My father was a twenty-one-year-old cook who, when he saw my mother one afternoon, asked her out. He got permission from her aunt to take her on a date one evening, and she had a good time, agreeing to date him again. On her second date, however, he raped her at gunpoint. When she failed to return home that night, her aunt called the police.

The authorities eventually found my mother at my father’s apartment and took her to a girls’ reform school. My father was taken into police custody, pending charges of statutory rape. When my grandmother heard the news, she drove to the town where my mother lived, arrived at the police station, and confronted my father. She gave him two options: marry my mother or face a charge of statutory rape. Prior to this my father had served six months in jail for stealing a car. In order to avoid more jail time, he chose—with my grandmother’s blessing—to marry my mother. In this way our twisted branch in the family tree—my heritage—began. My older brother, Danny, was born within a year. Shortly thereafter my mother found herself pregnant with me. Thus began the attack on my life.

After discovering that she was pregnant my mother began to have severe abdominal pain and was rushed to the hospital. She was told by the doctor that I was a tubal pregnancy and that she would require surgery to dispose of the embryo (me) in order save her own life. She agreed to do so, but God had different plans, intervening in a way that only he could. He knew the plans that he had for me, plans for good and not for evil, a plan to prosper my growth, not hinder it (see Jer. 29:11). Miraculously, when the doctor performed the surgery he discovered that I had moved from the fallopian tubes into my mother’s uterus without any problems. I was born eight months later. Two years later my mother again gave birth to my younger brother, Dale.

Satan was not pleased with my survival. He had tried unsuccessfully to take me out of the picture. Therefore, shortly after I was born he came into my life through the evil desires of others who stole my innocence through all types of abuse. I was sexually violated by two family members and a neighbor, and my father was physically, emotionally, and verbally abusive to me. To further complicate the issue, my family was steeped in various aspects of the occult.

Despite this twisted and flawed foundation, I had an interest in God. And because of that innate interest, I asked a lot of questions that went unanswered. In an attempt to stop me from asking questions, my mother started putting my brothers and me on the big, blue Bible Baptist Church bus that passed by our house every Sunday. Dressed in our best school clothes, with a quarter to put in the offering plate at Sunday school, my brothers and I would climb up onto that bus.