Free A New Beginning by Michael Phillips

many people looked up to. But besides losing a wife, he had lost a great deal of money when a depression hit. So by the time we children of his second family came along, he was aging and feeling many frustrations. He was beginning to show signs of mental infirmity, and from time to time he really treated us badly. When we misbehaved, even for some minor offense, he grabbed us by the hair and hit us with his hand. I was a timid and self-conscious boy, and the fear this caused within me was devastating. There is no other way to say it—I was terrified of him, even though, as I say, he was not by nature a cruel man.
    â€œSo I did not have the experience of a warm and loving and personal father. At that point in my life, if someone had told me, in trying to communicate God’s great love and goodness, that he was my Father and loved me like a Father, my response would have been to stare in bewilderment. If God was like a father —as I envisioned the word—why would I want to have anything to do with him?
    â€œWhen I was fourteen, after an illness of about a year, my mother died. She was only fifty years old at the time, and there were still four of us children at home. At the age of fourteen, I watched my own mother die, and let me tell you—I was not prepared for that. If any family needed a mother, ours certainly did.
    â€œThe very night of my mother’s death, at one o’clock in the morning, knowing that my father, now approaching seventy, could not possibly take care of us children, our high German relatives from his side of the family came in and broke up our home. My brother went to an older married sister, I went to a half brother by my father’s previous marriage, my younger brother went to an aunt, and my younger sister went to a different aunt. My poor younger sister spent the next years moving around from relative to relative and suffered far more than even I did.
    â€œIn any event, I lost my mother and my immediate family all in the same day. These changes came at such a critical time in my growing young life, when I already thought of myself as worthless. You can imagine how much deeper the wounds that were already there now went within me. As I said, I went to live with an older half brother and his wife, and I knew they didn’t want me.”
    I felt tears creeping up into my eyes as Christopher related his story. So much of what he’d told me those first days and weeks at Mrs. Timms’ about his struggles in his church had taken on even deeper meaning as I learned about his early life in more detail. How much more painful it must have been for him than I realized at the time.
    Christopher’s words came back to me about his ouster from the Richmond church: The following days and weeks were of such anguish and loss. My brain and heart were singed as with a scorching fire, and there suddenly seemed nothing left to live for. Everything I cared about had been swept away as by a hot desert wind—leaving nothing but the dry sands of the Sahara in its place. I felt worse than empty—emptier than empty. I felt a void, a nothingness, a hot parching thirst but with no water to drink, no water anywhere .
    Now as he described the loss of his mother, I saw how terrible the loneliness from yet another rejection must have been for him.
    â€œMy half brother and his wife,” Christopher went on, “kept me for two years. One day my sister-in-law came and bluntly said to me, ‘You’re sixteen now. We can’t keep you here any longer. You’re going to have to find someplace else to live. You’re too old to go to school anymore. You need to find work and make your own way.’
    â€œI was devastated. I knew nobody. I had no place to go. I’d never thought much about what I’d do when I couldn’t go to school anymore. I didn’t know what to do. Desperation grew in me. I knew they wanted to get rid of me . . . but I