"What do you do when Joy feels like a lie...?"

For the last near twenty five years now I've been mostly known by the nickname “Pastor Max”. From time to time some clown, trying to be rude, will ask, “Oh yeah??? PASTOR Max??? Who are YOU pastor of?!?” I always just smile and tell them, “Anybody that no one else wants, those are my congregation. The broken ones that everyone else has given up on, those are MY people! I love them, and I'll try to shepherd as many as the Lord sees fit to allow me to be there for.” I was raised by a good woman for the first seven years of my life. Then she went off the rails. By the time I was in fifth grade my home was a war zone in the sense that my mother had declared war on ME, and she attacked me twice a day, seven days a week. Between the time I came home from school usually around three thirty or four o'clock, and the time I went to bed — somewhere around ten or ten thirty, I would get physically and verbally abused. I felt real, adult hatred for the first time when I was twelve. Up until then, the attacks just broke me frigging heart, man. I was a gentle hearted kid. I couldn't understand how someone who said they loved me so much could say the things to me that this person screamed in my face daily. I was twelve. I felt real, bitch I would shoot you in your face if I had a shotgun kind of hatred. And that confused me and hurt me as much as anything later, because it opened up lines of thoughts that I'd never had before about another human being. I really did love everybody, man… regardless of race or how much money you had or what kind of house you lived in… and I'd never felt anything like what coursed through the very veins in my body when this woman bent over me with her eyeballs literally bulging in rage, screaming in my face with the spittle flying that she should have laid my head down behind that back tire and crushed my head in the driveway when I was a baby like she started to, and told God and everybody else it was an accident…. I remember the feeling of a fifty five gallon drum of ice water being poured over my head and slowly, like some kind of Arctic oil, sliding down my head and neck and shoulders and down my body until I stopped there cold and literally numb.