Love (Part 1)

That’s me in the picture.

Huddled on my bed, inside my room – my rat’s nest, my prison – captured through the lens of a spy camera attached to the ceiling.

I’m unaware of its existence in this moment, but I already suspect it.

In later screenshots from the live video footage, I’m standing on the bed, staring up, and examining it closely. The camera is hidden in the ceiling, inside a fake fire alarm installed while I was out. There’s a hole drilled into the sheetrock, and through that hole, wires lead upstairs – connecting to my husband’s computer in his office.

The year is 2016.

I share this moment with you because it reveals a story and a truth that must be told.

I share this moment with you because it’s the only way I'll ever be free.

I’ve waited for that freedom for a long time.

Am I allowed to tell my story and live free, as myself?

My story is a story about love.

MY ROOM

 My room was my hiding place, a sanctuary inside what had turned into a house of horrors during my legal separation from my late husband, THE PROPHET.

I’d brought all my belongings in there – anything I needed to take with me in case I had to escape quickly. The room was behind the garage on the bottom floor of our marital home, a massive three-story maze of a house with countless rooms filled with my husband’s junk.

I’d once made the room into a guest room for my mom, but now it was where I hid.

It had its own entrance from the side yard and another through the narrow path carved into the mountains of clutter in the garage.

I cooked in that room on a small cooktop for my children and me. They came to eat there, to visit me – their mother, the pariah – who lived in exile inside her own home.

I no longer dared to cook in the family kitchen upstairs, because each time I did, my husband would slip out of his bedroom and try to harass me with something.

I’d brought a refrigerator, a rice cooker, utensils, and a few pots and pans to my room, creating a small kitchen in the bedroom.

I washed my dishes by hand in the sink of a half-bathroom next to the garage.

I had my paintbrushes, my canvases, my computer, my writings, and my music.

I had God.

And I took these things, and held onto them for dear life, locking myself inside that small room – my prison, my Egypt – where I lived for three years after our separation, in constant agony, in a long, unbroken prayer, asking God:

“When? When will you take me out of here?”

THE INSIDE AND THE OUTSIDE OF IT

 Two realities existed in my marriage side by side: the one on the outside, and the one inside me.

On the outside, I was the prophet’s wife. A pastor’s wife, of sorts – proof of prophecy fulfilled. The helper and the woman who had been foretold long before we met:

“The woman with the golden hair.”

On the outside, I was God’s reward to the prophet. The trophy.
The homemaker, the mother, the nanny, the cook, the cleaning lady, the secretary, the editor of his prophecies.
I was also the one responding to his followers who wrote to him in pain — the correspondence secretary and voice of empathy he couldn’t be.
I was the heart of the home and the ministry — the perfect Christian wife.

But behind that image, I was also the janitor, the construction worker, and the one holding the house — and the illusion of normalcy — together.

When I moved into the prophet’s house in the year 2000, there were no finished walls — only open wooden frames with tangled electrical wires running through them, and spiderwebs thick in every corner. The smell of cat urine hit you the moment you opened the front door, along with mountains of clutter everywhere, the kind only a hoarder can create. Every surface was buried under papers, boxes, and broken things. The animals in the house had claimed the carpets as their territory.

It was a house left to decay — years of abandonment and neglect layered into the walls.

I cleared those mountains of junk just to make space to work. While he measured and placed the sheetrock — after much pleading on my part — I tore out the carpets, scrubbed and sterilized the floors, plastered the nail holes, sanded the walls, and painted every room until the house looked clean, safe, and normal.

And as the walls went up, the illusion of normalcy replaced the junk, the spiders, and the stench.

That normalcy was my creation, not his — both in the house, and in the life that we presented to the world.
I built the walls of that house, and the image that went along with it.

No one believed in that image more than I did.

But inside me, I had questions.

Why did he never help me?
Why were my duties as a Christian, as his wife, magnified, while his as my husband were overlooked?
Why was it acceptable that I didn’t sleep for eight days after my C-section — that while I was trying to heal, care for a newborn, and manage the house alone, he slept and did nothing — and why was my eventual visit to the ER for exhaustion hidden from everyone, especially his followers?

Why was our bedroom overflowing with cardboard and Styrofoam, the crib still unassembled, the refrigerator empty — while he was taking nap number four that day?

And why did he, God’s chosen prophet, push me across the room when I begged him to help with the baby so I could finally sleep?

Why did he forbid me to contact my female friends?

That was the reality inside me — full of questions and pain.

Untold.

And untold, unseen, were all the years I lay on the floor behind a locked bathroom door, wrestling with my questions, praying for God to help me.

That bathroom floor was my altar.

It had to be the bathroom, so I’d have a reason to lock the door behind me — to protect my children from seeing their mother cry.

THE ABUSE

His methods were many and varied. He had the power.

We used to argue in his office for hours — the same scene repeated endlessly, with only slight variations.

I’d come in with a need — a normal request that required my husband’s cooperation: permission to do something with the children, manage the household, or attend to a personal need.

My husband, who controlled all our money and documents, would then begin asking a series of questions that called into question the legitimacy of that need. Whether it was money for the children’s dental care or for groceries, the conversation always turned into a circle and a trap.

The interrogation would last for hours. I was forced to defend not only the request but also my character, which was constantly under suspicion.

My emotions would rise as he delivered his accusations, calm and collected, cool as a cucumber.
And why wouldn’t he be? He had the debit card and the power to say no. He had all our accounts and documents.
He held the key to every single door.

I remember a moment so vividly: I dropped to my knees on his office floor and prayed for the madness to stop — for there to be an end, any end, to the arguments.

And as I did this, a sudden realization hit me. I’ll never forget it.

I suddenly understood with piercing lucidity that my husband didn't want the arguments to stop. He wanted the opposite.

He took pleasure in my despair.

The realization was shocking, but it brought terrible clarity. I knew from the depths of my being that it was true.

I didn’t have the word for it then, but later I learned there was one — NARCISSIST.
It explained his behavior perfectly: the cycles between calm and storm, the control, and the strange satisfaction he drew from my pain.

A few years later, I discovered images of myself on his computer — stills from those arguments.

It confirmed what I’d already understood on my knees that day:

He fed on my emotional collapse.

Learning that he’d videotaped me during those arguments added just another layer to his pattern of callousness. For what purpose he did this, I still don’t know.

THE SEPARATION

By early 2014, after a series of painful realizations, I’d reached a point of no return. I finally understood that our relationship was fundamentally toxic and would never heal unless I stepped out of it.

Because I was committed to living my life according to Scripture, I followed the direction in
1 Corinthians 7:10–11 (NIV):

10 To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband.
11 But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife.

I took the “But if she does” as my exception to the rule and approached my husband to ask him to rent me an apartment where I could live with the children, separately from him, for a time. I explained that I believed God had shown me this was the only way for us to heal.

He replied that he wasn’t going to rent me anything — that I was free to leave if I wanted to, knowing full well I couldn’t go anywhere without money or my children. And since he had possession of both, I was in his hands.

A few months later, in the summer of 2014, after first removing me from our family trust and his will — leaving me penniless, as I later discovered — he filed for divorce.

Next came a meticulous operation. He transferred large amounts from our mutual accounts, hid the rest, and cut off my access completely. He also removed me from his ministry’s email list, cutting me off from what had been my spiritual family — the only faith community that shared and understood my belief in his prophecies.

Then one day, he sat me down with our children in the living room. Speaking to them — not to me — he explained that God had told him their mother was planning to move into her friend’s house, and that he was going to help her do it.

He told them they would have to go through many changes, but assured them they would be okay.

Then he began carrying my belongings out to his truck.

As I stood in the yard, watching him walk in and out of the house with my things, he handed me the divorce papers on the fly, like a grocery list.

“Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Here.”

I called my friend — the one I’d spoken to about possibly moving in — and told her that my husband had found out about our conversations and was now moving me out himself.

“I don’t know how he found out about this!” I exclaimed. “Did God reveal it to him?”

“He probably has listening devices nearby,” she said.

I didn’t believe it then, but two years later, after learning about my husband’s extensive surveillance, I never doubted it again.

My friend, who was suddenly put on the spot, agreed to take me and the children in, but those plans changed before we arrived. She became overwhelmed by the idea, and we decided against it.

Still, my husband was hellbent on moving me out, so I turned to another friend, who let us move in, but three days later, she asked us to leave. It was too much for her to house a family of three indefinitely.

With nowhere else to go and no money to rent a place, I had no choice but to move back into the house again.
That’s when my husband’s kingdom of terror truly began.

CRAZY MAKING

It started with a 5150.
I was homeschooling my son in his bedroom when there was a knock at the door, and the police walked in, asking to speak with me. They said someone had made a 5150 call about me.

“What exactly is a 5150?” I asked my friend later.
“It’s when someone tries to have you committed,” she said. “Involuntarily. For mental evaluation.”
“Like to a mental institution?”
“Yes. Maybe even long-term — if he convinced a judge to grant him conservatorship. And knowing him, he probably thought he could.”
“It gets better and better…”
“What did the police say?”
“They interviewed me for about fifteen minutes. And when they heard my side of it, they said — and I quote —Get the hell out of here. And don’t walk — run.”

After that, the gloves were off. Anything he could do, he did.

He changed the internet password to stop me from booking jobs online. I had just started working as a substitute instructional aide in special education — my first paying job in the States — and to stop me from booking my daily assignments online, he blocked my internet access. Then he forbade my children and his two grandsons, who were also living with us, from giving me the new password.

No one dared to break this rule.

“I’m the one paying for the internet!” he wailed. “Remember, you need to pay HALF OF EVERYTHING!”

This insane, self-imposed rule became his daily mantra. And he could enforce it — courtesy of the Family Court judge who’d handed him that power on a silver platter.

There was a court hearing in February 2015, where our separation became official — a hearing that completely crushed me. Instead of protecting me, it left me wide open to more abuse. I’d just started my job a few weeks earlier, earning less than $1,000 a month. The cheapest apartments nearby were $1,300, which meant I had no way out of the house.

Instead of ordering him to help pay for the children’s basic needs and stop the financial control, the court ordered ME to pay HIM $250 a month for the use of my car — a wrecked Kia Sedona with a crushed bumper he refused to fix through our insurance.
Meanwhile, he earned around ten thousand a month and didn’t give me a penny—not even for food. On paper, he paid all the bills, and I couldn’t prove otherwise.

As soon as the hearing was over, my husband began spending money like there was no tomorrow: a new car (his THIRD one), a log splitter, a new bathroom floor, new carpet and curtains, various tools, furniture, and machines —the list went on and on.
All while I survived on food stamps and a paycheck, he was determined to take away.

To keep working, I offered to pay him half the internet bill just to get access again. He refused.
So I called the internet company myself and had them install a separate line in the house.

When that didn’t break me, he went after the TV. I didn’t need a TV to survive, but it was a small escape — which is precisely why he wanted to take it away.

While I was at work, he and his grandson spent five hours removing the cable from the TVs —only the ones I watched: the one in my bedroom and another in the kitchen, where I used to watch my shows while cooking.

That evening, I came home, went to the kitchen, and started dinner. As always, the sound of me in the kitchen brought him out of his room. He sat down in the armchair in the living room, pretending to read his Bible. There was a direct view from his armchair into the kitchen. There he sat, waiting for my reaction.

But I didn’t give him one.

When I turned on the TV and saw the static, I said nothing. I left it on and watched the only working channel — an orchestra playing classical music.
He waited and waited, but the explosion never came.
You could feel his disappointment vibrating in the air.

***

And the campaign went on.

He spread his story to the world — to friends, relatives, and anyone willing to listen. The comments came casually and innocently, one here, another there. He painted me as someone unreliable, unstable, and confused. The words “lazy” or “crazy” never escaped his lips, but you could read them between the lines. He let people come to their own conclusions — that was his art.

To one friend, he played the part of the weary husband:
“I don’t know what to do,” he said with a sigh. “She says she wants to leave, but she just won’t.”
“So why don’t you leave?” my friend asked me later.
What could I say? Hand her my paycheck? Explain every barrier in sixty seconds? I’d learned that the more I explained, the more desperate I sounded.

The seed had been planted, and we drifted apart.

I lost many friends that way.

To his ministry email list, the story turned darker. He began to hint that there was somethingspirituallywrong with me. Suddenly, “Jezebel” and “the Jezebel spirit” became his favorite themes.
(In Christian theology, the Jezebel spirit represents rebellion, seduction, and deceit — the perfect label to discredit me and justify his control.)

To show how carefully he built this image: in the summer of 2014, after he’d filed for divorce, I took our two sons to a swim meet. During practice, I had a migraine — the kind that starts with zigzags in your vision until one eye goes blind. I called him to pick the boys up, explaining what was happening. Later, I saw what he’d written to his followers. It went something like this:

“Dear brothers and sisters,
I just received a phone call from Eva. She took our sons to swim, but now she wants me to pick them up. She kept repeating on the phone over and over, ‘I can’t see, I can’t see.’ I don’t know what’s going on. Please pray.”

He knew exactly why I couldn’t see — I told him — but he framed it this way because “not seeing” had a spiritual meaning to his audience. It was a quiet accusation, implying I’d lost my spiritual vision.
He dropped hints, one by one, until people began to believe them.

With me, all the curtains were removed. To me, he said outright that God had told him I was going to hell. But at this point, I had already stopped taking all his words as truth, especially since that same day, he called me a pig in front of our son.
When I told him not to speak to me like that with my son in the room, he said, “There’s no one here.”
“I’m right here, Dad,” my son said, staring at him in bewilderment.

Once the mask had cracked, there was no putting it back on again.

But he kept trying. Next thing you knew, his pendulum swung to the other extreme, and he spent several days playing “Super Dad.” During those days, he posted pictures online and around the house of himself with the boys. He taped human-sized posters of our sons to his bedroom door, framing them with blue masking tape, and then decorated their bedroom walls with pictures of himself as a young boy. My sons just watched all of this in silence. A couple of times, he pretended to take care of their actual needs by making them dinner. Dinner was a chocolate cake from Lucky’s.

Once that show died down, he turned his attention back to me, the root of all evil.

He used to watch my every move, like a predator, always searching for new ways to strike — sometimes with words, sometimes with prayer, sometimes with the police. He called them several times, each time trying to bait me into a reaction or frame me for something that never happened.

And I was “Jezebel,” the one who needed to be destroyed. He was constantly waiting for me to come out of my room so he could perform his “warfare prayers.” If I were in the kitchen, he would come out and take his post in the armchair, praying in tongues with his hands in the air. Other times, he paced the upper deck outside the kitchen window, circling the house and circling me while speaking in tongues. When I was downstairs in my room, he often brought a chair outside my door and did the same.

None of it felt holy. It felt ritualistic, dark, and oppressive. It felt demonic, like two hands around my throat, tightening slowly. The air in the house was thick with anxiety. It was a home turned into a stage of torment. Every story was twisted, every word used as a weapon, and everyone in the house was forced to play along. My sons and his grandsons were drawn into it, pressured to take sides, to nod along, to pretend they agreed, even when they didn’t understand. It took years to undo that damage, years for my children to see what had really happened, in a world where no one knew what was up or down.

THE CHAIR

Of all the cruel things he did, one small act has stayed in my mind as the symbol of it all.

It involved a dark blue chair — a high, wooden stool with a backrest that sat in the kitchen, in front of a counter next to the stove.

Years ago, I painted it blue and brought it into the kitchen so I could sit on it while I cooked. I had suffered from excruciating back pain since the birth of our two children. Twice, I’d been carried out of the house on a stretcher and taken to the emergency room because of it. Since standing for a long time always caused my back pain to flare up, the chair provided me with much-needed relief while I worked in the kitchen.

Everyone knew it was my chair.

When we separated, he began to carry that chair out of the house every day.

No reason for it, other than to take my relief away.

Every single day, he’d take it, carefully carry it through the house, and out, onto the backside of the second-floor deck, leaving it sitting there, facing the backyard.

And every day, I would go out there and carry it back inside.

The chair was heavy and awkward to carry. The deck was long, as it wrapped around the entire house on the second floor, and the back of the house was far from the entrance. Carrying the chair all the way back into the house was exhausting and infuriating.

He did this every day, fully knowing that my back and other unexplainable joint problems had been a constant struggle for me throughout our marriage — something I’d written about constantly in my prayer requests to his email list.

He took my chair away for no other reason than to cause me pain.

It was the chair, more than anything, that made me decide to move my kitchen downstairs into my room.

It was the chair that became the permanent symbol of his cruelty.

Yes, he was cruel.

I say it out loud now, I say it publicly. I say the words I’ve feared to say for so long, especially to his followers, the people who read his prophecies and donated to his ministry FOR YEARS, the people who, like me, INVESTED THEIR LIVES to follow the words written in his prophecies.

Raymond Aguilera, the prophet of God, was a cruel man.

 I understand how these words would cause his followers confusion, because I share in that confusion with them.

But there’s more to the story.

I already told you my story is about love.

(To be continued)