We overcome by the word of our testimony and by the blood of the Lamb!
Shawn’s Life Part 1.
We stand on the cusp of a brand new year. It is amazing to me how fast time flies and yet how some things leave an indelible mark that never seems to go away. In this article, I’d like to discuss some personal things that have impacted me in just such a way. Much of the facts of this story were told to me by my mother in the 2 years just prior to her death.
I was born on August 9, 1970. My mother, Pamela Marie (Papp) Bailey was 17 years old and married to my 26 year old father, Oakley Jacque Bailey. Dad worked on shipping boats all over the Great Lakes. My mother married my father to get out of her house, plain and simple. She was in love with him, in fact, she never stopped loving him, but marriage was a convenient way to get released from her home situation. Shortly after I was born my mother discovered that she was pregnant again. In the usual way, my two brothers Jacque and Joseph were born on July 31, 1971. Mom then became pregnant again. My father gave her a bus ticket to New York City and told her to go and get an abortion, because abortion was illegal in Ohio at that time. Mom went and did as he asked but when she returned he told her he was leaving her. On Valentine’s Day 1972 my mother was given, in the words of the judge at her divorce proceedings, "the best Valentine’s Day Present this court can grant," and her stormy marriage to my father was legally deconstructed.
Pam Marie Bailey at our wedding; May 23, 1992
I was around 2 years old the last time I had any dealings with the man who fathered me. Mom was 18 years old when he walked out of our lives, and in those days a person had to be 21 to be considered a legal adult. My mother couldn't even buy a car by herself, but she had 3 sons to care for. Some of our relatives and some of mom's friends suggested that she should put us up for adoption, but she was a very stubborn woman. She was determined to raise us on her own. During her divorce proceedings mom had discovered that my father had several other wives stashed in the ports off the Great Lakes. My father obviously believed strongly in marriage, but the monogamy-thing just wasn’t happening for him. Unfortunately for mom, she spent most of the rest of her life in love with that man. She never remarried, and I can only remember a handful of men that she dated over the next 24 years of her life.
For a good part of my early years I lived with one fantasy in my heart: I would discover where my father was living and my brothers and I would go there and kick his butt. I would imagine the look of recognition on his face as I swung my fist into the middle of his face. He wasn’t just an absentee father, he was a non-existent father. He never sent a birthday card, but perhaps he had forgotten our birthdates. However, he never sent a Christmas card, an Easter Card or any other correspondence during the long years that followed. As you may be able to forecast, he also never sent an assistance check or did anything to help my mother to raise us.
For the next 15 years or so, my family lived like nomads. We lived in so many different neighborhoods in the Cleveland area that it was pitiful. I computed one day that I attended 13 schools in my 12 years of school before college. My brothers actually attended more than I did because of promotion from Elementary to Junior High and Junior High to High School. When I was 14 years old, my family moved in with my Grand-parents and my Uncle (who is only a couple years older than I am), in a rural town about 50 miles south of Cleveland.
I was totally outside of my element. I was used to the city or at least suburbs, but this place was terrible to me. I went from a High School of about 5000 students to a school with about one tenth that amount. Not only that, but mom had discovered religion (again) and was forcing us to attend the little Freewill Baptist Church up the road.
At this point I’d like to tell you a little about my mother’s "spiritual journey." It has much bearing on this story, because it helps to fill in a few gaps. Mom was raised Catholic, but she rejected Catholicism when the priest refused to baptize me when I was born because mom had been married outside the Church. She actually baptized me herself in our kitchen sink. When we were really young, mom took us to a Pentecostal church run by Ernest Angeley, a healing, jumping, wild-eyed preacher with perfect hair who could call down the fire from heaven for 4 or 5 hours at a clip. This man would hold healing lines where people would come forward and be "slain in the Spirit." I remember he would always say to deaf people, "Say BAY-BEE," and they would say, "BAY-BEE," and everyone would start praising God.
We attended Church School at this church and I remember learning all the usual Bible stories in this church. However, this was a phase that mom quickly outgrew. She stopped attending after 6 months because of the travel involved. She then attended an Assembly of God Church in Lyndhurst, OH for a short time. I remember that church well, because they had these really cool Bible Comic Books that they sold in the lobby before and after service and if I was good mom would get me one. This phase lasted long enough for me to get everyone of the Biblical Comic Books and a few featuring the Archie Gang learning about God. Mom then fell away from Church completely for quite a long time. (When I was in 5th grade mom went back to Catholicism for a few years so we could get cheaper rates at the Holy Name Elementary, where she sent us to keep us from being bused an hour away from our house as part of Cleveland’s desegregation plan.)
However, during this time she was getting involved in the occult. Mom could read tarot cards and do astrological charts with the best of them. She was also beginning to branch out into candle-burning rituals and other "white," magic. She had a friend named Pat who she spent allot of time with exploring these things. During this time mom met a man she knew only as "Lou." I have never met Lou, but mom told me about his influence on her during this time. Lou took Mom and Pat under his wing and began to show them how to harness "real," power. Mom had been doing little things for years. She’ point out people in the Grocery Store and say, "She’s going to drop that bottle on the floor," and invariably we’d hear a crash and mom’s prediction would come true. Mom never had to look for a parking place, she’d just, in her words, "Zap one."
Lou told mom that she was a very bright student but that she "needed to be more evil," to accomplish any real power. This scared mom and shortly thereafter she left the occult stuff behind her. So all of a sudden mom started dragging us to church again. We were teen-agers and blissfully unconcerned with this church stuff. For a while mom would drag us a whole hour to Medina Assembly of God Church because she knew the Pastor’s mom. We hated it. Then we moved down south and mom started dragging us to the little Baptist Church. The church was within walking distance, so that was a bit of an improvement. Also, the services were shorter and that was a BIG improvement. But we still fought against it.
Throughout mom’s spiritual wanderings I had gone through quite a bit of soul-searching. Mom used to tell the following story: Shawn didn’t speak until he was 3 years old. The doctors thought he might be retarded because his speech was so stunted as a young child. One day we were waiting at a bus stop and Shawn was having a really serious conversation with one of those "imaginary friends." I asked him who he was talking with and he replied, "My friend the angel." And as he was talking I was getting a little freaked out because he was being very serious, not laughing or even smiling much. I asked him what they were talking about and Shawn replied, "He said that God wants me to be a Missionary." I thought this a strange thing for my 3 year old to be talking about with an imaginary friend and also, "Missionary," was too large a word for his vocabulary at that point so I asked him, "Who are you talking with, honey?" and he replied, "My friend Gabriel the angel."
Continued ...4b
Continued ...4c
Go to Testimony List
S i t e
|
http://webusers.warwick.net/~u1030443/rw2shaw1.htm
Site layout and design (c) Aug. 2000 Elaine Dantzler: Webmaster