Would You Forgive My Father?

Ormand Grant was a very smart man, a thinker, a planner, a gambler, and a schemer. My Father could have been a very great man.

He could draw 3-demesional designs to create detailed machinery and it's inner workings. My Father could rebuild automobiles from the chassis to the chrome. My Father could tear down an engine and put it back together better than it was before.

My Father read voraciously anything from Popular Mechanics to Pulp Fiction. My Father was a great story-teller. He spoke well. My Father could laugh and make jokes.

My Father had a fine singing voice. He was rhythmical and could more than adequately play simple percussion instruments when the occasion came up.

My Father could dance, even on roller skates.

My Father was married to Mother for 22 years. My Father raised five children, two boys and three girls.

My Father taught me how paddle a canoe, make a campfire, catch and cook fish, build a shelter, read a map, use a compass, read the stars, and find my way out of the woods without aide of  any of those things.

My Father worked hard when he had a job to do.

My Father rooted for the Red Sox every season.

I could admire such a man.

I could.

But I didn't.

My Father had a sexual perversion that destroyed our home.

My Father was a Pediphile.

In September 1967, we moved to St Albans Maine. I was 4 years old, and the next to the last child. It was a strange house with no electricity nor running water, no indoor plumbing. I don't recall being frightened of the house, but things were somehow darker with just kerosine lamps and lanterns. Vastly different from our house on Nancy Avenue in Beacon Falls Connecticut. (Mother and Father were native Mainers but Father had a job in Connecticut for a while)

I don't remember the first winter but I understand it was cold. It was the worst winter in years and one night Father almost died in a blizzard walking home from work at the Stryers Woolen Mill in Corinna .

We had a wood stove that first winter but my ingenious Father designed a gravity-fed oil burner furnace in the basement. Now with hot air heat, the wood stove was a goner. The next thing was to get the water pump into the kitchen and that happened the following year, I think.

It was Father's intention all along to improve on the house. In that first year he had designed a windmill and was even working on the blades in his 'shop' in the shed. I still remember the big sheets of metal. Without electricity, he was hand-drilling holes in the metal then sawing through it to cut the fan blades.

We had a huge garden. Father had us go fishing in the swamp near our house and bring home everything we caught. We placed a fish under every corn seed. The Yellow and Gold corn we had that year grew 14 foot stalks. We had potatoes, peas, green beans, carrots, and tons of food. Mother's Mother stayed with us for a time to help Mother learn to can it all.

I didn't know how much Mother and Father gave up to live in that house but later I learned Father went from a $50, 000 a year salary to minimum wage. His high paying job was moved overseas and the mill in Connecticut closed. Father always intended to get electricity to our house and open his own garage and auto body shop.

It was his intention to improve always.

Father didn't adjust well to being poor. He drank. Beer wasn't his downfall as much as the whiskey. He would get fighting mad on a whiskey drunk and my Father was a large man who knew a lot about fighting.

Father was raised a non-attending Catholic. Once in a while, he took us to the Pleasant Street Baptist church in Corinna. Things weren't very bad that first year.

Things somehow went all wrong. Father stopped going to church. His drinking worsened. Then life suddenly became strange. I don't know if he began with me, or my older sister first but when I was five years old, I became a sexual attraction with him. He would touch me and have me touch him. He said it was making babies and told me it was what a man and woman did when they loved each other. He told me it made him love me more and more.

If Father asked if I loved him the only answer was Yes.

 And I was never, ever, ever to tell anyone. "Promise, or Daddy would get hurt."

I didn't tell anyone. I began hating my Father.

At age seven I wanted to kill myself. --or him.

By that time I know my sisters were being abused. His drinking worsened and his anger rose with it. Mother had bruises and cried  sometimes. We were poor before, now we were poorer. Our lawn was littered with beer cans and liquor bottles. Father wouldn't come home paydays, with the money for Mother to shop.

I know a seven year old is capable of premeditated murder. I dreamed of ways to kill him and how i would explain it to the police. I hated him.

My oldest brother permanently moved out of the house at age 14. He'd been gone on and off from age 12 but he'd found a family to take him in. I never was close to him, barely knowing him.

My oldest sister ran away at age 17 and was gone for almost two years.

My other older brother lived at a state funded school for poor children.

That left me and my little sister. And Mother.

I became Father's little wife. He would buy me horsy things because I loved horses. He took me to where I could ride horses. He took me camping which I loved. He let me drive the car, so at age 12, I went for the fun of that. All for a price. He loved me, so he said.

In 1973, Father had surgery on his neck that made it impossible for him to turn his head without turning his upper body. He began getting Social Security Disability. He drank more, was less at home and even less a providing husband and father.

It was hard on us all. My older sister came home for a short time and ran off again. My older Brother seldom visited at all and my other brother was still mostly living at school.

I suppose my little sister got strange too but I got weird. I became frightened of everything and everybody. I was happiest out in the woods, far away from people. I dreamed of doing amazing things, of being invisible, or being a long-lost princess, of running away to get a job on a horse ranch, be a race car driver. I imagined having the FBI rescue me. I often planned ways to run off to live in the woods, designing how to build a shelter and then make trinkets and draw pictures to trade for food.

I studied ways to kill myself. In my imagination, I could do anything, even returning from the dead to spy on everyone and see if they actually missed me, which I didn't believe they would.

In January 1977, Father left for Florida. Just up and left us in the middle of winter. Mother with no income and three children to care for as my next older brother was home from school. We got very, very poor. I didn't know until later that people gave Mother all the help she needed for that first six months and she paid back every cent in the next twenty years. At that time, an abandoned mother couldn't file for State help for six months.

Father came back the next summer but Mother had the state help then and he didn't actually come back to live with us. He had a live-in woman down in Hallowell Maine but it began all over again. I was a weird, mixed up kid. Really odd and solitary. I was 13

Mother moved us to a house with electricity, running water and indoor plumbing. Father came around every so often and took me for rides. He took me camping and let me drive.

I began taking drugs, anything anyone handed me. All you had to do was explain how to take it and give it to me. I was already a drinker from age 7. Father taught me how to drink, and if you handed me anything alcoholic, I drank it.

Now that we were where I could get to stores alone, I started stealing. I could get my own things.

Suicide was always an option, either by choice or accidental, didn't matter. I thought about it.

I quit school at age 13. Mother always feared the school system would come after her not having me in school, but no one ever came. I guess they could see I was a lost cause and not worth the trouble. Mother got me psychiatry help. It didn't work.

I dated drug dealers. I traded sex for drugs. I stole things. I hated. I went with my Father because I could get things.

I can go on and on but I'll jump to age twenty-four. No, back up a bit. At age 18 I married. Imagine that! Mother was losing her state income on me and I needed someone to take care of me. In my mental state, there was no way I was capable of going out in the public and get a job. I latched onto a man to take care of my housing, food, and whatever. Only he didn't. Within a year he had gone back to his mother. It turned out he needed as much help as I sdid.

Mother moved us again. I actually got a job working at the dairy farm of the man she rented from. I worked for day wages, helping during milking and through the summer, haying.

Father came occasionally, but he and his woman traveled a lot. He lived in Florida during the winters and in Maine summers. But he came for me. I was still his little wife. I was still weird.

Then in 1989, Father's live-in woman in Florida, died. He called and asked me to come down there if he bought me a ticket. I went. I told myself I went to see my next oldest brother who had just gotten out of the Air Force. I missed him. We had been best friends and he was safe to be with.

Father took me to all the Florida Tourists attractions. I got to drive. I enjoyed Florida as a visit. I missed Maine. I missed Ivan, my boss, whom I now lived with. I didn't love Father.

My Brother invited me to church. I went. I heard a wonderful preacher talking about Jesus dying for me. I went back again and heard more about this Jesus who died for me.

Who would die for me?

When I finally figured out God died in my place, for my weirdness, my self-loathing, my awful, evils, I cried and went forward and ask Jesus to forgive me and save me. I became born-again.

Suddenly, I had this new life. Suddenly, I had this new feeling that Father could never touch this life and ruin it. I was feeling a love that was absolutely different.

Father didn't like me any more.

When I asked him to come to my baptism, he told me he wouldn't step into a church ever again. Back when I was 5 years old, when we were so poor, when he took us to church, someone told him he needed to wear a suit to church. His work clothes weren't dignified enough for the assembly.

Father sat in the car outside while I was baptized.

I came back to Maine and Father never touched me again.

*I won't go into all the things I went through in my first years of Christianity. I had way too much craziness to overcome and it wasn't easy. With a wonderful woman taking me under her wing and the care of a pastor who knew how to be kind and gentle in his counseling, I came to trust Jesus and His love.

Father died in 1988 of cancer. Learning he had cancer, he married his new live-in woman, hoping to keep Mother from getting his Social Security checks. He died four months later and upon receiving her first check from his SS, she said, "He's finally supporting me."

I didn't go to his funeral.

Now, for all of you who have read this thus far, would you forgive my Father?

I want to tell you something about Jesus. Jesus is God. God is perfect. Jesus is perfect. Nothing sinful can stand in His presence. His perfectness has to destroy sin and imperfection, He is that pure. It is as natural as your breathing. That is why it is imperative for people to be born-again into Jesus, to be saved from God's perfect wrath against sin.

God would forgive my Father if he had asked Him. God's love is that perfect. Jesus died for all my Father's imperfections, weirdness, evilness, and perversion. Jesus died for Ormand Grant's sins.

Jesus would forgive him and accept him into heaven when he died. My Father had every chance to be forgiven by God because God is that forgiving.

Would you forgive him?

My step-mother told me that Father asked for a priest before he died. Remember my Father was sort- of raised a catholic. My Father knew he was in need of forgiveness but the priest didn't get there before my Father hemorrhaged, bled, and died in Togus Veterans Hospital in Augusta, in June of 1988.


My Father could be in heaven waiting for me right now. My father could be dressed in the white robe of righteousness, clothed by the shed blood of Jesus 2000 years ago on the Roman cross for the sin of the world.

I know that a priest cannot forgive anyone's sins, only God. No man can give perfect forgiveness for any other man's sins. It doesn't matter that the priest didn't come. What does matter is if my Father knew he needed to be forgiven and that God would forgive, and if he asked God for forgiveness, my Father is in heaven right now, waiting for me.

And I will be so glad to see him.

It took me a long time to forgive my Father. I truly think that if he hadn't died in 1988, it would have taken me a lot longer to heal, but I am a child of God and my God is awesome. Now, I may still be weird, but I'm not that weird anymore.

I ask you again--would you forgive my Father?



* For more on my Personal testimony see PDF file My Testimony. See also chapter VI From Dregs to Pure, in my EBook Squished! Why God Seemingly Destroys Our Fruit. available at Amazon.com