Family Secrets Revisited, and God’s Healing

I wrote in depth about some troubling secrets in my family about a year and a half ago. It is time to do it again, but all in one post. 

Our church had a Healing Focus service this week, as we have had for several years now, and it was a good one. Eric and I got to lead worship, and by special request, we sang “He Touched Me,” an old favorite.

Pastor Joe always says that if anyone has a good healing testimony, to let him know. He always includes other areas besides physical healing, such as mental, emotional, and relational, and he schedules the testimonials, giving the speaker about 5 minutes, before he moves on to the part of the service where the elders of the church anoint and pray for people. We have some anointing oil from Israel called “Oil of Gladness” and it smells pretty wonderful.

But before this special service, I was struggling. Every year about this time, I wonder if I should tell my story. Some have told me no, don’t do it: people look at you differently when they know these things about you. But could my testimony of God’s healing work in my life be of help to somebody else? So I asked our pastor about it, admitting that it’s much much easier to tell about God healing you of cancer. He considered it, but finally replied that it would probably take too long for this service. Instead, we should strategize about how we could introduce this very important topic in the future.

Here is my story.

Fifty years ago – almost 51 now, in the summer of 1971 – I spent a few weeks during my summer vacation visiting with my Grandma and Grandpa Ware in California. My sister and I were flown out by ourselves from our home in Arizona, one at a time. And while I was there, the young 14-year-old that I was, with a poor mental image and no previous boyfriends, encountered a grandparent who was sexually attracted to me. I didn’t know what to do with that, since I had no other family there to ask, no way to contact anyone, and anyway, he told me not to tell.

After many encounters with him, I left California with only one instruction:

“Now when you go back home, you’ll probably have boyfriends. Whatever you do, just don’t get pregnant.”

Upon returning to Arizona, I did indeed find several boyfriends and I made sure I didn’t get pregnant. But until I was invited to a fellow high school band member’s Baptist church youth group in Lakewood, California in 1974, I really didn’t understand that my lifestyle of kissing boys was sinful and destructive. I was a Christian, but didn’t even know where it said in the Bible that that was bad.

So when I found out, with chapters and verses, the light went on for me. I repented of my sins and the cymbal playing girl with the bad reputation became the “Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice” of my youth band.

Eric and I were married in 1975. We knew full disclosure was needed so we confided in one another, but agreed that as Christians, it was all behind us. How could it be otherwise? 

Twelve years later, when our two oldest daughters were five and three, Grandpa invited all of us to California for a vacation. He took us to the beach, and at his request, Eric took the girls a little way down the beach to search for seashells, but at my request, he always stayed within view. 

I found myself alone with Grandpa. That wasn’t easy, and I stayed socially distanced for sure, but his purpose was to apologize for his actions when I was a child. To his relief, I told him I had forgiven him long ago.

And so life continued on without much thought until I began to write this blog, beginning at the beginning, when I was born. I introduced the primary players in my human existence, telling about Grandpa and his great wealth, and about his position as the founder and first mayor of a small city in California. But I also talked about Grandpa as a pedophile.

One thing led to another. In the course of telling about Grandpa and the family secret that I’d kept from most of the family for years and years, I became aware that Grandpa’s position and power may have enabled him to molest others as well. I had to find out what I could, so I talked with my Cousin Terri, who said no, Grandpa had not approached her, but she knew a lot of other family secrets, and they all came spilling out. I wrote about some of that as well.

But it was not the end of the story.

Here’s a picture of a birthday gift from my real brother in Texas. I looked at it very carefully the other day with my glasses off and realized that it was … me!

It is a very small bloom of Queen Anne’s lace, a native wildflower here in Indiana, also known less romantically as “wild carrot.” I called myself a morning glory earlier in this blog – rather a “here today, gone tomorrow” person, small, insignificant by myself, but beautiful in a field together with others, lifting up my head to the Son. Queen Anne’s lace is much the same.

Around the tiny flower is beaten silver, hand-crafted and not molded, a little rough around the edges, non-symmetrical. The craftsman has made this insignificant flower eternal by encasing it in glass, and then he has given it value by surrounding it with a precious metal. 

My Savior did all of that for me. He took a small, perishable, insignificant wildflower and made me eternal. He gave me value with His own hands.

This is what I wrote in my blog about my cousin Terri:

“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

Recently we’ve had more talks and grown closer. Terri has become my “Sister-Cuz” because she and I are both fanatical about JESUS, and there really aren’t any others like that in either of our families.

Terri has a hereditary neurological disease that used to be classified as a subset of Multiple Sclerosis – Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease. This causes great pain and paralysis in her muscles, until she can no longer walk but has caregivers who come in daily to look out for her. It was rather frightening to hear about how she had a spell of CMT while driving on an L.A. freeway and lost all feeling in her whole body.

You’d think maybe, since this post is about God’s healing, that I was going to talk about Terri being healed of CMT, but no… not that. Terri is healing from a childhood far worse than her disease, and far far worse than my own childhood, that extended into adulthood and parenthood (which actually came before adulthood on her timeline). 

Terri’s experiences included watching a drunken father rape and beat the tar out of her two older siblings every night, and waking from sleep to see her mother laughing and standing over her with a butcher knife. She saw her father throw every piece of furniture they owned through the glass windows and doors of the house. She remembers the police visiting the premises about three times a week, every week.

And, Terri cried when her mother left him, because he was the only father she had ever known, only to hear her mother yell at her to shut up – that he was not really her father.

What would you do to recover from a violent, horrible childhood like that? Of the three siblings, the oldest one is extremely violent, abuses drugs, and Terri says she’s demon possessed. From what I’ve heard, she is probably correct in her assumption. The brother never talked about the past after he left home, but just made money as much and as fast as he could. But Terri went to Bible college, found the Savior, and experienced a vision of Him holding her. It may be that because she has no knowledge of her earthly father, Jesus Himself gave her the comfort she needed at that time, and which she has never forgotten.

Terri told me a lot about her past, about her one daughter that she didn’t know how to raise who ended up on the streets selling herself for drug money, how her daughter tragically died of mouth and tongue cancer, how she herself had been homeless for a while and living in a slum, how she had been falsely accused of armed robbery and defrauded of about $100,000 on her credit card. But perhaps worst of all, she told me that she has spent her whole life never telling anyone about all of this, never talking about it, never talking to her brother, never having any kind of warm family relationships.

But because I opened up about Grandpa, and told her that family secret of mine, even though it had taken decades for me to finally address it, Terri felt safe telling me her own secrets. (Don’t worry – she’s reading this before I publish it.)

All of it came tumbling out, and then she got a chance to talk to her brother – for 2½ hours! – and it all came tumbling out with him. There was so much he never knew about what she’d gone through. And suddenly, there he was, listening patiently, intently, and compassionately with a possibility that there could be a real reconciliation in their family. When her cat died shortly after that, he called and wept with her. 

Why would you want to open old wounds again? Why would you want to bring up those painful topics? Terri would never have filed charges against her mother, who just this evening was taken to the hospital with a heart attack. Her father departed this life at age 54 with a carload of drunks in a horrible accident involving several trees. My own grandfather, his wife, and my mother are dead. They’ve all gone to their eternal state – whether that’s reward or punishment.

Those old wounds needed to be re-opened, because there was an understandable perpetual festering of bitterness going on inside. But when that pus is exposed, it can then be washed away by the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ.  And the Light of Jesus Christ is a phototherapy that sanitizes and purifies our hearts.

After Terri bared her soul to me, she said that she finally felt free. And she said, “You might have saved my life.”

That brought tears to my eyes. My freedom in Christ, freedom and healing from child sexual abuse, is my testimony. Jesus healed me as I revisited my past and recorded it in this blog, and now, because I shared my experiences and my testimony, my Sister-Cuz is also revisiting her past and finding the same healing. 

Now, her experiences will be her testimony too, that she can be free to share with others. And we are both praying for the salvation of her whole family. 

Let it be so, Lord! Amen and amen!

With love, 

Two small blooms of Queen Anne’s lace