Posted by Keith 2/Dave Kenady, et al on 9/25/2001, 6:51 pm

To Author Unknown: Be sure your publishers are legit To Author Unknown: Be sure your publishers are legit (Part 1) Posted by Keith on 8/10/2001, 6:28 pm Author: I've been following your updates about having your book(s) published, and reading some of the segments you've been posting on the board whenever I've had the time, and I've found many of them quite interesting. There was one thing, though: I just wanted to warn you to beware of scam outfits. I don't know who your publishers are or what kind of reliable organizations they may be, but before you go spending too much money on them, make sure they're not some scam organizations who are going to take your money and then never publish anything, or even ever have had the ability to publish anything to begin with. Once when I was a teenager—the naïve little kid I was—I got soaked for a goodly amount of money that I somehow managed to convince someone close to me to loan me, on what turned out to be nothing but a similar kind of scam. And then for many, many years after that, I had to endure an awful lot of stress from it—because one day, in the summer of 1977, when I was still a teenager at Chapel, still naïvely believing something was going to come of this thing, I decided to mention it in a testimony I was giving one Sunday morning. And the fact is, I think I made quite a fool of myself. It was a scam I had fallen for and had forked over the money for a year or two before that, about patenting a new invention. Even when I was in Bible college, I was still thinking something was going to come of it. Around 1975 I had drawn the plans on paper for an improved version of a musical instrument, which I submited to the ... crooks ... who said they worked at taking care of all the red tape involved in getting new inventions patented, and could get the person a much larger amount of money in returns, from the sales of the product. What I didn't know at that age was that in order to patent a new device with the U.S. Bureau of Patents, first you have to have a working prototype of the thing. I had no way of putting together a working prototype of it. But I didn't know that, and I fell for it. Now fast-forward about two years: One Sunday morning at Chapel in the summer of 1977, Marty Gemmer got up and preached a sermon about the dangers of rock music. As soon as he started, and I realized the sermon was going to be about rock music, I pulled out some of the little yellow pieces of paper and one of the little pencils from the pew, got up from where I was sitting, went into the foyer, and without listening to the sermon (because I already knew the material anyway), I sat down and started writing the notes for a testimony I was going to give when the sermon was over. After I was through and ready, and the sermon had finished, while the singing was going on, I went and asked Mike Sabourin, who was leading the service that Sunday, about the testimony I wanted to give. He gave me the go-ahead, then Molly Faylor got up and sang "The Lion of the Tribe of Judah," and sitting in the little pew facing the congregation on the podium at the old sanctuary, I prayed to God to anoint this testimony that I was about to give. In the testimony, I told about how deeply I had gotten involved in rock music, how I was going to spend my life in it, how I had already had an opportunity with a group that was heading for the charts (though they ended up never really getting there, except for a song or two on nationwide radio that never came to be any big hits anyway), and how though I was born-again, the denominational church I was in didn't stop me from seeking to pursue such an involvement. And then I ended up beginning to attend Community Chapel, going through the New Converts course with Don and Carol L. at the Kirkland Fellowship, being confronted with the fact that if one wanted to walk with God and be saved for all eternity, one could not listen to, let alone perform, rock music, and I had to make the extremely difficult decision to remove it all from my life, all one evening. The others present at that New Converts course, Dan K., Shannon T. and the two sisters Alice and Mary Ellen K., all laid their hands on me, we prayed up a storm over it, and that evening I rose up out of rock music, forever. I remember telling in one part in the testimony: "One day this friend asked me if I wanted to go down and see this church we'd been hearing about ... and it was called 'Community Chapel' ...." ... And the whole congregation starts shouting, "Hallelujah! Amen!" .... And I told about how, while sitting there in the service, though I knew nothing about how to enter in to praise and worship to God, I saw the Spirit of God moving in a way I had never seen, felt or experienced before, and it just pervaded my soul. I told about how, on the way down from Kenmore and Kirkland where we lived (about a 40-minute drive), we had been listening to rock music in the car, and then after the service, when we got back into the car, my friend hadn't turned the radio off, he had only turned the key off, so when he turned the key back on again, the radio came on. "But it was different now," I related. Something was strange. "It OFFENDED me to hear rock music now, after being at the service here." And the congregation erupted into shouts of praise and glory. "In the car I looked at my friend as if asking him, 'Are you going to turn it off?' But he just looked straight ahead. (That was Dan K.) I guess I knew that if I said something to him about it, he would answer back that it was just in the mind or something (he was going to study to be a psychiatrist after he graduated from high school). Afterwards I lamented how I had not spent more time telling the details of the struggle I went through and how God was taking me by the hand the whole time to lead me out of it, and most of all, the glory of what happened in my life after coming out (well, that is, I still had a whole slew of emotional problems for years—I should say decades—afterwards, but there still was a wonderful massive burst of glory in my life through it all). I touched on that, but I only skimmed over it. Later I couldn't understand why I didn't go into it more deeply, because that was the part that was more edifying. (Continued)