George Joli

My father, George Joli, was born in Vermont and spent quite a few years of his life in the New England states and in New York trying to support a large family. I believe it was about the year 1929 when he attended a revival meeting in a little church and gave his heart to the Lord. He had been religious for most of his life, but when he really got Bible salvation it made a very great change in his life.

From that time on, he and my mother went to just about every church in the area, searching for people who believed the whole Bible. They also read the Bible and prayed for God’s leading in finding the right people to worship with. While praying, sometimes all night long, and dedicating their lives to Him, they had some very outstanding experiences. It was at one of these all-night prayer meetings that my father received the baptism of the Holy Ghost. From that time on he was more determined than ever to be led by the Spirit to the place where the Lord wanted him. One midnight while praying in the Spirit, the Lord spoke to him and said, “Follow the Star—Jesus the Light of the World.” Mother wrote the words down, but had no idea what they meant.

It was not long after this that one of their daughters was sick and a friend gave her a bundle of Sunday school papers and other religious publications. As she looked through them, she called, “Mother, Look! Here is just what Daddy said in his prayer!” There in the upper corner of one of the papers was a star and right under it were the words, “Jesus the Light of the World.” As mother scanned the front page of that Apostolic Faith paper, her eyes fell on an article describing an ordinance service at the church in Portland, Oregon. It told of how the entire congregation engaged in the ordinance of washing one another’s feet, as is explained and commanded in the thirteenth chapter of St. John. My father had said, “If we ever find a people who believe in the foot-washing, they will be the people of God.” When he saw that he said, “We have to go to Portland, Oregon.”

From that day they started planning. How do you go about moving a family of nine children across the nation, about three thousand miles? It was necessary to sell the farm and get a large trailer. The Depression was at its worst about that time, and the task seemed impossible.

For the next year-and-a-half, they thought about it, but did little. They couldn’t sell the farm, so they traded it for a little country store and got involved in business and almost forgot their promise to go to Portland. But the Lord brought them back to their purpose through the loss of the store, and just about everything else they had, in a bad business deal. When one of the children came down with scarlet fever, my father began to fear that if he didn’t do what he had promised, the Lord might even take one of his children.

Renewing his vows to the Lord, he began to fix up an old four-wheel trailer he had found abandoned in the woods. It looked like a small boxcar and was very hard to handle on the road. At last they were ready to go. They had disposed of everything except the things they would need on the trip. The Lord reassured them that He was pleased with the effort and there would be an angel on the right and one on the left all the way. Nearly all of our relatives tried to discourage us from going, saying we could never make such a long trip as poorly equipped as we were, but God had called, and we had to go.

We had been told that it never rained in that area during the summer months, but the Lord must have sent the rain just for us.

We left Lacona, New York, on June 19, 1933, with only $120.00 to make the trip. Our car was a Hudson, made in the mid-twenties, and was quite large, but it was still necessary for three of us to ride on the trailer. There were eleven of us—Father, Mother, and nine children, ages seven months to nineteen years. We didn’t eat in restaurants or spend the nights in motels, needless to say; we camped along the road each night, and our meals consisted almost entirely of cornmeal or oatmeal mush with canned milk. On rare occasions, people gave us fresh vegetables from their gardens. The weather was quite warm, so camping wasn’t too bad. The laundry was done in the creeks and rivers along the road.

All the way, we were plagued by tire trouble. The hot pavement melted the patches off the tubes, and the heavy load caused extreme wear. Since buying new tires was out of the question, it required much ingenuity and the Lord’s help to keep us on the road. Once, while Dad was fixing a flat tire, the wrench slipped and hit him on the shinbone; he passed out and all of us children thought he was dead. We all started crying, but Mother and my eldest brother got him to the shade, and he went back to work on the tire.

Sometimes we got on the wrong road and had to turn back to get to where we belonged. On one occasion where roadwork was being done, we found ourselves on a side road that led down into a narrow place. Something told Dad to stop, so he did, and upon getting out he saw that we would have run into a large canal. The right road was several feet above us and up a steep bank. We couldn’t turn around and it was impossible for Dad to back out. It looked hopeless. Again we children stood there crying, and while we all prayed, Dad decided to try to get the car and trailer up the steep bank. We prayed and the old Hudson roared and groaned and the big trailer lurched, swayed, and tipped one way and then the other, but we made it! Once again those guardian angels had gotten us back on the road to camp meeting. Soon after we left New York it became necessary to lighten our load. We had only brought the things we thought we needed and a few things we treasured very highly, but the weight was too much. One of the first things to go was a small cook stove. No one seemed to have money to buy it, and we couldn’t take time to advertise, so we just unloaded it at a service station and went our way. Mother’s good dishes were next. We soon had practically nothing left in the trailer. By then we had a new opinion as to what was necessary.

As we came west, we encountered some desert country. Our route seemed to follow the Old Oregon Trail most of the way. Some days were so hot we could hardly breathe. We came to a desert and were told by people that it would be impossible to make it across because the heat was so intense. They begged us not to try it, but we kept going. We had to get to Portland before camp meeting ended. We had only gone a short distance into the desert the first day, when darkness overtook us, and we stopped for the night. The sand was so hot we could hardly walk on it. Then as we prepared our cornmeal for the evening meal, it started to rain. We had been told that it never rained in that area during the summer months, but the Lord must have sent the rain just for us. It rained quite a bit that evening and cooled the desert enough that our journey the next day was comfortable.

The mountains were getting steep and rugged as we approached Oregon, and sometimes it seemed the car couldn’t quite make it up the hills. On several occasions the family got out and walked, or sometimes pushed in order to keep moving on toward the Apostolic Faith campground.

On July 15, 1933, we pulled onto the beautiful campground. We had never seen anything that could compare with the lovely, peaceful, holy atmosphere of the grounds, but the sweet spirit of friendly helpfulness and the love of the people there outweighed even that. We were not very prepared for the first meeting that day. Our best clothes were little more than rags, and some of us children had lost our shoes, but friendly Christian people saw to it that we were able to attend that afternoon teaching service. As we entered the tabernacle and sat down and looked at the platform with its bright lights, the orchestra, and all the shining faces of the ministers, Mother said, “It seems like we are in Heaven!”

Although the long trip was behind us, we knew what the songwriter meant when he wrote, “The toils of the road will seem nothing, when we get to the end of the way.” Yet there were still some very great problems. With no more than five dollars left, we had to find a place to live and food for a large family. But the same Lord who had led us on the journey was still working on our behalf! The church gave us a tent, which we pitched on the vacant lot across from the campground, and with the huge trailer and an old shed, we got by for a few days. My father did odd jobs when he could find them, and soon we were permitted to move into an old house owned by church members. There was little work to be found during the Depression, and we were destitute. Mother scraped the flour bin in the old house and found little more than a cupful of flour that was left by the previous residents. We had biscuits that morning: there was nothing else. Then we had our morning devotions, and I heard my Father praying with the tears streaming down his face, “Lord, please supply food for my little ones. I don’t care if I have to go hungry, but Lord, don’t let the little ones suffer.” We had hardly gotten through praying when a dear little lady from the church knocked on the door and said, “While I was praying this morning, the Lord told me to go and see if you people could use some flour and potatoes.”

The Lord has never let us down. Times have been hard, there have been many trials and tribulations since those early days, but we have never doubted that the Lord led us to the right place, and the angels are still watching over us.

This testimony was provided by Carolyn Kasper, the daughter of George Joli.