Don:
I don't think we ever met back in the day. It blows my mind that all these years later, here we are connecting. Wow, huh? God is amazing, all the time.
I think we all have some post trauma stress syndrome about the LC. Some more than others, and that is why we are here.
I do believe I feel the gentleness of your heart and that you don't want to hurt anyone. I, like you, have seen way too much of that. And I have heard (read) you talk about what it was like for you in the post-LC years. I know that while our stories have so many differences, there are way more similarities, under the surface. Just like most of the time, scratch the surface just a little and find the ways we are the same.
It is impossible, pretty much, for me to describe what it was like there (in the LC) to people I know now. I think this is even more true because now we live in a very conservative, rural area where that sort of unusual religious expression just doesn't exist. Try to explain it to people and they start to picture Warren Jeffs, something like that. Crazy weird polygamy or something. I think that's why this forum means so much to us. We get it. For each other, from each other, we get it. Not perfectly, and not always easily, but we do get it. What a powerful experience it was, that we are here talking about it. For some of us here, it hasn't been that long in the past and for some of us it has been decades. But here we are.
So, okay. I'll do my best to bear with you as you tell the story --- and I'll try to add to it if I can. Like I said, I claim no objectivity when it comes to Max and his family. There you have it.
Local Church Credit Union? Boy, you are right there --- I sure have never heard about that! Crazy. And Approved Speakers List? Keep writing, brother. You have my curiousity stirred up here.
God Bless you, Don. What an amazing life, huh?
FPO
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