Chapter 8 - Know Thyself

There were a few things I noted about myself right away.

1. I was happy. I was incredibly happy!  After five years of descending, accelerating depression, I floated euphorically in exhilarating love. I loved God. There wasn’t a moment when I wasn’t loving God.  

2. I had an insatiable appetite for reading the Word. In the past I had picked up the Bible many times and found it to be inscrutable, but now I read with understanding. That dove sat on my shoulder and told me what the words meant. God actually wanted a good life for me and in fact, wanted me to be His friend and work His works with Him. It was all right there in black and white.

3. I had a new perspective. Things that I’d been wondering about suddenly made sense and I knew things I didn’t know before. How did I know these new things?  Through dreams and visions, mostly. 

One night I had a dream. My mother rode a bus across the state line from Missouri into Kansas. Kansas was on the wild side. People under age could elope by crossing that border. I knew my parents had gotten married in Kansas and I knew my father left before I was born, but that’s all I had been told. I thought I was watching my mother ride the bus into Kansas in order to elope, but that wasn’t what happened. My mother got off the bus, went into an empty warehouse where my father waited for her and they had sex on the concrete floor. Then she got on another bus and went home. 

When I woke I called my mother and asked to see her. She lived over the Bay Bridge and through the tunnel into Lafayette, in those days a 45-minute drive. I needed to see her face when I described my dream.

With a face of stone she listened and said in so many words, “Herb and I were married. We eloped because we didn’t have the money for a wedding. I was a virgin on my wedding night. When you were two years old, my sisters and I took all the papers, the marriage license, your birth certificate, any letters I received from him, and we had a ceremonial burning of the past. He had abandoned us, and we wanted to start over for your sake. And that is that.”

A few years earlier my biological father came for a one day visit; he said he thought he owed that much to me. In essence he said, “Peg and I were young, we fooled around and we got in trouble. You can’t fix trouble like that. I figured I’d get out of town so Peg could marry someone who would be a father to you.”

  When I told my mother this conversation, she said to this effect, “Well. He certainly is taking his lack of responsibility lightly. Don’t you see?  He’s trying to get out of any accountability. The truth is that his mother tried to get the marriage annulled because we never lived together, but I brought you to court so it couldn’t be annulled. I received paternity pay while he served in the war because the War Department took it out of his pay.”

  Despite her denials, my dream convinced me I was an illegitimate child. I’d always suspected that I was. My father sent no letters, no cards, no gifts, no support money, no visits, and none of his relatives wondered how I was doing. Yet I day-dreamed about him constantly that he would come and rescue me. I desperately needed rescuing. That childhood dependence, on someone riding in on a white horse to carry me away, rode into my adulthood and kept me trapped as a victim. 

We have to know who we are, what made us turn out the way we are today. From the truth we can dispel the demons that have plagued us, like the spirit of abandonment or the spirit of rejection. Obviously, God wanted me to know I was an unwanted child, so I sought to know the truth beyond that fact. Just knowing I was unwanted would create nothing more than further depression. What I needed was divine truth. He replied, “There are no unwanted children in my Kingdom.”  That solved everything. My father may have abandoned me; my mother may have rejected me, but God did not. I was born for His Kingdom; He created me from the foundations of the earth; and from the beginning, He designed a special place and a special destiny for me. His plan for my life was the reason I was born. There’s no such thing as an illegitimate birth.

  You know what else I learned?  There is a book written in heaven for each person who has ever been born. My book is entitled, “Marty Delmon” written by God. In it are all His hopes and dreams for me, all His plans and all His purposes. I can trust Him with my life because He has the best awaiting me!  The truth really does set me free and true freedom is trusting in God with everything I’ve got in me. Oh, to know Him!  Yes, I loved Him, but what I needed, even more than that, even now, I need to know Him.