James Patterson’s Journal—The Story of The Congregation of Andria Church During The Dark Time (Patterson’s Tale #3)
An Original Prophetic Story
(NOTE: For continuity of this extended story, I ask you to review or reread Parts #1 through #10 by going to <timesexaminer.com>, then clicking on my name under “Local Columnists”, and scrolling down the archived articles. Part #1 of this 21 part series was published on Aug. 7, 2023. The final 10 parts of “Civilization’s Interregnum” will be published more frequently from this point.)
BLESSINGS AND CHALLENGES BEFALL THE JESUS FOLLOWERS.
“As I said earlier, for about 20 years or so we lived mostly in peace with those in Andria village, even though we knew that as Jesus followers we were hated and despised by a sizeable number of its people, and including the hateful and violent Enforcers who poured their venom on us from time to time. We did our best to pray for these pagans, and we tried to be friendly with them in many ways, with mixed results. We tried to obey our Savior’s command to love those who deceitfully used us—we did our best to love our neighbors as we loved ourselves. We never stopped praying for the pagans and the government Enforcers and Overmasters who were abusing us, even though all we got in return was their ridicule, cursing, and persecution in varying degrees. We didn’t seem to have much success over the years in these spiritual dealings with the pagans, but we never stopped trying to share the good news of Jesus God’s birth, life, death, and resurrection with them. A few of them responded favorably over the years, but most just ridiculed us and continued in their lustful and drunken and often violent pagan ways.
THE JESUS FOLLOWERS CELEBRATE THEIR FIRST “LORD’S SUPPER” IN THEIR NEW CHURCH BUILDING.
“Almost a year after we finally ‘moved in’ to General Rober Tely’s old house, we had a prayer service one Sabbath to dedicate it to God’s glory. The room with the two remaining unsealed fireplaces was the only one big enough to hold all of us who gathered that day. My uncle Jorgan had departed to Heaven a few months earlier, so my cousin Torash had been elected by the congregation to replace him as their ‘pastor’. We had only a dim understanding of what it meant for someone to be a pastor in its historical context, so we just trusted our Savior to guide him in being our shepherd. After a wonderful service of prayer and singing, Pastor Torash and 2 men whom he selected to serve as Ruling Elders of our church, prayed to our Jesus God to bless our building and our congregation to His glory and to bring about those conditions that would ultimately lead to the Blessed Return of our Lord & Savior, Jesus the Messiah.
“At the end of these prayers we had the first celebration of our Lord’s Supper in our church home. This was quite moving and caused much weeping among all of us, even the young people, as we reflected on the amount of physical suffering and pain that our Savior endured before He was crucified and especially as he hung on that horrible cross many centuries before. As I took my portion of bread and ate it, and as I drank from the cup of fermented berry juice, I promised my Savior that I would be His man here on earth and in Heaven. I’ve done my best to keep that promise, despite times of temptation and extreme fear that almost caused me to renounce Him. But I never did, even when I witnessed my dear Leah and both of my daughters and their husbands being killed by the Enforcer beasts in the same fireplaced room in which we celebrated that first Lord’s Supper so long before, and when I witnessed the horrible killing of 3 of my 5 wonderful grandchildren, and when I came close to being murdered by them, enduring such extreme pain that I felt I also was hanging on that cross.
“But those things came many years later. On that blessed day when we consecrated our church home, Pastor Torash led all of us outside to the columned portico. The 8 beautiful columns, as tall as 4 or 5 men, had been mostly their brick interiors with little remaining of their original concrete and plaster coating when we first came to the old house. One of our members, Dale Kaskin, a gifted worker of stone and marble, had restored all the columns over a year’s hard work. I learned later that he used a secret mixture to make a very hard concrete, which included crushed up marble as an aggregate, as he called it (there was a lot of old marble buried all around Andria, and Dale knew how to use it to repair other marble, and how to crush it up and add it to his special hard concrete.) Our carpenter in the village made the forms around the old brick columns and assisted Dale when he and his crew poured the new columns. Since we had no electricity in the village (only the Overmasters and Councilors were allowed to have electricity in their fortified enclaves), Dale and Edwik Core, our carpenter, had to prepare a large enough quantity of the concrete to complete 1 column. It was very hard work pulling each load up the ramp and dumping it down the form, and doing all of the loads fast enough so that the concrete would cure at about the same rate. We agreed on a price for these men and their crews to do the work, and we raised their price in old silver and in farm animals and paid them in full when they completed their task.
“The first column Dale completed cracked within 2 days, so he tore it all down and started over with a stronger mix. That worked so well that after 50 years the repaired columns show almost no signs of wear. He even covered the column’s bases with the concrete, and reinforced their tops in the same way. Sadly, now that our old church has been sealed up by the Enforcers it will soon begin to deteriorate. The forest will reclaim it if the beasts that serve our Overmasters don’t tear it down. Perhaps members of the Jesus Sect in the future will restore Rober Tely’s old house again if it survives.
“Anyway, Pastor Torash gathered all of us in front of the columns on that day of Consecration. The forest around our church had been cleared, and a path cut from the river’s edge up the hill to our building which was now visible from the river. The floors had been reinforced, the walls restored, and everything on the outside had been painted in a white paint, bartered from another village (the only color available at that time). We painted the entrance hall also, and we made a wood frame around the old Saint Andrews Cross flag painting. It looked really good after several of our JS wives carefully cleaned it one day.
One middle column out on the portico had a fairly large cross put on it with rows of black sticky, facing the Tomak river. There were two rows of sticky for each part of the cross, with a narrow strip between each row of sticky. Our pastor explained that our 2 elders had determined that our church building needed to have our Savior’s sign on its front, and that he agreed with them. So they hired the only worker in stone around Andria, our own member, Dale Kaskin, to cut the cross in the front column. We all stood in front of the restored portico as Dale and one of his helpers climbed up a wood scaffold and began to chisel a large cross into the column, between the rows of the sticky. When finished it appeared it would be about 5 feet tall and 3 feet wide, with its bottom about 15 feet from the base of the column. It took Dale and his helper almost 3 hours to chisel the cross into the hard concrete, and they both were sweating a lot by the time they finished it. But his heavy wood mallet and iron chisel did the job well.
“By that time all of us had been enjoying a picnic lunch of cold curdled goat milk, boiled salted pig brains, boiled apples and carrots, and baked wheat bread drenched with warm pig fat and honey. All very delicious. Dale and his helper took a few rest breaks to enjoy some of our delicacies, but he was determined to finish his work. When it was finally complete, Dale removed the sticky from the column, and there it was—a beautiful cross to honor the sacrifice made by our Savior, Jesus the Messiah, so long before. It was cut so deeply that it could be seen from the bank of the Tomak river. Over the years the cross has been darkened somewhat by dust blowing into it, so it is even more noticeable than it was originally.
“This service took place in Early Fall of the JS year of 2362, as near as I can recall. We no longer used the ancient names for the months of the year, because it was decreed by some leader long before that the old names were ‘pagan’ and were no longer to be used. He tried to change the months’ names to ones of his choosing, but that effort died away soon after he did. The people soon forgot the old names, so we began to use the names of the season’s themselves---Early Fall, Fall, and Fall Late—Early Spring, Spring, and Spring Late, and so on, and those have been the names of our months ever since.
“We enjoyed mostly peaceful fellowship in our old church that we began to affectionately call our “Old White Church”, over the next 10 years. During that time we grew only slowly because the fear of ridicule by our pagan fellow townsfolk, and fear of the Enforcers, sadly kept all but the most dedicated people from our doors. So we established a popular ‘house ministry’, as Pastor Torash called it. People who were too timid to come up to our actual church building that was very visible from most of Andria (but guarded constantly), would come occasionally to meetings with our members they knew if they were held in that member’s house. So we did our best in this manner to share the love of our Savior with others in Andria.
THE “OLD WHITE CHURCH” IS SURROUNDED BY A VAST ANCIENT BURIAL GROUND.
“During this same period our people took it upon themselves to try to restore some of the many ancient graves hidden in the forest all around our old church. Before he passed to be with our Savior, my uncle Jorgan told me that the forest all around our old building had once been a very large grave place, or ‘cemetery’ as he always called it (I had never heard that word until I heard it originally from my uncle). He told me that many thousands of people were buried there, and once when I was a teen he even took me and my mother and sisters through the forest, using old trails that went by many old graves, most of which no longer had any stone markers, and many of which had markers that had fallen down, but some of which were still marked with readable names and dates.
“He told us that many of the names on the graves that were still marked were badly eroded, but I remember my uncle showing us a section deep in the forest where many of the remaining graves had the letters ‘CSA’ under the person’s name. He admitted to not being certain what they stood for, but said it was his opinion, based on information given to him when he was a young teen, and verified by the dates that were still legible, that they were the graves of people who had fought in The Tyrant’s War centuries before, and were the soldiers who had struggled in vain with General Rober Tely against the tyrant’s forces who attacked their country. I sometimes took Leah and my children to these graves when it was still safe to do so, and while we knew nothing about Rober Tely we always compared his valiant struggle against aggression to the struggle that all of us went through almost every day.
THE YOUNG JAMES PATTERSON MEETS LEAH LEE FOR THE FIRST TIME.
“As I grew and matured, I fell deeply in love with a beautiful teen girl named Leah Lee, whose father, Rachard, along with his wife Rachele, came to Andria one day in Summer Late of the JS year of 2372, when I was about 24. They came from a far away village named Fillyelfia, and had fled the increasing persecution they had experienced there. We were pleased to discover that they were also members of the Jesus Sect. My cousin, Pastor Torash, welcomed them warmly one Sabbath day when we were worshipping in our old church. Before he shared his Bible message with us he introduced the Lees to us. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the girl, Leah, whom we were informed was 18. I made a point of introducing myself to her after the service, out by the column that had the cross carved in it. She told me proudly that she could read God’s Word, having been taught by her parents, and could even write a little. By this time I had learned the basics of reading and spelling and correct writing from my cousin, Torash.
“Leah seemed impressed that I could read, and suggested that after her parents found a place to live around Andria, my mother and I should visit her and her parents. This invitation by the most beautiful woman I had ever seen caused my heart to beat rapidly that day. I must confess at this time that after 31 years of marriage to my Leah my heart never stopped beating rapidly when we put our arms around each other, or just when we looked into each other’s face and touched our foreheads to each other. That was how she affected me all those years, and I really hope that when I see her in Heaven my new body will still react to her new body in the same way. But that will be as our Savior wills.
NEXT TIME: James marries Leah Lee. He discovers that her father, Rachard Lee, was a leader of the Resistance movement in Fillyelfia, but was betrayed by those he thought were friends, which forced him to flee to Andria village. Pastor Torash is betrayed by the enemies of the Jesus Sect and is killed by Enforcers. Rachard Lee evades the Enforcers and will become the new pastor of the Jesus Sect in Andria as well as the center and leader of the Resistance movement in that area.
