It was frustrating! Here we were, up against it big time. We absolutely had to sell the Pete motorhome, and it didn’t sell at the auction. We had some big bills that were due, the phone and lights were going to be turned off if we didn’t pay them, and with that our entire venture was dead in the water.
But I had just had an interesting meeting with a guy who was proposing that we do a joint venture. If we would help him raise capital for his project, he would fully fund our RV business. His name was Ken Ericson and he had developed a process that could recover 5% or so of the precious metals from spent ore. Let that sink in. It was potentially worth billions!
How did it work? I’m not going to tell you. But it was signed off on by two engineers who verified that it worked. Richard, Ken and I had a few meetings and we decided to help him raise his capital. We formed a company, Fact Gold Technologies, and got down to the business of finding investors. It was surreal. Here I was, a fairly new Christian, suddenly raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, believing that we were all going to be stupid rich once this thing started to take off.
Ken was an interesting character. He claimed to be a Christian and he knew a lot of the same people I did in my Christian circles. He could quote chapter and verse, would pray at the drop of a hat, and seemed like he was a man of faith. We had no reason not to trust him. As we raised money for him, he was building his working prototype of the re-refining plant. It was not cheap. We built an entire industrial park in Abbotsford, with his plant taking up five bays of the main building.
I was rolling in the dough and was told that this was just the beginning. But something was nagging at me. I was a fairly new Christian and I was scared that all of that money would pull me away from God. All I wanted to do was play with trucks and be comfortable! I knew an older Christian couple, George and Ruth, and visited them often. I was thinking that going to Bible college was a good idea once I was financially stable, so I asked them if they could recommend a good one. They said, “Do you have a Bible? We recommend that you take it to a quiet place and read it, and let the Holy Spirit be your teacher. It’s taken us 50 years to get all of the nonsense we learned in Bible school out of our lives!” Not what I was expecting to hear, but it made sense.
Things were progressing slowly, and some of the investors were getting nervous at the delays. We assured them that due to the nature of what we were building, and that it was a huge undertaking, that everything was on track and under control. We had a Canadian Senator, the Mayor of Abbotsford, and a whole host of wealthy investors watching the project very closely. And Ken Ericson was under the microscope. But he kept building the plant, and, six months after he started, all of the aforementioned were at the facility to watch the first gold pour from his process. It was a success and everyone was comforted once they saw that it worked as promised, and that we were all going to be very rich, very soon.
Then I got a call. One morning Richards wife, Janelle, called me. She said, “Jon, I’ve just woken from a horrible dream! I dreamt that Ken had fled the country with everyone’s money!” I assured her that it was just the devil trying to scare her, and not to worry, everything was fine, and that we were on track. She said, “I sure hope so because it was so real!”
It was a beautiful summer morning, exactly one week later when I got the call.
“Jon, do you remember my dream last week? Well, it happened! Ken has cleaned out all of the accounts and fled the country! We’re bankrupt! He even left his wife holding the bag! He leveraged all of the capital we’ve raised and never used any of it to build the plant. We don’t have any idea where he is, but we’re broke!”
I just sat there stunned. This couldn’t really be happening! But it was and all of my hopes and dreams were gone, just like that. What a jerk!
I tried to get a job driving a truck, since I didn’t have much choice, but all of the doors were closed. No one was hiring, and my bills kept coming. I was renting a huge house and my monthly outgo was around $5000. I never thought it would be a problem but suddenly it was a huge problem! Not knowing what else to do, I packed my camping gear and went up to Tranquility Station to decompress and try to make sense out of all of it.
I got there on Friday evening and told David and everyone there what had happened. I was still in shock since this had all transpired less than three days earlier. After a few hours of fellowship and praying, I went and laid in the hammock behind the Summer Kitchen and asked God, “What do You want me to do?” Then I heard a voice as clearly as if someone was standing beside me, “I want you to rest here a while Jon”. I was surprised and shocked that I had actually heard God speak to me so clearly. So, I got up from the hammock and walked back to the Summer Kitchen. It was dark by then as all of the tiki torches were out of fuel, with David and the crew sitting by the fire pit. As I walked up behind them quietly, David said, “I believe the Lord is telling Jon that He wants him to rest here awhile.” “What did you just say?!, I asked. He turned around and said, “Oh hey Jon, I believe that the Lord wants you to rest here awhile.” Well, that was it. Hearing from God and having it confirmed a few minutes later, I was moving to Tranquility Station, “for awhile”.
“Find a quiet place where you can read your Bible and let the Holy Spirit teach you…”
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