My Personal Testimony

January 10, 2009

My own testimony begins with talking about my father, because my journey has had so much to do with him.

How do I best describe what he has done, what he has been like? He didn’t rape me. He’s not that type of man. That would be too simple, and hating him, then, would be too easy.

When I was in my junior year of High School I was a flutist in the marching band. One night, while I was marching, our school beat the state champions in football. We were ecstatic and I took the marching band bus so I could be with my peers and celebrate.

Now I know that jealousy had a lot to do with this. My dad thought that he was supposed to give me a ride home from the game. He had been at the game, and waited for me there, but I had gone home on the marching band bus. When he got home and I got home, he was so angry with me that he came to my room and beat me.

It was nothing new. Because he would get angry with me for no good reason, punishing me for things that were not actual wrongdoings, I was afraid to be spontaneous and happy. That was a significant night that I don’t forget. That night was one of the happiest nights of my life that turned into one of the unhappiest. I didn’t dare be happy because I was afraid that my happiness would be spoiled.

I felt unloved and unlovely. I felt that the opposite sex couldn’t love me. I was a beautiful girl by most standards, but I had no confidence.

How could he waste my beauty and talent? I had mountains of talent. By Junior High I was already a self-taught artist. I was drawing and painting and had mastered the art of drawing portraits of people that looked just like the person. I could sing and play flute and piano. By 8 years old I already composed my own music, but my parents took no special notice of it, nor tried to impose any special discipline to develop my musical talent.

In Senior High School I wrote for the school paper and helped make costumes for school plays. I directed a children’s play and did a little acting myself. I was in the Select Choir and did gymnastics. I did everything. I made my own clothes, even changing patterns –designing clothes for myself. I was a dancer – I loved to dance. But my parents were bound by legalism - they didn't believe in dancing.

My father was obtuse regarding the value that I had. I understand now that he was this way towards my siblings as well. My older brother describes the distance that he feels regarding his relationship to his father. My younger sister expresses the hurt she feels regarding his same lack of appreciation for her.

Because my mother would not defend me against my father’s attacks, I harbored bitterness towards her for years. I only recently resolved the bitterness I had towards her. I understand her now so it’s easy to forgive her – her undying loyalty and her meekness. I understand how good people get taken over by bad people. OK, he’s not a “bad” person, but he’s the disobedient one.

But my father… The problem I have with him is that he is still getting angry so many years later, and this poses a huge challenge for me: to be able to forgive someone who has apologized to me at one point in time, but continues to inflict the wounds – now mostly on my mother.

Today he suffers from a stroke and from the effects of shingles. He needs physical healing and the only way to it is to surrender to the Holy Spirit and to repent of his sin. We are praying, with very little hope and faith for him to still surrender and recognize the sin that holds him in bondage – to get the forgiveness that could heal him. He has some dementia now, so that slows down the mental processes.

He has been watching Christian television lately, where they talk about healing, and he seems very open, and that he is hoping for healing. I'm also reading the gospels to him and he talks longingly about Jesus' miracles. This could be a beginning.

In the midst of all the things I was doing in High School, I had rejected God. I had become an atheist. I decided that the easiest thing was to disassociate myself from the God that my parents believed in, because he was nothing but disappointment. My dad was the sorriest example of that God – a pastor who lacked understanding.

In addition to not appreciating me and his children, he couldn’t appreciate so many artistic things that the culture was producing – things like the acoustic guitar music of the early 70’s that was coming out. No, his favorite music was church organ music – yuck. He liked “old church” – crusty old church. What a personality conflict.

As a pastor, he was involved with evangelical life in the church until he got into midlife – his forties. Then he shut down, and closed his heart on the Holy Spirit.

And people in general would get on his nerves. When he got in line at the grocery store or the drug store, he would get angry at people who made him wait.

And later on in life, little did I know that I would come up against him when my heart became open with a passion to the Holy Spirit. Then I would find that he, in fact, has a rebellion against the Holy Spirit, against God!

So, all along, when I thought I was rebelling against God, I was actually rebelling against a man who was in rebellion against God, the giver of life, a man who was not open to life and the things of life.

He has always had an opposition to the charismatic movement – the Catholic one, the Lutheran one, any one.

He has been afraid of the work of the Holy Spirit. When he was head of the Lutheran Evangelistic Movement, he would try to stand in the way of people who wanted the things of God to happen in meetings.

Later on, when I got really filled with The Spirit, he got angry with me once when I said that I was going to go to visit a church in California that has a reputation for miracles and restoration from mental illness and things like that – a spirit filled church. He has been an enemy of God in my life at times.

After all this rebellion against my dad, and a flurry of intense creativity in High School where I flourished, at the end of my senior year, I noticed something wrong with my mind. Something weird was happening to me.

Through the summer after High School I wrote in a journal hate-filled and angry words and was unproductive. I enrolled in college in the fall and took just a couple of classes. I was becoming really wild.

My dad didn’t particularly like works done by black people, like jazz, so maybe this is why I liked it. I was playing jazz and all sorts of African American music – Marvin Gaye and other artists who were coming out. I was immersed in that kind of music. Black people were being immortalized and worshiped suddenly – it was very hip. Unfortunately, my dad lacked the ability to see the good things, and maybe he saw the bad things too – some of the rebellious elements.

But I just hated his lack of appreciation for all things black. And so I fueled my own love of things black all the more. It went so far that I fell in love with black men. Couple that with the fact that I was becoming mentally ill. I started to pursue men promiscuously, just briefly. I had been completely frigid and afraid of boys, and of sex. Suddenly I was wild and unafraid because of mental illness. (This is typical of mania!) Because I was having this fixation on black men, I started to pursue black men for about six months. I threw away my innocence.

By spring of the next year, something terrible happened. I had a full-blown manic episode. I had no idea what was happening. It was like the worst LSD trip you can imagine. It was the worst nightmare you can imagine. It was like a journey into Hell.

Because things started to get weird, I went to my mother and asked Jesus to come into my heart. Funny how you know to go to God when things get like that.

It was after that things got worse.

My mom knew about a charismatic group that lived in a huge mansion and ministered deliverance to people. She brought me there and they kept me there for several days. It was there that I experienced the worse Hell trip. Only occasionally was I aware that I was in the hands of caring people. Otherwise it was absolutely bizarre.

After it was over, I realized that Jesus had saved me, and there was this beautiful peace in my life. I also discovered that in the process, I had been “baptized in the Holy Spirit” and was praying in tongues.

Unfortunately, as life often goes, my nightmare didn’t end there.

A year later, around the same time of year as the episode had begun the first time, I had another manic episode. This time my mother tried taking me to a hospital. They put me on drugs but those were ineffective. The only antidote to the negative problems was taking me to a faith healer. This resolved the negative symptoms. I was immediately released through prayer.

The next year, again, the episode started. Again, this happened the next year. Each year this happened for four years. Each time, the answer always came through going to a person of God, even if initially I was taken to a health professional. The answer was always prayer. I came out of the episode through deliverance. We saw a miracle each time.

The last year we went to a powerful man of God who is now residing in a nursing home, named Prang. His ministry was amazing. He administered deliverance and I was immediately released from the episode, and all the symptoms. I walked away from the episode and didn’t have another episode for eleven years.

Part of the reason I didn’t have any more illness is that I moved out of my parents’ house. I discovered that just leaving their house enabled me to live free from episodes. When I tried to move back in years later, I almost had another episode. I narrowly escaped that.

During those eleven years I didn’t have an episode but I strayed from God. The reason is that I didn’t understand what had happened to me. I was discouraged from believing in God because of the mental illness I had experienced instead of believing in Him because of the healing I had received – dumb.

At the end of the eleven years, seeing how I still had some residual depression and some weird symptoms that still occurred every spring, I went to a psychiatrist instead of God and got on psychotropic drugs. This became my nemesis.

I soon found that the drugs were causing bad side effects and I wanted off of them. But I couldn’t get off. If I went off the drugs, then I had an episode. This has been the story since, that I have been sensitive to the need for drugs.

I started to search for God again because of this problem. I wanted to get off medication, so I sought God for healing.

I also sought God because of the loss of a man in my life that I was in love with. I was 33 and this was the love of my life and maybe my last chance to have marriage and family. It was a big deal. I sought God because of absolute brokenness.

So, that’s where I’ve been ever since – pursuing God fervently. But I need to add something else.

Finding a love relationship with God. At about 40 years of age, I was wasted. I had lost everything. Mental illness had destroyed the ability to do every single thing that my creative abilities carved out the will to do. Every dream was crushed. And every relational desire had been ruined by the bad relationship with my father, and with my parents in general and my family. I was broken down, and had returned to God and to going to church and being in fellowship. The healing had begun. But now something very special was about to enter my life.

I went to the church in Toronto called the “Toronto Blessing” not expecting too much. When I got there I knew it was special. The church touched my life in a profound way. My encounters with God there touched and healed my life. I’m not saying I don’t still need work, but the work that was done there transformed my life. They believe in “soaking in the presence of God” and I did a lot of that. They also talk a lot about forgiveness, and I am still learning that.

The most important thing that happened is that I experienced a love affair with God that I have never known – a passionate experience of relating to God that is unlike anything else in life. It teaches you that God is enough to be your father in place of an earthly father.

Now, in the wake of that experience, a lot of healing has taken place. I have moved back into my parents’ house, and can live with them free of mental turmoil. My relationship to my family has been healed and I enjoy many events with them. I’ve done a lot of forgiving which has gotten me this far, even though I’m seeking to do more. I’m helping take care of my dad so that he doesn’t have to live in a nursing home.

I want to go beyond granting forgiveness to my dad and others – I want a heart that truly loves. My dad did say something that I will never forget. He said that he believes I will end up being the “most blessed” of all the siblings in my family. I can’t say he hasn’t done anything to mend the breach.