Eternal Hell: God’s Justice and Love

If you and I were to poll adults on what is the most emotionally terrifying thing for them the answers would vary a lot. People have phobias about dentists, dogs, enclosed spaces, lightning, heights, public speaking, spiders, snakes and a whole lot more. And for the people with true phobias they can reach a point of panic dealing with these things.

When I was a child my father took care of what would be the most terrifying thing for me. And that was the subject of hell. For me it was the most emotionally charged subject on earth. And that came about because my father believed hell was very real. And in his twisted way of looking at life he believed that only by bludgeoning people with fear tactics would he be able to produce compliant people who would turn to God to avoid hell. My father was Fred W. Phelps, Sr. the head of a cult in Topeka, Kansas called Westboro Baptist Church, commonly referred to as WBC. My father never understood how important it was to respect people enough to let them know the facts about something and let them deal with those facts as the free agents and adults they were.

Beliefs and feelings about hell range from one extreme to the other on a long continuum. Recently I spent 45 minutes doing an interview with a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for the Studies of Religion at Baylor University on the subject of the afterlife, specifically hell. His goal is to create a tool to measure people's concerns about hell.

He asked me a lot of questions. About my life. About my religious background. About my beliefs about hell. He wanted to interview me and several of my family members who have left our family cult because he wants to include people who have had exposure to more strident teachings about hell to insure that his tool works for people with a variety of religious backgrounds.

I described the first 19 years of my life and what I was taught about hell. I referred him to five of my blog writings: “God Is Not Good”, “Abusing People with Religion”, “Assailed to the Breaking Point – Part 1”, “The Language of Love” and ‘My Brother Nate.” www.my-journey-of-healing.blogspot.com/ I told him this would be an efficient way to get an overview on the reality of the religious abuse our family experienced as a result of my father’s toxic pathology. I mentioned that as far as I was concerned I lived in a kind of hell for the first 19 ½ years of my life, right here on earth.

I stated clearly and forthrightly that today, as a man in my 60’s, I believe in a literal and eternal hell. And not because of my father’s fear tactics in my life but because of my own personal study and convictions.

I also described the stark reality of the psychological damage of having hell and the threat of hell used to control and hurt and damage me and its effects on my heart and my life. I told my young interviewer it took me 20 years after leaving my family’s cult to overcome the damage done to my heart and psyche by my father’s use of repeated threats of eternal hell to terrify me and manipulate me. My healing from this damage would include years of intentional work with professional counselors. Many of my siblings have not had the benefit of this type of restorative, healing work and remain trapped in the devastation of my father’s torturous words inflicted on their childlike souls as young children.

I explained in that interview my belief that the teaching of hell to children is inappropriate for where almost all children are both emotionally and developmentally. I told him I believe the love of God should be taught to little children and that little children should have free access to the truth of God and His love. Children need repeated affirmations of their worth and value to God during their young lives to grow up as spiritually healthy young ones. I told him my strong belief that only when a child is of appropriate age is it even responsible to tell them the truth about hell as Christ told all of us in His word. As we mature, each of us needs to know what is true if we are to ever be free. We need to hear and understand truth, but this needs to happen at a time when we are ready to absorb it and understand it.

I liken what the children in my family went through hearing about hell repeatedly and in such graphic and cruel terms to children who grow up in the midst of a war. Children will try various ways to cope with bombs dropping around their heads but when you talk to them as adults there are many scars in their souls having had to go through those things at such a young age. That would be true for all of my siblings and me who experienced “hell abuse” at too young an age.

I described to my interviewer the experiences I had as a child and how opposite they were of what I now believe is appropriate for young, tender minds and hearts. Instead of being told the truth about hell so I could have knowledge and be free to respond to the truth about my eternal consequences as a person, the threat of hell was used to hurt me and unnecessarily terrorize me. My father lied to me and my brothers and sisters about hell and about God. He lied by leaving out the amazing truth of God’s profound love for each of us. And that God had every intention of rescuing each of us from hell. If we wanted to be rescued. And that God gave each person that free will choice that he respectfully offered to them. With no bludgeoning!

I made clear that terror – stark raving terror - was the dominant emotion that described my childhood. Fear and anxiety and turmoil, a sense of worthlessness, hopelessness and the complete inability to sit still in my own skin were some of the ways I described what it was like to be threatened with eternal hell as a child, by my father. This wrong teaching was reinforced by my father’s own rage, violence, hatefulness and physical, mental, emotional and religious abuse of our entire family.

I described how my father manipulated my siblings and me by using the threat of eternal hell to control us from leaving his cult. Sadly, I had to set out in detail how constantly my father would verbally condemn anyone to eternal hell whenever he disagreed with or was upset with anybody at any time. He was very verbally free with these condemnations. My father told all of his children that if we ever left his church (his cult) we were going to hell. Period! The very thing he was so fearful of for his children was used by him to attempt to get and maintain complete compliance out of his children. My father had no respect for us as free willed beings who had to come to grips with our relationship with God on our own. He respected us far less than God did and yet never told us of God’s strong desire to rescue us from all that fear and condemnation of us as little precious people.

But in spite of all the wretched abuse we suffered as children growing up with my father I also said the solution to the question of hell was not to deny the truth of hell. I said there was one person who loved us enough to tell us the truth about the spiritual realm; the invisible realm of the spirit world; and that person was Jesus Christ. That Jesus came to earth just as He and his Father had decided he would, for the purpose of saving mankind. Jesus had an amazing and daring rescue mission to do for planet Earth and when He had accomplished His rescuing work after 33 brief years here He returned to the Father. He was faithful to tell us the truth about what we need to know.

1. When Adam and Eve disobeyed God they experienced exactly what God had told them would happen. They died spiritually. Spiritual death meant separation from God. Separation from God is Hell!

2. Hell is also described in the Bible as being a fire that is never quenched, outer darkness, a bottomless pit, wailing, gnashing of teeth, a worm that eats on you and never dies and never ending torment. Bottom line, I said that hell is literal and it will include the experience of pain and anguish and it is the complete absence of goodness and the complete absence of God. And hell will never end.

3. I said that God had solved the problem of this spiritual death and separation from Him before the problem had ever even occurred. He had a plan in place ready to solve this problem before any of us ever were aware we had a problem.

After having read all this you may still have a pit in your stomach or a brain that keeps saying back to you “but why hell at all? What is the point? Why can’t God forgive us for our wrongdoing without some punishment?”

That is how a lot of us feel when we first encounter hell. What has helped me in looking at this issue is to realize that we here on this earth have a strong need for justice to happen when others are wrongdoers against us. I recently watched a special on television about death row inmates in the weeks up to their executions. What was fascinating was not just the defendants understanding that they indeed had done a heinous crime in murdering people, often who were innocent bystanders, but the victims’ families’ responses. Even if the victims knew that the defendant had come to a place of repentance and understanding that the murder was wrong the victims still believed the inmate must suffer death.

I pondered where that need for justice comes from. I think it is from God. I think we have a built in system in our beings that knows when a wrong is committed and cries out for justice. I think it is built in by God. And honestly when I look at how we hurt each other on this planet, I realize that a lot of the perpetration of our wrongs is because we don’t see justice happening here so we take things into our own hands.

Back to hell. Hell is a judicial punishment for wrongdoing. It is a perfectly logical response by a just God toward our sin. God considers sin worthy of death. He made the planet and he gets to set up the justice rules. But God is not just perfectly just but He is perfectly merciful. So in his perfect mercy, He and His Son Jesus came up with a plan to deal with both issues. God and His Son came up with a plan to fulfill justice and mercy at the same time.

Oddly the whole thing was going to happen in Christ’s physical body. God was going to dump all of mankinds’ sin and crimes against humanity and God into one moment in history. And that moment was Christ hanging on a cross to pay for humanity’s sins. It met God’s justice requirements because Christ’s death was big enough to cover all of humanity’s sins. And He was allowed to do it because He never sinned himself. I know, wrap your mind around that! But that same act met God’s mercy requirements in that God and Jesus took the “hit” on themselves. And paid the price for sin so no one ever had to go to hell. Isn’t that amazing? Can you imagine being Jesus and knowing that your purpose in life was to pay for all the rape, and murder and kidnapping and wrongdoing the human race could ever think to perpetrate on each other and you yourself having done none of that sinning? Amazing Jesus.

So this week on Friday as you go about your day, just ponder the fact that Friday represents “good Friday” in our spiritual history. As the day God provided justice here on earth by Christ’s dying on that piece of wood in the Middle East. Sin had been paid for. And God also provided mercy. If someone wanted to accept the gift Christ provided by paying for our sin, we never had to experience hell.

And if you really want to get excited about who God is, ponder with me what happened on Sunday. God raised Christ from the dead so he would be able to live forever. If you receive the gift of Christ’s death on the cross, your sins are paid for, but Sunday, oh Sunday! It represents that Christ comes to live inside us in the person of the Holy Spirit to allow us to live COMPLETELY different lives than we would have before. Because we have a brand new living spirit that is capable of being and doing good! I know. This blog is mostly about Friday. But, oh, Sunday! Sunday is wonderful too in our lives!

I explained to my interviewer that there is no behavior or action or attitude or mistake that any person could ever make that would result in them spending eternity in hell except the rejection of God’s solution to the problem. I said that ONLY the rejection of God’s provision; who so loved us that He gave His one and only Son to die and save us from hell and so He could have the relationship with us He has always wanted; would be the reason any person will ever find themselves in eternal hell separated forever from God.

I told him that every single human being has complete freedom to avoid hell. That Christ loved us enough to tell us the truth about the invisible realm that is eternal, as well as the visible realm which is temporary. And by loving us enough to tell us the truth He has given us the full opportunity to solve the problem of hell forever, personally. Each of us individually!

While I had learned from my father to be terrified and to be one hundred percent certain that I would face a personal angry God with personal accountability and punishment, I had never been told that I had the option of experiencing a personal God who loved me and who wanted a relationship with me forever.

Sometimes I liken my father’s behavior in speaking so much and so often about hell because of his fear we’d miss out on heaven like any other parent who sees their child going into a potentially risky behavior. An example might be how a parent deals with a 16 year old learning to drive. One type of “glass half full” parent might want to not focus on the fearful part and help the kid understand the fun of getting to places, the freedom and independence to travel in this wonderful country, to get around where and when you need to and what driving offers. But even the glass half full parents probably muster up the courage to say “but honey, there is a downside to driving. You will be going at high speeds in a 2 ton hunk of steel with other drivers going at high speeds and we live in a culture where people drive drunk, drive while texting and drive when the weather doesn’t really permit it.” That might be a balanced approach to include the good and the bad.

What my father did in this analogy was not only to scare us to death about possibly dying and hurting ourselves and others, he just preemptively took the keys away! And told us every day that he would control our ability to drive (and hurt ourselves) by just never giving us the keys.

It would be impossible to overestimate how messed up my siblings and I are with this attitude my father foisted on us. He scared us to death with the negatives but not once every explained or lived out the positives.

So you might be surprised, with my upbringing when asked by my interviewer if I still have a fear of hell and my answer was “No!”

I said it was not just because of knowing the truth but that it was because of a personal relationship I have developed in the intervening years with my God. I said we all understand what it can be like to have a trusting relationship with a child, a parent, a spouse, other family member or friend and that though difficult to describe in words, we all know what it is like when we can trust someone. I said the same is true of God. In the world we live in, through difficulties and joyful experiences, day by day, week by week we are able to grow in our relationship with God and we can learn to trust Him.

Brokenness and terror and fear and anxiety can be replaced by wholeness and trust . . . and peace. I told this young man that perfect love completely eliminates fear. That the difference is the difference between night and day. It is like shining a light into a dark room. When the light enters, the darkness is gone.

I discussed the dangers of avoiding the subject of hell or denying the reality of hell. I posed the questions: “Why would you avoid or deny something of such importance when all you have to do is face directly toward the truth and deal with the truth straight on?” Not only does it help you forever but it allows you to have peace and wholeness in day to day living. Why would a person live in denial or accept a lie when the simple truth can set them free?”

Emotions that destroy the heart can be replaced with emotions that restore the heart and restore the life for each person who knows the true living God and knows the truth He has given us. We have absolutely no reason to fear hell!

So hell is real and even more real is the victory over hell and the grave that God secured for everyone who believes. The healthy way to heal and put your life on a strong foundation, forever, is to listen to what our loving God has told us about what is true, and accept what He says. Place your life firmly on the foundation; The Rock: of Christ Jesus!

I ended by telling this young man that I am free in my heart today in a way I never thought possible growing up in my father’s house. I am at peace in my heart because I have come to know the love of my Creator. His love is deep and wide and it lasts forever.

I invite you to please begin a relationship with God today, if you have not already done so, and take an unbearable load off of your mind and off of your eternal soul. Don’t put it off, don’t avoid it, and don’t try to do an end run around it or break an opening through the middle of this reality. Face it, accept it and live.

Eternal hell is real because God is Just. Eternal salvation is real because God is love! Receive the gifts of Friday and Sunday! God wants to give them to you!

Mark Phelps

Second Radio Interview - Part 2

Daniel: Our guest today is Mark Phelps. He is the son of the late pastor Fred W. Phelps, Sr. Fred Phelps was the founder of Westboro Baptist Church, a group known for their thousands of picket protests against the US Military and the homosexual agenda. Mark Phelps has come forward to testify about what it was like to be inside of the church the process of healing he had to go through in order to overcome the negative impact his father had on him and his family.

Daniel: How did you cope with the environment in your mind? Here you are, your dad is using the Bible to preach on Sundays. You are told that Jesus is Lord and your dad is a religious leader. People come to him to get advice for their lives then you see him doing these things, and you are going through beatings. I mean, how do you cope with that?

Mark: Well, I disconnected to a large extent, is what I realized years later. But the main coping mechanism that I particularly, specifically had as one of the 13 children living there was I drew close to the abuser. I became the yes man. I became his executioner. He even had me beating the children, my siblings, during that last couple of years I was living there. I became everything he wanted. I figured him out and I became just like him. I became exactly the way I knew he wanted me to be and I figured out how to get safe after some horrible beatings I had endured. In a nut shell, that’s how I did it. And yet I was still terrified that I was going to hell the night I left because you just don’t get through that kind of stuff without that kind of terror, you know.

Daniel: Would you say that you drew closer to your dad then you did to Jesus?

Mark: I didn’t even know who Jesus was. My father took my older brother and I to a Bible Conference when I was 11 and I got saved. I’m sure my father must have been preaching something from the Bible about that, before this time, but the Bible Conference was the first time I actually heard the words. My dad never focused on the New Testament, or very seldom did. He focused on his doctrines; he focused on the Old Testament a lot. I certainly had not the foggiest idea that there was any such thing as a personal relationship with The Lord Jesus who loved me and gave His life for me to save me. I just knew He had died for my sins and I was overwhelmed by that and knew I was saved when I was 11. But I felt more guilt. I would regularly go through this 7-day guilt cycle. I would hear more about what I should be like on Sunday and then knew how I was the other 6 days of the week. I pretty much was in the business of extreme guilt.

I want to clarify . . . I didn’t draw close to my father. There was no intimacy or affection or closeness or relationship. I figured out how to stay safe with him which made him think that I was an ally. But I did not grow close to him at all! I just figured out how to stay safe around him. That’s all there was to that! I don’t know of a single human being who ever was genuinely close to my father. My father was an abuser all the years I knew him. People do not draw close, genuinely, intimately close, to an abuser! They are not capable and those around them are too frightened!

Daniel: So as you watched your dad’s ministry develop, how did he begin to branch out into this picketing and attacking different groups. How did you see that in relation to his character?

Mark: Well, I didn’t see it all because I was gone by age 19 but it fits perfectly. Basically the way I’ve been able to figure that out by watching and hearing things from the family; although they don’t have contact with me you can’t help but get some pieces of information. To put it simply there was a certain point along the line there where he did not have the need to abuse his children; his family. The other children were more compliant and they were doing what he wanted to do and he kind of lost his family as a venue for his hate. He no longer had the stresses as high as when there were a lot of children at home, and perhaps there was not quite as much financial pressure; I can’t be certain about this.

He had been an attorney and then he had his license suspended for two years and the family had no income for quite a while so he had all the kids selling candy for the church. He abused the candy companies by not paying them for their product after it was delivered and sold. So we would sell the candy and he would keep the money. He also had most of the children running every day, 10 miles a night, literally. At least the older kids; the younger kids couldn’t get that far in the time allotted each day for running at the track. But all the children were working from the time we got up in the morning until we went to bed at around 10 or 11 at night. We were going to school, selling candy, and running around the track. I think he had less of a need and less opportunity to be hateful as the children got older.

When he lost his law license in the early 1990’s; remember I left in 1973; but as I’m watching it, he ran for governor of The State of Kansas thinking that might be a venue in which he could function. He only got about 30 percent of the vote thankfully.

After that, he was so hostile with the local officials, the district attorney and county commissioners, and so on. Somehow he got personal information about the local district attorney and some of the others; county commissioners. (So here’s the next step Dan) He started sending faxes with hateful, vulgar language regarding those local officials and sent thousands of faxes to the local businesses. He just kept fax blasting his hateful messages. I don’t know how long that went on; for quite a period of time; months if not years; until the FBI shut down his faxing operation. Then he got his idea to do the picketing.

To me it’s all consistent. My father finds ways to be hateful. I think there’s a part of him probably that’s a little five year old who wants attention from his mommy who died. Anybody that has observed that situation very closely figures out that if you leave them alone that’s where they are the most vulnerable! They want attention. They crave attention! My father has just been a master at figuring out how to get attention. I told Rick last week this is not about God and the Bible, this is about his need and desire to be hateful and he has just used God and the Bible as a venue to vent his hatefulness onto the world! That’s what I believe he has been doing.

Daniel: What you are saying is, absolutely whatever it was that inspired him, it was not the Spirit of God that motivated him to take the stands that he took.

Mark: That’s right! John 3:17 says: “Christ did not come into the world to condemn the world but that the world through Him might be saved”. There’s a New Testament folks! There’s the Lord Jesus Christ. And He came and He died. He gave up His wealth in Heaven and He came to this earth and He gave His life. And there is now hope! There is none of this hope in my father’s words. He doesn’t know the Lord Jesus Christ as far as I can tell. I’m just going by his behavior. I just can’t see it. I’m not attempting to judge my father. I’m bearing witness to the behavior I have observed. Where is Christ in my father’s behavior?

Daniel: In my mind, I’m wondering; I have two questions at this point. 1. How did he get licensed and instated as a pastor. Did those that put him in his position really have an idea of what kind of person your father was? Or did he just work his way up? Did they know what he was preaching? I mean, maybe you don’t know the answer to these questions.

Mark: I do because that local newspaper was trying to do some research and Jon Bell wrote about it in his book ‘Addicted To Hate’. Basically what he learned was those folks there at Eastside Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas; my father had gone in there as an associate pastor; and those men tell the media in 1994 that they were deeply concerned for him. They told the press that they watched him. When I was 9 months old they watched him slap my face with his open hand and cuff my face with the back of his hand, jerking my head back and forth with his hand because I had begun to squirm in the church service. They said that several of the men approached my father and told him not to do that again. They were concerned about his behavior but nevertheless that pastor there, and those leaders, set him up across town at Westboro Baptist Church. And Dan, I wasn’t aware or old enough to know, but from what I learned from what those folks told the media, was that just about as soon as they set him up in his own church, he cut himself off from Eastside Baptist Church and my father has been on his own, by himself, from that moment until the hour he passed away, with no outside contact or accountability. He has had no accountability! No human on this earth can function effectively without healthy, meaningful, willing accountability! My father had none!!

Daniel: Our guest is Mark Phelps. He is the son of the late pastor Fred W. Phelps, Sr. Fred Phelps was the founder of Westboro Baptist Church, a group known for their thousands of picket protests against the US Military and the homosexual agenda. Mark Phelps has come forward to testify about what it was like to be inside of the church the process of healing he had to go through in order to overcome the negative impact his father had on him and his family.

When we left off we were talking about what it was like to cope with everything that was going on and now I want to get to the point where you know; this has been abuse, there has been different things going on; and you are ready to leave. You left at age 19. What brought you to that crisis moment and what was it like for you to actually walk out the door and not look back?

Mark: What led to it was, I meant a young lady who was not like anybody I had known. She was just a gentle soul, peaceful, very loving. My father liked her at first. She was there at the church one day at the end of the church service on a Sunday evening and she heard my father cursing and beating my sister upstairs shortly after the church service. My father thought she had already gone; he had no idea she was at the bottom of the stairs listening to his rage and filthy language. This young lady walked right out of that place and down to the local grocery store and called her dad to pick her up. She told me she was not going to be a part of this and refused, absolutely refused to keep seeing me, if I was going to stay there. This is what started the process of my leaving.

At that time, also, my father was doing some particularly savage, brutal beating of my oldest sister and my older brother. Some incredible things were going on. My father was at his very best worst in his violence and abusing. He confined my sister for 40 days with only water after he had beaten her so horribly. I’m the yes man and I’m standing around watching all of this horrific abuse and I walk in from all of my college classes one day and see him savagely beating my oldest sister. He is bending her backwards over the church pew hitting her in the face with his fist and spitting in her face. Then he is beating her with the mattock handle. And he is cursing and screaming and berating her. All I am able to do is stand there and watch this and listen to his rage at my sister.

All of this is starting to wear on me and I’m seeing this young lady that I had recently met, and her family. Oh my gosh and I’m thinking the two families are worlds apart in their character . . . And then the thing that probably led up to it was finally, it was coming into the end of the semester there in December and I knew I wasn’t going to have a 4.0 GPA. Well, we didn’t have to have a 4.0 but we had to be pretty close. And I just wasn’t ready to be there when that report card came.

So on December 27, 1973 at about 10:30 at night I spent about an hour and a half leading up to 10:30 p.m. just taking two or three clothes items at a time and putting them in a basket. I had a little ’66 Pontiac that I had managed to get and I put a basket full of clothes in the trunk of that car. I had met a young guy who told me if I ever needed it I could have a room to stay in for a night or two. At about 10:30 I slipped out that night and drove away with nobody knowing I was leaving. When I was at that house that night sleeping in a strange bed at a house where I didn’t even know anybody, I vividly recall I figured I was going to wake up in hell! That’s basically how I got the transition made. I just was terrified and I just did it anyway. I just felt something wasn’t right. That’s the best I could do at that time Daniel.

Daniel: And in leaving, did you begin to go through what they call survivors guilt? In other words, ‘well now I left but now I feel guilty that my siblings are still back there with that heavy situation’?

Mark: Well, it was that, and guilt and fear. I had an automobile accident a couple of months later and I was sure; I poured over the New Testament; and I just felt sure from reading Hebrews that God was giving me one last chance and then that was going to be it. He was going to squish me! But I just stayed the course.

Then I got a job, got married, my wife and I started our own business, my wife miscarried three boys all during the first ten years of our marriage. For ten years, Dan, I was in limbo. I just didn’t know how to focus on anything related to God and the Bible. I felt guilty. I felt frightened. I started to get a little bit into the positive thinking arena; Napoleon Hill, his book ‘Think and Grow Rich’, W. Clement Stone. A little bit of the positive thinking material from Norman Vincent Peale. I was trying to figure out how to manage all the feelings I had stuffed down into my heart. Stress was starting to build a little bit; normal life stress in my life. Operating a business we had locations in four different states. Things were going well but I was really struggling from the stress; from my past. I didn’t understand the psychological aspects of it as far as how the mind works. But I was spending such a large amount of my energy keeping that garbage all stuffed in there. And it was leaking out!

I’ll tell you bluntly and frankly, although I wasn’t aware of it, and that’s the simple truth of it. I wasn’t aware of it but I was damaging my wife. I wasn’t sensitive. I wasn’t present. I didn’t have the foggiest first idea of what it meant to be a husband or an intimate partner. And it was taking a toll on this precious little soul I had married! All she knew was that she loved me. It shook me to the core when she was finally able to come to me one day and tell me she was having some problems. I just fell to the ground, emotionally. It was still another year or two; I was so busy with business and so on. Then when my business partner who had helped us start our business crashed his plane and died, that was the final shake. By 1988 . . . I don’t know if people can understand this, but when you are broken and you don’t know you are broken, it’s hard to know what to do. I’m driving along with my wife up into one of the little mountain communities there in southern California for a little time away. She is still so gentle with me as she’s always been. I said to her: ‘Honey, do you think I could benefit from some therapy?” That’s all I said to her. She said: ‘Maybe you could’. And so I knew that’s what I needed to do.

I had to find the right person though, folks. I had to find a guy who was a pastor, a psychologist and an attorney who could take the brunt of what I had to dump out. There wasn’t going to be any little mealy mouth for me; and I don’t feel this way today about therapist; but understand this massive garbage that I had. And I had the same attitude as my father; fundamentally I disdained people. I said to myself, I’m not going to sit with some mealy mouthed little person that wants to ask me how I’m feeling! I ain’t going to do that! But if there is somebody that can take this doctrine of Calvinism and if somebody can take this massive intensity that is roaring inside my soul then maybe I’ll do it. And it was two years with this guy and I finally started to get to my soul. I got all the garbage off the top of my soul, enough so that I began to feel terrified and all I could feel were all the emotions that were laying underneath all that cognitive diversion I had put in place to protect my soul.

And then I found a husband and wife team, bless their hearts, and I spent five years. Two of those years I spent going two or three times a week. And I found a woman’s group. And I’m telling you, that woman’s group, going once or twice a week at night for three hours, working with women who had been abused in every kind of way. Listening and seeing and watching and hearing and then every now and then I would join in and work on stuff I needed to work on. And they were a big part of my healing. I began to understand women and I began to understand feelings and I began to understand what it was like to be a human being.

Daniel: Now, uh, man, and see, this is the problem folks. The problem is that when we think we can bottle everything up and just bulldoze our way through life no matter what we’ve been through, what we’ve endured or what kind of abuse, this philosophy doesn’t work in the long run! There has to be a breaking point where we allow God to touch those deeper parts of us and take out the poison. What Mark is beginning to tell us is that he had a lot of poison on the inside of him. Some of you have a lot of poison on the inside of you. Be encouraged! We have a God who has a plan to take it out.

Mark is describing how he had come to the point where God began to heal him on the inside, to pull out the garbage and the poison. You know Mark I want to ask you this question. Could you be where you are today if you had not submitted to a season of internal healing; going back and allowing God to deal with all of the pain that you had been storing up in you from all those years of abuse?

Mark: No! Absolutely not even close. It would not have been anywhere near possible to know the Lord as I have come to know Him. There is a normal sanctification process and I know folks understand that. But if there is nothing there to work with; if you are going to die to Christ, if you are going to put yourself on the cross and die to yourself and live to Christ and walk with Him, you have to have a self with which to do that, you know? So I glory in that. I now know and I’m alive and I can give that life to Christ because I just didn’t know anything.

Daniel: Now let’s talk about the whole experience that you had with Jesus, in light of everything you have told us. So you actually genuinely received Jesus as your Lord and Savior when you were 11 and then continued to go through many years of abuse after that. And it was just terrible and you were terrified of hell but you had no relationship or intimacy with Jesus. You didn’t have intimacy with your father. Frankly it was hard to have intimacy with anyone. Now you leave your family and then there is a span of years. Now during those years, were you just keeping Jesus as far away as possible? Were you like kind of dancing on the sideline with Jesus? What was that element of your story like?

Mark: I was just so frightened and I just figured God felt the same way about me as my father did. I heard that I had become a primary part of my father’s sermons, that I was a heretic and I was a reprobate and I was the evil one and my father used me as an object lesson often, as I understood it, in his messages. And I just felt God hated me and I was just holding on by some kind of faith and hope that I wouldn’t just end up in hell.

What I didn’t mention earlier, that I want to mention now, in about 1984 I was finally able to start back into a church body. I still had the same arrogance and pride, with a chip on my shoulder that every single person in my family has, which we received from our father . . . that we had superior head knowledge about the Bible and a lot of doctrinal understanding. I joined a men’s Bible study that was a part of this church. It was the men in this men’s group that were the primary source of change for me. The leader simply had us memorize verses, and there was a lot of conversation and discussion. It was a Bible study with men and we would talk about our lives. And I just stuck with these men in this group. So by the time it came to 1988 and 1989 and I was beginning to do some of the formal therapy work, I had a relationship with the Lord that I had never had before. And it was by that, by taking what I had learned from these men that helped me so much. And I would listen to Focus on the Family a tremendous amount and I was ‘fathered’ a lot by Dr. James Dobson. And then some of those men; they all know it personally, I’m not telling anything here that they don’t already know personally; some of those men are like fathers to me and like big brothers to me. But these men were the way the Lord started getting into me.

So when I would go into those times when I would be driving my car from my house into the therapist office to do healing work, that time was spent in prayer. This is just as real as I know how to get with folks. This is not some holy stuff. I’m talking bluntly in conversation with the Lord, saying “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know what is coming next. I am scared. I need your help! I am begging you, Lord, to go with me into this next period of time with these guys and help me face what I have to face.”

The professional therapists had me lying on the ground, helping me to try and relax. Then, for example, they would start raging and throwing books off the shelves and they would try to recreate a little bit of the environment that I had been raised in. And I just asked the Lord to help me and to please be there with me in it as I faced the fear. And I began to be able to allow myself to open up very slowly.

When I was still living there, as long as I could avoid getting beat, I just shut off. The raging of my father and his beating of my brothers and sisters . . . I just shut myself off to all of that violence Dan. And I had to go back in and face all of that. So these professionals tried the best they could, bless their hearts, to recreate the reality of what I had faced. And it was sufficient because the Lord was with me and I just kept asking over and over for Him to go with me and to be with me and to go into my heart with me and to help me see this and help me face this and help me deal with this.

Also, I would drive my vehicle for business. We had businesses in Orange County and San Diego about an hour and fifteen minutes apart. It was just as common for me to pull off at an exit between Orange County and San Diego as it was for me to just drive all the way through to a normal day. I would be working on some aspect of my healing the night before in therapy, or some audio tape that I may have gotten from Focus on the Family that I had been listening to. I worked at my recovery day and night. I’d be in front of the Lord and I would be listening to stuff and I’d have to pull off at an exit and park my car and deal with whatever the Lord was bringing up for me to deal with. I would weep and roar with pain, and cry, and cry out, and I just had to take it as it came. My wife would head off to her work in her profession and my daughters would be off to school and I’d be there in the living room or family room, just laid out on the floor listening to something or reading something and dealing with the emotion of what it was bringing up for me.

I remember, for example, when I learned what love was. I learned that my father had replaced the word love with the word evil. What my father tried to pass off to me as love was his evil! I had to learn my whole vocabulary. I just had to be remade in the Lord Jesus Christ and He was with me every second, every moment of that time, and He held me up and He brought me through it. And He was with me and He still is!

Daniel: So you are telling us that your very vocabulary and definitions of things had been so tainted by your dad that even when you would try to read the Bible, for example, you were almost reading a different book then the love letter that God has really given to us.

Mark: I wasn’t almost reading a different book. I WAS reading a different book! And I heard from my niece recently near the time my father was passing away, bless her heart, she and her sister had left the church, and of course, therefore, had left their family. And in their words, they are ‘trying to do good’. This is second generation now. She tells how she and her sister; how all of them; have been told that what they are doing is good. Bless their hearts. God bless them. I don’t know what’s going to happen for them. I pray for them.

But yes I’m telling you, Dan, you’re right, I read the Bible as an instrument of hate to be beat over the head with. I never understood the Lord Jesus Christ! I had NO IDEA of His love! I had NO IDEA of His heart! I just didn’t know. And now I know Him intimately! And I’m telling you, the heart and love of Christ is LIFE!

End of “Second Radio Interview – Part 2”

First Radio Interview

Rick: Westboro Baptist Church pastor Fred Phelps passed away last month. He described himself as an old school Baptist. He said his theology was based on the five points of Calvanism. Over the years however he became a lightning rod for controversy as Westboro Baptist Church became famous for its protests against homosexuality and picketing the funerals of American soldiers as a way to protest American’s foreign policy and its support of abortion and homosexuality.

Rick: My guest today is Fred Phelps’ son, Mark Chandler. Mark is a devoted follower of Jesus Christ. He is currently battling a lung disorder. And I asked him to come on Trunews as a member of the family and to share with the whole world some very personal thoughts about his dad and the controversy that has surrounded his father. And I am very grateful that he was willing to accept this invitation and be on the program. Mark Chandler Welcome. Welcome to Trunews!

Mark: Thank you very much Rick. Glad to be here.

Rick: Yes sir. Glad to have you on the program. Mark is this a difficult interview for you to do?

Mark: It is not particularly difficult, no.

Rick: Okay, good, because you know I want to be respectful and sensitive to you.

Mark: Thank you.

Rick: You know I honestly do not know that much about your dad and Westboro. It is just what I have read in the papers myself you know. I never really followed his ministry or anything. It was a name that would pop up from time to time in the news. But he had his followers and he had his distractors and so he was a very controversial man. Now your name is Chandler. You changed your name from Phelps to Chandler. Let’s just start there. Why did you change your name?

Mark: That was just simply to protect our daughters. I left my family and that church in 1973 so it was not for any purpose other than to give our daughters a different last name as they started into the school system and began their lives. We have two adopted girls.

Rick: Okay. Well great! Great! I’ve got some adopted grand children in my family.

Mark: It’s wonderful. Just absolutely wonderful!

Rick: Yes and we are about to have more! My daughter and son-in-law are about to adopt five more so our family is about to take a big leap forward.

Mark: Oh that is so wonderful!

Rick: Okay you say when you left the church in 1973 you must have been what, in your mid 20’s or so?

Mark: I was 19.

Rick: 19. Okay. Was it that you just left home or was it an actual break with Westboro Church?

Mark: There was no leaving home or separating that from the church. It was only our family and a couple of other families. I was just so . . . at that point I did not have clarity, I was scared. I had met a young lady that was the way I believed a young lady ought to be and she was different than any girl I had ever seen or known. And I thought I was doing the wrong thing and I literally believed the first night that I left that I was going to end up in hell! But I left anyway. I just left! When you leave you are done and they cut you off and that is just all there is left . . . you are done. You either leave or you stay.

Rick: Was Westboro or is Westboro what is commonly referred to as fundamentalist Baptist?

Mark: Westboro has, certainly, some focus on the Bible and certainly they have some focus as Baptists, in terms of some of the aspects of that denomination as I have learned it. That church is a group that is mostly my family and they have been under the control and influence and abuse of my father from the time I was born. They broke off from a little Baptist church there in Topeka in 1954 when they got there to the city of Topeka. Maybe it was 1955. They cut that church off after that church had helped them set up their little place there at Westboro; they cut them off and it was only my family for a number of years than a couple of other families came along and that is how it was up to the time when I left. I started playing the organ for Westboro when I was five years old. My brother played the piano starting when he was six years old.

Rick: At the height; the peak of Westboro Baptist what was the membership, the attendance?

Mark: I’ve just heard since I’ve left, with all the nieces and nephews, and then I believe there was one other family that came in, it might have pushed 100. But what I want to emphasize, just for clarity, for anyone that would ever benefit from clarity . . . I mean this is years of boiling down Rick so I hope no one misunderstands . . . but I’m jumping over a lot of years of healing and experience and I’m boiling it down to . . . this is about my father and his hatefulness. And I have never been able to determine why he was so hateful. Certainly he used the Bible. My father used the Bible to abuse and he uses it now publicly to abuse. He is not doing anything different now, from my perception, to the outside world, than he did to his family. He had some visceral need to be hateful and mean and violent and cruel. And that’s not judgment; that’s just the truth of the experience that I had with my father. And it’s not about God and the Bible, as much as he tried to make it that. It’s about, for some reason or other he just has a need to be hateful. The concern I have is all those children that are there; my brothers and sisters, and now the nephews and nieces; they were born into it. And it is very difficult to undo the first few moments, weeks, months and years of your life. And so they have the same approach and the same words and the same passages from the scriptures they will refer to, the same speech style often; they have the same behavior as my father had and it denies; and this is what is so important to me; it denies the finished work of Christ on the cross and His love and for why He gave His life to redeem us. It is as if that never happened! Where is the hope? Where is hope? That’s what I want to know! If I am in that situation there at Westboro Baptist Church I’d like to know where the hope is! Where is Christ in that?!

Rick: Mark I just always assumed, and I know that assuming is not a smart thing to do, you know but I just always assumed that your dad, you know, as the years went by and he is getting older, you know, he maybe just didn’t know how to deal with America’s slide into debauchery and paganism and its sinful state. It’s gotten worse over the years. I just assumed well, you know what, he’s just an old fashion, old time preacher who is just going about this the wrong way but maybe his heart is right. I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe his heart is right and he is just going about this the wrong way and trying to take a stand. But what I’m hearing from you was that this was a lifetime of being an angry bitter person.

Mark: Yes and to please not mistake that. I mean for folks that are confused and possibly, I don’t know, troubled. It is about his hatefulness and it is about abusing. And it started, I don’t have recall of this, but when work was done in 1994 the local newspaper was trying to research and understand my father and they hired a guy and he worked with my brother and I for a year and produced a written work that I named. This writer let me name the work he completed, the writing he did, he let me name it. I named it ‘Addicted To Hate’. And my only condition, and my brother’s only condition, for working with this gentleman, was that he be true to the truth. If we were going to take the time to talk with him and work with him; and it happened to be during the years I spent doing professional healing, you know working with professionals to heal; and that was our only request, that he just tell the truth and not change that. And the local newspaper was unwilling to publish his completed work. So the writer put his writing on the internet so it is available. And the truth about what my father’s life was and about what he did, even though that local newspaper was unwilling to publish it for whatever their reasons were, I don’t blame them because my family was so litigious; they are all attorneys as you know. But the newspaper did not publish the writing and the writer put it on the internet and that is; you can rest assured; that is the absolute truth about my first 20 years of life with my father. And that it is about abuse and that is about my father’s hatefulness to his family and to the world around him. It had not evolved to the point where it had evolved this last twenty years when that writing was being done but it had already begun. He was already doing the hateful faxes to the local community. Somehow he would get information about their personal lives, some of the political leaders there in Topeka, he would put it in a fax and my brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces would spend the whole day faxing, literally. They would spend the whole day faxing to the local businesses. Filth . . . absolute filth about the local leaders there in Topeka. My father’s life is just a litany of details about a man who was hateful. My father said of himself that his father taught him that ‘if you are going to be in a fight you need to kick the other person in the shin as hard as you can and hit them in the mouth as hard as you can’ as his first lessons of how to relate to another human being. And that is what my father apparently learned. I cannot understand it from any other basis and it has taken me years to recover from that.

Rick: And through the years Mark, as you have wrestled with this, you still have not uncovered the root of this hatefulness, what was driving it, have you?

Mark: That local newspaper sent two of their reporters to Meridian and Porterville Mississippi and they spent two weeks in those little towns talking with people and asking questions. Thankfully I learned quite a little bit about my family because my father was quiet on the subject of his family. My father had rejected his dad and his family where he came from so I didn’t know anything about them, some wonderful things. My father’s mother was a wonderful Christian woman and his father had a tremendous reputation in the community and had gotten my father an appointment to West Point Naval Academy which my father declined when he was 16 years old. But those reporters could not find the root of the hatefulness. My father’s mother died when he was five years old. That is the only thing that I can speculate about as to the reason for my father being the way he was. His mother’s death must have been so disruptive to his soul is my best guess. I just do not know. The reporters were not able to really identify the reason for my father’s behavior. I look at my father’s behavior and I look at the behavior of Christ and there is something wrong here. Something is wrong!

Rick: Yes, a deep rooted bitterness and anger.

Mark: Yes.

Rick: And perhaps towards him-self which manifested. Maybe it was almost like a self-hate which he manifested in the world around him by lashing out at other people. I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe or explain it.

Mark: Yes. That’s why I just focus on behavior because it is just so hard to tell a person’s motive. And I am not judging Rick. I am bearing witness to the heart of Christ and I am bearing witness to the heart of my father and I am telling anybody that wants to hear it that there is no relationship between those two hearts.

Rick: Uh huh.

Mark: The heart of Christ has healed me completely. I have a full heart. And I am born again. And I walk by the Spirit. And I did not have that. I was born again when I was 11 years old but I had no idea who Christ was until 15 years later. There is just no relationship or comparison there between my father and his life and the life of Christ. Just no relationship! It is supposedly in the name of fundamentalism that my father was so mean and harsh and hateful. And Rick it breaks my heart because the most fundamental, and I believe this with all my heart, the most fundamental is when the woman taken in adultery was brought before the Lord and The Lord said: “Any of you standing here, any of you people right here; and he could be saying it to us; any of you that has no sin cast the first stone. If we could simply understand the grace of God! He drops grace bombs; he slops grace; he literally covers us with his grace.

Rick: Yes

Mark: And his love and his mercy and his goodness and his kindness. He is light and life.

Rick: And he also said to the woman ‘go and sin no more’.

Mark: Yes, that’s right.

Rick: But he said it with love. He didn’t threaten her. He forgave her and then he told her ‘now go and sin no more.’

Mark: Because He loves her and doesn’t want her to hurt herself any more.

Rick: That’s right!

Mark: And when the Lord tells us that it is his kindness and all of you who are judging . . . see Rick I had to work this out because I was terrified of hell. I had to work this out in the deepest core of my being. And I know it is true now. All of you who are judging are you now under the same exact condemnation as those you are judging!? Romans 2 is clear about that and that it is His kindness and His goodness. We need a soft response in our broken lost darkness. And that is exactly what the Lord supplied! When they released Barrabas and Jesus stood there quiet. And Jesus died for his sins and he died for my sins. What do we need? That is all we need. We need to understand the heart of Christ and His love and His gentleness and His goodness and His meekness and His humility and we need to try to be that way with the people in our lives. And it heals people Rick. That is what heals the soul. And it is breaking my heart to think that people are moving away from the Lord Jesus Christ who loves them and He gave His life for them and now He is up from the grave. And people are moving away from the hope and the light because of the hatefulness and meanness and nastiness and cruelty of my family. We must not do this. We must speak the truth in love.

Rick: That’s right. Uhm . . . Mark how many years did it take for you to be healed emotionally, spiritually, of the experiences that you had with your dad?

Mark: It took me until about 20 years ago. So I’ve been gone 40 years and that means it took me 20 years Rick. And the last 20 years I would say have been ‘normal’, whatever that is, a more normal sanctification and growth in The Lord. It took me 20 years to not be terrified, to not believe the lies about who God is and that God is my Father. And now I have a father. Took me 20 years! And I had a loving wife who is the same girl that I left there with. I have been married to her for 38 years . . . all of the love that she has given me and her father was everything you could ask for from a father, to me. I mean, Rick, you just can’t even comprehend the pervasiveness of the injury and the damage and the destruction caused from living with hate and from violence and abuse. Even with all of the support The Lord has provided for me, and all of that time . . . it took me 20 years even with all of the love and support I had since leaving. And I had to work at it on purpose and 7 years of that 20 years was sometimes two or three times a week going and facing myself and facing the wretchedness within me and facing the abuse and praying and begging The Lord to help me get through it and get out of it. I worked hard to get the lies and poison out of my soul. And now I can play the hymns on the piano and rejoice in the truth of the words instead of remembering what it was like when I was a little boy.

Rick: Mark I know that there are people listening to you and me right now who have either gone through a time of physical, emotional, spiritual abuse or they are in it right now. I read letters and emails that come in here every week from listeners that are trapped in very destructive relationships.

Mark: Yes

Rick: What would you say to them? How can you help them through it?

Mark: I think the first step is just to say . . . the first step is to say ‘this is not working, I’m broken and I need help!’ And do not turn away from The Lord! By pure faith, pure blind faith if you need to, say ‘I don’t understand this, I can’t figure this out, but I know The Lord is what I need; The Lord is Who I need! I need to just give myself to Him and go get some help!” If they want to send me an email or call me, whatever they can do. They can get connected to people who know The Lord and understand how to help people heal. The people don’t heal you, they help you heal. And that is the hope, to just say that’s what I need and to go get help. And it is going to take some time.

Rick: How important is forgiveness?

Mark: Forgiveness is central! Defining forgiveness . . . meaning The Lord and you working in your heart to forgive the abuser and to forgive those who need to be forgiven. If you define it that the person who has been the abuser apologizes or says they are sorry or changes their behavior then you are going to wait forever in some cases. But it is very important to forgive as far as working that out of your own cells. You have to work it out of your own cells. Get it out of your body! Because it will kill you! Because if you do not, it will kill you! If you don’t do the work of forgiveness it will wear your body out just trying to maintain that non-forgiveness. The Lord knows that and that is why He expresses so strongly that we must forgive. We are not even able to experience His forgiveness of ourselves, Rick, until we have forgiven. Not fully! We get stuck in it and we have to get out of it!

Rick: I know. He told me one time when He was dealing with me. I had a terrible offense done to me and I was wrestling with it for a long time and one day He began to deal with me to forgive the perpetrator. And I told Him I can’t. I don’t know how to forgive.

Mark: Yes!

Rick: I said I don’t know. I don’t know how to forgive. I don’t know how to do this . . . because of the severity of the pain. And I remember He told me, Mark, he said Rick if you don’t forgive like me you won’t be able to live with me.

Mark: Yes!

Rick: And I said ‘Oh Lord! I have to live with you!’ And He said: ‘Then you have to forgive like me!’

Mark: Yes! There is something about the way He made our minds, the way He made our beings. We have to forgive Rick!

Rick: And the healing doesn’t start until we forgive the wrong-doer.

Mark: Yes!

Rick: And that opens up the Spiritual door for healing balm to be poured in from heaven and it begins to heal our hearts and minds. It starts with the forgiveness!

Mark: I call The Lord ‘The Wounded Healer’! He was wounded for us and He understands our deepest pain, our most painful feelings. His word is clear, expresses it clearly, He understands everything about what we are going through and what it is like and what it feels like. All of it!

Rick: If anybody had a reason to carry a grudge He had one.

Mark: Yes! And He didn’t!

Rick: When we think about what was done to Him. He had a reason to carry a grudge! But He forgave them. He forgave them!

Mark: Yes. He endured such harshness and such horrible treatment. I couldn’t endure it. I just don’t know how He did it. But He endured it and He asked the Father to forgive them and He is still doing it today! He is our intercessor.

Rick: Yes He is! Mark I appreciate you being here today.

Mark: Thank you!

Rick: I know this is blessing someone today. This is bringing healing to somebody today. I just know it. In my spirit I can feel the presence of The Lord right now in our studio.

Mark: I hope!

Rick: I know right now there are people that the Holy Spirit is dealing with you right now!

Mark: I hope!

Rick: Both to forgive and there are some people that need to forgive somebody else and then there are people that need to forgive themselves.

Mark: Yes!

Rick: Because sometimes it is not what somebody did to you but it is what you are doing to yourself!

Mark: Yes!

Rick: And you are your own worst enemy; you are abusing yourself!

Mark: Yes! I stood and watched my father, as a teenager Rick, abuse and mistreat and savagely beat and then I also joined in. I was either going to be beaten or I could beat my own brothers and sisters. So I joined in and I did the beating for my father. You don’t think I needed to forgive myself?!

Rick: Uh huh! Yes! Just forgive yourself. Just don’t punish yourself forever about something you did a long time ago!

Mark: That’s Right!! It’s past and it is removed.

Rick: Mark thank you so much. I appreciate you spending this time with us.

Mark: Thank you Rick!

Rick: Mark Chandler, son of Fred Phelps. Thank you Mark!

Rick: I wish I had more time to continue this conversation with Mark Chandler because I’m going to tell you, the presence of The Lord filled this studio. I don’t know what you were feeling but I could feel the presence of The Lord during this interview with Mark Chandler. I am really sensing that the Holy Spirit is dealing with a lot of people right now about forgiveness because The Lord desires to deliver you from the bondage that you are in. Either you are punishing yourself for past mistakes and sins or you can’t let go of what somebody has done to you or is doing to you right now. Regardless you are paying the price! And forgiveness is the beginning. God’s grace and miracles and love won’t flow into your life to bring healing until you first let go and forgive!

End of Radio Interview

Sniffing After Whores - Party of Four - Part Four

Many of you who have stayed with this last 4 part blog are probably hanging on to hear the end of the story of my relationship with my girlfriend. And you are wondering, and rightly so, how our two worlds and our two backgrounds could ever meld together.

As I mentioned at the end of last week’s blog, my father made me quit the job I had taken to earn extra money. He had no idea I had taken the job so I could pay for dates with my girlfriend. And it wasn't my study hours my father was concerned about. My father was completely against any time we spent working elsewhere since it took time away from work we could be doing for 'The Place'. He simply did not want me focusing on ANYTHING other than what HE wanted me to do! He wanted control. It was not about my earning money; it was that he did not want ANYONE working ANYWHERE or doing ANYTHING that was not at ‘The Place’ under his immediate and direct control.

So, I had to shave a dollar here and there off my candy sales and summer yard work to court my girlfriend. I would sneak the car for a few hours and take her to a movie or dinner at a fast food restaurant.

Once, we were in the Taco Tico, a fast-food restaurant at 15th and Lane, around 9 p.m. when the place was robbed. Two men in ski masks came in, and my girlfriend and I took off out of the place. We didn't want our names involved as witnesses because my father would have heard about it on the evening news and the jig would have been up - my secret life of dating.

My now wife adds, laughing "Trouble was, after we hit the sidewalk running, only then did it occur to us everyone would think we were the ones who'd just robbed Taco Tico."

Despite my girlfriend’s quiet demeanor and biblical mane, I soon realized she was not plugged in to the world according to Pastor Phelps. For example, one day after Debbie had died, Nate, Jonathan and I were out in the car selling candy. Following Fred Jr.’s habit, I had brought my girlfriend along with us, and we sat and smooched while the two younger boys worked in the neighborhood. (I learn quickly!) When Nate came back to report scant sales for that day, I gave the command by reflex: "Chin chin!" And Nate put his chin on the back of the front seat.

With my girlfriend sitting beside me, I punched Nate painfully in the face for his sales shortfall, as usual. In equal reflex, one from another moral world, my mild-mannered girlfriend immediately slapped me hard enough to bring stars. "Why did you..." I asked in stunned bewilderment. "Why did you do that?" she demanded. Soon the esteem I had for this petite firecracker-five-feet-two, eyes of blue, and with a fist like my father - caused me to begin opening my heart to her radically different view of human relationships.

For several years before I met my girlfriend, I had been my father’s assistant master-at-arms: when there was a beating due one of my siblings, sometimes my kind father would order me to do it. "At first I thought it was a great idea," says Nate, who received most of his elder brother's ministrations, "because he didn't have my father's violent spirit when he swung the oak mattock handle. However, that was short-lived. After a few less than satisfactory beatings-from the old man’s viewpoint-he threatened to beat Mark instead. Suffice it to say that afterwards I couldn't tell the difference between one of my father's and one of my brother's beatings - except maybe in their angle of attack."

I agree with Nate. My father would tell me to do it and then he'd go upstairs and yell down to us in the church: 'If I don't hear it up here, it's you who'll get the beating!' Now, however, confused by my new feelings for this remarkable girl I was getting to know, I began to slam the oak mattock handle onto the pew cushions instead. It sounded sufficiently similar to the sound when I did hit Nate and Nate would just howl in pain every time I hit the pew. It worked perfectly. But it wasn't until my new girlfriend and her influence that it would have ever occurred to me to do that.

In a matter of months this teenager with her radically different world view was making a major crack in the crumbling façade of my father’s hatred. Love and its power to conquer hatred were being shown to me by a young teenage girl. And once my father’s wall of hatred and control started to fall my life would change. Forever!

I've been told children from abusive homes are unable to develop empathy. Boy that was us. It was survival . . . period. Save yourself. Remember how I said I felt when Mom used to drive off with everyone in the car, and Nate would get left behind, running alongside my window, begging not to be left alone with my father? I literally could not feel for Nate at that moment in my young life. I had only enough energy and stability to put one foot after the other and do what was required to stay alive and not be beaten myself.

God puts in us strong instincts of self- preservation. What it takes to care for others and do selfless and courageous acts must be taught by strong committed adults. In our abusive world nothing was being taught that would build our character, or our love for others, or our compassion. I didn't even know how to consider what Nate might be going through. I was just glad I was getting out of the house for a little while, and that was all that mattered.

But, after I'd been around my girlfriend, what was going on inside other people suddenly started to matter to me. I guess you could say she kissed me and changed me from the frightened little frog my father had made me. After I fell in love with my girlfriend, it made me begin to want to care about others. She gave me the courage to become much more of a person as she modeled a good life. Even at her young age. I have come to see how the Savior of the world, Jesus, would use a principled and loving young lady to be my savior to pull me out of the cult. To say I am eternally grateful to both of them is truly not thanks enough.

Little wonder my girlfriend is Nate's favorite sister-in-law still today. Though my girlfriend refused to join my father’s church, she continued to attend Sunday services there for nearly two years. "I knew if I didn't, Mark's father would make it even harder, if not impossible for me to see him" she says.

"During that time, I learned things about Fred Sr. I didn't like." Such as? "That God hates. It seemed to me he was putting his own words in God's mouth. I mean, Mark's father was a pretty disturbed guy. I could see that and I was only 15. It's just sad he didn't have the self-knowledge to leave religion out of it and get some help. Also I didn't like his attitude toward family. His belief in beating children, and that women were servants to men. As a future wife and mother, that left me little motivation to join his claustrophobic community."

Toward the end of my girlfriend's two-year ceasefire with the pale-hearted Pastor, she arrived for services early one Sunday--too early. My sister Katherine was getting beaten with the oak mattock handle upstairs. In shock, my girlfriend listened to my sister's screams of pain and sobbing pleas for the good Pastor to stop. He didn't.

My girlfriend turned on her heel and walked out. Shirley Phelps, who always wept hysterically whenever her father went into his beating mode, ran after my girlfriend. At the door she grabbed her arm.

"Please . . . please...," she sobbed. "He doesn't mean it . . . he doesn't know what he's doing..." I remember my girlfriend stopped, whirled around, and looked Shirl dead in the eye. 'No, Shirl,' she said, 'you're wrong. He does mean it.' And she left.

Shortly after, my father decided to dish my girlfriend some of the abuse he'd used on Debbie Valgos. Following Sunday services, while my girlfriend waited within earshot in the church, my father collared me for a 'talk' in the law offices adjoining. He was punching and kicking me, and yelling in crude, filthy anatomical detail everything he said he bet I was doing to my girlfriend when we were alone. He knew she would hear, and that's why he did it. The level of my father’s crudeness and callousness toward the people of his church was astounding.

And that was my girlfriend's last Sunday at the Westboro Baptist Church. She walked out and down to the shopping center on Gage Boulevard where she called her father to come pick her up. The girl with the knowledge of right and wrong had had enough. My father had stepped over a line.

My girlfriend knew that day that she needed to leave the church and in doing so had to leave me. When she told me it was over she never asked me to leave the church. She didn't believe I could. She knew I had been taught that, if I left, I would be taken by God during the first night while I slept and that I would wake up in hell. My girlfriend didn’t want me to have to face that terror. She was looking out for my good then and she has never stopped.

For my part, I was in despair. At age 19 I flung myself face down in my girlfriend's front yard and cried. I cried because I was losing the person I believed was the best person ever to have come into my life. And there I remained for two hours, embarrassing her parents in front of the neighbors. My girlfriend's dad even came to her and told her, "I didn't realize you were so hard-hearted." My beached whale impersonation did not sway my girlfriend. Have I told you how strong my wife is?

Such emotional firmness in a 16 year-old was remarkable. But my girlfriend didn't know what else to do. She had no intention of joining the Westboro family cult and raising children in that kind of environment. And she knew I wouldn't leave. Meanwhile, one can only imagine the kind of talk this generated among the deeper keels in my girlfriend's cheerleading set. She was certainly a girl with a foot in both worlds. And a firm, mature head to know how to navigate each!

After the break-up, neither my girlfriend nor I slept or ate for days. I walked around in a fog. Then I found out I was going to get a 'B' instead of an 'A' in one of my college courses at Washburn University. That meant I was in for more trouble with my father. Somehow the idea that my father might now hurt my body after making my heart so miserable . . . it just seemed insane and ridiculous . . . and if all this misery was to please God, I was beginning to think it was awfully mean and petty for a Being that had created such a majestic universe... and that's when I began to hope my girlfriend might be right. That God might really be a loving God, and not full of hate like my father. . .and that if He was made of love . . . then he wouldn't send me to hell for loving her so much, would He? Oh the power of the truth coming from my girlfriend’s knowledge of her God was beginning to set me on a path that would one day set me totally free!

So I did it. I just grabbed some clothes and left. An acquaintance had told me if I ever wanted to leave, I'd be welcome to stay with his family the first few days. Little did he know how much that simple offer was to challenge and encourage me that one day, maybe, I would do it! I just showed up on their doorstep and they took me in for one night.

It might seem funny now to some who did not grow up in the brainwashing our family was exposed to, but those were some of the most terrifying hours of my life. I lay awake most of the night in their guest room, in cold, absolute cold terror; waiting for God to kill me. Afraid if I fell asleep, I'd wake up in hell. Literally! The ultimate nightmare! But I didn't. I woke up in the same bed the next morning. It was then I realized God might be nicer and the world bigger than my father had taught. Oh, what a glorious morning of beginning that was! And I thank my God for that day!

I landed on my feet, renting a room from a retired couple and worked; first as a busboy, then as a salesman in a downtown shoe store. My girlfriend and I were reunited, dating on weekends and talking every night on the phone.

However, I was in a serious car accident six weeks later and miraculously escaped injury. That shook me up. I thought God was giving me one last chance before He did what my father said He'd do. So I high-tailed it back home. And my girlfriend broke it off again. “This time I wasn't so strong," she recalls. "I was totally miserable. I almost went over there many times." I really cannot communicate to you the depth of my gratefulness to my wife for remaining strong during that time. And it must have been so difficult for her!

By this time my father had taken to calling my girlfriend 'the Philistine Whore.' So now life with my father and a broken heart soon had me willing to play tennis with death once more. After two weeks, I returned to my new life, only to have my father swoop in to snatch me back, as he had with my sister Katherine and my brother Fred Jr.

That time, however, a miracle happened. Just as we pulled up to the church on W. 12th Street, some of my father’s law clients pulled up too. It was like a Hitchcock film: My father couldn't do anything in front of them, so I just got out of the car, walked through the front door of the law office (housed within the church building along with our family residence), and out the back door. Nobody stopped me. Freedom!

After that, I held on to my independence and my dreams tenaciously.

I knew I made enough money for only two of the following: an apartment; a car; and college tuition. I needed the car; and - now that it was for me and not my father - I really wanted to finish college.

For a year, I slept in my car or in the backroom of the print shop where I worked all day. In the evenings I took classes, and on weekends I worked as a waiter at Flaming Steer steak house just south of 37th Street on Topeka Boulevard. I took my showers at the YMCA downtown and did most of my studying while running the offset presses on the job. My girlfriend completed her junior year and senior years at Topeka High, and we dated on weekends. Despite my father’s curiously vivid and explicit imagination, our relationship remained chaste and unconsummated.

When my brother Fred Jr. asked me to be his best man at his wedding, I was thrilled and agreed. But when I showed up at the Westboro church for the ceremony, my father demanded I recant and return to ‘The Place’ or depart before the wedding went forward.

It was a trap! If my father ever missed a beat at being a jerk he did it before I was born.

I departed.

I have never been back. Well not until just a few weeks ago. That story will be in a later blog.

Nor did my father miss a beat damning me to the fires of hell. When I refused to die in my sleep, my father sent me my notice of eviction from the assembled elect of ‘The Place.’ I was cast out and banished forever from ‘The Place.’ My father then tore up both my picture and Katherine's picture in front of the rest of the family. (Katherine was also gone by then; she was working as a waitress and living with a soldier near 12th and Topeka Avenue. Apparently the GI took a dim view of anyone kidnapping his girlfriend, and the Phelps quick-reaction team left her unmolested.)

I did see my father again however. Once! At the YMCA gym one day, my father took the time to stalk up to me, close so no one else could hear, and whisper, glistening with hatred: "I hope God kills you."

God didn't.

In May, 1976, I graduated from Washburn University with a business degree. In August of that year, I married my childhood sweetheart after a courtship that had lasted since 1971. I was 22. She was 19. Though the family Phelps was all invited, none of them came. Many of them might have wanted to be there, but they had been forbidden to attend. My father, the good Pastor, had threatened anyone who did attend my wedding with being banished from ‘The Place’ and from the family.

My father’s methods involved erasing people from his life who did not live up to his code and then he moved on to demolishing them verbally for years. Does that sound like a man with the courage of his convictions or someone who is convincing himself?

The cramped apartment at 15th and Lane quickly became the headquarters for Phelps exiles. At one point, both my brother Nate and my sister Margie were living within its tiny confines alongside my wife and me. We didn't have much time to ourselves. I brought half my family out with me! Fortunately, Nate and I have always been friends. And, back then at least, Margie and I were too.

Later my wife and I would be the consolation and support for Paulette, Jonathan's girlfriend, who was driven from Westboro Baptist Church when she became pregnant by my brother Jonathan. Abandoned by Jonathan and rejected by his family, Paulette went through some pretty tough times.

Certainly today, if any of my family; if any of my nephews or nieces or brothers or sisters truly needed help, for refuge, for unconditional love, my wife and I, and Nate, would make ourselves available. Sadly the poison runs mighty deep in the hearts of those who have been abused and been blinded by hate. I doubt they would feel comfortable getting solace and comfort from us. But if they wanted it, it would most definitely be theirs.

So far, we haven’t had any takers on our offers. It’s understandable, certainly, that none in our family would want to associate with the one who chose a life with a woman who my father did not have on his “approved list.” I mean, who would want to associate with a ‘Philistine Whore!’ But from where I sit after 38 years of marriage with the one who was responsible for delivering me from a destructive cult and abuse, she has the highest approval rating I think a husband could ever give one woman. She has my undying admiration, love, respect and esteem. She is the heroine of my story. Our story.

Some of you reading this blog are longing to change your own stories. Many of you have poison in your souls just like I did and you want to begin to heal. And to bring to the surface the pain and agony of that poison and be set free. If I can be of any help to you as you take steps along that journey please let me know. A soul that is set free is an amazing thing of beauty! It is for freedom that Christ has set us free!

Mark Phelps

Sniffing After Whores - Party of Four - Part 3

In my last blog we ended with the untimely death of my brother’s beautiful girlfriend. This was a tragic death that would shake my brother at his core. But you remember the problem for Phelps children. We were not allowed to express normal feelings, true of many children of abuse. My father, Fred W. Phelps, Sr., simply had no place in his world for others feelings, either good or bad. He allowed only expressions of soldier-like support or the animated retelling of stories where we were the victors in fighting my father’s ideological battles for him. So when Fred Jr. needed to find comfort and solace to mourn for Debbie he would have to seek out someone other than my father, once again a perpetrator of wrong in my brother’s life.

Fred Jr. came to visit Mom, secretly. No one knew Fred Jr. was in the house. My brother Nate came into a room inadvertently and saw Fred Jr. and Mother sitting in chairs, facing each other. The eldest son had his head in her lap and she was stroking his hair. I have never talked to Nate about what that meant to him, but it must have been an unusual moment for him to see the great needs of a child being met by a parent.

Fred Jr. was crying for Debbie.

There's no question that my brother wanted to spend his life with Debbie. She was who he loved. And I knew her well enough to say my brother was the first light of hope she'd had in her life. When he left her, that light went out.

I think of Debbie sometimes. Debbie had a hard life before she met our family, and all she really needed was someone who would value her. If my father had allowed that, Debbie might have really found some hope and blossomed in her life.

In Matthew 12:20 Jesus says, 'the bruised reed I will not break; the flickering candle I won't snuff out; instead I will be your hope'. These verses are talking about people who are at a very low place in their lives and need extra special care. It was Jesus' desire to make it very clear He wanted to reach out to people whose lives felt close to being “snuffed out.” He wanted to bring them hope they might never have received before.

Jesus called himself the Good Shepherd. He was modeling very clearly what he expected leaders to do. When you read about Jesus’ life you sense his tremendous compassion for the downtrodden and the weak but he had very strong words of warning to religious leaders. When you look at the evil and the hurt my father caused during his lifetime, my father had no right to the title of 'pastor'- never mind 'guardian of ‘The Place’.’

Two years later, Fred Jr. married Betty, the woman he'd brought home that Valentine's Day. Betty was finally approved by his father.

Betty was music major at K-State when she met Fred Jr. She had perfect pitch and played many instruments. However, she transferred to Washburn for her last two years of college, and went to law school on command. What dreams did she give up in that decision? Or perhaps Betty made the choice to go to law school. I know Fred Jr. did not. Not really! He had a passion for history and wanted to teach history.

I remember a time in 1973, when Betty was visiting Fred Jr. in the kitchen and the pastor started beating our brother, Nate, savagely with the oak mattock handle in the adjoining church auditorium. Betty had been eating a cantaloupe and she jabbed her spoon all the way through it and screamed: “Stop it!" It was loud enough for my father to hear out in the church auditorium. The good pastor came in from the church auditorium where he'd been beating Nate, and he said to Betty: 'You got a problem with this?' Then he turned to Fred Jr.: "If that girl has a problem with this, then I'm not going to put up with it! You better get her under subjection, or you're not gonna be marryin' her!"

In one of his FAX campaigns to the local Topeka community a few years later, the pastor, my father, Fred W. Phelps, Sr., stated: "Wives who have strayed too far from traditional family values of home and children need to be whipped into godly obedience. Sparing the rod and sparing either the children or the women is a strategy that fundamentalist Christians reject.”

I do not know of anyone who calls himself a true follower of Christ who would condone whipping anybody for any reason! My father was preaching something that is simply not found in the Bible. There was never to be a time where a husband would lay violent hands on a wife. For any reason!!

Betty was put in her place by my father and she was the butt of numerous negative comments from the pulpit over the following months until she finally displayed the 'proper spirit of subjection and obedience'. Betty sat under my father’s preaching for months having to endure the humiliation he was heaping on her. Finally, Betty chose to willingly cease to be the person she was to meet my father’s desires.

When I think back on the brief life of Debbie Valgos, this amazing 17 year old, I realize my father was frightened of Debbie! He was actually frightened by the power of a life that still had joy and passion in it! It was something my father could never compete with. He knew she'd take Fred Jr. from him. Yes, she might give Fred Jr. the chance of having a truly joy-filled life, but if my father let that happen he would truly lose his son Fred. And my father would lose a soldier in his army. His first born son!

Seeing Debbie's weak spot- her self-esteem - my father did everything in his power to drive a sword through it... right into her heart. Debbie didn't hate life like my father did. She loved life despite all her reasons to despair. She had an indomitable spirit. My father knew she'd never fit in at his stoic doom and gloom ‘church’. Eventually she'd want to leave to go somewhere where life could be lived to the fullest and pull Fred Jr. along with her.

My father could not brook any insubordination in his “church.” It seems that Debbie was a person so full of life, and zest that her very presence seemed insubordinate! My father simply could not stand someone who was happy, or self-possessed, or had a dream or believed in herself or even believed in tomorrow and what it might bring. My father seemed bent on forcing all people into his mold. After he crushed the life out of someone, they were actually worth so much more to him. Because without a will to be one’s own man or woman, and without the ability to at least try to use the beautiful gifts God put in us, we tend to shrivel up into shells of whom we were meant to be. And shells are a whole lot easier to command.

Sitting in her mother's house, the sinking afternoon sun pours through the screen door, casting its soft gold across the widow's tattered carpet. Debbie’s mother offers, a little reluctantly and her eyes bright with guilt, the last moments of her daughter’s life: a First Communion veil; a dried corsage from an Easter Sunday get-to-together, and the photo album Debbie kept at the orphanage. On its cover, printed in the awkward, block letters of a bruised but hopeful new reed, a flickering candle not yet quenched, are the words:

I LOVE FRED PHELPS

"Debbie Valgos was a whore extraordinaire," snaps Fred Jr’s sister, Margie. But the good pastor’s words sound empty and formulaic on the daughter's tongue. What a pathetic justification for the loss of this beautiful, spirited young woman. Bankrupt words from a bankrupt system! And any who knew Debbie simply do not believe those words.

There is a verse in Philippians where Paul exhorts all followers of Christ to grow in love. To really grow in it! He says “This is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ Jesus.”

My family did not exhibit love first of all, but they certainly weren’t choosing to let their love grow in knowledge! Or depth of insight! My sister’s comment about Debbie showed a complete lack of insight! And this verse makes it clear that a love that is not growing in knowledge will not be able to discern what is best. My family did not love, so they were never, ever going to be able to discern what is best . . . about Debbie Valgos or anybody else.

And the end of this verse mentions the real consequences if our love isn’t discerning. We will NOT know what is best. We will simply not walk in a pure way or a blameless way. My family sadly has walked in a way FILLED with blame. All because they did not understand that a faith that isn’t filled with love simply can’t “get it right.” Not ever. Said another way, a life that lacks love will be a life filled with blame. That would describe my father’s church and what came from his hatred. And the blame for Debbie’s death is partly on them.

Research indicates that three out of four children in criminally abusive families will be unable to surmount their experience. As adults, they will rationalize their past and will accept abusive behavior as the norm in both the outside world and their personal lives.

It is instructive that nine of the 13 Phelps children, almost exactly the predicted ratio, continue to embrace the pastor's abusive world and ways. I am one of the few who made it over the wall at Westboro. I made it over the many barriers and managed to escape. And I hope my story can be a small beacon of hope to others who have survived abusive families. And who are ready to go on to lead different lives. Lives filled with hope and purpose they have never lived before. That is my strong desire as I write this blog. If I was able to be set free from the poison and pain of my past I know that others can.

I might still be my father’s point man today if it hadn’t been for a pretty 13 year old I met that evening at the skating rink. In May of 1971, a few months after Fred and Debbie had been dragged back from their aborted elopement, Fred Jr. and I met Debbie at the skating rink. Fred Jr. and Debbie paired off, and I remember I was rolling along alone on my rented skates, wishing for my hundred dollar pros Fred Jr. had sold, when suddenly a petite girl, slim and shapely, with long dark hair hanging halfway down her back sailed by. She fixed her beautiful blue eyes on me, smiled and said "You're a good skater!" And she pulled my heart right off my sleeve. I was only 16, and she, 13, but for me the search for my life's mate was over.

Only two months after rescuing his eldest from the charms of the 'whore-extraordinaire', my father found another wily ally of the serpent threatening his second son; my new girlfriend. My father actually perceived all future spouses of his children as allies of the devil. I think this was partly because he knew these spouses would naturally pull us away from him. But also I think my father had such distrust of the human race that he never was able to see any potential for good in our future spouses. In any of them! Even the hand-picked ones! He just had such a profound need to control us and use us as his pawns that all our marriages seemed a waste of time to him. But somehow he couldn’t think of any legitimate way to stop us from getting married. So, he would do his best to try to poison and control our choices in whatever ways he could. So my father saw my new girlfriend as a threat to be sure. And little did he know what a threat she would end up being. And what an incredible force for good she has been for those who have left the fold.

This girl was no fragile psyche, vulnerable and clueless when it came to dealing with abusive authority figures, as Debbie Valgos would be. Raised Catholic, Debbie may have had no criteria by which to identify Protestant heresies, and, coming from a broken home, she might have had no expectations of being esteemed by others or treated with kindness by the outside world.

My girlfriend and future wife to be came from a conservative Lutheran family firmly grounded in the unconditional love of God the Bible speaks about. Even as a young teenager my wife had high self-esteem and a very clear idea of right from wrong. Her parents were as firm about their God of love and their love for her as my father was about his hateful god and his hate for all. Little did my father know that he had just met his match! This girl, though slight and shy, was not going to accept my father’s interpretation of the Bible, his personal myth; nor would she take to being called a 'whore.' But, at first, things went well between the two.

A few weeks after my girlfriend and I had met to skate again and I had been calling her secretly by phone, she came to church. It was on that Sunday in early June that Debbie first came as well. Things went better for my girlfriend because the pastor believed her long hair showed her subjection to God and man. And her naturally shy and quiet way belied the stout heart within her.

If his boys had to have mates, here was a good example of the kind of girl my father wanted to see joining his church. Not the sassy, rebellious, Catholic, blonde-with-the-page-boy-cut Fred Jr. had brought home.

In high school, the disfavor of our family name, combined with the pastor's refusal to allow his children any participation in extracurricular activities, assured the Phelps kids were the pariahs of Topeka West High School. So Fred Jr. and I were both pleased with ourselves that we had the great fortune of meeting such wonderful girls!

Across town under the gothic vaults of Topeka High School, my girlfriend was quite the opposite of a pariah. She had many friends and became one of the school's cheerleaders. It was a mystery to everyone why she insisted on dating a member of the Addams family over on 12th Street. My girlfriend remembers the curious questions and the biting comments she got.

So why did she? She laughs "At first? Because he was a good skater, and he was cute – but remember, I was only 13. That's what 13 year olds notice. Later, it's not so important if they skate or not" she laughs again. "Seriously though, he had so much energy and he was very smart and he was really sweet to me. What chance did I have? Even my dad told me I wouldn't find a better one!"

Because she was just 13, her parents at first would only allow me to visit her at their home. I would sneak out whenever I could, or drop by while on candy sales. After a year and a half, her father agreed to let us date. He even offered to give me enough for dinner and a movie out. (My girlfriend had been attending services every Sunday at my father’s lonely keep, and she had invited her parents several times – and they saw enough for her dad to feel sorry for me.) My father knew nothing about my home courting advantage, or our plans to date.

I refused my future father-in-law’s offer to pay for our date and instead found a weekend job as a busboy in the restaurant at the Ramada Inn on Fairlawn Road in Topeka. That lasted one shift. My father found out about my endeavor to expand my independence and promptly beat me. In fact he punched me in the eye Sunday night immediately before church service. I promptly assumed my position at the church organ that night. I was so angry. My tears of anger made it hard to read the notes. But I did not let anyone see me crying. After the beating, he forced me to quit the job and forbade me to take another.

Perhaps this blog, even though it ends before we go on to its conclusion in #4 next week will help you see what difficulty it would be for Phelps children to follow the dictates of their own conscience and their own spirits. Especially when it came to the spouses we would choose. For those of you who have suffered abuse from a parent especially you may see parallels in your own life.

The abusing parent finds it especially difficult for their children to appropriately grow up and exercise adult decision making because it can signal the end of their reign of terror over that particular child. Often you will see the parent stepping up their fear tactics and making it clear that there is no purpose in telling anyone about the abuse. And to keep the child or fledgling adult tied to them in fear. Keeping secrets is a top priority in maintaining abusive control!

Perhaps some of you find yourselves in fear as you ponder seeking help. Perhaps as you imagine beginning to tell your story that there is just too much pain and that if you ever take the lid off of your rage and anger for the way you were abused you might not be able to contain it. I would love for you to write to me if you want to process this idea. Of beginning to allow light to shine into the dark places of your heart. Where the pain has been closed off, and held at bay, for maybe decades. Oh, friend, I would love to help you begin to consider the process of working toward healing. Or perhaps listen to a part of your story no one has ever heard.

Mark Phelps