Day 62 – On TV again…what a joke!
Things were going okay in Minnesota, despite all that had happened. I love those people in Minnesota, they are as resilient as it comes. Don’t mess with a Minnesotan who has made up his mind, one way or another. Now that can work for you or against you and that’s what leads me to my second, and thank God my last, time on TV.
I think it was in the winter after the TV Cult show almost a year later, that I got a call from the headquarters of our organization. They told me that they wanted to set up a wilderness training center outside the small town of Brainard, MN if I remember right. All I could think of was “Crap, here we go again!”
They told me that I needed to go to a hearing on zoning up in Brainard and that they were sending a lawyer and two representatives from the head office to go with me. They flew in and we made the trip up to this small rural area. As I’ve said before, winters are cold, dark, and not very hospitable, but that winter night was nothing compared to the hostile attitude of the people I was about to face.
My first hint was when we arrived at the courthouse and went to a small meeting room, we thought was assigned to us for the meeting. There was a sign in the door saying it had been moved to the main courtroom.
As I walked into the courtroom, it was packed…standing room only. There was a single chair set up for me up in the front and a long table which I faced with at least ten council members already seated waiting for me. There were at least three TV cameras in the room to broadcast the hearing. I felt like the Christians being led to the lions in Rome…it was a hostile environment for sure.
For over an hour, the council members questioned me on everything imaginable and then they opened it up for the crowd to ask their questions. If you saw the movie “Inherit the Wind”, an American film drama, released in 1960, that was inspired by the famous Scopes Trial of 1925, in which a Tennessee high-school teacher was arrested and prosecuted for teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, then you have some idea of what I was facing.
If I answered a question they didn’t like, you could hear the mummers and if they thought someone got the best of me, you could hear the cheers. When they opened the questions to the crowd, a minister stood up and said if we were a biblical research ministry, he wanted me to read and translate a Greek passive he had brought.
Bewildered, I look to the council and said, “Do I really have to answer that?” and they told the guy to sit down. The guys that came with me to “support” me were standing innocently in the back and never said a word or offered to help me.
After what seemed like an eternity of this ridicule, the council took a vote and decided that the zoning would not be changed and that we would not be allowed to purchase the land we wanted.
The crowd cheered and two or three reporters were in my face with microphones and a lighting guy shining lights at me, asking me what I thought of the decision. I said it was fine and if God wants us to have a place, He will work it out. The reporter just stared at me with her jaw dropped and then turned to the camera and said, “Okay, that’s what we have tonight from the Brainerd courthouse. Back to you at the station.”
That was my second time on TV and thankfully the last. We drove back to my house on Lake Minnetonka, and the guys who came to “help” flew back to Ohio the next day and this exercise in futility was over.
A few weeks later, I got a call that would once again change my life, but that’s another story for tomorrow.
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