FINDING YOUR PURPOSE

Most people, who meet me and see everything I have and what God has accomplished through me, don’t believe me when I say that I had a difficult life. I was the youngest of six children, and the only girl. However, even though by the time I was born my family was pretty well off, my parents and my brothers had all experienced what it means to be really poor and black in this country. My parents had been dirt poor before I was born. I used to hear stories about what went on during those years, but I never experienced the sort of poverty my brothers did when they were little. People who have to live through awful things because they are too poor to be able to do anything about them often wind up carrying a tremendous fear of poverty. It can be like having a monkey ride your back, goading you into doing crazy things so that you never have to be poor again. By the time I was old enough to remember anything, we had plenty of money to spend, but a lot of it came from drugs. My daddy’s sisters and brothers lived downstairs from us and they were into dealing big-time. They had cash spilling out of drawers and cupboards. I could go downstairs almost any time I wanted, grab handfuls of the stuff and head for the nearest department store to buy anything I wanted—and no one ever missed that money. My father may have been involved in a few things that would raise some eyebrows in so-called polite society, but he believed strongly in those old-fashioned virtues known as respect and honor. I was about five or six years old when one of my older brothers, Jed, robbed a bank. The police had not yet caught up with him, and he might have been able to get away with it altogether. Now, my father had told Jed, several times over, that he did not want him to bring any of his girlfriends into the house, because I was little and he did not want me to see people having sex. He believed that a child’s innocence is precious and something to be guarded. I had a few other big brothers, but Daddy wouldn’t let them live with us, so I never did get to know them very well, at least not while I was little.