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Passing of the
Patriarch
by Chris Geer
Part 1 of 5
Introduction
15 February 1986 Gartmore Scotland
God's richest blessings to you according to
the wonderful promises of His Word in the wonderful name of Jesus Christ
the lord.
I set pen to paper to tell the last days of
the life of Dr. Victor Paul Wierwille. After having spent so many days
together with him over the course of the years that I was his aide,
companion and confidant it was greatly significant to me that I was
allowed to spend the last twenty-two days of his life with him.
Dr. Wierwille had a knack of filling days
to the very brim with life, and he did not deviate from the norm in his
last days before he fell asleep. I have recorded here the content of those
days, though not in their entirety. Dr. Wierwille and I spent between
thirty-six and forty hours discussing topics as varied as God's Word,
affairs of the Ministry, agriculture, local topography, history, public
relations, books of common interest to us both and personal matters. He
counseled with believers and with Way Corps, worked with Juanita Carey on
her research on the life of E. W. Bullinger and involved himself with
other projects and interests not recorded here.
What I have attempted to record are the
basic activities of his last days and pertinent portions of the many hours
of conversations that we had during that space of time. I have included
relevant background to add clarity and continuity. I have not left out
parts to intentionally slight anyone or diminish the importance of the
time that they were blessed to spend with Dr. Wierwille during his last
days. Nothing could be farther from my heart or mind.
I am not a writer, but I trust that you
will find the text spiritually invigorating. I present it for your
consideration. It is my firm believing that God will give understanding to
the far from adequate job that I am capable of doing to communicate the
contents of the last days of Dr. Wierwille's life which I have called The
Passing of a Patriarch.
Definition of PATRIARCH from Oxford English
Dictionary (Volume VII ). 4: One who is regarded as the father or founder
of an order, institution or (by extension) of a science, school of
thought, Order the like.
Definition of PATRIARCH from Webster
Dictionary: 1 b: a man who is father or founder
c: (1): the oldest or representative of a
group (2): a venerable old man
d: a man who is head of a patriarchy
The Passing of a Patriarch Memories flood
my mind as I think of the events that led up to and surrounded the final
time that I spent with Dr. Wierwille. In December of 1984 we at long last
bought a location for The Way Corps to begin in Europe. This had been the
original intent when we came to Europe in 1983. It seems strange now to
think back that we had to fight through so much to get to the day that was
supposed to have been our beginning, but we did.
Had Dr. Wierwille not been so deeply
involved in every step along the road it would be easy to think that what
we had faced would have been a figment of imagination. The process to
finally acquire a Way Corps location in Europe had been a longer, harder
road than any of us would have anticipated. It was a road paved with
treachery and disappointment, but finally a road that ended with the great
delivering presence of God clearly manifested.
The final Way Corps location was not at all
what we had anticipated. It is located in an area that is far removed from
easily accessible transportation. It is also in a very difficult part of
the British Isles to facilitate business needs, and perhaps worst of all,
it is isolated from any large groups of believers. Our primary choice in
England would have had good transportation, easy access to businesses that
we had long dealt with and been close to a majority of the believers in
Britain as well as being far more accessible to the majority of European
believers.
There had been speculation during the WOW
Festival 1984/85 that Dr. Wierwille and perhaps Mrs. Wierwille would come
to visit us at the new Corps location in Gartmore, Scotland, shortly after
the New Year's period of 1985. However, after the WOW Festival, I got a
letter from Dr. Wierwille telling me that he would not be coming until
after the opening of The Word Over The World Auditorium, which was due to
take place in March.
In one sense I was relieved and in another
I was not. Though I would have loved to have seen Dr. Wierwille and to
have had his counsel at the beginning of such a project, our new location
was in Scotland which was not at all what we had wanted or planned for.
The setting of it was breathtakingly beautiful, but its remoteness made
doing business extremely difficult. This we suspected to be true before we
made the final decision to accept Scotland, and in particular Gartmore.
Knowing and coping are often very different things, and this was one of
the times that proved this out.
We had lost the original location in
England that we had selected because our own Way Corps graduates were not
capable of handling things involved in getting a location. They just
collapsed under the pressure. The increased difficulty in doing business
in a remoter area of Scotland made me glad to have the extra time to
prepare for Dr. and Mrs. Wierwille's visit.
There were massive things that needed
attention immediately upon our moving in. There had been very little
maintenance to the roofs and gutters and as a result there was
considerable leakage in any event of rain.
There was almost no hot water and the
heating was very poor. We either froze or boiled, and if we boiled we did
it at a great cost. There was so little hot water in fact that for quite a
while we used the showers adjacent to the large gymnasium in the Knox
Centre to shower, which meant walking across the centre of the campus in
robes and towels in the wintertime.
When we accepted the decision to locate the
Corps in Scotland, we had to evaluate whether Chris and Nancy Kent could
handle the United Kingdom from Scotland or whether they would have to stay
in Altrincham to be central to the country. Finally we decided that with
the percentage of our work that was in the southern part of the country it
was too much to tack on the additional drive to get to Manchester, let
alone from there to the south coast. It became evident that for the work
of the Ministry it would be more expedient to leave them in Altrincham.
That left us without the man whom we had felt could handle our Way
Builders and without Nancy whom we had thought would have been able to
handle our bookkeeping.
One of the other things that we faced was
Barbara's pregnancy. Having started in her pregnancy in England, we had
originally contacted doctors in England thinking that we would be in the
Cheshire area. The change from England to Scotland had put intense
personal pressure on not only myself, but Barbara. Because we were
operating basically with no support, her expertise in so many areas was
required in order for mere survival, so she never really had time to
investigate the various medical options that existed. In the end, she
settled for the care of a local doctor who (with the grace of God) helped
her through her pregnancy. We found out later of his intense dislike for
Americans and extreme unwillingness to be helpful; however, (again the
grace of God) she was referred to the correct people at the correct time
for her prenatal care.
The times leading up to the visit of Dr.
and Mrs. Wierwille were quite a challenge in themselves. Besides running
the first year of a Way Corps programme outside of the United States and
with multicultural and multilingual considerations, we were in a new
location that had massive physical problems to overcome. We also had to
acquire basically everything to outfit the location and do it in a culture
and a business community that we were not experts in.
When we moved into the facility, there was
one telephone which worked only sporadically. We had selected a telephone
system to replace the single wall phone that existed upon arrival, but due
to the costs involved and other factors we had decided to run all the
internal cables ourselves. This allowed us also to run the audio and video
lines at the same lime, and we ended up running approximately one mile of
cables all told. The telephone installation was to have been completed by
26 March, but the engineer did not even arrive to start the installation
until 24 March. When he did arrive it was only because we had started
making concerted complaints. It turned out when he did arrive that he did
not even know how to fit the new switch equipment. It was all new to him
and because I was familiar with the system it required considerable
assistance on my part. The project which was to have been completed by 26
March was in fact not completed until well after Dr. Wierwille's death in
May.
Dr. Wierwille's previous visit to Europe in
1984 had overlapped at its tail-end with the commencement of our Advanced
Class which we were holding in Bowdon, England, just adjacent to
Altrincham where we then lived. During that Advanced Class, we made
available, with Yann Beauvois, who had helped with the translation of the
Advanced Class into French, running the French Advanced Class
simultaneously with the running of the English Advanced Class in the same
facility. We had shared the same meals and auxiliary tapes (with
translation) and the Advanced Class had been handled for the
French-speaking students in French, and for the balance of the class in
English.
As I had been concerned with not only Dr.
Wierwille's visit but with the massive problems that we still faced at
that time, I attended portions of the French class but really I allowed
Yann the freedom to handle it. It was during the course of running that
Advanced Class in Bowdon that we began thinking and planning toward
running an even bigger multilingual Advanced Class the following year.
We had decided on Bonn, Germany, as the
location, and had decided to run English, French and Spanish and to have
Wolfgang Schneider do the first live presentation of the German Advanced
Class. It seemed the only feasible way we had of getting the Advanced
Class to people who needed it in other languages. We did not have anybody
else at the time who would have been qualified to have run an Advanced
Class except myself, and I simply did not have the time to run four
separate Advanced Classes in a year in four separate locations if we were
going to start The Way Corps and if I was going to carry on with the
remainder of the work.
Bonn was where Wolfgang lived, and I felt
this would give him the greatest ease at handling the class. It proved a
good choice too, because of coordination considerations. It was a central
point for all to travel to easily and offered the facilities that we
needed to do the class. I thought that since I spoke all the languages
except German I would be able to instruct all four classes and have a
class assistant for each class. Ray Brandt was to be my assistant in the
English language class, Claus Kratzenberg in the German language class,
Nicole Könz in the French language class and David Grimsditch in the
Spanish language class.
One of the other problems we faced in
putting together the multilingual Advanced Class was the production of the
syllabi and other materials for the classes, but I am getting ahead of
myself at this point, I really need to go back to the period following our
acquisition of Gartmore House.
One of the challenges that we were faced
with during the European WOW Festival and immediately following it was
cooking. To start with we needed to get a kitchen equipped and stocked.
Both Barbara and I are experienced at cooking for large groups and at menu
preparation, etc. It was largely Barbara who prepared the food for the WOW
Festival, and then directly following the Festival I personally began
handling the responsibilities of cooking three meals a day.
We were genuinely concerned from the
earliest days of the consideration of a Way Corps in Europe with the
quality of the food. This is something that Dr. Wierwille and I talked
over long before we ever came to Europe. He indicated that one of the
things of prime importance in a European Way Corps would be a good diet
with things that were readily available to hand so that our Corps in
Europe could learn to eat properly. Dr. Wierwille had noticed that there
was a tremendous weakness among the European Corps as regards their eating
habits. He pointed this out to me before we ever left the U.S.A. and I
knew that it would be quite a challenge and one of our major
considerations.
We advertised locally for a cook, and the
closest we came was in acquiring the help of a young man from Aberfoyle,
the adjacent village, whose help was more along the lines of cleaning and
washing-up. We were very blessed that he ended up taking the Power for
Abundant Living class though.
I continued to do the cooking, working with
some of the In-residence Corps as we went and finally took on trial one of
our Advanced Class graduates from the Continent. He had the
sense-knowledge qualifications to be able to handle the responsibility,
but within a period of three weeks or less it became quite evident that he
would not work out. So once again I assumed the responsibilities of
cooking three meals a day in the kitchen in addition to handling The Way
Corps programme and handling the work of the European Region. This also
included all the menu preparation as well as all of the shopping to buy in
the goods for the meals. I suppose I could have compromised and just let
it go, but I did not feel spiritually right about it, so I did not.
The first European Corps opened directly
after the WOW Festival. All of these things were taking a toll on me
physically. By the time we actually acquired a location, I was quite tired
from the concerted efforts I had exerted physically, mentally and
spiritually. When we lost our initial location, time was short, so it
required extreme effort to locate and evaluate other available properties.
Even though we needed to move quickly, careful evaluation was required so
that we would not find ourselves in a bind legally or caught in a bad
business deal. This meant learning the legal considerations which differed
from England to Scotland after having recently learned the English. Once
acquisition was made, there was a voluminous amount of work to do in
stocking the location so that we could begin to operate.
Almost from the earliest days of The Way
Corps we began to experience serious problems with a number of the senior
Corps. Their attitudes and thinking were very far from what Way Corps'
should be. It turned into a confrontation battle from early on in the
year, and in fact never ended until we dismissed a number of them almost
at the end of the year. This made life difficult, as we had to watch
everything that was done, and really the year turned into an exercise in
confrontation for large portions of the time.
One of the occurrences of these problems
that overlapped with the Advanced Class preparation from this was when a
member of the senior Corps had indicated that he was capable of fixing and
maintaining printing presses and of doing offset printing. I gave him the
responsibility of helping to put back together the offset press which I
had taken apart into its major subsections to bring it from Altrincham
when we moved. When he was finished there was a pile of spare parts and a
press that did not operate properly. I had to get involved in getting it
taken back apart and putting it together properly so that we could print.
Once we had done that, we had another
problem, that of the platemaker. The platemaker that we had been using in
Altrincham had broken just prior to our coming to Scotland. It was, in
fact, an old, very slow platemaker that we had gotten secondhand, so we
took in a photocopier that was meant to make direct-image offset masters.
This deal on the photocopier which we entered into very shortly after the
New Year's period turned out to be the one that taught us how difficult it
is to trade in Scotland, and especially how difficult it is being an
American. The issue of the photocopier/platemaker never really did get
resolved and in the end we had to buy an Addressograph Multigraph
platemaker which worked very well.
Even with the proper
platemaker, our senior
Corps man ended up wasting about six times more paper than he ever
produced finished copy. Furthermore, he never had the honesty to come and
tell us. It was when we found the evidence in the trash one day that we
knew we were in trouble. So on my shoulders fell the responsibility for
printing all the Advanced Class materials for our multilingual Advanced
Classes.
One of the additional disadvantages to
having to have a Corps location in Scotland as opposed to England was the
need to re-establish business contacts. Every time you have to start over
in business it takes time and work to develop good business relations. We
had had quite a good reputation among the firms that we traded with
regularly in England. When we started over in Scotland, it seemed to be a
very challenging adventure because we seemed to be besieged by business
"cowboys' out to take advantage of us, and we still had to rely quite
heavily on our English contacts to fulfill our needs.
During all of this time Barbara was getting
larger and larger and going slower and slower. Even though she was large
and going slowly she still had to maintain some very major
responsibilities. Shortly after the Festival it had become obvious that if
the Ministry was going to survive financially we would have to do all the
bookkeeping for the entire UK Ministry at Gartmore, rather than let it
stay in Altrincham. Things were just moving so quickly and every decision
seemed to be so major that it was the best that we kept track of
everything. This responsibility fell largely to Barbara, and she quite
admirably handled it on a day-by-day basis.
At the same time that all of these other
things were running, the Corps graduate that we had as our secretary was
proving not to be capable of coping with the responsibilities of the job.
It finally became evident that if she was going to stay happy and we were
going to have the work of the Ministry done we would have to change
secretarial help. She left us to go on the field in the spring, and even
before she left, Barbara and I reassumed her full responsibilities until
we got a new secretary in the summer.
When we finally got to the time of the
Advanced Class, The Way Corps were on the field as Lightbearers. Directly
following their departure those of us who were left (both Staff and those
Corps who were to be Staff for the Advanced Class) began printing all of
the materials for the Advanced Class. This took approximately twenty hours
a day for a number of days so that we could pack everything and be ready
to go. We loaded ourselves and all the equipment for the class into one of
our vans and drove to Germany. That meant that, as I was the only driver
on the trip, I drove to Germany from Scotland basically with one rest
stop, and that on the beat crossing.
When we actually began to get involved in
the Advanced Class, I was in for a rather unpleasant surprise initially.
Claus Kratzenberg who was to be the assistant for the German class really
proved inadequate. He would not take direction from Wolfgang, who was the
teacher in this instance, nor from me. He had pretty well made up his mind
that he was going things his way and everybody else could do their own
thing. I tried to work with him, but by the end of the second teaching
session of the class it became evident that the German class would be in
drastic problems if we allowed him to continue in his responsibilities.
This meant that I would have to handle the German class primarily and not
split myself evenly between the classes as I had anticipated.
This presented another problem. The
Advanced Class was supposed to have been an opportunity to physically try
and overcome some of the exhaustion that was catching up with me. The
daily sessions had been scheduled so that the English. French and Spanish
language classes had Twigs in the afternoon. We had placed Twig session
for the German language class in the mornings so Wolfgang would only have
two hours to teach at once. To get the equivalent third hour in, there was
a teaching session in the afternoon while the other language classes were
in Twigs. My intention had been to have an opportunity to rest and
exercise in the afternoons to try and overcome my growing exhaustion. When
I inherited the German language class, the time that I had anticipated
having was no longer available to me.
The entire Advanced Class seemed to be
plagued with problems. Spiritually it was a very high time with a great
enthusiasm among the believers, great deliverance and wonderful
fellowship. However, during the course of the class it became more and
more evident that the quality of the translated works was dubious. The
French was clearly deficient and in places quite misleading. The Spanish
was not laid out at all in the way that I had seen Dr. Wierwille lay
classes out with the attention to detail that he paid. We discovered
linguistic problems in both classes as well as inconsistencies in the
class layouts, and it took an enormous amount of work to try to keep the
classes as a whole on an even keel. By God's mercy and grace the class did
prove to be a success, and at the end of the class I returned home to
Gartmore to get ready for the next two big events, the birth of our baby
and the visit of the Wierwilles.
Barbara had very kindly held on to our
baby, and I was able to be there for the birth. In fact we were home for a
few days before she actually gave birth to our baby. Just five days before
Dr. and Mrs. Wierwille's visit, Abigail Nicole was born in Stirling
hospital. The joy of having a new face in the family also added the
presence of my parents. My mother had come for the birth and had been very
helpful in taking care of Rebecca so that I did not have to be concerned
with that aspect. At the very end of her visit my father came for one day
to see Abigail as well as to see our new entrenchment in Scotland.
The other thing that really required
attention and supervision was the preparation for Dr. and Mrs. Wierwille's
visit. We had been redoing one of the sections in Gartmore House for a
suite of rooms which we called the "ELO Suite". It was not in
particularly good shape when we started and required an extensive amount
of work to get it ready. This meant buying furniture, painting, hanging
wallpaper, refitting the bathroom, laying carpets, fitting a kitchen and
repairing floors as well as installing a workable heating system. All of
this we managed to do and have completed by the time of the Wierwille's
visit.
As the time of Dr. Wierwille's visit drew
closer, I became very concerned with his comfort, starting with the
journey from the airport to the campus. He was flying into Prestwick
Airport, from which we generally estimate transit time at between two and
two and one-half hours. It can be less than that, but because it requires
driving through sections of Glasgow during business times of the day with
traffic to consider, we had to allow that much transit time. I became
quite concerned with whether he would be too tired after the transatlantic
flight to adequately be comfortable in the car for that length of time. I
began contacting helicopter firms to try and contract a helicopter to take
us from Prestwick to Gartmore and land in the front of the house by the
sundial. We did in fact contact and successfully contract with a
helicopter firm that would have permitted us to have him from the airport
to Gartmore in approximately twenty minutes. I thought that this was a
workable solution and we made the necessary arrangements.
In order to accomplish this, Chris Kent was
going to accompany me, and we were to leave from Gartmore at 7:30 in the
morning to drive to Edinburgh, where we would fly with the helicopter to
Prestwick and then back to Gartmore. At approximately 7:28 a.m. the pilot
rang us to say that Edinburgh was closed in with fog, and so was Prestwick,
thus we could not do the trip in the helicopter. This was not only a
change in plans but required some very quick radical shifting, as we had
less than an hour and one-half to get to Prestwick Airport. As soon as we
reorganized ourselves to be able to accommodate Dr. and Mrs. Wierwille in
the car, we left for Prestwick and, despite heavy fog on our journey and
the rush-hour traffic in Glasgow that we experienced, we made the transit
in one hour and eighteen minutes. It was quite a challenge on the way home
to try not to go as fast as we had on the way down.
We arrived at Prestwick Airport and parked
in the car park and began to look for where incoming passengers would be.
The board said that the flight that Dr. and Mrs. Wierwille had flown on
had already landed and that the passengers were in customs. In fact
passengers with luggage-check tags from their flight were coming out of
the doors from customs, and we began to look around to see if Dr. and Mrs.
Wierwille had already come out. As we did not see them, we waited at the
doors. They were the second group of people to come out after our arrival
at the doors.
Dr. Wierwille did look very tired indeed,
and I was so sorry that we were not able to provide for him the helicopter
that I still think was the right solution, but he was in good humour
despite his apparent fatigue. When we arrived at the campus he graciously
greeted all the Corps and Staff, also welcoming Abigail to the Household.
Shortly after that, I escorted Dr. and Mrs. Wierwille upstairs to their
Suite where we began unpacking them.
I helped Dr. Wierwille to undress, so that
he could rest, as I had done so many times before. We put his clothes away
neatly and as I was helping him out of his socks and shoes he started
talking about how blessed he was to have me help him again. What followed,
however, was less expected. It was not his general custom to start talking
about deep things right off the bat. Usually when he had something to talk
about with me it would have come up later on in a conversation or visit
but not this time. He told me how Peter Esmond had blessed him in helping
take care of him. He spoke of how he was very blessed with both Peter and
Christie and their hearts for him. He said that Peter did not have the
abilities that I had in practical fields but that having him to help was
better than having Bill Warga He said that Bill was very talented and
capable but spiritually dishonest. He never had been able to really trust
Bill; Bill's heart had not been to genuinely, lovingly help Doctor. It was
not usual for the things of his heart to be so close to the surface, but I
attributed it to his physical condition of being tired from the journey
and did not really consider any deeper implications at that point.
That afternoon I spent time in the office
in the Suite with Doctor unpacking his briefcases and setting things out
for him. Barbara came up with both girls and we all had a visit. Doctor
had brought a bag of Tootsie Roll Pops with him and gave Rebecca one and
put the rest of the bag in his desk drawer so that she could come get one
from "Grandpa Wierwille" whenever she wanted to. We talked
through the events for the evening and cued videotapes for the night.
After a while I left so that I could finish getting dinner ready.
The first function that he attended after
his rest was dinner that evening for which occasion I had made lamb,
knowing how he loved lamb. After the meal, he wanted to share with the
Corps, but he said that because he was tired and feeling weak he would
like to do it sitting down. This, I think, was the first time that I had
ever seen that happen. He shared about his stop in Massachusetts, about
the tree that Ralph Dubofsky had organized to donate to the Gartmore
campus and about a number of things in the Ministry that were on his
heart.
After he shared, we adjourned to the
Victory Room. Doctor had brought along videotapes of a number of the early
events in the Ministry, and he played these for the Corps and shared about
the related incidents. Later on, he played some High Country Caravan
productions and talked about them. One of the moments of the evening that
really stuck out in my mind was a comment he made to Liz Slater, who had
been a member of Agapé, the music group. He told her that if Agapé had
stayed together and had been faithful that they could have been as good or
better than Branded.
The next morning Doctor was still pretty
tired. Jet lag often took him two or three days to overcome, and so he
took the day pretty easy. We visited on and off during the day and planned
to show the Corps a video that evening. He had asked before he came over
if there was anything that he could bring along to bless us, and there had
been only one thing that I could think of. He had carried a copy of the
movie The Black Stallion. on the coach and showed it to the Corps in the
U.S.A., when I had been traveling with him. Rebecca very much enjoyed The
Return of The Black Stallion so I had asked him if he could bring along a
copy of the original movie that we had not been able to find for Rebecca.
He told her that he had the film for her and asked who she would like to
show it to. she told him that she wanted to invite her "Way Corps
pals" to see it with her, so that is what happenend.
On Wednesday morning Cr. Wierwille wanted
to read, and I had cooking to do, so we did not spend a lot of time
together. I did work it out so that I could prepare the meals for the rest
of the day in the morning and have time free to be with Doctor in the
afternoon because he wanted to "case the joint".
That afternoon he and I went out for a
drive around the grounds in the Land Rover. He had been too tired to walk
around the house or grounds much. He had seen some of the inside of the
house, but in order to see the outside we had decided to ride around. we
drove along the grounds and looked at all of the different buildings and
outbuildings. We drove down the south road and when we reached the gate at
the end of our property we pulled in before turning around. doctor asked
about who owned which fields and other points, so we sat there for a few
moments with the motor offf and discussed things. As dr. Wierwille and I
sat in the Land Rover parked at the gate of the pasture looking east
toward Sterling, he began to talk. "Son, what would you say if I told
you I was going to die?"
After a moment I responded: "Sir,
every day that I have been with you I have always been mentally and
physically prepared to accept and deal with your death. I have know that
at any minute your deathe might come. You know how many hours I have
trrained to protect you and all the drills we have been through. You know
that I have literally covered your body with mine when there were
situations that demanded it. I have also pushed my mind to accept and
carry any last-minute instructions that you might give me. I have known
that they might be the last directions for the Ministry."
He hesitated and looked across the horizion.
There was a long silence between us, but not a strained one, a relaxed
one. Finally he spoke again. "Well, I am dying. The doctors call it [OE]melanoma'."
I did not know what that was at the time. "Dr. Winegarner says I have
up to a few years to live, but Father has told mne that the time is very
short. My days are shortly numbered. That is why I came to see you' this
will be the last time we are together."
Needless to say my throat was tight and
there were tears coming to my eyes. He continued, "Do you believe
me?"
I told him that I did. I remember that he
looked across me with clear eye as thought examining me, then his eyes too
filled with tears. All he said at first was, "Bless you, son."
Then he began: "My being here is really a breach of protocol in the
Ministry, but no one else has believed me yet. They all keep saying or
thinking, "That's just V.P.'"
He paused, then slowly he began to speak,
teling me how he was to be buried. He atalked about the route that the
casket was to take. He talked about how Howard had promised him that he,
Howard, would personally make the casket out of white oak with his own
hands. He talked about how he wanted a simple grave-side sevice and the
main recognition service conducted at a later time and at a large Ministry
function.
He was very explicit and clear on every
point. When he was through he asked me if there was anything that I could
think of, then we discussed it a little further. He told me what he wanted
me to do was to draft the gist of a statement to be released to the
Ministry around the world.
I asked him, thinking this was all already
set up somewhere, who knew all this. He told me that although some of this
had been communicated I was the only one he had covered this with lately
and then he paused. He told me that he wanted me to write this out for him
and give it to him and to compose the statement he had talked about and
submit it to him. I was, at that point so thankful for the ability that
Dr. Wierwille had drilled into me to develop, that of recalling
conversations point for point well after the fact. When I gave him the
copy of the notes he did not find anything missing or incorrect that we
had talked over.
Then he began to speak very softly as he
looked across the landscape. "Son, you are the only one that I have
to come to, to talk about this. No one else believes me. In the end I am
almost alone. I am reminded of Paul. My last days have been so lonely.
"You see, son, I have two earthly
sons. Today I cannot really talk to either one of them. J.P. is a nice
guy, but spiritually he just doesn't have it; he's weak.
"The hardest to face, though, is
Donnie. Despite everything that I have tried, he is not a spiritual man. I
knew years ago that he had tremendous administrative abilities. That I
have never questioned. I had really thought that if he was with us he
would grow and make a commitment spiritually, but he hasn't. He is
governed by facts, sense knowledge, and has basically neglected the spirit
of God in his life. Perhaps he has done more to harm this Ministry than
any other single man in its entire history."
He sighed and paused before he continued.
"There are basically only two men that I could talk to, you and
Howard. You never have been the friend to me that Howard has." I knew
that he was right; I had been painfully aware of this truth for a long
time. Dr. Wierwille and I were not of a similar generation, cultural
background or experience. We had both had to work very hard to get along
over the years and had developed a close personal admiration for each
other's abilities and a deep love-bond for each other, but we never really
had the friendship that he and Howard had between them. He continued,
"I told him that I was going to die soon, and he responded just like
Don did, with all the sense knowledge about doctors and facts.
"He has been so busy with the Ministry
I feel guilty to bother him, and when I do, I see how he has been
influenced and lost his spiritual perception. Today he is not the man he
once was spiritually and certainly not the man he could have been if he
had stayed faithful. The infection that has so deeply cut into the life of
the Ministry has taken my only real friend from me, too. In fact, I
haven't had him as a friend for a number of years now, and that is almost
too much for me to bear. I would have thought he would be the last to go,
but not the first.
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