[Lisbon]

I've been in the recovery for 41 years. Came in during the Max, Day Star era. I "invested" $1250 in the DS and tennis rackets with the full expectations of losing it all. Some young brothers said we are going to fleece Egypt and of course it was us who got fleeced. I never have had a lot of money but the loss was not that big of a deal to me. The secrecy was. There was too close to nothing said when DS went belly up. BP visited me in person and told me the sad news. He was concerned that the others might have a conscience problem and I wondered why. Well a little later I got a receipt signed by WL thanking me for my gift of $1000 to Stream Publishers. I had not ever given them anything so just figured he was giving me an out for my income tax. Nothing else was said. I kept the receipt for a momento to this day.

I remember very distinctly thinking in those first years even though I experienced the so called honeymoon that if both BP and WL were imprisoned for a couple of months and released, we would never hear of it. Just a fanciful thought. Not unhappy. The secrecy thing has always been a hang up and it never changed. I did not really know anything about PL untill about ten years ago and did not know any details until I started reading this forum. I'm quite sure the normal saint in Dallas knows nothing of the Anaheim mess and if anything was said they would say it was just lies and loose unGodly talk. Recently I was sort of baited to ask a simple question of 'our faith' and the two just smiled and we parted.

I began having real problems with WL during the Psalms videos. I sat beside Raul Bajandas and when WL started hatcheting psalm after psalm we just roared with laughter. There I was a 50 yr old man raised in a Christian and even heard WL quote all scripture is God breathed and here WL is hatcheting the Word right and left! And then not too much later I was talking with an elder and he said that the feeling now was that there should be just one interpretation of the Bible. Pope? Not long after I was listening to RK and he was very unhappy that someone had accused them of being popish. That was hard to believe. I met with RK for around three years and he seemed to be a very sober and of course smart person so I could not understand why he could be unhahppy with the characterization pope. What else would we think.

I must close but I wish to answer a new one I read a month or so ago questioning about the street car judgement if yo left the ministry. The first training I attended in the Anaheim convention center on Romans, JI told that story of getting run over by a trolley. It didn't scare me too much for I had heard the story 25 years earlier. My dad used to say those stories came out of Noah's ark. I never heard the story again. I have heard the story of leprosy though many times thru the years.

I do appreciate your articulate posters and I am hoping they are all right. There are real problems in the LC and it would seem they would all prefer to put head in sand.

Lisbon