WHAT IN THE NAME OF GOD HAVE WE DONE IN THE NAME OF GOD

 

Shortly before my 19^th birthday in the autumn of 1959 I was working and living on North Delaware Street in Indianapolis, an area of stately old mansions which had seen slightly better days.  This was a short sojourn of about six weeks before I went into the Army.  The weather was a beautiful warm pre Indian summer that September.  Across the alley to the North, stood the old Jewish Temple which had been converted into a thriving Fundamentalist Church.  The building was classically beautiful, constructed of pure white Indiana limestone with an abundance of colored art glass.  The place was very active with many programs and always seemed to have a full house for every sermon.  There was an air of success permeating the entire operation when you could hear the preacher coming loud through the open windows.  It was almost enough to make me curious enough to enter and sit down.  But having an inherent suspicion of churches and clergymen in general, stemming partially from my contact with them already while working in a Funeral Home, I stayed on my side of the alley.  There was a red flag which I didn’t connect until years later, but both he and his wife drove brand new black Cadillac sedans.  That was the day when a Cadillac still meant something, and yes, I had mine in another decade.

I saw her, his wife, one day walking----waddling--- really down the alley.  She did not look like she did when she was portrayed in the documentaries made years later.  She was short and stout bordering on fat.  She had a beehive hairdo which every woman under 87 had that year.  Even with my inexperience with woman’s hair and the distance from her I knew it was dyed black.  I had never seen a preacher’s wife who dyed her hair but way beyond that there was an air of absolute evil over and around her.  That is the only way I can describe it.

I went into the army and took my basic training.  I returned in the spring of

1960.  I drove up Delaware Street and the whole place was gone!!  It was like empty.  I don’t remember if the sign was still there or not but otherwise the whole place looked as if it had been raptured.  No explanation.

It was not until, November 18 1978, 34 years ago, when I had occasion to thank God for keeping me out of his church.  When it hit the headlines and the National news big time; stories of a murdered congressman and 918 people dead after drinking Kool Aid laced with cyanide that the name Peoples Temple and Jim Jones clicked into place for me.

THE SHADOW SAYS; THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER HISTORY ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT!