I
uncovered a
bundle of these
documents, fastened with
strawish yarn, in my
loony grandmother’s drawer, amongst other
ancient treasures and trinkets, for instance,
dainty brooches with tacky jewels, and an
odd money box contraption in the shape of a
coffin: I recall gingerly slapping a
two cent piece (oh,
those were the days) into a
plastic skeleton’s hand and then having the coin
disappear to a very creaky and
rusty sound. At the end of it, this greenish skeleton showed his alienish,
tacky head (I think he was meant to
glow in the dark). The thing was so
old it never worked properly so you’d have to
jostle him back in his coffin
manually. Sigh.
But, I’ve
deviated, the
papers were all
yellowing and
feathery and
burnt at the
edges. It was exactly how you would simulate a
pirate’s
treasure map for a project back in
grade school, with daddy’s
zippo lighter and
coffee smudges. It was clumsily
typewritten, which made it evermore
romantic. It’s the type of document that lends itself to being
crinkled into a
scroll, were it not so
delicate and
brittle with
age, and then prodded inside a
grubby glass bottle for a few hundred years of floating at
sea before some
landlubber eventually read your mysteries..
WHAT TO SAY TO JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES AT YOUR DOOR.
by. Canon R. F. Palmer. S.S.J.E, D.D.
“I admire your zeal in trying to forward your beliefs. I am sure you are a sincere person. But I cannot accept your literature. You preach a cruel and unreasonable God Who is going to sweep most of his Children away in a horrible battle of Armageddon, while you Witnesses stand aside and look on.
I don’t believe that you will really like to look at such a wicked thing. You are too kind for that. Yet you make out that God is not good and kind. He destroys His Own children, not because they are morally bad, but rather because they do not join the Jehovah’s Witnesses. You would not treat your children like that; so you are better than the God you preach. For ages He has known, according to you, that He was going to have this horrible battle of Armageddon, yet He has gone on making more children to be destroyed. I want nothing to do with such a God. If you go on preaching Him, you will get to be like Him, cruel and unreasonable. You Witnesses consider this world hopeless, and so you leave it to perish. You make little effort to help the suffering by supporting hospitals, orphanages or other works of mercy. You take no part in seeing that we have good honest government.
I believe in the True God, the God of Love; not in your old God of hate. I believe in the Gospel, that means the Good News that God loves us and cares for us. I do not believe your message of bad news. I know what the true God is like. Jesus is the true picture of what God is like. Your unreasonable God is not one bit like Jesus, Who went about doing good, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and Himself died for us on the Cross instead of destroying us. You are too good a person to be a Jehovah’s Witness. Be a Witness for Jesus and for the God of Love. Spread His Good News of the gift of eternal life here and hereafter.
Thank you for calling and for listening to me. I shall be pleased if you will read this. Good day, and God bless and convert you…..”