Why would anyone join a cult: Scene Three

Project in process...
To read Scene One, click here.

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Why would anyone join a cult?
Scene Three

Shortly after the split from my fiancé in May, 1977, I moved onto a farm with a hippy family who had moved to the North Carolina foothills from New York. I again dabbled with Transcendental Meditation and added in the teachings of Ram Dass, Hatha Yoga, the Bhagavad Gita, and The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ.

In July I visited a cousin with the intent purpose to accompany him to a Wicca gathering; Wiccans believe in witchery used for the good of humanity. My cousin ended up having to work. So, I spent the day with my aunt and accompanied her to a ladies' morning prayer group at a Charismatic Lutheran church.

At that meeting, I heard speaking in tongues for the first time. But instead of speaking, ladies were singing in tongues. Others with "the gift of interpretation" followed in kind - singing in English the interpretation of a tongue. The Baptist Church had taught me that speaking in tongues had ceased after the early years of the first-century Church and that any speaking in tongues since then was devilish.

But this didn't sound devilish at all. It was beautiful, angelic.

That day I was led into tongues and began to see a different side to the scriptures. Instead of a vengeful God whose love I had to earn, I felt the presence of a loving God who had freed me, a spiritual Father who accepted me because His son had sacrificed his all for the whole world, and for me personally.

A few days later I returned to the farm and told my yoga-hippie friends that they didn't have to do all that meditation to be one with God, "Just believe on Jesus Christ and speak in tongues!"

I engrossed myself in the scriptures, reading and rereading the Book of Acts and the Pauline epistles. In my private prayer life, I spoke in tongues a lot; clinging to that so-called "gift" as proof of God's presence in my life. I craved to understand and experience God's love, power, and purpose for my life. craved to understand and experience God's love, power, and purpose for my life. I yearned to know what the scripture meant when it stated the "breadth and length and depth and height," "to know the love of Christ," to be "filled with all the fullness of God."

Each Sunday, through the rest of the summer, I drove a three-hour round trip to attend services at the Charismatic church where I had been led into tongues - Resurrection Lutheran. The message at Resurrection was different from the message at Victory Baptist, the little church I'd attended just months earlier. Instead of hell-fire and judgement, the theme was love, grace, mercy, compassion, freedom. Not to mention, they had good music!

I was full of questions. I wanted to be able to reconcile at least a majority of the contradictions in the Bible. I thought, If I can learn Greek and get back to the original texts, then I can know what the Bible really says. I decided to attend college focusing on biblical studies with an interest in counseling. I also had interest in service work with either Volunteers in Service to America or The Peace Corps.

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Click here for Scene Four.