2009-5-31 15:57:00
After this experience we concluded that we must experiment with different approaches.
Curtis did have a bit of good and bad luck in the Idaho Falls, Idaho, area. He was fired from his job from his Mormon boss who was freaked out that he was excommunicated but then he received an answer to one of his ads from a guy who was very enthused about our teachings. I made a trip over there and we visited him together. He said that God had spoken to him and all he had was ours for the asking. For starters he said he had $50,000 worth of gold in his basement and we could take what we wanted. (Keep in mind that amount is worth about $164,000 in today's dollars.) That sounded almost too good to be true. We figured some unseen force must be helping us so we told him that we could start off with maybe $10,000. We explained that the first thing we needed to do was to move Curtis and his family to Boise so we could work together. He agreed and traded in $10,000 worth of gold and handed us the cash.
We immediately moved Curtis to Boise, Idaho, and just as he was settling in we received a call from the guy. He said that he and his wife were going to be in town the next day and wanted to visit with us. We immediately sensed there was a problem and sure enough when we got together they both had a very serious look on their faces. He explained that now God was telling him something else and he wanted his money back.
I took Curtis aside and we had a brief conference. We realized that since he had given us cash and we had it in our possession that we could just tell him we were going to keep it but we decided against this for a number of reasons and decided to give him back what we had left over.
We went back in their presence and I explained that we had used $3,000 to move Curtis to Boise and get him a place, but we would give him back the cash we had. He agreed, took the money and we never heard from him again.
"Well," I told Curtis, "at least we got you moved here so we can work together."
Meanwhile to keep body and soul together I worked at my real estate business that was dealing with rising interest rates and Curtis started a tree and shrub business.
Along the way I came across a book from the local library containing revelations from a guy who called himself Onias. The book contained a number of revelations that started out authoritatively proclaiming, "Thus saith the Lord." They were mostly directed at the authorities in the LDS church condemning them for not living up to their own stewardships and previous revelations. I shared this with Curtis and he found the writings particularly interesting and wanted to contact him. We wrote him in care of the publisher and a short time later he called us back on the phone.
It turned out that he had been trying to draw attention to his revelations for some time and was thrilled to talk to someone who found them interesting. He then told us he was going to take a trip down to Idaho to meet us.
A few days later he showed up and we spent some time with him. He was looked about sixty (but was only 50), balding with white hair and kind of looked like a prophet. He then shared with us two revelations that were not in his book. The first was "The Parable of The Pear Tree" and can be found at:
http://members.tripod.com/2ndbookofcommandment/id20.htm
The second was "The Parable of the Deceitful Merchants" which can be found at:
http://members.tripod.com/2ndbookofcommandment/id21.htm
We read these over and concluded that this was his best work to date. Then I came up with what I thought was a masterpiece of an idea. We could send these out to every single Mormon in the Boise area and if that went well we could send them out to every Mormon in the country. We figured that if anything would jar the LDS out of complacency that these writings would.
Both Curtis and Onias thought this was a great idea and we later pooled what funds we had and began the project. Onias was long gone back to Canada and Curtis and I started an organization that we called "The Restorers." Under this name we published and distributed my writings and the two parables of Onias.
The major hurtle we now faced in sending out the writings was getting mailing lists of the LDS in the Boise, Nampa, Caldwell, Idaho, area that we wanted to cover as a test. The lists were under tight control of the Bishops and we figured that the various Bishops would be very suspicious if we asked for a copy of a list of the local members. Then I had an idea. I told Curtis that there was another person in each ward that had a copy of the list and that was the female Relief Society president. She is not pestered for things nearly as much as the Bishop and was likely to be much less suspicious. Now Curtis was quite charming with the ladies so I told him he was the best one to carry out this project and I would handle the nitty gritty of compiling lists and creating the mailing labels. His job would be to charm the Relief Society Presidents into lending him the lists for a few moments while he photocopied them.
Curtis carried out this project admirably and wound up getting a copy of every single list in the designated area. If you every meet him at a gathering he will he happy to tell you stories of how he did this and sometimes succeeding by a hair.
I headed up compiling the list and made labels, and altogether we had about 10,000 LDS families that were going to receive the most startling piece of theological mail of their lives.
To be continued...
"All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed."
-- Sean O'Casey (1880 - 1964)
Copyright © 2009 by J.J. Dewey, All Rights Reserved