In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, a Father, a Cult

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Under the leadership of "The Man of God" the already demanding religion becomes life consuming with assemblies everyday and multiple services on Sunday, members being told they cannot eat with non-members (and even working with non-members was frowned upon). In the Days of Rain is Rebecca Stott’s attempt to make sense of her childhood in the Exclusive Brethren, to understand her father’s role in the cult and in the breaking apart of her family, and to come to be at peace with her relationship with a larger-than-life figure whose faults were matched by a passion for life, a thirst for knowledge, and a love of literature and beauty.

Whichever way you phrased it, it meant you didn’t get to choose, and that there was no getting away. Thus saith the Lord GOD; I will yet for this be inquired of by the house of Israel, to do it for them; I will increase them with men like a flock. Then there's our collection of travel deals and discounts, which could help you get away for less than you might expect once you've settled on your dream destination. Having asked his teacher the exact distance of the children of Israel’s flight from Egypt to the promised land, he found it baffling that a trip of 65 miles should have taken a full 40 years, or an average of about eight yards a day.

People lost jobs and livelihoods as they attempted to comply - some committed suicide as they lost everything and suffered loneliness and isolation. The LORD will make flashing clouds; He will give them showers of rain, Grass in the field for everyone. While finding this bizarre, and the rules the group was to follow continually changing, I didn't find it much different than any other book I've read of extreme fundamentalist Christian sects that shun others and become more strict as the group becomes smaller, and there are threats from within especially when the Rapture dates kept changing.

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Within five years The Brethren’s list of prohibited activities had grown five times as long; within ten years, it had increased by 20 times. If anything, she plays down the impact such an extremist upbringing must have had on her and her siblings. Ask the LORD for rain in the spring season, the LORD who brings storm clouds, and heavy rains, who gives to everyone grain in the fields. Stott grew up with an apocalyptic mindset, always expecting the Devil’s interventions and the End Times.

A memoir exploring Stott’s childhood in the Exclusive Brethren, a very strict Christian sect that became a cult in the ’60s and was rocked by a sex scandal in the ’70s. In In the Days of Rain Rebecca gathers the broken threads of her father’s story, and her own, and follows him into the thicket to tell of her family’s experiences within the sect, and the decades-long aftermath of their breaking away. The leader of this cult, Jim Taylor junior, winds up drinking to the point of brain damage and eventual dementia, grabbing all the ladies boobies in plain view of their spouses (also taking a few to bed), and using his pulpit time to spew the most dirty brown trash water imaginable.Both imposed tighter and tighter control over their charges after taking over, JT in the 1960s and WJ in the 1980s, cutting them off from the outside world, prohibiting access to television and radio, controlling employment and access to a wide range of material goods, houses, land, etc.