Modern Melchizedek Missionary
Perhaps, like myself, you consider yourself a 3-Mer, as I like to say—that being a Modern Melchizedek Missionary. Are we Fifth Revelation Readers content to just read and study The Urantia Book, and perhaps do some community service, or do you burn with the desire to tell the world about the most important book on the planet?
My husband says that when we meet someone new, he puts me on the clock and that within five minutes I am telling that unsuspecting soul about the existence of The Urantia Book. If I can tie it into their vocation or their interests, that is an easy opener. I keep my ears open for what I call a slide-in. With enough practice, one develops the right approaches, depending on the individual and the connection that has been established.
I know that The Urantia Book says that there is no such thing as luck, but our language must have another word to explain some of the stories I am about to tell you. Perhaps coincidence is a better word? You may even be reading about yourself at this moment, if like me you are a 3-Mer.
Let me tell you about a few interesting experiences I have had in my missionary experiences. I will start on the North Shore of Oahu Hawaii in 1972. I was living with a group of people, I guess you could call it a commune, as we were all working to open what then was called a Free School. We all had kids and didn’t care for the public schools. We found a large house right on the beach, nothing fancy but it fit our needs with lots of bedrooms, and a pool for the kids and the ocean for the adults. One afternoon I noticed a man sitting in the same place most of the day. I decided to approach him. I said something like “are you having a good day on this beautiful beach?” He replied that he was trying to figure out if there was a God. So I said, “Perhaps I could help you with that problem.” We got into a long conversation about religion, God, and I told him that The Urantia Book had all the answers to his questions. I had been reading the revelation for about four years by then. I invited him to share dinner with our group. Back then it was not as easy to stay connected as it is these days, plus we were young and moving around a lot, so at the end of the evening he thanked me, and I never saw him again back then. Many years later, at a Urantia conference I was speaking with a gentleman, so I asked him my usual question “How did the book find you?” He then told me a little story, “Well I was on the North Shore of Oahu in the early 70’s and I sat down on the beach and said that I wasn’t going to move until I discovered the truth about God. After a while a young woman came up to me and we started talking and she told me about The Urantia Book and invited me to have dinner with her household. I got the book after that encounter and have been reading it ever since.” I was shocked and said, “Guess what, I am that woman, it is nice to meet you again,” and then we had a big hug.
Maybe you have heard about Findhorn, a famous popular spiritual community in the north of Scotland. Since I was visiting with a boyfriend in Scotland in 1973, whose parents were Scottish, I decided to take their leader, Peter Caddy, a Urantia Book. He wasn’t interested in it at all, since they were busy channeling nature spirits. They had turned a turret that was attached to a building on their property into a library. It had a circular bench going around in front of the shelves of books. I said to myself, “I will be darned if I am going to take this big book all the way back to Hawaii, so I am going to just place it here in their library.” That was that—one less thing to carry around on my trip.
Many, many, years later at a European Urantia conference, I asked a man my normal question and this was his reply. “I was visiting The Findhorn community and when I was meditating in their library, I was trying to get comfortable but a book was poking me in the back, so I pulled it out and since it looked interesting I started to read it and lo and behold it was The Urantia Book, and I haven’t stopped reading it since then.” I told him that I had put it in that exact spot 30 years ago and that I was so glad that it was found by an open mind. It was quite a coincidence that he sat in that exact spot.
Want another story? Then keep reading, as this is a very fruitful one. In the early 2000s my second husband (who by the way, found the book on my coffee table) and I were traveling on the Spanish Island of Tenerife. We placed a Urantia Book in the English library there. When traveling I never leave home without one to place or give away.
Shortly after that, these excellent Urantia Study Guides started to appear. As each new one came out I would purchase it. Then at the Canadian Urantia conference in 2014 in Quebec I met a friendly sister named Hara Davis and when I asked her my usual question, she replied that she used to live in Tenerife and found The Urantia Book in the English library. Bingo! Hara has been a devoted reader, author and teacher ever since finding the revelation. Thanks, Hara, for all your service.
Then two years ago I got a phone call asking if I was the same Marian who lived on the Big Island of Hawaii in Waimea in 1978. I replied, “Yes, that’s me.” “Oh great, I thought that you might be. I was just reading your eulogy about Tonia Baney in a Urantia publication and thought that perhaps you still lived there. My name is Rick Bates, might you remember me, you told me about The Urantia Book in 1978?” I said how could I ever forget a guy I met at a Canoe Club party who rode his bike 6.5 miles straight up from sea level to 2,500 ft to continue our discussion about The Urantia Book? That is quite a feat. “Wow, how are you brother?” Obviously he was ready and had embraced The Urantia Book. He had moved off the Big Island shortly after meeting me, married, and raised three children. Rick has become a member of our zoom study group and he has a vast knowledge of the revelation. It has been so wonderful reconnecting with him after all these years.
OK, just one more out of a dozen such stories. At the Urantia conference a year ago in March in Baltimore, I met a nice man from Chile. We live in Chile part of each year. I have been coming to the south of Chile since 1997, when I helped the Foundation at a book fair in Santiago, and then traveled to a charming town called Puerto Varas after the book fair. I met two men and one American woman whom I introduced to the book. The next evening they arranged for me to meet a group of their friends at a hostel and we sat around a big table as I shared El Libro de Urantia with them. Several of those people became readers and it turns out that one of them introduced Felipe Arrigorriago to the book and he is now a leader of the Urantia movement in Chile. We just enjoyed meeting Felipe at the airport on our layover in Santiago this year, where we presented him with eight Spanish books that had been given to me and that he will share at an upcoming Mind, Body, & Soul Fair. I consider it a huge privilege to have been able to learn that some of these seeds that were planted years ago did indeed fall on fertile ground and have produced dedicated and devoted disciples of the Fifth Epochal Revelation movement. So my advice is don’t be shy, you just might get “lucky” and find out one day in the future that those seeds you planted have helped strangers find out about the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man and are now contributing to the growth of the Supreme. So take a chance and be a Modern Melchizedek Missionary and help 606 achieve Light & Life. Plus, you may get “lucky” and reconnect with those fellow eternity travelers that you encountered years ago.