Tomorrow, named after the theme of the 1939 World’s Fair held in New York, was devoted to analyzing “today’s news with the prophecies of the WORLD TOMORROW!” In other words, End Times prophecies. My parents tuned in and listened to Armstrong’s bombastic broadcasts like this one from the 1950s:
You and your family are seated around the dining table. Your RADIO is tuned in to your regular entertainment program. Suddenly a great Voice thunders forth from your radio, ‘This is GOD SPEAKING! I interrupt your program to bring you a STARTLING DECLARATION OF WORLD-SHAKING MAGNITUDE! I come to announce the imminent arrival of a TERRIBLY DESTRUCTIVE WORLDWIDE UPHEAVAL of nature! OF EARTH! OF SKY! Yes, even of the WATERS! It is TIME YOU WAKE UP to the fact that you and your nation, the nations of the world and their leaders have sinned!
Having lived through the Depression and witnessed World War II and the first atomic bomb, the end of the world seemed entirely plausible, even imminent, to many Americans, including my parents.
Herbert Armstrong culled doctrine from his former church, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the British Israelism Movement, as well as the Mormons. These were all religious groups that stemmed from nineteenth-century America and were led by charismatic men with a vision of a more “authentic” Christianity. Free magazines and pamphlets were given out explaining the Worldwide Church of God’s doctrine. This appealed to my mother, who was wholly incapable of turning down anything she didn’t have to pay for and never left a restaurant without pocketing condiment packets, straws, and a fistful of half-and-half containers.
“Should Christians Celebrate BIRTHDAYS?” (No.) “Is it a SIN to Have INSURANCE?” (No insurance can replace faith.) These were just a couple of the topics covered in the freebies, liberally punctuated with exclamation marks and capital letters to convey urgency. Eventually, my parents mailed away for the church’s Ambassador College Bible Correspondence Courses and, when we were all in bed, they sat in the kitchen and studied together.
They created a new bond over the material they were learning, a bond that overcame the gulf that separated them as Catholic and Lutheran. The correspondence course was practically like higher education, which neither had had access to before. It required them to read and think and study. “Why Study the Bible?” was one of the courses, as well as “Here’s the Good News . . . MESSAGE sent from Heaven.” By the time I was born, my parents were well on their way to being baptized in this new faith.
The church’s booklet Pagan Holidays—or God’s Holy Days—Which?, and others like The Plain Truth about Christmas and The Plain Truth about Easter, explained that all true Christians should eschew Christmas, Easter, and Valentine’s Day, as they were steeped in paganism. Instead, like Christians had done until the fourth century, we celebrated all of the Holy Days mentioned in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, such as Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread; Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; Rosh Hashanah, the Feast of Trumpets; Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles; and Shavuot, or Pentecost. We also observed the Sabbath on Saturday, not Sunday.
We were the only family in the ocean of Catholics and Lutherans in our county who belonged to the Worldwide Church of God, believing that we had found the authentic, first-century Jesus.
In 1965, when I was four years old, my younger sister Sarah—the tenth of ten at that time—was born with what appeared to be a life-threatening abnormality. Her esophagus led into her lungs instead of her stomach, and from the X-rays the doctors determined that an operation offered her a fifty-fifty chance for survival.
My mother remained in the hospital recovering from a Caesarean section, and my Catholic grandmother came over to our house. “Let’s pray for Mommy and the baby,” she said to us. We knelt by the couch. My grandmother bent her head low. With fingers interlaced, she prayed with her rosary beads hanging from one of her hands. I had no idea exactly what it meant to pray, but I knelt too, and bowed my head, keeping an eye on my grandmother so I knew when we were finished.
While we prayed, my father and my mother’s sister, my aunt Shirley, drove the baby an hour and a half to a bigger hospital in Evansville. The new set of doctors took X-rays and declared that there was nothing wrong and the baby could be taken home. My parents believed that not only had God performed a miracle on our behalf, it was their faith in this new religion that was responsible for it. The prayers of my Lutheran and Catholic relatives were completely discounted.
A few months later, I suffered a near-fatal bout of double pneumonia. It felt like a hot air balloon was pressing against my chest, preventing me from breathing. My mother put cold washrags on my forehead and a mustard compress on my chest. It was winter, and a well-meaning friend of my parents brought us a Christmas tree, unaware that we didn’t celebrate Christmas. Because I was sleeping in my parents’ bed, I overheard my father say to my mother, “We can’t keep this thing, we got a sick girl in the house!” as if the Christmas tree carried the plague and might kill me. In the middle of the night, my father hauled off the Christmas tree.
I awoke to a minister from the Worldwide Church of God placing his hands on my forehead. There was a jumble of “Our Heavenly Father . . . in Jesus’s name, Amen,” then a dry, white prayer cloth was pressed against my forehead. That night, I fell deeply asleep. The hot air balloon pulled me up into the air and out of bed, and I drifted above the room, looking down at the bundle of blankets on the bed and at my parents huddled nearby. Then, with a thump, the hot air balloon collapsed. I landed hard in my bed. Though it was still a struggle to breathe, I could get air into me. I’d turned a corner.
My father attributed my recovery both to the minister’s prayers and to the fact that he hadn’t allowed the pagan Christmas tree to remain in our home.
God, through the ministers of the church, had performed two miracles in quick succession. Thus, my parents realized they had found the right religion, the Worldwide Church of God. They were baptized shortly thereafter and viewed it as a rebirth, the beginning of a new relationship with God, the beginning of traveling the path to God. Eschewing the spiritual soil in which they were raised, while remaining firmly planted in the physical soil of their youth, they had crossed spiritual boundaries heeding God’s call, similar to the biblical Abraham who had left his idols behind to follow God’s call to the Promised Land.
CHAPTER 2
Five hundred years after Martin Luther split with the Catholic Church, the descendants of both the Lutherans and Catholics whose blood ran through my veins agreed on one thing: this new church was crazy.
What kind of Christian didn’t celebrate Christmas or Easter? Or eat pork or shellfish? For the past 2,000 years, Jesus’s death on the cross effectively nullified all of the Hebrew Bible’s laws, including its holidays. Christians believed that the New Testament was a new covenant. You received salvation by belief in Jesus as your Savior, not by fasting on the Day of Atonement or observing Saturday as the Sabbath.
Despite their disapproval, we didn’t shun our parents’ families, as the church told us we should. None of my grandparents were cozy and warm, and I didn’t recall them ever kissing any of their grandchildren except as babies. But they were family, and the blood bond was deep and heartfelt, even if it was not expressed outwardly.
Every Sunday we visited my grandma Himsel, who lived in a white clapboard farmhouse a few hundred yards from the old log cabin, which my father and his parents and two siblings had moved into when he was seven.
Uncle Robert was typically in the kitchen listening to either The Lutheran Hour or Billy Graham on the radio. He greeted us with “Hey, you little squirts!” in an almost affectionate manner. Robert spent each weekend feeding his dogs bologna sandwiches, chopping wood for the black,
