Karola Returns

1976.7.4

America is 200 years old. Happy birthday. God bless America.

It's been several weeks since I have made an entry. We are now in the fourth day of competition before Washington Monument. I have not been suffering from lack of inspiration. Rather the opposite. My experiences on my new team have been so deep that it would be extremely difficult to relate them on paper.

My love and respect for Captain Turegano is growing day by day. I see this team as being perfection stage. Richard Panzer's team was formation. Captain Yasuda's was growth.

My fallen nature is being exposed by the bucketload. On our team are two sisters, Darlene and Shirley, and six brothers. Jack is assistant captain and an All-American boy type, a very wonderful brother and a good seller. Dominick is from New York. He has a good sense of humor and is also a good seller. Jesse is fairly quiet and is struggling internally, because his results have not been so good, but I like him very much.

Mike Joyce and I came to Boonville about the same time. He likes to talk and give the team a blow by blow, play by play account of his spiritual difficulties. He obsesses about his spiel. He's convinced that if he could just come up with the right combination of magic words, everyone would buy and he would make a huge result. He's a very nice brother, but I have a hard time uniting with Mike. Every day he recounts the same struggles, over and over. No matter what kind of breakthrough he has one day, the next day it's like it never happened and he starts all over. He sounds like a broken record.

What prompted me to make an entry is I found tonight that Karola is in St. Louis and is hearing Divine Principle. She came back to America from Germany and somehow found out I was in the church and in trying to find me she ended up at the St. Louis center. Captain said I should call her tomorrow.

The whole thing is incredibly unbelievable. Captain Turegano was taking me around blitzing in Memphis and he just casually asked me if I knew a girl named Karola. I was so shocked. After he answered as many questions as he could, I told him of the relationship she and I had the summer before.

I still can't believe it.