Well, who’s talking about offense? You know why Jesus said that? I believe that God showed me something because I think john was just a little bit offended. Here’s kind of the way it goes: If you’re really God, then why is this happening to me? If you really love me like everybody tells me you do, then why have you not delivered me from this when I know full well that you could? I’ve even seen you do it with other people and yet you’re just letting me sit in this mess. Why have you not delivered my child from drugs like you delivered my friend’s child from drugs? After all, God, I tithe and I go to church all the time and they’re not even really all that committed, and they pray one little prayer and you deliver their kid and you leave my kid in the mess.

Let me tell you something: I pray that you get this because I know by the spirit of God that there are people who are not progressing in your walk with God because you’ve got some of this hidden away on the inside of you and you don’t even really know you have it. And until we stop asking questions that only God can answer and instead of demanding to know, we decide to trust, we can’t really go full force ahead with God. You think I didn’t want to know why I was sexually abused for almost 15 years? I received Christ as my savior when I was nine years old and let me tell you something: I laid in bed every night and I begged God to get me out of that situation.

I mean, I pleaded with God to cause my mother to leave my father or let him die or something but just get me out of this situation! And you know what? He didn’t get me out of the situation, but you know what he did do? A lot of times we see what God’s not doing but we don’t pay any attention to what he is doing. We’re so caught up with our pain that we don’t see that cloud the size of a man’s hand in the sky that would give us hope if we would just look at that one little positive thing going on and hang onto that.

Dr. Leman: They’re lost. God love them. They just sort of get along through life. So, with the themes you see with the memories is the firstborns think: “I only count in life when I dominate. I only count in life when I control.”  and you look at their memories and they’re perfectionistic memories. So they’re the most likely to grow up with a critical eye, which is not going to be an encouragement to other people but it’s going to pick out the flaw.  The irony here is that the person who’s an engineer or an architect — firstborn occupation, by the way — or a pilot, he gets paid, she gets paid for flying that plane perfectly, but that same person comes home to dinner and finds the flaw and says, “hey, what’s with the broccoli?” well, there’s a good chance you could be wearing broccoli shortly because it’s not going to be rewarded in the truer sense of the word. So we’ve got all the firstborn themes of perfection, doing things right. The middle children remember things — memories of comparing themselves to other people. They always have lots of people in their memories. They’re the toughest to pin down of all the birth orders because they play off of whatever’s above them in the family. So whatever the firstborn is, the second born’s personality, in all probability, is going to go a different direction. Then you have us babies of the family who remember Christmases, birthdays, parties, surprises. Firstborns by their nature don’t like surprises because they’re planners and organizers. I learned this in life with my wife when she turned the speed limit of 55, I took her out to dinner.  She’s a five-forker; she likes a really nice restaurant. She longs for presentation. I’m a one-forker; I like the waffle house. Plastic fork is fine with me.

Joyce: I’ll go eat with your wife!

Dr. Leman: Yeah, I’ll bet you would! But I take her out to this really nice restaurant, and afterward we’re walking up to our house and she’s telling me how much she enjoyed just being with me, and she loved the birthday and all that. I had 36 people in my house all ready to yell “surprise!” and she’s dead tired. So, it’s easy to view life from behind your own eyes; the idea in marriage, for example, is to get behind your wife’s eyes. Dave has to get behind your eyes and see how you see life.

Joyce: It’s like one of the things that I used to get so mad at Dave about all the time in the early years of our marriage was he’d go to work all week and I’d stay home with the kids. And then on the weekends, on Saturday he wanted to play golf and on Sunday he wanted to watch football. Well, I didn’t want him to do that because I was only seeing life from my viewpoint — that I was home all week with these kids, and I did this and I did this and I did this and I did this. But I wasn’t realizing that he worked all week and that he needed also to relax, and he needed to do something that he enjoyed. We always have a tendency to look at everything from our own viewpoint, and it’s not a giving attitude at all.

Dr. Leman: No. We tend to be hedonistic. But the smart husband says, “Honey, I’m at the store. Is there anything I can bring home?  Do you need anything?” the smart husband comes home and sees it’s been a bad day and sees that the whole family room looks like a train wreck. Rather than prop his feet up and go through the mail and read the paper, he picks it up because when a woman sees a man come through the door, Joyce, she sees relief coming from the bullpen.  And he better be a reliever or he’s going to be in trouble.

Joyce: When Dave and I got married and we started having kids, you didn’t have all the books and material available to you then. We had one book for helping raise children and it was a book by a doctor named Dr. Spock and it was about “that” thick — a paperback book. Anything that went wrong with your kid or you needed to know, you got in that book and looked. Today there are thousands of resources for people. The same way with marriage — nobody taught me to be a parent, nobody taught me anything about how to be a wife, so I come from this abusive background. My husband’s father was an alcoholic.  He had a great Christian mom, which really was a benefit to him. But it’s almost like damaged people get with damaged people, and then they just are banging on each other, damaging each other and their kids.

Joyce: I know when I was in my 20s, I could not remember ever being happy because I think when you grow up in a fear-based, violent atmosphere, no matter what’s going on, even if what’s going on at the moment happens to be joyful, you always have that overshadowing fear that daddy’s going to get mad or daddy’s going to hit somebody, or mom and dad are going to argue, or you’re going to get abused again or whatever the case might be.

I do have a tendency to… And I’m not really a negative person now at all, but it’s because I’ve purposed to change. I would have been because I had a lot of negative things happen to me, but I know for a fact that people can change, and you don’t have to be stuck in your past. But I think it is very interesting how your past affects the way you view and see everything. So, how can examining childhood memories help us?

Dr. Leman: Well, let’s take a look at what you just said. The lens that you see life through in your 20s, as you try to look back, even if it was a joyful day, it was a happy day in Joyce’s life, notice the dark gloom over it because that lens, that family atmosphere…

It’s like walking on eggs. How many women today are walking around in relationships — “We got married to a controller!” And as soon as he explodes, what happens inside of her? She recoils. There are women who would tell you growing up they weren’t abused but their father just gave them the look. And when they got the look from dad, they clicked their little heels together and they tightened up inside, and chances are today they’re a pleaser.

Joyce Meyer Ministries: They want everybody to be happy. “Why can’t we all just get along?” “It’s your fault because you picked the date for the family reunion and it rained.” You know, you become this pleaser where you just take on all kinds of responsibility for other people. But the walking on eggshells, the feeling that a trap door is going to fall out from underneath me, shouldn’t happen to kids but it does.

Now wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait — how many times does God forgive us for the same thing? I cannot even imagine how many times God’s had to forgive me for saying stupid stuff — several times this past week and probably a couple today. And he just keeps forgiving and keeps forgiving and keeps forgiving because he’s not going to give up on us. I said God’s not going to give up on us and he doesn’t want us to give up on anybody or anything.

Don’t be weak-willed and wimpy. “Oh, I just waited a long time and it’s just really getting hard.” Well, that’s why you’re here tonight so I can shake that out of you and you can get all encouraged and say, “I can do whatever I need to do in life.” Everybody say tonight, “I’m going to finish what I start.” I’m going to finish what I start.: Now let me tell you something, and this is important: you have to start with little things. I said you have to start with little things.

Don’t think you’re going to start some big ministry and finish it, or you’re going to go out and open a new business and bring that through to a place of victory if you won’t even finish the little projects that you start at home. If you’ve set yourself to get out of debt, then stick with it until you’re out of debt. If you’ve set yourself to get your life in order, then stick with it until you get your life in order. The more you do the right thing, the easier it becomes to do the right thing. I said the more you do the right thing, the easier it becomes to do the right thing.

Joyce: For me, it was, “I only feel safe when I dominate, when I control. If I don’t let…” Submission to any kind of male authority was a real challenge for me in the beginning because any man who had ever made a decision for me, always made a selfish decision; nothing that was going to help me.

Dr. Leman: Now that’s based upon not only your early memories, but the early occurrences that happened to you — all the bad things that happened to you in life, those are indelibly imprinted in your life.

Joyce: I’m so grateful that God promises to renew us and restore us and to reverse the bad things in our life. Actually even, the bible says that God will give us double for our former trouble, and that he will completely turn around the shame of our youth. Let’s go back to where we were before we took the break. We were talking about how our parents affect us and how these childhood memories affect our joy today. So let’s just say like me, for an example, I never really got to be a child. I had responsibility for as long as I could possibly remember. So I’ve had to learn to have a healthy childhood on purpose.

Dr. Leman: And you’ve also learned to have fun as an adult then, I would assume.

Joyce: Yeah, right. Like my husband always says… He has a healthy child in him. He’s a grown man but he always had a good time. I didn’t know how to just lighten up and be lighthearted. I had to make a big deal out of everything because when I was growing up, that’s the way it was in my home.

Tom Hewitt: What we’re trying to do is to help them to break those stereotypes and those internalizations and to reenvision themselves as full human beings made in the image of God.

Ginger: These children come to the streets trying to escape desperate situations. Some come from families that can’t afford to feed them so they find themselves here begging for food. Others are running from physical or sexual abuse they’ve suffered at the hands of family members. Some have no family left as a result of the raging aids epidemic leaving these children alone to care for themselves. Whatever the reason, they come here looking for a better life, instead they find that the streets are no place to call home.

Tom Hewitt: You’re talking about not only issues like rape and prostitution but also having relationships with people. Sometimes, it’s just a simple case of being desperate for affection and love and just taking what’s available, and these kids can be as young as 7-8-9-10-11-12 and so on. If the streets is what you know, the streets is your parent. That’s what you learn. And so they live in probably the highest risk category possible for contracting hiv aids.

Ginger: Priscilla is a 15 year old who came here trying to escape the physical and sexual abuse she was experiencing at home. At this point, she doesn’t even know how long she’s been on the street. Desperate to survive, Priscilla became a prostitute and is now living with aids. Her health is very bad.

Priscilla: I sleep here.

Ginger: Tell me about your family.

Priscilla: I stayed with my stepfather and my mother. My stepfather was hitting me and I came to the streets. Every day he is hitting. My stepfather, if he’s drinking, he wants to hit me every day. He gave us nothing. If he is going to work and then comes back, he takes the money to drink. He does not buy food, nothing. Joyce Meyer

Ginger: Would you ever want to leave here and go somewhere else?

Priscilla: Yes.

Ginger: Where would you like to go?

Priscilla: Some place safe.

Ginger: It’s only with the support of our friends and partners that we were able to say, “yes, we can help.” Kids singing:

Joyce: I believe that we are going to see revival all over Africa and I think we serve a great God who really can do more than we could ever dream or think. “Father, we thank you for this building. I believe great things are going to take place here. So we give it to you, Lord. It’s your building. They are your people and we expect you to get the glory, in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

Maria: It’s a big example to the community because I can say nobody cares what we are doing, but

Joyce can see, that is why she gave us the shelter.

Hurietta Schoeman: Joyce said today that revival is coming to Africa. We believe it with all of our hearts. And I think in this area, this is the center where it’s going to start, because the people of the Lord are here. We’re here. We’re willing. We’re committed. We want to bring Jesus to these people. This is going to change these people lives, because now we’ve got the structure, we’ve got the support. We know that we are not left alone.

Maria: We have 15 ladies who were drinking — they’re not drinking anymore. They have work to do. They have a garden. They become busy at the garden. Others become busy at the kitchen. They are cooking for the children.

Joyce: You’re all the cookers?

Woman: Yes.

Joyce: Good. Thanks for helping.

Women: We thank you. You have done a great, great job.

Joyce: Well, we have a lot left to do.

David Vanrensburg: Our whole focus is to work and give children hope. I mean, these children are born with no hope. They’re born with nothing at all, absolutely nothing. Look at the conditions.

Joyce Meyer Online – If we can just come close enough to work with them and give them a bit of love, give them hope, at least they will have a future in life. They have a future to get somewhere. And they deserve it. Why not? Why can’t they benefit from it?

Ginger: Now that the “hope center” is built, Maria will have the help she needs to provide for the children. Chablili is back at school, learning the skills she needs for a good future. Albert and Simpewe have the nourishment they need to grow into healthy young men. And most importantly, these three children are all growing up with the knowledge that God loves them.

Maria: God is amazing. He can change anything. He can make things happen. Like now, we have the shelter

Ginger: We’ve also built a hope center like this one in Oakley, South Africa, providing food, education and shelter for hurting people in that area. New pleas for help around the world are constantly coming to our attention and it’s only with the support of our friends and partners that we will be able to answer those pleas with “yes, we can help.”

Joyce Meyer: Well, if you’ve been watching the programs this week, you realize that we’re in the middle of a missions campaign and you’ve probably seen a lot of pretty desperate needs. Let me tell you, your part can make a huge difference. So whether you can give a small amount or a large amount, I’m asking you to send in an offering today to help us. Thank you so much for being obedient to God and reaching out to people in need.

Ginger: Next, we’ll show you how God’s light is shining in one of South Africa’s darkest places.