"What You Need Is Faith"

SN'T SURVIVAL one of the most important things in the world to you right now?   Would you agree that without survival, our time here on this planet has little meaning or purpose?   If I could show you how you can survive this life and even prosper in ways you may have never dreamed possible, would that interest you?

    I'm about to tell you a true story.   If you believe me you will be well rewarded with the answers you seek.   If you don't believe me, it will be well worth your while to change your mind.   Let me explain...

   A lot of people hear about faith -- or belief in a higher power, a Creator of heaven and earth -- but how many truly experience what that means first hand in their lives?

    If you're like most people, you've probably never looked carefully into this subject to truly understand it intuitively, must less from personal experience.   If was different for me.   My life was no big deal, though I was an entertainer and starting to have some success in the tough Los Angeles marketplace as a stage illusionist, and even on the side as a singer and Master of Ceremonies.

    But something else happened that sidetracked me permanently from all of that, which changed my entire life around and started me on the long, difficult road to becoming an author, publisher and teacher in a ministry unlike any other, without seminary training or ordination by any human authority.

    Along the way I had to learn some difficult lessons about faith, trust, death and survival which will always stay with me all the days of my life.   It all began when, at age 26, I got really serious about finding a wife and settling down to raise a family of our own.

    Our first meeting was purely by "happenstance" that was more intentional than either of us knew at the time.   I had attended a religious college called Ambassador, the major indoctrination school of Herbert W. Armstrong's Worldwide Church ministry, for one year (1969-'70), before going to the University of Missouri in Kansas City, Missouri for two years.

    Following this I tried unsuccessfully for two years to get a commercial/graphic art business, and even an arts and crafts side business, started in Denver, Colorado.   But in the end, something drew me back to Pasadena.   My animation work had come to the attention of Ambassador's television production studio -- which was then televising Worldwide's "World Tomorrow" broadcast to a nationwide audience -- during a brief trip to L.A. to line up suppliers for a product I was toying with marketing.

    After being promised the position as head of a new animation department, I wrapped up my failing business in Denver and, taking the plunge with only a few hundred dollars to my name, made the move to Pasadena two months later, only to discover the promised position had been filled in my absence by a former Disney animator.

    Although this left me in the difficult situation of landing a job and affording a place to live in the expensive Pasadena area, I did manage to land on my feet somehow, though things were tough and never easy financially as a result.   Their credentials and experience notwithstanding, the Disney animator soon found themselves out of work within less than six months, when operational funds for the entire Ambassador TV studio department was drastically cut, along with many superfluous jobs.

    Always one to count my blessings, I was very thankful I had not started that job, found an expensive apartment and gotten used to the luxury of a salary that would soon vanish into the mists of broken promises I was forced to face anyway.   It was far better for it to happen like this, I realized.   So, while I eventually found work as a printer's prepress paste-up and layout artist, typesetter, and all-around office help briefly, I soon began to branch out into entertainment, starting as a disc jockey with my own call-in radio show from a local cable provider in Sierra Madre and Arcadia.

    Later, I began a career as a magician, doing first close-up and later stage and television performances, then landed work with my first two auditions.   First, I snagged the coveted role as the singing lead in an Altadena Community Theater bicentennial musical.   This went to an alternate when I couldn't manage the schedule, and I became a co-director teaching my replacement the magic tricks he would perform to rave reviews.

    I also landed a six-month stint as one member of a bicentennial performing arts troop which gave performances all over the Pasadena community and surrounding areas.   I also landed a difficult to obtain performing membership with The Magic Castle in Hollywood, by passing a stringent performance trial before other professional members.

    All of this would soon fall apart, due to physical disabilities brought about by two religious-motivated attacks upon my person by active fellow Worldwide members, and by a drug-addicted neighbor whose attempt on my life was unsuccessful.

    These started when I had a dream vision directing me to cease studying a certain subject, which was immediately followed by a physical sign that made the point emphatically and unmistakably that this topic was taboo for me.

    My wife Anne was then a student of Ambassador College, and we met one day -- on the sixth anniversary of my baptism by Worldwide -- at the door to her dorm, where I was picking up another young lady for a date.   We both felt an instant liking for the other, and secretly harbored a desire to get to know each other, but were both too shy to initiate any further contact.

    Instead, a week prior to this brief encounter a mutual acquaintance had told each of us about the other, neither of us realizing who the other was, and set up a date to introduce us four days later, where we instantly fell for each other.   It would be a difficult relationship, however, due to my religious studies that had begun to call our Worldwide indoctrination into question, which she found difficult to nearly impossible to accept at first, and for the next seven years of our marriage.

    Two months after our marriage in the summer of 1978, on the fall equinox that year, I had a terribly realistic dream vision that foretold the eventual breakup and destruction of the Worldwide Church following my start upon a ministry to try and reach the followers of that major religious movement.

    Almost exactly one year later a second dream vision, picking up were the other had ended, foretold the eventual death of Herbert Armstrong and his top ministry, after coming into unprovoked confrontation with myself, leading to the breakup and dissolution of the two major ministries that were then vying with each other for members and superiority, HWA's Worldwide Church and the then new brake-off International Church headed by his estranged former "heir apparent" and son Garner Ted Armstrong.

    This, however, was not my first prophetic warning of this mutually assured destruction of these two competing religious movements.   Six months earlier, on April 15th, the popular news program 60 Minutes broadcast a segment about Worldwide, interviewing feisty and belligerent Church Attorney Stanley Rader.   The next day, two days before the last day of GTA's CGI's Passover observance, Anne delivered twin girls stillborn, that we had known were already dead two months before, but only thought she was carrying one child -- despite several ultrasound examinations -- until they were delivered.

    I knew at the time that these two girls, one known and the other unknown, whom we named Elizabeth and Barbara -- Elizabeth meaning daughter of the Almighty One in original Ibreya (incorrectly: "Hebrew") and Barbara being Greek for stranger -- representing both "Old" and "New" Testament approaches to scripture, were also representative of HWA's more "Old Testament" oriented, and GTA's more "New Testament" oriented religions.   The stillbirth of these daughters, then, who had struggled with each other, cutting off their blood supply by trying their umbilical cords in knots, indicated the future of both religious organizations.

   A year later, Anne was again pregnant, but fell on a wet floor entering a store.   She suffered with a pain in her abdomen over the next month until her delivery in May.   Afterward, she was so weak and anemic that she had to be carried from the pediatrician's office to the car, for the return trip to the birth clinic, where I was accused of "starving" her (I had been on a special limited cleansing diet, and naturally they just assumed she had also).

    Anne's condition required hospitalization for a blood transfusion, and this was nearly denied when we had difficulty putting together the needed upfront fee that was required and when the staff tried to prevent our baby from being allowed to stay with her mother for breast-feeding.   I finally worked out a compromise where I stayed with them in the room on a cot, but since we were unable to pay for any lengthy stay the hospital booted us out the next day.

    When Anne's condition remained weak, after the transfusion, at a follow-up examination I was informed that my wife might have some kind of trouble with her ovaries, and we were sent to another doctor for a second opinion.   This doctor, after only a brief, cursory physical examination announced there was no doubt about it, Anne had cancer of the ovaries and she required a complete hysterectomy immediately.

    I smelled something fishy about this entire situation and, realizing she was far too weak and anemic still to survive such an operation, and suspecting I knew the real source of her troubles, we sought a third and fourth opinion.   The last examination, by a doctor in a poorer district of Pasadena, who actually listened to me, uncovered a hematoma (burst blood vessel) in Anne's vaginal wall, a result of her fall nearly two months previously.

    She had been slowly bleeding internally that entire time!

    After another brief trip to a hospital for suturing -- where once again the staff of the emergency room spent more time arguing with me against being by my wife's side, along with our newborn child, and my refusal to leave and insisting on describing the location of her problem was the only way they finally found and stopped the squirting of her life's blood that Anne was losing with every heartbeat -- this problem was at last behind us.

    One thing this, and other incidents like it in years to come, taught me was the utter foolishness -- not to mention possible life-threatening danger -- of accepting the "authority" or supposed "superior" intelligence and capability of so-called professionals.   Whenever we have faced similar circumstances, I have found that being proactive in learning and applying medical, legal or spiritual knowledge was always the safest and best road to take.

    After delivering all eight of our children, the last seven at home and unassisted, and one of our grandchildren to date, I thank our Creator Yahveh for granting me the strength of faith to believe His promised blessings, and to reach out and receive them from His merciful hands.

    In similar manner, I have had remarkable and amazing revelations of spiritual knowledge and truth far beyond those contemporaries of mine who lost faith -- or never had any real belief -- in our silent but always trustworthy heavenly Creator.

    For instance, think about what the word "heavenly" actually means, while contemplating how the physical is a copy and image of the spiritual.   (Careful, though, for most of the "religiously" avid "true believers" will refuse to believe such things...)

    Just as we live on a planet in a solar system, is it too impossible that the location of heaven is likewise a type of planet or globe, though far more gloriously constructed and without the need for any sun to give it light or to sustain life upon its surface?

    Just as our universe is now being revealed -- through scientific discoveries that are less well-known, but more accurate than any previous suppositions about how our solar system is composed -- as filled with binary star systems, and our own solar system is actually also a binary system, in which there is a dark star in addition to our sun -- accounting for so-called sidereal time, the procession of the equinoxes, and earth's mythical "wobbling" on its axis -- hidden somewhere in plain sight is the heaven revealed in scripture, where the Creators of heaven and earth presently reside.

    It might be some distance away, like the binary dark star in our own solar system, or it could be on the other side of the sun, in the same orbit as earth but always 180 degrees in either direction, so near and yet so distant and always unobservable from our physical vantage point.   And should heaven simply stand still, perhaps it and earth would soon meet up with one another.

    How can I be so sure of this?

    Scripture prophecy reveals that one day both Father and Son Creators will make their dwelling on earth with a finally perfected humanity (cf. Zechariah 2:10-13; II Corinthians 6:16; Revelation 21:3) and, since this is their evident purpose and plan for the rest of eternity, it isn't too hard for us to conceive of heaven as a sort of temporary space platform, station or planetoid where they, along with a host of angels (those whom we modern humans call "aliens" today), await the completion of their ancient plan for their peace and glory to finally reside permanently on earth.

    It would be a big mistake to think of these things as just another "UFO cult," although such things are described throughout scripture -- from "Ezekiel's" wheels-within- wheels portable throne of Almighty Creator Yahveh, to the star of Bethlehem that led the wise men of the East to the newborn Savior -- and you might be confused and chagrined to see what lies ahead of us, in the immediate future, unless you first have the faith to believe the evidence of mostly unseen things.

    Nevertheless, the day will soon arrive when mere faith will no longer be required, when all is finally revealed to an incredulous and mostly rebellious, disbelieving mankind.

    The only question being, upon which side of the belief fence will you stand on that decisive day, should you survive to see it?

    And survival is only possible if you first accept and diligently live your life according to the Creator's immutable laws, as set forth in the 10 Commandments, and in the two greatest laws ("Worship Yahveh your Almighty One, and have no other mighty ones before Him," and "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.").

    That is the purpose of The Pure Truth Restored, and learning this way of life is the only hope you have left in a rapidly deteriorating world of violence, corruption and larceny from the "highest" offices to the lowest slums.

    Only a returning Savior can ultimately restore all things, and finally bring real peace to earth by putting all earthly governments under His direct and forceful but merciful rule.   Until then, carnal governments can only continue to self-implode or explode in endless violent wars, being divided into opposing political "parties" rather than united in purposeful action.

    And even should they finally unite behind a one-world despot, it will only signal the final end in mankind's long history of selfish rule over the earth, and the soon-coming arrival of the true Kingdom of heaven on earth!