Rejection & Redemption

The Kimberly McElroy-Jones Story

Story written by Abram Hagstrom on behalf of Kimberly McElroy-Jones. Posted with permission.

Preface

There is a part of my story that I’m not ready to share. Part of me that I don’t want you to see. But I’m writing this in the hope of helping you face your fears. So how can I urge you to do what I will not do? How can I lead you where I will not go? How can I give you courage I do not have? May God strengthen me and give me the humility to be as lowly as my Savior in the hope of reaching those who, like me, still find comfort in the darkness.

At the time of writing, I am fifty-four years old. I’m an African American woman from the Indianapolis, Indiana area. I still work in the city where I grew up, but my life now looks nothing like it did in my childhood. I live in an affluent suburb now, rather than the rundown government housing of my youth. I’m happily married, I have a great job, two wonderful children, and a five-year-old grandson. My husband and kids are the reason I live. I also hold two doctorate degrees: one in Organization and Management from Capella University, and one in Ministry from United Theological Seminary.

To understand the significance of the above, you need to know how my story began. To be clear, please know that I realize that the people involved in my story were either growing up along with me, or suffering from pain and trauma of their own. This story is not to shame or judge them, but it is my story and shares my lived experience, from my perspective. Please keep that in mind as you read.

Unwanted From Birth

I was born to two teenagers, John McElroy and Betty Harper, on May 18, 1967. As soon as I was born, my mother’s parents forced her to give me up for adoption. The adoption agency was located at a place called the English Foundation Building (a fact that will come into play later in my story). After a stay of unknown length at the adoption agency, my grandparents changed their minds and told my mother to go back and get me. It’s impossible to say how my life may have been different if my mother hadn’t come back for me, but if I had known the quality of life that awaited me in her care, I would have tried to jump from her arms even if I’d landed in the gutter.

As with all children, I was shaped by my environment. “Shaped” is putting it lightly. “Dented” would be closer. “Pummeled” would be right on the money. Ah, yes — money. Money was part of the problem. But so was promiscuity. And shame. And an absent father. I could say we were poor, but that wouldn’t quite capture it. Yes, our housing situation was unstable, and yes, food was often scarce. But, as with most sustained poverty, our financial symptoms stemmed from deeper spiritual disorders — a fact of life that I wouldn’t come to understand until my thirties.

One of those symptoms was that we moved a lot. My father abandoned us by the time I was four (he enlisted in the Air Force), my mother almost never worked, and welfare only covered so much. We must have moved a dozen times before I was twelve years old. My memories of the environments that shaped me, therefore, are an ever-changing tapestry of squalor, disgust, and fear. One of my earliest formative memories is having to get my stomach pumped when I was about five. Why? Because I ate a whole bottle of baby aspirin thinking it was candy. That happened at my grandmother’s house, which was in the same neighborhood as our many revolving residences: the hood.

Another time I went from my grandmother’s house to the hospital was when I careened through the glass of a storm door and slashed open my left arm. My five-year-old aunt and I were running circles in and out of the house while my mother was on the phone. At some point, probably wanting us to stop running through the room, my mother locked the storm door. The next thing I knew, I was in the back of my cousin’s car, veins and deep tissue exposed, resting in a pool of blood, with a bath towel wrapped around the arm, on my way to the emergency room. I can still see the black sutures of the 88 stitches the doctor sewed into my arm.

Why they didn’t call an ambulance for me when I might have bled to death, I’ll never know. In my mind, though, the lack of concern was consistent with their general regard for me: barely important enough to bring home.

My father took this message to the next level. It was bad enough that he was never there for us, but in his own special way, he managed to make it worse when he was. This man, who never took an ounce of responsibility for his family, once tried to give me and my brother a twenty dollar bill to split to make up for his unconscionable neglect. (Afterward, my grandmother made him give both of us a twenty of our own). His paltry offer was more salt in a wound — a wound much deeper than the one from the storm door. The wound my father carved into my heart was a matter of agonizing erosion, the way an unrelenting rainstorm can cut a trench in a mountain. My father’s absence was that long, dreary storm, and his rare visits were not shelter and warmth but harrowing thunderclaps.

If he had never been in my life at all, maybe I would have learned my lesson sooner. One day, however, when I was nearly attacked by a snarling dog, the man who had brought me into the world hurdled a fence and whisked me out of harm’s way, possibly saving my life. That happened when I was five years old, and probably planted seeds of hope in my tender little heart — hope that maybe, just maybe, when I really needed him, he would be there.

The following year, my parents finalized their divorce. After that, my father’s status went from that of a shadow to a mere memory. As I said, his absence itself was confusing and hurtful: he left a void where there should have been love and protection. But the things that happened because he wasn’t there were torture of another kind. As the ensuing years brought one traumatizing experience after another, the thought on my mind was always, “Why weren’t you here?”

The Path to Promiscuity

My first exposure to sex was at five years old. We had moved into a house that we shared with one of my mom’s friends (the same house where the dog almost attacked me). One day, this friend told me to go look in my mother’s bedroom. When I opened the door, I saw a man on the bed attacking my mother. Or at least that’s what I thought he was doing. So I did what any child would do: I screamed at him to leave her alone. Imagine my confusion when they yelled back at me to get out of the room and leave them alone.

The above may sound trivial, but experiences like this one began to set the tone for my understanding of sexuality. What was it? Was it good or bad? Was it voluntary? Was it painful? Was it meant to be scary? Was it a tool, a weapon? Why did people do it? Little did I imagine that a teenage cousin would begin to prey upon me sexually a couple years later, when I was only seven.

It happened once when my cousin from out of town was left alone with the younger kids in our family, including me. This happened when the older family members went to a nightclub until late in the night, leaving this male cousin with us because he wasn’t yet old enough to go with them. On this occasion, I was lying on the floor in the living room, watching TV. My cousin kept coming up behind me and touching me in ways that made me uncomfortable. So I climbed onto a bed where one of my aunts was resting, thinking I would be safe there. But he brazenly followed me into the bedroom and lay down next to me. I must have been frozen with fear as his hands finally found what they were after inside my underwear, between my legs.

The experience left me feeling violated, powerless, and disgusted. It also left me feeling vulnerable, unprotected, and angry at my mother who should’ve known not to leave me with someone like that. But the experience also began to answer some of my questions. I was coming to understand that what happens in bedrooms is about men using their power against women, even if those women are still little girls. By the time I was thirteen, several other experiences would hammer this thesis into an ironclad fact of life, and in the process, seal my determination to get my power back by becoming the aggressor rather than the victim. (My mother, for example, was raped in her own bed, frightened into submission with her own gun. I, too, was attacked by would-be rapists while I slept — not once, but twice. Yes, I’ve had sleep disorders ever since.)

While still in my single digits, I began to understand that somehow babies came from what happened in bedrooms. Babies, which were neither easy nor cheap. Babies, which, despite my age, I could see that my mother didn’t know how to raise — a fact that did not pair well with her promiscuity.

I was about nine years old when I realized that she was pregnant and trying to hide it from me. I found baby shower gifts hidden in our linen closet. When I asked my mother about the gifts, she lied to me, saying they were for someone at work. I knew she wasn’t telling me the truth so I grabbed all the items — sleepwear and clothing for a newborn — and threw them on the floor of the upstairs hallway for her to find later. To make sure she knew I was not pleased, I jumped on the items to dent the packaging. Later that evening she asked me about the things in the hallway. I pounced on her with pronouncements of her inadequacy as a mother: “What do you think you’re doing? You can’t afford to take care of the two children you have! You can’t have this baby! You have to get an abortion!” But she had the baby anyway; my sister, Jaime Lynne, named after the bionic woman on TV.

The next time my mother decided to conceal a pregnancy, I was twelve years old. Because she was overweight, the early-term fetus in her belly made little outward difference. But when her belly bumped into me one day in the kitchen, I knew she was pregnant again. Once again, I confronted her and her pained reaction said it all. My face twisted with disgust at the undeniable discovery. I was like, “Really? Again? Can you not see our living conditions?” It wasn’t that I had any problem with children, but I couldn’t see any sense in bringing another baby into such squalor. Nevertheless, we added yet another child to the family: my youngest brother, Jason Allen.

Hiding these pregnancies from me was the beginning of a trend that made me feel as if I were the adult in the relationship. As I grew more capable, this trend continued, with the result that my mother neglected more and more of her motherly responsibilities. One by one, duties that should have been hers fell to me. She collected the welfare, but I’m the one who looked after the other kids. One example that can stand for the many, was when I was in 7th grade. I remember walking around the neighborhood looking for a place we could live because the only adult in our house wouldn’t pick up the phone to ask about vacancies.

My mother wasn’t alone in treating me as if I were older than I was. Even as a child, people looked to me for maturity. And even when I was poor, people expected me to be wealthy someday. Eventually, I adopted these expectations of myself. The more I envisioned my success, the more I came to despise my living conditions. I looked at my mother’s lifestyle and thought, “That’s everything I never want to be.” Even though I was constantly surrounded by drugs and alcohol, I never smoked or drank.

I decided to live my life in stark contrast to hers. If she was uneducated, I would get straight As. If she was a picture of poverty, I would break the frame. If she let men mistreat her, I would show them who’s boss. In my own way, I told her as much through tears one day. She had taken it upon herself to show me how to cut up a whole chicken — which was the only kind we could afford. Standing in defiant protest of the slimy chore, I said, “I don’t need to learn this crap! I’m not gonna have to cut chicken when I grow up!” She knew then, if not before, that I saw myself as better than her.

But was I, really? I was so focused on denying my roots, and still so ignorant of what life-change really takes, that I couldn’t stop myself from sliding into her shoes. I hadn’t yet learned the meaning of the words, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” I was relying on my own strength, my own smarts, and ultimately, I resorted to taking my own callous advice.

As you read the following, please try to understand. I was only sixteen.

When I got home from school, I went upstairs as usual. My mother, because she was too heavy to climb the stairs, called up to me and told me to come down. Before I reached the bottom step, I could see that she was holding my diary.

“How’d you get that?” I said.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “What’s this shit about “CB” and “SP”? Why you writin’ in code?”

“It’s none of your business! Those are my private thoughts!”

“You think I don’t know what it means? I was your age once, too.”

“It’s not what you think,” I told her.

“If it ain’t nothin’ bad, then why you tryin’ to hide it?”

“It’s not half as bad as the stuff you were doing at my age.”

She glared at me for a long moment. “You think you so much better than me, don’t you, Kim?”

I stood there in stunned silence.

“That’s right, just go on and tell your little diary about ‘Cock-blockin’ and ‘Suckin Pussy.’”

With that, she threw my diary at me and stared me down as I picked it up off the floor and trudged back up the stairs to my bedroom, smoldering inside.

It’s funny how life works. My mother had been wrong about the meaning of the abbreviations in my diary. She had been wrong in assuming that I was having sex with Roger, a summer boyfriend from the neighborhood. For some reason, though, I wasn’t content to let her be wrong. If I’m gonna be accused of it either way, I thought, then why not do it? It didn’t happen right away, but after I began a relationship with a young man in high school, I let him take my virginity in the back seat of his car. Yes, I was using sex as a weapon. Although I let him think he was having his way with me, really, I was using him to lash out at my mother. As he took me, my heart throbbed, not with love for him but with spite for her.

These are the experiences that set the sexual trajectory of the first half of my life.

Failing College

Now that I’ve described my relationship with my mother, it’s time to say a bit more about my father.

By the time I finished high school, my father was on his fourth marriage. For some reason, he had decided to play the role of father for the children of the woman he was married to at the time. He was there for them. He was present and supportive. I saw him demonstrate the capacity to do for others what he had never done for his own children. More salt in the old, open wound. But there was something hopeful about it, too. Had he changed? Was there more of that fatherly affection to go around? I decided to take a chance and find out.

Back then, there was a place inside Union Station where you could go and record your own songs. I thought it would be so cool if I could get my father to go there with me. I could show him my singing skills and we could make a memory together — complete with a recording that I could listen to whenever I wanted. I waited for the perfect time to ask him. I felt nervous about what he would say, probably like a boy trying to get the nerve to ask a girl to a dance. But when I asked him, I tried to hide how hopeful I was, just in case it was all a mistake, a wishful fantasy.

That’s exactly what it turned out to be. He declined my invitation without a good explanation. This, of course, only confirmed the fear bubbling just beneath the surface: that there was something uniquely ugly and unlovable about me. Despite having carefully prepared my heart for rejection, it still hurt like a kick in the ribs. Instead of a daddy-daughter date to commemorate the milestone of graduation, I felt like I’d reached the final outpost in the wasteland of fatherly neglect. (That’s how I felt, but time would prove me wrong).

My father’s parents, John Vincent McElroy I and Fredonia McElroy (who was called Frieda), tried to ensure that my brother and I had a relationship with our father. I always viewed Mama Mac and Daddy Mac as a symbol of what Black people could achieve. Although no one ever spelled it out for me, their example helped me to see that income was correlated with education. Naturally, then, after high school my next move was college. I had found more esteem and significance in my academic performance than anywhere else, and I was convinced that my intellectual gifting was my best shot at getting out of the hood for good.

At the Pro-100 program graduation celebration, mentioned below

That Fall, my best friend and I moved to Bloomington to attend Indiana University. For freshman year, we lived in the dorms — which was fairly expensive. Toward the end of that year, we began looking for a better housing solution for our sophomore year. We were led to believe that the best option was to sign a lease for an apartment before going home for the summer. That turned out to be a ruse because upon our return we found no shortage of available housing in the area. But at least our living situation would be more manageable — or so I thought. For transportation from our apartment to the school, I bought a car (against the counsel of my grandfather, Daddy Mac).

Due to a series of minor fiascos, my third semester of college turned out to be a non-starter. But that’s putting it very lightly. In plain English, my third semester was a freaking mess. Living off-campus to save money might have been a good idea, but after wrecking my car, I had no way to get to school. That, it turned out, didn’t matter much because I couldn’t even get enrolled. Why? Because I had outstanding tuition debt from the year before. So, despite having been elected to the board of the Black Student Union, and despite qualifying for grants that would have covered four full years of tuition — if I had only known! — I found myself with a $762 brick wall between me and my one chance to make something of myself.

I swallowed my pride and took a job working the early a.m. shift at McDonald’s. With no car, I walked to work in the dark five days a week. Even so, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money fast enough to enroll on time. Although it fractured every independent bone in my body, if I didn’t want to see my dreams go up in smoke, I would have to ask for help. I remember it so vividly. I used a payphone outside of a grocery store.

I called my mother. She didn’t have any money.

I called my grandfather. He had the money but wouldn’t give it to me because I’d purchased the car against his counsel.

I called my aunt who had attended college but never finished. She wouldn’t give it to me.

So I called my father, the man who had never given me anything.

“Daddy, it’s Kim. I’m really sorry to ask, but I’m down here in Bloomington, and I need some money to get back into school.”

“Uh-huh. How much you need?”

“I’m working at McDonald’s trying to put the money together myself, but anything would help, really.”

“That’s not what I asked. I said, how much you need?”

“I just need $762 for them to release this year’s financial aid. Then I can keep pursuing the degree I started last year.”

“Seven hundred and sixty dollars! We can’t just be givin’ away no seven hundred sixty dollars!”

“Okay, okay. But I said anything would help! I’ve never asked you for anything, and you know I wouldn’t be asking now if I had any other option. Can’t you please help me, just this once?”

“Don’t raise yo’ voice to me, little girl.”

Before slamming the phone back in its cradle, all I said was, “I ain’t no little girl.”

After struggling to pay the lease on our apartment for a couple of months, I felt like the prodigal son: far from home and floundering in futility. I told my friend that I couldn’t do it anymore. I packed up my things and drove my wrecked Ford Escort back to Indianapolis.

Failing Marriage

For the next two years, I bumped from one odd job to the next, and one odd guy to the next, generally continuing my previous pattern of promiscuity. One of these guys, a man named Chris, proposed to me and I said yes. Then he cheated on me while he was stationed at a military base in San Diego. After breaking up with him, I started dating a guy I’d met briefly at a previous telemarketing job. His name was Paul Townsend.

Normally I wouldn’t have been attracted to Paul, but he was animated and charismatic and told me that he didn’t have any children. Having stopped taking birth control when Chris left for the Navy, it wasn’t long before I was pregnant with Paul’s child. Only then did I discover that he’d gotten someone else pregnant just before me. Despite my feeling of disgust toward my mother, and all my efforts not to follow her example, I felt like I was becoming more like her by the day. What a bitter pill to swallow.

Paul and I were married at the Justice of the Peace on June 16, 1988. Our daughter, Shanniese Renee Townsend Rice, was born just over a month later on July 4th. Shortly after she was born, while looking at pictures of her birth, I asked my mother why she didn’t have any pictures of when I was born. That’s when she finally told me about the circumstances surrounding my birth. It wasn’t until I had become a mother myself, at 21 years old, that I learned that my mother had given me up for adoption.

It’s hard to describe how an experience can be both destabilizing and settling. While the revelation was yet another kick in the gut, it also clarified so much of what I felt while growing up. Not having been held sufficiently during those particularly formative weeks surely sent messages of abandonment to my unsheltered soul. My mother, too, whether she could articulate it or not, was almost certainly marked by her choice. Although her parents had pressured her to give me up, she had ultimately acquiesced. As a mother myself, I believe this choice probably haunted her with shame and self-reproach (even at a subconscious level) that choked her ability to show me love.

I say that now, but I couldn’t have said it then. At the time, my reaction to her confession was colored mainly by anger. I didn’t learn empathy for my mother until long after divorcing Paul, which I did five years after saying “I do.”

As an aside, about the time I got married to Paul, my younger brother, John McElroy III, went to prison on charges of armed robbery and rape. He was fathered by the same environment and the same neglect as I was. Such things affect boys and girls differently, but the root pain is the same. This is yet another reason I don’t want to pretend that I escaped with clean hands. Hurt people hurt people, and I am no exception. This is not a story about my perfection, but about God’s powerful redemption. The miracle of my life today can be seen most clearly in contrast to what it was.

My marriage to Paul was not a good one. He could be a very unpleasant little man — a quality that seemed to peak once a year when it came time to renew the lease on our apartment. He would vent his stress by slapping me. Being physically bigger than he was, I would usually fight back. He wasn’t a chronic abuser, but nobody likes to be stuck with someone who periodically attacks them. I stayed with him for as long as I did only because I didn’t want my daughter to grow up without a father.

But when does having a bad father become worse than not having one at all?

I drew the line when Shanniese was four years old. Before our upcoming lease renewal, I made Paul move out. He came back more than once, trying to move back in, and I rejected him each time. The last time he tried, he came over drunk. In the middle of an argument, he ran to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and raised it over my head while my daughter was with me in bed. Would he really have done it? Was he drunk enough or desperate enough to think that killing someone was his only way out?

Although we made it out alive, that night an infuriated man was brandishing a knife in our bedroom. I was being attacked in my bed yet again, this time by my own husband. I was inches away from being stabbed to death right where I slept. What is it with men? It’s like they can’t help but misuse their power — just as I’d known from childhood. And what did love change? What did marriage change? Nothing. Love was a lie, and I was determined never to play the fool again. Slap me once, shame on you. But if I let you slap me until you pull a knife on me, shame on me.

That night in the bedroom, with the knife looming above my head, my saving grace came in the form of a question: I asked Paul if his deceased mother would want to see him like that. When he heard those words, he lost his nerve, started crying, and left us alone.

After separating from Paul in 1992, our divorce was finalized in September of ’93, when I was twenty-six years old. The five years following our separation were a very dark time for me. Even though I joined a new church the year of our divorce — a church that would eventually change everything for me — from the ages of twenty-five to thirty, I considered sex to be synonymous with relationship, and I considered relationships to be all about power.

Just like my mother, I would bring strange men into my bed. But unlike my mother, I didn’t do it for money and I didn’t let them stay. I told myself that I was making them have sex with me, and after the sex, I would make them leave. In that way, I maintained a position of dominance in all my fleeting “relationships.” I was taking control by taking the initiative. I didn’t leave a man the room to hurt me. But, as I would later realize, where there is no room for hurt, there is no room for love.

The longer I lived like this, the more empty and worthless I felt. I’d learned to protect myself, but that didn’t change the fact that I was still a single, uneducated, working mother. And deep down, despite all the attention from men, I knew I was still as unwanted as ever.

A New College, A New Church

Having failed at marriage, I once again turned to higher education. At this point, the idea of doctorate degrees hadn’t entered my mind, but somehow I knew that I had a bachelor’s degree in me. I would just have to add my classes to the circus of juggling work and my daughter. This time, I enrolled in IUPUI, Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis, and decided to pursue a degree in Organizational Leadership and Supervision.

When all was said and done, it would take me nine years to finish this “four-year” degree. Nine years of walking a razor’s edge, working full-time and going to school full-time while struggling to pay for childcare since no one in my family was willing to babysit my daughter. During this time, my mother once told me that I “needed a man to help pay my bills.” What she meant was that I should find someone who would pay me to spread my legs. She even went so far as suggesting one particular nasty old man by name. Yuck! What’s sad is that this was her idea of good advice. For my part, I was dead set on learning to pay my bills without selling my body.

For a few years, I worked as a pharmacy technician. In this low position on the totem pole on the second shift in the pharmacy at Riley Hospital, my schedule was miserable. But I worked hard, did a good job, and didn’t quit, and eventually, management took notice. Getting the promotion to supervisor was a game-changer for me and Shanniese. You know what else was a game-changer? Student loans. Believe it or not, in the course of this nine-year journey, I had to drop out twice due to insufficient funds. I simply didn’t understand how most people paid for college. When you don’t have anyone to show you the way, these are the kinds of things you have to figure out for yourself.

As I previously mentioned, shortly after separating from Paul, I joined Eastern Star Church. The preaching at this church changed my life. Not all at once, of course, but gradually the practical advice began to sink in. For the first few years I attended services, I continued to sleep around, but in 1997, at thirty years old, I decided I wanted to live my life God’s way. I wanted to learn to live as a true Christian.

I remember one time when Pastor Johnson shared that a woman could become a “recycled virgin.” I was like, where do I sign up? I wanted that second chance so badly that I decided to become celibate — not that it was all that difficult to walk away from meaningless power-sex with strangers. I went from loose to abstinent just like that. I would still date from time to time if a man showed interest, but if he tried to get me into bed, I’d be done with him. With each man that came into my life, I asked God, “If this is not the man you have for me, don’t let him come back.” That happened a lot of times.

Another area in which the preaching changed me is that of learning to trust God with my money. For my whole life, I had lived in a place of “not enough,” trying to make each dollar stretch, and definitely not giving any away. In light of what I learned about God’s ways with money, I was truly amazed at the backwardness of my financial intuition. In 1 Corinthians 1:25, the apostle Paul says, “The foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men.” I came to find that clinging to my money was actually part of what was keeping me poor. Only by learning to trust God enough to give my money away did I come to see the wisdom of what I had previously considered foolishness.

I want to share about a third arena that the preaching opened up for me, but I’m going to save that for the final chapter. For now, let me just say that it pertains to purpose and calling: discovering the particular gifts and talents that God has entrusted to me.

One very practical way in which Eastern Star Church assisted me was in helping me to buy a house. They had a program that helped people qualify for a home loan. I enrolled, and a short time later, Shanniese and I were living in our own home. It was wonderful! And, miracle of miracles, my father offered to buy me a stove for the new place. Should I have known better than to get my hopes up? In the end, his offer turned out to be as hollow as his role in my life. Instead of helping us as he said he would, he, too, resorted to telling me to find a man to help pay my bills. My own father told me to sell my body. What a joke!

Not long after this incident was the last time I had any contact with my father. While living in Los Angeles, he called his parents (Mama and Daddy Mac, in Indianapolis) and told them that he wanted to bring his mistress to meet them. Yes, his mistress. Not his wife, but the woman he was dating while married to someone else. Mama Mac and Daddy Mac were so appalled that they ended all communication with their adopted son right there. That happened in 1997 and none of us have heard from him since.

If you’ve been tracking with me, you may have guessed that the absence of my father wouldn’t have ranked high on my list of priorities at this point in my life. I was going to school full time, working as a supervisor full time, buying a house, raising my daughter, going to church, and paying for way too much childcare. Needless to say, many things, including my social life, went by the wayside during this season. God, however, can speak in the whirlwind. In 2001, during the very last semester of my bachelor’s program, I met Reuben Jones, the man who would soon become my loving husband.

Finally Wanted

When I first met Reuben in Business Law class, I thought he was arrogant. He sat in the front of the classroom and seemed so self-absorbed. In any case, we became friends. We would study together and he would tell me about the girls he was dating. One time, after dropping off one of his dates, he had the gall to call and ask if he could come over to my place! I took it as a good sign, because I was beginning to like him, too, but at the same time, I had to make sure he was the man that God wanted for me. After all, I’d already been married once, I already had a daughter, and I was 34 years old — a full twelve years older than Reuben.

For as young as he was, it was awesome the way he rose to the occasion. He began to date me exclusively, and we started going to church together. Now church was a bit of a hurdle because Reuben was raised Apostolic Pentecostal and I was raised Baptist. I won’t go into all the theological minutiae, but suffice it to say that I was wondering if this would cause us any difficulties. Thankfully, we didn’t end up having too many denominational issues, mainly because we both see God through the lens of relationship rather than that of religion.

Due to our age difference, Reuben’s mother (who initially thought I was Caucasian) tried to get me to date her brother. Eventually, she realized that Reuben and I had something special, and two years later we tied the knot. Without a father in the picture, I paid for our wedding. We were married in the Eastern Star Church sanctuary on June 1st, 2002 — exactly fourteen years after my first marriage. I felt loved for the first time. I could literally feel the love in Reuben’s voice, especially during the vows. I trembled while crying tears of joy listening to this man profess his love for me and I knew it was true. It was like finally entering the Promised Land: a place I had always believed existed but had never personally tasted.

In case you’re wondering, we were able to abstain from sex until after committing our lives to each other. Reuben graciously accepted my “recycled virgin” status and together we made a beautiful baby boy. Joshua Allan Jones was born on September 16, 2003.

After the “honeymoon phase” of our marriage, it became increasingly clear to my husband that I had some deep issues to deal with. He and our teenage Shanniese took the initiative to schedule a session with a counselor. I won’t say I went kicking and screaming, but I definitely didn’t want to be there. I was the straight-A student, remember? I wasn’t supposed to have problems. A big part of the image I’d created for myself was that I could overcome anything, no matter what it was. I could handle it on my own. Other people may need professional help, bless their souls, but not me.

Thankfully, the therapist was a Christian minister — and not just that, but a female Christian minister. Why this was so huge for me is related to what I said before about calling and purpose. About a year after re-dedicating my life to the Lord (in 1997), God told me very clearly that he was calling me to be both and teacher and a preacher (or minister). In my heart, I accepted the part about being a teacher, but not the part about being a minister. This was partly because I had never seen a female preacher and partly due to my fear of public speaking. So for years, I had been ignoring and denying the second half of my calling. I felt I could empathize with Moses when he told the Lord that he couldn’t go speak to Pharaoh because he wasn’t an eloquent speaker. Also, deep down, I didn’t feel worthy to speak on behalf of the Lord.

But this woman, Brenda, who is both a therapist and a minister, gently earned my trust and helped me to accept my calling. She helped me see that I’m just a vessel for carrying to others the message God has given me. She also helped me understand that my identity in Christ means that I am not a product of my experiences. Yes, I was knocked around, dented, and pummeled, but I don’t have to forever let those experiences define me. God’s love for me is bigger than the neglect, bigger than my fear, and bigger than my anger. Through forgiveness, I’m letting go of how others chose to treat me. I’m learning to say, as Jesus did, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”

Today, I know that I am God’s daughter even though I wasn’t treated like it. I draw courage from Psalm 27:10, which says, “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.” After years of working through my issues, pulling back many painful layers of shame, and letting God disentangle my twisted perspective in so many areas, I know that the molestation and the attacks and the neglect — and even the ways in which I mistreated myself — are not a reflection of my true value. The truth is, none of those people understood their own value, much less mine. Today I know that my responsibility is how I treat others, not how they treat me. This applies even to my mother, Betty Jean Harper, who probably tried to protect me in the best way she knew how. We simply cannot give what we ourselves do not have.

My Life Today

In August of 2009, I found myself standing under a park shelter giving a speech as the Pro-100 alumna of the year. After hearing my talk, the CEO of an organization called the Children’s Bureau asked me to have lunch with him. As we chatted over lunch, he mentioned in passing that the office of his organization was in the English Foundation Building. This triggered the memory of what my mother told me the day my daughter was born. I was having lunch with the CEO of the adoption agency where I spent the first few weeks of my life.

To make a long story short, I ended up becoming a board member of that adoption agency, and a supporter of another Children’s Bureau program called TeenWorks, aimed at teaching underprivileged kids a work ethic. This was the very program I had participated in as a youth. At the time, it was called the “Pro-100 Program.” Talk about coming full circle!

In November of 2020, I resigned from my position as the Director of Ministries at Eastern Star Church, where we continue to attend services to this day. (Time of writing is December, 2021). I am currently working as the Director of Community Partnerships for Community Health at Eskenazi Health. I love it. I think of it as a way of doing ministry in the broader community.

My life has followed an odd path for someone who hates the limelight as much as I do. To this day, I’m very introverted and overweight. Until my early thirties, I had a full, but nice, figure. Today, I’m still very shapely, but morbidly obese. As you can imagine, it’s hard to stand before a crowd all alone when you’re the very opposite of how the magazines say a woman is supposed to look. But I am through running from my calling. If that’s where God wants me, that’s where I’ll be. I used to tell myself that the extra layers are a way of hiding from the unwanted attention, but it’s probably mostly genetic. I judged my mother for being overweight; now I look just like her.

Nevertheless, people still say they can see a “divine light” in me, despite the weight. My late executive coach, who was very in tune with the Divine, once told me, “Kim, you have a light and you cannot hide it. You need to stop trying to hide that light.”

Am I really trying to hide my light? If so, then why have I spent so much time and energy trying to get other to see me? How do these two things go together?

At bottom, they are one and the same. Throughout my life, I have hungered for affirmation as a starving person hungers for food. My two doctorates are products of this very pursuit. Rather than the pure accomplishments most people seem to think they are, my degrees are a means of seeking to prove my worth — a means of trying to overcompensate for an absence of personal value. In order to be valued, I must be seen. But if I’m seen, then I can be rejected. Consequently, like many others, I have lived with these two things in tension my whole life.

It’s the same tension I navigated in inviting my father to Union Station; the same peril I negotiated in my years of promiscuity. Academic achievement was simply another iteration of the same desire and the same fear: to be accepted without the risk of being rejected. But as I have come to understand, the meaning of the former stems precisely from the possibility of the latter. We must take them together or not at all.

Everything worth doing has a cost, and all growth entails pain. I tell you my story in the hope that you, whoever you may be, will find the courage to steward the life the Lord has given you, to become the best version of yourself that you can be.

I’ll be trying to do the same.

Afterword

For the record, my childhood was not 100% horrible. In kindergarten, for example, I learned to make applesauce by hand. I remember really enjoying it. In hindsight, I can even see the comedy in the fact that my grandmother alternated between making us mayonnaise sandwiches one day and syrup sandwiches the next.

In their own way, each of my grandmothers showed me something of the God of love. Through their examples, a flame of faith flickered through my early years. They each planted seeds that would wait patiently in the soil of my life — fertilized by ample amounts of manure — until their appointed time to sprout and blossom.

If you found yourself wondering how I could be so book-smart and yet so clueless in other areas, this is my answer: Intelligence is not a good predictor of success in living. You have to be whole in all areas for true success. Contrary to the idea that education is the solution to all our problems, there are lots of people with brilliant minds and sad, sad lives. We are not just intellectual beings; we are bodies and souls animated by the divine consciousness, under attack by a spiritual nemesis.

If you’re someone who still wonders how a loving Father could allow His children to go through such trials, this is what I believe: that He himself is always right there with us, hurting when we hurt, and that He is cheering us along, allowing the challenges of life to make us strong — if we will only take heart and rise to the occasion.