If my story was written as a piece of fiction and I read it somewhere I would say that the plot was unbelievable. However this is not a piece of fiction it is the story of how I came into the world and against the odds survived my first unwashed and unloved year on this planet. This is not a tale written to elicit pity but to show how good can come from evil and how a waste product or an after effect that almost no one wanted can go on to be productive and happy.

I started off unloved and unwanted. I was born in 1946 and my mother was only twelve and a half years old when she had me. My father sexually abused my mother, and I was the result of this abuse. My father and my mother's father are the same. This makes my mother also my stepsister, and my grandmother also my stepmother, my father also my grandfather. What a mess.

As you can imagine I was not a welcome addition to the family. I was told by my adopted mum, that my father was put into prison for what he did, and that he was not allowed home until I was no longer there. My mother at twelve and a half years of age was only a child herself. My mother was too young to care for me, and my grandmother couldn't bare the sight of me. In my grandmother's eyes I suppose I was the one to blame for this situation. After all it was my existence that brought this dark secret into the open, and along with this revelation came the consequences which were my stepmother/grandmother's husband was in prison because of me.

The first eleven months of my life were spent, for the most part, unattended, lying on my back in a pram in the hallway of the small terraced house. When my adoptive parents took me home for the first time, I was dirty, malnourished, and covered in sores from where I had laid in my soiled nappies and soiled pram. I had a bald spot on the back of my head where my hair had rubbed off from always being on the pillow, and there were sores from my heels to my shoulder blades. My mum thought my hair was dark and curly but when she washed it my hair was in fact blond and straight.

I was unwanted, hated, rejected; unloved, even before I took my first breath, and when I was born I was also uncared for, neglected and it didn't get better it got worse. At twelve months old I couldn't stand, I had wasted little legs, which I had never even stood on, because no one had lifted me out of my pram to play with me. I was given the least attention that they could get away with. My own two children could both walk at ten months. By the time my adoptive parents took me home with them I was not only a mess physically, but I was damaged in every other area too.

I had learned that crying for attention only got negative attention, so I didn't cry anymore. I had learned that whenever I did get picked up, it was never a particularly pleasant experience, so I didn't like being picked up.

I was not the ideal baby that people long for, I wasn't a cuddly cheerful happy baby, and I didn't give my new parents lots of love back. I also brought trouble into my new family. My dad's step- mother said I was bad blood and would bring nothing but trouble. They would not accept me as a member of the family. When my mum and dad later had a son of their own, the grand-parents sent a Christmas present down for their new grandson but did not send one for me. My mum God bless her sent the present back, saying you send presents for both or for neither. So at the age of three and a half I was begrudgingly accepted into my dad's family, because they wanted my brother more than they didn't want me.

All these things shaped my personality and perceptions. Every thing that happened to me was experienced through the filter of these experiences. This resulted in me having no self- esteem, I always saw myself in a poor light. I was full of fear, especially in the area of other people's opinions. I had huge feelings of inferiority and inadequacy, and was overwhelmed most of the time by feelings of insecurity.

Life was a battle nearly all the time, but it was a battle that never showed on the surface. I became anxious in almost every situation, and I was pitifully eager to please, and the slightest things could damage me. I damaged so easily that imagined things were just as harmful as real things. For example if I thought you were talking about me that was enough, you didn't have to actually talk about me; I just had to think you were. Imagined or real the damage unfortunately is the same.

So how did I get from a hurt rejected unwanted person full of insecurities low self esteem self conscious anxious, inadequate with an inferiority complex that were it an Olympic sport I would have been a gold medal holder? I wish I could now detail a five point plan to follow for which I could take the credit showing how I overcame but I cannot. I had tried everything I knew to try and it made no difference. I left school at fifteen very poorly educated but I had a hunger for knowledge and a passion for reading and slowly I got the education that I thought would help me overcome some of these problems I got B.A.hons degree in Psychology and at the end I could trace things back and see how I got to be the person I was with all my defects but knowing how and why didn’t change a thing. I also did some Clinical Theology Courses and watched others transformed but I still stayed the same.  

At thirty five I was still as messed up as ever so what happened to change all that? Now is the time to bail out if you don’t want to hear about how God rebooted my system and restored the manufactures default settings. I had been a church goer most of my life and up until this encounter with God it had only made things worse because on top of everything else I never managed to live up to how I thought a Christian should live and so I just added a big portion of guilt and failure to my already struggling life.

What follows is an incident that changed my life and in which God showed me that I was not unwanted, unloved or unacceptable to Him. I am not trying to sell you the Christian way of life or change your views I just want to share with you this incident that turned my life around and changed everything.

I had gone to see my minister over some problem I was having, ( what that problem was I now can't remember ) but as I was being prayed with, the minister said that God was showing her that I was angry. I didn't feel angry; in fact at that time in my life I didn't feel much most of the time. I had in fact built up a protective wall around myself and most of the time I was emotionally numb. I was very much a flat liner where emotions were concerned, and so what the minister was saying to me didn't make much sense.

The more we prayed the more the minister kept saying that all God was showing her was this deep seated anger in me. By now I was getting pretty irritated and angry with this, but still I didn't feel that the minister was right. So I asked the minister more to shut her up or to get her to move on to something else ' OK, if I am angry then ask God who or what I am angry at. The answer that came back to this question was the last thing I would have thought of. The minister said that I was angry with God. I thought she was so far off the plot that she had left the planet.

Just as I was about to tell her this, I heard this awful mournful sound and it was coming up from deep inside of me. I think I was more surprised than the minister was at this. From deep within there was a mixture of rage, anger, despair, rejection, loneliness and it was all coming out in the form of this deep wailing noise. As it came up I could see myself as a tiny baby, in a pram in the hallway of a house. I had been left unattended in this pram laying in my soiled nappy, and soiled bedding. I was smelly, dirty, hungry and neglected; my flesh was covered in sores from laying in my own mess. I knew this my mum had told me about this once but being the emotional cripple that I was. I was not moved at all by it.

However as I saw this and I mean really saw this for the first time, I began to rage at God, if you are a God of love how could you let me be born like this, how could you leave me all alone crying and ignored. How can you say you love me, and yet let this happen to me? On and on I went until all this anger and rage that had been pent up pushed down and hidden from everyone including me, had been spent. I called God everything unpleasant I could think of and blamed him for everything bad that had happened to me.

When I had finished my tirade, and all my anger had been spent on Him, God ever gracious just somehow took me back again to that small baby lying neglected in the pram, but this time I saw that I wasn't alone, and I never had been. No matter how I felt at the time, the reality was that I had not been alone. This time I saw that I was in the centre of God's love and compassion. Every hurt, every rejection, every piece of neglect that I suffered, God somehow showed me that He took it personally. When I say He took it personally I mean really personally. It wasn't like it was done to Him; God showed me that it was done to Him. When they neglected me, they neglected Him, and when they didn't love me, they didn't love Him. God hadn't abandoned me, but had stayed with me throughout it all and He not only wept with me He wept for me. God actually felt every part of my pain and my rejection because it was His pain and rejection too.

I know this was not just some fanciful thing that my own mind conjured up; I know that it was God who showed me this. When I read this passage some time after this experience it brought me to tears I then not only had this experience which told me this is so; I also had God's word in which He told me the same thing..

Matthew 25:42-45 (Living) 42 For I was hungry and you wouldn't feed me; thirsty, and you wouldn't give me anything to drink;43 a stranger, and you refused me hospitality; naked, and you wouldn't clothe me; sick, and in prison, and you didn't visit me.'44 "Then they will reply, 'Lord, when did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and not help you?'45 "And I will answer, 'When you refused to help the least of these my brothers, you were refusing help to me.

Even after suffering that barrage of verbal abuse from me, God didn't get offended and touchy with me. God my loving heavenly Father didn't respond to the injustice of my accusations and assumptions but instead He treated me with patience, gentleness and loving-kindness. God wonderfully healed wounds that I didn't even know that I was carrying at that time. In that moment He showed me that contrary to everything that I felt, everything that others had said about me or to me, that I was wanted because He wanted me, and I was loved because He loved me, and I was acceptable because He accepted me. He showed me and I saw and then I knew in my knower not in my head. It was as simple as that and for the first time I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I didn’t have to do anything to get it or to keep it and it destroyed all those negative things and I was miraculously set free. As I write this I am aware that I have let some of these things creep back in and nestle just below the surface waiting to pull me down but just the retelling of this has released me once again.