I had a nice surprise at my college yesterday.  I teach nursing students at a community college, and a student I had in class last year showed up unannounced at lunch time in the cafeteria.  She had the day off from her job at a hospital an hour away and had driven a whole hour just to see me.  I was honored, but she gave me flashbacks.

TW

Last year she'd stayed after class one day to talk to me because she was upset.  She was in an abusive marriage, with 2 little kids 3 and 5 years old.  Her husband was a rage-a-holic, and the night before class this time he had put a gun to her head in anger in front of her kids.  She wanted to know what to do.

I told her flatly to get out and get out now.  If possible, not even to go home from class today.  If not for her sake, for her kids' sake.  It was just that simple, I said.

I didn't tell her why it was that clear to me; that was from flashbacks from my own personal past experience.  I left home at 17 four months shy of taking my final high school graduation International Baccauleureate exams because my abusive father introduced a shotgun into his abusive behavior. 

My flashbacks were from how he had been beating me weekly for 4 years.  Not spankings; beatings.  He hit me with his fists, breaking bones and drawing blood.  He kicked in doors to get at me, he put bars on my bedroom windows so I could escape him. 

It was bad enough for me to call social services for years, but we lived in a war zone overseas and I was a missionary's kid.  There was no social services agency to call in Uruguay back then, especially in the midst of a civil war there.  Government wasn't working normally.  Besides, who would believe a kid who said a pastor beat him like that all the time?  I was 5,000 miles from blood kin in the USA, too.  I didn't know my own aunts, uncles, or cousins, having been raised as a missionary kid overseas from the age of 7.  I was in the perfect trap.

My flashbacks when my student came to me were of how I could only lie in bed night after night for 4 years to wonder if I was going to die that week.  I realized if I did die from what was going on, nobody would ever know what had happened to my life. 

Then my father brought that shotgun into things, and suddenly I saw the future clearly and it snapped me to an answer:  YES.  I wondered no more.  If I didn't get out of that house right away, that was exactly what was about to happen.  Nobody would ever know why I had died.  I would just die.

My best friend at school had a mentally ill mom.  She went off of her meds and killed his dad with a shotgun one morning while he was standing at the bathroom mirror shaving.  I went through her trial with him, and we even visited her in prison afterwards.  I knew what a mentally ill killer parent looked like because I had looked into her eyes.

My mentally ill father had already tried to get our family killed by then a couple of times.  He was a big fan of a missionary named Nate Saint who had become famous for dying in missionary service a few years ago in Ecuador.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Saint

My father took us to Ecuador to learn all about Nate Saint's death when I was 12, and I learned that Nate Saint was a genuine martyr for the cause.  My father, I realized, though, was mentally ill, because he started trying to find ways for us to die as missionaries on the mission field in Uruguay, too.  He drove our car into a rushing river during a flood, he drove our car into a hot combat zone where we got car bombed.  When armed rebels stole our bible school van from in front of our house he chased them unarmed in his bath robe in our personal car and caught up to them.  They captured him but then released him, realizing he was harmless and mentally ill.

When he brought the shotgun into abusing me when I was 17, I realized he had raised the stakes of his death obsession.  Since he couldn't get us killed by accident or in combat, he was taking measures into his own hands.  I decided I had to take desperate measures to save myself from him.  I thought hard and realized that the fact that I was a missionary's kid had trapped me in my secret circumstances for years, but I could use it to get out, too.  I was planning to go to Wake Forest University in the Fall, but I could say God told me to get into my dad's bible school right away instead.  Since my dad was such a mystic that was the one thing he couldn't fight me on:  God called me.

It worked.  In 2 weeks I was in the States entering bible school in January.  I felt bad for saying God had called me to bible school, because it was a lie I had used to call my father's bluff to get away from him.  I did feel that God would want me to be safe, though.  Still, I felt guilty there with the other bible school students that semester from January to May knowing I didn't belong there for the same reasons they did.  I got away from my mentally ill missionary father and being cornered on the mission field overseas with his shotgun.  I hoped God would forgive me.  Better safe than sorry.

I lost my chances at Wake Forest U by the stunt that I had pulled.  I left the bible school and got a part time job working as a day care center teacher with little kids at Virginia Commonwealth U instead.  A full time employee with the kids by day, my job benefits included free tuition to take classes at VCU by night, so that's how I started university working my way through part time. 

I wrote a letter to my dad's missionary boss, but it was ignored.  He did fall from grace years later, though.  He moved to Peru when it was a war zone, too, during its war with its "Shining Path" rebels.  He got in cahoots with a crooked Peruvian congressman and laundered cocaine money through his church for him.  They got caught, the Peruvian congressman flipped on him, and Peru's authorities deported my parents and banned them from returning.  My dad was banned from pastoring churches, too, and finally had the full mental breakdown that had been brewing in his brain for years.  The only work he could perform after that was mowing lawns for a living.  But at least he didn't get himself or anybody else killed.

I eventually I became a university Spanish professor for 12 years.  Ironically, God and I made up about what I had done to run away at 17 and when I was 42 I went on to become a hospital chaplain for 10 years.  I was a different sort of minister from my dad.  A hospital chaplain is a full time hospital employee so it seemed like a safe place for a person to be a minister.  It was not an unsupervised minister job far away around the world where a minister could go crazy unsupervised.  I really enjoyed my job as a hospital chaplain.  Then I got kidney disease, and now I enjoy the job it gave me teaching nursing students.

I didn't want to tell all of my flashbacks from this personal history to my nursing student who came to have lunch with me yesterday, though.  I decided this was the proper place for me to divulge all of the flashbacks her visit gave me instead.  She had come back to thank me for insisting on safety for her and her kids and it was time to celebrate her safety and the safety she had given them.  In the year since I'd seen her she had gotten a divorce, had her own place and was happy, with a job assisting in surgeries now.

I'm really glad.  What I didn't tell her was that I was glad for both of us.  When abusers bring guns into the mix, it's well past time to get away fast.  Are me and my student alone in this chilling experience?  Has anybody else here been threatened by their abuser with a gun?