Someone once wrote that it is not good for a man when the gods take too much notice of him. I would add that it is not good for women or children either. However much God went out of His way to demonstrate His love for me, it seemed that Satan matched tit for tat to keep me from that love. I think that even at my birth Satan was fighting against me. I was born with a collapsed lung. In 1951 not many babies born with a collapsed lung lived. But God was there to heal me. It is interesting that I have been known for my “leather lungs” or lung capacity over the years.
After we moved to Ohio, my father’s mental problems slowly worsened. They peaked when I was about nine or ten. My father’s mother died when he was four. He lived in a very physically and emotionally abusive environment. He suffered from lack of nutrition also. Later in his life he would self diagnose food allergies, and my mother made fun of this idea. But when, after years of medical treatment that didn’t work for my ailments, I was finally tested for allergies, I found out that I too suffer from food allergies. Food allergies affect the immune system and can cause a number of ailments. Of course, the biggest problem that my father had was his lack of faith in God. God’s love could have healed a lot of hurts in his heart, but when he was young he did not know how to let love in. Hurt people hurt people. I believe that he wanted the best for his family, and that he loved his children with as much love as he had in his heart, but he lacked a lot.
I really don’t understand my mother. Whether from pride or fear, she stayed with him, allowing him to abuse her and her children. At times she actually instigated the troubles between them. She had been raised in the Catholic Church, a loving family, and a good school. She was attracted to my father because he was a rogue. She married against her father’s wishes, and left the Catholic Church to do it. When I was growing up, she would read me stories from the Bible and teach me prayers, but she believed that she would go to Hell. She was a strange paradox. She was deceitful and manipulative in her relationship to my father, to us children, and to people outside of our family. Yet she often prayed with faith that God would hear her and answer her prayers. She often said, “If you prayed for rain, take an umbrella.” She expected to get what she prayed for and taught us to expect it too.
After our young family moved back to Ohio, we moved a lot of times. When I was four we lived in a little two-room house in Southern Ohio. One sunny afternoon Mother and I were planting flowers and I began to cry. When she asked what the matter was, I told her. Daddy was going to spank me when he got home. Every day when he got home from work, he would ask me if I had sucked my thumb that day. If I said yes, he would spank me–hard. I knew that I had sucked my thumb this day and that it was nearly time for him to come home. Instead of standing up to my father and protecting me from this brutality, my mother taught me to lie. Perhaps this seemed so much easier to her, but the long-term spiritual effects were devastating. Not only did a spirit of lying enter me, but I also lost respect for her. Later in my life, long after I had totally quit lying and treasured the truth, my mother would say that she did not believe a word I said. She would denounce me as a liar to the family and finally she would quit speaking to me.
I can remember at the age of 7, that my father had decided to beat me for something. My mother did protest, but he took me in the bathroom, locked the door and beat me black and blue with his belt. I can’t remember what he beat me for, but I can remember my mother screaming and crying outside the door.
It was around this same time that Edna; a friend of my mother’s was visiting. She and my mother were making my bed when Edna noticed a bunch of small hairs in my bed and asked me about them. It was my eyelashes and eyebrow hairs. I had pulled them all out. Edna remarked to my mother that this was not a good sign, but nothing else was ever said or done about it.
The summer that I turned eight my father bought a “farm” in the Appalachian foothills of Southern Ohio. It didn’t have an indoor bathroom, but it did have running water in the kitchen. My father had a job with AT&T and so we never lacked for food. The “farming” that we did was subsistence farming. We had a garden and canned our own vegetables. We had goats, pigs, a few chickens, ducks, a few head of beef, a cow or two, and a small horse. We also had eleven cats and nine dogs. A black snake lived in the basement during the winter and lay on the front porch with the dogs and cats in the summer.
Much of the fieldwork we did by hand. We couldn’t afford expensive farm equipment, although we did have an old tractor when my father could get it running. Dad would occasionally hire someone with a planter to plant our field, but my father, my brother Rick and I did most of the work by hand. My mother usually only did inside chores, except for morning milking, and my father would try to get that done before he left for work, if he could.
Before we moved into the newly purchased farm I stayed with a friend of the family in the new school district so that I wouldn’t have to switch schools during the move. I got up one morning while the house was quiet. And suddenly there were evil voices in my head. I knew that they were not my voices or thoughts. I knew that they were evil. They threatened to hurt me, they made me fearful, and I didn’t know what to do. They told me if I told an adult I would be locked up in a mental institution. I felt trapped. They wouldn’t shut up.
When I was in school, I could concentrate on the teacher and the lessons and they were silenced for a while. As soon as I was alone, they would begin again. I don’t remember how long I struggled with them to no avail. Then one day I was out walking in the woods at the farm and I began to sing made up songs to praise Jesus. I didn’t know any Christian songs, because my parents didn’t often attend church, but the habit of talking to God had never left me. I discovered the demons (for that is what they were) could not talk when I sang. From then on, when I was alone and they reared their ugly heads, I sang to the Lord. I wouldn’t get deliverance until I was 21 years old. For 13 years, I resisted them and kept them at bay.
I was nine when I realized that I was lying all of the time. Not a day went by that I didn’t lie and sometimes it would be one lie after another. I made a decision to stop. It was very difficult. Sometimes I would stop myself in the middle of a lie to a friend, and say, “Wait, I am sorry that was a lie, here is the truth.” I think some of my friends must have thought I was nuts, but if they did, they did not say so. Once I stopped lying, the truth was extremely important to me. I have a reputation now for being “too truthful.” The truth can be a dangerous weapon too. A Christian needs to learn how to control what they say. The truth needs to be spoken in love. It is easier to be quiet, or to divert the subject if the Lord directs. A lie is never the right thing to do, but a Christian does not need to tell everything that they know either.
I was also nine when I found a book on hypnosis and self-hypnosis and started putting into practice what I learned from it.
I was nine when I found a King James Bible in the trash and pulled it out and started reading it. God gave me the ability to understand what I read and I began to know Him better. Yet, I still didn’t know the gravity of my sin of hypnosis.
In the fourth grade, I had a wonderful teacher that I loved, Mrs. Gampp. I talked too much in class so she set me up front near her desk. One day she said, “Becky, get back to work on your lessons. “ “I’m done,” I replied. It was only 9 AM and I had the day’s work done. She grabbed a book off the shelf. “Here read this,” she said. It was the Boxcar Children, probably not the best of books to be giving an abused child. It is about a family of children that run away and are self-reliant. I have to admit it did put ideas into my head. In any case, in a couple of hours, I went to her and said, “This was good, is there more by this author.” She did not believe that I had read it all, so she made me tell her the story. After recess there was a stack of books by my desk that was as high as my hip. She explained that after I finished my work, I could read books from the stack. When I finished a book I should start a “finished” stack, each night the finished stack disappeared and each day the “to read stack” was renewed. She continued this practice throughout the entire year. She went out of her way to find books from the library for me.
She was the one who discovered that I could not see the blackboard and had the Lion’s Club check my eyesight. They sent home a letter to my father, who would not get me glasses. After a number of months went by Mrs. Gampp called my father and told him that if we were too poor to get me glasses that the Lion’s Club would pay for them. My father took me to the eye doctor the next Saturday. He was stubborn, but he was proud. New glasses made the world so much more beautiful for me.
It was to Mrs. Gampp that I showed my body covered with bruises. She had helped me with the glasses; I hoped that she would get me out of that house. She did speak to the counselor, but they did nothing. I felt betrayed by adults. The beatings continued. It scared me more when my father beat my mother black and blue and I could do nothing to stop him. One time he threw a bucket of pig slop over her. Another time a bucket of wet cement. Once he threw a metal high chair at her. He beat her with his belt. He hit her in the face with his fist and made her whole face black and blue. Whenever he was mad at someone he would pick up whatever was closest and hit the person with it. It could be a 2×4. He got mad at the horse and shot it with buckshot. One of the shot hit the horse’s eye and put it out. No one knew what would set him off. I don’t think that he did. Later in his life he would tell my sister that he had periods of time in his life as long as six weeks where he did not remember what he did.
I made hiding places for my little sisters. One such place was under the eaves. Behind my bed was a hole to get back under the eaves so one could use the space as storage. The hole just had some plywood in front of it. I explored the space and moved some boards in there to sit on. I put a small lamp in there because my sister was afraid of the dark. When Monica was little I would rock her and hum loudly to block out the sound of the screams from her ears. As she got a little older, she did the same for Kristina. Sometimes I knew that Dad might notice if we were all missing, so I would put them in the hole and give them some colored chalk or crayons to color with and slide the plywood back in place.
I stopped eating my lunch at school and saved the quarter I got for lunch. The teachers helped me get a job in the cafeteria scraping trays. The pay was a free lunch. No one told my father. I picked up glass soda bottles and redeemed them. Sometimes I would spend the money for a coke, but sometimes I would save the money. And whenever I thought I could get away with it I would steal a dime off of my father’s dresser, never all of his change, never more than a dime. I was careful to only do it once in awhile when he had a lot of change lying there. I justified that since it was for my sisters that it was all right, but it was stealing and I knew it. I saved every cent that I could get so that when Christmas came I could go to the dime store and get presents for them. They usually got more presents from me than they did from our parents
Monica didn’t speak until she was nearly 4. I remember her first words were to my Aunt Sade and it was a complete sentence. “That’s a beautiful dress.” It was very difficult to understand her but I knew what she said. Mom took Monica to the doctor who said that Monica would need to go to speech therapy. Monica was afraid to go and cried for me to teach her how to talk. I had recently read the story of Helen Keller’s life. I thought that if a deaf person could learn perhaps I could teach Monica. So every day after school and through the summer I spent hours with her carefully demonstrating how to place her lips and tongue to make the sounds. By the time she started school she could speak clearly.
She had other symptoms of autism. She was always very fearful, even as an infant. She rocked constantly. In fact she broke her crib rocking it and a number of rocking horse springs. Dad finally put huge heavy springs on it, and said,” She won’t break these.” She didn’t, but she rocked that horse for hours. She could not go to sleep until she had rocked back and forth in her bed for hours. This knotted her hair into horrible masses. My mother had no patience with brushing it out and often hurt Monica. So I took on the job of brushing it out in the morning. I learned how to hold her hair and brush out the ends first so that it didn’t make her cry.
We lived far from Eastern Shore. Monica and Kristina have no memories of our grandmother. Actually they don’t have memories of either grandmother. There were no kind adults in their life when they were little making them feel special. They lived in a world of constant fear. I played school with them; read to them, put on plays, anything that I could think of to make their life less fearful. I wanted to run away, but I was afraid to leave them. It was into my bed that they climbed on cold winter nights. I killed the wasps in our bedroom. And I cleaned up their messes, and kept them out of trouble with both Dad and Mom.
I had a lot of responsibilities in those days. I fed and watered the animals after school. I cut firewood with a crosscut saw, or chopped it with an ax. I cleaned the barn. Yes, I had a brother, but when I was nine he was only six. Monica was three and Kristina was a newborn. Mother was sick a lot in those days with tonsillitis. And she had horrible nosebleeds. I would always take care of her. I read about treating nosebleeds at the library. I would put ice on the back of her neck and apply pressure to her upper lip. Eventually I could get it to stop. I remember one time I came home from school to find bloody towels all over the kitchen floor. I had to make her sit down and put her head back and take care of her. When I think back on those days, I wonder why she did not learn to take care of herself. Why she waited for me to come home and take charge. Perhaps Daddy wasn’t the only one who had lost his mind.
The summer that I would turn 10, the family made a vacation trip back to Eastern Shore, Va., to visit my grandmother and my Aunt Kate. Aunt Kate was teaching a catechism class. I found a copy of the instruction book and stealthily memorized it. I am not sure if my father suspected something or not, but when we got back he signed me up for Lutheran catechism at a church over 30 miles away and drove me there every Saturday for the lessons. I was confirmed Lutheran and I had memorized two catechisms.
In the 5th grade there was an epidemic of Hepatitis A. All of the schools in the county had to close for a number of weeks. Some children died. Right after the schools reopened I got Hepatitis. I was in the hospital in isolation for 10 days, but I missed 5 weeks of school.
In June of 1965, my mother was expecting her 5th child and I was doing a lot of the housework, along with my regular chores. I was nearly 14. One evening I began to have terrible stomach pains. I went to my mother who made light of it. But after I cried all night, my father took me to the doctor. The doctor immediately scheduled me for surgery. He removed a gangrene appendix. It had not burst but it was already gangrene. After the surgery the doctor came in my room and told me that had it burst it would have killed me instantly. Again God was protecting my life. I was in the hospital for a week and my mother had Christopher in the same hospital the day after my surgery. We went home together.
In late August of 1965, my family moved to a small town. My father kept the farm and rented a house in town. He had planned to start Kristina in Kindergarten there and then move us back, but we never did move back. I started attending a EUB (Evangelistic United Brethren) church with the girl next door. The pastor was a great preacher and ran a good youth program. I read the Bible more and was encouraged. I even went up for an alter call. And I learned lots of hymns. Goldie McGee was the choir director. She had been involved with the Pentecostal tent meetings from Kentucky. She was a woman of faith and of power. She was already old when I met her, but she stayed the choir director until she was too old to stand, I think. Now I was equipped with more spiritual warfare tools.
One late summer afternoon, my mother was gone. I was washing the dishes. My father came in from outside and made lewd remarks about wanting to have sex with me. I felt like it was my fault somehow. I felt dirty and went upstairs and locked myself in my bedroom.
Later in the fall, I got a cold sore in my mouth and my father made my mother take me to the doctor to see if I had VD. I had learned in school about VD and knew that it was not possible that I had any since I had never had sex. My father would not believe me. I was hurt and angry. It was a blessing for me that the doctor did believe me and was a comforting old man. But the damage was done, I had been accused of something that I did not do, and again my mother did not stand up for me.
Not long after that, I started having sex with boys. I wanted to be accepted, but I lacked the social skills to fit in to the community of teenagers. I wanted to be loved. I knew that sex was not love; with my head I knew that. Emotions don’t always get the message.
One night my mother brought home a Ouija board. My father raised a big fuss and told her to get rid of it, but she would not. She thought it was just a game and thought my father was silly. It is interesting that my father was the one who raised the objections. He didn’t know if he even believed in God, he told me, yet he sensed this was evil. I started using it a lot. It “worked” for me just fine. Pretty soon I was into Mediumism. One day I called on the name of my mother’s father. I had never met him, but he was a strong Christian. The board spelled out S I N. I tried again, SIN. Every time I tried to touch the board it would spell out SIN. Then I got the shakes. From then on if I would walk in the room where a Ouija board was, I would get the shakes. If someone else were using it, the board would spell out SIN. If I would talk about Ouija, I would get the shakes. It is another way that God stopped me from going too far down a road to destruction that Satan laid before me.
When I was 16, a boy that I was interested in called me up and asked me to go “riding around” with him and “some kids.” I accepted. I should have never gotten in the car, but I was more foolish than I knew. I was raped that night. Since I was not a virgin, I was too ashamed to tell anyone. I felt guilty and unclean. I felt that I deserved it. And I felt a huge sense of betrayal. In fact I felt that everyone that I had ever trusted had betrayed me. I wanted to die, and actually tried to kill myself with aspirins and other over the counter medicines. I just threw up. Stupid I know.
Then I discovered I was pregnant. I stopped trying to kill myself because I didn’t want to kill the baby. I told my preacher, who helped me get into a home for unwed mothers in Columbus, Ohio. It was the calmest time in my life. I finished my senior year in a few months. The baby was born in December. My father had wanted me to keep the baby but I was determined to give it up. I did not want to bring it back to the family that I grew up in, and I knew that I could not give it the kind of life I wanted it to have.
At the hospital when I was all alone awaiting the doctor to show up, not in pain, not drugged at all, not even afraid, I heard a voice. I knew it was God. I didn’t hear this with my heart. I heard it with my EARS! He said, “You shall keep your son and you shall call his name Paul.” When the baby was born, the first thing I did was check the sex! I had been convinced I was going to have a girl. I even had a name picked out. And so I took Paul home. I was 17.
I started college in January. I had a full scholarship, room and board paid for. I managed to get a student loan for clothes. My father refused to cosign the loan, so the bank president, a neighbor, cosigned it for me. I didn’t know then how much of a blessing that was. God was continuing to look out for me.
My father started coming down to the college “to play bridge at the student center with me.” I loved to play bridge. It was my father who taught me. At first I loved the attention. Then one afternoon we went for a drive, and he tried to “put the moves on me.” By now I was a more experienced young woman (even if I were only 17) and put him in his place. He stopped coming to play bridge.
After I was 18, I started doing astral projection. I thought it was the way to “understanding.” One night I was depressed. I called a male friend and asked him if he would sit with me while I astral projected. I wasn’t aware that he was a Christian, only that he was a stable minded friend. He had never seen anyone do this before and was unaware how like taking drugs it is. I left my body and went to the shore where I used to play as a child. A storm came up and the waves came over my head. I felt as though I were drowning. I managed to get back to my body, but I was outside it and I could not get back in. I could see it, but I could also see a brick wall totally preventing me from getting back in my body. I struggled against it, but I could not get in. The young man that I was with began to sense that something was wrong. Finally, in desperation, he pulled my body unto his lap and began to rock me, crying out, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus” At the name of Jesus, the wall crumbled and I was able to get back into my body. I knew that I never wanted to do that again. Yet the temptation lasted for years. I was like a reformed drug addict, having a package of drugs sitting on the kitchen shelf. It was always available, and always a temptation. But the one thing that I leaned that night is the power in Name of Jesus. I realized that what I had been doing was not right and that again Jesus had saved my life.
It was only after deliverance, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and being connected to Jesus in a fuller way that I was I to be free of the temptations of the satanic side of the spirit world.
There is good and there is evil. This is so in the physical realm and in the spiritual one. Evil can present itself as good and needs to be tested. I learned that night that I had once again been on the wrong side. The power in the name of Jesus was stronger than all other powers. I wanted to be on the winning side. One might have thought that having known the love of Jesus at such an early age would have kept me from making such dire mistakes. It didn’t. What it did do was keep bringing me home to the heart of Jesus. For all those years, I wasn’t in the trenches; the trenches were in me. Saints of God fall, but God promises that if we love Him, we will not fall headlong. Because when we fall, He is there to help us back onto the correct path.
This continuing struggle between good and evil in me would serve a purpose to God’s glory. I learned a lot about the sound, smell, and feel of evil. I learned too of the sound, smell and feel of God. What I learned to use to fight Satan in myself, I would later use to fight Satan for the body of Christ. My testimony is not one of God keeping me from sin. It is a testimony of God helping me overcome sin. Constantly he allowed me to make the wrong choice. Even after the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and a much closer walk with God, I would be tempted, fall and be picked up by God.
Each time God was revealing some area of my life not yet cleansed by His power. I had to learn to hate the sin, not see it as a way to solve my problem or heal a hurt. Just like the astral projection, I would still desire the sin, know it was available, and have to choose God because I loved God more than the sin. This struggle goes on in my life today. As I tell the wonderful things that God has done for me since I was 18, I don’t want anyone to think that I am self-assured. I don’t want anyone to think that I believe I have it all together. I still battle sin.
Satan would have us believe that sin separates us from God. It would, if the blood of Christ did not exist. Satan would have us believe that when a Christian sins, he becomes unworthy of ministry. Of course Satan would want us to believe that. He could convince the best warriors against him to hang their weapons on the wall and quit fighting him. I have heard it said, that all it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing. If Satan can convince us to stop having a relationship with the Father, he can hurt the Father. All the Father wants is relationship with his children. Satan knows he cannot hurt the Father directly. He can only wound the Father by separating the children from the Father. He does that with lies. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. The world no longer belongs to Satan. Jesus bought it with His blood and then He gave it to us. Satan and his demons live wherever no Christian is willing to evict him. This can happen because the Christian is ignorant of the power of God that dwells in us when we dwell in God’s heart, or because they don’t believe they are worthy of that power. Satan would try and keep us ignorant by selling us cheap grace or a truckload of manure called guilt. The Holy Spirit’s conviction of sin leads to the blood of Christ, redemption and healing. Conviction leads to overcoming, not to hanging up the sword. Conviction and guilt is not the same thing.
When I was 18, my mother sent me a letter telling me that my father would not give her money for food for Paul and that I should drop out of college, move to Columbus, Ohio, and get a job. She even sent me some clippings from the paper of possible jobs. I should have talked to my father about this, but I didn’t. Nor did I pray about it. I panicked, quit school and got a job so that I could send money home to my mother.
When I moved away I went to my mother and told her what my father had done. She called me a liar. I worried that he would try it again with one of my sisters. I tried to warn them but I didn’t want to reveal to them what had happened, because they were so much younger than myself. Finally in frustration, I went to the wife of the principal. She and I commuted to college together. She was one of the youth leaders and had children my sisters’ age. I explained very carefully what my father had said and what had NOT happened and my fears. She “shared” this information with other women of the town to my mother’s embarrassment. My mother never forgave me. However my father actually tried one more time with me before I was married. Whether he actually remembered it in his old age or not, I don’t know. He was so “mental” during those times that it is possible that he did not. He never apologized and I never confronted him about it.
While living in Columbus, I did volunteer work at the YWCA. I directed a play for them for a money-raising event. One night walking to the bus after rehearsal I was hit by car. I was on the sidewalk and the car was coming out of a parking lot. It was as if an Angel pushed me up on the hood of the car. It scared both the driver and me, but I wasn’t really hurt.
Although I had a job, and many men who wanted to date me, my life was going nowhere and I knew it. There was a deep hole in my heart and a sense that I was very lost.
One night in my apartment I knelt and prayed, “God, my life is so messed up, if you want it, you can have it. You can’t make a bigger fool of me than I have already made of myself. Do with me as you will.” That night I surrendered everything to God.
I knew that I wanted all of God that there was to have. I wanted to know everything that any saint had ever known about God. I wanted to be completely His. I started immediately going to church and Bible study with my Aunt Jean. Aunt Jean is my dad’s younger sister and a very faithful Christian. The Bible teacher of her group was a friend of Hal Lindsey and Hal even came one night to the class. I bought his three books; There Is a New World Coming, Late Great Planet Earth, and Satan Is Alive And Well On Planet Earth. I was beginning to see a bigger picture and have more understanding, but I still had a long way to go.
Satan would try one more time to strike me down with disease. This time it was spinal meningitis. I was at work when I began to get sick with a headache. A young male coworker who had a pickup truck was going to haul some stuff for me and I had promised to cook him a dinner. When he came over that evening I was very sick. I passed out from a high fever, 106. He carried me down 2 flights of steps and put me in his truck. He rolled down the windows so the night air could help cool me as he drove me to the hospital. I gained consciousness just as he was taking me into the hospital. At first the doctors thought it was the flu and were going to send me home, but then they decided to admit me. The next morning I was seen by a specialist, who did a spinal tap and put me in isolation. Again God was with me.
I don’t want to leave my reader thinking that there were not good times during these years. I joined Brownies at age 7, and being a Girl Scout through out these years was one of the many blessings in my life. I was given a scholarship to Girl Scout camp and learned to ride horses there. I also was given a scholarship to a Lutheran Church camp when I was 10. These breaks into sanity helped me to know what real life was like. God found ways to reach me and keep the hope and the joy in His creation alive. It was His presence that gave me the strength to not only survive, but to overcome the adversity.
