Even my little sister’s friend, a seven-year-old, was forbidden to come to our home to play. The tears and pleas of my sister, eight years younger than I, did not sway the decision. Friends were not easy to come by under these circumstances, and though I was only partially aware of it, I lived an isolated, lonely life. I was less favored than my sister, and I never had a real friend at all. I told myself I didn’t need friends, that I was fine the way I was. I deadened myself to the circumstances, neutralizing any hopes and expectations. I said “Whatever” a lot.

Mine was a precarious life as well as a lonely one. I was constantly on edge, vigilant, able to emotionally prepare myself instantly for what could come my way at any second. You learn quickly when the only thing predictable is the unpredictable.

We’d be packed and ready to go on vacation, only to cancel on the day of departure because the trip was “not God’s will.” We’d be eagerly anticipating a promised outing or gift and it would be canceled or never delivered, again because of divine will. Pets were given away without discussion. We were dragged from church to church every couple of months, abandoning a congregation once the pastor said something that “disagreed with Scripture.”

My father, a professor and theologian who was endlessly loyal to my mother, kept telling me it would get better, that God would do a new thing. He said this after each blowup, each tirade—and these could last for days.

I tried to believe him, and often after an eruption we experienced a period of calm. It was a scary calm—we weren’t sure when things would flare up again—but it was a calm nonetheless, and I was grateful. Yet the pattern inevitably repeated itself, and despite our earnest prayers and hopes nothing changed. My father sometimes bore his soul to me. “Why does she have to be so cruel to you?” he would say after an angry outburst that had left me shattered and sullen.

I didn’t know.

“She not only puts the knife in,” he said, “but she turns it.”

The fighting between my parents was extreme. Screaming and door slamming woke me in the night. Days of tension paralyzed my sister and me with fear, and we crept quietly up to the attic to play with old toys.

“I need to rise above this,” Dad would tell me in his vulnerable moments after he had been the target of an onslaught. “I have to not let what she does affect me.”

Away from home (and he kept the two worlds very separate) my father’s work and writing helped a great many people come to know the authentic power of Jesus at work in their lives. His combination of intellectual knowledge and conviction of the personal presence of God flooded the lecture halls where he spoke. But the world at home was scary, insane and lonely.

As I grew older I discovered that my mother had been the victim of severe abuse as a child. Even though I intellectually began to come to terms with the reasons for her behavior, I was unable to free myself from her grasp. Still, my father’s comments and judgments against my mother’s behavior helped me begin to grasp the unfathomable and experience a deep courage. Despite her claim that she was God’s voice and presence in the world, despite her grandiose proposals and assertions about her power and unique giftedness, I began to realize that she was—perhaps—wrong.