upon My shoulders and then you will be able to reach the fruit. To climb upon My shoulders means to obey Me 100%."

**Baba would retire from the male mandali at 3 P.M. daily. He had asked me to stay at Guruprasad daily till 6 P.M. and then leave for my home. One day at about 5:30 P.M. it started raining cats and dogs. I began to think that I had not brought my umbrella and so I would get wet. I decided to leave at 6:00 P.M. as per Baba's order, irrespective of whether or not the rain stopped. But the Compassionate Father, Baba, knew my situation and sent word: "Don’t leave ‘til 6:30. The car will drop you at your residence at that time." I left in Baba's car and reached home untouched by the rain.

 

Larry Pesta (Cont’d from p. 48)

you with the spirit." Then I said, "I'm going to say a prayer, it's just that simple, when I pray, you're going to receive it tonight." (I used to say, "Lord Jesus, I don’t know what to say but I ask You right now to fill these people with your Holy Spirit.") You know what happened? They received it. They didn 't even know what was going to happen to them. All of a sudden, I'd have people crying; I'd have people shaking and they didn't even know what speaking in tongues was. They'd be speaking in tongues. They'd come back weeks later to say their whole lives were different . They were experiencing God like I never have before.

That was my life at Melodyland. On August 15, 1976, I was ordained as minister at Melodyland, an ordination that hasn't been removed to this day. So, I recently performed Baba weddings in San Francisco. After I was ordained I moved back to Phoenix for a while where I had a small congregation of about eighty people. Mostly these people were Catholics who had left the Catholic church and were Charismatics. In the Charismatic movement of the Catholic Church, three Catholics internationally received this experience of being baptized by the Holy Spirit. As a result of this experience, statistics say that two million Catholics left the Church after these experiences. From Phoenix, I passed through a church in Colorado, and finally I moved to San Diego where I was offered a job on Sundays teaching at a church called The Christian Faith Center. The pastor there, Jerry Bernard, owned the Christian Broadcasting network in San Diego and he had services every Sunday. I taught Sunday mornings before church service. I started out with twenty four people and the group grew to be about three hundred. We had our own priest service meeting and Bernard had his own Christian network. A lot of times people couldn't show for their TV appearances. So, I was one of these characters on TV who interview people about how they came to Jesus. It was like being on the Johnny Carson show. Then Melodyland, the school of theology where I had studied, asked me if I would teach classes up there. So I became one of the youngest teachers at that school; they gave me a couple of classes to teach each week. I taught a class called "Spiritual Foundations" on the development of spiritual life.

How can I explain what happened next in my life? The Charismatic movement was not the end of my spiritual journey. It's that simple. I was giving talks in Arizona and New Mexico, and was based in San Diego. Suddenly I sensed that this a no the end. What happened at that point was that the Charismatic movement started changing. I wasn't changing; it was changing. It wasn't that small little movement anymore, where people were really sincere. It was becoming commercialized in