The Truth Spoke Deeply to Me
The year was 1969 and my first husband and I had just graduated from college in Iowa. We had both been accepted to law school in San Francisco, so together with our two- year-old daughter, Samantha, we moved to that glorious city the day after graduation. The Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury, hippies, and anti- war sentiments were all very appealing after living in the Midwest. We rented an apartment in Sausalito and eventually became resident-managers of a magnificent Victorian mansion that had been converted into apartments. As managers it was our responsibility to screen tenants and rent out the apartments.
One apartment we rented was to a very nice interracial couple, a Black man, Johnny, and his Caucasian wife, Pam. We were told that Pam worked nights at a nursing home, and we accepted the information without question.
We became friends with Johnny and Pam. One day I was downstairs in their apartment, looking at their bookshelf. Sitting there was a copy of the Urantia Book. I had never seen it before. Being an inquisitive soul I picked it up and leafed through it – strange names, very big, kind of spooky, but then Johnny was into stuff like that, and had been lecturing us about the revolution to come.
“Hey, Johnny,” I asked him, “What is this book? What’s it about?”
“Well, Miss Jane,” he answered playfully, “I haven’t really read much of it, but from what I can tell, it is a book about everything!”
Later, my husband and I learned from Pam that she was actually a prostitute and that Johnny was her pimp and not her husband at all. Eventually they moved out. My marriage later broke up, and I returned to my parents’ home in Michigan with my daughter. I became a charismatic Episcopalian with a vibrant, daily, loving relationship with Jesus.
Eventually I met John Roper, who would become my husband. The next time I saw The Urantia Book was at John’s home in Bloomfield Hills, a wealthy suburb of Detroit. Needless to say, I was a bit freaked out to see the book again in the possession of such a different sort of person than the “first” Johnny, and it took quite a while for me to get over my resistance to it. John Roper had been reading seriously for some time and our first dates consisted of talking about “life and stuff,” with him reading me large chunks of the UB and me thinking, “I am getting to know a lot about this book, but not much about this interesting man!” Finally I decided that I could not criticize the book without reading it myself.
I did start reading, and of course you won’t be surprised by the rest of the story. The truth contained in the book spoke deeply to me, enlarged my existing relationship with Jesus and our Father, and affirmed long-held philosophical concepts. I felt, “Yes, that’s the way I’ve always thought that this whole life experience, and God, and everything, should be.” It spoke to my heart and mind, and filled in all the missing gaps left by Christianity. I was able to affirm that indeed, I had found the fifth epochal revelation to our world – The Urantia Book.
