21. Inside the Press

© 2020 Daniel Yordy

August 1991 - May 1992

Justifying God 
Giving an account of one’s life in the presence of God is a terrible thing. It could not be done except we know how utterly embedded we are inside of Father’s Love. You see, there is also the realization that every person with whom one has interacted will also be giving an account, and their account must include you and your actions and responses towards them.

The shadow of darkness first entered God’s creation with the accusation against God that His words are false. Every offense of angels and humans since has been an extension of that same accusation. God will answer every single accusation against Him through Jesus, the Word He is continuously speaking, proven faithful and true.

When Paul said that every knee will bow and every tongue will speak the same word that is Jesus, that includes giving thanks for every moment, circumstance, and person in one’s life. This giving of thanks is central inside every giving of an account from every created being. God requires that every accusation ever uttered be shown to be false by the good speaking of Jesus and to be recognized as false by the one who so foolishly spoke it. That’s what “every knee bowing” means. 

If I have done wrong, if I have offended any particular person, I willingly confess my wrong and ask forgiveness. 

But the accusation against the Lord Jesus Christ, that one who belongs to Him and whom He carries inside Himself, is “evil,” and that a heart in which He dwells in Person in all glory, is also “wicked,” this accusation is the “gospel” of the serpent, mocking the Atonement of the Lord Jesus, the very revelation of our Father.

I said in the last letter. “You had no right to disrespect Maureen and me in that way.”
I knew that I would have to write those words from the moment I started writing about Blueberry. And the terror of that necessity is what flung me into a month of turmoil, for I was hearing the same voices again speaking the same words against me and the same devastating blows struck against my heart.

There is not and was not bitterness in my heart, only grief. The bitterness I had known at Bowens Mill and Albuquerque was long gone from me. And I do justify God in all things, that He alone is right and true, and have done so. I recognize clearly now God’s purpose in my life. It was not He doing something to me, but rather, I know now that in all these things, it was my Father bearing the brunt of the assault, carrying me closely inside His heart, though I knew it not. And in seeing His wondrous purpose, indeed, His intentions to share Hheart with me, I bow my face upon the ground and I give Him thanks.

God is good all the time.

Nonetheless judgment in no way ends with forgiveness, but continues into the imputation of the goodness of Christ. Yet it goes even further, for in seeing those whose thoughtlessness caused me such grief, I must also recognize that not only are they also filled with the Lord Jesus, but that the love of God is already poured out in their hearts towards me, whether they know that or not.

And so to judge that which was wrong, I must go under with Father, in lifting them up and in recognizing in humility the great love coming always from them to me and the costliness of that love.

Understanding Myself 
I have been sitting here pondering what it was that went wrong inside of me. It would be impossible, I think, to grasp the dealings and intention of God with me unless I am able to rightfully capture my growing internal split. That’s really what it was, a split taking place between the mental theology of my head and the Jesus of my heart.

You see, I was fully attached to both, and no matter how much confusion the theology of my mind created for me, it could never take me away from my faith in and desire to know the One who lived inside of me. I suspect that if it had, my confusion would have ended and you would never have heard of me.

That was never a possibility; in the end, a theology of separation could never appeal to me no matter how dramatically it was preached, nor how much I imagined it to be correct. I needed life and life is Jesus. I knew that by the Spirit; I knew that in my heart. But I did NOT know it in my head. 

It is a dangerous thing to trust, even to trust good people. I have been pleased to see independence of mind in my children and always encouraged it, for there are many pied pipers anointed mightily by the Spirit of God. Even good and sincere people, who are genuine and true, still can live inside a theology of the serpent and not inside of the salvation of Jesus, for that is all that has been known.

I can trace for you in the present time the beginnings of the word I now teach as the key verses of the Bible became rooted in my understanding. But I had no real idea of what they meant; I had nothing “figured out.” All I did was hold the word closely inside my heart.

Meanwhile, I held the elders at Blueberry in the highest regard and trusted their anointing and wisdom. That was not wrong; and I received much from them of great value, much of which shows itself through all I have written.

In some ways, my friendship with Maureen through my last two years of college had placed me into a steady, ongoing outward involvement. And this outward involvement was showing to me my Asperger’s inabilities. Yet not completely to me, but rather, it was my perception of what others seemed to see in me. 

What were those inabilities? 

I can’t get ahead of my story and bring in the many things that I will share when I get to my fifties and first discover that my life-long difficulties were shared in full by many others. I must remember how I perceived things then.

One problem I had is that I have to understand something to see how it all fits together, before I can talk with others about changes that might be made. People would give me their designs, all measured to the inch – except they would leave out the thickness of walls, or something like that. Their plans could not actually work. I had to have plans that could work before I was able to talk about what changes needed to be made. 

You see, building a house is very real and very practical. If it won’t work, it won’t work. And people in their dreams and ideas are not practical. Then, I would try to explain why I had something a certain way in the design. But I would also take all their ideas and complaints, think about them long and hard, and then discover how I could alter the plans to make their desires work. Of course, sometimes that was not practical.

Here was the problem. I did not know I was doing that and I could not have told them that’s how I thought. What they saw was an outer shell that was not me and of which I knew nothing.

Think of an autistic person and realize that autism is a spectrum. I was both high-performing autism and with a reasonably high IQ. You are aware that an autistic person gets very involved in the thing they are obsessed with. Other things are kept at a distance as they are focused on the patterns they are creating. Then, when someone intrudes and messes up their patterns, it’s like great noise pushing its way in, it’s like fingernails scratching on the chalk board. It’s very confusing and disconcerting. 

Even now there is one arena in which I go all haywire inside, and that is if I am driving and someone else is looking at a map and trying to give me directions. Think about the fingernails scratching on the blackboard; that’s what it feels like inside my mind and through my nerves.

And so sometimes I would hold onto my ideas tightly like a little boy grasping his toys.
This is NOT a demon; it’s a disability. I know well the difference between the two. But if someone is blind, you don’t shout at them that they have a demon, and if they would just get with God, “rise up into Christ,” they would be able to see. When someone has an internal physical disability, however, Christians can be very cruel.

Everyone expects God to heal an autistic person as if that’s all God could do. Few see the Father revealing Himself as He is through them as they are. But those who are able to do such a thing, are able to see God as they never before understood God to be. There is a depth of ability to know inside an autistic person that can be found only by reaching deep inside of them. If you are wise enough to do that, you will learn things you never could have known.

Then, I was very uncomfortable in social settings. One of the worst things for me was to come to the dining room and hear, “Sit wherever you like.” Instantly, I no longer had a place to sit, for I did not know where my place was. One of the most wonderful changes in my life, then, was when I came into the dining room with Maureen and heard that statement.

HA! I know where my place is. I will sit next to Maureen!

But family activities in the swirl of games, etc., these things make me very uncomfortable because I have no idea where my place is or how I fit. I was comfortable in my role only in two settings, the construction site and my classroom.

And I have never been able to counsel personal things with my students. I cannot draw from them their concerns or engage in a back and forth on personal matters or even on controversial topics in the classroom. It’s a wild and unsafe place far beyond where I could go. My safe response was always, “Is that right.”

For reasons unseen by me, however, I perceived that the elders whom I trusted believed that there was something wrong with me, that I held some sort of hard shell of conceit against God.

Here is an absolute law of reality, however, one that cannot be altered.

What you plant, that’s what grows. If you see sin, sin will increase. If you look for demons, demons will show up everywhere. If you root out flesh, flesh will be cropping up in every direction. What you seek, you WILL find, and you won’t find anything else.

That’s what was happening. We were looking for demons as the cause of our incredible “belief” (that is, unbelief) that God was displeased with the “fleshy” people of Blueberry. (This is not something I would begin to understand until 1996.)

There was a young man come to Blueberry. He was odd; he did not fit the profile. And over time, he did not seem amenable to change. He was not becoming like the preferred personality that being “like Christ” has to be.

So, in one of the many deliverance times we continued to hold, he went up for prayer. I felt to go up and share the prayer time over him with John Austin and Gary Rehmeier. And we prayed up a storm, even pushing on him, trying to get these “demons” to let go so that this brother could become something different. Nothing happened at all.

This experience really bothered me. I began to realize that maybe we were trying to “cast out” his human personality as God designed him. At this point in time, I know that is exactly what we were doing. This brother didn’t “look like” Christ “ought to look like,” and so we could not see Christ revealing Himself through him as he was. 

I am searching for how it was that I defined my world from deep inside my human beliefs and desires. And to do so, I must become honest. And I really can’t convey my reality unless I successfully describe my personal view of things at that time, so please bear with me.

The community was our world and our life. We were all committed to the community as to the Lord, with all our hearts. For the most part, this involvement was good and joyous and conveyed many blessings unknown by those who have never lived in such a setting.

But inside the community there was a definite class structure – those who were elders and those who were not. The elders, of course, were not overbearing. They were anointed of the Spirit in wisdom and love, and they gave themselves to the needs of the family more than most. 

I wanted to be an elder. – There, I’ve said it. 

As humans, God created us like Himself, including with the desire to belong and to advance in place and role. I didn’t want to be an elder in order to be “superior.” I wanted to be an elder because I wanted to belong, to be part of this group of people who represented to me everything I longed to be in my life. In all my years in community, I rarely felt that I belonged. 

But even more than that, I had known from my youth, deep inside my depths, a word, a desire to speak for God up from my heart, to teach that word in the anointing. Although I shared fairly often in the sharing service, this longing ache deep inside was unfulfilled until November of 2008, actually. It was only then that I had something to share.

I carried the ache of that voice, but no understanding of the gospel, no real words to give form to the groaning of the Spirit inside of me in words that could not be uttered.

In my high regard for the elders, I saw a number of wonderful examples of Christ in an outward and expressive manner on a daily basis, Sister Charity, Brother John Clarke, Sister Sue Sampson, Brother Gary Rehmeier, Brother Don Howat, and so on. 

I wanted to be like them; I wanted to be part of them. I wanted to belong.

But I could not. And for reasons I could not understand. 

And so from, say, 1988, until the summer of 1998, I was caught in the grip of a great and unrelenting agony. What was wrong with me?

I came truly to believe that there was something terrible, something nameless, something so contrary to God that must be in my makeup, something horribly wrong with me.

And this belief was not my fault or the elders’ fault or the move’s fault. The fault was the serpent in the garden and how much we Christians believed he spoke the truth, especially since AD 311 when a psychopath took the cross of Christ and turned it into an instrument of violence to hack people’s flesh into pieces, and everyone called it “God.”

And so everyone imagines that “the cross” means that we have to put our flesh to death, somehow, and that we’re always getting “off the cross” and always must make ourselves “die,” a Sisyphean exercise that cannot happen because it’s neither real nor true.

That was my continual dilemma, for I always got up the next morning, and it was always still me pulling on my pants. No one knows what “die, brother, die,” means, they just use it to distinguish difference of place. In fact, in all my years, I have never observed the cross being presented in that way, either behind the pulpit or to me personally when it was not that person, the “ministry,” wanting to get me to submit to them, being convinced that I was or we were – not.

BUT – let me qualify that statement again. You see, this path of imposed schizophrenia I am setting before you, and by “imposed schizophrenia,” I mean not the split-mind that comes from demons, but the split-mind that comes from fervently believed Nicene theology, this path can lead only to one place for me – a complete mental breakdown by the end of 1998 – UNLESS.

And that “unless” is three men through the years of my life, three elders, Abel Ramirez, Don Howat, and Rick Annett, who never once placed that false cross upon me, but always lifted me up with encouragement. It was that memory of my successful days with them that I held to as everything else inside was going all haywire. It was my memory of my times with those three men that enabled me to retain my weak grasp upon sanity.

One final thing. I watched a Dutch language television show recently that included an autistic boy just discovering his autistic dad who was behind bars falsely charged with murder. The boy was very bright, however, and he loved his version of patterns. But when people intruded into his space, it felt to him like noise, an unending increase of painful, screaming noise. His acting out was solely his attempt to silence all that painful noise.

My own limitation was not nearly as bad as this boy’s, but the meaning was the same. You can see, in my writing, the piercing memory inside of which I hold most every moment of pain in my life. My season of deliverance did bring a resolution of sorts to the difficulties I had known at Bowens Mill and Albuquerque. But from 1988 on, as I was slowly coming out from being oblivious to everything, there was no resolution.

And so event after event, word after word, face after face, gathered itself inside of me as voices of ever-speaking noise that I could not silence. Again, I know what bitterness is, and I described it for you in my time at Bowens Mill. This was not bitterness; it was grief.

You see, at the very moment that God began my season of healing, in December of 2001, every wound of my life was right there as if it had just happened yesterday. Keep that disability in mind, then, as we go forward through these next few years.

I do believe I have given sufficient foundation so that many of the things I must share will have meaning to you. You will have some idea of the why.

More than that, I am absolutely convinced that this path was utterly my Father with me, for the things I know now, that come out from Father and I walking this path together, fill my writing with understanding I could never have otherwise. 

And all the way through, I walked in the deep and utter knowledge of the grace of my Savior in which I always lived.

Two Massive New Projects 
Although there were always any number of small work projects ongoing inside community life, two specific construction jobs would now fill these two next years at Blueberry, the new washhouse and the new shop. In fact we built them almost simultaneously, going back and forth between the two.

Brother John Austen had received another significant sum of money from an inheritance. This time, he wisely reserved some of it for each of his children. (I suspect this is what he was counseled he should do.) But there was still over $100,000 which he freely gave to the community needs. This bought a new tractor for the fields and a very nice band-saw mill to replace the aging sawmill located above the high gardens. 

It also provided around $50,000 for the new shop and washhouse. In other words, we had the resources to build them right so that they would last. Indeed, much of this good resource we then directed into the foundations of both buildings, for this was sandy river bottom, and a building as heavy as the shop would sink and break and tilt in every direction otherwise. 

I designed and drew up the plans for both buildings through the spring or early summer of 1991. In all my designs at that time I was laboring under a handicap that I hope to be free from when my season of designing community returns back to me.

That handicap was this. Building a building was a big deal. It took lots of gut effort and skillful diplomacy in every direction. I had the knowledge and the gut; Don Howat had the wisdom and the diplomacy. More and more, we walked together in this role. And in that walking together we shared a lot of commonality of purpose and much good fellowship.

But, not only was building a building a big deal, but a community of this size contained so many and varied small needs, needs that would never get a space unless a space was made deliberately for them. And so my handicap was that I tried to fit into every plan I drew a space to meet all sorts of different needs in the community.

For instance, Brother Roger Henshaw was a machinist and the handyman of the community. He had many tools for his trade and work. But Roger never had a room of his own where he could set up all his tools and work in an efficient space all his own. If I was to design a shop building, then a nice little room just for Roger must be included. Then, Sister Terri Rehmeier was the nurse of the community. Yet always before, any such needs had to be met in her living room, with her nursing implements stuck here and there through her family’s belongings. If I was to design a center work building for the community, then a room made specifically as a first-aid station just for Terri, must be included. 

And so I designed larger buildings with lots of different spaces in order to accomplish many space needs inside this one construction job to which we had put our shoulders. In an ideal situation, I would not do that, I would design a series of smaller buildings, fitted comfortably together, like a French village, with each one unique to its need. There can be some combination, but not as much as I put into the shop and the Graham River Tabernacle coming up the next summer. Nonetheless, it is my conviction that a healthy community provides a workroom for each person in their interests and giftings that is their space alone, though it can adjoin the larger community space by the pattern of “Private Edges – Common Core.”

Part of my relationship with Don and others beginning through this time was the searching together for those things needed to make community life successful in the natural. Such a pondering had not existed when the communities started and so much that was formed worked very poorly and inefficiently. Many community spaces were almost anti-human, which was considered “holy” in the first years, a way of thinking that some of us had rejected, especially since we were the ones crawling under derelict buildings, trying to shore them up.

In fact, sometime through these years, and I can’t remember where it fit, John Austin hired a large track-hoe dump truck operation to come out and dig the dirt away all around the back of his house and all around the root cellar which had been built into the slope above the old barn and buried not that many years before. This earth against wood was not working, in spite of some effort to seal the wood. And so, rebuilding the root cellar inside and out and constructing hundreds of small crates for its use is another of my many projects fitted in somewhere. In fact, we had to get the root cellar insulated in with a double wall before the snows came (whether in 90 or 91, I don’t remember). So I was given a large crew of men to do that job on a Saturday. The ground was soppy wet, and we worked in mud all day. 

I had put Brian on the one task that most needed to be done right, and that was the insulated skirting around the bottom. So Brian had to work in sloppy mud almost to the top of his mud boots all day. We got the job done well, but at the end of the day I looked at Brian. You see, I was covered from head to foot with mud as well as every tool in my pouch. Brian had not one speck of mud above his boots nor on any of his tools!

You can see that we were very different.

We tore down the old washhouse/shop in the center of the community and located the new washhouse basically in that same spot. Don and I decided that we did not want to do a repeat of the poured cement pillars as we had done with Sister Delores’s cabin. Rather, we chose the foundation style of driving large creosote logs straight down into the ground. We purchased those logs from somewhere and hired a big pile driver out from town to drive them into the ground. We had considered carefully where a large water line was going through, whose location had never been marked. We believed we would miss it, but we were wrong, the farthest back piling cut it apart. Brian had to dig that out, then and re-splice the water line around the building.

When I was leveling out the tops of the driven logs, then, this was another time when Brian had to come along to tell me I was doing it wrong. I always respected Brian and never thought to do that to him, so I never understood why my ways of doing so aggravated him. I was doing it the best way, however, even though it was not by the book, so I ignored him and kept on.

Once the washhouse pilings were in place, ready for the building to be constructed on them, we left that project for the next summer and turned to the foundation and floor slab of the shop. This project was a bigger deal. The shop would be forty feet wide and ninety feet long. I made it two full stories with further spaces inside the roof with dormers as the third floor. The shop had three large bays, 30’ by 30’ as their base size, but with a ten foot space at the back that would serve as tool and work bays. Each bay was divided from the other with a large roll up door, with large rollup doors at either end. This way a large logging truck with a load could be driven in one end, be entirely inside with the doors closed to be worked on, and then driven straight out the other end. To the furthest bay, however, we enlarged it twenty more feet on the east side so that a large grader could be driven in through another rollup door on the side and be completely inside of a heated space. The concrete slab beneath where the grader would sit had to be much thicker and stronger to hold its great weight. 

All the large beams and roll up doors that we needed for this project, and all the planks for both shop and washhouse, we had obtained from the shop we tore down in Fort St. John. I designed the building partly to fit these components. 

The new shop building was located to the east of the washhouse, just inside the road curving up the hill towards the root cellar and across from the old barn. This was silty river-bottom land. I was not fully confident in my engineering knowledge, and others were less confident, so we employed an engineer out from Dawson Creek to determine what our foundation must be so that the shop would not move. He sent out a test driller to get a core sample of what made up the ground beneath. Maybe ten feet down through soft sand there was a several foot band of watery slush at the level of the river. 

So, Don and I drove down to Dawson Creek to see the engineer and get his recommendations. As we sat there, he looked at the core sample details, then he reached up, pulled a book off his shelf and opened to a chart, the very same chart I had taught Terry Miller from my own construction books. He put his finger on the lowest number and said, “You have to design the foundation to fit this load level," so much thickness per pound of weight sitting on it. He also drew out for us a basic sketch of how the footer, stem wall, and slab should fit together and how the rebar should be structured. That was it, $1500 to know which book to pull off the shelf. – Oh well. It was worth it, however, for now we were free to build the right foundation with confidence. 

But – I still had to design it all myself including calculating the differing weights throughout the whole building.

Constructing this large foundation was a huge task, but a lot of fun. Brian and/or Randy dug out a deep trench all the way around with the backhoe. Our foundation wall would be five or six feet tall, all underground, with a thick and wide footer beneath of it. We constructed and assembled forms all the way around. We bought big bags of cement from Edmonton and trucked in loads of sand and gravel. We filled the forms with rebar as we built them up. We hired a concrete mix truck to come out and sit beside the job site. Randy would fill its hoppers with cement and gravel, the operator ran the mixer, and we received the pouring concrete all the way around. Once the side walls had dried, we filled the space again all around them and packed the dirt with thumpers, similar to a jack hammer. When the ground was once again even with the tops of the walls, we were ready to pour the slab. “We” included myself, Don, Dani, Terry, John Austin, Brian, and quite a few others not normally in the building crew assisting with this job.

One issue in designing our new shop that concerned Don and me was that the move communities had a long history of woodstoves in shop buildings burning the shops to the ground. We did not want a woodstove in our new shop. For that reason, that prior winter, Don and I had visited a large personal shop next to the home of a trucker in Charlie Lake, just north of Fort. St. John. This man had installed a hot water heating system inside the slab before he poured it. That meant that, at 30 below zero, he could drive his ice-covered truck into the shop late in the evening and find it dry and warm by early morning. Because the heat was coming up from the concrete, the entire building was easily and inexpensively warm. Don and I had this man carefully explain every part of his system to us. We also obtained pamphlets on this heating style.

We then put in an entire hot-water under-slab heating system for the new shop. Randy constructed the metal pipe hubs where all the lines would come together. Once this was all in place, with the rebar (and triple rebar layers under where the grader would be parked), we were ready to pour the slab. We also asked Tony Cobb, from Dallas, Texas, to come up and help us with this large pour. He was one of those who had come to Citra to help pour concrete while I was living there.

So, with Brother Tony’s help, we poured a large and beautiful concrete slab for the shop floor. I did some research on finishing the slab and learned that raw linseed oil was best for new concrete. The next spring, after it was fully cured, we spread two coats of raw linseed oil on it before we began any construction. This made it the best shop floor I have known. Sweeping sawdust with a large broom meant no dust at all left behind on the first pass.

And so, before the winter came, both foundations were in place. And the shop slab and foundation were all one piece; no part of it could budge without all of it shifting together. But because it was so large, such a shift would never happen.

The School Year
This school year had begun before those foundations were complete. I had a full teaching load this year, though I was no longer teaching Terry Miller. I had the history classes as well as English in the high school, probably two English classes. I attempted to use the Writing Road to Reading to improve the spelling in one group. That was the class with Paul Austin, Jesse Rehmeier, Chris Kidd, and now John and Michelle Mancha. I learned from that experience that, while that full phonetic approach was great for children learning to read, it did nothing to improve spelling skills for high schoolers. I appreciated teaching the full range of world history as well. I believe that it was the next year, however, that I taught Church history as a full-year course. This exercise gave me the broad and specific grasp of the movement and patterns of world history that I so much appreciate having. 

Then, this year I was given the wondrous privilege of teaching two full college courses all on my own, one in the fall semester and one in the spring. In that fall I taught The History of the English Language and in the spring The History of Education. I tell you what, for both of these courses, I applied more design principles with more effort and carefulness than any design I had ever done before then. Oh, this was heaven for me. I think that my students enjoyed two wonderful courses. I had maybe eight to ten college students per course; even Sister Sue Sampson enrolled in and took my History of the English Language course. That was fun for me. 

Rarely in all my life did my heart sing in the joy of doing than it did in the teaching of those two courses. As I remember back now, overall, this was a good school year for me.


Our Home and Kyle and Kimberley
Let me place Maureen and I together with our little boy, Kyle, along with Kimberley in our little cabin. It was a good little home and we remember it with fondness. By the next summer, Kyle was talking and running around, before he was one, so I have to separate that away and just remember him as an infant. At this point, now, I have Maureen to help me remember.

But one thing that we did together took place in the summer a month or so before Kyle was born. You will remember that I love few things better than exploring the wilderness, preferably in a vehicle–hiking relationship. I had gone before with a number of college students to a place called Sikanni Chief Falls. I wanted to take Maureen there now, with Kimberly and Sola for a picnic, probably on a Sunday. To get there, you drive north up the Alaska Highway past Pink Mountain and across the Sikanni Chief River. Then you turn west on Mile 171 road for several miles until the road ends. There, you hike about a mile along the high bluff above the river until you arrive at the rocky area in full view of the falls. Here you were just above where the water went over the edge. Before, we had hiked down to the bottom of the falls which were about 100 feet high, but Maureen was pregnant, so we did not try that. If you want to see pictures of the place, here is a link – Sikanni Chief Falls. You must understand how much I love the wildness of the north. I even gasped looking through these pictures for I recognized the rocks. And yes, I went with Kimberley and Sola to that breathtaking view out over the top of the falls that you see in the pictures. We went there several times over the years.

Enjoying this day together, taking Maureen,  Kimberley, and Sola, into a wilderness experience that I loved, is a happy memory for me. 

We had a happy little home together. Kimberley was helpful and kind; she never responded to us as she had to others because she had no need to protect herself. Maureen and I always treated her in the highest regard. And Kimberley was great friends with little baby Kyle. It’s a bit sad that he was too young to remember that friendship. 

Because I was now part of Maureen’s life, I enjoyed all of her friends coming to visit. Maureen just naturally drew people in and made a place for them inside her friendship. And so many more of the sisters in the college and community became a part of my life as well. Our home was always a place of refuge, not in “rebellion against,” but in the receiving of Christ. And, of course, many came just to hold and play with Kyle.

Having a son was a big deal to me because I have always known that we, each by ourselves, meet with God face to face, and that such an answering is utterly real. And I have always known that no relationship with God can ever be imposed, but must always arise from within, in a joining of heart with Heart. I am convinced that God must meet with each of my children and they with Him inside of their own hearts, that nothing true can come any other way.

Inside of this certainty, however, I also knew just how inadequate I was, and how my own limitations made me incapable of giving to Kyle all that he needed to grow up inside a personal knowing of God. And so I held my son, close to my heart, with tears streaming down my face, and I covenanted with God, that He would be and do towards my son what I could not be or do. 

God is a keeper of Covenant.

We had a dilemma in the layout of our house, and that is that we had a small wood stove right in the center of a fairly small space, a stove that burned hot continuously through the long winter months. As Kyle began to crawl, I considered building a fence around that stove, as some have done. We did not have enough space, however, and I was also convinced that no fence would keep a determined little boy out. The probability that he would burn himself badly on that stove was pretty high.

And so I chose to implant inside of him the understanding that “stove” equals “pain.” I would let him get near the stove, and then whack him, either on his rear or on his hand as he reached out towards it. It’s called corporal discipline, the inflicting of a lesser pain in order to prevent a far greater pain.

It worked. Kyle seemed to be a fast learner and soon we no longer needed to be concerned about the stove.

When Maureen and I took the course to become foster parents here in Houston (which we chose not to complete), we were presented with the philosophy from the state, that corporal punishment is evil. The vicious hypocrisy of this claim was overwhelming to me. You see, the state, along with the general public, will condemn in great self-righteousness, the paddling of a twelve-year-old boy for disobedience. But when that boy turns eighteen and he disobeys the state, the cruel punishment inflicted upon him without mercy by both state and public is ten thousand times worse than a simple spanking. This is true evil.

That being said, such care for one’s children works only inside of a general environment of respect for their person and tender regard and attentiveness towards them, that they know they belong and are deeply loved. This truth will mean a whole lot in the growing up of our children.

That December, Maureen and I drove down to Oregon with Kyle to visit our family and for mom and dad to see their new little grandson. Dad could not respond, but I know that he was aware and got to hold our boy named after him. We took a roast of moose meat with us. I remember how Tim and Dave, my brothers-in-law exclaimed over how good that moose roast was. While we were all seated in the upstairs larger room, visiting, Kyle was sitting on one of my knees. Without warning, the little guy swung down and bit my other leg just as hard as he could. I have no idea what inspired his little mind to do that, but boy, that one hurt!

My Dad’s Funeral 
I must insert two things that happened in the early months of 1992. First, after our trip down to Oregon in December, I had invited Glenn and Kim to come up to Blueberry for the convention the first of March, which they did. They had two children at this point, their son, Alex, was around Kyle’s age.

Partway through the convention, Glenn received a call from Mom in Oregon. Dad had passed away. Glenn had not been there to help Mom get him up. She was doing chores outside when Dad gasped for breath, but could not breathe. Glenn took it hard, blaming himself for not being there. He and Kim left to return to Oregon right away. Dad was seventy-four years old.

A few days later, I flew down to Oregon by myself for my Dad’s funeral. It was a good time in Oregon with my brothers and sisters and mom. We had a brief memorial service in the funeral home in Lebanon. Dad was buried in the Lacomb cemetery on a grassy slope overlooking the Beaver Creek Valley about half a mile south of Lacomb. 

There was a growing animosity between my two brothers, however, Franz and Glenn. This problem will factor into my life story and so I will share more of my brother, Franz’s, growing disability in later chapters. 

I think there might also have been a bit of a conflict regarding “blame” and “responsibility,” along with Mom being caught in-between. Understand that, at this time in our lives, my brothers and I were very limited in our ability to communicate together and most of what we said to each other had to go through Mom. 

Glenn and Kim now lived in the downstairs of our house and Mom was in the upstairs as its own apartment. When everyone else had gone home and it was just Mom and I, I felt some need to “correct” Mom regarding her handling of an issue, which I no longer remember. I waxed eloquent in the anointing, showing her the “error of her ways.” Mom listened to me quietly and patiently. When I had finished, she shared the reality of the situation with me.

I was completely and entirely WRONG, and the shamefulness of my self-righteous posturing was clearly evident to me. This was a very important moment in my life, for it showed me the fallacy of assuming “knowledge” that God, in fact, never gives. If God does not remember our sins, how could He inform His “prophets” of things He does not know?

Nonetheless, this definition of “discernment” and “correction” was deeply embedded in move-of-God practice. God was making sure I was hit hard with the reality of its falseness. I would be hit hard many more times ahead until my Father succeeded in burning all of that wickedness from my own heart. 

Kyle and Surgery
Kyle was born with one eye turned in. Thankfully, in Canada, all medical costs were covered by the government and the hospital system is big on putting the needs of children at the top. 

In February of 92, we began to take Kyle to the hospital in Fort St. John regarding his “lazy eye.” They had us keep a patch on the good eye so that the brain would be forced to connect with the “lazy eye” and not cut if off from its knowing. The staff in Fort St. John also connected us with one of British Columbia’s leading pediatric ophthalmologists, Dr. Cline from the Vancouver area. Dr. Cline included children from remote areas in his practice and would travel where needed to perform surgeries.

Kyle was scheduled for surgery in April. This was overwhelming, especially to Maureen, that our baby would be placed under sedation and a knife put to his eye. The day before the scheduled date, however, Maureen received a phone call from Dr. Cline. He shared with her that he had Kyle on his mind all day during his surgeries and wanted to see Kyle early in order to know for sure that surgery was necessary. Dr. Cline’s concern brought complete peace to Maureen. Indeed, I don’t think we have ever connected with a finer medical practitioner in our lives than Dr. Cline.

Dr. Cline did operate on Kyle’s eye on April 24, at the Fort St. John hospital. The surgery was a success, but a second surgery would be needed, which would then take place in January of 1993. In between the two surgeries, we continued with the eye patch so that Kyle would learn to use both eyes. The second surgery was also exactly as Dr. Cline intended, and thus no more was needed. Kyle uses both eyes, though they remain somewhat independent of each other.

The Russians and Graham River
Let me begin with the Russians. I’m not sure, but I think that it was 1991 that the Russians came to the Peace River Country. I’m not sure of the dates, but I will place this experience here that included many instances over time. They were actually German Russians, whose families had moved from Germany to Russia under the invitation given by Catherine the Great. Many German Mennonites had also moved to Russia to be farmers at the same time. In fact there are over two million ethnic Germans scattered throughout Russia.

The story of these brothers and sisters in the Lord can be found in a book titled The Siberian Miracle by Peter de Bruijne. That is their story, of course, but through the years of 1991 to 1992, my story in community was connected just a bit with theirs. To be honest with you, this book is one of the most important that I would recommend you read. There is truth in it that is vitally needed for all Christians in our world today as tyranny re-imposes itself everywhere.

This story is of two pastors, father and son, both named Victor Walter, in their struggle to be the church together in community inside Communist Russia. They won this struggle in the late eighties, just before the Soviet Union came apart, and the KGB allowed the entire church, who had been living in community together outside of Vladivostok in far eastern Siberia, to emigrate together to Germany. Because they were German, they were recognized automatically as German citizens, but they did not feel comfortable inside a highly populated and worldly society. After about ten years there, they sought to immigrate to Canada, to the Peace River region, which is very similar to Siberia. They could not immigrate as a group, but all the families did manage to immigrate separately.

The older Victor had passed away before they left Russia, so it was the younger Victor Walter who brought them into Canada. They purchased two separate farms along the Halfway River on the road to Graham River and began to build two separate, but related Christian Communities on those properties. Their liaison in British Columbia was a brother named Boris. Boris knew of our communities and had visited them before this. Victor Walter visited Blueberry with several of the men and Boris, probably in the early summer of 1991. He came to request aid from our communities and from Blueberry in helping them build their new communities. 

In the end, the Blueberry elders agreed just to send Don Howat and me over to give them what construction and design advice we could give. At the same time, Amos Deardorff chose to live among them for a period of time, maybe two summers, to help them set up their farming operations. These were good people, but very legalistic and their attitudes towards women we did not share. It was wise that we did not become too involved, though we helped them with good suggestions.

Another thing that happened in this spring of 1992, then, before the school year was over, is that Brother D and Sister Ethelwyn asked Don Howat and I to come visit them at Graham River and give them suggestions as to their construction needs there. Of truth, Don and I worked together like this to help brethren at Evergreen and Hilltop as well. We had become a recognized team together. And so Don and I spent a weekend at Graham River. 

Brother D and Sister Ethelwyn had the cabin at the end of the row above the gardens, that had once been the Herman cabin, and onto which Steve Herman had built a greenhouse, which was still functioning. That’s where Don and I stayed, but all the gatherings for meals and services were in the former Davison cabin in that same row, where I had lived with them years before. Some of the interior walls had been removed to make it a larger and very comfortable place to gather. There were maybe twenty or thirty people now living at Graham, most of them involved with music and praise. They had restored a number of the cabins and had added onto them.

The problem was that they were growing rapidly, many people from all over were asking to move to Graham River and to be a part of the Shepherd’s School of Music. And, of course, the original Tabernacle and school building were no more. The brethren at Graham wanted our advice regarding how to meet their need for a larger Tabernacle. 

As we walked the community grounds and through our discussions together, it came clear that a large project would be difficult for us to help on, since we had full obligations back home. Graham River at that time did not have dedicated builders who could have tackled such a project. In the discussion, however, I remembered my wonderful experience at Bowens Mill when a large crew of men gathered together and built the Woody Crossin house in one weekend.

I suggested that this might be the solution to their need, that they might send forth a call to all the communities for many to come together at Graham for an extended weekend (four work days) and, with all the materials already gathered, raise their new Tabernacle in one great community effort. 

Brother D and Sister Ethelwyn became very excited about this possibility. It wasn’t long at all before they made it official and asked the Blueberry eldership if they would agree to release me to design their new Tabernacle and for Don and I to be released to plan and prepare for this great gathering that would number 65 men, to raise their new home in four days.

I was now caught in the expectation of the four most glorious days of my work life. At the same time, I was becoming comfortable in this new role that Don and I shared together and how we were now becoming known throughout the area communities.

~~~

The second half of this chapter will cover the next seven months, June through December of 1992, a time filled with an extraordinary number of things. And now, for the first time, I see God’s determination towards me, not just through these months, but all the way to October of 2011, and all I can do is place my face upon the ground before a holy and a mighty God and worship Him.

To my utter astonishment, everything makes perfect sense, and all of it is good.

I must also place inside of anything God might be doing in my inward person the wonderful blessing to Maureen and me that was every person at Blueberry towards us. to do that, I am including a few more pictures of our graduation and wedding.