THIS IS A STORY ABOUT HOW I BECAME A MEMBER OF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS. It all began way back in the spring of 1999, in my village of West Lebanon, New Hampshire. I was out walking Cacie, our family dog, after altering my consciousness with chemicals. My attire was remarkable. My head was adorned with a polka dotted bandana. I had a sweatshirt on that read, “I support the troops of Desert Storm”, and camouflage cut-off shorts. I had gone around the neighborhood, and visited with a strange old man named Neil. Cacie had gotten very excited upon meeting Neil. To my astonishment and horror, she had attempted to jump up on the man. Neil is about seventy years old, and the thought of Cacie knocking him over was frightening to both he and myself. So I cut our visit short, and began walking home.

On the way home I was on the look out for anyone passing by that Cacie would like to push into the snow bank. I saw two young ladies approaching, and took pains to make sure that Cacie wouldn’t pull my arm off or jump up on them or anyone by making her sit. We waited for the pair to pass us by. To my surprise, these two girls approached and started talking to me about Jesus Christ.

Missionaries from other churches had approached me in much the same way, usually while at work, or in the supermarket. These others seemed to be people of dubious character. They always were asking me, “Do you know Jesus Christ”. I was skeptical, but a strong, tangible spirit surrounded these missionaries. My interest was piqued. I spoke with them for a few minutes, about how I had overheard my mother saying that the church was an occult group, but I didn’t ever see why or how she had reached that conclusion. I saw that they had a book. I decided that reading the material of the church would help me understand, so I asked if I could have it. They were reluctant to part with it, to say the least. I did, however manage to convince them that I would read the Book of Mormon, and that I would take it seriously. They must have thought that I was going to barbeque my dinner with it or something, being as they were, so very reluctant to give me the book. But in the end I had the book in hand, and the sister missionaries did extend an invitation to me, to attend the church meetings on Sunday.

Shortly thereafter I began to actually read the Book of Mormon. I didn’t really know what to make of it. But I wanted to recapture the spirit I felt when I met those two sister missionaries from the LDS Church, and I wanted to learn more about what they believed in, and why. “Besides,” I thought, “They’re cute.” I needed to see them again, so I took them up on there invitation to attend sacrament meeting.

On that Sunday, about two weeks after I met them for the first time, I got up out of bed well before my customary time of one in the afternoon, and headed out for the chapel, which was in the town of Enfield, New Hampshire. I arrived very early, so I sat in my little blue car reading the Book of Mormon, and waiting for the appointed time. I walked into the chapel, and found the sister missionaries, to say hello. They seemed delighted to see me again. Apparently, they hadn’t expected me to actually show up.

I was dressed in a brown and black silk shirt, lots of hemp jewelry, with hand blown glass beads, and some really cool hemp pants, with my chest length beard and long hair, like something out of a Ken Kesey novel. I felt great, and it was wonderful to be around the positive people in the church. I went to all the classes and meetings. I spoke my mind, and actually felt like I was listened to. This was a great place to be.

I had my first missionary discussion right after church in the back of the sanctuary. I don’t really recall the entire discussion all that well, so I will not try and recount it. However I do remember that the missionaries asked me to pray so that I would know if the Book of Mormon was true or not. So I bowed my head in prayer and a positive feeling came to me that meant, “Yes, this book, the Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ is true.” One of the elders assigned to the Lebanon ward asked me if I wanted to be baptized. I told them, “Oh, well I have already been baptized”

The elder said, “Really, who was the one that baptized you?”

“My mother,” I replied.

The sister missionaries were horrified that they asked me to be baptized during our very first meeting. I did not consent to baptism at that time. However I did continue meeting with the missionaries.

We were meeting on a regular basis. They would even stop by the Bagel Basement with lots of other missionaries, and see how I was getting on. I went to sacrament meeting and all the other priesthood meetings for a long time, before choosing to be baptized. I went through the smoking cessation program that the church runs. After being smoke free for a month, the missionaries, the people that ran the smoking cessation program, and the people that used to smoke joined together to celebrate our liberation from the bonds of smoking addiction. We watched the film “Eight Cow Wife”, and had cake and ice cream. It was a real good time, but unlike the raucous parties I was used to.

Shortly there after, I was invited to go to Stake Conference. We were in the Concord, New Hampshire stake. Concord, as you may know is the capital of the Granite State with the largest representational legislature in the free world. However, it was quite a distance away from my village of West Lebanon. It took about an hour to drive there. I’m glad I took the time to go. It was there that I received an apostolic blessing from Jeffrey R. Holland, a member of the quorum of the twelve apostles. Mind you, this was to the entire congregation of the stake, not just me. I got to shake his hand. Sister Summers, one of the sister missionaries, had been his neighbor in Bountiful, Utah. So she got to give him a big hug. Still, I felt very blessed to be in the presence of such a wonderful and humble servant of the Lord. Before being baptized the missionaries invited me to go on a picnic with them, some new members, investigators, stake missionaries, and other people. My car was uninsured, so I was unable to drive out of the state of New Hampshire, where automobile insurance is non-compulsory. So somebody had to pick me up and take me to White River Junction, Vermont, where the picnic was to take place.

When the people arrived to pick me up, the missionaries were in the car as well. I was again wearing the polka-dotted bandana and camouflage cut-offs, with a purple and green tie-dyed shirt. With the exception of my head being completely shaved, everything was the same as when the missionaries and I had had our first encounter. When I took off my bandana to wipe my brow, the missionaries were quite surprised. I was undergoing a transformation, outwardly as well as inwardly.

After meeting with the missionaries for about two months I finally made the decision to get dunked. I still had a very long goatee that reached to the middle of my chest. But I had no hair on the top of my head. I felt that I had reached higher level of enlightenment, and I needed to show that outwardly, so I shaved off my goatee, leaving only a very long mustache. I waxed it into the classic handlebar style.

Soon after, I was performing my duties as the head bagel slinger at the Bagel Basement in Lebanon. I was delighted by the reactions I got from my co-workers and patrons with my mustachioed face, and was working away when who should happen in but the sister missionaries? When Sister Summers and Sister Minckler spied me with the new style, they both actually fell on the floor laughing. I was delighted. The very next week I was baptized in Mascoma Lake, right near the meetinghouse in Enfield, New Hampshire.

Sister Summers was sent home the very next day. It was the end of her mission, and Sister Minckler was transferred out of the area. But I kept writing to Sister Summers, and she kept in contact with Sister Minckler. I began to be less active in the church. I was having trouble at home, living with my aunt, and brother. I decided to strike out on my own.

A friend of mine was in need of a roommate in Taunton, Massachusetts. I decide to move down there. My friend was a practitioner of the black arts, and I spent many days and nights alone in my bedroom, with my cat Woody. I read the Book of Mormon, and the Bible on a fairly regular basis, but I wasn’t going to church. I was working at Nancy’s Coffee Café, and Car-Lene Research, in the Silver City Galleria.

I began consuming chemicals to alter my consciousness again, and was having a really rough go of it in general. I longed for contact with the church. I could have just looked up the church in the phone book, but I didn’t. I felt alone. I was devoid of the spirit. I wasn’t following the commandments and not living the covenants that I had made with God at my baptism. I sort of forgot about the church, and was living the same horrible, raucous, defamed and lecherous existence that I lead before I joined the church. I was terribly unhappy. But my Heavenly Father was still watching over me, and prompted me to pray. I knelt in fervent prayer, for a way out of misery. For I was truly miserable, in my jobs, with my spirituality, and in my home life. Shortly there after, he sent me a sign.

I was working at my job as a market research data collection agent, asking people their opinions on various consumer products, when three young men walked passed me, with name-tags and white shirts. They were the Elders, missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This was the way out. God was showing it to me.

It was like when Kerouac wrote in Big Sur, “`One fast move or I’m gone,” I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you cant learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimism you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca you drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with --- That feeling when you wake up with the delirium tremens with the fear eerie death dripping from your ears like those special heavy cobwebs spiders weave in hot countries, the feeling of being a bentback mudman monster groaning underground in hot steaming mud pulling a long hot burden nowhere, the feeling of standing ankledeep in hot boiled porkblood , ugh, of being up to your waste in a giant pan of greasy brown dishwater not a trace of suds left in it --- The face of yourself you see in the mirror with its expression of unbearable anguish so hagged and awful with sorrow you cant even cry for a thing so ugly, so lost, no connection whatever with early perfection and therefore nothing to connect with tears or anything: it’s like William Seward Burroughs’ `Stranger’ suddenly appearing in your place in the mirror ---- Enough! `One fast move or I’m gone” I asked the missionaries if I could ask them a few questions. I was under the watchful eye of my employer, an anarchist that practiced Buddhism. So I had to ask them in a way that it looked like I was performing my work duties. But they said, “We don’t have time.” They walked off. But they still showed me the way.

I knew something had to be done, and fast. So I made up with my Aunt, and moved back to my house in New Hampshire, and started working an eighty-hour workweek, between two jobs. I went to church seldom, but at least I had the my family that cared whether or not I lived or died.

My brother had come up with the idea of hiking the Appalachian Trail. He invited me to partner with him. We worked hard through the summer, and saved for our trip. We bought our boots, backpacks, maps, foodstuffs, stoves and other things necessary for an expedition of this magnitude. Included in my essential supplies were the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and a copy of the Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which I read aloud. It was about two weeks before the day of departure, that I received a telephone call. The call came from Theresa Margaret Minckler, who was know to me at that time as Sister Minckler. I was delighted to hear from her. And she told me of her plans to visit her old mission area. She was going to start off in Maine, but I told her about my plans to hike the Appalachian Trail with my brother Shawn. She re-arranged her whole trip just so that she would be able to see me before I left.

When Theresa arrived, we went to the Joseph Smith Birthplace Memorial, in Sharon, Vermont. This was a place that the sister missionaries had taken me, and I had been invited up there to meet some other sister missionaries about a week before. So I thought it would be a nice place to picnic. Theresa and I got lunch at the Upper Valley Food Co-Op in White River Junction, Vermont. Then we headed for the Memorial where we met the new sister missionaries. We ate our grapes and sandwiches under the trees listening to the beautiful music of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Theresa wanted to visit the famed Queechee Gorge, where in the past I had spent time throwing airplanes powered by rubber bands, off of the iron bridge. We walked down the gorge, and went wading into the Queechee River. Theresa slipped, but I caught hold of her, and kept her from falling into the drink. It was like an electric spark.

She drove me home, and invited me to visit her in Utah to celebrate our birthday. Both hers and mine fall on the exact same day, the eleventh of February. I accepted her invitation, and then…. And then…. She kissed me on the cheek and drove off.

I went hiking up and down and up and down those mountains for two months. It was a great time, and I would take a sip of whisky on the top of every peak. I was poisoning my body at an alarming rate, smoking countless ounces of marijuana. But I wouldn’t leave my sleeping bag until I had read a chapter in both the Book of Mormon, and in the Holy Bible. I got to bear my witness of the Book of Mormon to a man that called himself Pigpen. He hadn’t taken a bath since he started hiking, in Springer Mountain Georgia. I must tell you that my testimony of the Book of Mormon was not at all strong, but I told Pigpen all I knew, or thought I knew. And a man that called himself Wasabi asked me a question out there that changed my life. He asked me, “How can you profess your love of God when all you do is smoke dope?”

That question struck a chord with me, and I resolved that once I was off the trail, I would never use it again. I still maintain that people should be allowed by the law to use marijuana, because that is what we have free agency for. Don’t get me wrong here. Using marijuana is a bad idea, and you shouldn’t do it. But it is your choice. It is your free agency. Be warned, that using your free agency to decide that smoking marijuana is acceptable, is not good. In fact, smoking marijuana leads to the erosion of your free agency and makes you bond to the devil. It should still remain a legal choice, like gambling or any other vice. Just be aware, you will have to live with the consequences of your actions.

After I got off the trail, I went back to my village of West Lebanon, and worked one hundred hour work weeks, and attended church as often as I could, which is to say very seldom. But I was paying tithing, and paying off my creditors, and saving to visit my friends, the returned sister missionaries. After working more long hours, and paying off my creditors, I boarded the bus at the bus terminal in White River Junction, Vermont, bound for Salt Lake City.

Everything was really great on my trip until I got to Iowa. There the highway closed due to an ice storm, and my traveling companions and I were stranded at the Iowa 80 truck stop, somewhere about thirty miles east of Iowa City. I happened to be talking to a Nubian character that lived in Iowa City, and he was trying to find a ride there. But to my dismay, and his, the management of the establishment removed him from the premises for soliciting. There were at least three people of Northern European stock doing the exact same thing, soliciting for a ride to Iowa City, however, the management of the establishment neglected to kick them out. I felt an injustice was being done to this fellow, so I began soliciting a ride for the Nubian fellow, and was banned from the establishment as well. I then organized a boycott of the Iowa 80 truck stop with my fellow travelers on my bus. So we were there for about 12 hours, and the bus driver was nowhere to be seen. I could smell the burnt plastic smell of crack cocaine being smoked somewhere on the bus. I just kept listening to my tunes, and reading my scriptures, and my book, The First Circle by Alexander I. Solzhyneitzen. And we finally made it to Des Moines, where my traveling companions and I were stuck for an entire twenty-four hour period.

It seemed that I was the only one in the whole depot that was prepared for such an eventuality. Everybody else was starving. The Salvation Army came down and fed everybody. I didn’t need their help, but a couple of elderly ladies need mine. I helped them by getting off the bus and getting food for them and bringing it back to them aboard the bus. Eventually, the bus made it’s way to Omaha, Nebraska, where Sister Minckler and Sister Summers finally contacted me. They hurriedly bought me an airplane ticket from Omaha, to Salt Lake City. I was grateful not to have to spend another second on that bus. But Greyhound still had all my clothes. They had sent my bag ahead on a different bus.

It was while I was in Salt Lake City, that I fell in love with Theresa. I stayed an extra week in Bountiful, and Theresa drove me to Chicago, on her way to Minnesota. I flew into Providence, Rhode Island, and took the bus back to West Lebanon. In three months time, Theresa came and visited me, and we went to Maine. I asked her to elope with me, but she refused. She did agree to be my wife. And so we were engaged.

Three months after that, I moved here to Minnesota, to be nearer Theresa. We quickly realized that not being married was really dumb, so we got hitched in the Edgerton meetinghouse, on August eleventh, 2001. It was a wonderful ceremony with Bishop Albaugh conducting the ceremony.

And to top off all that, Theresa and I were sealed in the Saint Paul Temple on the eleventh of December of this year, which some of you witnessed. I am so grateful for all of your kind words and wishes, even if you couldn’t make it.

Theresa has benefited me so much, that it is really difficult for me to imagine where I’d be with out her influence in my life. With her kind guidance, I have been found worthy of being a ward missionary, which it gives me great honor to serve as. My testimony reminds me of one of my favorite stories from the Book of Mormon. In The Book of Mosiah, Chapter 27 (editor's note this is taken from The Official Scriptures of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints© 2000 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

2 "And it came to pass that king Mosiah sent a proclamation throughout the land round about that there should not any unbeliever persecute any of those who belonged to the church of God.

3 And there was a strict command throughout all the churches that there should be no apersecutions among them, that there should be an equality among all men;

4 That they should let no pride nor haughtiness disturb their peace; that every man should besteem his neighbor as himself, laboring with their own hands for their support.

5 Yea, and all their priests and teachers should labor with their own hands for their support, in all cases save it were in sickness, or in much want; and doing these things, they did abound in the grace of God.

8 Now the sons of Mosiah were numbered among the unbelievers; and also one of the sons of Alma was numbered among them, he being called Alma, after his father; nevertheless, he became a very wicked and an idolatrous man. And he was a man of many words, and did speak much flattery to the people; therefore he led many of the people to do after the manner of his iniquities.

9 And he became a great hinderment to the prosperity of the church of God; stealing away the hearts of the people; causing much dissension among the people; giving a chance for the enemy of God to exercise his power over them.

11 And as I said unto you, as they were going about rebelling against God, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto them; and he descended as it were in a cloud; and he spake as it were with a voice of thunder, which caused the earth to shake upon which they stood;

12 And so great was their astonishment, that they fell to the earth, and understood not the words which he spake unto them.

13 Nevertheless he cried again, saying: Alma, arise and stand forth, for why persecutest thou the church of God? For the Lord hath said: This is my church, and I will establish it; and nothing shall overthrow it, save it is the transgression of my people.

14 And again, the angel said: Behold, the Lord hath heard the prayers of his people, and also the prayers of his servant, Alma, who is thy father; for he has cprayed with much faith concerning thee that thou mightest be brought to the knowledge of the truth; therefore, for this purpose have I come to convince thee of the power and authority of God, that the prayers of his servants might be answered according to their faith.

15 And now behold, can ye dispute the power of God? For behold, doth not my voice shake the earth? And can ye not also behold me before you? And I am sent from God.

19 And now the astonishment of Alma was so great that he became dumb, that he could not open his mouth; yea, and he became weak, even that he could not move his hands; therefore he was taken by those that were with him, and carried helpless, even until he was laid before his father.

20 And they rehearsed unto his father all that had happened unto them; and his father rejoiced, for he knew that it was the power of God.

21. And he caused that the priests should assemble themselves together; and they began to fast, and to pray to the Lord their God that he would open the mouth of Alma, that he might speak, and also that his limbs might receive their strength — that the eyes of the people might be opened to see and know of the goodness and glory of God.

22 And it came to pass after they had fasted and prayed for the space of two days and two nights, the limbs of Alma received their strength, and he stood up and began to speak unto them, bidding them to be of good comfort.

24 For, said he, I have repented of my sins, and have been redeemed of the Lord; behold I am born of the Spirit.

25 And the Lord said unto me: Marvel not that all mankind, yea, men and women, all nations, kindreds, tongues and people, must be born again; yea, born of God, changed from their carnal and fallen state, to a state of righteousness, being redeemed of God, becoming his sons and daughters;

26 And thus they become new creatures; and unless they do this, they can in nowise inherit the kingdom of God.

27 I say unto you, unless this be the case, they must be cast off; and this I know, because I was like to be cast off.

28 Nevertheless, after wading through much tribulation, repenting nigh unto death, the Lord in mercy hath seen fit to snatch me out of an ceverlasting burning, and I am born of God.

29 My soul hath been redeemed from the gall of bitterness and bonds of iniquity. I was in the darkest abyss; but now I behold the marvelous light of God. My soul was racked with eternal torment; but I am snatched, and my soul is pained no more.

30 I rejected my Redeemer, and denied that which had been spoken of by our fathers; but now that they may foresee that he will come, and that he remembereth every creature of his creating, he will make himself manifest unto all.

32 And now it came to pass that Alma began from this time forward to teach the people, and those who were with Alma at the time the angel appeared unto them, traveling round about through all the land, publishing to all the people the things which they had heard and seen, and preaching the word of God in much tribulation, being greatly persecuted by those who were unbelievers, being smitten by many of them.