Mightyhandofgod, 48

god fearing women of god AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I was born in Bogotá, Columbia in 1976. I was later discovered in the city’s streets by the local fire department which took me to a local adoption agency.

I was adopted by my American parents, Clark and Trudy Duncan, and grew up in Iowa with one sibling, my sister Erica. In 1986 my mom died of breast cancer. My father remarried, to my stepmother Barb, which added five more siblings to our family.

There was unfortunately no feeling of belonging in my new family and I fought a great deal with my father and step-mother. I also felt that my siblings made a choice to exclude me from their daily lives because I was from a different ethnic group. I sensed that they saw me as the troublemaker child.

I attended a small elementary school, Martensdale St Mary’s. It was during this time that I began participating in and becoming successful at sports; I received countless championships in wrestling, baseball, and track.

Sports offered me more than an outlet for my athletic abilities. I came across numerous coaches who encouraged me to never quit and in a larger sense became my surrogate fathers; I continue to live by their advice and philosophy to this day.

Even with the coaches’ assistance, however, I still lacked a sense of belonging and direction. I was in and out of short-term, lock-up facilities numerous times for breaking the law.

Without making excuses, it doesn’t take a lot of insight to attribute my negative youthful behavior to unresolved emotional issues.

In 2000, at the age of 24 the first of my major life changes occurred. I was playing on my brother’s baseball team and asked I could catch for one inning, a request that would impact me for a lifetime. In what would have normally been another innocuous baseball play, I suffered a terrible injury, shattering my leg in seventeen places. I was in the hospital for weeks, and then had to learn to walk again.

In 2008, an even more profound thing happened, one that sounds like