To Ease the Passing of Time

It wasn’t long after her husband passed away that Margie O’Connor first came in contact with the Ted Crook Evangelical Ministry. Ted Crook had his show every Sunday morning at 10:00 on TV. At first, Margie was watching out of curiosity, and also because she thought the 62 year old, tall, slim and charming man was very handsome. With his salt and pepper full head of hair, he looked a little bit like Harrison Ford. He had a soothing voice and an honest look in his eyes.

When he died, along with the house, her husband left Margie an inheritance of about one million dollars. She had a financially secure and comfortable life.

After watching him every Sunday morning for a few months, Margie was convinced that the TV preacher was inspired by God, and that everything he said was the truth. One Sunday morning, when he looked at her in the eyes on her TV screen, and asked her if she was ready to give her life to Jesus, Margie fell on her knees and cried. She was overwhelmed with joy and gratitude. After the show, still sobbing, she wrote a cheque for $50, 000 to the Ted Crook Evangelical Ministry. The cheque was still wet with her tears when she put it in an envelope.

A few weeks after, during his show, Ted said that a member of his congregation, an elderly lady, was touched by God in a very special way. He said that that lady was being healed from her arthritis at this very moment by the power of God. Margie was sure that he was talking about her. She felt her heart and her whole body warming up, and she knew that her arthritis was gone forever. She wrote another cheque to Ted for $50, 000. The pain came back with a vengeance a few days after when the weather changed.

Ted Crook was preaching what is known in the United States as the Prosperity Gospel. Not only did Jesus come to save us from our sins, but he also came to earth to make us rich. For Margie O’Connor, an Irish woman who was brought up as a Catholic, this sounded a little bit strange. Didn’t Jesus say that it was “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God?”

To prove his point that God wanted him to be rich, Ted Crook asked his congregation to send him money to buy himself a 65 million dollar private jet plane. He said that he needed the plane to spread the word of God faster. Again, Margie thought of what she had learned about Jesus in her Catholic school. Jesus walked all his life, she thought, and the only time he didn’t was when he rode a donkey into Jerusalem. Then she thought that the reverend was always right; she send him a cheque for $100, 000. A few weeks after, she received a thank you letter from the Ted Crook Evangelical Ministry saying that her name would be engraved in gold letters on the belly of the plane.

When Trump became a candidate for the 2016 presidential election, Ted Crook said that all Christians should vote for him because if they didn’t, they would all go to hell. Margie knew that if Trump was elected, he would get rid of Obamacare right away. She thought of her friend Darleen, a widow with two teenagers who had to work two jobs for minimal wage in order to make ends meet. Darleen had never had access to health insurance before Obama was elected. She knew that Trump also wanted private companies to be able to refuse to insure people with preconditions like Darleen who has type 1 diabetic. Even if Margie didn’t feel comfortable with that, she trusted the reverend when he said that universal health care is a communist idea, an invention from the devil. “It may be good for Canadians who don’t know any better”, he said, “but it’s not acceptable for any true Christian American patriot.”   

When his gardener falsely claimed that the reverend had given him money to have sex with his wife while he was watching, Margie was very upset. How can you do that to a man of God? She sent Ted Crook another for $35, 000 to comfort him.

By the time Ted Crook was arrested for being a crook, Margie had willingly given him almost half her inheritance. At first, she would not believe it, but she saw the evidence on TV: the mansions, bathrooms with gold faucets, the fine wine and whiskey bottles worth thousands of dollars each. She cried and cried non-stop for days, and he promised herself that this would never happen again, never. 

A few months after, Margie found love online. His name is Harold Peterson. He’s an engineer from Houston who worked in the mining industry in Africa for many years. He wrote that his wife was eaten by a crocodile when she was sunbathing near a river, and that he was now very lonely. It didn’t take him long to fall in love head over heel with Margie. He wrote love poems to her that were strangely similar to the ones she used to read in school so long ago.

Then Harold wrote that he ran into trouble. He was stuck in some poor African country with the diamonds he had received as a payment for his work, but could not exchange for money unless he had some kind of clearance papers issued by the government. He needed money to bribe the authorities with American dollars. Margie did not hesitate and sent him money right away. After that, he wrote that because of the pandemic, he could not leave the country. He needed money to live, a lot of money, because “everything is so expensive.” Crooks were taking advantage of the situation to charge him a fortune for everything, and because of the virus, his request for the papers to exchange his diamonds for money, although it was already payed for, could not go through. “It should not take long now”, he wrote. "After that, we’ll be happy forever and ever together", he promised.

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P.-S.: This story is realistic in the way that most TV preachers in the United States -and some in Canada- are crooks. Believe it or not, one actually asked his congregation for money to buy a 65 million dollar jet plane, and a lot of them were caught in sexual scandals or prosecuted for money embezzlement.

But don’t forget that for every crook, there are hundreds and thousands of unknown generous and honest preachers, priests and ministers who genuinely want to share their love and faith with others. You just won’t find them on TV.

As for the scam romance that I describe of my little story, they are real too, very real, but again, you can also find true love and someone to share your life with online, but you have to be very, very careful.