Oct. 25, 2015: Prophecy and coming around again

It felt like something was coming full circle.

As I celebrated my 2lst anniversary at the Las Cruces Sun-News, I was working on a story about Joe Bullock,  author of  in “Walking with Herb: A Spiritual Golfing Journey to the Masters.” ( He's Artist of the Week . Read about him  in today's SunLife section.)

Joe is also the dad of  Nick, the subject of one of my first stories for the Sun-News, shortly after my arrival in 1994.

Joe called the newsroom to tell us Nick, then 11, had received a notice from the IRS that he owed about  $62 million in taxes. He didn't, of course, and most of the elementary school student's income had come from a part-time job that involved "selling frogs to friends."

The story went viral, in a time long before "viral" was an official thing, or called that, anyway.

AP picked up my story and it eventually attracted attention from national TV networks and financial publications.

"We even got a call from Johnny Carson," Joe told me recently.

Though Nick didn't make it to the old "Tonight Show," he did do several interviews, and his issues with the feds were successfully resolved.

And little Nick is all grown up now and a lawyer in Albuquerque, Joe reports.

The fight for truth and justice just might have influenced a career path.

Joe's book, by the by, is about a 60-something banker  who receives a message from God on his office computer, assigning a mission that includes winning the prestigious Masters Tournament, so Joe will have a platform to deliver some important messages to humanity.

It put me in mind of the classic 1977 comedy "Oh, God!" in which George Burns, as God, appears to a grocery store manager portrayed by John Denver with a similar mandate.

I got to know Denver when I was working as a consultant for the nation's first nuclear safeguard ballot measure in Oregon, an effort to ensure that there would be adequate testing of  safety systems and a sound plan for safe nuclear waste material management before new nuclear power plants could be built. (Prophetically good ideas, as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters would later demonstrate.)

Denver connected us with testimonials from Jacques Cousteau and other environmentally- concerned celebrities and offered his own services for a benefit concert for the cause.

Denver later also helped arrange for "Oh, God!" to be screened at a benefit for Tenny Hale, the prophetic soul who had predicted the exact day of the Three Mile Island Disaster.

It was one of her many prophetic hits chronicled in my book, "Tenny Hale: American Prophet," and an award-winning documentary by the same name.

I first met Hale in 1970, when she gave me a little book of predictions, in which she predicted the Watergate scandal, by name, long before the break-ins  that toppled a presidency. It was among a group of prophecies received when she was a small child, before she knew how to write, in the form of rhymes so she could remember them, she told me.

And I recalled her last days, and her predictions that the major population decimations in our time would come not from nuclear war, but nuclear accidents, climate and earth changes that would result in dam breaks,  and ferocious virus that would prey on our compromised immune systems. And  I recalled her predictions of advance technological developments that still seemed so far-fetched at the time of her passing in 1981, things that are part of my everyday life, now.

I thought about all that while I writing about the recent OYE! (Listen up!)  ecology-oriented overnight gathering in downtown Las Cruces, which was meant to inspire us to envision a better city, working with what we have, and brainstorm new ideas to help create a sustainable, creative and compassionate future for ourselves, our kids and our grandkids.

And I pondered some more while I was reading Joe's inspiring little book, a reminder that God works in mysterious ways.

 And that He always sends us prophets, warnings and answers to seemingly impossible dilemmas.

It's up to us to listen and pay attention, to believe in and love ourselves and one another enough to work on solutions. There's help out there, and a way, if there is  faith, and the will.

S. Derrickson Moore may be reached at dmoore@lcsun-news.com,  @derricksonmoore on Twitter and Tout, or call 575-541-5450.