Road to Salvation, Part 4

Through the next month, I would begin to ask Kent about his own faith and start my mental checklist of all the reasons why I would never believe in God.


My entire life was filled with time after time of learning that the word God was bad, churches were awful and people in the church were better than me. While I know that seems extreme, I think it was a normal perception for anyone who had endured a life like mine.

As a young child, my dad was very outspoken against God. The seed he planted with me was, first and foremost, that there was not a God. If there was a God, then bad things wouldn’t have to happen to me. Even if there was a God somewhere in this big world, then he would never care about a little girl whose parents didn’t love her. Yes, those were the seeds he planted through his words and his actions. He was not afraid to prove his theory to me over and over.

It was not uncommon for people from “the church” to visit our house on the weekend. I would later learn that they were Jehovah Witness and Seventh Day Adventist, mostly. I grew up in a very church oriented town who boasts one of the oldest religious parades and celebrations each year. When the church people would knock on the door, we were all forced to hide in the stairway and remain quiet until they were long gone. If any of us didn’t move to the hiding place fast enough or dare to make a noise, we faced the wrath of my dad once the coast was clear.

In my early elementary years, we received New Testaments at school. To prove his point that bibles, religion and God were not allowed in the door of our house, my dad would take the small bibles from us as soon as he found them. He would take them and the bibles left by the church people to his shop and burn them. If he saw that any of us were particularly attached to the small book, he would force us to throw the book into the fire.

Neither my brothers nor myself saw the small bibles as anything more than a gift that someone had given us. My dad, however, saw them as a threat. It was difficult for any of us to understand how something that was given as a gift could arouse such hatred in my dad. But, we would follow his rules on this. It was rare that any gift would be worth the punishment of fighting for with my dad.