Introduction
Christ’s redemptive love can overcome any amount of rejection you face. Pa shares how, after not knowing anything about his biological father, his stepfather made it clear that he was not a part of the family and taught him from a very early age to show no emotion, except anger and contempt.
Intense feelings of rejection along with an inability to grieve even when his childhood girlfriend died, put him in a dangerous spot psychologically. He intentionally did things to ensure he still felt no emotion and began to grow apathy towards everyone and everything. As a result, he reached out to God in desperation and asked him how He felt about people.
In an act of mercy, Pa began to weep for the first time in years as he felt the love God had for people. Between those events and then God calling him to the ministry, Pa, through Christ, began to restore the person he’d been created to be (Psalm 139:14).
God’s only request when calling Pa to the ministry was to tell the people that He loved them, and Pa’s been doing that for nearly 6 decades now. As his family, we are saddened when we hear the struggles he went through but are inspired every time we hear how and when he’s touched someone’s life with that message from God: “We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
The Discussion
Looking Back
Pa: You know, sometimes it is hard to look back at your life, because at some point in your life, you may not have accumulated enough time and experience to be able to look back and see things or try to determine what your life has meant. So I’m going to look back, because I’m 77. I got a long way to look back. I’m going look back 75 years to start with, because I’m going talk about how grief and rejection affects us.
He’s a Sissy
I can remember when I was two years old. And people say, “Oh, you can’t remember that, Pa.”
“Yeah, I can.” I remember being at a park in Amarillo, TX. It was Memorial Park . . . downtown. Next to it is a college right now. I remember being there with my mom, and my older sister, and my mom’s new boyfriend . . . who later would become my stepfather. I can remember that I had a big ball. It was probably a soccer ball, but to me it seemed like a basketball.
And I was so excited playing with it. I could kick it, and it would go in front of me. I’d run, pick it up, and kick it again. And my stepfather was there, and he encouraged me, “Kick it to me. Kick it to me.” So I did. I kicked it to him, and he turned around and kicked it back. But when he kicked it back, it was so hard, it actually knocked me over, knocked the breath out of me, scared me, and I started crying.
Of course, my mom came to my rescue and was like, “Well, what’s wrong? What’s wrong?”
And my stepfather said, “Oh, he’s just a sissy. He can’t take anything.” And so that began kind of my thoughts about myself, and about how to deal with things, how to deal with grief, and what is safe and what is not safe.
Substitute Friend
What I want to zero in on, is that in my family, I was the black sheep. Later I had another sister by him. There were the two girls, mother, dad, and me. And I was never a part. I never belonged to it. So, it was just a lot easier not to feel that you’re a part of the family, which I didn’t. And it didn’t bother me as long as I had a substitute.
Well, my substitute was my dog. Oh, I loved my dog. I loved my puppies. I had a lot of puppies. And the reason I had a lot of puppies is because you get them in the spring and then you wait six to nine months, and they die of distemper. Mine had always done that, because my dad would not put out the $2 for a distemper shot.
Well, I had a dog that I was especially fond of. I just really liked him. The reason I liked him is because he liked me. We bonded. He was my source, my contact. He was the only reason I didn’t become such a hermit that I hated everybody.
So anyway, I can remember one winter in Amarillo, and it’s cold. And I went out after school to feed my dog, and he was lying in his doghouse, listlessly. I figured out from my past experiences that he probably had distemper. And so, I’m like, “Okay, I’ve got to do something, because he’s going to die as the others had died.” I went in, and I found my piggy bank. And I took it apart, and I came up with just under $2. And I thought, “Man, this is what I’ve got, and I’ve got to go buy my dog some medicine.”
I walked to the grocery store. Now, the grocery store was between five and seven miles away, and I bought what I could with my money, which came down to cough syrup. That’s all I had the money for. I walked back home, triumphantly but cold, and this was all by myself. And I was maybe 8, maybe 10. I walked back home, and my dog had died.
And so totally in despair, I took my dog, and I put him in my red wagon. I found a shovel, and I found a pick. And I carried him across the railroad tracks – we lived in that part of town, across the railroad tracks – out into an open field. And I buried him.
And I came back home, and I was not crying but just so intently sad. My best friend had just died. I went in, and I didn’t say anything during the meal. I had to eat, because it was required, or you would get punished. But afterwards, I just went to my room with the lights off, and I just sat there on my bed. And I just thought about my dog that I had lost, very sorrowful, but I wasn’t crying. My stepfather stormed into the room, turned on the light, and said, “Get up from there. I don’t want you to do that again.”
I’m like, “Okay, apparently this is not something you do.”
Uncle George
So then, two years later, maybe, my stepfather had a younger brother. Uncle George, I called him, who was the delight of my life. And I figured out later the reason I liked Uncle George was really simple. He liked me. He was the first person that I’d met that liked me. And so, he would kid with me and everything, and I really, really liked him.
And I remember, one night in the summer, when I was 12, my stepfather came in and said, “Get up. You’ve got to go with me.” We went to a place called Buffalo Lake, and he left me in the car. It was like way early in the morning. And he came back, and he just looked at me, and he said, “George died. He drowned. But we found his body.” That’s it. That’s all he said.
I said, “Okay.” He took me to my grandma’s house. And I can remember that night, because I didn’t sleep. But I was always like, “I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming. I know my Uncle George isn’t dead. I’m dreaming. That’s just a dream.” I tried and tried and tried to wake up, but I never could. And the next morning, he came and got me. And of course, it was his own brother, but he didn’t cry. He didn’t do anything. And I knew I was not supposed to.
So we went to the funeral, and I can remember sitting in the seat. And it was my stepfather, my mom, me, and then my sisters. I was sitting there, and when they talked about my Uncle George, and they opened the casket, I started sobbing, just sobbing, because that, again, was the second time my very best friend had died.
And I can remember just such a loss. My father leaned over to me, and he said, “If you don’t shut up, I’ll take you out of here, and I will beat you.”
And I’m like, “Okay. Okay.” The threat versus the tears, so I just shut up. And then I made a promise to myself. I said, “I’ll never cry again.” Let’s move it along a little bit, because I have a point to this story.
Dana
So then about five or six years later, I had a girlfriend that I grew up with, Dana. I thought I’d marry her – cute little thing. I can remember one Wednesday night, she came to church, and I was there. And I reached out, and I took her hand to shake it, and she said, “Don’t shake it so hard. It hurts.”
And I thought, “Well, I didn’t shake your hand hard.”
And she said, “There’s a knot right on the back of my hand. I don’t know what it is, but it’s real sore.”
And I said, “Okay.”
Well, the knot turned out to be cancer. And for the next six months, I think I visited her every single day. And then at the time, I had gone away for the weekend and come back, and she had died. I was there when she was lying in wait. And I just could not accept that she was dead. I just could not accept it. The grief was there, but no tears. I never shed a tear for anything. I’d made my promise, and I didn’t.
And after that, I really began to be concerned because I said, “Mike, you don’t feel.” And you know what? I didn’t. I didn’t care about anybody. I didn’t care about anything. I never got close to anything. No more pets. No more anything. And it’s just like, I was just stone cold. And it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. My mom used to yell at me and say, “I’m seriously worried about you, because you have no emotions.”
And in my heart, I was thinking, “Emotions don’t do you any good. They just cause you more pain. As love doesn’t do you any good. It just causes you more pain.”
It Broke Me
And I can remember at one point in time on a Sunday morning, I was really concerned because everybody was like, “Well, Mike, everybody’s crying and you’re not. Everybody cries about things. God loves them, and they cry. You don’t do anything. You are numb, dead inside. You’re a zombie.” And I remember going to the altar and praying that Sunday morning. It wasn’t different than any other time. There was no emotion.
It’s just like back then, being Assemblies of God, if you don’t go to the altar, they know you’re a sinner. So I went to the altar, and I made one statement. You see, I don’t know how old I was? 18? It had been six, seven years. I never cried a tear, not one, not one for anything or anybody – not even Dana, never cried for Dana. So, I was praying, passing my time until it was enough to be righteous, and then I would get up and leave.
And I asked a question, I said, “God, tell me what you think about people.” And not expecting anything, I don’t know what I expected the answer to be. I don’t even know why I asked the question, but all of a sudden, I started weeping. I don’t mean crying. I mean weeping. I mean from the gut level of my heart, I was heaving. I was heaving, just broken, broken. And because I was feeling the love of God for people and how He loved them. And I mean, it just broke me.
And I’m thinking that if I had not had that experience, psychologically, I would have been a tragic case. I could have well been a sociopath. So that was my journey. We talk about salvation being from sin, but sometimes salvation can be from just a horrendous sense of grief, loneliness, and forbearance. Like you don’t belong anywhere, and there’s nothing in life anymore. You wake up every morning, and it’s nighttime. You go to bed at night grateful that there is no more daytime. But it was God’s grace, only by His grace, that made me then have compassion.
Tell Them That I Love Them
And when God called me into the ministry, and He said to me, “Mike, tell them I love them.” And that’s all. And that was the most redemptive thing I had ever heard. Not that God died for our sins, but that He genuinely loves us. So that was part of my journey, and part of my trials, and part of my struggles. So I am so thankful that God’s love can be redemptive in the midst of anything we face.
Redemptive Love
Jeremiah: You’re a man who still loves dogs, and has had many dogs, and maybe loves his dogs, maybe not more than his family, but probably more than anybody else. They are the most rotten dogs in the world. Let’s just say that, right next to Michaela’s dog. You later went on to marry Mom. And I would say of two married people, no matter how much you bicker, how much you love each other, y’all are totally inseparable. I pray that when you die, y’all both go together, because either one of you are going to be intolerable without the other one.
Pa: Amen. Amen, brother.
Jeremiah: And I think the important part is redemption, that God takes us through the things that we go through, but He has a perfect plan inside of those things. And He can take those circumstances and make us more than what we would be without them and more than what we would be if we endured them without Him.
And so, kind of completing that story, we were raised always knowing Grandpa Royce. As a child, I didn’t know any of these stories. I didn’t know any of these pieces. As I got older, I did. But I can pretty well say that at some levels, maybe my grandpa mellowed out as he got older, as most not nice people do. They generally mellow with age, but they don’t necessarily change. And I’m not sure he ever changed.
You offered him a pretty major peace offering through all those things and offered him a chance of redemption through me and Chris. You offered him a chance to have a relationship with us. He didn’t necessarily capitalize on any of that. I mean, I’m not sure you can have much of a relationship with a rock. But you offered him a chance for that, whether he took it or not. And that’s something that only God can do.
I think, knowing who you are, you offering him that chance of redemption in his life through God, is something that only could have happened through God and through what He did through you. In that whole arc of that relationship, you offered him peace at the end whether he chose it or not.
Pa: You know, sometimes we get filled with bitterness and resentment as we look back, and we’re like, “You know, God. Punish. Punish. Punish. Redeem me. Redeem me.” And redemption is not because someone else who has abused us gets punished.
Redemption is because we don’t want that person to be punished, not by God. We don’t want them to go to hell. We don’t want them to suffer. In fact, it’s God’s grace and love that’s so overwhelming that it makes us realize that whatever we’ve suffered, it doesn’t warrant another person having to suffer separation from God.
When you look at it like that, there is nothing anyone can do to us that would warrant God not loving them and them not finding the love of God. Whether they do or not, that’s up to them.
Jeremiah: And I think it ties in perfectly with a scripture that was always difficult for me to understand. “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Because I always thought that was the gun, right? The peacemaker. It says, “Blessed are the peacemakers” And I think that whole process that you just described is exactly what a peacemaker is – to resolve people back to Christ, to give them a shot back. And you’ve been a peacemaker. Your whole life, you’ve been a peacemaker on many levels.
Pa: Well, yeah, part of it the 45, and part of it the other.
Jeremiah: Well, thank you for sharing that, Dad. I hope other people can keep walking their journeys to find that peace in their life and to complete that full journey of finding peace for themselves and to keep doing what God wants us to do, which is help bring people back to who He is.
Pa: Yeah, absolutely right.
Jeremiah: Love the people.
Pa: Absolutely right.
Jeremiah: Thanks, Dad.
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