April 29
Introduction – My Father’s Story
My father’s life began in poverty and brokenness. He was born into instability, often living in trailers, and when he came into the world, his parents divorced. His father disowned him, accusing his mother of adultery.
His mother remarried a prizefighter who owned and trained animals for the movies. Behind the glamour of Hollywood’s animal shows was cruelty. My father, still only a boy, was forced to work from dawn until dusk cleaning cages. If he failed to do the job exactly right, he was beaten unmercifully. The stepfather treated everyone in the house like animals under his control.
To survive, my father learned manipulation as a defense. If he knew a beating was coming, he would lie or quickly tattle on his mother or brothers to redirect the rage. It wasn’t courage that spared him, but calculation. His survival came at the cost of watching others suffer in his place.
Tragedy soon compounded tragedy. His half-brother hanged himself in his twenties. His mother, beaten often to the point of unconsciousness, eventually took her own life. She shot herself while my father was serving in Vietnam. That very event spared his life — he was called home for her funeral while his entire battalion was slaughtered. Survivor’s guilt would haunt him, even as he tried to interpret it as providence.
After Vietnam, he sought to prove himself. He turned to selling drugs to show his father-in-law that he could make it on his own. That path led to prison — but in prison he discovered the Message. He joined the prison ministry, and what began as survival became identity.
Suicide would claim another brother in 2011, leaving my father the sole survivor among his siblings and half-siblings. He carried himself as though God had chosen him alone, spared for a purpose. Through becoming a minister and missionary within the Message movement, he found meaning. For the first time, he was respected, even admired. The Message made him feel special — predestined, called, elect of God.
I don’t deny that he was sincere in much of what he did. But alongside his sincerity was something darker: a craving for control, a hunger to be seen, a need for popularity. The Message gave him not just faith, but authority, and that authority became the tool he wielded for the rest of his life.
Introduction – My Mother’s Story
My mother came from wealth but never from warmth. Raised in a strict Roman Catholic household, she was taught ritual and reverence but not tenderness. Confession was a weekly duty, but when the priest she trusted made advances toward her, even suggesting intimacy, she knew something was deeply wrong.
Beneath the polished exterior of her family’s world, she felt out of place. Her parents weren’t the emotional or affectionate type; their love was measured in gifts and financial provision, never in hugs or encouragement. Her father’s temper often overshadowed their home. She grew up starved for approval, desperate for love that was more than material.
The emptiness turned into despair, and despair into depression. At her lowest point, she walked into the ocean intending never to return. She waded out, determined to let the water take her, when she saw a dark figure — like the grim reaper — and heard a voice: “Pack your bags and move to California.” She obeyed.
She arrived in California with no plan, no home, and no one to turn to but an Alcoholics Anonymous center, believing they might take her in. That same day, my father and two other men from the Message came to witness at the center, Bibles in hand. My mother approached them. After only a short exchange, my father looked at her and declared, “God told me you are my wife.” Shocked, she replied, “I don’t even know you. I’ll never marry you.”
A week and a half later, they were married.
My mother described that moment to me years later: when my father asked her to marry him, a supernatural presence filled the vehicle they were in, overtaking her will and forcing her to say yes. She always believed she had been pressed into it against her better judgment.
Her father was outraged. He hadn’t known of the marriage until after it happened, and he despised my father for it for years. But my father had already honed the art of intimidation and persuasion. His words carried weight, his gaze carried power. He could make people feel as though resisting him meant resisting God Himself.
It wasn’t long before she and the rest of us felt the same force. When someone opposed him, his entire body would begin to shake, his countenance would change, and he would fix his eyes on us. He would prophesy in the name of the Lord, often to get his way, and many believed it. Some of his “healings” and prophecies seemed to come to pass; others failed entirely. But the effect was the same: his family was kept under control, and fear was the leash.
My mother, who had already longed her whole life for love and security, mistook his control for protection, his authority for safety. And I, born into their world, inherited the atmosphere they created — an atmosphere where power was disguised as God’s will, and submission was the only way to survive.
The Return To Wholeness 
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