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** About the Salvation Code **

It is the worst-kept secret in the world because God
wants everyone to know about it.  It is simply ten
ASCII characters strung together, but once you
understand the code, it can make your life full of
hope and purpose.  The best part is that you don't
have to buy anything to get or understand it.

Here is the Code:  O3IXI8E0OC

** The Origins of the Code **

I travel a lot and I was contemplating how to really
do something useful and needed.  I have know about
God's plan for Happiness for many years, preached it
(with varying success) to many people, and gone on to
a somewhat normal life where I share it only
occasionally when I felt it was right.  I decided
I needed to share it more often and wanted a unique
and somewhat compelling way to do it.  Thus came the 
Salvation Code.

Once upon a time, digital commuincation was strings
of simple text that were sent from here to there.
Computers need everything codified, so the ASCII 
(American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
Code was created to facilitate this.  Being creative,
people began to draw pictures using the characters of
the ASCII code to express themselves, which has been
called "ASCII art."  A more modern and simple form of
this is the emoticon, which uses a few ASCII
characters to express sometimes complex emotions.

In short, people were using computerized letters and
numbers to create things far beyond the original
intent of those numbers and letters.

I wanted to explain God's plan for happiness in a
way that was compressed and easy to transmit, with a
typewriter, a URL, an email tagline, or just a few
characters scrawled somewhere.  I also wanted it to
be an identifier of a believer in the Plan.

On the way to the job I had, the concept of the Code
came to me.  On the way back home, scrawled on a
blank piece of a bag from Wendy's, I created the Code
itself.  It took almost no time at all to actually do
it.

** The First Results **

I shared the Code with my wife teh morning after I
created it.  It came into my mind that the test of
whether it would be a good thing was if the person
who was taught the Code could remember it after one
telling.  She could reproduce the code (hey, it
really looks like a random string of letters and 
numbers!) after only about seven minutes of exposure!
My oldest daughter got it in about the same time.
My mother had it as well but it took my mother-in-law
a bit longer.  I think it really helped that all of
these people are very conversant in God's Plan and
only needed to tack the symbols onto what they already
knew.  I would figure that it wouldn't take quite as
well with someone who was being exposed to the Plan at
the same time.

It does say that once you see the symbols for what
they are, it tends to stay in the mind, which is what
was wanted.  My daughter shared it with a Seminary
class and it seemed to catch on there.

** What Next? **

Well, this is a "cast your bread upon the waters"
sort of thing and we will see how it spreads.  I
made some feeble efforts at sending it randomely to
a few email addresses on the net and submitted the
code.atspace.us website to many search engines.  I
expect that someone who is much better at chatting
and such could get the vision of the thing and be
the real one who gets it into the mainstream.



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