The Law, Self-Love, and Eternal Life (Part 1)

Before I begin this post, I want to clarify some things. It’s written primarily for Christians, but I invite anyone outside the group to “peek in” to see what I’m talking about.  There are things you should definitely consider.  And, if you don’t see the answers you are looking for in this post, notice that this one is Part 1.  There should be more about this subject coming up next week. 

What Does the Law Say?

You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. 

~Leviticus 19:18

And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested Him, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?"

He said to him, "What is written in the law? What is your reading of it?"

So he answered and said, "'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,' and 'your neighbor as yourself.' "

~Luke 10:25-27

When it comes to Law, there are always lawyers, and there are always legal questions and definitions. We just had three meetings with our attorney, going over creating an LLC for our business, a family trust for our stuff, and our personal wills. Signing everything in triplicate, I slowed down to at least skim through the legalese, to make sure everything looked okay, and I caught the fact that the last page said, “Page 13 of 14.” We laughed at that, but it actually seemed to be a big deal. The legal assistant was sent to pull out the typewriter to overcome the glitch, and type out a page that said, “The End,” designating it “Page 14 of 14.” 

The rest? Most of it looked standard, so we didn’t argue with it – we just signed on all those lines.

In the verses from Luke above, a lawyer tests Jesus with a question about how to inherit eternal life, and Jesus basically says, “What do you think?” The lawyer must have been listening to Jesus’ other teachings because elsewhere, He had pointed to a couple of non-Ten-Commandment verses to show that 1.) loving God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and 2.) loving your neighbor as yourself are the two greatest commandments. They summarize all the rest of the Law. So in fact, this lawyer got the question right!

Most of us, and indeed, Jesus’ listeners as well, understand the first one easily enough, but the second one gets sticky and misunderstood too frequently when we try to analyze it. In Jesus’ day, this lawyer wanted to know, “Yes, but who is my neighbor?” He wanted to make lists of exactly whom he was expected to love, and hang the rest of the world. Jesus then had to close the loopholes with him by telling him the story of the Good Samaritan, where He is showing it is not so much who is our neighbor, but are we being neighborly to the people with whom we come in contact? Does that sound like Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood to you?

Now, in 21st Century America, we Christians have another question about this same commandment, and it would sure be nice if Jesus could be here to answer this point of law for us, because it just seems to be giving us fits. The question of the day is, “How can I love my neighbor as myself if I don’t love myself?”

So let’s talk about this. Many people believe they don’t love themselves, or even that they hate themselves, and that this is evidenced by feelings of depression, a desire to self-harm, self deprecation, drug or alcohol addiction, or even suicide. Now that you’ve seen some of my posts, you know that, like about all of mankind, I’ve been through some periods of feeling lonely, rejected, and ashamed. You may be thinking that I might not love myself if I express guilt and shame over my past. 

And so, you might think that in order for me to be a good Christian and live up to Jesus’ definition of loving my neighbor as myself, I need to be set free of all these negative feelings about myself and start loving me more. Some people work very hard at that. Here’s one of those self-help videos (eight hours worth!) that will teach me how to love myself while I’m sleeping. I don’t really recommend that. Just listen to it for a few minutes. You may notice that it’s actually unapologetically blasphemous. It replaces the love for God with love and worship of Self. Oh wait! We are to Love the Lord with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind. Uh-oh! That does not leave room for Love of Self.

You see, in reality, this notion of a need for more self-love is in the realm of humanist philosophy. In eighth grade, there was a very popular girl in my school named Joann. She had a very cool British accent and read very thick books with lots of words, in small print. If you wanted to be cool like Joann, and be “accepted” by her, you would find a copy of one of those books and read it. You would start with The Fountainhead and move on to Atlas Shrugged. Both were books by a popular humanist and founder of Objectivism, Ayn Rand. You would even learn how to pronounce her name!

Of course, in striving to be accepted, I found a copy of The Fountainhead and got all the way through it. The ideas have not left me, though the storyline has. There were various characters in the book, and sometimes you thought, “Oh this is one of the heroes.” Eventually you found out that there were only two classes of people in Ayn Rand’s world: The Selfless and The Selfish. In her books, you were to learn that only the Selfish are powerful. The Selfless are weak and can never accomplish anything, whether for good or for ill. But the Selfish, not the good, were the heroes. This, my friends, is not Christianity. In fact, it is the opposite.

But God has said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” What does that mean, exactly? And what do I think of myself? What does anyone think of themselves? Is our problem in society really about low self-esteem? Is that why we commit suicide? Is it why we take psych drugs to overcome anxiety and depression?

Pursuit of Happiness

Maybe we Americans think the Constitution contains a “Happiness” clause. Actually, the “Pursuit of Happiness” is in the Declaration of Independence, next to the Right to Life and the one about Liberty. That is, we have a right in America, to pursue happiness, not to be happy.

When you think about it, it really boils down to this: we all do want to be happy, but that is often elusive. Sometimes we think that kind of gratification will come from owning enough stuff, or sometimes it is a relationship or a position of power, but if we are disappointed in this, and we are unhappy, that’s when we might head for the drugs, the alcohol, or the counselor.  

Herein lies the answer. For the most part, we do not really hate ourselves. Somewhere along the line, we may think we got a bum deal in life. It might be that we were cheated, or physically less than perfect, or that we grew up living in a 10-ft.-wide trailer and Dad was never home. But this all proves that we do love ourselves, and someone else doesn’t love us enough. Was it Dad? Was it the coach? Was it the other kids who teased? Was it the person who assaulted us? Or, was it ... God?

You see, this is what Paul says, in another place, and you have to listen to Paul because he was an expert in the Law, being a very astute Pharisee:

“So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself.

“For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church.” ~Ephesians 5:28-29

So basically, Paul is saying nobody has ever hated themselves. Both Paul and Jesus assume the foundational truth that everybody already loves themselves. That’s why we usually eat and try not to die. 

Why do people then sometimes commit suicide? Many times, it’s because, like Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus, they are under a heavy load of guilt and shame. Because of this or some other physical pain or psychological pain, they have grown to believe that the pursuit of happiness lies in non-existence, and their desire to be rid of the pain supersedes the desire to live. This erasing of the pain, they reason, will finally make them happy. 

Unfortunately, this reasoning is not of God. It is a deception from the enemy of Mankind, especially since there really is no such thing as a state of non-existence. “Nirvana” is a concept from a false religion, that says when we’ve collected enough good Karma, we’ll dissolve into a state of nothingness that finally ends the cycle of continuing to return in various forms to atone for our shortcomings in a previous life. But God teaches that there is either eternal life in Heaven with God … or eternal separation from God, which includes eternal torment. We cannot shut off Life like a spigot. It will continue, one way or the other.

I can’t address all the reasons people believe they hate themselves, but let me at least address the guilt and shame part of it. I’ve heard it said that only people can blush – no other member of the Animal Kingdom can be ashamed of themselves. We humans are blessed with a very complex part of our makeup called a Conscience. This makes the creation of life in a test tube wholly ineffective and impractical. Biologists who try to create an imitation of Life by gluing cells and flesh together as well as possible can’t really find a human spirit, a conscience, or a personality to put into their creation, neither can they generate one of these on a 3-D printer. It is not possible. 

Now, I have blushed over my past more than once. There is shame connected to it. As I mentioned last week, there is an element of “it wasn’t my fault” and another element of “I knew better and I need to repent.” With the humanist philosophy, I might “feel” better to totally dismiss my guilt and shame and blame others. 

But in my heart, I know that’s not true. I have a Conscience. For my part in what occurred during my high school years, the only way to actually get rid of guilt and shame is to take it to Jesus, who nailed it to a cross and died for it. Jesus said:

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

“For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.” ~John 3:16-17

I am stunned to think:

“That God shouldst love a sinner such as I,

 How wonderful is love like this!”

Do you still believe that you really hate yourself?  If you could believe those verses above, that even though you hate yourself, the God who created you loves you enough to die for you, wouldn’t that change everything?

“Lord Jesus, I know that what Man does to Man can influence his behavior. And I know that we have some reasons for acting wrongly. But there is also just plain sin that permeates our lives, and we cannot live up to Good Samaritan standards. We cannot inherit eternal life on our own, no matter what we do. It’s only by Your mercy and Your sacrifice that we can be clean and pure in Your sight, and inherit that eternal life we so need.

“Thank you for the cleansing you’ve done in my heart!

“And Lord, if there is anyone reading this blog post now that has not yet believed in Your mercy and accepted your gift of redemption from sin, I pray that they will now. That is the one and only way to get rid of that guilt and shame that comes with the territory of being human. Come into their lives and make them clean and whole, just the way You did for me. In Your Name, Amen.”

Note: If you have prayed to receive Christ’s sacrifice and asked Him to come into your life for the first time, would you leave a comment below? And, when you receive Him as your Savior, do you realize there is great rejoicing in Heaven?

“Likewise, I say to you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” ~Luke 15:10

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Loving Jesus and Kissing Boys

My story continues, the summer after my vacation in California with Grandpa Ware. After he bade me farewell at the airport, and warned me not to get pregnant, I continued home, questioned my friends about whether my experience was “normal,” and promptly fell in love with every boy who looked at me. There were many who did, and still others I fell in love with who never even looked at me. 

There were entire drum lines of several bands, drum majors, and drum instructors. There was even the biology teacher, and the chemistry teacher, who was known to be a flirt. I was wishing he would flirt with me, but he didn’t.

I made up a parody to the song “Happiness” from “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” but I don’t think I sang it for anybody. It included all the names of the boys I was in love with right then (mostly drummers). After all:

“Happiness is playing the drum in your own school band
And happiness is walking hand-in-hand.”

There were also two different young airmen the summer of ‘72: Mike, who met me at a Spiritual Life Conference and then rode his motorcycle from Norton Air Force Base in California to Arizona to see me on weekends, and Daryl, a tenor who sat behind me in the Luke AFB Chapel Adult Choir. Somehow I kept them from knowing the truth about each other and kissed them both. Mike eventually stopped coming because I was in high school and he thought that at 18, he was “too old” for me. But I found what I thought was love, in the arms of Daryl, who was 21 and who also had a motorcycle. 

My mom privately warned Daryl that if she ever found out he’d been messing around with me, she’d have him locked up. So he considered this carefully and started pulling back. This had me very worried that I was losing him, and I didn’t know why.

That summer, I had been asked to house-sit for a farmhouse while its owners were on vacation, because in Arizona you never turn off the air conditioning in the summer or all your candles will melt and your birds will die. They needed someone to tend to the garden, collect eggs from the chickens, and just live in the house mainly, so they could justify the electric bill. So I asked Daryl to come and visit me there because I was lonely. 

Through the window, I could see him riding his bike down the dirt road, and riding back again. And then finally driving away. How could I keep him? How could I convince him that we were meant for each other? I decided to offer him my body. Later on, after I called and begged him to come back, he did come in, and when he left, I was no longer a virgin.

When Daryl finally told me the reason he had been pulling back, we agreed upon a solution:  we made sure Mom didn’t find out. Honestly, neither of us were even really sure it was bad, and we kept trying to find out. Since neither of us were married, it didn’t seem to come under one of the Ten Commandments. So, neither of us being a Bible scholar, we did what came naturally. And I had an idea that it was a way to keep Daryl, at a time when I was very much afraid that I would lose him and be all alone again. It had worked for my mom, all those years ago, or so I thought.

One Saturday morning, my mom woke up with a lot of energy, saying we needed to have a cleaning day. Her enthusiasm met with lazy resistance from my siblings and me, but especially from my siblings. I did eventually buckle down to dust the Venetian blinds, but by then my siblings had utterly discouraged Mom. Depressed, she got in the car to drive to Circle K, just down the road, to pick up something. But then she didn’t come back.

When she finally did come back, long after dark, we found out she’d driven nearly to Tucson, and was passed out along the side of the road when a police officer pulled up behind her to ask if she was all right. Somehow, after being brought back to herself, she made it back home. Years later, Mom could not remember that day at all, but it was very real to the rest of us. 

When she got home again, the yelling began. I did not like to hear that, but the worst part of it all was finding Dad, in the bathroom, crying. Dad never cried.

I called Daryl then, and told him to come over and bring some wine. Being young and inexperienced concerning what to do when facing a crisis, I somehow had the idea that if you are unhappy, you should drown your troubles in wine. I didn’t know exactly why, but I heard it would make you feel better. Where did I hear it?  Sometimes things are more “felt” than taught.  I was brought up in an environment where alcohol was not “wrong” per se, but just “for adults.”  I had an adult-sized hurt and an adult-aged boyfriend, so I gave it a try.

It was the one and only time I got drunk. It didn’t really impress me, but there I was, drunk in the dark to deaden the pain, on a picnic table in our yard at the trailer court, kissing my 21-year-old boyfriend.

Did that help my parents’ marriage? Not a bit! Fortunately, Mom and Dad began counseling with the Lutheran chaplain at the base, Chaplain Hermanson, and eventually everything settled down again. Mom and Dad had a vow renewal ceremony, and all of us got new clothes so we could participate – it was to be something like a wedding, 17 years after their first one.

In January, when Dad retired from the Air Force, we moved to California, Daryl moved to Michigan, and I continued to look for love. Because I still looked good, from my weight loss in 9th grade, and because I was now the “new girl,” everything was different. Suddenly, I had boyfriends. And I remembered how I had whined to God about not having any friends when I had been expected to tell them all about Jesus. If I had boyfriends finally, I was determined to tell them about Jesus.

There was the Jewish boy who was the class president, whom I kissed but also tried to witness to, whenever we came up for air. There was the curly-headed Italian Catholic kid whose dad ran for school board and whose competition had their campaign signs removed by his son and his son’s friends while I ducked down in the back of the car to avoid detection. I tried to witness to him too. Neither of these guys appreciated the Gospel, for some reason! Okay, probably they didn’t take me seriously because my actions were speaking much louder than my words.

Sometimes I had close calls, like the time I was riding my bike home and a guy in a truck picked me up. He put the bike in the bed of his truck and started to drive me home out of the kindness of his heart, but made the mistake of nonchalantly showing me a pornographic magazine. I told him I lived RIGHT THERE (at a small empty lot) and ordered him to stop and let me out.

Another time, I heard someone whispering my name from inside a bush at the school, and beckoning me to come in there with him. Upon inspection, I found out it was just some boy who wanted to kiss but I didn’t even know him! So I didn’t stay in the bush.

I met more drummers, guys at church, and guys at school. 

Our youth band toured the summer of ‘73, and we found that the back of the bus became a good place to kiss. 

But the other thing I did on that particular tour was lead a fellow band member to the Lord. At that time, the Jesus People in the band kept running around greeting one another with “Maranatha!” and pointing upward with their index finger, which was the official hand signal for the Jesus Movement – the “One Way” sign. 

The poor girl was very annoyed because she didn’t get how Jesus could, as we said, come back again if He had died on a cross. So I showed her Jesus in the Book of Revelation. She was amazed and got saved! It was the first time I’d been able to do that and it was very thrilling to me. For the rest of the tour, we all sang Jesus Music together in the back of the tour bus.

I dated a very nice guy named Joel, from the Baptist church, who casually told me on a date while we were sipping sodas, that he had, I think, eight siblings, and that’s what he wanted to do when he got married. My eyes widened, but he was really good looking and I thought that plan might work – I just hadn’t thought about that concept before. 

Joel took me to the Queen Mary for a New Year’s Eve party with the Youth Group, and he was my date for a Pan American Queen Festival Competition that I didn’t win. He even helped me craft my speech for that. But afterwards, when I was still all dressed up in my purple semi-formal, he dropped me off at home and kissed me on the doorstep …

FOILED by my parents, who drove up behind us, caught us in the beams of their headlights, and honked their horn. The next Wednesday, Joel apologized. And I was crushed!

Compared to girls, I did actually prefer guys, though, for their superior companionship. There were too many girls in my life with whom I had nothing at all in common. I was the only girl in the chess club, for instance. And well, there were never any other girls in the drum line. One girl tried to get me to show her the answers to a test while the teacher was out, and when I answered with a “no,” she threatened to have a bunch of boys gang-rape me after school. 

Once, on a band trip to Catalina Island, I hung out with three boys, just having fun and talking. We walked around Catalina doing things like balancing on a log or doing a Monkee Walk. Later on, I overheard some girls, who were painting their nails and talking – about me!! They called me a synonym for a woman of ill repute, and that got me crying. 

But the good thing about the Baptist Church was that they made you come to the Youth Group if you were going to sing in the Youth Choir. And they had teachings. And one time, the youth pastor taught a very detailed program about all the big words in the Bible that have something to do with sexual promiscuity. That’s right – growing up in Sunday School, I had never heard a single teaching on this subject, and so words like “concupiscence” had never been a part of my vocabulary. 

But now I came to the realization that I was supposed to wait till marriage for all of that. Now that I knew it, for the most part, I changed my ways. I understood why Joel apologized. Embarrassingly, this change was noticed in the Youth Band, and even though I had been a Christian for 6 or 7 years, the drum instructor gave me as a gag gift during the annual awards ceremony, “The Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice Award,” They had just noticed that I belonged to Jesus. Before that, I was just like everybody else.

Then there was Joe. We met in Anthropology class. Joe was tall and skinny with wire frame glasses and a ‘fro. (Short for “Afro” – a type of hairdo that today would be called “cultural appropriation,” but it was cool back then.) Joe was a full-fledged “Jesus Freak” and he and I were in Anthropology class together, not because we loved the subject – the study of Man – but because it was a place to witness. We were the only two Christians there, and whenever the teacher began to ridicule us for our beliefs, we were a fighting team. Jesus is Real, Jesus is Truth, Jesus is our Savior, and Jesus is Coming Back – Soon!

Joe took me places, like the Fire Escape – a Christian coffee house, where kids were “getting high on Jesus,” and to his Assembly of God youth group, where there were about 40 kids all wearing blue denim from the waist down, and where all forty of them grouped around me one Sunday night and prayed a long long time for me to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. We also went to a park on dates, with a tape recorder and Revelation teaching tapes.

And Joe took me to Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, where they had two free Jesus Music concerts every Saturday night, back to back. It wasn’t for social distancing purposes either – they had two concerts because their “new facility,” that seated 5,000 people, was filled to capacity for both concerts. Hundreds of kids got saved every week, without much fanfare. It was the time of the Jesus Movement and it was awesome! 

In Maranatha! Village, where Calvary Chapel’s old building used to be, you could find a little shopping mall of Jesus People artisans and their wares. We bought the Revelation tapes there, and some of my first records like “Andrae Crouch and the Disciples,” and “Children of the Day.” I also picked up a leather Calvary Chapel dove on a chain, and some tiny dove earrings.

Joe also led the “Jesus for Lunch Bunch,” who sat under a large tree at the school during lunchtime and discussed the Scriptures. Joe bought me a “real” Bible, since my Revised Standard one was obviously for Catholics. The new Bible was a Cambridge King James with center column references, and I still have it today. And he bought me a small leather purse during his family’s vacation to Ensenada, Mexico. That made it worth the temporary separation. 

I really thought this one was going to work out. I wasn’t sure how, because Joe talked about wanting to have a ministry to Hispanics in the area, but I didn’t speak Spanish, and I was thinking about the Air Force after graduation. It seemed like a long shot. But yes, I kissed him too, and the only picture I ever took of me in my red graduation robe from Artesia High School was next to Joe in his black one. Had I finally found the man I could love and would love me back – forever?

As you can see by my survey, I led two different lives during this period – on the one hand, I was a Jesus Freak, but I also “tried out” many boys and men at the same time, and never understood the hypocrisy. I found out, at least, that “missionary dating” is never effective. Guys who want to kiss you are not going to listen to the Gospel of Jesus Christ you deliver to them. 

I began to narrow the scope of my search to guys who were real Christians. There were much better possibilities there. It would be better to find someone I did not have to “fix.” We would be on the same page from the get-go. I even wrote about that in my Sociology class. I did not care what my future husband would look like on the outside – I desperately wanted someone who loved me, and who loved Jesus like I did.

There are two sides of this coin, concerning all the boys I kissed. Be assured – these were not all of them, but they represent the whole.

On one side of the coin is my personal responsibility. I did repent of my sins in the Baptist Youth Group. Once I realized that the main problem was that I was kissing someone else’s husband – because all of these guys would marry someday – it didn’t feel right to do it anymore, but pulling back was much harder than I thought it would be. 

On the other side of the coin is the fact that one of the effects of child sexual exploitation is that the victim becomes hypersexualized. And so the period between the summer of ‘71 and the summer of ‘74 was very likely directly linked to my experiences with Grandpa – his desire to “awaken me sexually,” and “give me sexual satisfaction.” 

Only recently did I truly understand that Daryl was legally a rapist. Sex with a minor is actually a crime in every state, whether or not there is consent. Before then, I looked upon this time solely as a period of my own personal guilt and shame. This is also on the list of consequences of childhood sexual exploitation. But the way I was “acting out” was actually a result of how I had been taught. The only good thing is, I heeded Grandpa’s warning to “not get pregnant,” (Daryl knew how to do that) so nobody had to whisk me away or pay for an abortion to hide an unintended baby.

God has been gracious to me, taught me things, and opened my eyes both to my sin and shame and to His mercy and pardon. If we go through the fire, only to come out stronger on the other side, hasn’t it been worth it in the end?  The question is whether we take the straight path from there, learn, and grow, or go down the way of destruction, which is broad and has a fancy gate.

Aunt Jackie, Family Secrets, and the “Generational Curse"

Facebook and the Internet have been instrumental in reuniting people after a ridiculous number of years. I even managed to find Guido, my kindergarten crush from 1961, and found out he had grandchildren!  (As, of course, did I.)  But I don’t think he quite remembered me, even if he did write a letter on standard kindergarten letterhead about marrying me when he was 21.  (Mom thought that was hilarious at the time.)

Similarly, in November of 2019, I was reintroduced to another blast from my past.  In the summer of 1972, a year after my summer vacation with Grandpa Ware, I dated a young airman named Mike Porter, and he was able to look me up last year by finding my high school yearbook picture online.  

We’ve become close friends, one of the kind I mentioned in my last post – the kind the Lord brings into your life to substitute for a missing relative – so I think of him as the brother I never had, my “Real Brother.” 

Mike’s wife Janet is suffering from a rare terminal neurological condition called Huntington's Disease. I encouraged Mike to write a blog to tell their story. In turn, he encouraged me to write a blog and tell mine, as hard as it may be. And if you’ve been reading to this point, you know how hard that has been – with even more yet to come, though maybe not quite as intense.

And then, even more recently, I’ve been in contact with my Cousin Terri, who lives in Los Angeles and is about four years older than I am. Since I was in the process of writing my story, I became very interested in finding out if there were similar stories among other members of the family.  What follows is a result of some pretty intense Facebook chatting.  

I have always thought of Terri fondly because when I was little (8), she was a big kid who was nice to me and let me read her Scholastic Book Club books, like “The Pink Motel.” We would lie in the grass side-by-side and read, and I thought that was amazing!

Mostly, in the Facebook chats, we’ve been talking about riots, COVID-19, and masks, along with the New World Order and the imminent Rapture of the Church. And we’ve talked about the persecution of the church in California and the Beach Revivals at Huntington Beach, where my Aunt Jackie lives. Terri’s been there to experience it – how exciting!

But finally, a few weeks ago, I asked her point blank: “Did Grandpa Ware ever approach you sexually?” I had to know. This was and still is, one of the fears I’ve had concerning my own private family secret. How much other damage was done because I didn’t tell? Terri said no, he had not, but then went on to tell me many other things I never knew. The one thing all the stories had in common is that they had been secrets for a long, long time, to the detriment of multiple generations.  She confirmed some of the things I had heard from my mother, and broke my heart with further details of her side of the family, of which I had, until now, been blissfully ignorant.

Here’s a disclaimer, though. Like COVID-19 policy, some things change over time, not because facts change, but because new information is discovered. If I relate something in my blog that is wrong, I apologize in advance. I’m going with the best information I have at the time of writing, and some of this is impossible to fact check now. 

For example, now I know that the white robe my Grandpa Berto was holding in the picture I published here (Chapter 5) was not a Christian liturgical alb, but a robe my dad brought home from Saudi Arabia. When I showed that picture to my dad, he wondered where I got it, but said that his father had been really excited about the robe.

According to my Cousin Terri, her mother, my Aunt Jackie, was conceived out of wedlock. Jackie’s mother, Grandma Pearl, left her small hometown of Sumner, Missouri, and went away to Lafayette, Indiana to have her baby and to hide the stigma of her pregnancy. And so, Jackie never knew her father. 

According to Terri, it is commonly said (at least among family) that Pearl and Jackie prostituted themselves as a mother-daughter team as she grew older, or at least they did until Pearl married Grandpa Ware.

I don’t know where Grandpa met his new wife, after he was divorced from my grandmother, Audentia. It’s easy to speculate but impossible to prove. It seems the second marriage was no better than the last one. My mother’s story of how Grandma Pearl didn’t love poor Grandpa was almost the same as Terri’s – except that she said that Grandpa didn’t love Grandma

My mother never called Pearl “Mother” and never taught us to say, “Grandma Ware,” but only “Grandma Pearl.” My image of her was as a homewrecker. Because of her, my mom had to live with her drunken mother and step-father, at least that’s what I thought.  Actually, there must have been some better times.  Here’s a picture of Grandma Pearl with my mom, “Margaret Lee” at the big house with the pool.  It appeared in the scrapbook on the same page as the picture of Mom and Dad with Grandma Pearl at the Santa Anita racetrack.

In contrast to what I’d heard, Terri says Grandpa never liked Pearl and treated her very very badly, hardly the blissful home my mother dreamed of living in. They had arguments and slept in separate bedrooms early on. Terri says she never did like Grandpa because he was so mean to Grandma, and that he was bitter and negative.

My mother told me of the history of her step family on occasion. She said Aunt Jackie had been married and divorced three times, so her three children had three different fathers, and that after those bad experiences, Jackie just lived with a fourth man outside of marriage. 

But Terri said she and her older brother were both fathered by the same man – “a Spanish man” – but Jackie never told them who he was. Jackie’s third husband adopted all three kids, but was a “crazy drunk” and a drug addict, who beat and molested Terri’s older sister and her brother, until the oldest daughter ran away, walking ten miles to get to Grandpa’s house and live with him instead. (Was that any better, I wondered?) 

This older daughter prostituted herself, too, like her mother and grandmother, even with Terri’s boyfriends. She left the family 40 years ago and never came back.

My mother told me that Jackie had asked her once how she had done so well – how had she found such a good man? Mom told her that while Jackie had met her lovers in bars, she had met my dad in church.

Hearing that story fed my pride. I considered our side of the family better than their side. From afar, I watched their side deteriorate over the years with early marriages, divorces, remarriages, and more. I saw that Grandpa Ware had been able to obtain legal custody of his step-great-grandson Willie because his mother was not a fit parent, and he put both Willie and his step-great-granddaughter Tammy through Christian school. 

And yet, no matter how good Grandpa Ware was, his step-descendants turned out all wrong. Tammy lived on the streets as a drug-addicted prostitute. Tammy’s sons moved away and “married” men. Everybody hated Grandpa for some reason, but always turned up when they needed cash.

I blamed all that on Southern California. People go bad in Southern California. 

Terri had more to share, though. She says Grandpa had a mistress that she knew about and Grandma knew – not surprising. And she and I speculated about how many other women he may have had.

There is a popular doctrine these days, called the “Generational Curse.” It is talked about in the Old Testament, how sin continues to so many generations – basically, it’s history repeating itself

Here’s God’s proclamation of His Name:  

“And the LORD passed before him and proclaimed, "The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and the fourth generation." ~Exodus 34:6-7

And in the Ten Commandments:

" You shall not make for yourself a carved image --- any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.” ~Exodus 20:4-6

Looking at the other side of the family, there are a good five generations at least, of sexual sin, much prostitution, and now, homosexuality to add to the mix. It could be argued that it is some kind of curse from God, but it looks like some of it could very well have been perpetuated by the same man who molested me. How much could have been avoided if I had told, or if the first mayor of Hawaiian Gardens had been incarcerated?

And, the same year my Grandpa was exposed, I found out that all those many years ago, he had approached my sister Rennie before I came to California, but she had turned him down and avoided him for two weeks. So because I never blew the whistle on Grandpa as a perverted child molestor, my siblings blamed me for all the terrible things that happened to them their whole life, things like babies born out of wedlock, abortion, nearly fatal drug overdosing, and endless cycles of marriage and divorce.

After the conversation with Terri had progressed for a while, and she said, “I know all kinds of family secrets … ” I had to stop her. I would have gently touched her shoulder, but it was just a chat window.

“Terri,” I typed. “We are set free from all of that.

“Jesus took our guilt and shame to the cross with him. All of that is crucified and CANCELLED. There is therefore now NO condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. Our ancestry and the circumstances of our family life do not matter anymore, because even if it has affected who we are, it does NOT define us.”

And I prayed, “Our dear Father in Heaven, Terri doesn’t know her father nor her grandfather, and my own grandfather betrayed me. But You are our Real Father. Help us to understand that someday we will stand in Heaven before You, along with our very large and diverse Real Family, together forever, where You will wipe away every tear from our eyes ...”

Terri and I are set free. I am healing from the effects of incest. I know the Father, and this is what I think of “generational curses”:

“Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree")”

 ~Galatians 3:13

Because Jesus hung on a cross (the tree) and died, we as Christians have been set free from any and all curses, including the infamous “generational curse.” History does not have to repeat itself. We are free. Indeed, now the second part of that verse in Exodus applies:

… but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.”  ~Exodus 4:6

That’s the other side of the coin: Mercy. It is a bit debatable whether this should be translated as “thousands of people” or “thousands of generations.”  One sounds understated and the other sounds overstated.  But nonetheless, living in God’s mercy is the happy state of the Believer in Christ.  

It is my hope and prayer that whoever reads this blog will also see the need for a Real Father, who truly loves us and protects us, and who wants us to be saved from our sin, to be rescued from any curses, and to live with Him forever.

And that is the best “Happy Ending” I can think of.