White Wasteland by Jeff Kirkham (best color ebook reader .txt) 📕

if it were just one fact standing alone. But how many policy-based idiosyncrasies had stacked up to blunt the prescience of the Church? Their lack of foresight for the end of times had left them as helpless as everyone else. That shouldn’t have happened to the “true church.”

During the first years of Joseph Smith’s restoration, the Mormon religion captured that hurly-burly furor of the New Testament—radical teachings, brazen peculiarity and do-or-die brotherly love. They were a tight family wrapped in a strange faith.

Then the calcification of time did its work. The Church became an institution. Radical faith receded and policy gained ground. After 200 years, fervent prophesy gave way to measured practicality. The strangeness had been wrung out of their faith, replaced with a legion of safeguards.

Maybe that very truth lurked beneath the dark magnetism of Rex Burnham, even as he threatened civil war upon God’s true church. He had welcomed the polygamists back. He had re-instituted the United Order. He had prophesied with fire and made them, once again, a peculiar people.

Perhaps Richard’s own mistake—taking food from Vanderlink—had opened his eyes to the dead zones in his belief, in his church.

The chickadees were back. Even after the truck left with his dead neighbor, he still stared across the yard. The tiny birds flitted to and fro, bobbling from oak branch to oak branch, moving his reverie on fickle winds.

The corporate version of the Church had been obliterated now; just like every corporate church. The thought brought him back to the chickadees, whose fugitive lives knew no impediment from last winter to this.

The cold had brought the chickadees back to Utah from wherever they spent their summers. The tiny birds needed no walls to protect them nor logistics supply chains to feed them.

Like the lilies of the field and the sparrows of the air.

The chickadees lived without safeguard. They persisted in the hands of the Lord, come what may.

A knock echoed through the halls of his condominium, and a moment’s time passed before Richard understood the sound. It’d been a long time since someone knocked on his door. The unspoken agreement during the flu had been to stay away—for your good and mine. The dark spell of the plague had broken and his calling had returned: prophet, seer and revelator. What exactly that meant, he couldn’t say for sure. The world had jerked on its axis and the loose pieces remained in the air. They would return to ground, but in what order, he couldn’t guess.

“Brother Vanderlink. I’m so pleased to see you well.” President Thayer exclaimed as he greeted his head of security. The two men declined the handshake, the habits of the plague still fresh.

“President. How are you and Sister Thayer?” The large man delivered the nicety with a stone face.

“We’re well, thank you for asking. We were fortunate not to catch the flu. Come inside,” President Thayer invited.

Jack Vanderlink stepped toward the prophet’s couch, seated himself and got down to business. “I’d like to discuss raising a force to go against Elder Burnham in the south.”

After the flu and the quiet, he could now see Brother Vanderlink’s lightless heart. How he hadn’t seen it before, he didn’t know. It was so easy, between members of the same church, to miss the signs of a marred soul. Jack Vanderlink should never have been trusted with the means of force. His personal character sloped toward thuggery. Richard could see it, as clearly as he could see that the man combed his hair to cover his receding hairline.

Sometime, somewhere, President Thayer knew the man before him had been deeply wounded. He would spend the rest of his life, and the life beyond, wrestling with that damage to his soul.

Richard Thayer admitted that he had probably refused to see it—a part of him knew that Jack Vanderlink could expose him as the word breaker he was. Brother Vanderlink had been strong when Richard Thayer had been weak. Vanderlink had prepared for a storm while Richard had failed to secure the future for his family. A witness to his weakness, Vanderlink had become a spiritual blind spot.

“Brother Vanderlink. I am extraordinarily grateful for your service to myself and the Church. You stood in the gap and protected my family and the temple. Church history will forever tell the story of what you’ve done. We’ve reconstituted the Quorum of the Twelve, and together, we extended a calling to Brother Kirkham to lead our military. I hope that you can sustain Brother Kirkham.”

“Brother Kirkham? You mean Jeff Kirkham the non-member from the Ross compound?” Jack Vanderlink lurched forward in his seat, gobsmacked. “How can you call a non-member to that position? To any priesthood position?” He bounced on the couch in agitation and Thayer recoiled, wondering for the first time if he might be in physical danger.

“Brother Kirkham hasn’t yet accepted the calling formally, but we have extended it, regardless of his church attendance.”

Vanderlink’s face flushed. “I gave you my MREs,” he shouted. “I brought the MRAPs to protect the temple, and to protect you and your wife. You can’t do this to me.”

Richard Thayer glowered, perhaps for the first time in a decade. “Brother Vanderlink, neither you nor I come first in the service of God. He calls whom He wishes and you would do well to check yourself. There’s undoubtedly a good reason to remove you from this calling—a burden of repentance you haven’t been willing to address.”

Vanderlink roared at the prophet, stood to his feet and thundered down upon him with anger. His hands clutched at the air, kneading his meaty fists. Sister Thayer appeared in the hallway, her face a picture of fear. She fired confused glances back and forth between her husband and the livid man standing in their living room.

“You should leave now, Brother Vanderlink,” President Thayer ordered.

Vanderlink stormed from the living room, stomped down the marble hallway and out the oak door, slamming it behind him.

“Richard,” Melinda sputtered. “Are you okay? What happened? Why would he shout