I considered myself a good Christian and a good Catholic in my earlier days. When I was attending Catholic grammar school, I went to Mass almost every day. I even thought about becoming a priest as a way of pleasing God. But I never did anything too seriously to go in that direction. But I was proud to be a Catholic. I considered the Catholic Church to be the one true church founded by Jesus Christ. In Catholic grammar school, we were told by our nun/teacher that many people outside the church wish to be Catholic, but they are timid and are just waiting for someone to asked them. She told a story of a young woman who hung around her Catholic friends. One day, one of them asked her, "Would you like to be a Catholic?" The woman responded, "Ooh, you don’t know how long I waited for someone to ask me." So, our nun/teacher told us with a little smile on her face, "If you know some non-Catholics, ask them, ‘Would you like to be a Catholic?’"I tried to talk my mother into becoming a Catholic. She would always say, "I was born a Protestant, and I will die a Protestant." I asked my best friend, Timothy, who was a Lutheran, if he would become a Catholic. He said he would give his balls before he became a Catholic. I was stunned. How could God let that happen when I was trying to help Him?

I wasn’t the zealous Catholic as some people thought. When the pope was on TV instead of one of my favorite shows, I turned it off. My father was surprised. He thought I would sit in front of the TV all day long watching the pope on TV the way I watch Bishop Sheen and Bishop McNulty of Buffalo. That’s because they were American Catholics.

Besides believing that the Catholic Church was the One True Church, I also believed that the Bible, the whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, was the Word of God. We were taught that most of the Bible is sealed; that we could not understand the prophecies until some time in the distant future just before the return of Jesus Christ. I remember wishing and praying that I could know the mysteries of the Bible.

Such a time occurred in a way I never thought possible—through another church. It happened back in 1969 when the so-called peace negotiations were being conducted in Paris to end the Vietnam War. I was groping for answers—for the truth. I didn’t believe we could negotiate an end to the Vietnam War simply because we had nothing to negotiate. The North Vietnamese had their army in South Vietnam. We had our army in South Vietnam. What was there to negotiate? Answer: South Vietnam. In other words, the only thing we could bargain with was surrender. I looked in the TV section one Sunday and saw the Vietnam War being the topic of discussion on a program called the World Tomorrow. It was the last 15 minutes of Part II, and it really interested me. Garner Ted Armstrong laid out three rules which he said came from Mr. Eisenhower. They were: 1) Never commit your troops to a land war in Asia. 2) If you do commit your troops, bring them in altogether; don’t send them in piece-meal. 3) The object of any war should be nothing less than victory. At the end of the program, he offered a booklet titled, "The United States and the British Commonwealth in Prophecy." WOW!!! That really got my attention---a book about the FUTURE of the United States! I sent in my request for the book that very day.

I always pictured the future of the United States with rose-colored glasses. In the future, the United States will be sending rockets to the moon. We will be building cities on the moon. We will be building underwater cities on the ocean floor. We’ll have super cities all over the country. A skyscraper will be where my house was on Goemble Avenue in Buffalo. We’ll have super trains criss-crossing America. We’ll have super trains going to Alaska; and we’ll have super trains crossing the Bering Strait and going into Russia and to all parts of the world. With a title like, "The United States and the British Commonwealth in Prophecy," my imagination ran wild. The United States will become a Super United States with US states all over the world just like Britain had.

I wasn’t the only one who had big ideas about the future. In one newspaper magazine, I read about a super super highway in which motorists could travel from New York City to Dallas to Los Angeles at 120 mph. There was some talk about building skyscrapers out of plastic instead of steel. One medical prediction was that death itself would be conquered—it would be treated like any other disease.

Finally my copy of "The United States and the British Commonwealth in Prophecy" arrived in the mail. It was a thick soft-covered booklet about 200 pages long. Written by Herbert W. Armstrong, it started out with dire warnings that if the nations of the world knew what was going to happen shortly, they would institute crash programs and be in a state of national emergency. It then turned to the Bible and said that nations are simply families grow great. It asked the question, "Why does the Bible tell about the little nations like Israel, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon while leaving out great nations like the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and Russia. The answer is, it doesn’t. It then went back to the time of Abraham and how he was given promises of great blessings. There were two different promises, one was physical (national greatness), and the other was spiritual (salvation). After Abraham proved he was willing to sacrifice Isaac, those promises became unconditional. These promises were passed on to Issac, who passed them on to Jacob, who passed them on to Judah (salvation) and to Joseph’s two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh (national greatness). After the reign of King Solomon, the Holy Land was divided into two parts. The northern ten tribes were the Kingdom of Israel, and the remainder of the two tribes became the Kingdom of Judah where David’s sons reigned in Jerusalem. The northern kingdom fell into idolatry and was taken into captivity by the Assyrians. The Kingdom of Judah continued until the time of the prophet Jeremiah; and then it was taken into captivity by the Babylonians. Even though the throne of David was to reign eternally over Israel, it seemly came to an end at that time. The author tells us that one of the princesses of the Kingdom of Judah was taken to Ireland, which was a colony of the Tribe of Dan, one of the northern ten tribes of Israel. In the meantime, according to the author, after spending some time near the Black Sea, most of the lost ten northern tribes were freed from their captivity and slowly migrated towards northwestern Europe to Scotland and England. Thus the Anglo-Saxons (Saxons from "Isaac’s sons") came from Denmark (which is really called (Dan’s Mark) and took over what is now England and became the British (which means "covenant man" in Hebrew) people. David’s throne moved from Ireland to Scotland and finally from Scotland to London where it reigns over Lost Israel, the Tribe of Joseph. All the physical promises of national greatness was given to the Tribe of Joseph, the British people, but was held back from them until the year 1800 when God’s punishment on them ended. The Tribe of Joseph had already separated into Ephraim (the British Empire) and Manasseh (the United States). Since 1800, the British acquired possessions in all parts of the world, and became the mightiest empire in all of history. And the United States became the single most mightiest nation in all of history. This all changed after World War II when God started to bring to end His unconditional promises. Britain gave up most of its colonies. And the United States was no longer able to win anymore wars. We fought a stalemate in Korea. And we lost a long divisive war in Vietnam—our first defeat. The author, Herbert W. Armstrong, warned that more curses would follow unless we repented and fully obeyed God. But we, the Israelites, have never obeyed God for very long. Therefore, God will continue to remove His blessings from us and add more and more curses upon us until we are finally invaded, conquered and taken away to our enemies lands. He identified our enemies as the members of the Common Market, specifically Germany (the descendants of our ancient enemies the Assyrians). Germany, as leader of the European Union, would first defeat us in a trade war, and then in a military war—World War III. Once we are taken as slaves to the EU, our people would finally repent. The Lord Jesus will then come down from heaven (the Second Coming), destroy the armies of Europe, and rescue us from our captivity. We will then be taken to our original home, the Holy Land, where we will prosper and never be removed from again.

I was amazed when I finished the book. Imagine, we, the United States, are the lost people of Israel! But it took a while to sink in. I remembered going to bed that night and waking up the next morning thinking that it was all a bunch of baloney. But it must be true, I reasoned. The Jews are real. The British throne in England is real. And we’re the most powerful country on earth. We’re the only ones who landed men on the moon, and yet we are not even mentioned in the Bible? Then it must be true—we are the lost people of Israel.

Along with the booklet, the World Tomorrow or Ambassador College people sent me a free subscription to The Plain Truth magazine. I ordered other booklets from them, including, "This Is The Worldwide Church of God." They claimed to be the True Church founded by Jesus Christ. They said that the true church was prophesied to always be a small church, not a great church. And they would always be a persecuted church. One of the prophesies of Jesus Christ was that the Gospel of the Kingdom of God would be preached to all the world, and THEN the end of the world (the Second Coming) would come. How could the preaching of the gospel be a sign of the end of the world if the gospel has been preached by the Catholic Church for centuries? I still kept going to Mass every Sunday until I felt too guilty to go. The teaching that the kneeing, genuflecting, and praying before statutes and crucifixes was idolatry and the breaking of one of the Ten Commandments made do what I had to do. Leaving the Catholic Church was one of the hardest decisions I ever made in my life.

One of the Ten Commandments is: Remember to keep holy the Sabbath Day. This is the Jewish Sabbath, from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset. The Worldwide Church of God said it is God’s Sabbath and all men are commanded to obey it. Christ said that the Sabbath was made for man. Not only did we have to keep the weekly Sabbaths, but also the yearly Sabbaths, such as Passover, Pentecost, the Feast of Trumpets, Day of Atonement, and First and Last Feast Days of Tabernacles.

So I was back on the street again looking for a job. Not only was I looking for a job, I was looking for a job with Friday nights and Saturdays off. I couldn’t find one. I noticed in the want ads that TV Repairmen were making $6 an hour, which was big money back in the 70’s. I figured if I were a professional, I would be able to have the time I needed for Sabbath observance. Unfortunately, after about four or five years of learning how to fix TVs, I found out that the opposite was true. Friday nights and Saturdays were a TV repairman’s busiest days of the week. I turned down two good job offers.

Office people seemed to get the hours off I needed for Sabbath observance, so I took up office training in 1976. I was able to land a few filing jobs. Other than that, I worked in another bread factory and did some work as a security guard. A friend of mine, Ron, suggested I take up keypunching, which I did. I did a lot of practice to obtain keypunching and data entry skills. The magic number was 12,000 keystrokes per hour. It took me quite a while to learn that speed is not as important as accuracy. Regardless of the relevancy or irrelevancy of keypunching and data to national security, international diplomacy and world leadership, an important lesson to be learned is that quality is better than quantity. You need to do things right before you can do things fast.

I left the Worldwide Church of God in 1978, so it didn’t matter if I worked Friday nights and Saturdays after that. It was a gradual process. The main break was that I stopped giving tithes and offerings. I wasn’t finding work most of the time. I was lucky to be living on unemployment benefits. Sometimes I had to live on public assistance checks. God’s promise for tithing in Malachi 3:8-10 by opening the windows of heaven to pour out such a blessing that I would not be able to receive it simply did not apply to me. Then I read that Herbert Armstrong gives himself a salary of a half million dollars. It was then when I began to send for literature from former ministers of the church. By reading that literature, I was able to learn the truth about Sabbath-keeping, the British-Israelite theory, and the kosher laws we were required to keep.

While I was in the WCG, I read the Bible about three times a day. Then, when I left, I gave up reading the Bible. But I started reading it again three times a day since I didn’t want to be less of a Christian than I was when I was in the church. I haven’t joined another church since then. I attended a few church services at the Seventh Day Adventist Church and two or three other churches.

GRACE

In my Sociology of the Families course at Erie Community College, my teacher and I got into an argument over a question that pertained to the lesson of the day. It must have been something about self-esteem. I argued that we don’t need self-esteem because the Bible tells us to be humble. Then he said if I wanted to tell the class about grace. It was not relevant to our discussion, so I didn’t. I thought he was just trying to ridicule me. I regret not standing up and telling the class about grace, because it is very important, especially to a democracy like the United States. To understand about grace, you have to understand the nature of God. God has a dual nature. On the one hand He is male and on the other hand He is female. The male side of God is good, holy, perfect, righteous and just. This side demands that we pay for our sins. In the Bible, the punishment for sin is death, not hell and not purgatory. It’s death. Since we are all guilty of sin, we are all condemned to death. On the other side of God is His female side, which is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, mercy, and wisdom. God’s female side does not want us to die for our sins. So He gave us Jesus Christ, His only Son, to die for all of our sins. If we, as a nation, continue to deny Jesus in our daily lives, then we will simply have to pay the penalty for all the laws we are so busy breaking.

THE MORMONS

Recently, I attended a Mormon service. Two visiting "elders" (both in their twenties) persuaded me to attend their temple in Lancaster. The people there were friendly. One of them gave me a ride to their building, and a couple gave me a ride home. But they told me that the Bible is incomplete and imperfect without their Book of Mormom. The Bible says that Jesus is the word of God and that He is the Alpha and the Omega--the beginning and the end. At the end of the Book of Revelation, the last book, it says, "I warn every one who hears the words of the prophecy of this book, if any one adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if any one takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city..." I told the two elders that the Muslims believe the same thing--that the Bible is incomplete and imperfect; and that the prophet Muhammad gave us the koran. I haven't heard from them since. I read a few pages of the Book of Mormon to find out if it contradicts anything in the Bible. It does. Here are two of them: 1) The hero is leaving Jerusalem just before its exile to Babylon to the "promise land," which is somewhere near the Red Sea." The Bible says the land of Israel is the Promised Land. The area around the Red Sea is either Egypt or Arabia. About Egypt, the Bible says God delivered the Israelites from Egypt. In another part of the Bible, concerning Egypt, it says "you shall not go back there." 2) The hero is making animal sacrifices in the new promised land. Animals sacrifices are to be made only in Jerusalem. Anyway, I wouldn't mind going back to the Mormon temple because there's was a nice-looking young lady there I would like to meet; and a typical Mormon family has about eight children. Wow!   I mean, if the Mormons ask me to come back, I wouldn't mind going back.