0 February 1999
Dear Shannon,
Dear, dear, dear, dear daughter - where are you?  I love you so
much. "I want to see you again." My God-given role as your mother is to
help you and nurture you and help send you forward to serve and glorify
our Lord. What can I do for you? The profound glory of the Word
confronts me daily as I work with young Christians "on fire" to serve
and as I meet with mature Christians who freely share with me the
insights they have gained after years of studying the Bible and living
by biblical principles. But my heart yearns for you. The abstraction
"Put God above all else in your life" becomes real to me every moment of
life as I try to serve Him in the place to which He has called me:
Mother and Professor. How I wish I could share with you my simple life
of serving and glorifying Him. Shannon, you know I have turned away from
the "pleasures" of the secular world and find  peace and pleasure only
in God. But from a biblical perspective, something is terribly wrong :
my precious daughter won't talk to me.
You may wonder how someone in the secular world can serve and
glorify God. True Christians (not the hypocrites!)  respond to the
question "WWJD?" by carving out a small piece of the decadent universe
and sharing God with the people in this realm through their words and
actions. People learn about God as they see lives of self-sacrifice and
example. Your brothers and I try to live such lives. In his letters to
the Corinthians and Thessalonians, Paul stressed the importance of
working so that he could care for himself, and he encouraged others to
work and share the fruits of their labors with others in need. No one in
the family of the church should ever be in need. Christians like your
brothers and I want to be like Paul in  (1) planting and re-newing
churches in our communities and sending missionaries to plant and re-new
churches throughout the world and (2) serving the needy and helpless
through the Church. The Church has far to go to achieve this goal, but
we are bound by God to work within the parameters of the local church
through love and discipline of the members. The Mennonites provide a
good example. I wish you would join me in establishing a community of
believers dedicated to God and reaching out to the needy and helpless in
the Mennonite tradition and incorporating the good aspects of the Jim
Roberts community. Surely God created you for this purpose, dear
daughter. Please tell me more about your community.
I am so happy that you have chosen not to be a hypocritical robot in the
ugly secular world of mainstream Christianity in which idols rule the
lives of men. But perhaps God wants you to experience the blessings of a
simple life within the context of a stable church community and the love
of the family into which you were born and which wants to help you in a
ministry to the needy and helpless. I don't think you have yet seen how
powerfully God could use you in His world if you were free from the
limiting and unnecessary restrictions placed upon you in the Jim Roberts
Group. Shannon, please pray about this. God has encouraged me to reach
out to you for answers to my questions:
* What do members of the Jim Roberts group do to show that they
love their neighbors other than recruiting others to their
(self-centered?) lifestyle and isolating them from confronting nominal
Christians who need to be encouraged and discipled to become more
Christ-like? God would surely bless a ministry of sending you and some
of your brothers and sisters into mainstream churches all over the USA
to preach the message of self-sacrifice and love to get nominal
Christians to share their wealth and learn about true joy. We would
joyfully support you in such a ministry.
* Why are you suffering the unnecessary inconveniences of constant
travel, scavenging and reliance on charity to survive when Christians
who love God and you would support your full-time ministry to the needy
and helpless who don't know Christ?
* Why do you limit your fellowship to members of the Jim Roberts
Group when your flesh family and others who love you so much want you to
also be part of our lives and work with us as we glorify the Lord in our
service to "the least of them"?
* Why don't you and some of the brothers and sisters move to the
farm in Lockhart and establish a stable base which will actually free
you from having to deal with your basic needs so that you can
concentrate on reaching out to others who need Christ and your help in
their lives? Or you could join the biblical Mennonite church in Ft.
Collins or elsewhere and work with their strong, stable, active
Christian community.
* Why don't you join a missionary organization like WYAM so that
you can reach out to others all over the word who suffer in pain and
poverty and will never know Christ unless you go to them and share the
Gospel? God uses people like you for such missions, and we would be
happy to support you in helping those in desperate need.
Listen to God's voice. Reach out and respond to the challenges He sets
before Christians.

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