My story has been on this website since early 2007. One of the things which has bothered me about it, is that it has never had an ending. That is no longer true. It does now have an ending, and a good ending. I hope you will read it.
This article is by far the most difficult thing I have ever written. The Lord has impressed upon me very strongly that it is past time to come clean, explain what happened and ask for forgiveness from the many that were hurt by my actions.
The total of our lives can be evaluated by the sum of the hundreds, thousands and hundreds of thousands of decisions, small and great, which we make every hour every day of our lives. Hopefully, those decisions are made based upon a Christian world-view. However, in my case, while that was my goal, many were far from the mark.
While our lives are made up of the cumulative decisions of life, groups of large decisions seem to approach at three different times in life. The first big set comes as we complete high school, decide on a college or not, a career, even a spouse. Another set comes for many people in mid-adulthood. We sometimes call it the mid-life crisis. Interestingly enough many people never really face this set of decisions. Others collapse beneath the weight of it. The final set of three appears as we move into our retirement years. Over the years I have found myself going back many times to that first set after high school, going over what might have happened if I had made different decisions. I don't do that any more. It is an exercise in futility; although it does allow for temporary escape when one has made bad and irrefutable decisions such as I have made.
I need to fast-forward to my mid-life crisis. It was not a traditional mid-life crisis in that it did not begin with any faulty thinking process on my part. My mid-life crisis was actually forced upon me by a heinous crime committed against my family, my church, my community and myself. I'm not going to go into detail; the story has been on this website for some years. It happened in 1975. As a result of that attack, I spent six weeks in a mental health institution operated by Loyola University School of Medicine, being treated for more than a year following by Psychiatrist Dr. Marvin DeHaan, a board member of the hospital, and son of the late Dr. M. R. DeHaan, founder of Radio Bible Class Ministries. It was at this point that my bad decisions began. They seemed so little in the beginning, but by the time it was over, I had hurt the ones I loved the most, and ruined both their lives and the life that God had entrusted to me.
For the first time in my adult life, I found myself working at a secular job. It wasn't that I disliked it. There just wasn't any challenge; it was a dead end job. I became impatient. I wanted to get well and get back into full-time Christian service; but all I was doing was treading water. It wasn't that my family and I were not serving the Lord. I was leading the singing and choir at our church and involved in other church activities as well. I was busy with the work of the Lord, but dissatisfied at the pace of my recovery and the likelihood of getting back into full-time Christian service.
It was at this point that I began to be dishonest with Dr. DeHaan. I began to whitewash over things which were happening in my life, or just not telling him about issues and how I was feeling. I wanted to get this phase of my life over. The fact is that my recovery was not going nearly as well as I made it out to be. I had learned now to calmly cover up what was really going on in my life. And when he finally dismissed me from treatment, I was not anywhere close to ready. In two years when I became a youth pastor, and a short time later, a senior pastor, there was no way I was ready for what was ahead. I even took classes in counseling, and read all of the books on Dr. Jay Adams system of Biblical counseling. I did it more to help myself than I did to help others.
It was probably about one year into my pastorate that I noticed several things happening that shook me back to reality. Number 1: I believed I had slipped into deep depression. Number two: I could not carry on an intimate conversation with my wife any more, except for the usual generalities of life. No one would have known I was in depression, because my reaction to depression was to, by brute force, make myself work so hard that I didn't have time to reflect on what was really going on in my life. I was up at 5:00 every morning; in the study by 6:00, busy throughout the day well into the evening, when I would come home and collapse into bed, ready to go again the next day. I enjoyed studying and preaching, and worked hard at it. I created work for myself so I could stay busy. I also stayed perpetually tired and worn out.
Now, please don't think that I am trying to lay down an excuse for what happened next. I have to own up to my decisions. They were mine! They were deliberate! They were very wrong!
It began on a Saturday morning at 6:00 when I unlocked the church for the men's prayer breakfast which would take place an hour later. The doors were all locked. I unlocked the study door (it was locked too), opened the door, and discovered that every one of the hundreds and hundreds of books in my library had been cleaned off the shelves and scattered on the floor. My file drawers and desk drawers had all been emptied on to the floor, as well. It was a mess; totally ransacked! My reaction was one of sheer terror and fright! Somehow I made it through the weekend; I'll never know how. Looking back the whole weekend seems a blur.
I'm not going to go through the story again to set the stage for the terror and fright. If I had been trusting on the Lord instead of all my fighting depression, maybe I would have approached it differently. I have no idea if, or how things might have been different. I do know that the choice I made was the result of a refusal to wait on the Lord believing that the Lord could not act quickly enough to get me out of this one. I made a choice; a really bad choice. I knew at the time it was very wrong! I knew it would haunt me for what ever life the Lord allowed me to have after this. And I also was quite sure that after making this choice, the Lord would not allow me to live another five years (and that was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy). I told myself that I was trying to save the lives of my wife and children. I really did believe that at the time. I told myself that, "If God couldn't help; then I needed to do this;" even while still knowing that what I was doing was wrong!
Again, without going into the details of the story, the results of that decision caused even deeper depression and pressure. I was living life in a cauldron. Having studied up on Dr. Adams counseling methods, I knew I could not live like this for long without it taking a severe toll on my health. Within a few months my blood pressure was skyrocketing. I became dysfunctional. My life was out of whack. There was no doubt in my mind that within just a few years, if that long, I would be dying of cancer. There were times in the following years that I was taking as many as 16 pills per day. It was six years into this time period that God permitted Pat to come into my life. I hope you paid attention to the wording there. He permitted her into my life; I believe to keep me alive. Pat had multiple and very serious health issues as well from an inherited disease. Her high school aged daughter had been through well over 30 surgeries. Somehow I thought maybe by remote control I could substitute her and her daughter for the result of my horrible decisions. That didn's work! But over time we became very much in love, and are very, very close.
During those years I forced myself to stay very busy working to try to cover up my deep depression. That's not to say that it was all bad. But there were several times I worked two full-time jobs. For example, I worked at a news talk radio station from 4:00 am to 11:00 am, six days a week; then from 4:00 pm to 12:30 am as a Quality Control Supervisor at a local aircraft parts manufacturing plant. That allowed me to sleep, eat, and do everything else from 1:00 am to 3:00 am and from 12:00 noon to 3:00 pm. After work and travel time that left me with 5 hours a day to eat and sleep. It kept me sane, it that's what you want to call it. This rush, rush, rush of activity went on from 1980 till the fall of 2007, when praise the Lord, it all came to an end.
Over the following months, I was reunited with many members of my family and received their forgiveness and made some long trips to visit with them. The Lord has forgiven, as He promised. I finally retired at age 70, and we are now busy serving the Lord voluntarily at our church. However, it is time now to ask for forgiveness from the others my decisions have hurt, with whom we have not been able to make contact. There are some who are still very angry and don't want to talk to me. I understand that, and will respect their wishes.
There is, however, one other group of people that I must address:
A SPECIAL MESSAGE TO THE RESIDENTS OF THE COMMUNITY OF MAINE, NEW YORK, AND TO THE MEMBERS OF FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH OF MAINE, NEW YORK.
From about 1986 through 1989, I did something I wish I could take back. I had become very bitter against the church board at Maine, because they refused to give me the private detective's investigative report, and I believed were covering up what had happened, and keeping us from finding the truth. I wrote a version of the Don LaRose Story, which was extremely critical of the board, including calling them unchristian and failing to follow God's Word in resolving disagreements between Christians. I verbally berated them as best I could. It was bad.
To make things worse, I had no name recognition of anyone in Maine, so I ordered a copy of the Binghamton area telephone directory, went down through the prefixes for Maine, New York, and picked every seventh one. Over the next several years, a trucker friend of mine mailed copies of the story to addresses in Maine, New York, not knowing whether it was getting to church members or not. I wanted them to know, as I thought, what kind of bums they had as church leaders. I wanted to hurt them! I cringe as I write this. It was a horrible thing to do. I have pled with God to forgive me of this; and He has. However, I have not been able to communicate my regretfulness, my sorrow at my actions to the people in Maine, New York, either in the community or the church.
It is my deep hope that my actions did not achieve the goal I intended. I believe their is evidence that is indeed the case, as I did try through a third party friend to contact the present pastor and apologize and ask for forgivensss back in 2007. However, in a comment from him to the news media, it was apparent that he did not understand the intent of the contact. Perhaps that means those mailed stories had no impact on the church or the community. I certainly hope that is the case. So, I make this apology publically and ask for their forgiveness.
Everyday I pray for the church at Maine, New York and the church at Hammond, Indiana, asking God to bless them beyond anything they could ever ask or think. I pray for their leaders and members. I ask God to multiply them numerically and spiritually as they carry on God's work in their communities.
NOW FOR A POSITIVE NOTE
"I have DECLARED my ways, and thou heardest me; teach me thy statutes" (Psalm 119:26).
"WRITE the vision, and make it plain upon tablets..." (Habakkuk 2:2).
Here we come to the decisions heading into one's retirement years. Through the above and additional passages, the Lord has impressed upon me that I needed to write down my declarations before Him, and He will bring them to pass. these DECLARATIONS have come after much soul searching, and I believe they are what God has for Pat and me during what ever time He gives us to serve Him.
Number 1: I want to cultivate an ATMOSPHERE in our lives in which God can communicate His love, and His will and direction to us. To that end, Pat and I are reading through the Bible at a rate of twice per year; in addition to our daily times of devotion and prayer.
Number 2: We will contionue to SERVE THE LORD in the two ministries at our church in which we are currently involved. We are currently working in our church food pantry, helping to distribute food to the needy on Monday's, then unload the truck and stock the shelves on Friday. The Lord had to do a real work in me after I asked Him to give me a heart for these people. The second area of service is the Spanish language congregation we have established at our church. We work together with the Hispanic pastor as one of his prayer partners, and attend the Spanish services. What a wonderful group of believers who love the Lord and serve Him. I didn't think I could learn a second language at 70 years of age. Should other areas of service arise, we will consider them prayerfully before the Lord, wanting to serve Him as best we can.
Number 3: I will continue with Ken Williams Ministries website, also publication, speaking and singing as the Lord provides opportunities.
After all these wasted years, what a wonderful experience to be able to finally rest in the arms of Jesus and experience what He really wanted for us all these years.
What amazes me is that I am still here. The human body should not be able to endure what I put myself through for more than 35 years. At any moment I expected to hear the word "cancer." In my mind, that was a given. After multiple tests throughout the month of December 2009 (tests for heart trouble, gall bladder, lower organs, full body scans, etc), I heard the doctor say, "Malignant tumor on the spine." There was no shock or reaction of any kind (inside or outwardly). I already knew. And for the first time in my adult life, I had already given it over to the Lord. It was all in His hands.
I am currently undergoing radiation treatments each day on a out-patient basis. According to the doctors, the tumor is responding. We will keep you up to day.
NOW, believing that the story of my abduction from Maine, New York and the subsequent events over the following 35 years has accomplished its purpose, we will be taking down the "Don LaRose Story" from this website in the near future. However, it will continue to be available in print, free of charge, for those who request it. _________________________________________________________________________
