PAPER POWER!                       DFO 303A        2/74

         1. I'M TRYING TO GET YOU GUYS TO SIT DOWN & GO TO WORK, THE HARD WORK OF COMPOSING UNDER INSPIRATION & WRITING WHAT HAS TO BE SAID. If you leaders & pioneers don't learn to depend on the inspiration of God & the Holy Spirit to tell the World about where you've been & what you've done, then for God's sake, it's not worth telling. If you can't depend on the Lord to give you the inspiration, if you can't sit down to a tape recorder & DICTATE it or WRITE it out, may God help you!
         2. I realise that for most of you this hasn't been your calling & you're not accustomed to doing things this way, but that's why we have very little on record of all the big long sessions in all the great meetings & all the tremendous programmes that we have had. Who heard it?--A handful of people & the rest of the World can go to pot.
         3. In spite of all I have written & all I have told you about the importance of writing, I'm having to write you about it again, & for God's sake, some of you sure need it! You think you have the WORLD VISION!--You guys sit in your one little dinky Home & tell a few people about your experiences to get YOURSELVES inspired!
         4. If I hadn't started writing it down there wouldn't have been any Revolution. We'd have died on the vine right where we were. As long as I stayed at TSC I couldn't even keep TSC straight, it went in one ear & out the other: Talks, lectures, teaching--here today & gone tomorrow. The other Colonies that didn't hear them at all were already going astray.
         5. They had nothing written to hang onto.--They had nothing concrete to go by, & God had to yank me out of that situation & send me half way around the World to where I was FORCED to sit down virtually alone & WRITE down what I had to say. If you leaders can't LEARN that lesson, then the Revolution is going to die with me, or at least its leadership is going to die with us.
         6. The only leadership the Revolution is going to have left is what is on paper, what WE put on paper. But you are FLITTING around from Home to Home exhausting yourselves, TELLING hours of tales over & over again to little HANDFULS of people.
         7. You ought to be sitting down & spending hours putting it permanently on paper where the whole World can hear about it! But no, you want the glory & the glamour to go before the audience & get the great praise of Man & the glorification to inflate that actor's ego, to get that audience reaction. I used to be there, I know what it's like!
         8. But "put it on paper" was one of the main lessons God was trying to teach us back there in Israel. And I'll tell you right now, a lot of you haven't learned it yet!--God gave you plenty of time to write about your experiences & the lessons He was teaching you when they were fresh.
         9. You have failed God & us by not writing about your experiences! You could have kept a diary. Do you keep a log? Do you faithfully keep a little diary? A lot of you don't even keep a log of daily events.
         10. Every leader in this outfit is supposed to keep a daily log of daily events. But some of you don't even keep a log, you don't even write weekly reports!
         11. You folks have not caught the vision of the power of the pen & the paper! Maybe you're a street fighter, a front line soldier & you're great at that, but your generals will never know what you're doing because you don't report. We'll just get second-hand information on what's happening.
         12. So you leaders feel hurt 'cause you're left behind to write a report & you're all by yourself, all alone when all the fun & games is going on. You're not getting the hero's royal treatment & having a big glamourised splurge, & "Lo, the mighty conqueror comes!" telling your great tale.--All of which you can do & we expect you to do, but you should reserve that which is LEAST until LAST.
         13. You should first be sitting down & doing the hard pick & shovel work of getting it onto paper, the kind of work that Maria & I do ALL the time. It might be something totally new that you'll have to learn how to do. But God help us, it's about TIME you LEARNED.
         14. It wasn't beneath Maria's dignity to sit there & slave away 4,5,6,8 & 10 hours a day, bang, bang, bang, bang all day long on the typewriter, or you'd never have heard the story.--It was just plain HARD WORK!
         15. Of course, there is always someone who is tickled pink to sit down & listen all day to your tales. But it goes in one ear & out the other.
         16. OTHER THAN WHAT GOD SAYS TO ME DIRECTLY in my sleep, about the best thing that I produce is that which I sit down & I THINK & I PRAY about & I DICTATE it to Maria CONCISELY: "This is the way it is." But that takes hard work. It takes THOUGHT, it takes a little PLANNING. You have to sit down & take YOUR time out to DO it.--But the World has heard!
         17. We are willing to sit down & do the pick & shovel work, & because of it the World is getting the gold we find. But some of our little miners around the World have been unwilling to mine. They've gone on strike because they want more glory & higher pay. They don't want to get down there on their knees & grub around through the mud & the muck & the filth & work hard at hammering away to pick it out. You just apparently want to lecture or sermonise someplace, & somehow have it come out all by inspiration of itself.
         18. But you have got to sit down & write or else! That takes SELF-DISCIPLINE, it takes RESEARCH, it takes HARD WORK, it takes making notes, organising your material, sitting down & writing out some kind of an outline & then finally putting the meat on the skeleton & writing it all out in words.
         19. You kids have spent a lot of time researching new fields, fine; & you have had a lot of important conferences, fine; & you had a lot of interesting experiences, fine. Where are the NOTES you kept? Where is the LOG you kept? Any fellow who tries to write a thesis off the top of his head, out of his hat, is just plain CRAZY!
         20. I'll bet a lot of you never even kept notes or a log about your daily experiences. Well, I'll tell you, most of it has been lost because you'll never remember it. We have found if Maria gets behind two or three days in her log she loses a lot of the details. This is a law of memory:
         21. It's almost impossible for you to recall all the events of a day three days ago. It just gets wiped off your memory. It may be somewhere, you might be able to get back & get on a train of thought which will bring back related thoughts one after the other, but three days later you're not going to be able to remember much of what really happened except perhaps some outstanding event.
         22. Here you kids have had remarkable & unusual experiences & yet you are not willing to sit down & do what even every single high school student does & what definitely every college student has to do every year, every term. You're not willing to do that for the LORD & the REVOLUTION & the WORLD to enable us to put it in print & get it out!
         23. About all that's left that's usable of all those sermons that I heard my Mother preach is what is in my head, & a lot of what you hear, that's where it came from, but it's precious little compared to what she preached & what she had to teach & what she had to say.
         24. She was a great woman but she could have been a whole lot greater if she'd have taken a little time to do the PLAIN HARD WORK of writing it down. But you know what she spent most of her spare time doing in the day-time between meetings?--What I USED to do.
         25. She spent most of her time taking care of individual people, writing letters, answering mail, sending little thoughtful notes & gifts & blah, blah, blah to a little old lady here & a little old man there & so on & so on.--Very thoughtful, very kind & considerate, but while she herself was personally busy with a little here & there, the great work that she COULD have done by WRITING it down for MULTITUDES MORE was GONE!
         26. I was willing to forsake all that God-damned glamour & glory of the public eye & the praise of Man in order to get alone with God. As Maria knows, we have never started a day of dictation or work without prayer & asking the Lord to help us, lead us & guide us: "Help us, Lord, with this tough job." And when I pray I hear from Him, He NEVER fails!
         27. I'll tell you, the need for glamour & glory is an addiction as bad as drugs! Actors have it. Frank Sinatra quit the business, but he can't stand it: He HAS to get back, get on the stage again. He's GOT to have that glory & that glamour! Bing Crosby did it. I don't know how many times he retired, & he HAD to come back. It's in their blood, they have just got to be up there in the public eye. They have to hear that applause, that laughter.
         28. Well I want to tell you, the World has heard from me & it has heard ABOUT me! The World has HEARD, & it will REMEMBER & it cannot forget, because it's ON MILLIONS & MILLIONS of little pieces of PAPER in countries around the Globe in dozens of different languages!
         29. Even after I am gone they will continue to hear because we sat down in a room alone day after day after day after day & month after month & year after year PUTTING IT ON PAPER. When I'm gone the World is going to REMEMBER it. They will have heard. But at the rate YOU'RE going, when YOU'RE gone you're going to be FORGOTTEN!
         30. You've got to have great faith in the inspiration God gives you, that it's getting across, that it's really doing something & getting somewhere. It's by pure naked faith, that you're saying what God wants you to say & what needs to be said, because you can't hear, you can't see, you don't know what the reaction is.
         31. The Prophets didn't prophesy for audience reaction, to hear the laughs & the howls & the Amens & the applause. They just spoke the Words of God, come what may, live or die, sink or swim, rise or fall, & that was that, flat!
         32. Now if you've got anything to say about your experiences that is worth saying, for God's sake why can't you get up the gumption to sit down & talk about it into a MICROPHONE at least! You don't even have to WRITE it with your fingers or TYPE it on a typewriter.
         33. Even if all you have is what you've already written in logs, notes or letters you wrote, you should be able to sit down & take those & go over them, analyse them, mark them, organise them & write the story.
         34. So what if it's not perfect? It's YOU, it's YOUR words! I don't try to write like somebody else, I don't try to write like my Grandfather or my Mother, I'm just ME & I write what I feel inspired to say, & I SAY it! Why in the world can't YOU do it?
         35. Do it NOW!--Tomorrow may be too late! Because if you don't, if you do not make some progress with that story so that we can see some visible progress that you are ACCOMPLISHING something, you're washed up as reporters & you have no right to ever sit in on any more news conferences or interviews or events or trips as a correspondent!
         36. We'll have to send someone else next time in your place, a dear little disciple who WRITES good REPORTS! Yes, we'll send somebody in your stead who can REPORT, who WRITES a NOTE on every photograph, little flunkies who are able to faithfully REPORT because they don't know any better than to OBEY, they don't know any better than to know that REPORTS are REQUIRED of them!
         37. But you're not going to be able to work much longer here with us unless you do what we tell you to do! If you can't DO what we TELL you to do, & WHEN we tell you to do it, & get it DONE, then you're not going to be any good to us, & we might as well send you back to the trenches where you can do as YOU please, live or die! Some of you have been on assignment a long time & we have YET to see a thing accomplished on your REPORT!--What's your excuse?
         38. If you were correspondents for any other newspaper but ours you would be fired right now--end of job! Because your story is now getting so old it's almost ancient history. Jesus, help us. Lord Jesus! Well, you need to do some praying, I'll tell you! You feel neglected? Well, you're NOT neglected, but you sure HAVE neglected your job & your work! YOU'VE been negligent & neglecting what YOU'RE supposed to do!
         39. Put it on paper for those NOW and to COME.--It's "PAPER POWER"! "The PEN is mightier than the SWORD!" We can change the World with our Message through "PAPER POWER"!--WRITE it NOW!--Tomorrow will be too late! Get those reports in today!