My experience with Children of God/The Family, Part VI
Part I : Part II : Part III : Part IV : Part V : Part VI : Part VII : Part VIII : Part IX : Part X : Part XI
Most people would say, "Once someone has left a controlling group, they are free.
Obviously they are not brainwashed or under mind control, they could just walk away and
get on with their life."
How I wish this had been true...
When I went home to visit my parents at Christmas, it is important to note that in my mind
at that moment I was NOT leaving the group. I was simply obeying my leader Mo, to go home
and preach the final message of salvation to them before the destruction of America.
When I arrived at my parents' home, I gave them a customary hug. This hug was not the
relief hug of, "Oh, wow, it has been so long, I have not seen you and I missed you
Mom and Dad." No, it was a compulsory goodwill pastor-to-the-flock hug of God Bless
You, my poor sinners.
When I arrived, I did not sit down relaxed and confortable with them and try to catch up
on all the news of everyone, or see what they had that was new, etc.
I am sure they were bewildered. I got upset immediately with my mother when she called me
by my birth name, the one she had named me; and especially upsetting was when my dad
called me his favorite nickname. My shoulders went stiff and I corrected them both that my
name was Jublilee, and that's who I was now and they should never call me that other name
again.
Then I asked stiffly where I was staying during my visit. My mother showed me politely to
my old room which was now completely different because the COG had removed all my
belongings when we did my "Forsake All." That is what they named the act of
collecting everything you have, taking it back to the colony and removing it from your
possession. They would either claim it themselves or sell it, etc. There was, sadly,
nothing here to remind me of who I really was.
Now, many people who adhere to different faiths undertake a forsaking of this kind. The
COG often compared themselves to nuns and priests when they take their vows. But the big
difference is that in the other Christian communities, these goods are given to the
person's family or distributed to the poor of the community, not to the Church, or the
local priest or pastor and his family.
I was very afraid that now I was right in the heart of Satan's territory. This is what we
had been repeatedly conditioned in the COG to believe about everything about the world
outside our colonies. To the point where even my parents' love for me was considered evil,
because they criticized the group, The Children of God.
During the next two weeks, I refuzed to eat white sugar or white bread, considered
unhealthy and evil by Mo. The same went for chocolate or chips, which I used to love. I
refuzed to watch TV because Mo told us Satan was using it to brainwash us to believe
worldly Satanic lies and values.
I did my praying and memorizing of the Bible verses and Mo letter quotes every morning as
I used to.
Every chance I got or every time someone visited, including several of my old friends, I
would try to preach about Jesus and the Family. These would sometimes start out as simple
conversations about music or sports, for example, which I would use as a platform to
preach from.
As you can imagine, it was not very pleasant for my parents and my father especially was
getting angry. I brought out some literature to give to my friends. Now there was a
specific and important separation in the Mo letters.
There were Mo letters which were labelled GP meaning General Public, and then there were
DOs, or Disciples Only.
The GP letters told of typical Christian values and quoted lots of Bible verses, fairly
harmless non-offensive stuff with no particular details about our group. What we wanted
the public to know.
But the DO letters talked about sex and people who were our enemies and about problems
that were going on within the COG. These letters were only available to those who had been
in the group a year or as long as the leaders deemed you "revolutionary enough"
to handle them. Or in other words, to keep them quiet and not question them.
Back at the commune, at the end of the study time before the doors of the colony were
opened or unlocked, all of those who had their DO collection of letters would acutally
lock them up in suitcases and store them in a vault in the leader's office.
Later on I found there was another level called LO for Leaders' Only. But that was much
later on.
The order was that if ever the commune was raided by the police or authorities, these DO
and LO letters were to be burned.
Well, the point of all this was that we were never allowed to take these DO and LO letters
outside of our communes. Especially to dangerous places like our parents' homes.
So these letters I tried to give to my friends were the GP letters, like the ones we would
hand out on the streets.
My father blew up at me and told me never to do that again. He did not want his home to
become a pulpit. So I took that as a direct attack on my religion.
Two weeks went by and my leader Amaziah never called me. So when he finally did call me
the next week, I was a bit upset. He sternly asked me what I had been doing, had I been
faithfull to the Lord, etc. By then I was actually committing the sin of eating chocolate
cookies and chips and oh my God, a glass of coke.
He asked me if I felt my work was done spreading the final warning to my friends and
family and was I ready to come back. I was starting to feel the pure pleasure of
occasionally watching the hockey games on TV with my dad, which was considered worshipping
war to Mo. Finally, I told Amaziah that I felt I had more preaching to do.
Amaziah reminded me of the Bible verse, Rebellion is as the Sin of Witchcraft, and what
happened to Lot's wife who looked back on Sodom and Gomorrah, she was turned in to a
piller of salt. He then told me, quoting Mo, God hates backsliders. By then I felt so
guilty, I just told him I was staying home.
And that is what I did. Now I had a dilemma, what was I going to do to fulfil my new
religious conviction and not be in the Chosen Family? I still also believed the end of
America was coming as Mo predicted. I still believed Mo was God's prophet to tell us God's
words.
So I went back to my highschool and asked my principal if I could go into several classes
and tell them of my newfound lifestyle.
He agreed to let me talk to the sociology class, the religion class, and history class.
Nobody was really impressed. Then in a few weeks I enrolled in night courses at the school
to take bookkeeping courses and typing.
Within a couple of months I got a job working at the bank where my father, mother,
brother, and his wife worked.
It was large bank in downtown Toronto, so we never saw each other. I tried to preach to
everyone at work, friends, bosses, acquaintances, etc. I even had two friends who prayed
with me and started reading the Bible and Mo letters with me at their houses. So I felt I
had at least two people to save before I went back.
Then I started reading my Mo letters less, and the Bible, and started going out
occasionally with my new friends from work and going dancing, etc.
It was at a night club one evening that I met the fellow who would be my boyfriend for the
next year. We were falling madly in love. I though, was still a virgin and he respected my
desire to stay that way until I got married.
I absolutely would not attend a church. Mo had told us how evil an hypocritical church
Christians were. It was like saying a swear word to call them "Church
Christians."
My new boyfriend, we'll call Steve, had grown up out west in a Mennonite Community and
left as soon as he got a little older. He completely refused to talk about God or let me
talk about God either.
What a switch!! And yet, he was kind and gentle and clean and polite, a real sweet and
loving person. My parents thought he was wonderful and practically adopted him.
I tried to reach the commune by phone to see if I could pray with someone about my new
boyfriend but the commune was no longer there.
So a year went by with absolutely no contact with The COG. I tried to talk to Steve about
my experiences and he simply told me the group was stupid and not Godly.
Then one day, we were walking happily down the street, very deeply in love, in fact we had
just bought two matching jackets together, and suddenly I heard a sound that stopped me
dead in my tracks, "Jubilee!!! Sister, God Bless You, how are you, where have you
been? We really miss you."
I remember Steve's face going dark and distorted. I spun around to look in to the face of
one of my long lost brothers. He ran up and gave me a big hug. Within seconds, I was not
myself anymore, I was Jubilee. In a short time the brother had given me the newest Mo
letter and wrote the address of the commune and the phone number on it and told me how
much things had gotten better in the family.
Steve and I fought all the way home to my parents house. He kept insisting that these
people were not really my friends and they would hurt me again like I had been hurt
before. Everything he said just bounced off me as if I could not hear him.
Suddenly, I was accusing him of not loving God or me and of wanting to cheat on me with
one of my friends. He stood sadly staring at me in disbelief at the door of my parents'
home. "Please," he pleaded, "don't go back to them."
I loved him so much, I was seriously thinking of marrying him, but I was stuck in the web
of the COG. So I broke up with him then and there, telling him I had to pray about it but
I had decided to serve God. I told him that the USA was going to be destroyed and I had to
be with God's family.
I lay on the couch for the next 3 days weeping and agonizing in prayer, asking the Lord to
give me the strength to break up with Steve and go back.
My mother and father were so sad and confused. I had handed in my resignation at work and
was preparing myself to leave. I even visited the commune a couple of times to go out
witnessing with the brethren. They now called this Litnessing instead because 90 % of your
time was spent handing out, selling the Mo letters on the streets instead of preaching.
The explanation Mo gave was that God's word through Mo would convert their souls, it was
not up to us to do it on the spot. It also reached more people that way, he said.
Unexpectedly during this time, I went out with my good friend from work and her sister to
a night club, to sort of say goodbye, to celebrate my sendoff.
During this last night, I met a fellow, we'll call him Leonard, that would affect another
great change in my plans.
End of Part VI
A
