(Mrs. O'Darby and a local Southern Baptist pastor. At least that's what he said.)
If you've read my testimony – and if not, what's the matter with you, anyway? – you know I entered a Baptist seminary shortly after graduating from college. Alas, I quickly dropped out for the reasons I explain in my testimony.
One problem: When I was a newly minted Christian and had no clue what I was doing, I'd taken a public vow to enter into "fulltime Christian service." Seminary was the first step in fulfillment of that vow.
After dropping out, I did nothing that even vaguely resembled fulltime Christian service for more than 20 years. As you might imagine, this nagged at me from time to time.
Then, voila, it happened.
Through unusual circumstances involving one of my law partners (who was about as religious as a Ford hubcap), I was introduced to the founder of a renowned Christian ministry for the mentally and physically challenged. ("Challenged" being a euphemism for "severely impaired.") He immediately offered me the presidency of a sizable operation he was launching.
My wife and I thought we'd have more credibility with the ministry staff if we first worked directly with the challenged folks the ministry was helping. They were euphemistically called "ranchers" because the ministry operated a rural campus and farm on many acres. We agreed to become live-in houseparents for five adult female ranchers.
It sounded like it would be enjoyable and rewarding – and, at last, I'd be fulfilling my vow!
We sold our home. We sold our car and bought an old Dodge van to transport our ranchers. We sold almost everything we had. I resigned my partnership with the law firm and went on inactive status with the state bar. (Only by the grace of God, as you'll see, did I not fully resign from the bar.)
We moved into a doublewide mobile home with our ranchers. There were about 15 such homes on the campus. We had a little apartment at one end. We were paid minimum wage and the checks were irregular at best. There were no medical benefits or other perks of any kind. We repeatedly dipped into our savings to buy our ranchers little gifts and treats. We were on duty for ten straight 24-hour days and then off for two (still in our apartment) while someone else filled in.
The job itself was a rude awakening. My delusional image of the mentally challenged as peaceful sweeties was shattered in about three hours. Our five ranchers had impairments so severe their own parents couldn't deal with any one of them. They gladly paid the ministry something like $3000 a month to be free of them. Moreover, their impairments were all over the map, from zombie-like autism to violent schizophrenia. To put them all together under one roof was insane and dangerous. We coped, but I quickly concluded that anyone who did this for more than a year had to be either a masochist or a saint of the first magnitude.
But the job, grueling as it was, wasn't the real problem. The ministry was a fraud. The founder who had recruited me and who lived on a hill directly above the campus hadn't set foot on the place in years. Conditions were deplorable and dangerous. The communal meals were a health department's worst nightmare, but the founder carefully avoided any governmental regulation or oversight. His sons were paid exorbitant salaries to do precisely nothing. Gifts to the ministry, including new vehicles, were diverted to them. (I personally received a check for $225 from a visiting donor, only to be told it would "miraculously" pay one son's entry fee at a golf outing.) Having been recruited as a future president, I never saw or spoke to the guy again before the day we were booted. Because I was a lawyer, I was under a constant cloud of skepticism and suspicion on the part of the strange cult-like characters who administered the campus for him.
A wonderful guy named Mark who had been with him for years saw the same things I did, and we had many discussions. "We can't let the dreamer kill the dream." he'd often say. Finally, after four months, I could take no more. I wrote a respectful, lawyerly memo to the founder, carefully addressing in measured terms some of the things I had observed and making a suggestions for improvement. I let Mark review it before I dropped it in the founder's mail slot in the administration building.
Good-bye, O'Darby and Mrs. O'Darby.
We were summoned to his home on the hill first thing the next morning. We were informed we'd be leaving that very morning. I was "too strong of a personality" and should "go start [my] own damn ministry." Anyone who had confided in us (we gave no names) would be identified and shown the door as well. There was a coldness about him that was almost satanic. In fact, that was my first reaction: "We just met Satan, face to face."
We stumbled back to our little apartment in shock and started packing. A big goon named Pastor Randy who had never liked me soon arrived and started shoving me around. I fended him off with an aluminum baseball bat and later filed a criminal complaint. Our ranchers and others who knew and liked us were screaming and crying and wanting to know what was happening. It was heartbreaking.
My wife and I and our cat Deputy Baby sat in the parking lot in our old van looking at each other with no clue as to what to do next.
Hey, thanks, God – that fulltime vow thing worked out REALLY well!
On a pure whim, I pointed the van at Rochester, New York, 2,000 miles away. I'd worked for a large corporation in Rochester a few years earlier and had always liked it. The van broke down before we had reached the Arizona border, but we eventually made it.
We got an apartment in a funky old midtown building. We were thrilled when my wife soon found a minimum-wage cashier's job at a 7-11. I sent out resumes all over the place (but not for lawyer jobs because I wasn't a New York lawyer, which limited me to anything else for which my skills might be a plausible fit).
But I also wrote a letter back to the founder of the ministry: Yeah, pal, you thoroughly ruined our lives in the short term. But guess what? Evil like yours will NEVER prevail. Sooner or later, you WILL have your day of reckoning.
It was really kind of a bold and feisty letter for someone in my circumstances to be sending.
A couple of months later, I felt like an Old Testament prophet. Good old Mark had taken my memo to the Board of Directors. Because this was a major ministry, the board members were serious lawyers and business and financial types in Phoenix.
Unbelievably, the founder and his sons were o-u-t, OUT. Gone from the very ministry he had started (originally with good intentions, I believe) 25 years earlier. They were gone so fast I could scarcely believe it. Over a period of years, the ministry and the campus were transformed into what they always should have been. Today, more than 30 years later, the campus is a well-run showplace that "just barely" acknowledges the founder in its publications.
Now I understood: God had held me to my vow, if only for a few months. Being who I was, I was able to do what someone who wasn't a lawyer and who didn't have my particular personality and skill set might not have been able to do. It wasn't so much a matter of "getting" the fraudulent founder as helping the ranchers and their parents.
But what about us, God?
I visited my old boss in Rochester. No, he had nothing for me. But then he called a couple of days later. The company was involved in a gigantic antitrust lawsuit and could use my skills after all. I hurried down to his office.
"What would it take for you to do some research and writing?" he asked.
I was desperate but tried not to show it. "Oh, maybe $15 an hour?" I suggested, hoping it wasn't too much.
"I already have approval for $125, so we'll go with that," he chuckled.
Suddenly, I was minting money – working as much as I wanted on my own schedule.
OK, God, thanks!
I knew it couldn't last forever, of course. In a few months I started scanning the help wanted ads in Arizona newspapers at the Rochester Library. One day I saw a little classified ad by the Arizona Attorney General. They wanted someone in the remote outpost of Kingman, where I'd once lived.
The person who took the call "just happened" to be an old law school classmate of mine. "Oh, you don't even have to interview," she said. "The job is yours. Just come on back."
I called the Arizona Bar to see what it would take to reactivate my license. Since I'd been gone less than a year, it would take pretty much nothing. We'll just put you back on active status right now, OK?
I called the developer of the subdivision where we had lived. Did they have any homes similar to the one we'd sold?
"Uh-huh, there's one exactly like it the next street over, except this one has a fireplace." We bought it by fax, sight-unseen.
Just about exactly one year after entering into fiasco-filled fulltime Christian service, we were back in Arizona with a new job, a new house, new furniture, a new car and two cats I'd adopted at the Kingman pound.
Nice work, God! Really nice work, Big Fella!
I really can't attribute this bizarre sequence of events to anything other than the hand of God. It truly seemed as though He held me to my vow for a very specific purpose, put me through hell and then set me back on my feet so fast my head was spinning. It's one of a handful of really complex, life-altering sequences I can only explain by divine intervention.
At some level, I'd love to tell you the name of the ministry and its founder. I won't, however, because he died several years ago and I do believe he had started the ministry with godly intentions. Like so many of us, however, ego and the lure of money and fame proved to be his undoing.
