Love (Part 3)

This chapter is part of a larger story I am telling. Some parts are intentionally reserved for the book alone—not because they cannot be told here, but because of the weight of the material and the need to protect myself as I continue this work. What appears on this page is shared deliberately, in the spirit of truth and authenticity.

The Ring

I was sitting in my room, writing a prayer request to the prophet’s email list about my declining health, when I heard a sharp clink. My wedding ring had dropped onto the desk in front of me. I stared at it, stunned. I looked at my hand and saw the empty crease on my finger. I couldn’t understand how it had come off on its own.

It had carved a canyon into my finger; that’s how tightly it sat. You couldn’t get it off without significant effort.

I picked up the ring and slowly worked it back onto my finger. Then I got up and went looking for the prophet. I found him downstairs in his office.

“Can you pull this ring off my finger?” I asked and held out my hand.

He tried. He pulled and pulled but couldn’t remove it.

“Why don’t you try using some soap?” he suggested after a while.

“It’s okay,” I said. “You just have to use some muscle to get it off.”

He nodded. I turned to leave.

“But can you explain,” I stopped at the door, “how this ring, all of a sudden, out of the blue, DROPPED OFF MY FINGER AND LANDED ON THE DESK?”

He gave me a long look. He had no answer for me, so I left. But inside of me, a silent shaking had already begun.

“Is it over?” asked a quiet voice inside of me. “Is that what You’re telling me? Is it finally over? Have I finally paid the price?!”

The year was 2009.

The Trips

Then came the dreams.

They started around that same time, appearing in different versions night after night. They always centered on the same idea. In the dream, I was part of an outer-space excursion, a group of students. We would meet in storage buildings around town. Inside the corrugated-metal walls, there was always a hidden spacecraft, with stairs leading up to it.

We would climb the stairs to the rocket ship, which would take off through a secret opening in the ceiling. It would take us to outer space, the moon, and beyond, into the deep eternity of the solar system. I remember watching the planets roll by from the window.

“What if we won’t make it back?” I always feared, as the rocket ship ventured farther and farther away, past the moon and the planets I knew, even beyond our galaxy, to distant worlds.

“It’s okay,” I was always told. “You’re completely safe here. It’s going to be alright.”

There was always a sense that everything we did was “part of a process,” some laid-out plan following a formula someone had put together in advance.

The last night I had that dream, something changed. As always, our group climbed the ladder into the rocket ship. We were dressed in white spacesuits. The rocket ship took off, and out the window we watched the Earth move farther and farther away. Then the movement stopped completely.

From the window, I watched the blue, peaceful Earth sit still in the darkness, surrounded by endless stars.

Then it exploded.

I froze with my hands pressed against the glass.

As I watched the Earth shatter and the darkness swallow up the pieces, I knew I would never return to where I’d come from.

Life as I’d known it was over.

***

These were the signs, big and small, appearing long before our actual separation. They remain inside of me to this day as mysterious goalposts sprinkled along the way. Like the distant light of streetlamps illuminating a dark road, placed there by God’s hand, to show me the way out of the darkness, one footstep at a time.

Shortly after, I had another dream. I was standing on a moving walkway at a busy airport. As I approached the end of the ramp where you step off, an African American man stood waiting for me next to the railing. He had a stern look on his face. There was a suitcase beside him.

“You’re going to take a trip,” he said.

I felt the gravity of his words.

“It’ll be very important.”

“Oh,” I said.

“But you need to know that there’s someone who will try to stop you. He will try to throw sticks at your wheels.”

“Okay,” I said.

“That someone is Raymond Aguilera.”

“Hallelujah!”

I threw my hands up in the air, even though it wasn’t something I normally do.

“If it’s God’s will, then it must be good,” I said.

That’s how afraid I was, even in my dreams, to say anything critical about God’s prophet.

But my body already knew.

Long before my mind could form the words, it already knew that my marriage was slowly killing me.

And because I wouldn’t listen for the longest time, it had to teach me the hard way.

By falling apart.

My Body

It started slowly at first. In my lower back, then my knees, gradually spreading to all my joints. By 2009, things had turned drastically worse. What had begun as occasional back and knee pain turned into mysterious clicking, aching, and cracking throughout my entire body. I ran from doctor to doctor, but no one could tell me what was wrong.

I suspected some kind of autoimmune disease.

“My body is slowly eating itself up!” I despaired.

I was certain I was headed for a wheelchair.

I stood in the living room explaining the situation to my husband.

“He said he didn’t think it was rheumatoid arthritis,” I said.

“Who?” He was only half-listening.

“The doctor. The doctor said he didn’t think it was rheumatoid arthritis.”

“Ok.” He turned to grab a banana from the bowl on the dining table.

“My test results…” I continued, “point to an elevated Rheumatoid Factor. It’s really high.”

“Aha.”

“But it’s not enough to call it rheumatoid arthritis. He said there’s no single test. You have to have other things going on too, like swelling of the joints, and I don’t have that.”

“Ok,” he nodded, his eyes fixed on the banana.

As I spoke, I watched, in slow motion, as his chubby little hand carefully removed the banana peel and gently placed it on the sofa armrest.

My eyes locked in on it. Something inside of me clicked.

As usual, the approximately twenty-step journey to the nearby kitchen trash can was too long for him, and since the sofa armrest was the nearest, that’s where the banana peel landed.

There was nothing unusual about this. It was house rules.

He lived his life like a carefree horse, joyfully grazing across a pasture, dropping waste everywhere he went, while I followed behind him as the busy stall boy with a broom and a dustpan.

Except on this particular day.

It hit me—I wouldn’t be able to keep up with this much longer.

That banana peel suddenly came to represent everything I soon wouldn’t be able to do.

I imagined the house filling up with trash from floor to ceiling, as I sat in a wheelchair, helplessly watching it, while my children got buried underneath it.

How could I possibly hide it from the world now?

I decided to write a letter to the prophet’s email list, asking for prayers.

But I got stuck in front of the computer, searching for the right words. Every truthful version felt like a landmine.

What I wanted to say was:

A. A mysterious health condition had taken over my body, making it hard for me to move. It was slowly getting worse, and I was asking for prayers for healing.

B. Because of this, I could no longer manage the household and the children on my own.

C. I could no longer keep up with the mountains of trash the prophet accumulated daily.

Scratch C completely.

Strongly modify B to eliminate any suggestion that the prophet wasn’t helping. He would’ve never sent out anything like that to his email list.

To stay safe, I made it all about me.

I blamed it on my body—on me, even though I knew some people on that list might see it as a spiritual failure. After all, weren’t we supposed to be God’s chosen couple? So how could I be sick?

But I decided that the prayers were worth it anyway.

After sending the message—filtered through the prophet’s sieve of censorship—the responses were a mixed bag.

Some had compassion. They said they would pray for me. A few even offered to pay for housecleaning. I was grateful for their warmth.

And then there were the advice-givers.

One suggested I put the children and the prophet on a strict schedule to evenly distribute chores.

I remember thinking—if only you knew.

I was trapped. A prisoner of my own polished lie. All the years I’d spent protecting the image of who he was—and who we were supposed to be, had built the walls of my perfect prison. And now everyone believed in it.

A silent call formed inside me for someone to come in and help me.

And it was answered.

But not the way I expected.

God sent a helper—
in a form that immediately rubbed me the wrong way.

His name was Michael.

Michael

“No, no, no,” he exclaimed. “You’re wrong!”

All wrong.

I stood in the kitchen, phone pressed to one ear, a finger in the other, trying to block the blare of Fox News coming from the living room TV. I could barely hear him.

“How am I wrong to say that God loves me as I am?” I asked.

Another avalanche of words came rushing through the phone. He spoke quickly, and with such a thick British accent that I could barely understand him. But from the bits and pieces I gathered, I was somehow deceived, deep in sin, and in desperate need of deliverance.

And apparently, he was the man to help me.

After writing my prayer request to the email list, something inside me had shifted. While I wasn’t healed – my joints still ached and cracked as ever – a strange lightness had taken over me. It felt as if I was being carried by an invisible wave. Nothing in my circumstances explained it, yet there it was—a mysterious peace.

Inspired by this peace, I sat down to write, and an image of an orchid came to comfort me.

I got this idea that God was using it to say something important about my sensitivity, which had always felt like a burden to me. It dawned on me that the character trait I’d always considered “too much” may have been entirely by His design. Maybe it was the whole point of why I was here?

Soon, orchids began appearing everywhere I went—at the store, in random TV ads, and on the internet. Even the prophet brought it up one day.

“God had a word for you this morning,” he said. “You're My orchid.”

I decided it had to be Him speaking, so I wrote about it to the email list. I even painted the orchid and included a photograph in the message. “Despite all of this,” I concluded, “everything is okay, and God loves me just the way I am.” In the midst of my pain, writing that felt like an act of worship, like a way to discover diamonds in the ashes of my life.

But that evening, the phone rang angrily in the kitchen. It was Michael on the other end, ready to put an end to my “foolishness.”

“Surely you understand the problem in saying that God accepts you as you are,” he lectured. “We’re not supposed to accept our sin; we’re supposed to carry our crosses, deny ourselves, and transform into His image.”

“Yeah, I know that, but I don’t think you understood what I meant.”

My words were swallowed by more words.

As I tried to interject into Michael’s monologue, I saw movement in the corner of my eye. The prophet had left his chair in the living room and was now walking silently past me in the kitchen, giving me a long glare. Its message was clear:

How dare I jeopardize his relationship with one of the ministry’s highest monthly donors?

“You say you’re doing your best,” Michael continued on the phone, “yet you willfully continue doing what God already condemned you for.”

“What do you mean?” I paused. “Condemned me for what?”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

“No, I don’t. Condemned me for what?”

“I’m not going to tell you, because you already know.”

“But I don’t know!” I protested. “Please tell me what you’re talking about.”

He wouldn't.

“God told you a long time ago, and you know.”

“Told me? Told me what?”

“Through Ray, years ago. And you already know,” he repeated. “You already know.”

Was he referring to one of my husband’s many prophecies that talked about me in cryptic ways? I wondered. Or was it something my husband had said during one of Michael’s few visits to our house? Could I have overlooked some horrific warning that revealed a significant blind spot in me?

“Please tell me!”

But he didn’t budge. Our conversation ended in a stalemate:

Go to Jail.

Go directly to Jail.

Do not pass Go.

To this day, I still don’t know what I was already supposed to know.

Years later, it seemed increasingly likely that my husband had planted ideas about me in Michael's mind during their long phone conversations, and that Michael had accepted them without question. Considering my husband’s later lies to his ministry about me, it fits the pattern.

Later, in a storm of emotion, I wrote him a letter. For the first time, I pulled back the curtain and gave someone from the prophet’s ministry a glimpse of what my life with the prophet was really like.

I ended the email with the words:

“At least this time he didn't call me a f…ng b…ch.”

I never received a reply from Him.

The Visit

The first time I met Michael’s wife, Margaret, she came climbing up the deck stairs behind him, slightly out of breath by the time she reached our front door. She was a stocky woman with short curly hair, closely trimmed against her scalp. Like Michael, she was originally from Kenya, though they had lived in England for many years before moving to the States. There was an air of weariness about her, as if she were perpetually tired from dealing with the daily nonsense of people.

From her demeanor—and Michael's slight sheepishness around her—I got the impression that she was the one who called the shots.

Michael couldn't stop commenting on how much I'd changed since the last time he'd seen me at Carl's Bible study.

“I can't believe it!” he marveled. “You've doubled in size!”

I was eight months pregnant at the time, a beached whale ready to pop.

“No shit, Sherlock,” I thought, immediately repenting of it in my head.

But then the thought returned because he simply wouldn't let it go.

“It's unbelievable how one person can change so much!” He rejoiced.

His smile stretched from ear to ear, reminding me a little of the Cheshire Cat.

“Oh, stop it,” Margaret mumbled. “Leave her alone.”

Margaret had a prophetic gift, and much of her conversation revolved around what God had shown her about people and situations.

Like Michael, she seemed to have appointed herself to straighten out our lives, our faith, and our houseplants.

“A little bit of eggshells in the soil will get rid of those brown leaves,” she said as her eyes scanned every inch of our living room.

Nearly every conversation began with:

“What you don't understand, Eva, is that...”

I didn't dislike her. She struck me as sincere, and I believed her faith was genuine. I felt the same about Michael, although there was always something slightly dismissive in the way he treated me, a coldness I couldn't quite put my finger on. I suspected it had something to do with me being a woman—as if he believed I didn't know my place.

What struck me most about the two of them was their complete inability to read the room. They seemed stunningly oblivious to their impact on others. They simply said whatever came to mind.

At one point, Michael walked into my husband's bedroom, looked around the mess in bewilderment, sniffed the air, and announced there was a “musty smell” in the room.

Yup. That's right, I thought.

But nothing compared to how it used to smell.

Margaret's Prophecy

“EVA!”

He almost made me drop my coffee.

“I need you to look at something.”

He nodded for me to follow him as he led me down the hallway into his dark, cluttered office, where the bright light from his computer screen shone in the corner.

“This came from Michael’s email, but I think Margaret wrote it.”

I sat down in his crusty office chair and looked at the screen.

To RAY and EVA, it said in the subject field.

“Our names in CAPS?” I noted and kept reading.

7/10/11

 “The Lord gave this message and asked me to give it to Ray and Eva,”  it began.

“1) Ray claims to be a prophet of the most High God,

     yet he did not consult God when he chose to take money from  Michael, over a period of 10 years…”

I sat up in the chair.

“2) When Michael’s wife Margaret, called crying , in 2004 about how  unfairly Michael was using the family’s money, Ray did not even attempt to  stop taking this money.”

The numbered list continued through six. Each point came down like a hammer, placing blame on both the prophet and Michael. Michael, described as a “basket case,” was accused of idolizing the prophet and mistreating his wife by giving away the money intended for her retirement.

“Eva complained bitterly to Michael about a prophet (her husband) who was abusive in many ways. Michael did not lend an ear.”

I did a double take at the words on the screen.

The message went on to say that Michael now wanted to REPENT of his wrongdoings. The list ended with a question that had run through my mind several times throughout the years:

“How does a prophet who claims to know God operate this way?”

After the list, the message continued with instructions for the prophet to immediately begin returning “God’s money,” which had accumulated to $91,000.00 between 2006 and 2010. The prophet was also told to now learn to have FAITH and trust in the Lord instead of MONEY, and to read the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 30, verses 1-3.

The email ended with a warning in bright red caps.

“IF YOU DO NOT DO AS HE ASKED, GOD MAY CHOOSE TO PUBLICY DISGRACE RAY.”

“Ninety-one thousand dollars?” I turned to look at the prophet. “How are we going to pay that back?”

He shook his head.

“What are you going to do?”

His face was emotionless. “I’m just gonna keep my mouth shut. That’s what the Lord told me to do.”

I turned back to the sloppily formatted message on the screen. I read the words again.

And again.

I didn’t tell the prophet what I really thought about them.

That I believed in them.

Typos and all.

***

(To be continued)