ALLAH’s Now Invisible Man

President George Bush and the Christians who approve of his shoot first tactics, vividly demonstrate that supposedly being a Christian does not at all automatically solve problems. The reality is that those men whom I have just quoted, each have much to grieve about because of the violence currently swallowing the Mid East, much of it either initiated or exacerbated by a supposedly Christian President.

But what also hurts my heart is this. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that an enthusiastic turning with deep heart commitment to the risen man who has now been empowered by ALLAH to be present with every last person in the Middle East can change the whole Middle East dynamic. Yes, ALLAH two thousand years ago empowered him to totally defeat death and to also defeat the wicked conspiracy of Jewish leaders to end his light and life forever, and He is still empowering him now.

The shameful reality is that though the dynamism of the Risen, living, accessible Messiah has the potential to inspire such a high degree of loyalty and a new moral and ethical commitment, that he could ultimately dissolve the hatred between Sunni and Shiite, his power is being totally ignored. If not, the hatred between Fatah and Hamas could be finally defeated. But the deep, deep, deep, deep, deep irony is this. The leaders of Islam including each of the above men that are so justifiably concerned that the Mid East might explode like a keg of dynamite and who sincerely do care about the horrible suffering of children, are making a horrible mistake They each callously or ignorantly choose to totally reject the healing that is only provided by ALLAH’s great physician. They unwisely treat him as if he is irrelevant. That is, they have an aversion to acknowledging that they have made an enormous error in understanding the true meaning of one key verse in the Holy Quran. So tragically, they inadvertently sabotage the opportunity for him to treat their wounds. Regrettably, they would rather have the whole Mid-East blow up with their children being burned to death or blown into small pieces than to have other Muslims criticize them for giving ALLAH’s living Messiah a realistic chance to help. To put it bluntly, it appears that it is up to the young people of the Mid East to bring about the necessary change because the older Muslims choose to stay even blinder than Bush and Cheney.

The Weakest of the Weak

 You may legitimately ask this question. What are Tom Griffith’s credentials to make such bold statements? My answer is this. ALLAH is so powerful and mighty that he will not share His might with any one who might be strong enough to take any credit when ALLAH chooses to make His significant break-through. So ALLAH must use a very weak person instead of a strong person who could be tempted to take the credit for doing something for ALLAH. Therefore, my chief credentials are that I am possibly one of the weakest persons on the face of this earth. But my desperate weakness has forced me to be a person of prayer. In fact, I have had to constantly pray in order to get myself out of the trouble that I often find myself in. I have learned to pray whether its for passing an algebra class or for getting out of a Syrian prison. In fact, one of the things that I do have in common with the highly respected Prophet of Islam is that I have spent considerable time praying in certain edges of the desert in Saudi Arabia, even near the mountains east of Mecca. But I am not at all comparing myself to that great prophet because he must have had at least ten thousand skills that I don’t have. So my greatest credential to be led to speak out a message from ALLAH is that I am so terribly weak that I have learned to depend on Him and not on myself.

Physically, I’ll start from the top of my body down. 1. I am losing my hearing. 2. For the last 58 years I have had two false front teeth because I got them knocked out when I was a pin setter in a bowling alley. 3. I think I have some minor brain damage since I had encephalitis as a five year old. 4. I have scarred lungs from having histoplasmosis, a Kansas dust disease, as a ten year old. 5. I began needing glasses after I went to sleep under a sun lamp when I was in the Navy. 6. I was born with a bicuspid heart valve. (I had only two heart valve leaflets where normal valves have three. So I now have a heart valve that is made out of cow. It has about six years left on it. (I purposely didn’t get a pig valve so I could possibly return to Saudi Arabia some day.) 7. I slipped in the mud so I experienced a double hernia attempting not to fall down. 8. My feet are so flat that I have callouses on my arches. 9. I am such a lousy basketball player that when I recruited a team to play in a Kansas City basketball tournament, the team that I recruited won the tournament. But they wouldn’t let me play because I was such a bad player. 10. As far as my mind is concerned, I had to get extensive help to pass basic algebra. 11. I was so poor in college statistics that it was like a foreign language when I was in the class. 12. I was getting a D- in college accounting when I dropped out of business administration. 13. As a teacher, I didn’t do very well because I have trouble with organization 14. As a counselor I did better because my ears are so big that it was obvious that I should listen.

Many Tiny Evidences That ALLAH for His Reason

Began Speaking To Me About Speaking To Islam

Regarding The Risen Man From Bethlehem

Note: The following mostly sequential experiences are not meant to convince anyone that they should believe that I have a unique calling from GOD. But the following are some of the basic reasons that I persevere in my attempt to convince the Community of Islam (Umma) that the Quran definitely supports the conclusion that ALLAH’s intention and His will is that ALLAH’s Risen Messiah be accepted as the Risen Messiah of Islam.

So this list reveals why this one person who is compiling this list is himself 100% convinced that he has such a calling. But those who choose to believe that I am suffering from the same type of delusional thinking that afflicted the brilliant mind of the man in the film “A Magnificent Mind,” may be correct. However, there is one glaring contrast between my mind and his. His mind was brilliant. My mind is not. So please reach your own conclusions regarding my mental state until after you have read this list. But of course even then you might still be convinced that these are all strange coincidences and have no connection to ALLAH calling me to communicate with Islam about His Risen Messiah.

This list, for the sake of brevity will omit thousands of relevant details.

Mostly my Journey started in 1969

1. I was in my counseling office in 1969. I had gotten down on my knees in my Chief Sealth High School because I was looking for a misplaced paper that I thought could be in my bottom file drawer. Suddenly a distinct voice spoke in my mind which said: “Do you want to serve me?”              Taking the voice to be from GOD, I said “Yes, Lord.”

2. A few months later the Seattle school district graciously allowed me through my flexible principal, Mr. Bob Bell, to begin working part time so I could spend the afternoons meeting international students on the University of Washington campus which was located about a quarter of a mile from our family home in Seattle’s University District.

3. As I met more and more Muslim students on campus I became convinced that GOD wanted our family of seven (my lovely now deceased wife and five young children to move to Saudi Arabia if I could be hired for a position there. However, at that time I had little to offer in the way of marketable job skills.

4. The main place that I could get to know local male Saudi students was at the University District Century Tavern. When I explained to my Saudi friends that I wanted to go to Saudi Arabia so I could more completely understand why Muslims and Christians have such a different view about ALLAH’s Messiah, one of my Saudi friends gave me a very clear and frightening response.

5. One night he told me in no uncertain terms that he and his Saudi friends saw through my double talk of wanting to understand Islam. He said that they had all agreed that I really intended to influence Saudi Muslims to become Christians.

6. Despite my reassurances that that was not my intention, he made it very clear that if I carried through with my plans to go to Saudi Arabia, that he and his friends would make certain that I would never make it to that nation. Because he had been drinking beer, perhaps that had influenced his implied threat. Regarding my own beer drinking in the tavern, I often mixed my beer with tomato juice in order to keep my mind as clear as possible.

7. Because I took his words as a very definite threat on my life, I made arrangements for a certain group of elders in a church in Des Moines, Washington to pray for my protection and for my plans and desires to go to Saudi Arabia although at that time I saw no prospects for a job there.

8. As a result of an amazing set of coincidental circumstances on the very night I was to meet the elders for their prayer, I heard about the Head Master of the American Community School in Beirut Lebanon being in Seattle to interview a close friend for a chemistry teaching position at the Beirut school.

9. My friend insisted that I contact the headmaster about an open counseling position at the school. So I contacted him by phone the next day. He explained to me that the position did not pay enough to support a family of seven. But he kindly added that I could write him a letter outlining my qualifications and how I thought my family could survive on such a small salary.

10.  A month or so later I received a call from the principal of the high school. He had come to Seattle because his wife had won a round trip plane ticket in a raffle. At the interview with him I was offered the position of high school counselor to begin in September of 1973. Beirut was much closer to Saudi Arabia than Seattle. So my wife and I agreed that I should accept the position as a possible first step to Saudi Arabia.

11. An amazing coincidence happened about 3 hours after we arrived in Beirut with our family of seven and 27 bags. (I believe that the following “coincidence” had been arranged by GOD in order to give me a powerful reminder to keep my eyes on Saudi Arabia as our ultimate destination.)                               I had returned to the Beirut airport from the school to retrieve a missing bag and to get one more passport stamped. While I was rushing through the very crowded airport, I literally bumped into a person. When we both turned around to say “pardon me” both of our eyes got very big. He was the person who had threatened me at the tavern about going to Saudi Arabia.                                                 We did not have time for any additional conversation. But I could see that he was just as surprised to see me as I was to see him.

12. The lack of an adequate salary did prove to be a hardship for my wife and children ages five through fifteen. However, a few faithful friends from the sates sent us small amounts of money. I also counseled one struggling teen-ager on week-ends which helped with the limited finances in addition to accepting a summer position at Chaifat school in the mountains of Lebanon teaching English.

13. In the summer of 1975, while my wife and two youngest children were back in the states visiting my wife’s ill mother, I decided to use our old V.W. camper to take my three oldest children and a friend of my 12 year old son (whose father was chaplain of American University of Beirut) to Turkey for a visit.

14. Though I thought I was driving carefully after entering Syria, a ten or eleven year old boy started to run down the middle of the road in front of us. He had suddenly run-out from a road-side water-melon stand. Though I hit my brakes, there was no way to avoid hitting him.

15. Though I had knocked the injured boy into fairly soft, moist ground at the edge of the road, I immediately thought that I had killed the unfortunate boy. When he finally moved and groaned, all of us who had gathered around the unconscious boy were greatly relieved.

16. My son and his friend later visited him in the hospital and he had a broken bone in his leg and also had a slight concussion. But they were assured that he would be O.K.

17. Two very kind large Syrian taxi drivers advised me to let them take me to the police station so I could be protected from the gathering crowd that could possibly become quite hostile to me.

18. At the police station there was a lovely Syrian wife of a doctor who graciously volunteered to care for the four children in her home until they could be sent by taxi back to Beirut. This was assuming that I would be held by the Syrian authorities.

19. Though I was immediately put in jail, some kind soldiers woke me up about midnight to take me across the street from the police station in order to join them for a beer.

20.  After the night in jail a car arrived from the doctor’s wife’s home to take me to be with my children for a lovely outdoor breakfast.

21. After having been returned to the jail I was taken to an office where I was interrogated through an interpreter (who was also a lawyer) by a couple of different government officials.

22.  Then I was taken to a building in the city of Tartus where two policemen told me that I needed to talk with a man who was on the other side of a closed door. They opened the door with a key. I walked in. They closed the door and left. There was more than one man there. There were about a hundred men walking around in an open court yard which was surrounded by about six or seven group prison cells. I was in prison. I immediately wondered if I would ever get out.

23.  I remembered that Paul and Barabus in the New Testament sang hymns when they were in prison. I wasn’t terrified that I had suddenly been put in prison. But I certainly was worried and disillusioned. I had hoped to go to Saudi Arabia to find out more about the place of the Risen Messiah in Islam. Instead, I was going to find out if I could survive in a Syrian prison and if I could avoid dying in prison from diarrhea which was my most immediate fear. So to reassure my own heart and mind and to send a clear message to GOD that I was desperately trying to trust Him in the midst of some very trying circumstances, I sat down on the prison floor right in front of the hundred or so milling prisoners who were slowly walking around me. And there, while trying to remain positive, in a reasonably loud voice I sang at least four verses of “Amazing Grace.”

24.  In retrospect, I think singing was about the best thing I could have done. Aside from sending GOD a message, I think my singing in English under such circumstances probably gave each prisoner a clear message. The message was this. This about forty-two year old man who was obviously American, was probably a little bit crazy. So except for the extreme anxiety of sleeping on a thin sponge between two convicted murderers on the first night, everyone sort of treated me with kindness and fascination and as a kind of younger brother mascot for whom they fixed food and wanted to protect.

25.  Actually, if I had known I would be released in about a week, the prison time could have been a positive experience. But the anxiety of not knowing if I would ever be released and the isolation from the outside world, was difficult to handle. However, the fact that my son’s friend’s father was a high official at American University in Beirut probably contributed to my getting out of prison much earlier than I would have if this influential man’s son had not been with us.

26.  The trip in my V.W. camper back to Beirut brought another unexpected emergency. However I am convinced that it was GOD who provided the needed help so that I could escape Syria. But, before I relate that experience, we will return to the prison in order to provide the background for what could have prevented me from leaving Syria.

27.  While my son and his friend were visiting me at the prison, an emergency occurred causing the guards to yell at the two boys to leave immediately. This happened just as I was trying to figure out what papers I should give to them and what papers I would need later. However, with the guards ordering them to hurry up and leave, I just pushed all of my papers through the jail bars and told them to take them without realizing the implications of what I had done.

28. But one more emergency would occur before I reached the customs station without my necessary papers. When I discovered that I would be released in 24 hours I decided to get a cheap shave and a haircut from a fellow prisoner. That proved to be a potential fatal mistake. While my prisoner/barber had my head bent back with his straight edge razor on my jugular vein, he asked me in broken English if I had ever visited Israel. I was so glad that I had not. I definitely had the strong impression that he could have purposely slipped in the water on the concrete floor and purposely slit my throat if I had said “yes.”

29. Then a few seconds later his sharp razor wandered back to the same vulnerable spot. This time I was asked who I thought was right, the Israelis or the Palestinians. I will honestly acknowledge, at that particular moment I could not have had more sympathy for the Palestinians.

30. After my welcome release, I pulled up at the customs station just before I would leave Syria. But because I did not have the correct custom’s papers, I was asked to meet with the approximately 350 pound head of customs who was seated on a very strong but short stool. He gruffly ordered me to return to Tartus to get my last custom’s paper. But I knew that there was no customs papers in Tartus for me to get.                                       But an apparently deaf and unable to speak young man was watching my interactions with the official with real compassion for me. So when the big, big man was not looking, the compassionate boy hand signaled for me to quietly get in my car and drive off. So I followed the young man’s instructions, but I had never looked into my rear view mirror so often to see if I was being chased. The exceptionally valuable lesson I learned from a combination of the very frightening prison and custom station experience, was that GOD delivers even when I am helpless to help myself. And I needed that lesson in Saudi Arabia many, many times.

31.  After returning to Beirut, their civil war soon started. But it had not interrupted life so much that I couldn’t put on my tennis shorts and give some wives of male staff members a group tennis lesson. When the lesson was over, I felt that I owed it to a close friend in the U.S. to visit his “God Daughter” who was in the Beirut Women’s Prison. She had been arrested with her boy friend who had been caught with some drugs.

32. I was naive not to have been suspicious when there was no persons or cars on the usually very busy street near the prison. However, I was even more naive when I was in the women’s prison on visitors’ day and I was the only visitor. But, as I left the prison I soon figured out why the streets were deserted. A gun battle was just about to begin between two enemy factions. One group was in the upper windows of the apartment buildings on my left. The other group was hiding behind walls on my right. So this terribly naïve American was walking along in his tennis shorts right between them. But luckily they hadn’t yet started to shoot. Suddenly, a weapon was thrust in my face from a large hole in the wall on my right. Then a rough voice ordered me in basic Arabic, “RuHH min hoan!” which translates, “Get out of here!”

33. My frightened mind suddenly told me that I should run back to the safety of the women’s prison. But as soon as I started to run, four or five armed men began running behind me, shouting in Arabic. They used words that I could not understand and they were also franticly waving their weapons.                                                                  When we had all covered the about 40 to 50 yards back to the prison, the gate guard who had just let me out of the prison compound less than two minutes before, began acting as though he had never before seen me. But just after they had taken my passport from me and I guess had taken me prisoner, the woman director of the prison showed up and convinced them that I didn’t speak Arabic. She also told them that I was harmless and was not a spy. She then explained to me in English that they probably would have shot me but they were confused. At least in the Arab world, spies never wear shorts in public.

34.  Soon the school closed due to the war and our three older children returned to Seattle to live with friends and resume schooling. But my wife, two youngest children and myself soon went to Amman Jordan as refugees. We were offered housing in the attic of a church which had contained PLO offices during the “Black September” Jordanian war with the PLO.

35. Soon, my wife and I were attending Arabic classes in Amman and our two youngest attended two different English speaking schools. Then, just as we thought we had settled in, we received a disturbing letter from Christian friends in Seattle. They firmly ordered us to return to Seattle immediately and to fulfill our “Christian responsibility” to get our family back under one roof.                    I was truly upset by the authoritarian and rigid tone of the letter. Nevertheless, I struggled to trust GOD in these difficult circumstances. I was firmly convinced that GOD wanted my wife and I as well as our two youngest to stay in the Arab world to accomplish whatever we had been sent to do. I was personally confident that our three oldest would adjust to living temporarily with caring friends in Seattle. But I knew it would be a difficult adjustment for them.

36.  I left my wife and two children in Amman in the caring international community of the fellow students in the Arabic language school and hurriedly returned to Seattle. Through much prayer I was able to convince my key authoritarian friends that I had no peace in leaving the Middle East at that time. I remained convinced that GOD had a purpose for me in the Arab world. But it did hurt that certain friends seemed to be telling our older children that their father appeared to love Muslim Arabs more than he loved them.

37.  Amazingly, as it often seems to work out where GOD is involved, an event which appears to be filled with negatives can turn out positively. It worked out that when I visited with a close physician friend, he had a medical colleague who had just obtained a position at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh Saudi Arabia. So with one phone call my friend obtained the telephone number of the hospital recruiter in Nashville whom I called. The recruiter had received my application for a position in the hospital that I had sent while I was in Beirut. But he had no idea how to find me to interview me for a position as “Orientation Coordinator” at the ultra modern hospital in the desert. So an interview was able to be set up in California because I had been compelled by friends to return to the states. Wonderfully, this new position in Saudi Arabia also provided the opportunity for our son to spend another year with us in Saudi Arabia before attending school at the Notre Dame International School in Rome.                                                                     The interviewer explained to me that my strongest quality that got me the job was this. Out of the many questions he asked, I always seemed to answer the questions from the frame of reference of a broad perspective. Apparently my college sociology training had paid off so that I could become thankful for being lousy in accounting. If that weakness had not caused me to drop out of business administration, I probably would not have had the great opportunity to work among the very friendly people of Saudi Arabia.

38.  Through a series of both encouraging and discouraging circumstances, I finally ended up with a position working with mainly Saudis in a Saudi company after having worked with both the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and with the International School in Riyadh.

39.  One of my main activities while in Saudi Arabia in my off work hours was walking around desert areas on the outskirts of either Riyadh, Taif or Jeddah, pouring out my heart in prayer to GOD. I pleaded with Him to somehow make it clear to the Saudi people that the Risen Jesus was indeed the Risen Messiah and that it was ALLAH’s will for Saudis to believe in him in a stronger way than they appeared to.

40.  One Friday morning which was sort of the work-week Sunday in the Arab world because we had that day off, I awoke with a sensation in my head that I had never experienced before or since. Due to one of my older children going through a very tough experience that week, I had spent a great deal of time in extra prayer. When I awoke early that Friday it was though my head was ready to explode with ideas. I felt such an intense pressure inside of my head that I knew it had to be released.

41. I had no work scheduled so I picked up my pen and began to write the ideas that were bursting to come out of my seemingly pressurized head. What I wrote surprised me. It was a resounding prediction that there would be a future major turning to ALLAH’s Risen Messiah throughout Saudi Arabia.

42.  A few weeks after that unusual experience, I began to sence an overwhelming conviction that GOD wanted me to talk with Saudi Generals about His Risen Messiah. Without going into detail, through a whole series of amazing coincidences which I am convinced could only have been arranged by ALLAH, for four or five consecutive weeks I got together with four to six generals in a Saudi General’s apartment. There I had the GOD arranged opportunity to listen to these Generals in a combination of Arabic and English, discuss alternative ways of interpreting An Nisa 4:157 and 158. (I understood about 5% of the Arabic and 95% of the English.)                                        So these important meetings with these friendly generals planted the seeds in my mind that these two profound verses were not necessarily intended to be taken literally. I learned from listening to these experienced Generals that the Quran could actually be understood to teach that the Messiah did die and did rise, although all of them remained convinced that he had not died and then risen.

43.  Shortly after this experience my job moved me to Jeddah. While there certain ideas again began to envelop my mind so that I felt compelled to write them down. About the time I completed writing my ideas about the Risen Messiah in the Quran, my company began the process of closing down and our family was forced by circumstance to return to Seattle. Significantly, after about five and a half years in a combination of Beirut, Lebanon, Amman, Jordan and Riyadh, Taif and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, we felt that it was the necessary and the right time for our family to again be together though we had all spent valuable time together in Saudi Arabia during one summer.

44.  The ideas I had written in Saudi Arabia soon became a book that I self published and mailed all over the world to mostly Muslims. The book was titled “Sound the ALARM From Saudi Arabia.” It included two themes. The first theme was a literal interpretation of Ezekiel 37 and 38 which appears to present that a coalition of nations which would include Iran, Libya and parts of Russia would attack Israel in these last days. Then they would be defeated not so much by Israel but by ALLAH’s miraculous intervention. (Significantly, I am not as convinced today that this will definitely occur as when I wrote the book.)                   The second theme was how obvious it is when certain verses in the Quran are understood in a more consistent way with other verses in the Quran without a Bush/Cheney/Muslim kind of irrational spin, the door opens for the Risen Messiah to be the Messiah of all of Islam.

45.  Soon after writing the book I had the words authoritatively spoken to me in the middle of the night that were a direct quote from the Prophet Jeremiah although at that time I did not remember ever having read them in Jeremiah.                                                             “My Words are like a hammer.”                                  So I had the distinct impression that ALLAH was telling me that the general words he was inspiring me to write (not the exact words) would be a significant part of finally breaking down the resistance in Islam to ALLAH’s Risen Messiah being Islam’s Risen Messiah.

46.  Later I was given an exceptionally vivid dream in the night that showed many, many small mole type marks appearing on my hands. Then I suddenly realized that I was standing in water to up above my knees in our kitchen. (The symbolism of water in the Scriptures often represents the nations) Then suddenly living larvae started coming out of each mark on my hands. When each larva fell into the water it became instant food for quite large fish swimming in the shallow water. So a feeding frenzy began as they fed on the living substance which was coming from my hands.

47.  When I awoke I immediately interpreted the marks on my hands as different papers I had written and would continue to write. I felt that the living larvae were a sign that the papers would result in new revitalized spiritual life being given to Muslim persons. It seemed to me that some of them would be important persons since Americans often use the word big fish in order to refer to an important person. Also, the Messiah told his former fisherman disciples that he would make them fishers of men (and women.) All of this occurring in water in a kitchen suggested to me that GOD has His reasons to use this very weak person to prepare through his writing living food for thought for many persons of many nations.

48.  Significantly, about three years ago when I had prepared about 1500 post cards to send to about eighty different nations, I had them organized all around me in my living room. Then I asked myself a question out loud but it could have possibly been a silent question in my mind. Will this writing start the feeding frenzy I had dreamed about? At that point I was writing and not paying any attention to the constant chatter of the talk show host and his guest on cable T.V.  But then at that precise instant I heard one person say to the other person immediately after I had asked my question to myself and to GOD. “Yes, this will start a major feeding frenzy.”

49.  In 1988, right after the first Palestinian Intafada had begun I picked up a dictionary and randomly opened it with the purpose of adding a word or two to my limited vocabulary. But my eyes suddenly fixed on a word that I was already quite familiar with, “envoy.” Then for two or three seconds I began to slightly tremble. I immediately interpreted this experience as GOD letting me know that He has anointed me as a spiritual envoy for His spiritual Kingdom.

50.  Then, approximately 10 months ago I was sitting in my Seattle apartment about 17 years after my initial experience with the word “envoy.” Spontaneously I made a decision to review in my mind the precise circumstances that occurred when I had felt that I received an “anointing” as an envoy for GOD’s eternal Kingdom. As I was in the middle of this meditation our phone rang. When I answered it, I noticed on the caller I.D., the word “Envoy.” I thought perhaps that I had misread the caller I.D. So I asked the lady on the line what organization she represented. It was a public survey group by the name of “Envoy.” Still thinking that I might be imposing my own desire on what I thought I was seeing and hearing, I asked her to please spell the organization’s name for me. She patiently replied – e-n-v-o-y. Coincidence or confirmation? What is your view?

51.  Just a month after what I took to be my anointing as an envoy, I received a call from a moderately wealthy Colorado oil prospector. He had read my book, “Sound the Alarm” and wanted to take me to Israel to mediate between some of his Palestinian and Israeli acquaintances. He said that from reading my writing he felt that I had mediation skills. I went with him and stayed most of the summer in the Bethlehem Bible college observing first hand the first “Intifada.” The mediation never worked out. Nevertheless, I was exposed for the first time to Palestinian suffering. Also, I had a sort of humorous but relevant experience on mount Carmel where the Prophet Elijah had defeated the Prophets of Baal.

52.  Our group had stayed all night at a small hotel on Mt. Carmel. I had been asked to speak that night at what I remember to have been the Nazareth Baptist church. But I had not yet decided what topic I would discuss. As I was putting my pants on in my room I was simultaneously asking GOD what I should speak about that evening. But to my great surprise, there inside the waist band of my pants was the timely topic, Hagar, (the name of the manufacturer of the pants.) Interestingly, this particular topic would end up getting me in a little misunderstanding with the man who had brought me to the West Bank and who had paid for my plane ticket.

53.  I chose to speak on Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, because it was so obvious to me that GOD showed her special compassion in a similar way that Christians would need to show Muslims special compassion when multitudes of Muslims begin to choose to follow the Messiah. It is my opinion that many Christians will object to Muslims being accepted by ALLAH’s wonderful Messiah. However, my Christian benefactor felt I was way off base with such a positive emphasis about Hagar. He firmly believed that GOD was very displeased with Abraham for having a child through this Egyptian woman. So it seemed to follow in his reasoning that I was totally wrong to say anything positive about either Hagar or Ishmael. (The irony is that the author of Genesis, Moses, had much positive to say about both Hagar and Ishmael.)

54.  My reasoning was entirely different than this man’s reasoning. I was convinced that even if I had not been shown the name Hagar at the very instant that I asked GOD what to speak about in the home town of the Messiah where angry Jews had tried to murder him, I still should have chosen to speak about this persecuted woman. Because whether Abraham was wrong or not wrong, since the mother of Ishmael was twice portrayed in Genesis as being comforted and protected by ALLAH’s Messiah prior to His Messiah being introduced to all of us by his birth in Bethlehem, all Christians and Muslims should be made aware of the positive portrayal of both Hagar and Ishmael in the important first book of the Bible. The final crown or capstone of the strong evidence of the honor awarded to Ishmael by the not yet born Messiah is this. He instructed Hagar to name her soon to be born son one of the most spiritually significant names in all of the Bible; Ishmael which means “GOD hears.”

55.  Soon I returned to Seattle from in the West Bank where I had written the paper “ALLAH Sees the Israeli Felony” while in the town of the Messiah’s birth. Also, it had been quite special to have visited his home town where his own people had tried to murder him. So I guess visiting these two special places prepared me to soon have another significant experience in the middle of the night. Though I could not recall ever having heard the term before, GOD spoke the term “Abdul AHad” to me that I took to mean this. For His own reasons He wanted me to know that I was viewed by Him as His servant because Abdul AHad means “servant of the one,” or in this usage, servant of the One ALLAH.

56.  It was less than two years later that I had the experience described in detail on this web site of GOD speaking to me immediately after I had been in intense prayer against U.S. bombers bombing the vulnerable Iraqi troops that had invaded Kuwait before constructive negotiations for the troop’s withdrawal could take place. He spoke the distinct message, “The American Administration wanted Iraq to invade Kuwait.” So the first Bush’s invasion of Iraq conveniently used Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait as its excuse for its own invasion. This was roughly equivalent to the second Bush’s WMD’s, as far as also justifying our second Gulf War with Iraq.

57. It was after this word from GOD and after the Gulf war ended that I felt compelled to write the long poem, “The President’s Plan.” This was my version of what went on in the first President Bush’s mind that caused him to trick and manipulate Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait in order to justify the first Gulf War. The poem virtually burst out of my heart and mind.

58.  I sent this poem to mayors, governors, congress persons, and African Americans whose addresses I found in the “Black Whose Who,” as well as to Muslim leaders throughout the world. One of the first many positive responses I received was from the highly respected Black Woman spokesperson, Barbara Jordan, who urged me to keep on speaking my conscience.                               Henry Gonzales of Texas, said in his reply that the Gulf War had resulted in the greatest manipulation of the press in the history of the U.S.                                                Black former civil rights leader who was an early colleague of Martin Luther King Jr., who then became quite radical and partially Marxist, Stokley Carmichal and I exchanged three or four letters as a result of the poem. He referred to me as sort of a prophet who had exposed the root causes of the Gulf War. Though uncomfortable to me, he urged me to use my poems as radicals use bullets. The bullets part I could not agree with.                                     The minister of religion of Iraq at the time praised me from his heart in broken English for using a poetic form of exposing the U.S. for its covert part in causing the first Gulf War.                                                                        If I remember correctly, it was a mayor of Lincoln Nebraska who sent me a very complimentary post-card thanking me for exposing why we had the first Gulf War.

U.S. Racism Against Blacks and Indians 

As Well As Against Arab Muslims

59.  Shortly after this poem, an incident of racism against Blacks in the Seattle media occurred which reminded me of earlier racism against Black University of Washington football players. This combined in my mind with an incident of racism against Indians at a Seattle high school. These incidents of racism compelled me to write three poems that are now on my website. Two exposed historical racism against Indians and one exposed historical racism against Blacks. I mailed each of these poems to every major college newspaper in the U.S.                      My most significant response came over the phone from a Black man in Biloxi Mississippi more than a year after I had mailed out the poem about racism against Blacks. His call especially touched my heart for two reasons. Even though his home had been destroyed by fire, my poem about racism had been preserved. He had been so emotionally touched by it that he had put it in a metal box with his very important papers, so that his important papers and my poem would be preserved. There was a fire and my poem was preserved.                                      The second reason I was so encouraged is because at the age of five I had visited my grand mother, Toot’s home in Biloxi. When my five year old eyes observed the shacks in the black community where her maid lived, my five year old mind was shocked at why black people lived in shacks. So it was in Biloxi Mississippi at a very young age where I was first introduced to the very real consequences of ugly racism.

60. In approximately 1989 or 1990, I experienced three words being spoken clearly and emphatically to my mind that were entirely unexpected. Interestingly, this experience occurred in Seattle’s Ravenna park about a quarter mile from where I was when the words were spoken to me “The American Administration wanted Iraq to invade Kuwait.” This time the words were, “United Arab Emirates.” Also, the time frame was within about a year or two after the words about Iraq invading Kuwait.                      However, instead of thinking about football when this next experience occurred, I was actually praying about ALLAH’s Risen Messiah being revealed to nations with predominantly Islamic identities. I almost always refer to the individual Emirates of Ajman, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Umm al Qaiwain, Ras al Khaima, Fujara, and Sharjah or by the initials, The U.A.E. However, this time only the three words, “United Arab Emirates” were spoken to me without, “The.” From today’s perspective, I am personally convinced my unique experience of fifteen years ago may have been a hint of what may occur in my near future. For in the last several months I have had an increasing conviction that someone will soon invite me to the U.A.E. as an envoy for important dialogue regarding ALLAH’s Risen Invisible Man from West Bank Bethlehem.

61.  In 1993, after I first retired from Seattle public schools and my dear wife of thirty-seven years had experienced a remission from the ugly cancer killer, lymphoma, we took our last trip together to the Middle East where we had previously spent close to six meaningful years.                                                       We first visited Jordan where our son worked, then Egypt where we had friends, then Muscat Oman to visit more friends and Sanaa Yemen where we also had dear friends. In each of these cities I continued my prayer walks each day of pleading with ALLAH to bring about a wonderful breakthrough so that millions of Muslims would fully appreciate ALLAH’s great gift of love to us all revealed in his wonderful, compassionate Risen Messiah.

62.  Soon after we returned home my wife’s cancerous lymphoma (the same dreaded disease that later took the life of the loved and respected King Hussein of Jordan) returned with a vengeance. But GOD gave the two of us a significant precious gift on the darkest day of our lives together. That dark day we were informed of her impending death by a compassionate Group Health Doctor emphatically telling us that Jean probably had no more than six months to live. This news was unexpected and descended like a dark cloud upon us. However, when we returned home from the hospital the mailman had left for us a pleasant surprise. A friend had mailed us a poem written by a husband and wife servants of GOD. Together they had also longed for Muslims to experience more fully GOD’s living Messiah. They had written this short poem in 1951.                                                                                       “Fear not, Islam too shall own,                                    Our Savior, Christ the Lord.                                       In every mosque he shall be known,                              His precious Name Adored.”                                                                                                            So this profound poem told us on that dark day that the 23 moves that we made together attempting to carry the Messiah’s message of love, had not been in vain nor had any of our efforts and sacrifices been in vain. Why could we be so reassured? Because our beloved Messiah would soon be loved in mosques throughout the entire world.

63.  In about the six months that the Doctor predicted, Jean was gone to become a permanent resident in one of ALLAH’s mansions in heaven. (See John 14) Our entire family’s loneliness and desire to again experience my loving wife’s presence was incredible. I actually dreaded being alone after 38 wonderful years and quickly, perhaps too quickly, by other’s standards, yearned for a new loving companion in my life.

64.  A month or so after Jean’s death I received a letter in Arabic from a Christian executive secretary of an Islamic insurance company in Amman, Jordan to which I had sent to a then absent board member an Arabic translation of a paper I had written. It was a fictional interview with the Prophet Muhammad concerning his possible views about both the Living Christ and about the root causes of the Gulf War. She assumed that I had written the Arabic which I definitely could not have done. Before her own beloved brother’s sudden death from a heart attack, he had asked her to please write this Seattle man to request another paper that I had written which I had mentioned in my cover letter.                                                            She explained that her brother, who was a respected lawyer, had liked the interview paper so much that the two of them had made many copies and had given them to numerous Islamic fundamentalists. She told me that these Muslims also appreciated my perspective of what the Prophet had believed about the Messiah. She said that her brother also appreciated what I thought the Prophet would have believed about the Bush Administration’s deception of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein which led to the First Gulf War.

65.  Since this was the only response to any of my writings from an Arab woman, I will acknowledge that it soon entered my mind that I wondered if GOD was providing this woman who so respected her now deceased brother, as the person who would be my next wife. A seemingly insignificant factor that added to my wonder was that she had signed her letter in green ink which is the color that often signifies Islam, the Islam which I had been attempting to reach in behalf of ALLAH’s Risen Messiah. Additionally, since I had included my phone number in my letter, she also included her phone number on her letter to me.

66.  Several more circumstances occurred which convinced me that GOD appeared to be indicating that I should see if there was the potential for a future relationship. So after several phone calls to Jordan I requested permission to visit Amman so that I could meet this woman who had been kind enough to send me a photograph which I had requested.

67.  On the way to Jordan there was another seemingly significant sign that God was a part of this journey. It involved an amazing combination of what occurred at two airports, the SeaTac airport and the Dallas airport. Because I received a special benefit on the price of tickets due to one of my daughters working for American Airlines and due to booking my ticket at the last minute, in order to reach the international flight in New York, they had booked me through Dallas.                                                    While waiting for my Seattle-Dallas flight, I purposely sat away from the crowd of people waiting for the flight. Apparently, because I am old enough to look harmless, a woman came and sat next to me and started a conversation about where we were both traveling to. When she heard that I was going to Jordan she asked why. When I told her that it was because I thought that there was a woman in Jordan whom I had not yet met, that possibly God might want me to marry because I had recently lost my wife of 38 years to cancer.                                          When she replied that I must have “great faith” to go all the way to Jordan, I told her that I did not think that I did. But I also told her that the actual meaning of my Welsh name, “Griffith,” is “great faith.” “Gri” means great and “fith” means faith or Grifaith. However, only hours later I was shocked when I picked up my boarding pass in Dallas. I had spelled my last name wrong. So the boarding pass told me that I had great faith, just like the woman had told me that I did. The boarding pass was printed: “Tom Grifaith.”

68. The four days in Jordan meeting the charming and compassionate Bess and her family, were quite meaningful. Without going into many details, we were married about a year and a half later near her sister’s home in California.                                                                  

More Amazing Circumstances                       

There is no doubt that memories and desires residing in the sub-conscious can influence certain things to occur in our minds. However, when the things that come to our minds occur in a language that we do not know or occur to another person other than ourselves, it is unreasonable to link them with our own personal subconscious memories, especially when we do not even know the words of the other language.

69.  In this regard, shortly after Bess and I were married, I walked into my Sharples school lunchroom one day and a substitute teacher whom I had never before met began talking to me like he knew about my interest in writing for Muslims regarding GOD’s Risen Messiah. He later explained in a phone conversation that the night before we met in the school lunchroom, he had met me in a dream in a basement in an underground Church in a largely Muslim region of Communist China where he had previously taught school. Consequently, he recognized me from the dream when he saw me the next day in our school lunchroom.                                                     He explained that they kept the basement dark to avoid detection and had placed a candle by each Christian book on display. He said that when I came to the open door with my book in my hand (I had just completed writing a small booklet that I mailed in English and Arabic throughout the world entitled, “Will the Quran’s Messiah Be Allowed to Visit Mecca?”), this book glowed with so much light that they no longer needed the candles. When I asked him what I was wearing, he said that I was wearing a robe. This amazed me because just an hour before our phone conversation, my wife had purchased for me a new robe.

70.  Shortly after I had returned from the West Bank during the first Intafada (uprising) I was having prayer with a very spiritual Asian friend about my mailing out my paper “ALLAH sees the Israeli Felony.” As we were praying together, he suddenly said, “Tom, the Lord just gave me a verse for you but I will have to get my Bible to find out what the verse is. Then he explained that a small image appeared in his mind like a small T.V. screen. It had on it, Jer 15:16 with Jer. standing for Jeremiah. The verse is:           “Thy words were found and I did eat them and thy words become to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart for I bear thy name oh Lord.”                                                  This verse quite vividly described the experience that I felt that I was having as I wrote the papers that I mailed around the world and which are now on my web site.

71.  There is a fairly well known gentlemen who had friendships with different world leaders and at least two President’s but I will not mention his name and possibly hurt his reputation by associating him with someone as controversial as myself. But after he read my book, “Sound The Alarm From Saudi Arabia,” we became friends. So when he visited the Seattle area to speak at churches, and homes, he sometimes took me with him to share regarding the Risen Messiah with groups where he had been invited to speak.

72.  On one occasion in a private home, a young soldier approached me while we were having refreshments shortly after I had shared about Saudi Arabia. He explained that while the group was praying for my sharing about the Messiah with Muslims through my writing, he suddenly saw something that he could not understand because he did not know that people ever prayed in that position. He said that he saw hundreds of men on their knees with their heads touching the ground. And there was a man he assumed was me explaining to them about Jesus from the book he was holding.

73.  Another time this world traveling gentleman was meeting with a group of “Charismatic Christians” in a basement room in a Catholic Church in the South of Seattle late on a Sunday night. When he asked me to share about Islam, I was in the middle of my talk when a man stood up. He asked, “Would you like to hear about a vision that I just now experienced while you were speaking?” Of course I told him “yes.”                                        He explained that he had just observed a tidal wave of the good news of Christ sweeping over the Arabian Peninsula up into the Middle East. I asked him if it could have been a tidal wave of judgment. But he insisted that it was a tidal wave of the good news of Jesus.                            I silently asked our Lord to please confirm to me if it actually was a movement of blessing about the Risen Christ.                                                        Approximately 14 hours later when our home mail arrived, there was a book sent by a friend to me called “The Crest of the Wave”. This book was written by a man from Fuller Seminary which described the blessing of Christ coming to many nations. For its cover, there was a giant wave breaking. There was the confirmation that I had requested from GOD about the meaning of the man’s vision.

74.  A brilliant young U.S. Navy technician who later became a naval officer once wrote to me and explained that he had found my book “Sound The Alarm From Saudi Arabia” in a used bookstore. He said that it had empowered him to integrate the Christianity that he had become disillusioned with in the racist South with the Black Muslim Faith that he had adopted.

75.  Amazingly, at the very moment that I was telling the wife of the man who had taken me to the West Bank about my friendship with this person, while the two of us were sitting in the lobby of a small hotel in the outskirts of Jerusalem, a naval officer walked by us. To my total amazement, it was the very person about whom I was just speaking to her.

76.  While sleeping one night in Amman in the home of my wife’s lovely mother and her now deceased father, I was given an Arabic word in my mind in the middle of the night that I did know the meaning of, “harraka,” meaning movement. I took it to mean that ALLAH was confirming to me that there would be the movement or tidal wave of the Spirit that the man had spoken to me about in the Catholic church in South Seattle.

77.  Another night in the same room I was given another, Arabic word that I also recognized the meaning of “Amal,” or “Hope.” Or it could have meant “Work” according to the precise pronunciation.

78. Another time while sleeping in that same room in Amman, a promise from Second Chronicles that was once given to King Hezekiah, was spoken to me. Its emphasis was that I would prosper (not materially but in what God had given me to accomplish) if I would do GOD’s work with all my heart. Then immediately my dream or vision showed me either the “Arch of Triumph” in Rome or the one in Paris. I am not sure which. But I wrote down the word I had received and date of the vision of the Arch of Triumph, next to the verse in my Bible. I took the meaning to be that I would be involved in ALLAH’s triumph of multitudes of Muslims coming to understand His Risen Messiah more fully.

79.  Then, while sleeping alone in our room in our former University District home, while my wife was in Jordan, a thrilling word was spoken to me in the Middle of the night and I actually heard the tone of voice of the speaker. His voice was firm and forceful when the word “Majd” was spoken which means “Glory.”

80.  I have written in several papers about the three consecutive visions I experienced on Easter Sunday morning about eight years ago while attending a communion service. The first two were about Islam turning to our Messiah and the third about a green bush (George Bush I presume) being uprooted from the Straight Path or Straight Road of Islam, in which the aggressive Bush Administration has now inserted itself in Iraq.

81.  Of course, mentioned in detail in several places on my web site was the November 2004, remarkable experience in the bedroom of our Seattle Apartment. While I was attempting to reach for a printed post card that used the words “publicly mock” to describe President Bush’s treatment of “ALLAH’s Messiah,” the two word insult “publicly mock” virtually radiated to my eyes from the card before I could be in position to actually see them on the card. Thus, this unusual experience was interpreted by me to mean this. I should not be reluctant to expose this out of control President’s flagrant disregard for all kinds of standards of human decency, whether it involves Islam, Iraq, the U.N., the U.S. Constitution, International agreements, ALLAH or His Messiah or any other meaningful entity. Everything seems to be fair game for his mocking style but the chaotic slaughter in Iraq that this President has initiated must be both exposed and opposed by anyone who takes morality seriously.

82.  Then, there was my Egyptian friend who was firmly told by our Lord to get up from where he was sitting and to call me and tell me that “the mountain has been moved.” (The mountains are symbols of barriers to prayers being answered.) This phone call occurred only hours after I had looked up in the Scriptures the place where the Messiah had promised that when we have faith as a grain of mustard seed that we can order mountains to be moved or to be cast into the sea.) This was also quite significant because while I was driving on the Mecca bypass between Jeddah and Taif Saudi Arabia, I would often pull off the hi-way and pray for the mountains that I could see on the East side of Mecca to be symbolically moved so that the Muslims of Mecca would more fully understand their Risen Messiah.

83.  While I was in my dentist’s chair waiting for a root cannal, I fell asleep and was shown in my mind a quite accurate outline map of Saudi Arabia with only the small coastal city of “Saihat” placed accurately in Eastern Saudi Arabia. Why I was shown this, I have no idea.

84.  About eight years ago I requested that a very quiet friend who now serves our Lord with his blind wife and their seeing-eye dog among those Japanese people in Japan who have the responsibility to take care of the bodies of people who have died, open in prayer before I shared about Muslims responding to the Risen Messiah. (You will notice that I never use the term becoming Christians because the vast majority of the time I am convinced that it is ALLAH’s Will that Muslims stay Muslims while honoring His Risen Messiah.)                                         As he began praying, he suddenly stopped. Then he briefly shared with us. He described how he had just seen a vision of large containers of prayers as described in chapter five of Revelation, reaching their tipping point and over-flowing so that the blessing of the Risen Christ will spread over the Muslim Middle East.

85.  Then four nights ago after I had spent several hours composing a personal letter to a very controversial Muslim leader, I was having some kind of dream, but I cannot remember its precise content. However, I distinctly remember that suddenly at the end of the dream, either myself or someone else would say the word “fitna” or “fitna.” Then after a second or two he would again repeat loudly the same word “fitna.” So this word “fitna” was thus repeated by the person about five or more times.         In the next couple of days I had an opportunity to ask both an Arabic speaking friend and a Farsi speaking friend this word’s meaning. They both repeated exactly the same definition, “to cause a great disturbance.” But I have no idea whether my web site will cause the disturbance, I will cause the disturbance or whether the controversial receiver of my letter will cause the disturbance. But what I am certain of is this. This word, like several other words that I have received in Arabic, has a message from ALLAH behind it.

86.  Yes, perhaps these eighty-five unusual circumstances which all relate to Islam in one way or another, have absolutely no connection with each other. Possibly they are all just bizarre coincidences experienced by one sort of strange Seattle person. Or perhaps our amazing GOD who uses weak people for his purposes has decided to use this especially weak person to both point to His risen Messiah and to expose some of the deception of my own government and thus offer hope for all Middle Easterners. But especially do Iraqis and Palestinians need new hope. May ALLAH soon provide us the answer. But if I were you, I would not bet that GOD cannot think “out of the box.” So I believe that He will relatively soon use this unusually weak man to help accomplish His purposes regarding Muslims responding to His Risen Messiah.

"Early Slavery and The Holy Trinity"

In no way can even a multitude of persons' abuse of something considered sacred can in reality devalue its sacredness.  Nevertheless, it is instructive to observe how a degenerate and wicked person can appear to devalue what is supposed to be a required holy gate pass for Muslims before they can become a part of the Risen Messiah's Eternal Community. These decadent words by the world famous Christopher Columbus quoted in Zinn's book, "A Peoples' History Of The United States" reveal how America's Discoverer exploited the term, "Holy Trinity" to justify his own wicked participation in the degenerate institution of slavery which he shamefully introduced to the original inhabitants of Haiti and also to the surrounding regions.

"Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity

go on sending all of the slaves that can be sold.”

It is also significant that when Pope Benedict was using his own selective quotations to denigrate Islam, the Pope made no relevant comments about the way the two acclaimed gate passes of “Son of GOD” and "Holy Trinity" have been consistently used by shameless men like Christopher Columbus in their own institutionalization of slavery and mass murder. So such men violently denigrate every positive value Christianity is supposed to stand for with not even the Pope objecting.

So now the proper time has arrived.  Submitted Muslims must demonstrate to ALLAH and to the world the positive values Muslim believers in ALLAH's Risen Messiah will live out in their daily lives.