Who influenced my life decisions?

by Senvestulo - Oct. 12, 2020

Mohandas Ghandi:

I love Ghandi’s Saying, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” I’ve taken this to heart and decided I could not remain silent any longer about what I really believe. I’ve tried to ‘go along to get along’ and it hasn’t made life any easier, because I knew in my heart that I was living a lie. I’m a naturist and I am a Christian. I just couldn’t live with myself any longer without expressing both of these sides of my personallity. I love meeting God in nature the way he created me. I have to start speaking out and letting others know. I have to be the change I want to see in the world.

Darwin Chandler:

There aren’t a lot of people who even know his name. Darwin Chandler was a pulpit minister for a lot of his life. He has a degree from Lubbock Christian College in Lubboch Texas, followed by Harding Univeristy in Searcy Arkansas. He preached for years, but his biblical views were very controversial. He was asked to leave the ministry in the Denomination he was raised in, the same one I grew up in. He tried other Denominations but none were open to his view of what the Bible said on the topics of nudity, sex & marriage.

The thing is, I was raised like him. Taught that we were not to take what was said from the pulpit as “gospel”, but to read the Bible for ourselves, and decide for ourselves what it said. I had come to many of the same conclusions he expounds in his books, when I was in my teens. Especially about nudity.

Chandler wrote several books.

• The Royal Law of Liberty: Living in Freedom Under Christ’s Law of Love. He wrote this book and published it under his own name.
• Divine Sex: Liberating Sex from Religious Tradition. Written under a pen name, Philo Thelos
• God is not a Homophobe: An unbiased look at Homosexuality in the Bible. Written under a pen name, Philo Thelos

Unfortunately for us, he died in 2018, disillusioned, and rejecting Christianity altogether. Driven away from the Church by people who couldn’t look past society’s mores to see what the Bible actually says and the freedoms contained within.

Leif Heilberg:

Naturist, Photographer, Esperantist. I identify so much with this man. He used to have much of his works on a website where one could go and browse them. I wish I had copied his works locally. After he passed away his family took down his works, and they are very hard to find anymore. He published several books, though. I’ll have to purchase some of them.

Leif made his living as a professional photographer. He traveled the world and photographed the naturist movement around the globe. He had a Photography Studio in San Francisco, California, but his work was also was well represented in Naturist magazines around the world. His Obituary (in Esperanto) on the website of INOE, the organization of Naturists who choose to learn and speak the international language. His books and other works he contributed to are for sale on Amazon

About the Photo:

The photo at the top of this page is a panorama of a beautiful pond that I ran across while hiking in LBJ National Grasslands in North Texas. It was a very peaceful day, and I took 5 separate photos from left to right with my Canon DSLR, and stitched them together into a panorama in Adobe Lightroom.