Because the program actually makes you focus on yourself more, not less, Pat became upset with living up the standards. The same burden fell on us kids.
We have Sunday Bible studies much of the time. We did not go to church.
In many ways, my mother was one of the most irresponsible people I can remember. She would go riding around a skates, acting like a child, then she would yell at us. Often, I can remember how she would team up against us, most of the time joining with my sister against us.
No matter what I did, I was not good enough. Living under law can do that to a person. I was walking around on egg shells, never knowing what to expect when I saw her from day to day.
Sometimes, she would be the sweetest person in the world, other times, she would yell at me because I thought that it was particularly cruel for her to say "I'm glad my mother's dead."
How sad that I have ended up sharing the same sentiment. What a sorrow. Yet because of Christ in me, the hope of glory, I do not feel bitter, but my heart can rest in His grace (Hebrews 13: 9)
Now that everything makes sense, now that I understand with greater wisdom all that Jesus Christ did for me at the Cross, I can see all the events that transpired in my life, the bad, the worse, the worst, which made me first in Christ, and Christ first in my life!
At the time, with all the suffering that took place in that apartment in Southeast Torrance, there was so much sorrow, so much sadness, so much emptiness. I had no life because I did not understand the life that was living in me. How depressing and sad were those days, the memories of which I tried hard to forget, trying so hard.
What was the most painful thing that happened to me as a kid? The one event of many which I had tried so hard to forget.
After about eight months living in this dilapidated three bedroom apartment across from Hull Middle School, I found that this sense of upset in my life just would not go away. I was sad all the time, depressed, mostly from living with a repressive parent who shamed me and maimed me emotionally, blaming me for the problems in her life. She looked at me as if I was the problem in her life, which simply was not the case at all.
So, one night on the basketball courts at Wilson Park, I got down on my knees, begged God to help me. I was feeling so sad.
When I returned to the car, I told my mom that I was still depressed, still so unhappy, I did not know what to do about it. At first, she was listening to me with some calm in her voice. Then she started to get angry with me, blaming me for how I was feeling. She took me to Torrance Airport, Zamperini Field, where she shouted at me, crying out "I am not your higher power!"
I was in so much trouble, I felt. I was sick to my stomach, the sense that I had done some terrible thing that I could never make right in my life. She stormed away form me crying, then she yelled at me, saying "That's it! You are going to go live with your father!"
I could not believe what I was hearing. She had been demonizing that man for months, my father. On some days, he was the very devil incardinate. She called him all manner of evil, cursing and swearing about him as if he was the root cause of all of her problems. One saturday night, she was screaming and yelling at the top of her voice about the guy, for what god-forsaken thing I do not remember. It's actually pretty funny when I look back on the whole thing, but at the time her flights into absolute rage where just frightening.
That night, February 1, she was yelling and screaming, calling me "spiritually sick", in need of great help. I needed help, all right, getting away from this abusive person in bondage to a cult ideology in which a person can sense or see or ascertain any peace in his life. AA was a bane then as much as now, and I can tell you very simply why. . .
My mother told me that I was going to go live with my father, who by divine coincidence was having a Friday night church service at the Hope Chapel across the street. Just before she dropped me off, she told me "I told you to take your inventory." If I had just taken enough inventories, she presumed, then I would not be a mess. No, the inventory taking makes one introspective, with no peace. Just crazy all around, with no release from the inexorable sense of failure which dogs someone who keeps trying to make himself all right, when in Christ we are made the righteousness of God in Christ.
I am so glad that I can write about these trying times. For many years, I would not ever talk about or try to think about these days, because the terrible loneliness that I felt as a kid, the terrible abuse that I suffered, the fear of being alone that I did not know how I had escaped would wash all over me.
I now know and believe that all things do work together for good to those who love God, and that we love God because we know and believe that He first loved us ( 1 John 4: 19)
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