Quite some time ago, I started to start telling my story here, and called it, “Introduction to My Story,” so you should to back and read that before reading this. Now, I plan to just write everything down, and go in order as best as I can. You can expect Wednesdays to be when I post in this series, and Fridays when I post on other topics.
Photo by Chris Ensminger on Unsplash
The Wolf knew my parents in his college psychology class as their professor, he officiated their wedding, and became a powerful influence in their lives in the years before my birth. Ultimately, he convinced them to move from our home in North Carolina to the South Carolina Lowcountry to help establish his new church when I was just 18 months old.
I didn’t stand a chance. As an infant, toddler, little girl, teenager, and young woman, I was trusting and naive, and he was conniving and calculated, speaking into my life through his control of my parents in my earliest memories, and then taking a much more direct place in my life as I grew. As I look back, I can see his methodical alienation of children from their parents, so he could have a direct access to us. He knew that we were the most malleable and susceptible. We had no outside experience, and the only life we ever knew was our life there in the cult. We could not understand that what was happening to us and each of our families was not normal, and was, in fact, abuse.
Leaving the church was a phrase that meant much more to us than just not attending on Sundays. To leave the church meant we were turning our back on God because we had turned our back on The Wolf. He always said he wanted us to follow God, but the line between following God and allegiance to The Wolf was blurry. I wanted nothing more than to please God, so I would do my best to follow everything The Wolf said, and I didn’t ever want to leave the church. I did everything I could to keep that from happening.
Although there was someone who meant my harm and meant to exploit and use me since I was born, God was the One writing my story and holding me in His hand for as long as I can remember. As a 4-year-old I understood that I was a sinner, and that I was incapable of stopping sinning because I would try with all my might to stop sinning every day, but I just kept on sinning. I wanted so badly to be able to tell my dad, when he got home from work, that I had perfectly obeyed all day, but I never could. I knew, even at 4, that I wanted, as we used to say, “ask Jesus into my heart,” and one night, after a particularly sinful day, I prayed with my dad to be saved.1
Just a few years after that, somewhere around 7 years old, I remember sitting cross-legged on a carpet in our Children’s Church class, looking up at a flannel graph and hearing my teacher explain what Jesus did on the cross for me. It was enormously weighty and breathtaking, and I remember grasping (to a degree) and internalizing the gravity of what Jesus went through. It went deeper than I had words for then, and even now, I still struggle to articulate it except to say that the Holy Spirit was working and that day deepened my childish understanding of who Jesus was and what He did. I sat quietly and speechless, obviously lost in serious thought, so later my Children’s Church teacher singled me out from the others to be sure I was ok. I didn’t know how to explain to her that I was in awe of what Jesus did, and I knew it was my salvation, so I think I just told her that I was thinking about Jesus dying on the cross.
As precious and clear as the Gospel was at first, it was nearly immediately muddied by a focus on self and accomplishments. I was not discipled to look to Christ, or to apply the Gospel daily, but definitely felt that I had to do the hard work of being a Christian. I don’t remember learning to ask God for help when I struggled, but to just try harder. I remember a lot of fear and shame. These kinds of teachings only became worse and worse as The Wolf continued exercise more and more control and practiced how to devour the flock while seeming to be a caring and selfless person.
Even in my earliest memories of him, before things changed and morphed into the hellish nightmare they eventually became, I remember being afraid around him, almost a reverential awe. He demanded respect and attention, and was the kind of person people wanted, even needed approval from. One time when I was very young, perhaps around 3, he prayed over me in a church service. He had a glass vial of anointing oil, that he kept up at a small, round table at the front of the church. He touched the oil to my head. I remember feeling my head burn where he had touched me. I remember the tone of his voice praying, and that I was frightened. I don’t remember the words, but I remember the power he seemed to have and that he had a very direct access to God that no one else did. I think what was so scary to me, too, was that things were happening to me outside of my control, and he must see things about me that I could never see, and he only continued to capitalize on that idea over the years until I fully relied on him to tell me everything. Over time, I thought he could look at me and know what I was thinking because over the years, he would stand and “prophesy” about people, and regardless of if it was true, people would have to take it and admit it because he was anointed, and you cannot touch God’s anointed, and no one could call him a liar.
The Wolf holds a PhD in professional counseling from Purdue University, specializing in Marriage and Family Counseling. He has an MA in Psychology from Western Kentucky University, Concentrating in Learning Theory and Psychobiology. His BS in Chemistry was from Clemson University, with a focus in biochemistry. He is smart. And I think he knew what he was doing to us all along. He used his high level of education on how people work, and how to help them, and rather than using that knowledge for helping the hurting, he preyed upon his own flock. He utilized tactics of mind control, and what now seems to me, particular kinds of therapeutic techniques without our knowledge or consent. He used us, alternatively exploiting and condemning us for our strengths, depending on what he needed. And for good measure, he shamed us for what he perceived as our weaknesses and sins. He continues to use all these tactics to cruelly abuse the flock, and has only become more and more open about it with time.
To be continued…
I want to point out carefully that I do not believe that salvation is a work, even of us saying the correct “Sinner’s Prayer.” I am simply recounting moments where it seems like God was bringing awareness and life to my heart as a child. The terms were all I had at that time.
Privileged to be a witness to your voice.