my Blueberry experience. This was wonderfully of God, however, because I had to face everything again, things I have never looked at. Yet to place the Lord Jesus Christ upon every moment, as the gospel commands us to do, has been to find a healing in me at depths that had never been healed before.

It required me, not just to forgive, but to see the goodness of Christ in those whose voices had become harsh accusation to me.

Writing the first chapters of Blueberry turned me inside out in convolutions of pain and healing over almost a month before the Lord Jesus completed that healing. In the midst of that agony, I awoke in the night enveloped inside the full fear I had lived inside of through these eight years ahead, that is, from June of 1990 to August of 1998.

I arose, went to my computer and wrote the next short section. I will leave it as I wrote it.

The Stakes
I am fleeing for my life, carrying precious seed. Even before finishing “A Season of Deliverance,” I am frightened out of my wits.

Nonetheless, it is for your sake, dear reader, as well as mine, that I must pause in this desperate run out from death and into life in order to place everything into its place through the present eyes of the Lord Jesus Christ, through eyes of fire.

The stakes could not be higher. It is death, close at hand as well as behind us, or life, beckoning ahead, for me, for you, and for all creation.

The picture inside of which I am finding my only way out of this plunge into icy waters is the picture of Eliza, the slave girl in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as depicted by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Indeed, I find that picture on a recent edition at Amazon. The fear that is upon her face is exactly what I am feeling right now.

The Picture of Eliza


Behind Eliza is enslavement under a regime of horror. Beneath her feet are the icy waters of the St. Lawrence River as she leaps from one block of ice to the next. And in her arms is her precious child, of greater value to her than her own life.  

Yet here in this land of glorious salvation, inside of life and joy and love, I know beyond all question that it was never me. It was always Jesus, my Savior and my life, carrying me inside His arms, through the cold and the night. Never once could the fear have touched me, though I was frightened beyond measure. The icy waters were no threat to me, though I nearly slipped into them. And if I came out of this run, frozen inside without any hope or any ability to know that God loves me, carrying intact that which God had placed inside of me, that is His doing as well.

Do you wonder that I have no connection with anyone who would blither that Jesus is not my life, that He is not Savior and all Salvation?

When God said to me, as I climbed up the shores of the other bank, “Son, you passed the test,” He was not speaking of me, but of Jesus, yet He was speaking of me, for Christ is the only life I am (Galatians 2:20).

~~~

Let me now explain why this picture from a story became so vivid to me in the night. The dogs of slavery were the voices of the hard doctrines of Nicene Calvinism spoken into me, that I was contrary to God and that it was my fault. The icy waters of the St. Lawrence were the bottomless pit of my finding fault, of speaking against, and of blaming myself or others. The distant shore of Canada was our precious union with Christ inside of which I now live. And the “baby in my arms” was the precious word and truth of Christ which God was giving me through every day of this “run.”

This is an accurate picture, and these were the stakes.

“They Lied to Me” 
My writings through the year 2014 represented a beginning of healing for me, coming out from the transformation that took place when I read “Sealed in the Midst of the Storm” into audio in May of 2013. Writing the first chapters of my book, Musings on Union, in late 2014, was my first foray back into the pain of my Blueberry experience. I wrote Chapters 3, “Double or One” and 4, “One and One,” out from the first real healing God worked in me, though certainly not the last. If you were to read them, you would see some of what I hope to convey again in this chapter.

Just prior to starting Musings on Union, in September of 2014, I wrote these words in my book, The Feast of Tabernacles. ~ “They lied to me. They lied to me. When they told me that You were far away from me in my distress, when they told me that my mistakes meant I was in trouble with You, they lied to me. And all those years of heartache came from something NOT TRUE. You are so close; You are my life and my breath. You are bound to me in perfect Covenant Bond forever. We walk together in all ways as one.” ~

Let me divide very carefully between the “voices” and the individual people who belonged to those voices. In doing that, I am not claiming that I “imagined” all these things. Rather, I am separating between Christ living as the individual persons who were ministries over me in the move fellowship and the ideas they believed were true, which they spoke with sincere hearts.

Let me use Janet Randall as an example. I wrote what I shared above, then I felt a disquiet inside until I understood the difference. You see, I must place myself with Father beneath of her. That means I honor her as the Lord Jesus, but not as a “ministry over me.” Some of what I heard from her may well have been only my perception of things, but not all.

Nonetheless, the Lord Jesus intended Sister Janet in those moments just as much as He intended me, though He did not intend our false thinking, yet He carried even it inside Himself. Then, the moment I see the vast divide between words and ideas and fears versus the precious brothers and sisters in whom Christ dwells, I am free. I am free to love; I am free to look back through the pictures of this time and see only joy and goodness; I am free to honor each one as the Lord Jesus Himself, even those who did speak wrongful things to me.

This is the true judgment of God.

Setting out the Issues 
Let me expand on what God was really doing in my life, why He made me the way He did, and placed me in the exact circumstances that He chose. Indeed, my life is and has always been perfect, regardless of anything outward, and carefully directed by my Father for His Desire, that He might be made known through me.

Again, the first issue is the gospel of the serpent, from which we are escaping. The second issue is the true dealings of God in our lives. And the third issue is carrying intact the precious word of Christ AND the precious people whom God gave us, all the way through to the other side of the darkness. 

I am placing these three issues, then, across the eight years of my life from June of 1990 to August of 1998. And this is as critical for you, dear reader, as for me. The icy waters of death over which we are fleeing are CONTEMPT for other Christians, especially towards those who are “over” us in the Lord, the very reason Adam chose to defy God.

God created me the way I am, including with an Asperger’s disability, and God placed me into the move of God fellowship and into these particular Christian communities for a very specific purpose. And my heart is bowed upon my face before my Father, that He would set such determination and purpose upon me, regardless of all my searing inabilities.

Nonetheless, the place for sharing the whole picture must be at the end of this narrative. Here I will place only my overall Blueberry experience.

The problem, essentially, is the fall of the Church into Roman darkness, in the imposing of the words of the serpent in the garden upon every gospel truth, and thus creating received Nicene “theology.” This “Roman darkness,” then, was first made hyper by John Calvin. And when I looked closely at John Calvin just a few years ago, I was overwhelmed at the stark sameness between that and what Buddy Cobb taught in the move fellowship. It is a weaving of all the gospel “truths” into a pattern that is contrary to God and to Paul’s gospel of our glorious salvation inside of Jesus.

And so my use of the two metaphors, one, of the womb becoming hostile and driving out the baby, the other, of Eliza fleeing across the St. Lawrence bearing her precious child, is an escape, not from the move of God fellowship, but from the gospel of the serpent in the form of Nicene theology, a theology that placed upon me one outcome only – “Depart from Me, for I never knew you,” that is, the slavery of corruption.

And I was always running towards one place only – “And My Father will love him, and We will come to him, and will make Our home with him.”

Yet it was not death that was as the hounds baying at my heels, but death was that which lurked right beneath my feet. Death would be my own false choice.

DEATH, the death of which Adam ate and then turned and vomited forth upon God’s creation is CONTEMPT – hating God by hating other people.

The great issue of this period of my life would not be the word God was giving me; it would not be the people of the communities; it would not be the false theology of the serpent; it would not be reaching the other side. The great issue of this period of eight years was the purifying FIRE that is God, removing out from my heart all the root hairs of contempt.

Touch not Mine anointed and do My prophets no harm. - Touch not Mine anointed and do My prophets no harm.

Whatever you do, “say, think, or feel” towards the least of these My brethren, you ARE doing it to Me.

And in spite of many of the things that Brother Buddy Cobb believed and taught that were contrary to Paul’s gospel, still, it was he who planted inside of me the greatest gift from God beyond “Christ alive in my heart” – and that is a genuine, true, and deep fear of God.

Here inside of the love of God, it is then the fear of God that keeps us “on top of the ice” all the way across. Indeed, we flee across the death of contempt and into God All-Carrying with all determined boldness as our escape from any thought of “Depart from Me”

What I mean to say is that the most important aspect of my life through these years is that finger of God working in my heart, teaching me to impute no blame at all.

Placing Myself into Jesus
As I go forward, now, in sharing with you the next three years of my life, I realize that some might perceive in what I must write a strong “accusation against.” That is not my intention, but I cannot show you from whence comes so much of what I share in the present time except I take you with me through this difficult path.

More than that, if any of those who were elders at Blueberry or ministries in the move read this account, the answer of the goodness and kindness of the Lord Jesus through them to me would be a very simple, “Please forgive me, Daniel, I was wrong.” And with great joy, it all becomes part of walking together inside of Christ; it all becomes rivers of living water.

Nonetheless, I do not feel here, in this chapter, to draw anyone into the love of God poured out inside of me. Rather, the right thing to do here and through the next three years, is to place myself utterly and entirely into the Lord Jesus.

I was at times treated badly and without cause, and especially as a false word spoken into me. It is right and necessary for me to say so and to declare my just innocence inside the Lord Jesus.

“Lord Jesus, I place myself utterly into You, through these three years from mid-1990 to mid-1993. You carried me inside Yourself through every moment. Lord Jesus, I know that You have filled my heart with your glory through my entire life. I know, now, that my heart was good, my heart was filled with Jesus in every moment of my confused agony.

“Lord Jesus, I know that You intended me out from all goodness in every moment. And though You did not intend any wrongful thing, nonetheless, You bore the brunt of it, allowing just enough of the awfulness to pass through Your mighty wall of protection to share Your own suffering with me, that my heart might be shaped to fit our Father’s heart.

“Lord Jesus, I declare now and know that I was never alone, but that You were living in me and as me, that You were extending to me precious things that would become the center of my knowledge of Father. 

“And, Lord Jesus, looking out, now, through Your eyes, I see each one of my brothers and sisters through these years, and especially the ministry that You placed in my life for that season, calling them each by name, and I see their hearts, longing to know You, just as much. Whatever mistakes they may have made towards me, You also were carrying them through those instances. I find, even now, Your great compassion already poured out in my heart.

“Lord Jesus, You and I together turn every mistake, those made by others as well as those made by me, into the result of goodness and blessing towards me, yes, but even more so towards each one of them.

“You are good, Lord Jesus, all the time, You sustain all things by Your good speaking, and You do all things well.”