Deeper Than State Part 2

 

Deeper Than State Part 2

A Religion of Craft

September 2013 – September 2015

 

 

 

“They have taken crafty counsel against thy people, and consulted against thy hidden ones.” – Psalm 83:3.

 

“For even thy brethren, and the house of thy father, even they have dealt treacherously with thee; yea, they have called a multitude after thee: believe them not, though they speak fair words unto thee.” – Jeremiah 12:6.

 

“They have dealt treacherously against the Lord: for they have begotten strange children: now shall a month devour them with their portions.” – Hosea 5:7.

 

“And through his policy also shall he cause craft to prosper in his hand; and he shall magnify himself in his heart, and by peace shall destroy many: he shall also stand up against the Prince of princes; but he shall be broken without hand.” – Daniel 8:25.

 

 

 

These verses popped out at me, and all of them speak to this situation.  There is another one in Isaiah 44:13 - 16 which connects to Matthew 23:15 concerning the “proselyte” they “made”.  You can almost smell what is coming.

 

We left off on “Deeper Than State”, Part 1 with the timing of the evolving of the blog in revealing the Word of God, with being targeted by the Mormon church or at least certain ranks within it.

 

There are speeches which I have from their website, where their President during general conferences admits that the “Latter Day Saints” will be “the Government of God on earth”. 

 

They also believe that they will “build the temple”, and not “the unbelieving Jews”.

 

In their Doctrine and Covenants (130:12-14 to be exact), they claim that the beginning of the bloodshed will commence in South Carolina prior to the coming of the Son of man.  And this bothered me because we lived in South Carolina at the time (I left in early 2020, my husband still lives there).

 

Rel/LDS-d-c-130

 

These I found on research of their website after my husband came home one day and declared that he was getting baptized into their “church”.

 

 

 

The Proselyte

 

One day as we were delivering plastic barrels to the Cathey’s, we were standing outside, discussing current events in the news, I was invited by Nancy to go to their “store room”.  She wanted to show me how they did their own canning for storing and stockpiling non-perishables.  There are hundreds of these around the country as I was to learn.  I accepted and we decided on a day two weeks down the road.

 

The barrels they were buying from us were 55 gallon, blue plastic barrels.  They were buying them for water storage they said.  So we scrubbed them out before delivering them (Most customers used them for animal feed storage).  Over the course of two years they probably purchased a total of close to 200 of them.  They were buying them not just for themselves, they said, but for friends and fellow church members.  They would buy 20 at a time: that was the most we could fit into the pickup truck at the time.  Sometimes they would buy less, but never so little that it wasn’t worth the gas to deliver them.

 

During one of these drop offs, Mrs. Cathey suggested we attend one of their services so we could get a feel for what it was about.  She described the morning service (it was in three parts) as “worship”, then “study” (Sunday school) then the “Testimonies” where someone was chosen from the congregation (and they could offer) to present their testimony.

 

When my husband suggested that we’d be honored for the invite, Mrs. Cathey blurted out “Fantastic, I can’t wait for you to join our church!”  At the time, I thought that was a bit impulsive and presumptive that we would even want to join.  But we did go to the service.  This was in early August of 2013.

 

We went to the service.  It was long – three hours out of every Sunday.  What they “taught” during the “school” part was basic Mormon history out of the Book of Mormon.  I understood none of it.  It was foreign to me and had little to do with the Bible.  Nothing connected.

 

My husband and I spoke about this, and he had the opposite experience.  He was enamored with the service, loved the testimonials and thought the teaching hour was educational and “spiritual”.  The men are taught separate from the women, so perhaps he got something different.  Women are not to be leaders of any sort in the Mormon church, but are regarded as “support”.  They can offer counsel, but it is vocalized through the husband.  What the husband decides is law.

 

I know many other churches also teach this probably to a fault: disregarding the stories of Esther, and Deborah, the Marys, Priscilla and Anna et. al.  But for the most part I agree that is the “natural” plan of God: They are equal but separate with different purposes in the partnership.  They must have thought me evil when I balked at joining the church and my husband was all for it.  I was not happy at all.

 

So things moved forward for him, and I began digging in my heels.  How could he be so deceived?  Where in the Bible does it say that ANY of Israel was allowed to leave the Babylonian captivity and go start their own religion?  Then my husband suggested we go to a council session (where their religion is explained on a one to one basis).  I agreed to go.  Why not?  I had nothing to fear.

 

At this period of time, the last quarter of 2013, I was getting deep into what the WORD actually is, in the Bible on the “MichaelsGuardian” blog.  God was showing me in scripture what had happened to me, and how it related to “The Word”.  What that had to do with the “Name above all names” that Jesus was given by God; and what act or offering that Name represented.  I was sharing all of it on my blog as it came to me.  That is when all of this began to surround us in earnest.  So when we attended this “council” session, I brought my Bible.  They came with their Bible and Book of Mormon.

 

The couple who was to be “our” home teacher was an older couple named “Philsby”.  They were in their sixties to early seventies.  He was very tall and walked with a special walker, having to endure an affliction of the degeneration of connective tissue in the hips.  I rather liked him.  He was mild mannered and soft spoken.  His wife was a little more forthcoming and on the abrupt side.  It was her I conversed with most.

 

When I asked questions, it was more along the lines of “where does the Book of Mormon “complete” the Bible?

 

In her answers, I was looking up passages in the King James Bible.  When she got to their story where the “Israelites” were told to come to the American continent to escape Nebuchadnezzar, I went to the passages in 2 Kings 24:20 into 2 Kings 25 concerning the rebellion of Zedekiah (Mattaniah).  I read where the Lord had told Jeremiah that their bondage would be for seventy years and that they were to submit (it was their protection from total destruction as expressed in Jeremiah 40). 

 

Mrs. Philsby searched in the Book of Mormon for a connecting verse to explain it and had trouble.  I said to her “Can you show me in the BIBLE where the Lord contradicts himself on this?”  She looked at me and said “No.”  She then tried to explain that the Bible is “not the complete Word of God”.  That is when my ears closed.

 

My husband attended the next two services by himself.  I prayed.  I also conversed with the Gagnon’s online (this is on the computer that is in storage so that part of it is going to have to wait).  I learned that Gagnon’s husband was not a Mormon until a few years after he married his wife.  In our online discussion, he told me “you’re coming from the opposite end of this” (religion/doctrine/their beliefs).  I responded that “no” I’m coming from the scripture that’s in the Bible.”  If that was the “wrong end” then we are probably done talking.

 

I had confronted him with the explanation on the LDS.org website that they believed that Jesus was conceived carnally and not by the Holy Ghost; and that “God” started out as a man like us, and “ascended” and now lived on “Kolob”, a planet represented by the planet Saturn.  At first he said he had to go look at it, then he admitted, yes, God lived on Kolob (Kullaba was once a suzerain of the Egyptian Empire, now the “Anu district” in what was Uruk, now Iraq, as I learned a couple of years later).

 

The conversation didn’t go anywhere other than we disagreed, and I was angry, because this is what they were feeding my husband.  Another part of the discussion was that those who were “leaders” or “elect” would get their own planet to govern but I was done with the conversation.  God gave man six thousand years to “manage” the planet and man can’t even manage earth; and they believe God is going to give them 144 thousand other ones to screw up?

 

 

 

Baptized In the Midst of Beasts

 

The day Ed came home and told me he was getting “baptized”, and that Gagon’s husband was going to drive down from Virginia to do it personally, I flipped.  “You’re ALREADY baptized”.  Ed responded “I’m just getting baptized into the church”.  I asked “So getting baptized in Christ isn’t good enough for them?”

 

We fought.  I was livid.  I didn’t know who he was anymore.  It’s like everything I THOUGHT he believed was just brainwashed out of his head.  I told him he is going alone. 

 

Ed was “baptized” inside a “temple”, in a pool held up by twelve concrete oxen.    The very same which David said in Psalm 106:19-20 that changed Israel’s “glory into the similitude of an ox that eateth grass”.  He was baptized on “Saturn’s Day” (sixth day of the week, I don’t care what Gregory did to the calendar), on September (sixth Hebrew month), the 6^th at 6pm.  There was my “six miles” dream.

 

We had a bad thunderstorm that night.  I went outside before the rain came and watched it role in about 8-9pm.  I stood on the front stoop looking up into the sky.  Lightning was flashing all around me.  I felt exactly like that sky, and I wanted God to know it.  I said without speaking out loud, “you told me, but you didn’t STOP it.  Why?”

 

I went back inside.  I was angry with God and I was angry with my husband. 

 

Then the “gifts came” – The Gagnon’s sent him the “books” (Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, some other book which I thought might have been the book of Abraham).  A woman living with them by the name of “Randi” sent him a very delicate lap quilt with a verse on it.  There were some other things like a book cover.  It was like he went through his first Bar mitzva at the age of fifty-two years old, or a “confirmation”.

 

Before we moved my mother into the house at the end of that month, Ed’s mom and sister came down to visit.  They day they left I exhibited signs of a flu.  I knew it was going to be a bad one.

 

That Tuesday, missionaries came over with one of the women I had met at the service we attended.  Her name was “Hess”.  She had young lady missionaries with her.  As she got out of the car with them, I came out the front door to warn them off because I was sick as a dog.

 

“I thought you were coming on Thursday?” I said between coughing fits.  She replied “No, it was today”.  I sent them away and told her I had a really bad flu and I didn’t want to give it to anybody.  She looked angry, but she had to hear it in my voice.  It was raspy and I was coughing in between words.  I was also running a fever, so I was definitely contagious.  I was the only one in the house that caught this flu.  And it took me weeks to get rid of the cough.

 

We moved my mother in at the end of the month.  I updated her on what had transpired between the time we hauled her horses out here to when we moved her.  She gave me “the look”.  She said “Mormons?” Then “Oh boy . . .”

 

As Ed and I occupied ourselves putting in fence posting and securing hooks for the electric fencing, the battles ensued.  We fought with my mother over things she wanted us to do, we fought over who was going to go over to our friend’s house to clean out the horses pasture three times a week, and we fought with the neighbors over the horses coming over. 

 

One day, Ed came over and said our next door neighbor had filed a complaint with the town council over bringing the horses here.  I said to him, “They have family across the road from them that has five horses!  This is only two!” 

 

“I know” he said.  He had called someone he knew from political circles that was on the town council who just happened to be her ex-husband.  He told my husband “You’re fine, as long as you can get your neighbor on the other side to agree to the use of part of his property don’t worry, she’s just trying to start trouble”.

 

I went over to where my husband was talking to her, and she was going back and forth about how her “husband” was on the town council.  Ed laughed and said “you mean your ex-husband” and I interjected about the horses across the street.  I reminded her that we bought this property and we could put on it what we want.  Then my husband said “I talked to your ex and he said as long as we have two and a half acres for the two horses we were fine.  But if you insist on causing problems we’ll just bring hogs in, instead. There is no zoning requirements on them!”

 

She responded “Hogs!  HOGS?!!”  I almost bent over laughing but I was too angry.  It made no sense, how are horses okay for her brother in law but not for us?  I went into the house and told my mother the flack we were getting over bring her horses over here.  Then I looked up at the ceiling over the breezeway between the kitchen and the living area and said to the Lord in a loud and not-too-reverent tone of voice, “What are you DOING?!”

 

I immediately felt it . . . abrasion.  I didn’t get an answer right away, but I felt immediately contrite in how I worded my exasperation.

 

That night as I lay in bed, still wired, I was finally starting to fall asleep.  What I heard on my way there made my eyes fly wide open.  The Lord answered my question with a tone that matched mine earlier in the day:

 

“I am pre-PARING YOU!”

 

 

 

February 9, 2014

 

It is not really that cold in February in South Carolina.  It was a Sunday, and my husband had already left for “services”.  He was now attending the ward in Lancaster, South Carolina instead of the ward in Camden.

 

I got up and my mother was sitting on the love seat we had in the living room.  She was reading something and drinking her coffee.  I made myself a cup of tea and sat down in front of my computer, which was in a little alcove off the living room that I used for an office area. 

 

As I booted up my computer, my mother asked me “did you know your husband was giving a speech at church today?”  I replied “no” without much interest.  Then she replied, “Did he tell you he asked me to type it up for him?”

 

I looked at her, over my glasses, “Did you?”  I already knew that she did, because how else would she know?  She responded, “Yes.  I sent it to your email.   I think you should read it.”

 

Oh great, I thought.  What dreadful, sinister surprise am I supposed to find in his Mormon-fed ego trip inspired “speech”.  I just kind of rolled my eyes.  When the computer boot up, I checked my blog stats (I did that first thing every morning) and then signed into my email.  (I no longer have this email, it too was shut down with the account my blog was on.)

 

I found her email, and I opened it, and I read it.

 

I read the first paragraph of the speech.  I could not tell you what it said.  I have a copy of that too on the old computer which is in storage.  The second paragraph however, referenced a speech given back in 1975 by then President N. Eldon Tanner on October of 1975.  This is the part quoted which my husband was to read:

 

“Our great responsibility might be more emphatically stated or clearly understood if we realize that there is only one member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints for approximately every 999 people in the world and only one member of this church per every 333 Christians, approximately . . .”

 

My jaw dropped.  “Mom”, I said, “this is exactly what the old man in that dream said!  That the title of the book he was giving my husband was the “999^th verse of the Bible, when giving my husband the witchcraft books!”

 

Mom was shaking her head, “I know.  That’s why I sent it to you”.

 

I combed the “LDS.org” website looking for this speech, because I honestly thought I was being played.  It took a while, but I found it.  I wanted to see if indeed it did exist, and you can still search it on their website.

 

I took screen shots, I copied the link, and I went in search of other text in relation to that since Doctrine and Covenants was referenced in the original speech.  As I combed through that, I found the “prophecy” for South Carolina “prior to the coming of the Son of man”.

 

 

My mother said, “something else happened this morning”. 

 

Thoughts: (“oh . . . what now”)

 

She then proceeded to tell me (and I don’t have all of this down word for word, because this was nine years ago), That Ed went out on the deck to feed the feral cats that hang around (and keep the mice down) and he came back in white as a ghost and shaken.

 

“Something weird is going on”, she said that he said, “Something weird”.

 

He then proceeded to tell my mother “I was leaning over putting food in the cat bowls and this shadow went over me.  I looked up and this huge vulture flew four feet above my head across the back yard and roosted on the light pole on our neighbors property.  He was CLOSE”.

 

My mother continued “then he told me, ‘then I bent over to get their water bowls filled and another shadow flew over me.  I could hear it’s wings, again only a few feet above my head!’ And he said just as he looked up at the bird flying to a tree close by, three more flew over his head.  He said he looked over up on the roof and there were nine or ten big vultures sitting on the roof.  When he looked over at them they all flew off one by one to the tops of trees surrounding the back yard.”

 

I looked at her.  I’m sure my eyes were as wide open as my jaw.  I asked “Are they still there?”

 

Mom replied “I don’t think so.  But he came back in and his face was ashen.  When he left, the vultures were across the road but only five of them.  They were sitting in that dead tree across the road.”

 

The window was right by my desk.  I looked out and saw there were three in the dead tree.  It was about 50 feet or so from our mailbox.  My mother said to me, “when he left, two of them followed his truck, the other three circled then went behind them”.

 

Between 2014 into late 2015, we were besieged by these things.  We owned a slip of land that we had purchased that had the original homestead so we would have a full five acres.  The house was dilapidated but the roof was relatively new.  Between the roof of that house, the surrounding trees, and the bed of his pickup truck we sometimes had upwards of forty of these things, like sentinels, on guard on our property.

 

Sometimes I would be mowing on the riding mower and they would be watching from the dead tree.  Sometimes Charlie or Sugar (mom’s Morgans) would stand in the front part of the pasture and look at me as if they wanted me to do something.  One particular day, it was Charlie, just standing out there, looking at me as if I forgot to feed him.  I stopped the mower and said, “What do you want?”  He stood there then backed up as if he wanted me to follow him.

 

I walked the outside fencing, as I followed him.  As I cleared around the house, I saw Charlie stop.  Then I saw what he was looking at.  A huge vulture standing probably a good three feet tall or more, was right on the edge of the grove of trees in their pasture.  Ed was coming around the opposite side of the house with a hose.  I guess he had seen it too.  But Charlie acted out of sheer impatience.  He had had enough.

 

Charlie let out this guttural whinny, charged the bird then spun around to kick at it with his hind legs.  I didn’t think the bird was going to move, it just backed up, but when those hooves started flying, the bird took off.  We were close enough to it to see the sheer effort that vulture put in taking off from the ground with all that weight he had to lift.

 

My husband was livid when I told him about it the numbers in his speech: not because there were numbers in it that matched the dream, but because my mother had emailed a copy of his speech to me as if it were some big secret.  He said to her “that’s the last time I will confide in you about anything!”

 

Confide . . . confidence . . . secrets = division.

 

 

 

2014 – 2015

Sent From The North

 

Sometime in the summer of 2014, Ed told me that the church ward president had assigned a family to him to “mentor”.  It was a young, divorced mother and her son, and the boy’s father had died, so they moved south “from your neck of the woods”, he said.

 

“My neck of the woods?” I asked.  My husband replied, “Yeah, they lived in Ulster or Rome and Sayre”.  (I thought to myself, pick one, will you?)  Ulster, Rome and Sayre are all little mountain towns in Pennsylvania in northern Bradford County where my boys grew up.  Their last name was “Dodge” and I didn’t remember any family by the name of “Dodge”, although my boys might have.  I asked them.  My youngest son said he had heard of the name, but didn’t know any of them.  Living in those towns they would have attended Sayre schools, not Towanda, where my boys went.

 

Ed said they were destitute.  The mother was probably in her early to mid thirties he said, and she had a fourteen year old son named Charlie.  He said the church had “assigned them” to him.

 

Ed spend the next few months practically glued to their side.  He was over their house every day, driving them back and forth between Kershaw and Camden to the “Habitat for Humanity” store to get them dishes, clothes, bed clothes, a couch, a microwave, a cooler for their food because they had no refrigerator . . . they had nothing.  Ed was also fixing up their house so that it would be “livable”.  “You should see where they live”, Ed said.

 

They lived in a dilapidated two bedroom house in Mill Village.  This was on the north end of town, in a group of houses that were built when the Springs Factory came to town.  The cloth factory had since closed down and it was turned into a factory that processed corn to be turned into ethanol.  The houses were slums, some were abandoned.  And the house they lived in would never have passed inspection for a normal rental.

 

What was odd about this arrangement was that Chris and Charlie were not the only family of theirs that moved down from the top tier of Pennsylvania: Chris’ mother and stepfather, with one of their grandsons lived in another house a block over on the corner, and another family member who was once married to Charlie’s dad lived in another house a block or two down from the mother.  How they found three rentals within a two block radius was remarkable enough.  The person who owned most of those houses was a man who owned the hardware store in town.

 

I was also to learn that Charlie’s dad was married to his mother’s sister before he died.  I remember asking Ed when he told me this, “Who ARE these people?”

 

He invited them over for dinner one night, and this time Ed asked me before just deciding.  I said sure.  I wanted to meet them.  I believe I made Spaghetti that first night (my sauce is to die for), and had a salad ready.

 

Ed went to pick them up (they had no car either . . . how did they get down here from Pennsylvania?) and when they arrived, I guess I was not prepared.  They were very polite but something was off.

 

Her son looked much older than fourteen years old.  He looked 21.  His build was more mature.  He looked filled out and tall.  Chris, his mother, had pink hair and very bad teeth.  I didn’t know how she was not in pain.  She was very “unkept”.

 

Nobody in the family worked.  They were all on some kind of disability (I was told).  I wondered how three separate families all related to each other in some way, could move all the way down from Bradford County Pennsylvania to Lancaster County, South Carolina with no money, and how they could afford very expensive IPhones.

 

This was during the time of the “Obama phones”, when the Obama administration was giving away free cell phones with basic service:  These were not THOSE phones but expensive IPhones with unlimited service.

 

The first time Ed brought them over to the house (for dinner) they were very polite.  My mother’s reaction to the girl’s hair color was amusing.  This wasn’t as common place in 2014 as it is today.  I thought “these people are Mormon?”

 

The girl wore clothes that were way too small for her and you could see half of her breasts.  She was a large girl and they hung down.  She had some physical health issues but that was all that Ed shared.  She was on disability for her mental issues though.

 

During conversation she had shared that she had been sexually abused as a young girl.  Her lack of expression while telling us this almost sounded as if she were reciting something, and not something she actually experienced.  It was an odd and awkward dinner.  What she did make sure she did though, was sing the praises of the Mormon church and how they “saved her”, and what a great “community” it was.  Mom and I exchanged glances all through dinner.

 

I listened but not without thoughts of my own, like: If you have been with the Mormon church for seven years, why do you still dress the way you do?  And: “Seven years with your church they haven’t helped you do anything but move down south to give me a sales pitch?”

 

The more she said, the more wary I became.  When Ed returned from taking them home, I asked him: “Well how did they do?”

 

He replied “Okay I think.  They loved your spaghetti!”

 

“I’m talking about with their task.  Because it sure sounded to me like she was trying to recruit me”, I replied back.  Ed rolled his eyes and said “whatever!”

 

Through the winter months and into 2015, this went on.  Ed went to work, Ed came home or sometimes went straight to the Dodge house.  He did everything from fix plumbing to mowing their grass, weeding, helping them set up a garden, took them to doctor appointments or shopping.  Meanwhile, things that needed fixing around our house went neglected.  I took up mowing the lawn which I actually enjoyed.

 

He invited them over often.  He asked me to befriend Chris because he thought I would have a calming effect on her.  At times when he was working, I was asked to take her to “Habitat for Humanity”.  There were times I was asked to help her with groceries or shampoo or whatever it was they needed.  When mom came with me, we would converse while Chris was furiously texting on her phone in the back seat.  I always wondered what she was writing/reporting and to whom.

 

One afternoon, when Ed was home both Charlie and Chris were over visiting.  I believe they were going to have dinner.  Charlie said something about having to charge his phone.  We had plenty of outlets from which he could do it, including the adapter by Ed’s recliner, but he came around the couch to plug it into my computer while I was on it.  I was in immediate response:

 

“Don’t plug anything in here. Nobody plugs anything into this computer”.  Charlie immediately pulled it back and went back around the couch as if he had just been caught doing something.  But it was Ed’s reaction that really shocked me: he looked at me with unabridged, full-on disgust, like I was the biggest piece of dirt on the face of the earth.

 

I said to him looking him directly in the eye, “You have a computer, why didn’t you offer yours?”  All he did was continue to try to admonish me with that look on his face, and at that point, I didn’t care what he thought.  It just seemed to confirm my suspicion at the time. 

 

There were times when I went grocery shopping only to return home to my mother reporting that Ed was rifling through my desk drawers, rather agitated, as if he couldn’t find something he was looking for.

 

One time, I said “This?” I asked her as I reached into my purse to pull out my two thumb drives.  “Maybe” she replied.

 

There were several times that this happened.  It was a good thing I didn’t ever leave them at home.  In 2015 I was unabashed in sharing my experiences with this church and those in my husband’s life on the blog on a daily basis.  I never used full names, but a good description of incidents left no doubt to the concerned who I was talking about.

 

 

 

Autumn Leaves

 

When September came, it was still hot.  Days were usually in the 90’s sometimes ending in evening thunderstorms.

 

Ed was still taking Charlie and Chris to church on Sunday’s so I didn’t see him most of the day.  There were also occasions when I would go with Ed to one of his Mormon friend’s houses to either drop off or pick up something for another church member.  We attended a Luncheon at one of the Lancaster Ward member’s houses.  I knew her.  She had a nice family and a daughter that was going back to college.

 

There was another lady at this luncheon that was interested in my mother’s paintings.  She did end up buying one of them.  Her last name sounded like “Cannabis” and I said that much to her, to which she laughed.  We did converse online occasionally.  She was a lot less pushy about the church and didn’t treat me like a pariah.

 

In April of that year, I got two distinctive messages:  Leave.  There was no peace in that house and I was praying constantly for God to “fix it”.  We got our taxes back and I took half of it and drove north.  I didn’t know where I was going, but I was going.  I felt trapped: Mom didn’t want to leave because of her horses, and I felt I was being squeezed between what mom wanted and what my husband was doing regardless of what it was doing to our marriage.  He was completely twisted from “non-institution spirituality” to “Nobody gets glory except through Mormonism”.

 

I drove north, through the night.  I stopped at a rest stop somewhere in Virginia to try to get some sleep in the back seat of the car.  I cried.  Where was I going?  God, where ARE you?

 

I drove to one of my son’s houses in Maryland.  I didn’t even know how to begin telling him what was going on.  Ed took care of that for me.  He called my brother and he called my older son, telling them I took almost all of the money out of our account (which was a lie, I only took half of the deposit from the tax return).  My younger son called my older son while I was there.  He was coming over, and my ex was with him.

 

When my younger son arrived, I set him straight on everything he was told.  No, I didn’t clean out the account.  No, I didn’t go nuts.  And I told him everything that was going on, including the “family” he adopted, by order of the church.  My younger son took me around the corner from my oldest son’s house while he went over to talk to his dad.  I told my ex “you’re getting grey” . . . to which he responded, “So are you” which made me laugh.

 

My youngest son, after hearing my explanation said something to me that day and I will never forget it: he never talks like that and the wording was weird.  He even interrupted me and said “Hold on, I have to say this to you”, then he continued when I went silent.

 

He said, “I know you are going through this and I know you believe . . . but the son in me is telling you to go home”.

 

He said “the SON in me” . . . And so I did. 

 

It took me a year to understand why I got two contradictory messages.  And what God told me wasn’t a lie and he didn’t change his mind.  It was a test.  Was I willing to leave everything to follow him? 

 

 

 

Returning to Oppression

 

One of the most upsetting things about all this was the subversion that went on.  A lot of these exchanges was on the old computer because Ed bought me a “new” one in April of 2015 after I “ran away” . . . the first time.  A “peace offering”.  Only later did I learn that he had taken me off the main bank account.  I could not call for balances, I could not take cash out unless he gave me the ATM card.  I thought to myself fine.  He can pay the bills, he can go grocery shopping.  I’m done.

 

We had passwords for each other’s Facebook pages.  I had received notification on a posting from one of the Gagnons but it was to my husband’s page.  When I hit the link there was a generic post about the church on his newsfeed, and comments under it by Randi, and a couple of others.  It was Randi’s comment that made me bristle.  I went to leave her a private comment but thought better of it.  I instead went into Ed’s private messages where I was gut-punched.

 

Both the Gagnon’s and Randi (the woman living with them and their 7 children) were conversing with my husband . . . about me.  What they were doing was “offering” suggestions as to what was “wrong with me”:

 

“she might have some schizophrenia . . .” and “You know the church offers counseling for free to church members . . .” and . . . “It sounds like she’s attacking you . . .”; “the devil causes division” etc, on and on.  They were offering books, and websites for him to look into for “symptoms”.  At one point Ed had offered that “she was upset because a friend canceled an activity for tonight” and the woman named Randi had responded “neener neener”.  I took a screen shot and shared it on “Sodom and Egypt”.

 

My husband had responded to that “neener?”  And the woman sent “sorry”.

 

When this conversation took place, I was fifty years old.  My husband was fifty-two.  These three people were in their forties perhaps close to fifty.  These people were in my husband’s ear about putting me on the defensive concerning my mental stability.  I didn’t cry, I didn’t even get angry at this point.  That came later.  All I did was change my password in FB, shut down my computer and go into my room to pray.

 

During my prayer, this was what God put into my mind:

 

“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.  For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.” – Matthew 10:34.

 

And God sent me to this one also:

 

“For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” – Hebrews 4:12.

 

When I awoke the next day, I sent the screenshot I had taken of one of the parts of the conversation and sent it to my husband’s email.  I sent him a private message with the same, on Facebook.  And I sent those verses as an announcement. 

 

He was going to have to make a choice, or I was going to.

 

During that summer, Ed spent more measured time at home and only weekends at the Dodge’s house.  Some Friday’s we did our pizza night at Lugoff House of Pizza.  He was still attending the church, but I think something happened during the course of them prepping him for the “Endowment Ceremony”.  It deposited a seed of doubt in him about the direction he was going, because he remembered a conversation we had about this.

 

Ed attended and received the “blessing” and he let me read it.  He offered it to me to read it.  I wondered why when everything else he was doing was a secret.

 

I did some research on the “Endowment Ceremony” and shared it with him.  Ed showed me the undergarments that he had to buy for this.  But he never attended it to my knowledge.

 

About a month before he was supposed to go through with this, he was in preparation for it.  He was having trouble remembering some of the responses and this wasn’t like him.  It was like there was a disconnect and I thought to myself, “maybe my prayers are being answered”. 

 

Then one Sunday he returned from church.  His home teacher was helping him prepare for this ceremony.  One of the other men who was talking out in the parking lot with him about it and Ed shared the conversation with me.

 

Ed stated that the man (I can’t recall his name but he was an older gentleman) was responding to questions that Ed was asking him.  Ed told me:

 

“He told me that the ceremony was almost like what you go through for induction in to the Masonic Order, but different; and I told him I don’t want ANYTHING to do with the Masons!  He got kind of nervous and ended the conversation saying he had to get home.  I don’t think he was supposed to tell me that”.

 

To my knowledge, Ed never did proceed with the Endowment Ceremony.  And after the research I had done about it, I thought it was kind of abrupt that they would want to rush him into this so soon into his becoming a Mormon.

 

Christina and Charlie were still dependent on him and he was still doing his “duty” there, but something went out of him concerning his “zeal” for doing for them.  He did bring Charlie over to help work in the garden and was paying him or would buy him things or take them out to breakfast.

 

Something else happened toward the end of the summer of 2015.   And this was stranger than the vultures who were still hanging around, but in less and less numbers.