HEADING
Monsters Peretti Slayed
By Edna C. Brown
Christianity.com -
When I was a kid, I felt terrible about myself,
says Frank Peretti. My self-image was in
the toilet because I couldn't throw or catch a football, I couldn't
run very fast, and I was considered small and frail for my age.
Peretti went through repeated surgeries during his
childhood. Injured at
birth, he suffered cystic hygroma, a birth defect that develops on
the side of the neck. The forceps the doctor
used to draw him from his mother's abdomen slipped off his head and
damaged the right side of his neck under the jaw.
The lump on Peretti's neck as an infant didn't go
away. It ballooned to
the size of a baseball by the time he was one month old, and he barely
could swallow. Cystic hygroma can obstruct
breathing and cause nervous palsies, hemorrhaging, and infection.
When Peretti's mother took him to a different doctor for a
second opinion, he showed signs of all the complications of the illness.
I was barely two months old when the doctors
cut my neck open, trying to clean out a swollen mass that threatened
to kill me, writes Peretti in The Wounded Spirit ((Word).
Instead of his imagination running footloose with
fictional narrative as usual, Peretti opens up about his childhood
in The Wounded Spirit, his first-ever nonfiction book. He freely details his
early years to help others heal emotionally and spiritually.
Even though Peretti's wounds started out as medical,
he soon learned his physically disabilities meant ridicule, in spite
of his parents love and support. The disease left
him with his tongue hanging out, dripping dark, bloody drool that
turned to scab around his mouth and chin. Kids at school teased
and tormented him. At times, he felt like the Frankenstein
monster in the poster on his wall. He also had the plastic
model on his desk.
I'm close to fifty years of age, writes Peretti,
but I still remember the names, and I can see the faces of those individuals
who made my life a living hell day after day after day, during my
childhood. I remember their words,
their taunts, their blows, their spittle, and their humiliations.
As I review my life, I think of all the decisions
I shied from, all the risks I dared not take, all the questions I
never asked, all the relationships I didn't pursue, simply because
I didn't want to hurt again.
In spite of all the childhood heartaches, Peretti
came to a place of personal acceptance. He encourages others
from this position of physical and emotional healing to prevent them
from becoming targets of abuse.
All of us, with all our wrinkles, shortcomings,
bumblings, and imperfections, are God's creation, he says.
Peretti sees the 1999 tragic deaths of students at
Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, as the results of the
wounded spirits of teen killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
The two vented their frustrations in violent fantasy turned
reality, instead of getting past their humiliations.
No Band-Aid answers come from Peretti, but his life speaks
as evidence that no one has to live with a wounded spirit.
The best-selling author (The Visitation, The Oath,
Piercing the Darkness, The Present Darkness) helped his
father pastor an Assembly of God church after studying film and English
at UCLA. Today, besides writing
blockbuster books, Peretti, plays the banjo, is an avid pilot, and
does carpentry, sculpturing, bicycling, and hiking.
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