“If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own” (John 7:17).
That truth is always stranger than fiction is once again borne out by the strange drama of Joe Conlee’s life. Never heard of him, right? The son of a Methodist minister, Joe followed in his father’s footsteps, intending to become a pastor himself. In seminary, someone gave Conlee a small tract written by Tom Paine entitled, “Age of Reason,” telling him that he really ought to look at both sides of the issue; be a man with a balanced mind, not carried away with religious emotionalism.
Conlee read Paine, followed by Renan, Huxley, and Darwin. Finishing his studies, he took a church, but he wasn’t at all sure that he believed what he was expected to preach. He and his wife were warm and outgoing and made friends easily, so the churches he pastored did quite well. One day, though, he walked out of the church and told his wife, “I am through; I have preached my last sermon.” No longer believing what the Bible taught, especially about Jesus Christ, there was no alternative; he quit.
Conlee edited a local newspaper, then started his own paper which he sold for a large profit. He then became an editorial writer for the prestigious Los Angeles Times, but lost that job as the result of a growing problem with alcohol. The Times’ competitor—the now defunct L. A. Examiner—hired him, but he soon lost that job too. Same problem—alcohol.
About then, “Three Lucky Swedes” as they were known (despite the fact one was actually a Norwegian), found gold in the spring of 1899 in the Klondike of Alaska. “What do I have to lose?”, thought Conlee as he read about the nuggets of gold cascading down the sluice boxes of eager miners. Before he left, he was given a medicine box by his wife and daughter which he threw in the bottom of his trunk.
So, the ex-preacher and failed newspaperman headed for Dawson and from there pushed into gold country, building a small cabin at a place known as Forty Mile. Conlee had brought provisions to carry him through the winter along with a barrel—yes, I said barrel—of whiskey to wash them down. The winter of 1899 wasn’t exactly what Joe Conlee had experienced in Southern California, and as the snows piled higher and higher, he drank more and more.
When sickness struck, a miner more dead than alive staggered to his cabin. Conlee searched and found his old medicine box—the one his wife had given to him. He opened it, but there was more than medicine inside. Out fell a Bible. He recognized it at once—the Bible he had once given to his little girl. She had crossed out the wording, “From Daddy to Florence,” making it read, “From Florence to Daddy.”
With nothing to do, Conlee began reading. He read Matthew, Mark, and Luke. When he got to the fifteenth chapter of John, his doubts were settled once and for all. He believed this was the Word of God. He began to sob and the three of them knelt on a dirt floor in a Klondike cabin in a prayer meeting, which lasted almost through the night.
The book, which Conlee didn’t believe to be supernatural at one time, became real, but more important, the one whom this book tells about—Jesus Christ—changed his life in that little cabin . No, Conlee didn’t strike it rich at the creek at Forty Mile, but he connected with Him who went to prepare a place where streets are paved, as it were, with gold. He was reunited with his family and his old habit of alcohol was put behind him (Source: Charles Price, “The Lonely Cabin on the Forty Mile,” Golden Grain, Vo. 8, No. 6, April 27, 1926, pp. 15-25).
He took the challenge of the psalmist: “Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in him” (Psalm 34:8), and he was not disappointed.
Resource reading: John 7:1-19.
Source: Charles Price, “The Lonely Cabin On the Forty-Mile,” Golden Grain, Vol. 8, No. 6, April 27, 1926,15-25.
