© 2017 Daniel Casko
© 2017 Urantia Foundation
By Daniel Casko, Indiana, United States
This is the story about how I asked for and eventually found The Urantia Book. My name is Daniel Michael Casko. I was born in April 1949, in beautiful Gary, Indiana. I was very much blessed with a loving, Christian family, and my mother and grandmother took my brothers and me to church every Sunday.
My grandmother was raised very religiously in the mountains of Southeastern Kentucky, and when I was a baby she often rocked me to sleep, singing gospel songs from the Bluegrass country. I still remember those songs today. I learned a great deal about religion while growing up and attending church every week. I think all children should be informed about the spiritual life, our relationship with our heavenly Father, and the story of Jesus’ life and teachings.
Attending church every week allowed me to feel as though church was my second home, and the people there were like my extended family. I progressed very swiftly as a child, and when I was taught to pray before bed each night, I decided on my own to expand on the practice and pray when I woke, and soon throughout the day as well.
I was so excited about getting older and attending Sunday school like the older kids. For some reason, adults often asked me what I planned to be when I grew up. So one day I asked God what He wanted me to be, and I knew the answer was being the best that I could be. I did tell Him that I was uneasy around blood, but if being a scientist was good enough for Him, I could be just that.
My life, up to this point in 1955, was full of hope, knowledge, progress and direction. The future looked bright! This was the year that I would finally start first grade in both public school and Sunday school. It was a new beginning on my path to “be perfect, even as my Father in heaven was perfect.”
Little was I prepared for the wall that I would run into. My first-grade Sunday school class was run by two mothers who read to us from the Bible. I couldn’t read or write yet, and no one had ever read to me from the Bible before. The first lesson was about Noah and his ark. I hadn’t heard this story before, and I listened with interest while the teacher told it. She got to the part about collecting the animals in pairs, male and female, and I couldn’t imagine how Noah traveled the whole world back in that time. Perplexed, I raised my hand up in the air and asked how Noah got all the way to Australia. Perhaps my question surprised her, and I found her answer unacceptable. So again I asked how anyone during that time in history could have traveled not only to Australia but to everywhere else around the world in one lifetime. That didn’t go over too well either, and she told me to be quiet, to sit there and listen, and to stop interrupting her.
I kept thinking about it and asking myself, “Why would God kill all of the innocent people as well as the evil ones? Would He not just rid the world of the evil ones and allow the good people to live?” I spent the entire week thinking about this and got so depressed that I couldn’t hold my head up.
My mother took me back to Sunday school the next Sunday, but I didn’t want to go. On the way to class with an almost-empty heart, I took one look at the exit door pushed it open, ducked around the corner, and started talking to God about this problem. I remembered other issues too, and we went over them as well. Pretty soon it was time for my mother to return. With just minutes to spare, I came to the conclusion that there was only one way to fix this problem. I told God that He had to write another book. This new book needed to address the questions that I had and had to expand on other things too. After all, it was a new age of wonder in technology and science. God might as well go big, right?
Over the years thereafter, I just waited for the new book, not knowing that The Urantia Book had been delivered to Urantia Foundation at 533 W. Diversey Parkway, in Chicago, Illinois.
When I was twenty-one years old, I found myself in prison for refusing to be a part of the Vietnam War. I spent a lot of time sitting in my cell wondering if there really was a God. I felt like an animal in a cage, but I still believed I was doing what God wanted me to do. So there I sat in that prison until one night a man came to my cell and told me to follow him. We got in a van, and he had the driver drive me to the entrance of the fort-Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The man told me to get out. I was free to go home.
Walking to the interstate with no money and the temperature very close to zero, I stuck out my thumb to hitch a ride home. Late at night, even back in those days, it was hard to hitch a ride. But I was very fortunate! A hippie named Robin was heading to Indiana from California, and he picked me up and took me all the way.
He asked if I had ever heard of The Urantia Book. I had not. So he told me about it, and when we arrived in Indiana, he showed it to me. Within minutes I knew that this was the book I had been waiting for since 1955 . I have been reading it ever since.
The Urantia Book is truly a revelation of God, and its teachings are the greatest truths since the days that Jesus walked this earth. The teachings are the cornerstone of my loving service, and I am eternally grateful!