hen the Blodgetts moved out of our guest cabin, they set themselves up in a 2 family household with their long-time friends Bill and Tammy Kurcz. The Kurcz family had moved to our area in Southern Oregon from the Pahrump Nevada area. We had been told that Bill and Tammy and their kids had been closely involved in the Blodgetts' Nevada ministry.

In the first week at the new household, Chris brought Bill and Tammy over to interview them on his radio program. They were presented as their old friends who were committed co-labourers in the ministry of the Gospel. The Kurczs were former members of the same church as well as having a long time involvement in the Blodgetts' Friday night Bible study group back in Nevada. Chris and Sharon said that they had been close to Bill and Tammy for at least 5 years.

When the Blodgetts moved into a large house with Bill and Tammy, they retrieved all their larger household goods that had been stored at our warehouse. Most people know storage facilities are expensive, but obviously they were never charged a penny for the 9 months of storage in the facility that we had rented.

Indeed, the rent at the warehouse was high and we were eventually unable to sustain the rental overhead. The problem was we had a vast amount of long term dehydrated food stored there as inventory for our Applegate Ranch food line. I asked Chris if their new garage had room and he said yes. We had stored the Blodgetts important items for months, so they were now in a position to return the favor.

After I discharged Chris, he refused to return the 5,000 pounds of our stored food inventory that was kept in their garage. He also has a computer that belongs to the ministry claiming he figured we "owed" him these items. We still have one stereo audio amplifier of Chris' in our possession. He figures that's a fair trade.

They hadn't lived with the Kurczs for a month when the Blodgetts began murmuring about Bill and Tammy! Suddenly, we were told, Bill and Tammy were completely off base spiritually. The first thing we heard was that when the Kurczs came into some money, they bought toys for their kids that Chris thought were extravagant.

Chris told us the kids manipulated their parents into buying them toys when Bill and Tammy should have given a substantial sum to the Blodgetts. Sharon began to claim the Kurczs owed them money for rent. Sharon tried to gossip about Tammy to Susan, but Susan shut her down immediately. Then Chris began to tell me about all the sin they were seeing in Bill and Tammy.

Bill had immediately landed a truck driving job, and Tammy had also taken a job outside the home. This time, Tammy was the focal point of their criticism - apparently because she was a woman with a job outside the home. Once again, in a household with 4 adults, 3 were working. This is the precise pattern that we experienced. As the animosity towards the Kurcz family increased, Sharon actually verbally castigated Tammy for doing too much laundry!

Previously, we had heard how wonderful the Kurcz children were because they had been raised in a Christ-like environment. Now, Chris said he wanted to discipline the Kurcz's kids, because they were spoiled brats that got away with everything!

Indeed, Chris had once threatened to smack my sister's 6 year old child when April lived here at the warehouse. I was not present, but Susan came out snarling. Think of it! Here is a man that has abandoned his own children, fled the state seeking to evade paying for their support, posing as a pastoral figure who is qualified to advise others on how they should raise their children!

After a couple of months at the 2 household family consisting of the Blodgetts and the Kurczs, Chris told me things were so bad he wanted to "bitch-slap" Bill Kurcz. This is a colorful expression for fisticuffs that is also derisive. Seeing that he was very upset, I took it in stride and counseled him to exercise restraint. We prayed over the matter. Meanwhile, Sharon had become positively venomous towards Tammy.

Chris told me he refused to pay their share of the rent at the house because Bill and Tammy owed them money. Sharon made the same claim. Since we had no independent contact with the Kurczs, we weren't in any position to know the truth of the matter.

Chris told us the Kurczs had locked them out of the garage where they stored Christian Media's commercial inventory of dehydrated food. Things came to a head when the Ford repossession man finally found the Blodgetts and showed up at their new address to repo the Blodgetts' SUV. Again, even though they had $14,000 in cash when they arrived in Oregon, they never made a payment on the vehicle loan.

We calculate their payments were about 2 years in arrears at that point. The repossession was blamed on Tammy, for their Nevada creditors had no way to locate the Blodgetts without someone in Oregon helping them. We later found that Sharon had inadvertently given the Ford people their new address through some subterfuge utilized by the repossession agency - and that Tammy Kurcz had nothing to do with it. Obviously the situation was extremely tense at their house.

With the Blodgetts looking for another place to live due to the open animosity with their roommates, Susan told me in no uncertain terms that the Blodgetts were not coming back to our guest cabin. It was around this period that Craig joined us and moved in to the guest cabin vacated by the Blodgetts. I was happy he was there for it gave me a legitimate excuse to refuse to bring them back with us in the event they couldn't find a rental, and I still felt a certain amount of responsibility for their welfare.

Chris and Sharon searched intensely for another house to rent and finally found one. Christian Media advanced the money for the first month's rent and the deposits as Chris said all their money was gone because the Kurczs had "ripped them off." I never understood why they couldn't seem to live within their means with the monthly monies they were receiving from Christian Media (in addition to donations from listeners and sales from Sharon's lovely book).

We never heard Bill and Tammy's side of any of this until much later. After Chris and Sharon moved out of the 2 family household, the Kurczs moved again, changed their phone number, and seemingly disappeared.