The Devil in Pew Number Seven (29 page)

People traveled from across the country to honor the man they admired. In a way, I wasn’t surprised. Daddy had led hundreds of people to the Lord. He had planted churches in several states. He had been driven to pursue the lost and feed his flock. He had preached faithfully under fire and had been willing to lay down his life, if necessary, to care for his congregation. No wonder when it was time to sing “Heaven’s Sounding Sweeter All the Time,” the packed service erupted in praise.

I listened to the music while looking at Daddy’s casket. I remembered something he once told me: “Rebecca, if anything ever happens to me, don’t go to my grave. I’m not there.” I knew he couldn’t wait to shed his earthly shell and get a new body, one that was free from pain. He didn’t want my brother and me to mourn over an empty grave.

During the family’s private viewing, I noticed that Daddy’s hair wasn’t quite right. It didn’t make sense to me why someone didn’t comb his hair to the side. I wanted him to look his best, so I took my brush out of my purse to fix his hair as he lay in the casket. Tucking the brush back into my purse, I reached in to touch his hand the way I had with Momma just seven years earlier. I had to hold the hand that had held mine so many times before.

I tried to imagine the joy Daddy would receive in heaven after all he had sacrificed to bring his heavenly Father glory. I know his face had to have been beaming as bright as the sun when Momma walked up to him to say, “I’ve been waiting for you!” My parents were both gone, but they were together. They were safe forever in the presence of Jesus. Proverbs 10:25 says, “When the storms of life come, the wicked are whirled away, but the godly have a lasting foundation” (
NLT
). That was the good news.

However, I was old enough to really understand my personal loss. I knew what it felt like to live without Momma in my life for the last seven years. Admittedly, after Daddy’s funeral I didn’t experience the same sense of peace I had felt when Momma died. In fact, I had quite the opposite reaction.

When Momma died, I knew it was because a man shot her.

When Daddy died, I felt as if God took him from me.

I blamed God. Why couldn’t He just heal my daddy?

* * *

Although I confess that my first reaction was to blame God, I’m grateful I was in church three times a week—Sunday morning and evening and Wednesday night in my youth group. I believe staying in fellowship with other believers, hearing about God’s goodness, coupled with my personal journaling and Bible study, kept my anger at God from taking up a permanent home in my heart. And when the early signs of anger began to surface, Aunt Dot, my youth pastor, and his wife helped pray me through it.

I can see why I struggled with depression at times as a teenager. I was a prime candidate for medication, although I didn’t take any. My depression was rooted in a combination of issues. There was the trauma I experienced at the hands of Mr. Watts during my childhood. There was the string of new schools, new friends, and the uncertainties that came with the transition whenever we relocated. But losing
both
of my parents was so emotionally over-the-top, the weight of my feelings knocked me to the floor.

I could tell Daniel was doing his best to cope too. He and I shared an unspoken sadness: the missing, the hurt, the loss, and, yes, the questioning why we had been asked to endure so much injustice and pain. I could see the haze of trauma lingering in his eyes even if he didn’t say a word. I tried to be there for Daniel when I was home, and yet I was torn between supporting him and trying to stay busy with friends and activities, hoping that in some way, somehow, I might outrun the nagging feelings of grief that nipped at my heels.

For me, the first two years after Daddy died—when I was fourteen to sixteen—were the hardest. I literally sat in the corner of my room, staring at nothing for hours. I wondered how my life had come to such a place of emptiness. I couldn’t imagine ever experiencing the “green pastures” promised in Psalm 23. I wanted to move forward with my life but felt as if I had been stuck on the pause button. I didn’t want to accept the fact that there were things in my life I couldn’t change—forget about trying to deal with the nitty-gritty of living in the present.

And the future? That was too overwhelming to envision. I needed the steady hand of my father to keep my free spirit tethered to earth. His spiritual leadership was essential to my understanding of who God is. I needed Momma’s guidance to walk me through the changes that were happening to my body and my emotions. I had neither. Instead, I felt wrung out and hopelessly broken.

I even tried hanging out with friends from school who weren’t Christians. I figured maybe they could provide some escape from the questions and pain that constantly taunted me. But the more time I spent with them, the more confused I became. I quickly noticed that these friends didn’t exhibit any sense of inner peace. And regarding the choices they made, they trusted in their own ways rather than seeking God’s wisdom. Grandpa Welch used to say, “Some children are trained—others just grow up!” I knew I had been trained in the ways of God; trying to live any other way would not bring me peace.

Yet I remained fractured.

Here’s the best way I can describe those years. Imagine taking seven different one thousand–piece puzzles. Then, imagine doing the unthinkable—mixing them all together in one giant pile. Then, after you’ve created the mess, you look at the pictures on the various boxes and realize there are tons of pieces of nondescript sky and fields of grass. Your job is to re-create the seven puzzles. That’s when it dawns on you it might take a lifetime to figure out which pieces fit into which puzzle.

Is it any wonder I was depressed?

Thankfully, Daniel and I had Aunt Dot. At age forty-six, single, living with and caring for her parents, Aunt Dot chose to love us with everything she had as if we were her own children. She made sure we had our homework finished, our lunches packed, and our breakfast eaten before getting us off to school on time—while getting ready for her own full-time job. That was no easy task.

For years Aunt Dot was bivocational, working as a paralegal while doing ministry as a missionary in India and Africa. She tripled her workload the moment she made the decision to become a single parent for her brother’s children. I later learned that in her twenties, Aunt Dot felt that God had spoken to her in her heart not to marry. She wrestled with that for years. She wanted children. Her mothering instincts drove her to seek a mate, settle down, and raise children. Why, then, did God ask such a difficult thing of her? After Daddy died, God’s leading made perfect sense.

She would have children, just not biologically.

Not only did Aunt Dot provide comfort and the security that blossoms from the rich soil of a loving home, she counseled me through this fragile time. She helped me realize that I could only take each day as it came. She encouraged me not to dwell on all that had happened nor fret over what the future might be like without my parents. She said the best thing I could do was to ask Jesus to reach down and pick me up. I had to be totally dependent on Him, to be okay without knowing all the answers to the questions echoing inside of me.

In time, I came to see that only God could take my impossible situation and make sense of it. As I leaned into Him, He looked at my upside-down world and said, “Becky, do you think that’s hard or complicated for Me to sort out?” Before I could give all my justified reasons for wondering, fretting, and failing to exercise the faith that, indeed, the task wasn’t impossible for Him, He snapped His fingers, and everything fell into place.

No, I didn’t get my parents back. But I was able to rest in the knowledge that He knew where, and how, all the pieces of my life should fit together. I knew He said in the Bible that He’s a father to the fatherless and to the brokenhearted. I was both, so we had a perfect fit. There was one more insight I came to embrace.

I needed God more than I needed to blame God.

* * *

One of Daddy’s final wishes was for his sister, my aunt Dot, to adopt us if he were to die. In the summer of 1986, two years after his death, the adoption was complete. I was sixteen, and Danny was eleven. Aunt Dot did an incredible job filling in for my parents. She made sure we were able to participate in school activities and sports, and since we were living with her at my grandparents’ house, we saw our uncles, aunts, and cousins often. Her desire was to provide for us a sense of family unity while protecting us from any more harm, which is why she made a point of knowing who my friends were, what we were doing, where we were going, and who was calling for me at the house. She knew we had experienced a lifetime of hurt already. The last thing she wanted was for another crisis to rock our world. And, as God would have it, for the better part of a year things were calm.

That’s when the phone rang.

There was nothing ominous or unusual about the ring.

I was in the family room watching television, too preoccupied with my show to break away from the action. I continued to watch as Aunt Dot answered the call and, for a few minutes, talked to the caller in muted tones. She asked the man to hold and, with her hand covering the receiver, called me to her side. She appeared guarded, as if contemplating the wisdom of handing me the phone.

“Becky . . .”

“Yes, Aunt Dot?”

“There’s someone who wants to speak with you.”

“Okay—” I reached for the phone. She hesitated. She didn’t immediately hand it to me. I wondered what was driving her reluctance. She seemed to be studying me, searching my face for the answer to an unspoken question. As I learned later, she was weighing the decision whether to crack open a doorway to the past. She understood she couldn’t shelter me forever. There would be a time to confront the events that took place on Sellerstown Road.

Evidently, she decided that time had come.

“Honey, it’s Mr. Watts. He’d like to speak with you.”

My heart exploded against my chest.

“Mr. Watts? From Sellerstown?” I felt my face flush.

“Yes . . . but Becky,” she said, her voice dripping with caution, “you don’t have to take the call if you don’t want to, okay?”

I took the call. I placed the phone to the side of my head as my heart pounded out warning signals that pulsated around the edge of my ears.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Becky. This is Mr. Watts.”

His voice was painfully familiar to me ten years after we’d left Sellerstown. The husky, gravelly tone triggered a rush of mental images of the man . . . pacing the street in front of our house, under a full moon, in his pajamas and brown fedora hat . . . shaking his fist at our car as we drove home . . . and cutting up in church, trying to distract Daddy from pew number seven.

“Hi, Mr. Watts.”

It was about all I could think to say at the moment. The truth was, I hadn’t spent any time rehearsing what I’d say to him if, by chance, I ever spoke with him again. I had no prior plans to read Mr. Watts the riot act for what he’d done to me and my family, and that didn’t change with him on the other end of the line.

“Becky, I know talking with me might be difficult for you. I don’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable—”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Watts. I’m fine.”

“Well, then, what I have to say won’t take but a minute.” He paused. At first I thought the line went dead. Then I got the impression that someone—Mr. Watts?—was fighting back tears on the other end of the connection. He continued. “Becky, I’m out of prison . . . but I’m not the man you used to know. Believe me when I tell you I’m different now.”

I listened. In the back of my mind something didn’t make sense about the fact that Mr. Watts was out of jail so soon. We knew two of his four 5-year sentences were to be served concurrently, but that still meant he should be in jail for fifteen years. We’d later learn that Judge Britt had cut Mr. Watts’s sentence to four years and then granted him parole after serving just one year.

“I . . . I was wrong for what I did to you and your family,” he said, his voice catching on several of the words as he spoke. “Your parents didn’t deserve any of the things I put them through. I’m sorry about what I did.”

I wasn’t sure where this conversation was headed, but my impression was that this couldn’t be the same man who had harassed us for so long. The Mr. Watts I had known
never
apologized to anyone for any reason. But here he was clearly fighting back the tears, offering me an apology. There was more.

“Becky, when I was in prison, I got right with God,” he said, and then he broke down and sobbed.

The floodgate of repentance had opened, and Mr. Watts no longer attempted to choke back the years of regret. “I need to know that you’ll forgive me for all I’ve done to you and your family. I can’t live the rest of my life without knowing you’ve forgiven me. Can you?”

Mr. Watts never sounded more human.

* * *

I’m sure what I said next surprised him. I told him my brother and I
did
forgive him. I told him, in fact, we had forgiven him long before he had asked for forgiveness. I explained that my parents not only taught us these words of Jesus, but they modeled them for us as well. Jesus said, “But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” (Luke 6:27-28,
NIV
). Mr. Watts had given me plenty of years to live out those words in my life.

And while I didn’t go into many more details with him, my parents had taught me quite a number of things about forgiveness. If I found myself questioning why they didn’t fight back after one of Mr. Watts’s attacks, Daddy would say, “Becky, the Bible says we are to ‘bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse’” (Romans 12:14,
NIV
). To be sure, the seeds they planted in my heart took root and allowed me the freedom to forgive Mr. Watts rather than to become a prisoner of anger and resentment.

Daddy knew that Mr. Watts had been tormenting us because he, in spite of his power, money, and political connections, was a tormented man. And as I spoke with Mr. Watts that afternoon, I sensed that while he had been physically released from prison, he wouldn’t be completely free until he had called me. As difficult as this might be to believe, it made me happy to see Mr. Watts set free from the guilt that he had unnecessarily carried for so long.