Judi,  

Your sweet OE community post choked me up, as much as I could after learning to stuff my emotions as an Order Kid. 

As I’d indicated in my marketing posts prior to publication, my primary audience is both Order Kids and Order Adults, with the full realization that Order Adults are a dying breed in 2025. My own mom died three years ago at 91, and by the Grace of God, my dad is still alive with almost full faculties at 93. I’m happy that he is still alive to see IRON BOY debut.

I visited Dad and my step-mom Joyce in Texas recently, and helped him edit his own memoir. Funny how two family members living together and apart can experience two very different lives at the same time. Parallel universes. But he has come around that although creating a Family Order was an audacious “Grand Experiment” with lofty intentions, that so many Order Adults, including himself, were ill equipped emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually to pull it off, especially with regard to caring for the children, and exacerbated by the drive to scale the global presence and scope of the mission so quickly without sufficiently trained human capacity. Since he’s one of the few Order elders still alive, I’m relieved to see that he committed that to print in his upcoming autobiography.

I’m delighted to hear you thought enough of my story to pass it along to your three sons. I was in the book publishing industry for 16 years as an editor, marketer, and executive; and I learned that books with staying power do so because satisfied readers pass them along to others who may benefit from the messages as well. Thank you, thank you! 🙏 

The Future Is Open,

David

Sent from my iPad
David Marshall
www.marshallbooks.net

On Jun 19, 2025, at 3:25 AM, Judi White <judiwhite070@gmail.com> wrote:


David, purchased Iron Boy to give to my 3 sons, reading it first. I experienced it as an account straight from the heart. Cried as regrets for awful emerging generation parenting as well as abandoning my own sons. Your publishing this is a healing balm for all of us, understanding the whole experience as collective as well as a personal responsibility. The final chapter, the hiking trip encounter, holds  the call to all all inone image. Your father is right, in spite of or because of it all, the emerged generation is ready for this period in human history. Thank you for sharing your heart and soul with your gift of writing true wisdom so clearly. 
Bowing in gratitude.

On Sun, Jun 15, 2025, 4:02 AM David Marshall via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
Dear Former Order Colleagues & Friends,

Sunday “House Church” Blastoff! (Father’s Day - appropriate launch day since Order fathers loom large in this book)

IRON BOY is officially for sale today on Amazon as both a paperback and e-book.

The Iron Man statue is still alive and well in Fifth City sixty years later. In 2021, I visited Chicago with my wife, daughter, son, and their partners, and we all went to visit Fifth City and the Iron Man—they for the first time. Attached are some photos, of me in front of the Iron Man with the Program Center in the background where I took part of the Academy, the still-running “Iron Man Can” Fifth City Preschool, and my old elementary school, now renamed Leif Ericson Scholastic Academy. 

Also a vintage wintertime Iron Man statue photo that I used for the front cover of IRON BOY.

And finally a little artifact from that era I just received. I visited my 93-year old dad Gene and 91-year-old step-mom Joyce in Texas recently, and they gave me this seven-inch-tall metal Iron Man statute that they had picked up along the way from the Wichita Religious House. Did all the Religious Houses have one?

When I raise up my hands like the Iron Man, I think of these words from the Order song, “Free, free, free to decide, what this world is going to be.” We've still got a lot of work to do!

Much appreciation for putting up with my 10-week House Church countdown to IRON BOY’s debut. If you read it, or share it with others, please let me know the impact. You can obtain both the paperback and e-book now on Amazon, and through other bookstores soon.

https://www.amazon.com/IRON-BOY-Searching-Freedom-Religious/dp/B0FCMMVHDC

Grace & Peace,

David Marshall, www.marshallbooks.net


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