Concealed Weapons by Alana Reneé

Author:Alana Reneé [Renee', Alana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781462822027
Publisher: Xlibris US
Published: 2010-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

I remember the first time my dad demanded one-third of my pay. It was the first day I came home from work. At first, I gave it to him because he was the king of our castle, but over time, I built up enough nerve to respectfully ask him why he always took my money, my argument being that I had worked for it. He listened to my argument, and then he told me to always remember that what I made was never mine alone. He said that Uncle Sam took one-third of what he made every week, whether he could feed his family with the rest or not. He said that I needed to understand that now, and this was why he took a third of my earnings.

Painful though it had been, it was the best lesson my father ever taught me. I knew that the Bible taught us to pay to Caesar what is Caesar’s so it made sense. I prayed for wisdom and understanding. I read the entire books of Psalms and Proverbs repeatedly, and I gave my dad his share of my money without prejudice. He didn’t stop accepting his share until I’d worked almost two years.

After what I believe to be a night of heavy drinking in his office, my dad pulled me aside and proclaimed that he was anointed and that he was one of 144,000 anointed heirs of Jesus Christ blessed with Holy Spirit. For Jehovah’s Witnesses’, being anointed meant that my father had received Holy Spirit and had been personally invited to go to heaven as part of this 144,000 to be taken to heaven from the earth to reign over the new earth. I tried to believe him.

According to the Truth, only a remnant of anointed Christians, this 144,000, are going to heaven. The rest of the people, a great crowd of the living and the resurrected, will live on earth in a gardenlike paradise where there will be no sorrow or crying. I was glad my father had been selected. I was hoping it would make him kinder. It did not.

On the surface, it seemed I had an ideal Christian father who was loved by everyone in the community. Yet behind the scenes, he created a horrible environment for his wife and children to live in. My dad was very abusive, and I prayed for the willingness to forgive him because God asks us to forgive those who sin against us. From what I knew of his background, I supposed he had childhood monsters of his own. Who was I to judge who Jehovah chose to go to heaven? He didn’t get kinder. He got worse. The Truth was becoming a little hard to believe.

Soon blood would be dripping after a beating. We would get alcohol and help each other clean up the worst of them. Either I’d be cut or one of my siblings would be bleeding from “taking licks” at my dad’s hand. I kept my thoughts to myself, but I began contemplating the criteria God was using to decide who should go to heaven.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.