racheljeffs-blog

[racheljeffs-blog]

Its Peach Season...

Peach season always brings good memories of happy times when I was younger and living with my family. My sisters, Warren’s many wives, and me would gather together outdoors and peel, cut, bottle, freeze, and eat many pounds of fruit. We took turns telling stories; that’s when the books that I had secretly read in the bathroom became useful to me. I would rehearse the stories I had read without telling my sisters how I knew each story. They loved hearing them. Most of my sisters made up their stories or else we played the “guess what I am thinking about” game, which had to be a noun, and all that the person that was “it” or “thinking” could say was “yes” or “no.” 

“Person?” I would ask. “No,” my sister would say. “Place?” “No,” she would answer again. “Thing?” “Yes,” she would answer. God, I would think, “things” are always the hardest to guess. Sometimes it took forever to figure out what “it” person was thinking about but the game kept our minds engaged while we labored. The canning process was tedious but working together was fun.

Today my kids and I continue the tradition of preserving peaches, only we make it a lot funner. Turning on some real dance music, it often becomes dangerously sticky when the kids have their hands full of fruit. Majasa does the blanching (and dancing and singing) while Nathaniel and Lavinder peel peaches (and dance and sing). Rulon and Porter slice the fruit for freezing and bottling while Ember bags the fruit to be frozen. I fill bottles with peaches and sugar water and finish the canning process. 

Sometimes we listen to an audiobook of an exciting, adventuresome story. At other times, while our hands are engaged in the gooey work, we tell stories or play the guessing game, traditionally. 

Exclusively the kids love canning season and beg to do more of it because they love how it brings us together. And like little Nathaniel says, “Mom, this winter we’re going to have lots of yummy peach milk shakes with all these frozen peaches!” 

We end our peach season with some homemade fresh peach pie to reward ourselves for all our hard work. It doesn’t last long, and soon peach season is just another good memory until next August comes around. 

#peachseason #stickyfun

[racheljeffs-blog]

Why do people stay in a cult?

Many people ask me, “What makes people stay in a cult? How is it possible that they can’t see how they are being controlled?” 

I cannot speak for people who have been converted to a cult, but I can speak for those who were born into a cult. 

When a person is born into a cult, that is the only way of life they know. The world seems foreign and as outlandish as the cult seems to the general population.

Inborn cult members are taught from childbirth that their way of life is the only right way, that the rest of the people in the world are lost to God, or the correct way of living. They are taught to scorn the people of the world and their traditions.

The cult leaders often prevail through threats, intimidating their followers through the power of fear for the loss of their salvation, telling them that hell awaits all those who do not obey their strict teachings.

Cult leaders refer to themselves as supreme and to question their leadership is certain damnation. Whatever crimes they commit they do so in secret, and keep the fact that they are just regular human beings from their followers. Thus their congregations believe them to be Godlike.

Because cults most often homeschool their children and keep education strictly cult controlled, the children never see life a different way. Children and adults are warned that people of the world will come and try to turn them against the “correct way” they have been taught and that they (cult followers) must never listen to them or they will be dammed. 

If someone living a normal life was told, “Everything your parents taught you and everything you learned as a child is a lie,” would they believe the person telling them so? Probably not. The same goes for a cult member. They believe their parents and leaders. Only through the power of deep reasoning and often pain experienced by cult leaders do cult members begin to see the folly they have been living through the lack of freedom and happiness; realizing the constant presence of misery.

Cult members are most often oblivious to the sadness and control they are under until they escape and experience freedom. To judge an innocent cult member for following their brainwashed minds to believe their vile leaders is impossible unless one has walked their path. 

God says to leave judgement to him. All we can do is try and help cult members to see the happiness in freedom and the pain of following power-hungry men. 

[racheljeffs-blog]

An Unmarked Grave

She was quiet yet kind. I struggled with the fact that my father had married a girl my same age at sixteen and that I had to call her “mother Sheena”, but after a year or so we became friends. 

Sheena Roundy won the family’s love. She was a hard worker, loved all Warren’s wives and children, and lived a life of sacrifice and giving.

In 2013, when I was living in South Dakota with my husband Rich, I went to spend a morning with my sister Melanie at father’s house. Sheena came to Melanie’s room and told us that she had been feeling sick and confided to us that she had several lumps on her breast. She asked us what we knew about our mother’s breast cancer and how mother knew if she had cancer or not. I was very concerned and said, “You need to get looked at by a doctor.” Sheena said, “I wrote to father (Warren Jeffs) about it and he sent a message back for me to not worry about myself, but to focus on blessing others.”

Soon after I was sent to live in Short Creek and didn’t know how things were going for her. Months later, when my sister Angela came to talk to me she told me about Sheena:

Sheena’s sickness rapidly got worse in the spring of 2013. Her back began to hurt her, so much so it was painful to walk. The family had been told by Warren Jeffs that no one  should touch each other more than a handshake, but Sheena was in so much pain she asked some of her sister wives to massage her back. 

Warren Jeffs was informed of the massaging and he sent message that any of the women who had touched Sheena’s back, as well as Sheena, must go to live alone in different houses of hiding and repent. Sheena felt ashamed and believed she had done wrong in allowing her sister wives to massage her.

Within weeks of living alone Sheena was unable to walk at all. She told my uncle Isaac on a phone call that she could no longer take care of herself because she could not walk. Isaac told father in a visit to the prison about Sheena’s condition. Warren Jeffs finally said that she could go to a doctor near Short Creek. 

Sheena was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. She was told that the cancer had crushed her backbone and that she would never walk again. Warren Jeffs then sent message to all of his family, including myself, saying, “Sheena has breast cancer and the Lord has shown me that because of her immoral thoughts and desires she will soon suffer death.” I was stunned. “Why didn’t he let her go to the doctor sooner?” I wondered to myself. Yet I knew. He didn’t really care about Sheena. He never had.

Sheena moved into a small house near uncle Lyle Jeffs’ home. Warren Jeffs told his wife Sheena that she was not allowed to go outside of her home, and that she should keep the blinds and curtains on the windows pulled shut at all times. He told her she was to hide for “his protection”. Two of her sister wives were to be at her side at all times to help take care of her needs. They were the only people that could see her and take her to her doctor appointments. 

My sister Angela and I figured out which house she was living at. We would go and  play our violins outside Sheena’s window so that she could have some kind of comfort and enjoyment. Sheena would ask one of her sister wives that were with her to open the window an inch or so so that she could hear us play. But we were not allowed to see Sheena at all.

In August of 2016 Sheena was still fighting to live. Warren Jeffs was angry that she had not died as he had predicted. He sent Sheena a message of reproof telling her that the Lord was displeased that she was taking the medications the doctors had prescribed to her to prolong her life. Warren said Sheena could no longer be a member of the Lord’s chosen people because of her disobedience and that she must live elsewhere.

Sheena died at the beginning of 2017, a quiet death, unrecognized, and without family. Her older brother quietly buried her in Short Creek and her death and grave is a symbol of shame to Warren Jeffs and his followers. 

My brother Ray recently went and found her grave and sent me this picture.

I pray to God that Sheena’s death and suffering will not go unnoticed and that she will be rewarded richly in heaven.

[racheljeffs-blog]

Visiting beautiful places is healing to the soul.