Dear Peter Kent,  You asked me a question that I didn’t know how to answer, “If you had not been raped, who would you be now?”  There is no way to say with certainty, because a quarter of a century of other things have happened that brought me to where I am today, but if I could turn back time and pick up the night before that happened, I can imagine how my life would have progressed based upon the trajectory it was on.  I was in love with a man that made me feel like I was in the presence of God.  Mike Belcher was in college, studying to be a preacher in the Church of Christ, and was from Bowling Green, KY.  He was not an attractive person, but people flocked to him and you could just see his aura from all the way across the college campus.  I didn’t know what an aura was then, but to me it was like seeing a man surrounded by angels.

 

The college girls all just loved him, but I was the one he asked to marry him.  When he found out how young I was, (I was 13 or 14) he was willing to wait.  I knew that being a preacher’s wife would be hard because, as I explained to you earlier, we don’t pay our preachers much of anything so that we can be sure that their motives are pure.  I would likely need to learn a trade so that I could support the both of us and I wanted to be a Veterinarian.  It was my plan to finish school early and get into a good college on a scholarship.  I was a straight A student and in the 6th grade had taken the entrance exam to Florida College and passed with the highest score on record.  This was also true on my Real Estate and Mortgage License exams.  I am great at tests.

 

My grandmother had polished me for public speaking from the time I was six, so I was comfortable with people and felt like I would be the perfect preacher’s wife.  I was teaching myself the Grand Diplomat School of Cooking course at home and did all of my family’s cooking and cleaning and was raising my brother, because my parents were working all the time.  After school I worked in a gift shop (on N. Florida Ave in Tampa) that my grandfather set up for me when I was nine and later for my father’s lawn care business every day after work.  I was also responsible for keeping our 10 acre yard up for my family and for my grandmother next door.  I was loving and trusting and felt like the sky was the limit because all my life, my mother and grandmother had told me so.

 

I loved Mike Belcher and was in awe of his knowledge of the Bible and his ability to share that knowledge. I loved that he was so comfortable in his relationship with God.  I had always been that way, but even at that young age noticed that most people didn’t feel that intimate connection to their Creator. When he was in college here I was with him whenever I wasn’t working and I felt safe at his side.  When he was home in KY I wrote him love letters and poems and I longed for the school year to resume.

 

After I was raped, I quit writing him and wouldn’t take his calls.  I couldn’t tell him why.  I was so ashamed, I couldn’t tell anyone.  Later, after I had left home, my mother said  he came looking for me, but she didn’t know where I was.  I became an alcoholic and a chain smoker and even though my work ethic stayed strong, I was only a shadow of who I had been until I got pregnant with Jamie at the age of 19.  My husband locked me in a room of our house, for what seemed like weeks, but was probably only days, until I dried out.  I never drank again, except for the occasional glass of wine.

 

I wouldn’t allow a Bible in the same house and I didn’t talk to God for 13 years.  My first husband, also named Mike, who I hated, discovered that my parents really loved him for dragging me to church and I did it while we were married, but I was unfaithful to him and to God for the eight years we were married.  It was in the mid to late 80’s, after my divorce, that Wally nagged me back to church.  Wally just kept telling me he was praying for me and that God loved me and tha