My Journey

Love from an Unloved Child

by Katie Guadalupe King

At the age of twenty-one, I had nothing to live for, so I came up with the perfect plan to end my life: Take a week’s vacation off work and buy as much cocaine as I could get my hands on, plus three bottles of sleeping pills and a twelve pack of beer. I would go to sleep and never wake up again. But God had other plans.
I grew up in a home where love could not exist. My real dad, whom I never met, separated from my mother before I was born. He was in and out of Big Mac (a prison in McAlester, Oklahoma). He came back for a one-night stand; I was the result of that night.

My mother never forgave my father for getting her pregnant and so blamed me for everything that ever went wrong in her life. Thanks to her drug habit, I was born addicted to cocaine and screamed for the first nine months. My mom admitted years later she would have done anything to make me quit screaming.

She did do anything — like trying to kill me before I was two. Weighing only eighteen pounds, I suffered from malnutrition to the point my hair turned orange and my stomach distended. I could not walk or talk. While I was in the hospital receiving treatment, the nurses couldn’t take the diaper off me without ripping the skin, so they soaked it off. Because of such gross neglect, the authorities removed me from my mother’s care.

But I also failed to find love with my adoptive parents. They were church leaders who knew how to look good at church while they tortured me physically, sexually, and emotionally at home. By the time I was five, my adoptive mother convinced me I was pure evil — the antichrist. If she was right, I told myself, even God could not love me. Checking out would save God the trouble of the final showdown.

After the age of five, I begged God every night to let me die. Each morning when I woke up, I was furious with Him, convinced that He hated me, too. I vowed to hate God the rest of my life.

Two weeks after graduation I was kicked out of the house and never went back. I worked five jobs at fast food stores to make ends meet and to keep from thinking about my life.

I eventually met a guy named Bryan and married him two weeks later. He became abusive in time, and we divorced.

During this time, my great-grandfather took ill and died. He was one of the few people in my life who truly loved me. On the night I tried to take my life, he appeared to me in a dream. He tried to convince me that my life wasn’t over, that he loved me, and more important, that God loved me. He was sure I’d get my life straightened out one day. He hugged me and then disappeared.

I was furious! I screamed at God, “If Grandpa is right and You do exist and You really do love me, then You’ll have to send someone who can explain You to me so that I’ll want to have something to do with You.” That was no small order.

Eight years later, I gave birth to a daughter by Billy, a man I eventually married despite an on-again, off-again relationship. I ended up leaving Billy because I was convinced he was abusing Shelby. I wanted to protect my daughter and myself at all costs, so we left Arkansas and moved to Idaho when Shelby was four. After five years of separation, Billy moved to Idaho and convinced me that he had changed completely. Because Shelby wanted a dad, I married Billy.

But the marriage didn’t last. After a year, I left Billy for the last time. He wouldn’t agree to a divorce without trying to get custody of Shelby, so I remained legally married but separated.

Three years later, Billy’s dad begged me to come see him in Arkansas, so I took Shelby with me. He told me he knew that this was the last time I would see him alive, that he was ready to die. How can he be so at peace about death? I wondered. I was terrified of it. I couldn’t ask him because it would be like giving my ok for him to die.

When my father-in-law died three weeks later, I cried for the first time in over thirty years. God, why? Why Dad? He was the closest thing to a dad I’d ever known. You know he loved me! Standing at the casket, I told God, “I had just decided to give You another chance, and You did it again! I hate You!”

I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t die (God wouldn’t let me), and couldn’t live. I hated God yet wanted the peace Dad had before he died. I was preoccupied trying to find out if death was the end. I felt like a thirty-seven-year-old child who had lost her only parent. I was lost, scared, and lonely.

At that time, I worked for a school bus company. After a month of constantly bugging two of my drivers for answers, I gave my life to Christ. The drivers are now my pastor and his wife.

Coming to Christ was not easy for me. Two weeks after attending church, I was confronted with a lesson on marriage in Sabbath school. I shut down emotionally and wanted to get up and walk out. I knew I couldn’t serve a God who wanted me to go back to Billy and give up the peace and safety my daughter and I had just gained. Billy started stalking me in Idaho and even tried to kidnap Shelby, so I was awarded a temporary protective order. After finding out how much trouble he could be in if I pressed charges, Billy agreed to a divorce. I also wanted to break the last of the bonds with my past, so I legally changed my first, middle, and last names to match the new person Christ had made me.

Somehow I knew that giving my life to Christ wasn’t the end. I wanted to show God’s love to the unlovable, to share what I had found with them. But how? When I heard about Pioneer Missionary Training, I knew I’d found the right answer.

God made a way for me financially to go on the trip, so in late December I found myself serving beside my fellow Christians in Monterrey, Mexico. During the ten-day trip, I learned how to minister to others and share my faith. One day during street witnessing I shared my faith with a stranger. The man asked the interpreter if I would pray with him to accept Jesus as his Savior.

That’s not the only transformation I saw thanks to participating in PMT. Last summer Shelby (then eleven years old) gave her life to Christ at the Meridian, Idaho, campmeeting. She could hardly believe the change in me over the last year, especially as I prepared for and served through PMT. Now Shelby can’t wait till she’s old enough to go on a PMT trip herself.

So many times Christ should have given up on me, but He didn’t. He went beyond what I thought He could do — saving me from my past — and planted a desire in me to share the peace I have found in Him. I want those who have nothing to live for to know that there is hope. I want them to know that if God could take an unloved person like me and love her, He can do it for anyone.

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