Chapter VIII

Chapter VIII
The Pain Begins

    My Dad is where I started to feel pain when on my search. I remembered a time when my Dad was on the couch asleep and I was watching Romper Room on T.V., the teacher had us get two sticks that we could hit together. As I recall, they were two Lincoln logs from my Lincoln Log Set. The kids on T.V. had painted sticks like the ones we had in kindergarten. I must have been about five when this happened. The teacher on T.V. told us to march when the music starts and to beat our sticks together in time with the music. I began when the music started. I can remember my Dad opening one eye and looking at me. I fell to the floor totally embarrassed for acting so silly, acting like a little kid (I was a little kid). Why would I be embarrassed about this? I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted to please my Dad. I can remember my Dad hugging me but with it came the whisker rub on my face. I don’t ever remember my Dad saying I love you but I know he did love me. I have many good memories with my Dad (tons).

    I did not know the pain I had about needing to be told I love you until this past Christmas. I had been talking to my Dad, said goodbye and handed the phone to my sister. My father knows of the things I am now going through and has been very supportive as your father would probably be also. I have sent my father copies of my notes and he is starting to understand how ancestors do pass down hurts. Just before he said goodbye to my sister he asked her to say I love you to me. I said back loud so he could hear, I love you, too.   Two days later I was talking to my aunt by telephone. I was telling her how I could never remember my Dad telling me that he loved me and before I could finish telling her, Dad had said he loved me, I began to weep. I got off the phone and had to go into my bedroom and shut the door. We had a construction crew working in the house at the time. I wept and heaved from deep in my chest for almost twenty-five minutes. I am loved. My Dad said he loves me. In spite of the horrible things I have done, my Dad loves me.

    I remember at a very early age, learning that big boys don’t cry. It took me thirty something, plus years before the tears ever broke again. I prayed for over twenty years to be able to cry. It was just answered in the last few months, sorrow over what I have done to hurt others, started the tears, thoughts of Scotty and understanding James 5:16 have brought tears almost every time I read, go over notes or think of how this one man has changed my life.

    The biggest thing I remember as a kid is about my tree house. I remember one day when my Dad came out into the side yard. I don’t remember if he just drove up or I had awakened him with my hammering. I do remember that if he was on the hoot owl (12-8 shift) I did not hammer, but I was in my tree house. It had windows, trap doors and a ladder to the highest point in the tree. I could climb to the top, which was higher than our house, and see downtown 1 1/2 miles away. My Dad stood on the ground and said, That looks like a shit house.   I don’t remember if I said anything back, but if I did it wasn't smart for I never talked back to my parents. Then he said again, When people give directions to find my house they say, Just look for the house with the shit house in the side yard’. I was afraid maybe he wanted me to take it down. He went into the house. I really don’t remember what I did next. I don’t remember if I cried or not. I usually did not cry because big boys don’t cry. My Dad never said anything about the tree house again. My mother told me last week she had heard him yelling at me and tried to talk to him. My Mom tried to tell him that you could hurt him really bad inside by talking to him like that. Mom said that Dad replied, How are you going to hurt him? He'll get over it. Well it’s thirty-eight years later and I still remember. It seems as though I could never please my Dad. I remember him saying hundreds of times on through my adult years, "How you gonna do that?" I’d tell him about some job I had closed a contract on and his answer would be a question, How much money will it make?   No matter what I tried, he knew the negative side to it.

    I would do anything not to feel the pain of rejection. I learned apparently at a very early age to control situations so that I would not receive rejection. I’d try anything to be accepted. Working harder, striving, trying new ventures, hoping that maybe it could give me what I needed to please with. Money to please my father and receive his approval. Money to buy nice things for my friends. I have lists and pictures of things to buy for people that I have collected for years. Daydreaming again of giving to receive love.   When I looked at the pictures and could not afford those things I only felt more hurt and pain that I could not buy them. The cycle continues of feeling again a failure.

    I had to learn to sell every project with orchestrated words and bend the truth to look more sellable. It will work, it won’t work, it’s got to work, It can’t work… both ends taken to the extremes.

    In all fairness as I look at this today the day that I am writing, my father talks the same way to my sister now. My sister has never been bothered by it, she just argues back, gets mad and forgets it. I never argued, I just took it. In my entire life, I can only remember telling three people off. All three I apologized to within three days because of the pain it caused.

    In the multi-level group, Dad knew people who only made $30 a month who had been in it for years. With my construction business, Dad’s best friend’s son or someone else made more on a siding job than I did. Going down the river towards the bay on Dad’s boat he would tell me about Paul’s son-in-law who designed those Oyster Separators and owned the patent on them, the Shucking' Houses were owned by another relative of Paul's.   Penny Hill Marina started out as a small boat yard and now look at it. Docks, a lift and filled with boats in storage. Next door to Penny Hill’s where my Dad docked his boat was his old friend from his service days, he had built his own docks and put in his own poles. Three miles farther down river was a small restaurant that had started as a bait shack that’s now docks and a very good breakfast and lunch business, speaking of his friend Paul, he said, everything he touches turns to gold.   Looking back I’m sure my Dad just wanted to see me to do better than he had. This is why he took me into the glass plant where he worked on a very hot summer day, to show me how they could cook an egg on the floor in four or five minutes. Dad showed his love by pushing me to do better than he had. But try as I may I could never find anything the he’d approve of. I could not please him. My mind had been programmed from a very early age that it won’t work.   Years and years of   it won’t work.   My Dad’s honesty is impeccable I knew he would never lie. I believed him. I had learned how to trust people to-a-fault (after all my ways couldn't, didn't, would never work). I did not question another’s honesty, I just accepted blindly. I could see no wrong in others. I trusted people because of my blinders and tunnel vision. Then when things did go wrong, I always blamed myself. I knew it was probably my fault.

    I know my Dad was proud of me, only because someone would tell me how proud my Dad was of me, or how he had played my singing tape for them. I just wish my Dad could have told me. I am just now beginning to understand how the picture of my earthly father putting me down about finances for so many years has given me the same impression of God. I could pray in faith for many things, but have absolutely no faith in asking God, or expecting God to help me in any way with finances. I felt like I was on self-destruct even before I started.

    One Sunday morning after church when I stopped to talk with a friend of mine, I told him that I do not or have not ever had the faith to pray to God about finances. I realized the view I had of my heavenly father ties into my view of my own father. No matter what I ever tried I was told it wouldn’t work, couldn't work or it would never pay off. I have written page after page in my day timer (business planner) of reasons why a business should work. It has been an internal struggle from the time I sold tomato, eggs and vegetables when I was a kid, to zip code directories and Wheaton Ware glass when a teenager into my construction business while married to Julie. Anything I started was doomed before it got off the ground. After all, my father never lied to me. But even after years of being put down I’d always get up and go again. One thing I am not is a quitter.

    I found this verse this morning while studying Joshua 24:15 TLB, But if you are unwilling to obey the Lord, then decide today whom you will obey. Will it be the gods of your ancestors beyond the Euphrates or the gods of the Ammonites here in this land? But as for me and my family, we will serve the Lord.   The whole idea of following the gods of our ancestors as when the Israelites confessed the sins of their ancestors was that they had to get rid of the old ideas that were ingrained in their heads. The ideas that you just take and run with without ever questioning need to be looked at against God’s word. How many times have we all said, because that's the way Mom does it or Grand mom does it or Dad or whoever does it.   Check it out with the WORD. If it doesn't line up drop it, flush it, bury it but for God's and your sake get rid of it. Any addiction that we have is destructive (life controlling) and can be passed from one generation to the next. This is why God wants us to search ourselves and look and confess not only our sins but the sins of our ancestors. God understands how we pick up and make part of our lives the ways we have been taught to do things. God understands how the patterns of our ancestors are programmed into our (computer) mind. God wants us to plug into the mainframe and have these things deleted from our minds (computer). God (mission control) will give us wisdom and God will give us guidance and God will give us a Scotty (friend) to come on board our star ship (into our lives to help us understand how our computers (minds) work. My Scotty was a man that helped me understand a verse that God laid on my heart when I was a young teenager. A verse I found just a week or two after I first met Scotty. The verse was James 5:16 KJV: Confess your faults one to another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous may availeth much. I learned two things from this verse. It was a revelation, confessing faults that they may pray for you, that you may be healed, ties your faults to a sickness. Faults, be it gambling, drinking, drugs, overeating, undereating, controlling, manipulating, pornography, masturbating (physical, mental and sexual abuse), obsessive compulsive disorders, changing or trying to change others to your image of your parents or the perfect mate to the point of a compulsion which also is controlling, trying to keep perfect order in a house can be controlling, time management can be controlling, trying to bring order in your mate, laying guilt trips on your children with fear, to inflict guilt for control, using anger, tears, throwing yourself on the floor for needed attention to be rescued, continuing even after your children are grown to meddle into their marriage, when God clearly tells them to leave their mother and father and cleave to their mate. All of these things are faults we need to be healed of. If we will go to God in prayer and confess our faults to God and man, God will bring into our lives be it a pastor, Rabbi, priest, facilitator in a search-study-group to help bring healing into our lives so that we can be freed from the destructive forces we use on others just as the destructive forces have been and are used on us.

    The second revelation I received from this verse was when you confess your faults one to another you are then accountable. Someone can now look me in the eye and ask, how are you doing this week Sam? They can look me straight in the eye, because I have nothing to hide.

    I confessed first to Scotty. I then found a pastor who believes in God’s grace and mercy. My pastor holds a Doctorate in Divinity and Masters in Psychology. When I first met with pastor I poured my heart out to him with every horrible detail of every affair from the time I was thirteen. I spent five hours with him where I found a peace of mind that I have never known. I went home and called my former pastor in the Southwest. Then began to confess and talk with my parents, my children, my sister and brother-in-law and share weekly with my pastor and two self-help groups. For the first time in my life I am now able to fall asleep by 10:00 p.m. (early for me) without having to listen to T.V. or radio room noise to blot out thoughts in my mind.

    I personally believe that unless we are 100% truthful in our confession there can be no healing. If we are not able to confess to our faults, how can we be healed of them? When we admit we have faults, we can then search them out, then and only then can we be healed.

    When we continue to see only the faults in others and are not willing to look at ourselves we have no wisdom and are not truthful, we are like the splinter and the beam parable, we are the one with the beam and God calls us a hypocrite.

    Your mate may very well be the perpetrator. You may be able to cry and weep over the things the perpetrator has done. You will be able to find countless numbers of friends, relatives, and rescuers to help you that will agree with you. The only problem with this is, the friends, relatives and rescuers may not ever be honest with you or may not encourage you to look at yourself.

    It does not matter who you are or what side of the offense you are on, we need to search ourselves. I am referring here to our own attitudes.

    When we search we will all find things in us that are faults. We will all find things in us that are wrong. We will all find things in us that we need to correct and apologize for.

    Richard Goldston the chief prosecutor of the international war crimes tribunals for Bosnia and Rwanda, spoke at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in early 1997, Goldston states that a nation suffers, when it shrinks from publicly acknowledging it’s gross injustice. The effect is like a cancer on the society, and that will explain the violence the world has seen---.

    Elie Wiese, a Holocaust survivor and a Nobel Peace Prize Winner also spoke at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Elie states that, while crimes need to be punished, exposing the truth is the goal in itself. There really is no compensation for what happened. But a certain balance can be established that opposing the fear there is hope. Truth becomes a shield for the future.

    Powerful words, it’s amazing to me when we need famous people to confirm God’s word. It should be the other way around. When we hide our sin it is like a cancer, when we confess our sin it is a memory to our past. It is back there to look at, to remind us it happened, but it is now history. When we ask Jesus Christ into our lives and ask him to forgive us our sins he forgives us. He makes us brand new. Only we can see the old memorial. God can not see it. Let the memorial remind us of what we have been forgiven of. Do not go to the memorial to weep for what you lost, go to the memorial to weep with tears of joy at what has been left behind. Let’s look at ourselves, search it out, ask forgiveness from God for hurting Him and others we love. Ask forgiveness of those we have hurt even if it was unknowingly so there can be healing and there can be joy over what we have left behind.