Sometimes you hear a personal testimony from a fellow brother or sister in Christ which both inspires you to greater faith while also provoking much concern and wonder at the state of the Fallen Church in this hour.
Having mentioned, just a few weeks back, that I would like to include the testimonies of Parable’s readers here on the blog, it came to mind that I already have a testimony waiting to be published, sent to me recently by a long-term reader of Joseph Herrin’s writings, Jeff Higdon. Jeff and his wife Mary have been mentioned several times in Joseph’s older blog articles. One of these accounts is found here: https://parables.blog/exceedingly-abundantly/
(Please note that some older blogs, those which – for some reason – were located on www.heart4god.ws rather than on the Parables website, are no longer available here on Parables itself. Hence why there are broken links in some articles with lines ruled through them. Some older image links were also missing. I have been able to restore all of the missing images – but the missing blogs themselves from Heart4God are still not available. This is a matter for the previous website administrator, and is unfortunately out of my hands at this time.
However all blog articles that were ever posted on Parables are still fully available, and can be accessed through the blog archives as usual).
Some of the details of the following account I found difficult to believe when I first read them. I do not mean I did not believe what I was reading, I mean the details were so incredible to me personally – having never really been part of the Organised Church System – that it was difficult to even imagine how pastors and supposed fellow saints could act in such ways as described. Christians opposed to mothers ‘staying at home’ to look after the children? Pastors prompting wives to leave husbands because the husbands will not worship the authority of the pastor? Fellow church-goers ostracising brothers and sisters who will not celebrate Halloween? Quite amazing.
Other details of the following testimony are truly inspiring – particularly when they are concerned with taking a leap of faith without really knowing where or how you are going to land – all the while being lead blessedly by the will of the Father out of Babylon.
Leaving Babylon – A Testimony by Jeff & Mary Higdon
Hello from North Idaho, Brother Colin!
I wanted to introduce myself and my wife Mary to you. Joseph Herrin has written about me and published things I’ve written in the past, but its been some years now.
My wife was born into a family that did not consider themselves Christians at the time. Both her mom and dad were in the Marines, though my wife ended my mother in law’s career as they did not allow women back then to have children and stay in. Her parents marriage did not survive in between the many deployments her dad went on to various countries including fighting in the war in Vietnam and her mom getting caught up in the feminism ideology sweeping America in the 60’s and 70’s.
After her parents split up, chaos reigned in the house. In 1978 at the age of 18, my wife found God in a United Pentecostal Church in Slidell, Louisiana, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans.
For myself I was born in 1969 into a United Pentecostal Preacher’s home and my mother’s father was also a United Pentecostal Preacher. It was all I ever knew growing up. When I was young, my father was used mightily in the gifts of the Spirit, accurately prophesying over people and the events came to pass, praying for the sick and they were healed, etc. Some people were a bit scared of him because of it. Prophesying and miracles were common in the 70’s, I witnessed many first hand and they were very real.
Going into the 80’s and 90’s they started waning in the church, and by the 2000’s much of it was turned into fabricated illusions to give the illusion that God was with the ministers and people.
My father went through some very hurtful things in the church in the late 70’s and got very bitter over it. He never stopped preaching, but slowly, slowly the bitterness ate away at him and he slowly turned into a shell of his former self and secretly committed many sins that he never was caught at, nor did he ever repent of until perhaps at the very end when he died in September 2023.
My wife and I went through many hurtful things in the church in the 80’s up until we left in 2011. I was very respectful of the ministry, but if I felt convicted of something, no one could persuade me otherwise and I held true to it. Also, I had more miracles happen in my life than anyone I know, and this did not sit well with those who had resorted to fakery.
We were poor (still are) and out of favor. We found ourselves in the outer court of any church we went to and the object of ridicule and mockery with many targeted messages at us over the years. It was hard to hide the fact that my wife, though she had a masters degree, stayed at home to raise our 6 kids, so that was a lighting rod for a lukewarm church that had bought into the 2 child policy with husband and wife both working and believed the prosperity gospel.
Without a Home
In 2005 after having a business partner force us out of our business, we found ourselves without a home, an iron clad “No Compete” agreement, and $15,000 in our pocket. We were in Ruston, LA at the time and had always said we’d move to New Orleans if we ever left there.
My wife said “I guess this means we are moving to New Orleans?”. Right in that instance, I had a download of knowledge. I knew that a massive hurricane would hit New Orleans, and that if we moved there, though our lives would be spared, we’d escape with only the clothes on our backs. At the same time I knew we were to move to the Austin, TX area. That was June 2005.
In July 2005 we moved to Georgetown, TX, north of Austin, and one month later Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. The area we would have moved to had the shore of Lake Pontchartrain go inland 2 miles, wiping everything out.
It was a time of new beginnings. Free from what I had come to call the “Devil’s Triangle” in Louisiana where though we faithfully attended and did what we should according to what was taught, we were never accepted. Here in the new place, things were happening, and a church was starting up and we were asked to help. The pastor had not grown up in church and was just a good, hard working man who became the pastor by default when his bible study became so big that they moved it into a donated double wide trailer.
I enthusiastically threw myself into the work, sleeping little and working a lot. At one point I was working full time teaching industrial cleaning (and we talked about God every day) in a prison and I had a full time carpet cleaning business I owned and worked in, plus we had prayer service on Tuesday nights, Wednesday night church service, Thursday night bible study at my house, Friday night youth service, Saturdays I often worked all day at the church building fences and buildings, repairing things, etc. Sunday morning service, Sunday night service and choir practice between. I also ran the church bus, taught Sunday school, and I preached either Wednesday night or Sunday night for a while. I slept 3 hours a night and I was working the rest of the time.
As I observed how sincere the pastor was, I told myself and my wife, if this good man changes to be like the preachers we have set under in the past, then I will know that its the system that’s the problem, not the people. As the church grew, slowly, slowly the pastor changed.
The pastor put more and more of the responsibility on me while slacking off himself until there came a breaking point in June 2010 when I found myself in the emergency room with my heart starting and stopping and racing away. After a week of test, they found nothing physically wrong with my heart. The doctor was puzzled, so finally he asked me to describe in detail what I did every day. I started at 3 am and went to midnight listing what I did Monday through Friday, plus all day Saturday and Sunday.
The doctor told me if I didn’t drastically cut back on my hours, I was going to have a heart attack, so immediately after leaving the doctor’s office I made three phone calls and sold my carpet cleaning business to one of them. I also met with the pastor and told him what the doctor had said and that I was going to have to cut back on my responsibilities at the church. This upset him very much and he exploded and said “I don’t think it’s God’s will for you to do any less for Him, Do you?!!” I did not point out the fact that I did more than the pastor himself, but I did insist that I had to cut back. This ended up souring the pastor’s feelings towards me.
My business sold the first Monday in August, 2010. Immediately after that, I had a vision for three days of a mass evacuation out of Austin, TX, everyone fleeing North. After praying for three weeks, the Lord showed me that I was to move my family to the area I now live in in North Idaho.
Following that, I had many dreams and visions for several months. I was praying for direction on everything, scared to actually do what I heard God telling me to do, and facing opposition everywhere I turned. When I shared what I was shown I was told I was crazy, and I half believed it myself!
I had another vision and saw a huge storm coming to the shores of America and I understood the storm to be three things: 1) Great physical destruction 2) Great financial destruction 3) Great spiritual destruction.
I had another vision that I saw a small little chapel, like the size of a large portable storage building, with double doors on the front and a steeple on top. I heard a voice speaking saying “My spirit has departed the church, and Ichabod is written across the doors!!” As this was spoken I saw the word “Ichabod” written like on a white banner going diagonally from the top left of one door to the bottom right of the other. This disturbed me greatly and I didn’t know what to make of it.
The Lord kept showing me things through this time period, told me I would lose my job in January and that I was to move after I lost my job. When I asked “what am I going to do about church?” He said only “It will be something different.” When I asked why I was to move He said two things: You are going before, and it is a safe place. My immediate question that was not answered was “Before what and safe from what?”
I was sharing some of these things with the pastor, and he was having none of it, doing everything in his power to keep me from moving. Finally he told me that if I moved, my whole family would die in a blizzard during the move and that it would be “YOUR FAULT, YOUR FAULT” as he raised his voice and jabbed his finger at me. This disturbed me greatly, so I prayed all the more earnestly.
My wife helped me gain clarity through all the noise by asking me the simple questions: “Are you sure God is telling you we are to move?” to which I affirmed I was sure, then the one that struck terror through my heart as she asked “What if you don’t obey what God is telling you to do?” From that moment on, I worked diligently and feverishly at preparing to move. That was in October, and there was no indication other than what I heard the voice of the Spirit saying that I was doing the right thing.
Unexpectedly in December and out of the blue, the prison I worked at, Bartlett State Jail, called me and 50 others in for a meeting and we were told we were losing our jobs January 15th. There had never been a layoff in the Texas prison system, yet here it was. On January 15th when I walked out of the door and got in my van, fear gripped me in the throat and all I could think of for three days was my family dying, caught in a blizzard, and it being my fault. The fear gripped me so hard that I could barely say “Oh God, Oh God!” On the third day I had a very clear vision of an interstate highway with snow 4” off the white lines on either side and the road was clear. I clearly heard the Lord say “You will not drive on any snow while you are going North.” A peace I can’t describe flooded me and I had no more doubts. I was also clearly shown in an instant download the path that I was to take from where I lived all the way to Ogden, UT, but I was not shown past that. No matter how much I prayed, nothing past that point was shown.
Preparing to Leave
We determined to leave the first of February 2011. A week before we were to leave, the pastor called me and told me to meet him at a local restaurant at 6 am the next morning. I had warm fuzzy feelings thinking that he had finally accepted that we were going. I thought back on the many good times we had had together over the past 5 years working together with the exception of this friction that had taken place the last few months over relinquishing some of my duties and sharing what God had been speaking to me.
The next morning I pulled into Denny’s restaurant a few minutes till 6 am. A minute later the pastor pulled in beside me, then much to my surprise, the now assistant pastor who had taken my place a few months earlier, pulled in on the other side of me. I felt a moment of consternation. The now assistant pastor had lived across the street from me for 2 ½ years and the only time he would speak to me was if he needed to borrow a tool or needed to know how to fix his car. Otherwise he was very aloof with a “I’m better than you” attitude. Also, he NEVER got up this early! After the flicker of doubt at seeing him, I was again flooded with warm fuzzy feelings and thought that perhaps he was coming to wish me goodbye too.
We went in and ordered breakfast and after it was served, they both started in on me, telling me I had not heard from God, I was not to move, etc., etc. The assistant proclaimed loudly “I once thought that God told me to move to New York and I did, but a year later I came back with my tail tucked between my legs, AND YOU WILL TOO!!” As usual I was calm and even tempered and said quietly, “I hope not.”
After this, the pastor started grilling me on where I was going to attend church. I replied that God was the most important aspect of my life and though I had prayed diligently asking, He only said “It will be something different.” I had no idea what this meant. The pastor then announced that he had found a UPC church 45 miles south of where I was moving and that the pastor had gone to church in Stockton California at Brother Haney’s church. Brother Haney was at one point the General Superintendent and leader of the UPC church world wide.
My pastor held out his hand and said “I want your firm handshake of agreement that you will attend this church!” I replied I could not give him my word as I had to know what God would have me do, and I’d never heard of this church nor its pastor before that very moment. The pastor kept repeating this more and more insistently, holding out his hand, telling me my kids would be lost if we didn’t go there, etc.
All at once I had a vision and I saw this man who I’d never seen or heard of before. He was a thick and powerful built man and I heard the Spirit say “This man is meaner than a snake. If you take your family there, they will be destroyed!” When I saw that, I slammed my fist on the table between the ministers and loudly said “I WILL NOT AGREE TO GO TO THAT CHURCH!! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?!!!!” It was the first time that either had seen me angry or raise my voice and they both fell back. I walked out of the restaurant, and afterwards they gave orders to everyone in the church not to have anything to do with us or to help us pack up.
Hitting the Road
A week later on February 2 we hit the road for Idaho, leaving right as a huge snow storm blanketed the western half of the United States, going all the way down into Mexico and killing the crops. It was 6 degrees that day, the coldest I’d ever experienced in Texas.
We traveled to Ozona, TX the first day, where we spent the night. A snowstorm had closed interstate 10 ahead of us in El Paso, TX, and with no snow plow equipment and back to back storms on the way they said it might be 5 days before it was open for travel.
The next morning we got up and as we left we learned that it had snowed 3” in Austin, TX behind us that morning and the State Troopers had closed all the roads due to all the wrecks. El Paso was also still closed ahead of us.
As we drove, I worried about the road ahead when suddenly I realized I had seen the road I was traveling on before. It slowly dawned on me that it was the exact image I had seen in the vision showing a clear road. I called my wife who was following and reassured her that all would be okay, that God had shown me we would not drive on any snow while traveling to Idaho.
When we got to El Paso, the road was open, with snow 4” off the white line on either side. After we went through, snow storms hit behind us, closing it again. We spent that night just across the state line into NM, and the next night in Kingman, AZ. When we left Kingman our next stop was Ogden, UT, on the North side of Salt Lake City, but snow storms had the roads closed before there.
Our Uhaul truck was getting 10 miles a gallon, but as we started to climb in elevation, the miles per gallon dropped to 1 mile per gallon the rest of the way to Idaho. To this day I can’t tell you how much I spent of fuel, I didn’t want to know. It was a LOT!
We got to Ogden with no difficulties and the road was open. When we checked into the hotel, I was told that the road north of us was closed and would be closed for several days due to snow storms. God had not told me the route to go from this point, so I was unsure what to do. I drove to a local truck stop and asked the truckers the best route considering the snow storms. They unanimously said to go straight north on I-15 into Idaho, all the way into Montana to I-90, then go west to Couer d”Alene, ID and then go north to Sandpoint, ID then West to Priest River. It sounded reasonable to me, but it bothered me that the Spirit had not told me which way to go.
The next day, the road ahead of us was open. As we traveled, snow storms hit behind us closing the road, but we still had not driven on any snow. As we came to a Y in the interstate, I felt a voice behind me ear say “Go left”, so I did, driving west towards Boise, ID in southern Idaho, instead of continuing north. A couple of hours later someone in Texas called and asked if I was trapped in the snow storm on I-15 north of the Y where I had turned, they saw a Uhaul stuck in the snow on the traffic camera. They were in disbelief as to why I had turned, and told me that when I got to Boise, to turn North on highway 95.
When I got to Boise, again I heard the Spirit speak behind my ear saying “Go straight” so I did not turn. I had no idea where I was going. Again a frantic phone call asking if I was the Uhaul truck they saw trapped on highway 95 in the snow storm. When I told them where I was they asked “How are you going to get there from where you are? “ I replied I had no idea, so they hung up, not giving any more advice.
We crossed over into Oregon and went over a pass through the mountains. As we came down, Baker City was in front of us and I saw a hotel on the right. Immediately I was prompted, “Stay here.” When I was checking in, the clerk asked if the State Troopers had turned us around as we were the first to arrive after they closed the interstate just past there. I didn’t know anything about it, but shortly after that the hotel was packed as everyone traveling had to stop as the interstate was closed due to the heavy snow. We still had not driven on any snow.
The next morning I went to the desk and asked the clerk working if the road was open, and she said no, and that it wouldn’t be for probably two days. As I walked away, she said “Yep, no one is going to Boise today.” I spun around and said “Did you say Boise? That’s where I just came from, I’m going the other way, West.” She was surprised and said, “Oh, well that pass is open today, but the other way is closed.”
We continued on. As we crossed the pass, snow hit behind us, closing it. We continued on though Pascoe and Spokane, WA, arriving in Priest River, ID. We had driven 2500 miles through what the news said was the worst snowstorm in the United States, “Snowmeggedon” and we had not driven on any snow, just as the Spirit had said. It felt like the Israelites crossing the Red Sea.
Due to the moving truck using 10 times the amount of fuel for ½ the trip, most of our money was gone. We had $1200 in our pocket, did not know anyone personally from there and had no job, no source of income and no house rented. As we would find out, renting houses here in the winter is very difficult.
However, we never missed a beat. God provided a house and income and it went very smoothly.
The Babylonian Church
On the church front however, though my pastor in Texas had given up on talking to me, he had continued calling my wife, trying to persuade her to go to the church he had ordered me to go to. (It is common in the United Pentecostal Churches to control the husband through the wives. Many times I’ve heard of and witnessed preachers ordering the wives to leave their husbands when the husband wouldn’t do what the pastor ordered him to do, and the wives obeyed the pastor.) Because of the craziness of getting ready for the move and the lack of time, I had not talked a single time to my wife about the conversation I had had with the pastor and his assistant or the vision I’d had.
My wife began trying to persuade me to at least go and visit the church, so after her asking a few times, I agreed. Immediately I felt smote in my heart and sick. I got up and walked our long driveway and prayed and told the Lord that I would not go back on my word to my wife on taking her to the church, but please, let the preacher be exactly as he is, not sugar coating things because we were first time visitors.
The next Sunday morning we traveled to the church, and there was a lot of excitement in my family. The church was very familiar feeling, the way the service was conducted and the songs they sang felt like what we had always been around. However, when the pastor got up, I was shocked. It was the man I had seen in the vision!!
His message was a stern one where he repeatedly said “You don’t mess with the man of God!” He told stories of how he had threatened to beat up a man that week who he disagreed with about the end times, and how several years earlier he had had a run in with Richard Butler, the head of a white supremacist group called the Aryan nation. He told how he had driven to the gates of the property of the compound Butler lived on, and prayed against him and the next morning they found him dead. (In other words, if you don’t do what I say, God is going to kill you. Not the first time I’ve heard that from preachers over the years.)
After the service was over, he came off the platform and made a bee line for me. He grabbed my hand, tried to crush it, yanked me in to his chest so that I was just inches from his nose and loudly said “This is your church. God sent you here. You WILL be back next service!” I replied calmly, “Well, we’ll see about that sir.” He spun around and walked off. A few minutes later he came back to me and did the exact same thing, more emphatically. This time I had fire in my eyes as I said “I SAID, we will see about that Sir!!” He immediately walked away, so I told my family it was time to go.
We went outside, and as is my habit, I went to the passenger door and opened it for my wife. Much to my surprise, when I turned, she was not there! The girls and I got in the truck and a few moments later my wife arrived and got in, all the color drained from her face. She said shaking “Lets get out of here!” The pastor had grabbed her arm and yanked her back in the church and told her that she was to bring us back, but she said “That’s my husband’s decision.”
Out of Babylon
So began our journey out of Babylon. At first I thought it was just the United Pentecostal Church that I was to come out of, but over and over we were rejected in other fellowships, other denominations, home bible studies too. Too radical. One church was very upset because we didn’t participate in Halloween, and afterward members would shun us in the grocery stores. I did not try to persuade anyone of our beliefs, or even tell them they were wrong, but I did answer truthfully and frankly if I was asked about anything and why we did or did not do something.
I kept feeling that I was supposed to come out of the church, but it had been my habit to go to church every time the doors were open and I felt I HAD to go to church somewhere. Finally on December 29, 2014 I was up on a mountain in a log truck and I was feeling a lot of fear, which is not normal for me. As my truck was being loaded I stood out looking down the mountain praying asking God why I had the fear and what He wanted me to do. After getting loaded, I was driving down the highway and felt like I had made a direct connection with God. I was getting through!! I told the Lord that I wanted to be in His perfect will, not His permissive will.
I needed to use a bathroom, so I pulled into a gas station in Loon Lake, WA and got out to walk in. It was 5 degrees Fahrenheit with ice on the ground. As I hurried in, I stepped in a puddle of oil on top of the ice and hit the ground so hard it felt like I’d been hit full force with a baseball bat. My head hit a 4” concrete lip and I was knocked out cold for 30 minutes. When I came back to, my life was changed. I had memory loss, it was very difficult to do logic and reasoning for a year, didn’t know where home was anymore, and had migraine headaches for 2 years. It was October 2019 before I felt mostly myself again.
After the accident, I continued trying to go to churches and bible studies, but crowds made me have gut wrenching throwing up spells and I would be in agony for two days afterwards. Intense conversations of any kind were rough on me as well. It finally broke me from going to church every week. It also began a time of severe trials in my family that is still going on today.
My wife stuck by my side through the whole thing, but my best friend and his wife, who we had gone to church with in Texas, and who we helped move here in 2011, secretly turned against us. They took our kids aside, counseling them not to listen to us and drove a wedge between us. At the same time, they pointed out the faults of our children to us, to amplify the situation, working both sides. One by one our children shut off communication with us and now all these years later we have very little communication with them. This family still meets with our children and keeps the grievances going, driving the wedge.
In 2013 we purchased 5 acres of property and in 2014 we moved on to it in a 40’ travel trailer I found that some one was giving away. The utility company wanted $20,000 to connect to a power line that was less than a football field from my trailer, so instead I purchased solar panels and batteries and we went off grid. After hauling water for two years, we dug a well using a borrowed excavator. We found very good drinking water at 16’ deep, and lots of it.
When the three youngest girls were still at home we had sheep, goats, rabbits and chickens. After they left, taking the sheep and goats and rabbits with them we just had chickens. At the moment all we have are 4 rabbits that have become pets instead of livestock.
This past year has been one of the tightest financially in many years. In between inflation rapidly eroding the buying power of the dollar and employment being unsteady, we’ve had to rely heavily on the Lord to get through from month to month and week to week. God is always faithful though and we’ve not lacked in anything we’ve needed.
I only know of the things coming to America, I do not know anything about your area. I know that the merchants of this world will mourn when they see our destruction as they have all been made wealthy by our consumption of their goods. We have but a little more time to prepare before the destruction that fast approaches so it behooves us all to get prepared both spiritually and physically as the Spirit leads.
For the immediate future I’m concentrating on getting out of debt and providing for our basic necessities of food, water, shelter, and heat. Though God told me that this area is a safe area, that does not mean its okay for me to sit on my hands and not prepare.
May God bless you and your family!
Jeff and (Mary) Higdon
Thank you for providing this account Jeff. My prayers go to you and your wife Mary and your family. Please keep me posted on how life is going on your smallholding there in Idaho. Off-grid is certainly the way to go; at the very least, preparing for prolonged power outages and food shortages whatever your personal circumstances may be. This is certainly how my wife and I have been lead by the Spirit as well.
At this time I would like to invite other readers to send any testimonies they feel lead to share. Anything that might be of profit for the Remnant. And also any comments or writings concerning ‘preparing for the end’; what preparations we saints can make both spiritually and materially for the tribulations that are coming fast.
May you be blessed with peace and understanding in these last days.
Colin Buchanan
thiswisefool@protonmail.com
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