My Story

I was the firstborn in a family of three kids. It was an unhappy home.

I learned to be hyper-vigilant. To never trust anyone. Ever. To put on armor, and be stoic and strong. To show no emotion.

The first fist fight that I remember was at age five. I beat up an eight year old, the son of my dad’s friend, at Christmas time. He was picking on my brother.

I fought my way through 9th grade.

My folks got divorced when I was 10, and we moved from California to Minnesota.

Just prior to that, mom, who was completely unchurched, received Jesus in her living room watching a Billy Graham crusade. We ended up in a Baptist church, where I walked the aisle and “got saved.” I was 9 almost 10 if I’m remembering that correctly.

In Minnesota, we joined an Independent, Fundamental Baptist church. I won a Bible in vacation Bible School memorizing over 100 verses. I attended then worked in AWANA. I brought my Bible to school every day in 9th grade because of a youth evangelist’s challenge. I got picked on and bullied for Jesus.

In my senior year of high school, I almost got kicked out of choir because I wouldn’t sing Jesus Christ Superstar. Fortunately another classmate privately had the same objection, so the director changed to another song.

My first love, Carol, was in my senior year. I was so religious, wearing it on my sleeve, that often as we would make out, she’d be worried for my conscience cuz I was obviously sinning. We broke up just before graduation.

I never tried weed. In the 70s, in a class of 450, I bet I was one of 10 or less who never smoked up.

At the urging of my youth pastor, I went to Bible college in 1976. I declared English as my major. I loved literature, reading, and writing. I dreamed of becoming an English teacher, and taking the summers off in a cabin “up North” and writing a novel.

Bob Jones University declared itself to be The Fortress of Fundamentalism. They were racist. (I didn’t know til I got there that they prohibited interracial dating, and had only very recently admitted black students.)

The first week, they had evangelistic meetings every night.

I got “convicted” and changed my major to Missions. I became a “Preacher Boy,” a ministerial student.

I met my best friend, Mary, who became my wife, in Freshman Speech class. That class was one of our best memories.

We got married in 1978. Tried to stay in school, but ran out of money.

We ended up moving back to Minnesota, in 1986 after a horrible business loss. That was my second business loss. There would be more.

I took a job at Blue Cross of MN, which I kept for almost 7 years. Made good money. Stable. During those years I was an elder in an IFB church (they were called deacons but functioned as elders). I was also the worship leader for seven years. I preached from the pulpit occasionally. I was “all in.”

Oh, and we got into the Bill Gothard homeschool cult. Our church was big in it. Couldn’t send our kids to “Satan’s Schools.” Oh… and birth control was a sin. We ended up having seven kids (later adopting one more).

But I wasn’t stable at all. Inner demons, which had driven me from day one of our marriage continued to drive me to be successful. To make money.

I became self employed as an insurance agent. That led to starting a telemarketing company in 1995 that grew from six part time telemarketers, to 100 pt telemarketers and 15 ft staff, and 1.4 million dollars a year in revenue within three years. It was in Fort Dodge IA, and I lived three hours north in the Twin Cities. I was out of town four to five nights a week. I drove a fancy leather trimmed SUV, traveled all over the country to corporate offices, and hated my life.

I had fully become what I had been on track for years to become: hard, hateful, driven, cruel. I was a mini Donald Trump. Friends loved me, and enemies (I made many) hated me. I had not gone to church in years.

I lived in absolute fear ever waking moment. I had panic attacks in the middle of the night. I did not know then that I was afraid. It was buried. But people feared me. So did my kids.

It all crashed and burned at the end of 1998. I lost it all. (This could be a separate book.) It was complicated, and many friends said it was not my fault. But it never felt that way. I was the captain, and the ship sank. That was emotionally all I could see.

I ended up $400,000 in debt. My ex employees sued me in federal court. They drove three hours north to my house to yell at me on my front steps. They protested outside my 5,000 square foot building in Fort Dodge, and called the Des Moines tv stations to come film it. Which they did. I was personally, with my picture, on the evening news. I had to literally sneak out of town one night. Oh… and no one got their final two week paycheck. People living hand to mouth with kids to feed. I was (and maybe still am in that town)… hated.

I was suicidal for a year. Broken. I got a charity job from a friend. We went to food shelves. Friends paid our mortgage for months. We lost both vehicles. Neighbors watched them towed. Neighbors also had to put up with the IRS asking them questions. Had they seen me digging holes in the back yard burying money. I was investigated for over a year. I owed them over $120,000 in withholding taxes (that included the “double owner penalty). Somewhere, deep-sixed in their files, I still owe this. But they eventually decided to not prosecute me. A few years later they told me they would no longer pursue collection.

Through a weird chain of jobs, I ended up building and hosting websites. I became a webmaster. I did that for 17 years. I had at one time hundreds of customers, and two employees.

We went back to an IFB church. But its hypocrisies drive me soon to a Brethren Assembly. Our first church after leaving fundamentalism. It was a healthy church.

Since the telemarketing company crash in 1998, until 2011, I lived in bitterness, rage, and emotional isolation. We moved to Kiester, MN, population 500, and paid cash for a house.

Two of our daughters dropped out of high school early, one in her sophomore year, one in her junior year. They took their GED and went to college away from home. They did this partly (mostly I think) to escape the toxic environment I created. It was almost unlivable. I know my wife had thoughts of leaving me.

I was miserable, and that misery bled all over everyone in our home. I would yell and curse in my home office and throw keyboards against the wall. I’m sure the holes are still there. I remember that for more than a year, I would wake up every morning and curse God with the f bomb, and beg him to kill me. Then angry he wouldn’t. How could he let me keep hurting the people I loved. How could he? I hated the thought of eternal security, cuz how crap was that, that I would get to go to heaven. I literally wanted to be punished. It was the only right thing.

I was going to church with my wife maybe every third week, so she wouldn’t feel like a church widow. I deliberately made no friends. The misery deepened.

In 2011, everything changed.

In a strange “only God could have orchestrated this” series of events, defying all logic… I ended up in a small group. A parachurch ministry that the evangelical church we attended had kicked out, and only recently allowed back in. It was called The Ultimate Journey, and it’s based in Des Moines, IA.

It was a 12 week emotional healing ministry. Three of us, and a facilitator, Ray. He was like God’s angel to me.

Not that I liked him at first. I hated him. Disrespected him. No college. A hog farmer. Divorced. Who the hell was he to think he could “fix” me. I had forgotten more theology than he ever knew. I spent the first two weeks with my arms crossed, literally daring anyone to help.

We learned to write letters by hand from our older self, to the child within us. Long letters. Then we read them in group out loud. We learned to be the “Adult Ally” of the child within us. We laid hands on each other at the end of each session and looked in each others’ eyes and slowly said a dozen affirmations.

By week four, the classes were going five or more hours. By week six I started crying. And I couldn’t stop crying for the next year. I had never cried in my entire life that I could remember. The letter writing took hours each week at home.

I learned to love the little child within me, even though at first, he resisted that. He was so stoic. Bottled up.

But eventually that love grew, as the letters were written to older and older versions of myself. Somehow, some way, eventually I felt deep empathy and compassion… forgiveness… for my adult self. I mean, I had loved the innocent little boy; how could I just turn that off as he grew?

I saw the fear that I had lived with. I saw why all my best friends in school had been girls. I saw how terrified of men I was.

I learned to say… “well of course you ended up this way. How else could it have been different?”

I learned to truly love myself.

And somehow, by week 11, my “Adult Ally” (older me) led my inner child to Jesus. I remember it as if it happened yesterday.

I finally saw how God saw me. He saw me with tender eyes.

All the fear and pain was gone. I had never breathed so deeply in my life.

I stopped carrying my two handguns (I was a conceal carry guy). I don’t even remember making that decision. I just realized one day that I wasn’t carrying.

When I learned to deeply love myself… have pity on myself… God was free to enter. I had kept God out of the real me my whole life.

My wife got a new husband. My kids got a new dad.

I gained empathy for the first time in my life.

But now I also felt the pain of the world.

Mary then went through the group. Then three of my kids. Then Mary and I separately (and twice I think together) each facilitated new groups for five more years.

Eventually I saw the disconnect between that and the larger evangelical culture I was a part of.

It was the beginning of my deconstruction, and I didn’t even know it.

I miss those six years of emotional intimacy I had with God. It was palpable. I could taste it. Touch it. It was the most emotionally healthy time of my life. It was God filling me with love. I saw people come to love themselves, and in turn, become free to accept God’s love.

In 2017 we left our large evangelical church for a variety of reasons. We ended up at a smaller Piper-style church where we soon ran afoul of the elders. It was over our “butting in” to their authority as we tried to come alongside an abused wife and mother. We left a year later. I was beat up, exhausted, and bitter.

We tried going back to our original church, but Trumpism was in full bloom, and my conscience wouldn’t let me stay. We walked out of evangelicalism once and for all in 2018.

I hit a downward spiral for a year. I started drinking heavily. I grew more and more depressed. In August 2019, I stayed in a Crisis Center for a week for suicidal ideation. Three weeks later, I was hospitalized for a suicide plan I had planned to implement in a few days. After release from the hospital I went to a mental health residential treatment facility for seven weeks.

I know about “church hurt.” It drove me to alcoholism and very close to suicide.

I attend NA, and I see a psychiatrist and a clinical psychologist. Slowly, the healing is happening.

God has made sure that I’ve never been truly alone. God has sent human angels to care for me every step of the way.

You aren’t alone either.

God has never abandoned you. Your worst day is not your last day. You still have a story yet to be written.