TRAILER EXCERPTS  My Biological Father My biological father has been in and out of my life ever since I was born. Around age 56 now, he has since my becoming the age of 32, played “Santa” maybe five or six times in my life. Each time, he has tried to prove himself around my grandparents by giving money, lavish presents, and trying to take me around to see other family members or friends to introduce me as “his daughter”. What was once an outcast, by age 9, I was finally worth loving. Maybe I started to look like him. Why am I saying all this, you may ask? Because as a little girl, my grandmother told me stories on the reasons why I was adopted. The only thing the stories did was fuel up negative energy towards my father. Year after year many different holidays and birthdays came and I waited to be able to see him walk through the door. But he didn’t show. So of course, after a while, I would go on with life as if knowing he would not be a part of it. Until he would show years later with the same routine. If you’ve ever had a situation in your life like this, then this is definitely for you. Emotionally over time after constantly feeling abandoned, then to have someone turn around and play “ping pong” and bounce the ball back in your corner can have dramatic effects in the long term development into adulthood. Ultimately, your “past” feelings of neglect will rise up in every future relationship you try to have with other people. To conquer it, you would have to undergo deliverance from it, asking God to restore you and your past, which God will so graciously do, if one would just ask and receive the salvation of the Lord. But unfortunately for years, I didn’t see it that way. Up until the age of 13, I was lost with very low self-esteem, timid, feeble, sickly, and constantly thought of as one who was hanging on by a string. No one, and I’m sure, including my father, thought that I would make something of myself; I would be dead before I’d even get out of grade school. I’m saying this because of the previous illnesses in which I had. If not fully recovered, a flare up of TB could occur again. From the time my grandmother first told me about my being adopted, automatically assumed that no one loved me or wanted me around. If it had not been for the Lord watching over me, I would have either been dead or sent around to every foster or orphanage home known to man. But I really feel God equipped my grandparents with the task of caring for me-no matter what the price. Because of that, I felt it really didn’t matter whether I had my biological father in my life or not. April 25, 1974 April 25, 1974. I was born in Orlando, Florida at Orlando Regional Medical Center. Three pounds, seven ounces, so my mother says! I was told that I slept in a small shoebox and sometimes a Chek drinking box. I was small enough to hold in the palm of a hand. Reportedly after being brought home, I was already premature and malnourished. Plus, because of the trauma emotionally that my mother faced, she did everything she could not to feed me. She would give baby food away to other people’s babies, half feed me, and hide food from my grandmother to make it look like I was fed. When they found out my health was not improving, my grandparents persuaded my mom to let me live with them. My grandparents were very active being grandparents at the time. After awhile of being taken care of by my grandparents, I was taken to the doctor to find out that I had a bad case of “TB”, Tuberculosis, which is a swelling in the lungs or joints that is caused by a bacterium called tubercles. The only thing the doctors could tell my grandparents to do was to take me home, make me feel loved, and in so many words, watch me die. But my grandmother believed in the power of prayer. She prayed the prayer of faith, laid me on her stomach when she slept (so that I could breathe by feeling the way she breathed) and within days the Lord healed my body. Doctors were amazed at the progress after seeing me back in the doctor’s office “well”. From that day on, life would never be the same between my mom and my grandparents.