BY HANNAH
Before I met the Lord and the Family, He used books I read or stories like the one I shared before –Scheherazade – to prepare my heart for meeting Him and forsaking all and following.
Another fictional novel I read that influenced me deeply was The Harrad Experiment. It was about a university where the coed living was in the rooms, not just on the same floor. And the story was following the thoughts, impressions and growth of three couples of roommates over a four year period. Eventually when they came to the end of their 4 yrs of school, they decided to all live together and traded mates every month. Kind of a group marriage. This was so intriguing to me.
In my own situation at my school, we had a group of close friends. We loved each other very much as friends, but few, if any, besides me, haha, crossed the line to be more intimate. But it didn’t really matter because we all considered our platonic love more important than sex. Most of us had had our fill elsewhere so that was not the need.
My third year I went abroad and I realized that our idyllic group was only going to last as long as we were in school and when the four years were up, everyone was going to go on their merry way, being lawyers and doctors and all that. No one put the emphasis or the weight on our friendship like I did. For me that was the most important thing I was living and learning.
During that third year abroad, however, I met Jesus and the Family, and I was so thrilled to find that something like The Harrad Experiment actually existed. Only it wasn’t for 4 years, it was for a lifetime. Here were people dedicated to living in love. I jumped at the chance and dropped out, pretty much on the spot.
I have never looked back.
I was a bit disappointed after the Reboot that no one wanted to live together anymore. I didn’t understand it. But I still kept this in my heart, that what Dad has given us and our heritage of living Acts2:44 and 45 was not impossible.
That’s what flipped me out when I met you guys online, that there is still someone who believes it is possible.
You have no idea how important it is what you are doing there. Like the class recently about “A Sample not a Sermon“. It really is what makes us different.
Tons of Love, Hannah
PS.
Here’s a little condensation of a book Review of Harrad Experiment:
A new-age ‘experiment’ takes place in the 1960s at Harrad College, a privately endowed and liberally run school that admits carefully selected students. This social experiment encourages premarital living arrangements and is totally committed – not mere lip-service or public-relations hype – to getting young men and women to think and act for themselves. What do they think about? Everything that interests the author, Bob Rimmer: human relations, sex, history, philosophy, anatomy, existentialism, art, music, Zen, politics – and, once more, sex. Four Harrad students record their thoughts regularly for four years
When you have read this book, you will find yourself entertaining the question of whether a real-life Harrad Experiment could – or should – be going on somewhere today, turning out a very special group of young men and women with the potential to utterly change America’s (or the world’s ) ways of living, thinking, and loving in the 21st century.
“When I walked upon this Earth, the scribes & Pharisees sought to catch Me in My Words so that they could have something to condemn Me with. So shall it be with you, that they shall try to catch you in all that ye shall say, that they shall have something to condemn you with. But if it is not this thing, it shall yet be another. They shall seek after you to catch you in one thing after another, for it is in their hearts to condemn you. But it is in My heart to justify you & to keep you & to protect you, & to continue to use you to bring My Word & the purity of My Word & the purity of My Love to this generation.”