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In Reply to: A 3-Part series of the so-called Christian Digest, I think posted by locke on October 04, 2005 at 20:14:17:
Now you've really piqued my interest. That must have come out after I left. I'll keep an eye out for that. One's bound to show up somewhere sooner or later.
I like what you said in your other post about us writing history here, and of course that goes for any site or person who is documenting these things in one form or another. With that in mind, here's a little tidbit, for the record, about Paul Theophilous.
At the end of 1973 I was in the Burlington, Washington camp as it began the final stages of closing down all together. I had just turned 18, having joined a year and a half earlier as a 16 year old. By the time I reached Burlington I was pretty much indoctrinated. Even though I wanted to stay in North America and weather the end-time storms I was told were coming (just the kind of gung-ho fighting attitude one might expect from a new army recruit), the leadership had other ideas for me. Soon I would be tagging along with Amos O'Test and his growing brood as we marched through the Seattle airport headed to Hawaii singing The Message of Jeremiah for television cameras.
Anyway, a month or two prior to that, I was bunking in the same cabin as Paul and a few other guys. This was just before he got married to Terry, a wedding I was witness to there in Burlington. One evening I came back to the cabin and climbed the ladder into the upper loft. There sitting trance-like was Paul and another guy whose name escapes me (he was blonde, from California, and had an amazing memorizing method he had learned in university that everyone began to imitate). This guy was asking questions and Paul was answering, but it was like he was "speaking in the spirit" or receiving prophecies or something. When this guy saw me he motioned me to come up and start taking notes. So I began scribbling as fast as I could, thinking that these guys, who were both favoured by the leaders, were getting something special from God.
Apparently they told the leaders because later I was instructed to bring my notes to one of the secretaries to type out. I can't remember now any details about my notes except for the word "matrix". I had never heard the word before; I dropped out of grade 11 to join TF and it just wasn't in my vocabulary. Paul, on the otherhand, would have been very familiar with that word, and all of its various meanings can easily be used metaphorically, perfect for spiritual mumbo jumbo. But for an easily impressionable, under-educated teen that word had a certain magical appeal.
Those leaders and their favoured sons were the kinds of adults I had now become associated with.
