Global Community Communications Alliance Member Profile
Landau Lawrence, M.D.
My name is Landau Patrick Lawrence. My given name was Patrick Nicholas Lawrence, and I am the third eldest of 15 children. I graduated from a Catholic high school in Orange, Texas in 1964 and entered the United States Army a year later. Early in my military career, I was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant and served as an officer in the North America Air Defense. Later, I was moved into military intelligence and served in that capacity in the Republic of Vietnam.
In Vietnam, I sustained gunshot wounds to the right chest and shoulder, and I returned to the United States in November, 1969 and was made captain to a medical holding company until my honorable discharge in September, 1973. During that time I received a degree in physics, and along the way I felt led by God to make a commitment to Him that I would embrace a career in medicine, and so I entered medical school at the University of Texas in 1973.
Looking back, this was my first giant step in coming full circle into partnership with God. I had always wanted to be an astronaut, but I believe that God our Father wanted me in medicine, and I somehow really knew that since I was about six years old. My own strategy had always been to delay God until He could finally “come around” to seeing things my way. But in May of 1978, as I began to practice medicine in a small town in North Texas, I got the unmistakable impression that God was beginning to win in my life. That is, God had most definitely found a way to effectively use me, and, despite myself, I found that deep down I really didn't mind such an arrangement.
By 1984, I had moved my medical practice to central Texas, near Austin, and 10 of my surviving 12 brothers and sisters ended up in the same locale. The same year, my dad discovered he was dying of cancer, so he and Mom moved in with me and my own family so that I could attend to him for the last 3 months of his life. I promised God that if He would help me to handle the challenge of facing death with my dad, I would write a book telling how God heals persons and families through circumstantial reality, or Providence.
God did help me through some very difficult moments, and I wrote the book called: Dying to Live. But I didn't publish it right away. In December of 1987, I found that God was urging me to find a publisher for the little book, so I went to a mall in Austin to inquire as to how I might go about that. Serendipitously, I met a doctor friend whom I hadn't seen since medical school. He looked over the manuscript and decided that it reminded him of another book, The URANTIA Book. God had finally led me to The Fifth Epochal Revelation. My little book was so puny and primitive compared to this awesome tribute to God. Nevertheless, there was something in common between the two books.
In my little book, the idea of Revelation-in-Progress ran from cover to cover, reflecting that God is revealing more and more of Himself to each of us every day of our lives. In other words, revelation on the inside and validating on the outside is ongoing and never ending. Not in so many words, but laced throughout the tapestry The URANTIA Book was the same dynamic promise; that is, revelation is ongoing and ever upwards on the outside as well as on the inside.
I can tell you truly that finding The Urantia Book brought new fulfillment to my life beyond all my previous dreams. It led me to find new pockets of spirit-born friendships in Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Denver, and even pen-pals in Sidney, Australia. Love of the truths in that book and fellowships with others who felt like me led me first to Boulder, Colorado in October of 1993 and then to Northern Arizona in January, 1994. There I found the greatest gathering of truth seekers I have ever had the honor of meeting, and they embraced me as though I was family from the start. I have remained and spiritually grown with Global Community Communications Alliance ever since and made the great exodus from Northern Arizona to Tubac/Tumacacorin with this my greater family a few years since.
In my personal life, especially over the last decade, I have seen the growing need for all souls to adjust to God's higher reality while freeing ourselves of misinterpretations and distortions of that reality based upon our unrealistic goals or over-dependence upon our sense of physical reality alone. In my daily practice of medicine, I have had to redefine all of my prior ideas about life and death. I am beginning to appreciate more and becoming more functional in the higher meaning of life and death in both a personal and a cosmic way. While I am still very awkward in my attempts to let this higher reality have its way in me, I can say that I am trying harder to do it day by day, even moment to moment. I believe that the more we try to be good hosts to God and his goodness in all our lives and affairs, the greater things can happen in the transformation of ourselves and our world.
Looking back over a lifetime, having been both soldier and physician, one of the greatest paradoxes of my life has been the admixture of both warring efforts and healing efforts within the same individual. I now realize that on this Earth, healing really is both an individual and a global war today, an intense struggle between the partial isolated self and the Whole Self. To win such a war, we each and all have to outgrow localized dreams, and expand our care-coverage into a global fellowship, one big family in God.
I started off identifying myself as one of 15 children born to a couple in Orange, Texas, USA. But every day now, as I try to bring the family practice of Soulistic Medicine into the hearts and homes of every soul I meet in Southern Arizona, I see us all as siblings in the One Family of the One Earth which is also only one of the many, many sibling worlds in the One Great Family of God Our Father!
Landau Lawrence, M.D.,
Vicegerent Elder
to Gabriel of Urantia and Niánn Emerson Chase and the Mandate of the Bright and Morning Star