My dad talked of a God but He was a mean God. If you had long hair you were going to hell. You didn’t have a chance.
I used to climb trees to get closer to God to see if I could get a little closer. I can’t explain why I did that but I would. I thought I could get closer. I fell out of a real high tree once doing that and landed on my back. It knocked the breath out of me and I thought I was dying.
My brothers would laugh because I would say; “I know Jesus is real.” They said, “How?” I couldn’t tell them. I said, “I just know it.” I was just a kid. I didn’t know.
Like I was saying, I was molested as a child. My sister did that to me. Then somebody in the woods, one of our neighbors did that to me when I was five years old. I don’t know, she was about thirteen or fourteen years old. When she started, I screamed for my dad and he told me to shut up and go to sleep. My dad wouldn’t come to the rescue. We were so poor that we had to sleep with each other.
My mom, I loved her. I couldn’t stand my daddy. But she hated me. I don’t know why. When I was gone to school she would cut my favorite clothes into shreds where I could find them. If I brought a girlfriend home from school she would tell them that I was born mentally retarded because up to six months I couldn’t do anything but roll my eyes. My spine was damaged somehow. She would make sure that I would tell them I was born mentally retarded to hurt my feelings. But I always loved momma.
I started on opioids. My momma and daddy would give me those and valium around thirteen years old. I got really hooked on them and my brothers got hooked on them.
I watched six brothers die. Five were by prescription drugs. None of them lived to be forty-seven.
After I got out of prison, I did all of my time, I got hooked up with Teen Challenge. I was almost dead on drugs. I was a junkie. I would shoot anything I could get in my arms.
So, when I went into Teen Challenge they loved me. They treated me…I don’t want to get to shedding no tears, but they treated me like I had never been treated.
I was used to being abused and beat up. My dad beat on me with anything he could get in his hand.
When I got there, I wasn’t used to this with my family, they said, “We love you, we love you.” I thought they were a bunch of kooks. In my family if you told somebody that you loved them, you were a weak person. But they showed me. I thought they were just playing or just joking but they showed me love I had never known before. They told me about Jesus. That’s when I felt his presence.
When everything was up and we went out into a field. Me and my counselor did. He had everything he had written down about me and he put it in a can and set it on fire. He said, “God says it’s over.” He is healing you of this. Ever since then God has been healing me because I used to be one of the angriest persons you ever met. When you would get me mad I would think for days of how to hurt you. I am not that way anymore because God healed that. I always knew God wasn’t like that. I had it in my heart. I always felt that He wasn’t mean like that.
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