Alicia’s Story

Based on a phone interview, May 18, 2020:

Joel and I met at college in Marin County; we were in the same geography class. I really loved the Lord, but I’d gotten into astrology, and I was teaching a little astrology class there. He was sitting next to me in this geography class, and I said, “You’re a Cancer, aren’t you?” He said, “Yes.” We dated that whole year, then – he had been at UCSB and he was going to go back down there. I went there, I saw the beach, I drove up to the campus, and I thought, “I’ve got to go!”

So Joel and I had started going to UCSB in Santa Barbara, and we would drive back and forth from Marin County, where our families lived. On one of his trips up north, Joel went to this Pentecostal church in the Haight-Asbury. They were all hippies, and they raised their hands and they spoke in tongues and they fell over. Joel was blown away. Some older guy kind of took him under his wing, and I think that’s where he gave his life to Christ, in San Francisco at this hippie church. Sharon Ridbaum was my roommate in September, and we were praying for his salvation. He probably got saved in the fall.

I started school in September, and I went to Campus Crusade meetings. One thing really stood out. All the sisters went over to Patty’s and Betty’s apartment, and we listened to the Grace Tape by Jon Braun. It explained the whole point of their leaving Crusade. It blew me away. I grew up a Catholic, and I loved the Lord as a little girl, but I went to 14 years of Catholic school, and all you did was study about sin: “This is a venial sin – if you only do that, you won’t go to hell. But if you do the other one . . .” So it was all about sin. I grew up very guilty. I was a really good girl; but if I had an argument with my sister, I’d go to confession on Saturday and God would love me again. I really was torn – I wanted to make him happy but . . .

So I went to their house, sitting on the floor, and we listened to the Grace tape. Jon said that not only were all my past sins forgiven, but the future ones as well. That blew me away. I’m forgiven! I was free for the first time in my life. I realized, “Oh, wow! God has forgiven me forever!” That really changed me a lot.

I remember that first summer, sitting out on the cliffs, having the Lord’s Supper . We were so free. I had been a strong Catholic, and I went to my best friend’s wedding in Los Angeles just before I came to Santa Barbara for the church. I was the maid of honor. I went into the confessional. It was in March. I told the priest my sins. He said, “When did you have confession last?” I said, “Christmas.” He said, “You should have come earlier.” I already knew the Lord by then. I said, “Well, I confessed my sins to God, and I sought His forgiveness.” He said, “No, that’s not good enough. You have to come to the priest.” So I walked out on the Catholic church. That was it.

When I first came to Santa Barbara, they were all going to some evangelical mainline church – Bob and Sandy and everybody. I’d never been to anything like that. I definitely left the Catholic church. The Lord led me out of it.

I lived at Fontainebleau Apartments in Isla Vista, and my roommate was Sandy. I started going right away with them to Campus Crusade. It was really exciting. I went to Arrowhead Springs, then I went up in the mountains where the Campus Crusade leaders all spoke.

After I lived at Fontainebleau, I moved to an apartment on Del Playa. It was beautiful. My roommate was Cheryl, who later married David. We shared the apartment with three other girls. Linda, Jon Braun’s niece, came and stayed with me. She became like my little sister. I think we led her to the Lord. Later she married Peter.

A bunch of us wanted to go down to UCLA to a conference of ex-Campus Crusade leaders. I was with Joel and some others in the car. It was raining really hard in L.A. I was sitting on the left side of the auditorium, and when Gene Edwards got up and started speaking, this fire ignited in me. He revealed God’s eternal purpose from Genesis to Revelation, and my heart was burning in me. It was awesome.

Remember after Jesus resurrected, and a couple of the disciples were walking down the road to Emmaus talking about what happened, and a stranger walked up and started talking? He asked, “What happened?” and they said, “You don’t know?” He started teaching them, and they said their hearts burned within them. Then they realized it was Him. I feel like what happened at UCLA was like that: my heart really burned within me.I remember thinking, “It wouldn’t be us from Santa Barbara who would experience that. It’s got to be people from UCLA, not us.”

That UCLA message changed my life; it was the pivotal point of my life. I’ve never been the same. The auditorium was packed out. All the guys that talked were wonderful; I had heard them at different places before. But once I heard Gene, I forgot everything else. It all paled in comparison to him.

I was so excited when Bob connected with him and he came up to speak to us in Santa Barbara. Gene would always laugh about how, when he was speaking at that meeting at Bob’s and Lance’s, I sat right at his feet and he couldn’t move. That’s when we were all smoking pipes. Sandy Jordan worked at a pipe shop in the main mall down in Santa Barbara. So for my 21^st birthday, everybody gave me pipes and tobacco. I was her roommate, and I really loved her. I remember being down in Los Angeles for her wedding. We were all chucking the religious system, so I don’t think Bob and Sandy were excited about having a formal, traditional wedding. But they did it anyway. It was really good. I remember going to Gene’s house afterward, sitting around the table and eating. It was neat to be at his house after the wedding and to hear him talk.

Gene was so Southern, so Texan. We loved his funny stories. He grew up in the oil fields. He’d have these funny expressions that were unique. He’d come every month, and he started teaching us how we could touch the Lord. He really went into how we were to live by another life. God never meant us to live by Adam’s life. A frog lives by frog life and a dog lives by dog life. And we weren’t meant to do that. How do we live by another life? It’s by touching Him, by being in His presence, by taking the Scriptures and eating and drinking them, rather than having a Bible study and learning them in our heads.

In the late spring he gave us an assignment. He wanted each of us to pick a particular verse. Then we were to have a meeting where each person would bring a psalm or a hymn or a spiritual song, after having spent time with the Lord finding what to bring. So we did. It was fabulous. I wrote a letter to Helen, Gene’s wife, and said, “It was wonderful. It was beautiful.” And she wrote back. She was very happy about me sharing that. I knew that they’d want to know what happened. And she encouraged us.

That summer, Gene did a whole long weekend on Deuteronomy 8, about how the good land is flowing with everything, with fountains and springs, with fruits and grain and olive trees and honey, and it has copper and iron. Each thing that that whole chapter says about the water and the brooks and the fields and all that, Christ was each one of those things. It was beautiful. The thing to draw from it was that He’s everything. He’s the good land, He’s everything.

The next teaching that stood out to me was a series he did on the priesthood, at Christmastime. He showed us how there’s the outer court of the temple, with the slaughtering and the sacrifice, then the inner court, and the basin, then the Holy Place with the lighting of the lamps and the showbread, then you go into the Holy of Holies. That has stuck with me. That’s how I would visualize myself going into the presence of the Lord. The goal was not to be out there with all the noise, but to be in His presence as priests. That was really wonderful.

I visited the Local Church in L.A., which had been started by Witness Lee, and I met the people. I loved the songs. When we started meeting as the church in Isla Vista, Patty and some others were putting together a song book. There were all these songs to choose from, that came out of the Local Church. Gene was shocked that we didn’t choose any of those. He saw that as something of the Lord, that we didn’t choose that. We weren’t going that direction.

We learned from visiting the Local Church that they broke bread from house to house and they ate together. Gene encouraged us to do that too. He told us, “Just be together,” and we did that. And that was really, really cool.

Bob and my husband Gene were childhood friends. Gene’s father and Bob’s father worked together at the phone company in San Francisco. The Emerys lived on the Peninsula and Gene’s father lived up in Sonoma County. Gene would go to company picnics, and he knew Bob growing up. The way I met Sharon, my sister-in-law, was – the two fathers talked. Gene’s father talked to Bob’s father about how their kids were Christians and they had some little Christian group in Santa Barbara. So Sharon found out about that, and she went, and I met her there in the spring. In the fall, she ended up being in a Statistics class with me. It was a huge class, but I was drawn to her. I caught up with her really fast on my bicycle, and I went to her house, and we ended up being roommates. Later, I ended up marrying her brother, and I introduced her to Sam. We always say our kids are like brothers and sisters really.

Through Sharon, I met my husband. I came to a meeting, and he was here from Vietnam, visiting his sister Sharon. I showed him around. I was engaged to marry Joel at the time. Sharon said, “Oh, write to him. He’s so lonely.” So I started writing to him. As he wrote, the Lord told him that he was going to marry me, but he wasn’t to tell me. He came to visit in January, and the UCLA message had just happened, so we went over to Paul’s place – he was Altree then. He was the guy in charge of tapes, and it was the big reels, not even cassettes. I had Gene N. listen to the UCLA tape. We kept writing, and then we got married. Gene Edwards called me just before I got married that day and blessed me, and it worked out fine.

A big thing that made a difference for me was reading Mme Guyon’s book The Autobiography of Mme Guyon. Her book drew me to walk and live in His presence. We were all reading books by Watchman Nee as well. That was great.

The baptism: I was in that first group where we ran down to the ocean. It was so glorious, to go in the water, with Bob and Lance and Joel and Sandy and whoever else; to me, it was almost like when John the Baptist baptized Jesus. There was this presence from heaven that came down on us in the ocean when we were baptized. It was so exciting. It became kind of a tradition. We kept doing it, and people in Isla Vista at the beaches got used to seeing us. They’d stop swimming and they’d stop talking and they’d all watch us. They were all kind of drawn to these crazy kids running down into the ocean and getting baptized.

We had a bonfire at the beach to burn all the things that represented the world in our life. I burned my astrology books. I was a psychology major, so I was fascinated with all that. It was a big bonfire.

One thing that really touched me was Gene talking about Beta Sheirich, a missionary to China. I felt a real connection with her. Gene told the story of how she was in a prison camp with Watchman Nee. Then she came to America, and she was totally rejected by Witness Lee’s church. Her family didn’t really recognize who she was. I got a manual that someone wrote about her. But Gene said that she prayed and prayed for three men, and he was one of them. She prayed that they would be used by the Lord to raise up the true church in America. So she prayed, she poured her life out, and after she was no longer welcome at Witness Lee’s church – I think they spread lies about her, I don’t know – but she spent her time in intercession day and night. She would take care of her grandchildren, and she’d push them on a swing. When she got really frustrated, she baked and baked and baked. Her family, in Ohio or somewhere, were very well-known Christians. So in the cemetery they had these huge statues. And for her, I don’t think they had anything. I did feel a real connection, that she did that and passed that on to us and to me, to continue to intercede and pray for the Lord’s church in America.

Beta lived with Paul Border. If he’d go out to the garden for an hour or two, when he came back in she’d treat him like she hadn’t seen him in a long time; she was so happy to see him. I thought that was really amazing. But she suffered a lot from Witness Lee. I think they were jealous of her, and they didn’t really like a woman being anything.

Gene would describe the Local Churches as “cookie-cutter churches,” and I understood what he meant. We visited the Local Church in San Francisco – it’s the same thing in all their churches: the men on one side, the women on the other; the same inflection to their speech. I read once that there are pear trees, there are apple trees, there are all kinds – and the Lord wants that; He doesn’t want everybody to be the same. I was impressed by that. When we visited the Church in L.A., I came to find out that Gene had been a part of it – he called it the Antioch Line. I thought that was so exciting.

During the early years of the church, riots were going on in Isla Vista, rallying against the war in Vietnam. The rioters burned down the Bank. That day I didn’t know there were riots going on; I didn’t know they were burning the bank. I went to see a couple at the hospital in Goleta in my little convertible. They had just had a baby. But on my way back, because of the bank burning, Isla Vista was blocked off. I took a shortcut through the campus to get into Isla Vista. As I drove through downtown Isla Vista going toward the beach where I lived, nobody was on the street. I thought, “Where are all the people?” I was used to people walking around. Nobody was there. I looked to my right, and there was the Bank of America burning. Then I saw, in the field beyond, thousands of people and police and rioters. I was in a zone you weren’t supposed to be in. I managed to get out of there. They shut down Isla Vista, and you weren’t supposed to go outside. But I lived on Del Playa with five sisters. We had to go outside the apartment to do our laundry. When I tried to do that, the police would come and throw tear gas at us. We had to put wet towels under the door because the tear gas would come into the room.

We had some meetings during that time, even though it was illegal. The helicopters were flying overhead constantly, observing, so that was memorable. That was all after the UCLA message.

I remember when Jon Braun came to live in Isla Vista. I guess his marriage was shot, and we all got in cars and caravanned down to the L.A. airport. I guess he was really broken, because Mary Ellen had gone a different way. So we met him at the airport, and we all sang at the L.A. airport to him. He was amazed. We got him an apartment, and I used to love to cook. My mother was a gourmet chef. So I would make all these things with wine and sour cream. He used to say I was the best cook. He loved my food.

Then I got to know some of the people who came from Georgia, like the Shannons and the Bruners, Dean and Penny.

My mother came to visit, and we had meetings at Fortuna Lane. I remember Gene was standing there in front of the fireplace talking, and my mother was quite close to him. She told me that right there next to Gene, standing there where the fireplace was, she saw Jesus. She cried, and she gave her life to Jesus Christ. Her name was Clare Claeboe. She is the first person to come to know the Lord there. That summer, when everybody decided to stay in Isla Vista, I didn’t want to go home. So my mother left Marin County with my grandmother and our two dogs and rented an apartment on Del Playa, and I stayed there. That’s how I could be there for that summer. It was wonderful.

Clare was my adoptive mother. I’ve always been closer to my adoptive family. I’d be with my birth family, and they’d say they had done this and this when they were children, and I was just kind of an add-on. They were all happy to see me, but there’s nothing like your mother that raised you. My sister’s name was Corrie, and she was also adopted. She looked the opposite of me – she was blond haired and blue eyed. She was four years younger. It was so neat – one time Roddie and I and some others – five sisters altogether – came up from Isla Vista to visit. My sister was going through a rough time. We left my sister with Roddie, and Roddie led her to Jesus Christ. A strong Christian woman named Connie lived in Novato, and I connected Corrie with Connie, and Connie mentored her and loved her.

I remember the time that Gene was saying that the economy was going to be bad, something was going to happen, and everybody should get jobs with the government. So Paul Fischer and Theo Faber were driving a bus, and they were all doing that kind of thing. Some of them became teachers.

Gene taught us in the very beginning that he wanted us to learn to eat really healthy, to juice carrots and do all that. He said, “The reason I want you to do that is because, in the Christian world, you see people in their 60s and 70s, and they’re spending their time in doctors’ offices, and they’re getting pacemakers. What I really believe is that the Lord spends your whole life getting you ready for what he has for you when you’re older. And that gets sabotaged when you have eaten very badly and you have bad health.” That really impressed me.

I hate getting up early in the morning. Gene Edwards knew that. We’d always sign up to meet with people in the morning. You’re supposed to get up at 5 or 6 in the morning and pray. People would come over, and I’d beg my husband, “Please go pray with them; I’m too tired.” So one time I went over to Gene’s to pray with him, and he was all smiles. I was kind of nervous praying with him. He told me, “The reason I was so happy, Alicia, is I saw that you got out of bed early.” I went to UCSB when I was going out with Joel, and the church was beginning, and I could never make my 10 o’clock class!

My son Jonathan was born at Sarah’s house, and all these sisters came. Sarah said she would deliver my baby. She had been with me when David and Stephen and Daniel were born. So we decided that I was going to have my baby at her house. I had a laundry basket, with everything I would need for the birth. Les Williams worked at Heyer Schulte, and he got some medical supplies like pads and different things. I kept those with me in my car in case I went into labor. I was due on Thursday, but on the Saturday before that I went to the hospital to visit Anne Lise, who had just had her baby Austin. It was about two in the afternoon, and I thought, “Oh, Lord, I want to have my baby today!” So I went home. Sandy and Bob and Paul and Rhonda were all about to leave  for Hawaii for Weltblick. I said, “Oh Lord, I want to have my baby before they leave.” I actually had him about six days early.

It was on a Saturday. I knocked on Sarah’s door – they lived near the Mission in a house there. I had my basket with me. I was feeling some contractions, and I said, “Sarah, I think I’m going to have my baby right now.” So I went into her bedroom. I think I was having back labor. My husband Gene was going to deliver it. Anyway, I was in labor. I called Marianne, I think. There was a conference or a big meeting on Saturday night down the road at State Street. I called them there or somebody did, and all the sisters ran out and came up there. The funny thing was that Marianne, Maridee, Christie – they all came running up.

I felt when Jonathan was born that heaven had come down; that that room was full of angels. All the sisters were singing these beautiful songs, and they were passing Jonathan around. He was born with all the sisters around, singing. When that was over, they went out and had a barbecue. So they brought me dessert. Iris decided she was going to stay there in the living room – I was in the bedroom – all night and watch Jonathan. But he never woke up. It was really a big family affair to have a baby in the church.

Conversely, a couple of years before, I had lost my baby Stephen, but the sisters once again surrounded me. We were such family. It wasn’t like anything else. Stephen had an immunization at the Health Department, I guess, in Santa Barbara, around 11 in the morning. He started crying and cried all day. Finally around 11 at night I put him down. He was still crying. I remember when I found him the next day. Alice and Ed Snekvik came right over. They were like Mom and Dad to us. They just held us. They were wonderful. Then Gene Edwards came, and Christie came, and we went over to Gene and Helen’s place. All the saints came and sang to us. There was so much love. I think of people going through things by themselves. It’s really not supposed to be that way. We’re supposed to be there for each other, whether it’s a wedding or a birth or a death, whatever. It’s all the church.

Someone gave us their cabin up by Tahoe. There was a lot of snow. We went up to get away. I didn’t really want to get away; I loved being with the saints, but my husband wanted to get away. So on the way home, when we were in Paso Robles, I started feeling funny. It turned out I was pregnant! I was pregnant when I lost my baby. I lost Stephen in February, and I had Daniel in October. It was so wonderful, immediately, to have a baby to look forward to. I already had David, so that was good.

The kids in the church were all brothers and sisters. Not just my kids, but all the kids. We made these special houses for them. We had meetings all the time, so someone came up with the idea. We had an apartment that the kids would come to during the meetings. The brothers built playhouses for them, things like firehouses, all painted. It was really neat for the kids.

A group of us moved to Santa Barbara, to State Street – the first, original people. Gene and I stayed in Isla Vista. I’m glad it happened. We lived on Sabado Tarde, and Marianne and Chuck lived upstairs. Next door to us were Sarah and Les and their girls, and Chris and Sandy and their baby. There was a courtyard, and the kids would all ride their hot wheels there. A lot of us were all pregnant at the same time. We’d exercise every day. We’d walk on the beach together. We all had our babies, and our deliveries went really well.

Camp Pendleton: We were illegally on the base to preach the gospel to these South Asian refugees after the fall of Vietnam. My husband had recently gotten out the military, and he had a love for the people in the camp, because he’d been to all those countries – Thailand, Singapore, Korea; he was stationed in Japan for two years. So he went down there, he and Lura and a whole bunch of them. They were trying to hide the fact that they were on the base illegally and preaching the gospel and everything. So this commander came and asked my husband Gene, “Hey, what are you doing here?” Gene said, “We’re here illegally.” And the commander said, “Oh, okay. You can be here.”

The first Thanksgiving that the Hmong were here, we lived at the Fortuna House, and it had a big porch. We put a big table out, and it was thanksgiving for the Hmong, whose lives had just been spared from being killed, and it was the most special Thanksgiving I ever had, to be with them. They had so much to be thankful for. Some of the Cambodian pilots were up in the air, and when they came in, all their families – their uncles and aunts and kids – were all slaughtered. So they had nobody. So when they came to Santa Barbara, we were their family. They were such sweet people.

Les got some of the refugees jobs at his company, and they were such good workers that they kind of took over. I remember the sisters – they had a custom that when they were about 12 – as soon as they got their periods, the men would come and kidnap them, and then they’d have to have babies and be wives for the rest of their lives. Well, when they came to America, I think Christine and different people started teaching them hygiene and they started getting excited that they could get an education, being women – because that didn’t happen in their country. We really helped them transition to becoming women that could have families and get an education. That was very cool.

I remember one time I dropped off Pao Xiong at his house. He was standing next to my car and he said, “Wait a minute.” This bird had just landed on a branch near him, and he caught it with his hands! They would go fishing at Stow Lake and Devereux Point. The Hmong would all move into an apartment that was meant for four people or eight people. They didn’t know anything about American laws, so they filled their bathtub up and they caught all these fish that were really in a wildlife preserve at Devereux, and that’s what they ate. Their whole bathtubs were filled with fish. Another thing they’d do was, they’d put a firecracker in the water, and all the fish would come up, and then they’d grab them. They were a different culture.

We lived at Trigo House at one point. Joel was in charge of housing. He said, “We want you to move out, because the Hmong are going to move in. Before that, this guy Nguyen and his wife and his baby moved in with us, but they had come from the jungle. I was pregnant, and the smell of their fish sauce made me sick. We moved over to Fortuna House, and the Hmong all moved in to Trigo. Trigo House had a big kitchen with a lot of cupboards. When the Hmong moved in, they removed all the cupboard facings and put chicken wire in, and they kept their chickens in there. If you went to their house for dinner, right in front of you they’d cut the head off the chicken. So Trigo House had quite a history.

We moved into this little one-room place on Trigo. We had to get out of our place, and we didn’t have a place yet. So Theo and Suzanne invited us up, and we were sleeping on the porch in sleeping bags. She had Uriyah, and I got to be there for the birth. That was really cool. Suzanne was a hippie. She was into wheat grass juice and all that. She grew it in trays. Suzanne made a big difference with that wheat grass juice.

I was at the fasting house with Jim. I was on a 30-day fast. I had fasted for 10 days on water at Embarcadero where we lived. Then after 10 days, I went to the fasting house and had juice for 15 days, and I ended the fast with water. I remember, everyone went to work, and there were Jim and I, fasting. I look back, and I’m thinking, I was pregnant five years out of seven years, but I nursed for seven years. So it meant that I was nursing while I was pregnant all those years. So that’s why I was tired during that time, and I was tired afterwards. It had depleted everything. They all laughed at me. They called me the Fertile Turtle. Gene would say, “How can you do this?” He couldn’t believe that my body could function. It took so much out of me.

We were involved with a black church in Watts, led by Elvin. We invited them to come up, so when Elvin came, he walked into someone’s house where he was staying and opened the refrigerator. He saw that it was all carrots and celery and all that, and he said that was a sign from the Lord, because blacks down in Watts didn’t eat well. And the Lord had told him that in the church they were to eat raw and natural and eat healthy. When they came up to Isla Vista and saw that we did, it was a sign to him that we were okay and we could be brothers and sisters.

We loved them. Gene and I lived over in Goleta, and this one other brother, really sweet, and his wife, Norma I think – they were driving up from L.A. and we told them where we lived. I said, “We’re probably going to be at a meeting and we’re not going to be home, but just walk right in.” Well, two doors down from us was a house just like ours, and they walked in the door. And they were as black as black could be. So they scared everybody.

In Watts, the Lord showed them to take over a big building – maybe a bakery or something – and they turned it into a sports center. So they had all the gang kids coming over and they were teaching them basketball, and playing games with them. High school kids, even. So the word went out on the streets down in Watts, with the Crips and all of them, “Don’t touch them. They’re good. They’re taking care of our kids.” We went down one time, and our son David – he always wandered, he’d always go somewhere – he wandered out of the house and was wandering through Watts. They pulled some guns on him, but they misfired, or he would have been killed. We lived through that.

The church ended in 1981, at our house in Goleta. I was part of the church from day one to the last day. We had an official meeting, and it was symbolic that the light went out. But there was one last meeting where Gene spoke, and we were crowded on our living room floor and down the hallway, and it was the last time we gathered together in Goleta. We sold our house for something like $119,000, and somebody’s sister bought it. We moved to Idaho, and like a year and a half later, it was worth $500,000. When they were first built, they were like $17,000.

Toward the end of our time in the church, Gene urged people to become psychologists. He also encouraged people to get into alternative health professions. I did that. I became a healthologist down in Ventura. I had my own office. It was before anybody did that.

Gene said at that time he would prefer that people just move away, because he didn’t want a “Bless-Me” club. So we moved to Idaho. It was a disaster, because the economy in 1982 hit the bottom. So we got up there in this big old house, I had four kids, there was snow, we had no money. I opened up an office to practice healthology. But the people there ate meat and potatoes; they weren’t into that stuff. My husband Gene would go down to L.A. and live with different people who had moved down there so he could do vinyl repair. I was in Idaho with the kids; I had never wanted to move there. I was up there in the snow, and my tires were bald.

When we moved up there, we wanted to put our daughter Grace, who was four, in a little preschool. So we found this whole group of Southern Baptists – I’d never been around Southern Baptists – who had moved up from Texas to Idaho. We went to their church. Gene was down in L.A. trying to make money on the car lots, fixing upholstery. We didn’t have food, because I’d be waiting for him to send us some money. So this guy moved up to the Baptist church in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and he opened up a little store that had produce and eggs and cereal and milk and bread. He said to me, “I know you’re good for it, and I know your husband sends you money. So you just stop by and you pick up all the food you want, and just pay me when it comes in.” Once Gene moved up there and he was making money, the guy moved back to Texas. So it was just for that time.

I was really heartsick, leaving, the church being over. I felt like what I learned wasn’t over, that it was inside of me for the future, forever. It wasn’t like I went on to something else. But I was involved with Mike Bickle and all that for 10 years, and the 10 years before that, in the 90s, I went to 10 Benny Hinn crusades. I was involved with him a lot.

As far as Gene Edwards goes, I loved him from the very beginning, I loved him till the end. I’ve seen him in Jacksonville a few times. They did a Les Miserables thing for him years ago, and I went down for that. The ones in Jacksonville put on the play, and they dressed up in the theme. The words were changed to be Christian. He and Kitty – I always know her as Helen – sat at the table, and they did this whole Broadway thing of Les Miserables for Gene, because he loved it. I was there, and Phil Warmanen, and Shirley Lumm. It was pretty neat.

I visited in Maine one time, because my sister worked for the airlines, and I could fly. We went to Maine and saw Marianne and Chuck there. Gene had just discovered that a lot of his health problems were tied to some dentistry that he needed. So he had just had some work done there. My father had moved to Jacksonville, so I would visit him, and I would always see Gene there. I stayed with him a few times. I have a relative, a pastor, there. I was over at his house, and Gene called to talk to me. When I came back in, he said, “Gene Edwards called you?” I said, “Well, he’s my spiritual father.” When I got back I told Gene that. He said, “No, I’m not your spiritual father. I’m your friend.”

I was never offended with Gene. And I’m glad. It just wasn’t in me. For me it was a destiny. It was a point my life changed, and my life is the way it is because of that.