An Interview with the Scoonovers
JK: Today we have the pleasure of having Lewis and Elly Scoonover in for an interview today. Thank you for coming.
Lew: I’m not sure why you wanted an interview with us, Mr. Sellers. I’m not even in the book after all. You do realize that I die before I get a chance to even to speak one line. You should have someone like my grandson, Rick or one of his friends.
JK: Even though you aren’t ‘in’ the book, your influence is felt all throughout its pages and besides, your loving wife has a major role to play as well.
Elly: Oh, I don’t know about that. We just did our best to establish the farm and raise Rickie to be the best that he could. He began life with so many challenges.
JK: Oh? What were those?
Lew: Well, as you know, his father, my son-in-law, died back in ‘03 during the Iraq War. Rickie was just a toddler at the time. My daughter, Viviana, took Frank’s death pretty hard. She loved him very much you know. While Frank was deployed, she and Rickie had prayed on their knees every night that he would return home safe. When he was killed in Nasiriyah, Vivian lost all faith in God. I tried to explain to her that we must have trust in God and not lose faith in His plan for us. I reminded her that we all will be reunited in the afterlife and we will all be together for the eternities after the resurrection. She wouldn’t listen and was angry with God for taking her husband away and leaving her to raise Rickie alone.
Elly: Viv started drinking after that. A lot. When that didn’t help, she sought relief from hard drugs. After several years going downhill, Viv left Rickie with us and disappeared. Some friends in Vegas said they saw her panhandling on a street corner with another crackhead. We tried to find her. She kept moving around living in homeless shelters and on the street. Three years later, she was found dead…from an overdose in an alley.
JK: I’m sorry for you lose. What did you do?
Elly: We raised Rickie the best we could. He was an angry, bitter child for losing both parents. We had the farm and he loved animals. I think that’s what saved him from following in his mother’s footsteps.
JK: I'm happy you were able to help him. Let’s go back a little bit. Where did the both of you meet?
Lew: We met at a church dance while in high school back in New Mexico. We fell in love and were married a year later. That was before I joined the Marines.
JK: Why did you choose the Marines?
Lew: My father served in the Corps during WW II with Lewis Puller, the most decorated Marine in American history. In fact, my Dad named me after him.
JK: Where did you serve?
Lew: Mostly in the Pacific like my Dad. When I enlisted, Viet Nam was just beginning to heat up. After basic I signed up for Force Recon and was accepted. A year later I was sent to ‘Nam and did two full tours there.
JK: Two? Was that normal?
Lew: Depends. The real hard a…I mean the real hard-core guys did multiple tours. I know a Gunny who did five. At the end of my first full tour my Master Sergeant got me falling down drunk and talked me into signing up for a second tour.
JK: What was it like?
Lew: Unconventional jungle warfare is very difficult. You are not only fighting an unseen enemy who hides among the civilian populace, but you also must fight nature itself. It takes a toll. Fighting takes a toll…
[Long Pause]
Elly: Yes, it does. Lew came back a completely different man. The Lew I knew had died in those wet and savage jungles.
JK: You suffered from PTSD?
Lew: Yes…There are some things your mind just never gets over. Things you done and things you didn’t do. Guilt too. Yes. Guilt for things I did in that war. But there was a grinding guilt of leaving all those friends behind who died…one after another. I survived and they didn’t. I kept thinking: What could I have done to save them? Was it my fault they died? Something I did or didn’t do that got them killed? How could I face their wives and kids after leaving them behind?
JK: How did you overcome those feelings?
[Another Long Pause]
Elly: After Lew Got back home, I tried as best I could, but it wasn’t enough.
Lew: You know how stubborn I am Elly. After…I tried to kill myself, she sought help from a neighbor who was one of our ecclesiastical leaders. She had come to realize that she couldn’t do it alone, that we couldn’t. We needed help. We needed God’s help.
Elly: Vernon prayed with us. Lew needed to know God loved him no matter what he had done in the war and that He could heal all his pain and suffering. Christ suffered in the garden and the cross to take away our sins AND to relieve our suffering and pain.
Lew: I prayed Mr. Sellers and when I did, I felt a warm feeling fill my heart. The pain was lifted from me. I felt His love cover me like a warm blanket. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that God loved me. That began my rebirth. I changed completely.
JK: So, what did you do when you got back from Vietnam?
Lew: I thought about going back to school on the GI Bill. My father had died the year before and left me with a small inheritance. Instead of school, I took that money and bought a few hundred acres of farmland in a small valley in the middle of the Wasatch Range of Utah near the Rockies.
JK: Why Utah? Didn’t you grow up in New Mexico?
Lew: Yes. I wanted a safe place for my family, a safe haven from the world so to speak.
JK: Isn’t New Mexico safe? It’s not like you were living in a dangerous inner city or something.
Lew: No, ha-ha. No, New Mexico is a very safe place to live…for now.
One of my pastimes after leaving ‘Nam was studying the Bible. I got a lot of comfort from reading it. I also felt apprehension too. There are mountains of faith promoting stories in the Bible. However there are also warnings from God to flee Babylon and to go into the mountains scattered among the words of many prophets. The New Testament has a lot of references about bad things occurring in the end times and I believed they were well on their way. So, I left the mean streets of Albuquerque, ha-ha, and ‘fled’ to the mountains of Utah.
JK: Why Utah? Aren’t there mountains in New Mexico?
Lew: Well, yes there are.
When I read those passages, they bothered me for a long time. I prayed to God what I should do, where I should go to establish a refuge for my new family. So being a Marine, I took out a map of North America and looked for the most logical place to build that refuge. The Rockies quickly caught my eye. A high and formidable range of mountains that began in my state of New Mexico and rose high all the way up into Canada. That’s one mighty barrier, those mountains. The high valleys west of the Rockies are fertile with reservoirs up high in the canyons. To the West of those valleys is a dry desert that runs hundreds of miles to the Sierra mountains. The southern flank of these valleys is protected by the Grand Canyon and the Colorado river. In that area protected by The Rockies on the east and north, desert in the west and the Grand Canyon on the south you have farms, dairies, cattle ranches, herds of horses, oil, natural gas, iron, copper, precious metals, manufacturing, you name it. Everything a refuge from the coming storm would need.
JK: What makes you think we are in the end times. Hasn’t there been predictions about the end of the world since forever?
Elly: Of course there have been, silly. That doesn’t mean that Christ ain’t coming. We just don’t know when. Or at least we don’t know the day or year. But we can recognize the signs and they are coming more and more often.
JK: What signs have you seen lately?
Lew: You have God’s word being taught in every language and every country now. Even some Jews are starting to believe that Jesus is the Messiah or at least a great rabbi. Speaking of Jews, their return to the Promised Land and the establishment of the country of Israel is another prophecy that has been fulfilled even after all the attempts to stop it and destroy their tiny country. Wickedness has increased and people have left the Churches in droves and have lost faith. There are many more prophecies that have been fulfilled.
JK: So, you think the time is close? And if you do, how soon?
Lew: Jesus said that the signs of His second coming will be like birth pangs. Now if you’ve ever watched a baby being born you know that the birth pangs increase in intensity as well as frequency as the time gets closer to the actual birth. And so it will be with Jesus’ return.
JK: What do we look for? To know it’s near.
Lew: You have to read the back of the book to find out what’s going to happen.
JK: The Book of Revelation? Oh, I have Lew, but it is so confusing with all those weird animals and creatures and on top of that you have angels blowing trumpets and tipping over bowls. It’s hard to understand and so mystifying that I usually skip it or just skim through it.
Lew: I was the same way Mr. Sellers. After studying how God uses symbolism to get across His ideas to the finite mind of man and then reading it over and over again, I was able to dig down to the basics of what He wanted to warn us about.
JK: Well, come on, give.
Lew: I won’t be able to give you that in just one sitting, Mr. Sellers. Just the outline I have will take at least an hour to explain in this interview.
JK: Can you send it to me then? I’d really like to see it.
Lew: Sure. I can mail you a copy of it as soon as I get home. It’s kind of messy though. With notes and scriptures written all over it.
JK: That’s fine. Whatever helps to understand the visions that John saw. I would be grateful.
Lew: I’m glad we can help.
Elly: Yes, thanks for having us. You are a nice young man, but we have to be going. It’s going to get dark soon and Lew’s not supposed to drive in the dark.
JK: Again, thank you for coming. I’ll be looking forward to that outline Lew.
Elly: I’ll send something along too. A surprise.
JK: Thank you both for being here and sharing with us a little about yourselves.
JK Sellers
P.S. If I get Lew's outline of the Book of Revelation in the mail in time, I will include it in next month's newsletter in place of an interview.