The Return To Wholeness

Chapter Six: Cut Out Before I Could Begin 1998-2003

When my father started his gutter company in Florida, he split everything four ways—between my two brothers and my parents—and cut me out entirely. The reason? I was a girl. He said my husband would be responsible for supporting me, so I didn’t need a stake in the business.

It wasn’t just about the money—it was about what it represented. It was the confirmation that, no matter how hard I worked, I would never be treated as equal. I used to wish I had been born a boy just so I could work on the truck, just so the excuse to exclude me wouldn’t exist. Instead, I was paid $7 an hour to work in the office after school, while homeschooling half the year so I could keep the business running alongside my mother. My brothers got a quarter of the profits each. I got scraps.

In eighth grade, I signed up for half-price lunch at school, punching in my number each time—a public reminder that we had no money. It felt like begging. The only time I ever got a raise was when I found another job, and they begged me to come back. I refused unless they matched or beat my new pay.

I cried myself to sleep more often than I can count, unable to understand how God could allow such deep unfairness. In West Palm Beach, there was no “Message” church to attend, so we just listened to Branham tapes at home. I longed for a church, for Christian friends, for fellowship—but I had no one. The culture shock was brutal. I went from the Philippines, where everyone wore uniforms and looked the same, to an American middle and high school where appearance was social currency. My mother dressed me in the same baggy, outdated clothes she wore. At school, kids called me Amish.

A year after we moved, I discovered Pirch98—a chat program where “Message” believers from around the world connected. I finally had friends to talk to, people who understood my upbringing. For a moment, I felt less alone. But any glimpse of happiness was always short-lived. My brother Josh would hide the mouse and keyboard, or disconnect the computer entirely. My parents let him. He made my life a living hell, and any source of joy I found, he tried to destroy.

If my skills with computers and graphic design had been acknowledged, I could have gone to college for it and built a career on my own terms. Instead, I had to teach myself, constantly proving my worth to a family that saw me as “too young” and “just a girl.” Nothing I did was good enough. That dynamic followed me into marriage, where I was treated the same way—dismissed, diminished, disregarded. There were nights I prayed for God to take me home. My brothers were handed everything on a silver platter while I couldn’t even convince my parents to get me a $500 golf cart.

My mother controlled every interaction I had with friends. No one could come over unless they wore a skirt. I used to sneak skirts to my friend Stephanie so we could hang out or play Monopoly. Once, my friend Julie came over and my mother cornered her in my closet, preaching to her about why wearing shorts was a sin. I stopped inviting friends over after that. I just wanted out.

Marriage seemed like my only escape. When my mother mentioned my desire to be around other believers, a friend of hers who lived in a trailer park a mile from the Branham Tabernacle offered to take me in. I was seventeen and desperate to leave. My mother even bought her a new washer and dryer, and got me a bed. I thought I was free.

The reality was different. Her house was full of rigid, senseless rules—like forbidding me to use the washer my mother had just bought for her, insisting I hang my clothes outside. She seemed unstable, and I became physically ill from the stress. By the second week, I couldn’t keep food down for three days. I forced myself to eat some soup on the fourth day, then told my mother I couldn’t stay.

It crushed me. I thought I’d finally found a place with youth gatherings and friends my age. I’d dreamed since childhood of working for Voice of God Recordings as a secretary in order to give back and help people. The day I left, my mother’s friend casually told me she’d “forgotten” to give me a message that they had returned my call.

But when I finally visited the Tabernacle, I learned that the Branham family didn’t even attend church there. They just listened to tapes at home. It was a moment of disillusionment—the realization that even in the heart of “The Message,” what I thought I was moving toward didn’t really exist.