—MO December‚ 1972 NO.190—DO

—It's about Thanks‚ Health, Farming, Living & Dying for Jesus!

Copyrighted December, 1972 by The Children of God

P. O.Box 31, London WC2E 7LX, England or GPO Box 3141‚ San Juan, Puerto Rico 00936

PERSONAL THANKS AND COMMENTS

1. My dearly beloved children in the Lord: Greetings in Jesus' Precious Name! THANK YOU AGAIN FOR YOUR FAITHFULNESS IN SENDING IN ALL THOSE GOOD REPORTS EACH WEEK ON TIME, TOGETHER WITH VERY HELPFUL GIFTS from some of you that have been a real blessing, as they were greatly needed. Some of you have responded very sacrificially to our urgent appeal in our last letter to you, and we trust that others will take the hint and do likewise whenever you can, as we do really need it. God bless you!

2. THANKS ALSO FOR EVERY ONE OF YOU WHO HAVE DONE WHAT YOU COULD in sending us little tokens of your love, such as sweet little notes of your affection and appreciation for what the Lord has done for you through your humble servants, your shepherds in the Lord. Each of your notes are so encouraging that every one of them makes us feel like it's worth it all! A few have even sent us a "Pledge of Allegiance" to their King to assure us that they wanted us to know that they would try to be as loyal and faithful as they could to God's Shepherds. Thanks so much!

3. THANKS TO BITHIA for her thoughtful class on massage. Our faithful little secretary has been trying some of it out on me and it sure feels good. If any of the rest of you can think up a good class or instructions on any other needed subjects which we can pass on to all of you, by all means send them in. Some of them may even be good for our new LT Classbook that's coming out soon, God willing. Thanks to Caleb and Lydia for that very special gift which is going to be a big help! We know the Lord will reward you according to your faith!

4. THANKS TO DEAR BROTHER DEICHMAN for his wonderful generosity in supplying nearly the whole Kingdom in Europe with good, warm, Winter shoes and boots in which to witness, even in the cold and snow! Poor little Maria's feet got so cold on a recent trip that she nearly got sick, and mine were half frozen, too. So we went into a store where they were having a sale on boots and tried on some, but even their sale price was too much for us. We just didn't believe the Lord would be pleased with our spending nearly four dollars of His precious funds on new shoes, so we decided just to trust Him to provide.—And sure enough, the very next day someone walked in with two pairs of Dr. Deichman's boots which exactly fit each of us! Hallelujah! It pays to pray!

5. —AND OF COURSE, READY'S JUG OF WINE all the way from the Lord's vineyards in Spain will be enough to warm all our hearts throughout the Christmas season! Thanks for Prisca's help, too, in a special task we gave them recently. Thanks to our dear Brother Paul in America another of our good kings, for all of his help, both past and present, and especially those excellent prayer letters he's been writing recently to try to help raise funds for God's seemingly always needy Kingdom! Thanks for the interesting book, too‚ Brother Paul, on the "Naked Capitalist". We'll be having a letter coming out soon, God willing‚ which will also interest you, on the international Capitalist conspiracy of the new multinational corporations who are adopting a form of international Capitalistic Socialism in an attempt to survive in the face of a growingly Communistic world!—Capitalist communes next?

6. THANKS, AMMINADAB AND WATCHMAN‚ FOR THOSE INTERESTING TAPES about your fields. Already you should be receiving some of the helpers you asked for.—And our special thanks to Corny and Cephas and their wives and staff for the terrific job they are doing in the Office of the America's, including that fascinating little news magazine they publish about the goings on in their fields!—Great idea! Keep it up!

CARE OF YOUR TEETH

7. I PERSONALLY IMMEDIATELY ATE ALL THE CHOCOLATE COVERED NUTS—the only kind of candy I like—out of a box recently sent us in love from Love and Asaph, but I helped my little secretary resist temptation of her favourite sweet by putting her on a strict ration! When she first came to us‚ she had a rather serious acne problem which she'd had since her early teens, but which the Lord and I cleared up completely with a strict diet with little or no sweets in just a few weeks‚ and it also helped her teeth—only one cavity in four years!

8. OF COURSE‚ I, WHO HAD HAD only one cavity in my first fifty years, was a pretty good teacher on the subject, as my father had taught us from childhood to always rinse our mouths thoroughly with water immediately after eating or drinking anything sweet, and to eat as little sweets as possible, as they not only rot your teeth, but also rob your bones of calcium‚ the building material with which your body tries to repair those cavities! See what the Bible says about honey, even.

9. NEVERTHELESS, EVEN I MUST HAVE BACKSLIDDEN SOMETIMES, BECAUSE RECENTLY I HAD TO GO TO THE DENTIST WITH MY FIRST TOOTHACHE IN 53 YEARS, and he found several small cavities!—Shame on me! However, he also found two brand new wisdom teeth just coming in nicely! When I told him I'd only had one filling in my whole life and that one thirty-five years ago when I was 18, after a little patchwork, he said, "Well now! That should last you for another thirty-five years—And Maria rejoiced at the good news that she only had one in four, as her previous record had been pretty bad before I and the Lord and the Revolution got ahold of her! So take good care of those teeth God gave you!—They may have to last you all your life!—Eat right, clean right, rinse right and live right!

CARE OF YOUR HEALTH, AND SAVING ON LAUNDRY AND WATER

10. WHICH REMINDS ME, WE HOPE TO GIVE YOU A LITTLE MORE INFORMATION SOON ON HOW TO TAKE BETTER CARE OF THE TEMPLE GOD HAS GIVEN YOU to dwell in and serve Him in on the planet earth, meaning your body! Meanwhile, this winter, please try to keep warm and well so you can serve Him well as long as possible. Remember that this starts with a good nights sleep of at least six to eight hours unbroken slumber in a quiet, not too warm room. If possible, hang your clothing‚ particularly your under clothing, up to air for the night before donning again in the morning, including your socks. This helps them to dry out and freshen and stay sanitary by killing germs and odours—and anything else you may have! Believe it or not, light and air are great purifiers!

11. THIS ALSO CUTS DOWN ON LAUNDRY BILLS, as you'll be able to wear your clothing longer without changing. One of our over-sized Colonies has had a weekly laundry bill of a hundred dollars, which is ridiculous, and we're going to cure it right quick! The way they wash clothes, they need a laundromat! Some of our spoiled young people from the affluent society still think you have to change all your clothes and take a bath everyday!—They've got a shock coming!

12. I ONLY CHANGE MY SOCKS, SHIRTS AND UNDER CLOTHING ONCE A WEEK, AND I CAN WEAR A PAIR OF PANTS FOR A MONTH before they need washing! Besides, if you're normal and your job is not too dirty or too strenuous, and you don't have some peculiar perspiration problem or disease or bugs, YOU SHOULDN'T ORDINARILY HAVE TO TAKE A COMPLETE BATH MORE THAN ONCE A WEEK, and the ancients used to go all Winter without one, as they thought it was dangerous to take a bath in cold weather—and it is! A hot bath opens your pores and removes essential body oils which keep you warm in Winter, and can cause you to catch your death of cold by getting chilled afterward, so the fewer baths you take in Winter, the better, like one a week.

13. THIS IS ALSO PROBABLY WHY SOME COLONIES HAVE SUCH TREMENDOUS HEATING AND WATER BILLS: THEY'RE TAKING TOO MANY BATHS IN TOO MUCH WATER and using too much hot water doing so! You can take a very good bath in only two to three inches of tepid water (barely warm, not hot) in the tub, or in about five minutes of the same in the shower, not more than once a week, stay healthier, catch fewer colds, and save thousands of dollars worth of hot water for God's Kingdom! Try it! It works!

14. WE USED TO ENFORCE THIS RULE IN SOME OF OUR COLONIES, AND IT REALLY SAVES HEALTH AND WEALTH AND A HECK OF A LOT OF TIME that some people spend singing in the shower or dozing in the tub when others are standing in line waiting—so it saves patience and tempers, too!—And watch those laundry bills go down! Some of you gentlemen of the cloth could also learn the simple but useful art of washing your own dirty socks and underwear in a small washbowl of water and hanging them up to dry with your own dear hands!—And you dear ladies are already supposed to be proficient in this fine art of fabric fullering lest your fellows go philandering! So please don't let hand washing become a lost art! Such an art is plain common sense and good business! So brush up on it!

15. WHEN I WAS A SMALL BOY WE USED TO BUILD A WOOD FIRE UNDER A HUGE IRON KETTLE in the yard and haul buckets of water to fill it and "boil" the clothes in it, rubbing out the stubborn stains on a scrub-board—something you probably never even heard of! But then there are probably a lot of other things you've never heard of, such as only being allowed one tea kettle of dubiously hot water for one entire bath only once a week on Saturday night! So, of course, we put as little cold water as possible in the tub so as not to cool off that one tea kettle of water to much, and then we jumped in and out as fast as we could! So why don't you try the same and save!—It may save your life!

16. AS A RESULT, MY POOR DEAR MOTHER ONLY HAD ONE WASH TO DO A WEEK, instead of a mountain every day, as in some of our extravagant colonies! "Mountain men"and "Mountain women"seems to mean a mountain of daily dirty clothes and an entire lake of hot water in some of our daily-dunking deep-sea-diving colonies! Let's stop it now before we bury ourselves under a mountain of bills and drown in the flood!

PREVENTATIVE HEALTH CARE IN COLD WEATHER, AND SAFE HEATING OF HOUSES!

17. AND DON'T FORGET TO PUT ON PLENTY OF CLOTHES when you do get out of that weekly bath, it's going to be such a shock to your system—or you'll soon find yourself getting chilled and down with pneumonia as the ancients did! For the same reason, don't get all hot and sweaty in an over-heated room and then run outside into the snow to cool off before putting on plenty of heavy clothing, coat and hat to keep you plenty warm despite the wintry blast!

18. THAT'S WHAT SENT ME TO THE HOSPITAL WITH A TEMPERATURE OF 106 AND DOUBLE PNEUMONIA THAT NEARLY KILLED ME WHEN I WAS IN THE ARMY!—I ran out into the icy outdoor air to cool off just a few minutes after sweating all evening over a hot sink full of dirty dishes! That really does the trick! Ask George Washington; that's the way he died! Don't stand around in the hot house for an hour with your coat and hat on sweating like a sauna bath while waiting for the other slowpokes to get theirs on! Don't put'em on till the last minute as you walk out the door, or you could soon be clad in a pine box and very cold, six feet under!

19. TRY TO KEEP AT LEAST COMFORTABLY WARM AT ALL TIMES, indoors or out—not too warm and not too cold; either is dangerous and the combination of both is a killer! TRY NOT TO DO YOUR WITNESSING FOR HOURS IN THE COLD, or you may kill both yourself and its object before he's had time to make a decision that could land you both in the grave!

20. EVERY COLD COUNTRY COLONY SHOULD HAVE A WARM PLACE IN WHICH TO WITNESS where you can keep your mind on the Lord and the lost instead of your lungs, larynx, lumbago and freezing limbs! You should either have a coffeehouse of your own or use somebody else's—or your living room or theirs or a school clubroom, military base dayroom or club, or the heated hallways of those giant apartment complexes or housing estates; or hotel or theatre lobbies‚ or bus or train station waiting rooms‚ air terminals, subway tunnels or underground tubes‚ or the buses or trains themselves.In either New York or London and some other big cities of the world, you can ride all day or all night or both for only one small fare just by not getting off, or changing trains in such a way that you don't have to go out the gate! Just be sure to take your lunch!

21. EITHER THAT, OR OBEY "802 SOUTH"! There are plenty of still–sunny climes just waiting for your witness in the warmth! If you don't believe it‚ read it again!-Some places are having their Summer during your Winter! But if you just can't make it, BE SURE YOUR COLONY HOUSE IS WELL WINTERISED AND WARMED with either central heating or vented room heaters WITH PLENTY OF FRESH AIR VENTILATION. You don't want to come in out of the cold only to die in your sleep at the suffocating hands of a silent killer named asphyxiation!—Especially if you use open oil, paraffin‚ gas, kerosene, coal, or even wood stoves or heaters or an open fire-place or grate. These flames not only eat up your oxygen but also give off suffocating carbon dioxide fumes or deadly carbon monoxide gas and other poisonous gases which can kill you in a few minutes in sufficient concentration‚ or make you very sick or very dead in your sleep during prolonged overnight exposure to them in even minor quantities! SO BE SURE THAT STOVE, HEATER, OR FIRE-PLACE HAS AN OUTSIDE VENT, stovepipe, or chimney, or its nice warm heat may kill you cold as well!

22. PLASTIC SHEETING THE WINDOWS, INSULATING, WEATHER-STRIPPING‚ OR CALKING THE CRACKS AND CRANNIES MAY PREVENT HEAT LOSS and economise on fuel, but it may also prevent sufficient ventilation of fresh air, and cost you your life! So watch out! Always KEEP AT LEAST ONE WINDOW DOWNSTAIRS AND ONE UPSTAIRS SLIGHTLY OPEN TO CREATE CIRCULATION of fresh air throughout the house, if it doesn't already have plenty of large cracks under the doors or windows or even in the walls to give adequate ventilation. This is essential to your health and life!

EAT GOOD FOOD IN A WELL-BALANCED DIET!

23. ALSO, EAT PLENTY OF GOOD, WHOLESOME FOOD IN A WELL-BALANCED DIET. It doesn't have to be fancy or expensive in order to be well fed. Consider the sheep in the pasture and the cows in the corn: All they've got is grass and vegetation, a completely vegetarian diet, but fresh, living, raw and uncooked so the vitamins are unkilled and unprocessed with poisons! But you yourself can approximate God's healthy creatures' God-given diet of ample healthful ingredients by making sure each of your meals contains a protein, a starch, or carbohydrate and minerals and vitamins. Proteins can be either a simple, inexpensive meat, fish, eggs, milk, cheese, beans, peanuts, or even peanut butter, or natural whole grain cereals or whole wheat bread. The latter, whole wheat bread and grains, contain all the necessary nutrients, and a glass of milk (powdered or skimmed milk) or some fruits, such as bananas‚ are a whole meal in themselves. The most wholesome starch is potatoes, but you could also use spaghetti, macaroni, rice, noodles‚ white bread, etc. Then you must have some kind of fruit or green or yellow vegetable, cooked as little as possible to make them tender enough to be edible, but no more, or raw, if possible, such as lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, cauliflower, carrots, cabbage, pickles etc.—or a combination of these can be made into a healthful salad for your vegetable, containing all your needed minerals and vitamins. Whole grains are whole food‚ but store in a dry place!

FARMING AND REFUGE COLONIES—DANGERS OF GRAIN STORAGE, MUSHROOMS‚ ANIMAL CARE, PIGS, HOME-CANNING, HORSES!

24. WE'VE HEARD THAT SOME REFUGE COLONIES HAVE BEEN ATTEMPTING TO STORE WHOLE GRAIN CEREALS in plastic bags buried underground, but we certainly wouldn't advise this because you're apt to dig up nothing but rotting garbage when you'll be needing this food in some emergency! Instead‚ whole grain cereals should be stored in a well-ventilated cool dry place, even in the original burlap bags they usually come in‚ such as in your attic or the upper lofts of the barn or a regular grain storage room, preferably as far above ground level as possible to prevent rats, rodents‚ varmints or various other farm animals from getting at them, as they, too know they are a delightful health food. Large metal garbage cans or metal boxes or even glass jars or bottles can be used to protect these grains from both moisture and predators. They should have loose lids, not air tight, and the more light there is in their storage place the more it will discourage the destructive molds and rots which thrive on warm, damp darkness, like many evil doers!

25. WHICH ALSO REMINDS ME, IT WOULD BE FAR BETTER FOR YOU NOT TO EAT ANY MUSHROOMS AT ALL, IF YOU DON'T REALLY KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS, rather than have you accidentally or unwittingly get ahold of even one member of the immense variety of painfully or deadly poisonous saphrodytes which could quickly bring your service for the Lord to a sudden painful and untimely end! Let the pickers beware! It may kill!

26. SPEAKING OF FARMING‚ AGRICULTURE AND ANIMAL HUSBANDRY ARE ACTUALLY EXTREMELY COMPLICATED SCIENCES which it usually takes a lifetime and even several generations, to learn well! So don't think you city jakes can dash off to the country and immediately tell Farmer Brown how to run his business! The reason there are so many jokes about country farmers, cracked by city jakes, is because the city slickers would have to spend a lifetime on the farm to even begin to understand Farmer Brown or his very delicate and intricate scientific work!

27. AFTER SIX YEARS ON THE RANCH, we were only just beginning to understand plants and animals, even a few of God's remarkable creations, and we had to resort constantly to the nearby friendly farmers and old-timers who really knew their stuff, for help and advice. ANIMALS, IN PARTICULAR, NEED A LOT OF TENDER, LOVING CARE, but many of these same animals do not always respond very tenderly nor lovingly to such care, however well-intentioned it may be! A shepherd or herdsman must win the confidence and faith of his sundry charges and establish genuine communication with them before he will ever have much success in soliciting their cooperation. In fact, some of them you will be positively convinced are virtually demon possessed—and you may be right! So it may not only take a lot of know-how, but also a lot of genuine prayer!

28. HORSES, CATTLE, AND PIGS CAN BE PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS and quickly land you either in the hospital or your grave if you don't know the dangers or how to handle them. Shetland ponies are especially cantankerous, and we've had some dangerous spills‚ bucks and kicks from them, as well as painful bites from their very mean teeth! We watched one once make a lightning—like about-face jump and full–gaynor twist which brought him in split second position to kick a full-sized goat half as big as he was twenty feet into the air and landing dead as a door nail before he even knew what hit him‚ because the goat was trying to get into the pony's food! Other cattle and horses can also kick, jump, buck or come to dead stop with unexpected suddenness, and you may take an unexpected flight like the goat did, catapulting you with surprise into Heaven! DON'T FOOL WITH ANIMALS UNLESS YOU KNOW HOW!

29. PIGS ARE ANOTHER PROPOSITION. They can dig their way in or out under almost any known fence, break down the side of the barn or the storage shed to get at the feed, learn to lift the latch of the barn door with their snout to raid the grain, and then when you catch these clever thieves at their dirty work and try to challenge or get them out, the hefty ones can charge you with such speed and ferocity as to knock you for a loop and rip off an arm or a leg with a flash of their razor-like teeth which can crush bones at one chomp!

30. WE'VE WATCHED SOME OF THESE BEASTLY LITTLE SCAVENGERS CRUSH THE BONES OF A DEAD GOAT AND DEVOUR HIS WHOLE CARCASS, bones and all, in nothing flat!—That's what God made them for—to be scavengers‚ God's garbage disposals. But don't let them get ahold of a hand or a finger of yours while they're at it! They can't see very good‚ and it may be purely by mistake, but you could still be minus your digitals! Our boy, Aaron, nearly lost a few of his several times while tending pigs, especially the time he tried to tie a bell around the neck of one of his six–hundred-pound wayward wonders! They've got weight and teeth you can't cope with‚ so don't try it! They make good garbage disposals and are real money makers, but they're filthy as sin, mean as Satan, and think like Hell! So don't raise pigs unless you know how!

31. ANOTHER DANGER ON THE FARM THAT IS FAIRLY COMMON IS OFTEN THE WATER SUPPLY. The old farmer himself may have drunk from that spring, brook‚ or well all of his life and has built up a resistance, like inoculation, to its dangerous germs. But one swig of that delicious, clear, cold elixir of life from the same source may mean near death to you, or, at the least, very painful stomach and bowel cramps and a severe case of the runs until you yourself get used to it—if you live that long! SO IF YOU HAVE ANY DOUBTS ABOUT YOUR WATER, BOIL IT AT LEAST TEN MINUTES BEFORE YOU DRINK IT, OR USE IT in foods that are cooked at least that long before you eat them, or PRAY WITH FAITH!

32. EVEN CHICKENS, RABBITS, DOGS OR CATS CAN BE DANGEROUS! They carry almost every disease known to man and can transmit them to you by means of their own lice, fleas or excrement, who are not particular whom them bite or contaminate! So you see, FARMING CAN REALLY BE A VERY DANGEROUS BUSINESS IF YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO HANDLE IT. IT CAN ALSO BREAK YOU UP IN BUSINESS IF YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT PAY. Most of the small farmers in America have already gone out of business and their small acreages have been gobbled up by big business corporations who farm thousands of amalgamated acres with giant combines and expensive machinery operated scientifically by university graduates with extensive degrees in agriculture, husbandry, etc. The little farmer can't beat their high quality, intensively efficient operation, nor their low cost mass production profits and prices, nor their vast big business processing and marketing cooperative procedures, so the little fellow just sells out and goes to town and gets himself an ordinary simple little job, like most other city slickers, and gives up the highly complicated, intensively scientific, extremely sacrificial, and rigorous hardship life of farm!

33. ANOTHER FARM DANGER THAT CAN BE A KILLER IS HOME CANNING! Unless you know exactly how to can, which is also a very scientific process, you'd better forget it! Because the botulism or ptomaine poisoning of POORLY CANNED OR CONTAMINATED CANNED GOODS CAN KILL YOU IN AGONY IN ABOUT THREE MINUTES FLAT! This is why you should never buy cans that are so severely damaged that the contents may no longer be sterile, as is often evidenced by the puffed ends of a can caused by gas from these germs. So damaged can goods can be dangerous unless you have a lot of faith!

34. SO, TO YOUR SURPRISE, YOU MAY FIND THAT FARMING CAN BE THE MOST DIFFICULT, DANGEROUS, AND COSTLY OCCUPATION THAT YOU EVER TRIED in your whole life—unless you know how!—And even then, it can be costly, difficult and dangerous! So don't attempt it on any extensive scale unless you know what you're doing, or have someone with you who does, or very friendly neighbours who are willing to do yours while neglecting their own!

35. SOME OF THEM MAY EVEN BE TOO HELPFUL, like letting you play with their horses if you'll let them graze on your land: you'll soon find out where the expression came from to "eat like a horse"! HORSES HAVE THE MOST RAVENOUS APPETITE OF ANY ANIMAL ON THE FARM! They don't eat like a pig—they eat more than pigs, and valuable grain, grass and feed that can cost you a fortune! They never seem to know when to quit unless you limit them in their grazing area or ration their food to them‚ and it's not at all unusual for a horse to over eat‚ then over drink, and swell up and die! So horses are a real problem, costly to keep‚ (their usual room and board at an average stable is at least $75 per month!) and also dangerous to manage or ride unless you know how.

36. SO UNLESS YOU HAVE LOTS OF GREEN‚ GRASSY LAND to satisfy this king of beasts' voracious appetite, and know how to handle him, you just haven't got what it takes to keep one‚ and normally can't afford to buy his feed. So ONLY ONE OR TWO TO EACH FARM IS REALLY ALL YOU NEED in case of present or future transportation emergencies.—And, unless he's an outright gift‚ don't take him on loan just to eat up your pasture!—And if you have to buy him‚ get an expert friend to do it, because HORSE TRADING CAN BE THE NEXT MOST CROOKED BUSINESS TO A USED CAR LOT of anything in the world! Don't look a gift horse in the mouth but thoroughly check the chompers of some old nag you're about to buy for evidence of their extensive wear and tear: it's the surest way of telling a horse's age and remaining usefulness—don't take the so-called friendly seller's word for it! And even though he looks beautiful and sounds like a bargain‚ he may turn out to be as mean as the Devil and bite like mad or kick like Hell the minute your back is turned, or throw you through the roof the minute you try to ride him! I've had 'em bite through a heavy leather jacket and several layers of clothes, and carried the tooth marks of one old nag on the back of my neck for several days who always tried to bite us every time we turned our heads, or sneaked a clever little sidekick at us every time we threw a saddle on her!

37. HOWEVER, IF YOU SURVIVE ALL THIS, FARMING CAN BE BEAUTIFUL and its a great life if you don't weaken! It's only the first hundred years that are the hardest. If you live to be nearly a thousand, like Methuselah, you may learn how to handle it! Meanwhile, I suggest you LET THE EXPERTS DO THE JOB, SCROUNGE FOR YOUR EATS, AND JUST USE YOUR FARM FOR A DEFINITE REFUGE IN TIME OF GENUINE EMERGENCY—unless you have one of those great and rare geniuses of all experts, a genuine farmer in your group! Otherwise you'd better limit your farming to the few animals and crops you know how to handle or that your friends and neighbours can show you how to handle in a few easy lessons!—Or you may find yourselves, as we once did, spending all your time trying to learn how to farm for the rest of your life instead of witnessing and winning the lost!

38. I CAN REMEMBER THE DAYS AT DEAR OLD TSC RANCH when it took about 100 inexperienced prospective South Clinic missionaries to take care of 50 milk goats and one garden which netted us about $50 a week, when almost ANY ONE OF US COULD HAVE GONE OUT AND EARNED MORE THAN THAT SINGLE–HANDED, OR PROCURED ENOUGH DONATIONS, FOOD AND GOODS TO FEED THE WHOLE CAMP WHILE WE ALL WITNESSED—and I later proved it in 1970! PTL?

VISITING AND WRITING PARENTS

39. SPEAKING OF HOME, GO HOME FOR CHRISTMAS if you can—just be sure your folks foot the bill! We've always encouraged you to go home for the holidays to witness to your loved ones, improved family relationships and even receive a few Christmas gifts which might be helpful. If you're too far from home and can't go, why not at least send the home folks a Christmas card with your love and a kind word: It could be a blessing to both of you! Love ones means just that: loved ones!

40. IN FACT, IT'S ALWAYS BEEN OUR POLICY TO INSIST THAT YOU WRITE HOME TO YOUR FOLKS REGULARLY—at least a card once a week if possible, and let them know your whereabouts and what you're doing. You might even tell them what you need, or what your Colony needs. Even if they don't like me, they might be willing to help you and your Colony‚ and this could be a great blessing both to you and your folks. Why not try?

BREAKING UP A LARGE COLONY

41. WE DISCOVERED RECENTLY THAT ONE OF OUR HEADQUARTERS COLONIES HAD AGAIN GROWN TO RIDICULOUSLY LARGE PROPORTIONS, with a partying attitude and a country club atmosphere‚ so we're sending lots of them home for Christmas and to various other fields where they belong and are much more needed‚ and trimming this over-sized Colony with the big-Colony spirit down to about one-fifth its former size with the Holy Spirit. NO ONE CAN PROPERLY PASTOR A COLONY OR CHURCH OF TWO OR THREE HUNDRED people—not even your top leaders! Even Jesus restricted His to twelve most of the time, and when His got up to seventy, He sent them on the road two by two! Why don't you try it? He only fed the thousands a couple of times‚ and it took miracles! Don't attempt something that even the Lord didn't try: to try to house, feed‚ clothe‚ heat, transport, manage and pastor a Colony of over a dozen unless you have lots of faith! This one crazy Colony became nothing but problem and problem cases, was getting very little work done, but had lots of time to fuss and fight, almost no time to witness, and so, of course‚ was losing the blessing of God, having lots of trouble, neglecting the sheep and their under-shepherds and friends and sponsors, failing God and others, and going broke!

POLICY ON PROBLEM CASES

42. SO WE'VE STIRRED UP THIS OVER-SIZED NEST AND FLUSHED OUT MOST OF THESE OVER-GROWN BIRDS WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO FLY ON THEIR OWN a long time ago, and have even sent some of their over-indulgent and over-worked mama and papa birds to other fields and smaller Colonies where they're more needed and they can learn again YOU CAN ACCOMPLISH A LOT MORE WITH A LOT LESS!—QUALITY, NOT QUANTITY, IS WHAT WE NEED! We also need more discipline to insure this, and we've begun enforcing this at the top! NO LONGER ARE LEADERS GOING TO GET AWAY WITH THIS, NOR ARE PROBLEM CASES GOING TO BE PROMOTED with a free, all-expense-paid tour and vacation at Headquarters in an attempt to nursemaid them into being good! This kind of pampering, of course‚ makes nearly everybody want to be a problem child! From now on, if they can't make it out there on the field, they're going to be shipped further out on the field! If they still can't make it‚ we're just going to ship them out‚ period! Amen? You'd better read "Die Daily" again! If after being around for a long time, and you still can't pull your own weight or even take care of yourself‚ how are going to take care of others?—Move it back to church!

LIVING AND DYING FOR JESUS!

43. AND FOR YOU WHO WANT DIVISION, WE WILL GLADLY GIVE IT TO YOU—DIVISION FROM US! You can go back to the churches who specialise in this sort of thing: Feuding, over–grown‚ retarded children in fancy nurseries! We have no time or money to waste on you, and no room for you in our rugged army barracks! Please go home to Mama and the preacher! We're sick of you! GOD NEEDS STRONG SOLDIERS WHO WANT TO WIN THE LOST AND SAVE THE WORLD!—HE WANTS WILDLY, WILLING, WORKING WITNESSES DYING DAILY FOR JESUS AND OTHERS!

Copyright (c) 1998 by The Family