I was the sixth of seven children. I was molested from the time I was two or three years old until I was six or seven. When I was ten, I gave up on life. My dad was very angry, a drinker, and my mom was very religious and fearful. When I was six or seven, she took me aside and told me what I was doing was wrong. I didn’t know how to stop a sixteen, or seventeen, or an eighteen-year-old guy from doing what he was doing to me.
As an adult, I reached the place where I absolutely had lost it. I literally cried out and screamed to the Lord, “Either save me or kill me,” because I’d made a promise when I became a believer that I would not contemplate suicide any longer. So trying to keep that promise at this time in my life [was so hard.] I really had given up. Again! There was no way I wanted to keep failing my family, my husband, my children, and my life.
After we moved to Georgia, I went to a deliverance ministry in Atlanta. Through that, I realized that a lot of my anger was based on my mom not protecting me as a child. After experiencing deliverance, receiving forgiveness, and forgiving those in my life that had caused the hurt, I was set free. I really was free. That was the first part of the deliverance of fear.
Fear has many faces. I had transferred my fear of my father onto my husband. I was terrified of him and everybody else. I was just terrified. Experiencing deliverance freed me to be able to talk to him, to not be afraid to say how I feel, to no longer be afraid to order the wrong thing in a restaurant. There was no reason for this fear. It was just that so much of my anger revolved around meals growing up. It opened up a whole new life to me. I could order what I wanted, pick out what to buy in a store, be five minutes late for an appointment. It was a whole new way of life that I never realized I could live. I could make choices. I could be happy. I was allowed be happy.
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