HomeARC ML 0303A
"PAPER POWER"--MO February 10, 1974 NO.302A--DFO
Copyright February, 1974 by The Children of God
P.O. Box 31, London, WC2E 7LX, England or BP 752, 75123 Paris 03, France.
1. MY LORD, IF I COULDN'T SIT DOWN IN ONE AFTERNOON OR ONE EVENING AND EXPLAIN 20 PICTURES I THINK I'D QUIT! I want to tell you it is harder to get some of our leaders and pioneers to do anything than it is almost anybody in the Revolution. It's harder to get obedience out of some of you than it is almost anybody. You all have your own idea of the way you want to do things, and to get you to keep the commandments of your leader, or follow an order, or do what you're told to do is just about the hardest thing in the world.
2. YOU DON'T WANT TO DIG COAL, IT'S TOO HARD.--Not any glory and glamour in it. All I can figure out is you're just plain damn lazy and don't want to work, that's all. You want to sit around and gab or watch television or tell your tales to other people, or whatever, while the whole world is hungry and waiting to hear your story, but after all, "to hell with the rest of the world".
3. YOU WOULD RATHER STAND IN THE SPOTLIGHT of your own Colony and be a big shot and a performer, where you can get some inspiration from their laughs and applause and Amens and happy smiling faces.
4. IF I HAD WAITED FOR THAT TO DO WHAT I HAVE DONE FOR THE PAST FOUR YEARS YOU WOULDN'T HAVE GOTTEN ANYTHING, absolutely nothing, and the Revolution would have gone to pot years ago and we'd be the forgotten men. Thank God for my one little encourager, God bless her.
5. IF IT HADN'T BEEN FOR MARIA YOU PROBABLY WOULDN'T HAVE GOTTEN ANYTHING EITHER. She worked hard, I'll tell you. She worked hard to produce it, and she works hard every single day and makes me do my work.
6. FROM THE TIME I WAKE UP IN THE MORNING SHE HOUNDS ME WITH SCRIPT IN HAND, she shoves it into my hand on the toilet. She makes sure I've got pens and glasses, she follows me around with it from room to room. She shoves it in my lap again when I sit down in the chair, if haven't paid attention to it so far. She gives me sales talk, she begs me, she cries, she cajoles.
7. SHE DOES EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD TO TRY TO GET ME TO WORK on my work. She locks the door, she tries to protect me from other people. Then finally I take a look at it and maybe get a little bit interested.
8. BUT BECAUSE I KNOW IT'S GOING TO BE A LONG, HARD JOB, I think of every stall I can think of and everything else I can do. I spend half an hour cleaning off my desk. I decide I better listen to the news or I figure maybe I ought to read the newspaper first.--Well I better read the mail first, or I cut my toenails or anything I can think of to try to keep from doing it.
9. ALL KINDS OF NICE LITTLE THINGS ARE SO MUCH EASIER to do, and I try to do every one of them first. But she just hounds me and hounds me and hounds me until she just practically crams it down my throat. She fights like mad to keep anything else from taking my time, almost to the point of offending me and others. Otherwise I would sit there and chat by the hour and have a nice little talk and a good time and let the rest of the world go to Hell.
10. SHE FIGHTS EVERYTHING OFF, fights with me, and does everything she can think of to try to get me to go to work on what I'm supposed to do. And finally when she sees it has actually caught my interest, and I begin to get a little absorbed in it, she will tiptoe around on feet of wool for fear she's going to make the slightest sound that might actually distract me and stop me from doing it.
11. WHEN SHE'S GOT ME ROLLING SHE IS JUST AS HAPPY AS A LARK. Then she'll tiptoe out of the room and type someplace else or do something else to try to keep me totally undisturbed and leave me alone once she's got me going.
12. SO NOW I'M TRYING TO GET YOU GUYS FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE TO SIT DOWN AND GO TO WORK: the hard work of composing under inspiration and writing what has to be said. If you leaders and pioneers don't learn to depend on the inspiration of God and the Holy Spirit to tell the world about where you've been and what you've done, then for God's sake, it's not worth telling. If you can't depend on the Lord to give you the inspiration; if you can't sit down to a tape recorder and a microphone or something and dictate it or write it out, may God help you!
13. I REALISE THAT FOR MOST OF YOU THIS HASN'T BEEN YOUR CUSTOM and you're not accustomed to doing things this way; but that's why we have very little on record of all the big long sessions in all the great meetings and all the tremendous programmes that we have had. Who heard it?--A handful of people--one or two little Colonies--and the rest of the world can go to pot.
14. GRANDMOTHER SPENT YEARS GOING FROM CHURCH TO CHURCH, and meeting after meeting, year after year after year, and in all those years and churches and meetings put together, she never reached as many people or did as much good as she did when L.P. Lehman practically locked her in her apartment and said, "You sit down and write your life story!"
15. HER BOOK HAS NOW SOLD WELL OVER A MILLION COPIES, and reached people in five languages all over the world and done more good than she could have ever done in person.
16. IN SPITE OF ALL I HAVE WRITTEN AND ALL I HAVE TOLD YOU ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF WRITING, I'm having to write you about it again, and for God's sake, some of you sure need it! You think you have the world vision!--You guys sit in your one little dinky Colony and at most tell a couple hundred people about your experiences to get yourselves inspired.
17. I HAVE TRIED TO SHOW YOU AND GOD HAS BEEN TRYING TO TEACH YOU WHAT GOD HAD TO SHOW ME. I don't know what the Hell He's going to have to do to you to show you the importance of writing. You fellows go bury your heads in some desert sand, or far away land, or you bury your head in the concrete of some Colony and you simply seem to forget about the rest of the world that needs to hear your stories.
18. GOD HAD TO ALMOST KILL ME AND DRIVE ME OUT OF THE COUNTRY, isolate me in exile to flee for my life and cut me off totally from everything and everybody, so that I had no other way to communicate except by writing it down. Through that, thank God, I learned to put it on paper where the whole world would hear about it.
19. IF I HADN'T STARTED WRITING IT DOWN THERE WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN ANY REVOLUTION. We'd have died on the vine right where we were. As long as I stayed at TSC I couldn't even keep TSC straight, it went in one ear and out the other: Talks, lectures, teaching--here today and gone tomorrow. The other Colonies that didn't hear them at all were already going astray.
20. THEY HAD NOTHING WRITTEN TO HANG ONTO.--They had nothing concrete to really hang on to, to go by. God had to yank me out of that situation and send me half way around the world to where I was forced to sit down alone, virtually alone, and write down what I had to say. If you leaders can't learn that lesson, then the Revolution is going to die with me; or at least its leadership is going to die with me.
21. THE ONLY LEADERSHIP THE REVOLUTION IS GOING TO HAVE LEFT IS WHAT IS ON PAPER; what we put on paper. But you are flitting around from Colony to Colony exhausting yourselves, telling hours and hours of tales over and over again to little handfuls of people.
22. YOU OUGHT TO BE SITTING DOWN AND SPENDING HOURS PUTTING IT PERMANENTLY ON PAPER where the whole world can hear about it. But no, you want the glory and the glamour to go before the audience and get the great praise of man and the glorification to inflate that actor's ego, to get that audience reaction. I used to be there, I know what it's like and I haven't forgotten.
23. THAT IS ONE OF THE HARDEST THINGS IN THE WORLD TO GET OVER. I was in it most of my life--it's almost like an addiction; it's a mania.
24. WHAT IF I HAD SAT DOWN IN MY HOTEL ROOM IN ISRAEL AND CRIED IN MY SOUP because there were no more classes to conquer and nobody to teach and nobody to talk to and nobody to tell my story to? I mean the Lord cut us off from everything.
25. "PUT IT ON PAPER" WAS ONE OF THE MAIN LESSONS GOD WAS TRYING TO TEACH US there. And I'll tell you right now a lot of you haven't learned it yet!--God gave you plenty of time to write about your experiences and the lessons He was teaching you when they were fresh. I think God is trying to show you something now and maybe even give some of you a good spanking because you have failed the Lord.
26. YOU HAVE FAILED GOD AND US BY NOT WRITING about your experiences. You could have kept a diary. Do you keep a log? Do you faithfully keep a little diary? A lot of you don't even keep a log of daily events.--Think of it! Even Maria keeps a daily log.
27. EVERY LEADER IN THIS OUTFIT IS SUPPOSED TO KEEP A DAILY LOG of daily events. But some of you don't even keep a log, you don't even write weekly reports!
28. YOU MIGHT SAY, "WE THOUGHT WELL, WE'LL GET IT ON TAPE, so we won't need to write it down". Why do you think I got so furious when we were first in Israel and you'd keep sending me those tapes, hours long? I didn't even have time to listen to them. I was too busy trying to write down what the Lord wanted me to say to the world, and then you expected me to sit down: "Make me a tape, make me a tape."
29. I WOULD HAVE WASTED HOURS OF MY TIME TALKING TO ONE PERSON, or a handful, doing the very thing God was trying to get me away from, and then they would have wasted hours of their time listening to it while the whole world waited.
30. YOU FOLKS HAVE NOT CAUGHT THE VISION OF THE POWER OF THE PEN AND THE PAPER! Maybe you'd better just simply stay in your own fields; maybe that's all you're good for, maybe you can't do anything else, maybe you're a street fighter, a front line soldier and you're great at that, but your generals will never know what you're doing because you don't report. We'll just get second hand information on what's happening, and what's going on, because we've just about gotten used to virtually never hearing from some of you.
31. SO YOU LEADERS FEEL HURT 'CAUSE YOU'RE LEFT BEHIND TO WRITE A REPORT and you're all by yourself, all alone when all the fun and games is going on. You're not getting the hero's royal treatment and having a big glamourised splurge, and "Lo, the mighty conqueror comes!" telling your great tale.--All of which you can do and we expect you to do, but you should reserve that which is least until last. Or perhaps you sit around moping because you can't spout off endless words that will never be heard any further than your own four walls.
` 32. YOU SHOULD BE SITTING DOWN AND DOING THE HARD, HARD, PICK AND SHOVEL, WORK OF GETTING IT ONTO PAPER; the kind of work that Maria and I do all the time. It might be something totally new that you'll have to learn how to do. But God help us, it's about time you learned.
33. WE'VE BEEN TRYING TO GET YOU TO DO IT FOR YEARS and about the closest some of you ever came to doing it was when we were first pioneering Europe. We used to get some pretty good reports; little day by day running commentaries on your activities, and it was great! They just thrilled us to no end, and we even used to try to publish bits of them and sometimes the whole spiel.
34. BUT YOU'RE JUST TOO BIG AND HIGH AND MIGHTY NOW and you're too famous. You can't stoop to a little thing like writing a running account of what happened, that's beneath you. Well I want to tell you something: it wasn't beneath me, and some of it I even sat down at the typewriter and typed off myself when Maria was busy.
35. IT WASN'T BENEATH MARIA'S DIGNITY TO SIT THERE AND SLAVE AWAY 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 hours a day bang, bang, bang, bang, bang all day long on the typewriter, or you'd never have heard the story.--It was just plain hard work!
36. OF COURSE, THERE IS ALWAYS SOMEONE WHO IS TICKLED PINK TO SIT DOWN AND LISTEN all day to your tales. But it goes in one ear and out the other and it never gets any further because nobody has the time to transcribe hours and hours and hours of detailed stories. I mean it's enough to give all the poor secretaries a nervous breakdown to try to transcribe all those long, long tapes!
37. OTHER THAN WHAT GOD SAYS TO ME DIRECTLY in my sleep, about the best thing that I produce is that which I sit down and I think and I pray and I dictate it to Maria concisely; "this is the way it is", but that takes hard work. It takes thought, it takes a little planning. You have to sit down and take your time out to do it.--But the world has heard!
38. WE ARE WILLING TO SIT DOWN AND DO THE PICK AND SHOVEL WORK AND BECAUSE OF IT THE WORLD IS GETTING THE GOLD WE FIND. But some of our little miners around the world have been unwilling to mine. They've gone on strike because they want more glory and higher pay. They don't want to get down there on their knees and grub around through the mud and the muck and the filth and work hard at hammering away to pick it out. You just apparently want to lecture or sermonise someplace, and somehow have it come out all by inspiration of itself of its own accord.
39. NOW SOME OF YOU NEVER GOT TOO MUCH SCHOOLING and I want to tell you something: That is one thing, as Maria knows, that school and college does for you. You are faced with an absolute crisis. You have got to sit down and write a certain theme or a thesis or a dissertation on some subject and you have either got to write it or flunk!
40. YOU HAVE GOT TO SIT DOWN AND WRITE OR ELSE. Nobody's going to write it for you, and you either pass the course or fail it on the grounds of one thesis. That takes self-discipline, it takes research, it takes hard work, it takes making notes, organising your material, sitting down and writing out some kind of an outline and then finally putting the meat on the skeleton and writing it all out in words.
41. IN CASE YOU DON'T KNOW IT THAT IS WHAT COLLEGE IS ALL ABOUT. It's not just sitting there reading textbooks and hearing lectures. The final crucial crux of the whole matter of whether you pass college courses or not, is whether you are able to sit down and write a thesis on the subject that you have studied or some incorporated or related subject.
42. DO YOU KNOW HOW THEY GET MASTER'S DEGREES AND PHD'S and doctorates of science and so on in college?--It's not from just going to classes and hearing lectures and taking little examinations, one, two, three, four questions--do you know what they have to do?
43. THEY HAVE TO CHOOSE A SUBJECT AND RESEARCH IT, find out everything there is to know about it, organise the material, work out an outline and all the rest, and then sit down and thoroughly, systematically, analytically exhaust it, deal with that subject from A to Z and include bibliographies of the whole works including all their sources and all perfectly done.
44. TO GET A PHD OR AN MS. YOU LITERALLY HAVE TO WRITE A BOOK on some subject. That's what a lot of these non-fiction books are that are published: They're some guy's doctorate, they're some guy's thesis that he had to write on the subject in order to earn the honour of a doctorate or show that he knows something.
45. YOU KIDS HAVE SPENT A LOT OF TIME RESEARCHING NEW FIELDS, fine; and you have had a lot of important conferences, fine; and you had a lot of interesting experiences, fine. Where are the notes you kept? Where is the log you kept? Any fellow who tries to write a thesis by sitting down and writing it off the top of his head, out of his hat, is just plain crazy.
46. I'LL BET A LOT OF YOU NEVER EVEN KEPT NOTES or a log or anything about your daily experiences. Well, I'll tell you, most of it has been lost because you'll never remember it. We have found if Maria gets behind two or three days in her log she loses a lot of the details. This is a law of memory:
47. IT'S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU TO RECALL ALL THE EVENTS OF A DAY THREE DAYS AGO. It just gets wiped off your memory. It may be somewhere, you might be able to get back and get on a train of thought which will bring back related thoughts one after the other, but three days later you're not going to be able to remember much of what really happened except perhaps some outstanding event.
48. HERE YOU KIDS HAVE HAD REMARKABLE AND UNUSUAL EXPERIENCES and yet you are not willing to sit down and do what even every single high school student does and what definitely every college student has to do every year, every term. You're not willing to do that for the Lord and the Revolution and the world to enable us to put it in print and get it out.
49. WELL, BELIEVE IT OR NOT, FOR YEARS AND YEARS I KNEW I HAD SOMETHING TO SAY and I went around to little dinky churches and little podunk centres and little handfuls of prayer meeting groups giving out one of the biggest messages the world has ever heard to a little baker's dozen here or there.
50. MOST OF IT WENT IN ONE EAR AND OUT THE OTHER AND NEVER ACCOMPLISHED A DAMNED THING with possibly the rarest of exceptions. Frankly I have yet to hear of any fruit of the first 50 years of my life, really. Oh, I won a few souls I could tell you about and you've heard about.
51. THE REASON YOU'VE HEARD ABOUT IT IS BECAUSE I'VE WRITTEN ABOUT IT SINCE THEN, FOR YEARS I BEGGED MY MOTHER TO SIT DOWN AND WRITE out her marvellous sermons. There are so many books she could have written, and that she should have written. They would have done her even more good and other people more good and been more of a source of income in her later life and a blessing to the world but they were never written. There's still a conglomeration of scribbled notes and key words she used to remind her of an illustration that is now long gone and forgotten and nobody else can possibly remember.--Lost to the world and the memory of man forever.
52. ABOUT ALL THAT'S LEFT THAT'S USABLE OF ALL THOSE SERMONS THAT I HEARD HER PREACH IS WHAT'S IN MY HEAD, and a lot of what you hear, that's where it came from, but it's precious little compared to what she preached and what she had to teach and what she had to say.
53. SHE WAS A GREAT WOMAN BUT SHE COULD HAVE BEEN A WHOLE LOT GREATER and she knows it, if she'd have taken time to do the plain hard work. But you know what she spent most of her spare time doing in the day-time before meetings and between meetings? You know what she spent most of her time doing? What I used to do.
54. SHE SPENT MOST OF HER TIME TAKING CARE OF INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE, writing letters, answering mail, sending little thoughtful notes and gifts and blah, blah, blah to a little old lady here and a little old man there, so on and so on. Very thoughtful, very kind and considerate, but while she herself was personally busy with a little here and there, the great work that she could have done by writing it down for multitudes more was gone.
55. ABOUT ALL THAT IS LASTING OF WHAT SHE DID ARE THE SOULS that were saved and the lives that were claimed and the people who volunteered for full-time service and so on; but none of them have really made a dent, none of them have done what we have done. I mean not one of them even began to accomplish what we have done because we've put it on paper for the millions. About all that has really accomplished anything and that has lasted are her two books and what she fed into my computer and what the Holy Spirit is able to bring out when I am willing to be turned on and let Him press the button and give it, besides all the fresh stuff He gives.
56. BUT YOU'RE TOO GOOD FOR THAT PICK-AND-SHOVEL HARD LABOUR OF SITTING DOWN AND WRITING or trying to organise the material or trying to figure out how to do it. I don't think that's asking too much.
57. WE HAVE TO DO IT ALL THE TIME. Figure out our space, count the letters on a line, count out how many lines, figure out what's going to fit. But no, that's beneath your dignity, that's beneath the great and lofty status of "Lo, the mighty conquerors come"! But I want to tell you, it hasn't been beneath mine. We have sat down and figured and followed and planned and worked and counted and measured, all the little details and hard things, just plain downright hard work.
58. I WAS WILLING TO FORSAKE ALL THAT GOD-DAMNED GLAMOUR AND GLORY of the public eye and the public platform and the praise of man in order to get alone with God. As Maria knows, we have never started a day of dictation or work without prayer and asking the Lord to help us, lead us and guide us: "Help us, Lord, with this tough job." And when I pray I hear, He never fails!
59. HOW COULD YOU GO ON DAY AFTER DAY AND STILL NOT OBEY? I thought, "Surely they will try at least". Some of you haven't even tried. You haven't come up with one line, one sentence, or one paragraph, as far as I know.
60. YOU'RE STILL WAITING FOR THE INSPIRATION, and you've got to have some kind of a big audience to get it. I don't understand that kind of thing--well yes I do, I went through it for years.
61. I'LL TELL YOU, THE NEED FOR GLAMOUR AND GLORY IS AN ADDICTION AS BAD AS DRUGS! Actors have it. Frank Sinatra quit the business, but he can't stand it: He has to get back, get on the stage again. He's got to have that glory and that glamour! Bing Crosby did it. I don't know how many times he retired, and he had to come back. It's in their blood, they have just got to be up there in the public eye. They have to hear that applause, that laughter.
62. THEY'VE GOT TO FEEL THAT MARVELLOUS FEELING OF GLAMOUR AND SELF-GLORIFICATION. One of these days Frank Sinatra will be gone and Bing Crosby will be gone and the only things they will ever be remembered for are the songs that were permanently recorded. That's the only thing that will ever be remembered--just forget the rest of it!
63. WELL I WANT TO TELL YOU, THE WORLD HAS HEARD FROM ME and it has heard about me. The world has heard, and it will remember and it cannot forget, because it's on millions and millions of little pieces of paper in countries around the globe in a dozen different languages!
64. EVEN AFTER I AM GONE THEY WILL CONTINUE TO HEAR because we sat down in a room alone day after day after day after day and month after month and year after year putting it on paper. When I'm gone the world is going to remember it. They will have heard. But at the rate you're going, when you're gone you're going to be forgotten!
65. ONE LITTLE LETTER FROM ME HAS DONE MORE GOOD AND GONE FARTHER THAN ALL THE GREAT PROGRAMMES you put on, the songs you've sung and the audiences you have entertained from one end of this world to the other, believe it or not! When you look at it that way, a lot of your time has been wasted, gone down the drain.
66. I KNOW MARIA HAS WATCHED ME PACE THE FLOOR OF A LITTLE TINY HOTEL ROOM just as inspired and just full of fire and the power of the Holy Ghost and blasting away to nobody!--Because I knew the world was listening!
67. I KNEW IT WAS GOING TO GO ON PAPER AND GET OUT to the rest of the world. But no, that's too much like hard work, there's not enough audience reaction. We can't hear the applause, we can't hear the laughs, we can't hear the Amens. That's too much by faith. You're got to have great faith in the inspiration God gives you, that it's getting across, that that's it, that it's really doing something and getting somewhere.
68. IT'S BY PURE NAKED FAITH, that you're saying what God wants you to say and what needs to be said, because you can't hear, you can't see, you don't know what the reaction is.
69. THE PROPHETS DIDN'T PROPHESY FOR AUDIENCE REACTION, to hear the laughs and the howls and the Amens and the applause. They just spoke the words of God, come what may, live or die, sink or swim, rise or fall, and that was that, flat!
70. NOW IF YOU'VE GOT ANYTHING TO SAY ABOUT YOUR EXPERIENCES that is worth saying, for God's sake why can't you get up the gumption to sit down and talk about it into a microphone at least. You don't even have to write it with your fingers or type it on a typewriter.
71. WHY CAN'T YOU USE A LITTLE IMAGINATION AND THINK about all the people out there that are going to hear it? You'd never be able to a be a radio broadcaster, I'll tell you, because they can seldom have a studio audience.
72. DID I TELL YOU THE STORY ABOUT DEAR OLD DR A.U. MICHELSON, the great Jewish evangelist? He sat up there all alone in his office till two or three o'clock in the morning recording his worldwide broadcasts, a rumbling voice behind the dark door, with nobody listening but the microphone. But he could put real inspiration, real heart and real love, real feeling into it just sitting there absolutely alone talking to a tape recorder. He had enough vision, enough faith, enough inspiration to know that there were millions of people listening. But you can't seem to get that through your thick skulls. Like Ho said when he was a child, "I know I don't like it because I never had any". Some of you leaders are saying "I never tried it, so I can't do it. I've got to go down and talk to the Colony and talk to my secretary."
73. MY LORD, GOD'S LISTENING! WHY DON'T YOU TELL HIM ABOUT IT? It's not nearly as hard, it doesn't take near as much work as planning or as much thought, or even as much inspiration to go down to a meeting as I used to do, and ramble on and on for hours. I know, I've done it.
74. BUT EVEN THOUGH IT IS HARDER, IT'S BEST TO SIT DOWN AND THINK AND PLAN and pray and try to figure out what you're going to say in order to get it down on paper in some concise form that isn't going to be too long, and get it to all the people. Some of the worst things I have produced are those ranting, raving, raring, tearing, long, rambling tape-recorded discourses, that give the typists breakdowns and that the poor printers must have nightmares trying to print!
75. SOME OF THE BEST THINGS THAT I'VE HAD TO WRITE DOWN WERE THE MOST INSPIRED.--That Letter "Cromwell" for example. I think it's inspired whether you know it or not. It is eloquent, it is oratorical, it is inspired, and it's only about two pages.
76. IT WAS WRITTEN UP IN A LITTLE ROOM ALL ALONE with only Maria listening, just getting on fire, inspired and pacing back and forth and dictating it. I was having to pause between phrases and clauses and sentences for Maria to write it down and still try to hold the thought, and to think. You don't even have to do that, you can dictate it into the microphone if you want to.
77. EVEN IF ALL YOU HAVE IS WHAT YOU'VE ALREADY WRITTEN IN LOGS, NOTES OR LETTERS YOU WROTE, you should be able to sit down and take those and go over them, analyse them, mark them, organise them and write the story. If you guys don't know how to do it and you just have a mental block and you flatly refuse and won't do it, someone will have to do it for you.
78. BUT I DON'T THINK THAT WOULD BE NEARLY AS EFFECTIVE AS YOUR OWN DESCRIPTION in your own words of what happened to you. Why should it be told second-hand, or third-hand hearsay, when you can sit down and write it in your own words?
79. SO WHAT, IF IT'S NOT PERFECT? It's you, it's your words! I don't try to write like somebody else, I don't try to write like my grandfather or my mother. I'm just me and I write what I feel inspired to say, and I say it! Why in the world can't you do it?
80. IF YOU CAN'T DO IT ANY OTHER WAY, the simplest way in the world to cut down all the extraneous steps and wordiness and still include all the main points is this: Pick out the top pictures from your adventure, divide them among your team members and decide which ones of you want to write which stories about which pictures. Then figure about how much space you've got to give each of those and try to keep it down to about a paragraph or so per picture. If they're really interesting pictures, maybe you can take a couple of paragraphs and perhaps leave out another picture. Why can't you sit down and hold the picture in your hand and do the way I used to do with my slide lectures?
81. I USED TO GET UP THERE BEHIND THE SLIDE PROJECTOR SHOVING THOSE SLIDES THROUGH MYSELF. I didn't trust anybody else to do it, but I'd take a box of slides in one hand and a little stack of a few slides in the other, and while I was running through that I was able to look at each picture and know what I wanted to say about that picture and tell the audience.
82. I HAD SOME TREMENDOUS LECTURES, but, you know, they're all totally lost now.--Nobody ever recorded them, they were never put on paper, so they're absolutely gone! Did you know that?
83. THERE'S ONLY ONE OF THEM THAT IS RECORDED AND IS ON PAPER, and it continues to this day in the classbook.--Just one of them! Do you know what it is? "Bible Prophecy in Palestine"--that's the only one.--And you know why? Because a friend and I decided that these lectures were so good they ought to be recorded and written up and we ought to make film strips out of them and try to produce them to get out the Word and make some money on them, so he pushed me to it.
84. I HAD TO DO IT BECAUSE HE VIRTUALLY MADE ME. We went down there and turned out several of these film strips of Bible Prophecy in Palestine, and he said, "Now you've got to write the script." Well, I had lectured time and time and time again, but I had never written down one single word, not a word, except the little helter-skelter notes I had.
85. BUT NOW I HAD TO SIT DOWN AND WRITE IT OUT, AND I DID. You have that lesson verbatim, exactly what I wrote for the script!
86. BUT YOU KIDS CAN'T EVEN SIT DOWN AND LOOK AT A PICTURE AND WRITE DOWN OR TELL ITS STORY in a few of your own words. Oh you can sit down with a little group and you want to show everyone your pictures and you want to tell them all about them, but you don't want to tell the rest of the world. You don't want to tell the microphone.--Why not? Why not? Time's a-wasting! Valuable days have gone by. Pretty soon it's no longer an exciting news story, it's become ancient history!
87. NOW WRITING MAY NOT BE YOUR MAJOR CALLING: Somebody has to be a street fighter and a frontline soldier and somebody has to organise and manage. But for God's sake, on one little assignment we ask you to sit down and write the story of your trip and you can't even write a word! It's almost unbelievable!
88. WHY CAN'T YOU AT LEAST PICK OUT WHAT YOU THINK ARE YOUR BEST PICTURES AND THEN SIT DOWN, EACH OF YOU, AND WRITE YOUR OWN STORY on those pictures or dictate it into a tape recorder, whatever you're going to do, and do it now!--Tomorrow may be too late! Because if you don't, if you do not make some progress with that story so that we can see some visible progress that you are accomplishing something, to select your pictures and start your stories, you're washed up as reporters and you have no right to ever sit in on any more news conferences or interviews or events or trips as a correspondent!
89. SOME OF YOU ARE LOUSY CORRESPONDENTS, and someone else will have to take the information second-hand and write it for you, and know what they'll use? They'll just have to go right straight from the letters you wrote, something that's recorded, something that's written that they can use! If you guys cannot sit down and write in a few words a simple story of each picture, and if you can't do it while it's still news, you are falling as reporters for the Lord!
90. WE'LL HAVE TO SEND SOMEONE ELSE NEXT TIME in your place, a dear little disciple who writes good reports! Yes, we'll send somebody in your stead who can report, who writes a note on every photograph and every piece, little flunkies who are able to faithfully report because they don't know any better than to obey, they don't know any better than to know that reports are required of them and that they have to write them and that they have to write them!
91. BUT SOME OF YOU ARE SO ROYALLY TREATED and so royally privileged you think you don't have to do anything like that: Everybody can just take your word for it. After all, why should you have to sit down and slave away over a typewriter or a tape recorder and work it out and dictate it or write it? That's just about the way some of you do.
92. WE GET LITTLE OR NO REPORT, PRECIOUS LITTLE, OUT OF SOME OF YOU, INCLUDING TOP LEADERS! Weeks, weeks and weeks there and still no report! Some of you top leaders are the worst in the whole Revolution when it comes to sitting down and reporting faithfully. How you expect it and require it of others when you don't do it yourself and are not willing to do it yourself I'll never know!
93. BUT, BOY, DO YOU REQUIRE REPORTING FROM OTHER PEOPLE!--The most complicated kind of reporting I ever heard of! I can't even understand the advisories that you send out on how to write a report! If I were the average kid out there I'd give up half way through the advisory! I'd get so confused I wouldn't know what the score was! You spend pages and pages telling other people how to write their reports, and yet you're not willing to sit down and write one simple little report yourself!
94. SOME OF YOU GUYS ARE SPOILED ROTTEN, that's what wrong with you! We let you get away with too much. I have disciplined Jeth, I have disciplined Josh, I have disciplined Deborah and I have disciplined Mom and others. I have virtually demoted and exiled and almost crucified some of those people because of their mistakes and their disobediences and failure to do what they were told to do and the hell of messes they made as a result! But I went unusually easy on some of you younger ones.
95. BUT YOU'RE NOT GOING TO BE ABLE TO WORK MUCH LONGER HERE WITH US UNLESS YOU DO WHAT WE TELL YOU TO DO! If you can't do what we tell you to do, and when we tell you to do it, and get it done, then you're not going to be any good to us, and we might as well send you back to the trenches where you can do it, where you can do it, where you can do as you please, live or die! Some of you have been on an assignment a long time and we have yet to see a thing accomplished on your report!--What's your excuse?
96. IF YOU WERE CORRESPONDENTS FOR ANY OTHER NEWSPAPER BUT OURS YOU WOULD BE FIRED RIGHT NOW--END OF JOB! Because your story is now getting so old it's almost ancient history. Now maybe we can still publish it like it just happened if you'll publish it like it just happened if you'll hurry up, for God's sake, and just get it written! Jesus, help us, Lord Jesus! Well, you need to do some praying, I'll tell you! You feel neglected? Well, you're not neglected, but you sure have neglected your job and your work! You're not neglected but you've been negligent and neglecting what you're supposed to do!
97. WE WANT YOU TO WRITE THE STORY, but you go off in a huff and you sit down and twiddle your thumbs because you can't have a conference and tell us all about everything that happened and what shall we do and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah!--When the world hasn't even heard the story yet, our own kids haven't even heard it, and some of them don't even know you've been there!--At the rate you're going they never will!
98. I WANT TO SEE SOME PROGRESS ON THOSE STORIES or you are fired as reporters as far as I'm concerned! You are no longer correspondents because you don't correspond! That's that, period!
99. PRAY AND ASK THE LORD TO FORGIVE YOU. Pick out those pictures and lay them out on your desk in the order in which you think they ought to be used, and then you number them and choose which pictures, and who's going to tell which stories. The dictate your captions by number, so we'll know which picture you're talking about. It's just that simple!
100. WHY YOU CAN'T DO IT I DON'T KNOW, but we're going to find out soon or you're through as far as that job's concerned! We'll have to write it for you! It's just plain hard work! God bless you! I love you--that's why I spank you. "For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth"--Heb.12:5-13.
101. READ IT!--SOMEONE WROTE IT DOWN FOR YOU, and therefore we still have it for our instruction and encouragement after nearly 2,000 years!--Think of that!--Write it down!--Someone may be reading yours years from now and need it very much!
102. PUT IT ON PAPER for those now and those to come.--It's "Paper Power"! "The pen is mightier than the sword!" We can change the world with out message through "Paper Power"!--Write it now!--Tomorrow will be too late!
103. GET THOSE REPORTS IN TODAY!
Copyright (c) 1998 by The Family}
