“Seek Yahweh while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return to Yahweh, and He will have compassion on him. Turn to our Elohim, for He will abundantly pardon.”

Isaiah 55: 6-7

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My Salinger Year

I just watched the movie My Salinger Year. It came out in 2020, but it didn’t reach the movie channels that I get with Spectrum until recently.

Typically, it takes me a while to decide if I want to watch a movie. First, I look at the title. This one caught my eye, because I recognized the name “Salinger”. That’s J.D. Salinger who wrote Catcher in the Rye.

I don’t know exactly why I never read Catcher in the Rye. It was probably because it was never an assigned reading in any class that I took in high school or college. I heard about the book and read things about it in various magazine articles over the years, but I was never intrigued enough to sit down and read it.

Over the past few years, I have watched two movies that are based on Salinger’s life: Rebel in the Rye (2017) and Finding Forrester (2000). Both movies are worth watching, but they didn’t inspire me to read Catcher in the Rye. My Salinger Year did.

My Salinger Year is about a young woman who wants to be a writer. She decides to move to New York City and launch a writing career, and she finds a job with the literary agency that represents Salinger. He is a recluse who lived in New Hampshire at the time, and she is given the job of responding to the mail sent to Salinger by his fans.

Salinger didn’t enjoy responding to mail from anyone. At first, he sent form letters to the people who wrote to him telling them that he didn’t respond to mail, but eventually, he didn’t want to do that, either. Salinger’s literary agent assumed the responsibility of responding to his mail, and she hired an assistant to do it for her. My Salinger Year is about one of those assistants, Joanna Rakoff. She wrote a book with the same title. It was published in 2014 and got good reviews.

Enough about J.D. Salinger and My Salinger Year. This editorial is not about either of them. It’s about me. Why did My Salinger Year resonate with me?

First and foremost, it was because Joanna Rakoff wanted to be writer, but her job had nothing to do with writing. In fact, the movie made it clear that literary agencies don’t want to hire aspiring writers. I don’t want to delve into the innerworkings of literary agencies, but let it suffice to say that for literary agencies, not hiring aspiring writers is a common practice.

Eventually, Rakoff had to make a decision. Either she would be a writer or a literary agent. She knew that time was passing her by and that if she was serious about becoming a writer, she needed to actually do it. In the end, she decided to leave the literary agency and start writing.

That’s what I did.

Two months after I graduated from college, I married Katie. She still had 2 years of college to complete, so I decided to find a job in Athens, Georgia, so she could finish her degree. My logic was simple. If I took a job in another city, the odds of her finishing college were not good, and I didn’t want to take a chance.

As it turned out, I took a job with a small business in Athens that had been in operation for several decades. The man who started the business was in his 70s. He didn’t want to run the business. His 2 sons did that for him. One of them was an attorney. He ran half of the business, and his other son ran the other half.

During the 2 years that it took Katie to complete her degree, I got an MBA at night. During the day, I ran the half of the business that the lawyer had run. Katie and I completed our degrees at roughly the same time. By then, the business I was running was making more money than it had ever made, and the growth in revenue and profits were phenomenal. Thus, I was offered a partnership in the business, and I ran both halves of the business until I left to get a Ph.D. degree.

Running a small business was never my goal, even though running that business and getting involved with my partners in various other business ventures promised to make me very rich at a very young age. Since I was a young boy, I understood that I would do something for Yahweh. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew that running that business wasn’t it. Getting a Ph.D. degree gave me some time to figure out what I would do.

While I worked on my Ph.D. in business strategy, I had time to read the Bible carefully and delve deeply into the subject matter. Unbeknownst to me at the time, not going to seminary and allowing Yahweh to tell me about the Scriptures instead enabled me to avoid becoming indoctrinated by people who thought they knew the Scriptures. Since then, I have learned that seminaries indoctrinate as much or more than they educate. One day, I may write about that problem in detail, but not today. I said “may”, because I think it might be a waste of my time. Despite their obvious lack of knowledge, seminary-trained preachers tend to be stubborn to a fault and self-satisfied. That’s a dangerous combination.

Turns out most preachers and seminary professors don’t know the Bible the way Yahweh expects them to know it. They have been repeating the same errors for generations, and they have done it without thinking. As a result, most churchgoers are not well-prepared. They read Bibles that are very poor translations of the original Scriptures, and they hear sermons that are for the most part based on letters that Paul wrote to explain what the Scriptures tell us. Because most preachers and seminary professors have ignored what Yahweh told us and have substituted the thinking of men in its place, they have had a very deleterious effect on Christendom.

That is not a criticism of the apostle Paul. His letters are important. Like the gospels and letters from Peter, James, and John, they deserve to be shared, but they are not Scripture. Very few if any preachers today rise to Paul’s level. See The Trilogy for detail.

Some preachers will read this editorial and will be offended by it. That’s their problem, not mine. They need to hear it. Yahweh is moving right now in powerful ways all over the world, but they keep repeating the mistakes of the past. That has to change. Yahweh will make certain that it does change.

Shortly after I started working on my Ph.D. degree, Yahweh told me that I would do something very specific for Him. You can read about it here: “Yahweh’s Precision Timing: He’s Never Late and He’s Never Early”.

When I completed my Ph.D., I joined the faculty at the University of Virginia. For the next 25 years, I taught strategy, leadership, and entrepreneurship. As a faculty member and as an administrator in various capacities, I became immersed in university life at every level. That was never my goal, but I learned a lot in the process. When it was time for me to move on, Yahweh told me.

I retired from UVA in 2004. Since then, I have devoted myself to Yahweh, and I have seen evidence of Him using me in ways that I can barely comprehend. For example, a group of preachers in Nigeria read my book His Name is Yahweh and asked me for permission to copy and share it. I gave them permission, and I posted the book on the internet in PDF format so that anyone in the world can read it for free. It has been read by large numbers of people in many countries including China, Iran, and Indonesia, the largest predominantly Muslim country in the world.

I can’t speak to the effects the book has had on every country, but I can talk about the effect it has had in Nigeria. For example, watch the video below. The musicians are Nigerians. They got the message, and my book played an important part in their education.

I know what comes next for me, and I don’t think it’s too far off. I will complete my mission when I finish the next leg of my journey. It will take place in Jerusalem. I can hardly wait.

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“I am the good shepherd. I know My sheep and My sheep know Me — just as the Father knows Me and I know the Father — and I lay down My life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also. They too will listen to My voice, and there shall be one flock and one Shepherd. The reason My Father loves Me is that I lay down My life — only to take it up again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of My own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from My Father.”

John 10: 14-18