Conversations in Church

Conversations in Church One week after Keith Steffen fired me from OSF, an Apostolic Christian friend of mine told me she had been approached in her church by an Apostolic Christian nurse who also attended the same church. In very definitive terms, the nurse explained to my friend some rumors she had heard about me that came from a “not low level source” at OSF. (A couple of the things that this nurse stated were almost verbatim what Keith had told me or people that had approached Keith on my behalf.) The nurse warned my friend about travelling to Haiti with me in January, ‘02. (When I told Bishop Jenky, he was visibly enraged.) My friend started to cry in church at hearing these rumors and asked the nurse if she had ever heard of Keith Steffen. The nurse stated she had never heard of Keith Steffen. (The Apostolic Christian community in this area is close knit. Steffen had visited her office in the past. Also, my friend’s mother used to baby-sit for Keith and his brother when they were kids living in little rural communities near Peoria.) When my friend called me about these rumors she stated that she thought “I needed a chance to defend myself.” When I heard this, what Keith Steffen was saying to me when he smiled and looked at the floor in his office and shuffled his feet and repeatedly said, "John, when this comes out about you, it won't be good", made sense to me for the first time. I was being set up for a big fall. The seeds of doubt were being sown by the Administrator of OSF. The next day, I went and talked to this nurse who I was seeing and meeting for the first time in my life. She was extremely nevous and apologetic for what she had said. (One month later, she wrote me a letter apologizing for what she had said.) However, later my friend told me the nurse called her and berated her for telling me in the first place. So I don’t know how sorry she really was. After hearing what my friend had told me, I was extremely happy for many reasons that I had not let myself be coerced into seeing the "wellness physician" to keep by job at OSF. October 5, 2006--An interesting followup to this post is the following: Take a wild guess which office this nurse worked for when I spoke with her and she told me that she had never heard of Keith Steffen? Peoria Day Surgery Center which was also known as Peoria Urological! Recently, the Journal Star stated that Mr. Steffen had threatened to "bury" Peoria Day Surgery Center. Sadly, for Mr. Steffen and the nurse that was saying she had never heard of Mr. Steffen, Dr. Joe Banno told me in his Peoria Urological office in 2002, that Mr. Steffen had threatened his office to run them out of business. Dr. Banno told me that he did not believe his nurse had never heard of Mr. Steffen. ------------------------------