Suffering in Light of the Cross

Mez McConnell grew up in Scotland being physically abused by his stepmother.

Early on, he had to develop strategies for survival. The rule is protect your kidneys at all costs. That's the painful one. As long as I didn't get a kick to the kidneys, I could take the kicks to the face and the head. So try and get your back to the wall if you can.

Took me a couple of years to learn that one. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. How does a young person learn to survive when their regular experience is physical abuse at home?

We'll talk to Mez McConnell about that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. I think one of the questions that plagues all of us is when we stop and wonder where is God in the midst of some of the stories we hear about people, particularly children, who are experiencing abuse, who are suffering. And we think, how can a good, loving, compassionate God allow that to continue if indeed he has the power to keep that from happening? I'm wondering if all of us go through a time where we wonder that, when we lose a spouse, a child, when there's been abuse. I know I've wondered that. Like, God, I've been praying all these times for all these months or years, and it seems like you don't even hear me. Yeah, and I would say after 40 years in ministry, that is the number one question, in my opinion, for almost—it's universal. Yeah.

Because it's a real—I mean, how do you answer that question? Well, we are connecting with someone whose life story gives some light on that question. Mez McConnell is joining us, and we should say he is joining us virtually because Mez is in Edinburgh, Scotland.

We're in Little Rock, Arkansas, but technology is making it possible for us to connect. Mez, welcome to Family Life Today. Thanks for having me, guys.

Appreciate it. See, just your accent is kind of cool. You know that we get to do this. Do people in Scotland think our accents are cool?

Yeah, generally, they do, yeah. Okay. He's probably being nice. I think so. I just looked it up. It's 4,238 miles in between us.

I think we could drive there tonight. What do you think? Mez gives leadership to a ministry called 20 Schemes, and Mez, explain to our listeners what it is that 20 Schemes is all about. Yeah, so a scheme in Scotland is somewhere like, imagine a trailer park crossed with a project, crossed with a North American Indian reservation, and so it's where historically the working class poor lived.

My scheme, for instance, is over 200 years old, and so families have lived on them for two centuries, and so in that sense, they have that North American Indian culture. About two million people in Scotland who live in Schemes, so 20 Schemes aims to plant or revitalize gospel-preaching churches in 20 of Scotland's poorest communities. Wow. You're more likely to find a Christian walking down the street in Saudi Arabia than you are in a housing scheme in Scotland. Oh, my word. Wow, so what does that look like? How do you plant a church there, and are they receptive?

Yeah, very receptive. So, historically, the 60s probably was a peak in the UK in Schemes. The churches would have been filled.

The last five decades has been just a steady decline. Culturally, people recognize a church building in the middle of their community, because that's where their grandma went to Sunday school, or their parents were buried, etc. So there's a cultural acceptance of the church as an entity, but largely viewed as irrelevant, and so we currently have 10 church plants in various levels across four cities. In Scotland, families move in. In some instances, we take over old church buildings and we revitalize them, and we're seeing success. We're seeing people converted, saved.

So God's doing the business amongst the poor in Scotland right now. Well, we're grateful for that ministry, and also grateful for the story you have shared in a book you've written called The Creaking on the Stairs. And honestly, Mez, as I read through this book, I thought if this was a part of my background, this is a story I would not want to revisit. Yeah, it's certainly not a story I could have written in my 20s. In fact, I signed a contract for the book four years before I first wrote a word of it.

Wow. And then I actually wrote the book in five days. So it was a difficult one. It was difficult to know what to leave out and what not to leave out. And there's a phenomenon out here called poverty porn. Everyone wants to hear about poverty and get all the, make it as, you know, juicy as possible.

And I wanted to try and avoid that and make the book about Jesus. The overarching story you tell is the story of the abuse you experienced at the hands of your stepmother primarily for a period of years. For how many years? About 11 years, yeah. And we're talking about abuse that was... Horrific.

Yeah, so significant. You passed out on many occasions from beatings that you experienced at her end. Oh, yeah. Yeah, beaten, unconscious, sexually abused by her friends, neighbors.

Yeah, yeah. Give us the overview of your family situation. When did your mom pass? Did your parents divorce?

Take us back to the beginning of the story. So, yeah, I'm actually from Ireland, Republic of Ireland. I was born in Ireland in the 70s. And my mother, I think is still alive, walked out on us. I was two years old. My dad was just drinking and gambling. A young man, he'd have been 21, 22. They married very young. And then my sister and I, he was a year older than me, we ended up in Cair in Northern Ireland in the early 70s, which was at the height of the IRA bombing campaign.

I don't know if you know much about the IRA then. And so a big group of children were put on boats and shipped to England. And I ended up in an orphanage, if you like, in the north of England. And how old were you when you were put into an orphanage? I would have been two when I first went in. I think I was seven when I came to England.

Okay. So, yeah, I went to a big children's home in Yorkshire. My dad had moved to England by then with this woman. And we were sort of in and out of care. So I would be in foster parents for a while, then I'd come back, stay with them, back with my dad and this woman for a while, then I'd be back in Cair.

And that just went on for a number of years. And why would you be removed from your home? Because a social worker was recognizing you were in danger in your home?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we weren't told. We would just be removed in early hours of the morning, whatever. People would just come in, strangers, and just take us and we would be taken away. But how did anybody even know what was happening to you?

I'm assuming school reports and things like that. So, yeah, it would be pretty apparent we were pretty malnourished. And so as we were reading the book, you know, when you went to be with your dad and your, I guess, stepmom, it was really horrific, right? Yeah, I mean, she was a very brutally cruel woman.

So, yeah, we'd be starved and beaten. And I understand my dad was a young man in his 20s. He had two kids. He liked to drink. He worked. He was a bit of a bricky still is. He liked to drink and he was out a lot.

And she obviously had a lot of anger towards him for dumping what she would have viewed as his kids on her to look after. She wasn't the smartest person and came to realize she used to beat me just for reading. I was caught with the book.

I was tortured. It wasn't until I was older, much older, that I discovered that actually she couldn't even read very well. So it's probably a lot of her insecurities were inflicted upon me and my sister.

So obviously you're building up, I mean, even as a young boy and then a young man, just bitterness. I mean, it sort of becomes a story that people learn about when you write, what was it, a blog after her death? Yeah. Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead. Talk about that because that's sort of in some ways why we're sitting here today because then the world found out your story.

Yeah. I mean, you have to understand that there's a previous book to this book called Is There Anybody Out There? I don't know if you realize that, which I wrote about, it must be about 15 years old now, which is the first book to the creaking on the stairs. So it's quite well known in that sense, but the kernel of the idea, I didn't intend to write a book on child abuse. I just was in the house one night and a friend texted me and said, do you know she has died, this woman?

And I said, no. And then obviously went online and Googled it and there she was. She died very young and just I couldn't sleep. I hadn't thought about for a long time. And then I just sort of wrote, I like to write because it just helps me to relax. So I just wrote this blog and then the thing just went mental.

I think about a million hits or something in the first 24 hours and I was getting hundreds of communications from around the world from pastors and other people who'd been abused and said it resonated with them. And quite a few people suggested, will you write a book? And I'm like, no, I don't feel like I want to do it.

And then I can't remember why, how it came about. But then I thought, you know what, maybe I ought to write a book, but I want to write a book that's evangelistic. That's honest, that it's all right to say, hang on a minute.

If God's out there, why is he allowing this to happen to us? There's not very many honest books out there. I didn't want to make it an intellectual sort of, you know, apologetics book.

I wanted to make it a sort of raw, visceral. This is the path I walked to try and get some answers. And even then those answers aren't always satisfactory, are they? Yeah. So, Mez, walk us back through some of that. You were with this stepmom for how many years and abuse was constant? Yeah, so between the ages of two to 13.

So those are significant years too. Oh, yeah. And I'm talking terrorized.

It wasn't, yeah, it was pretty bad. So if abuse starts at the age of two, you're probably not even able to process at any level what's happening to you. It becomes kind of the expectation that this is what life is like to be beaten like this.

Yeah. I mean, I didn't process what had happened to me until after she'd left and my dad remarried. I mean, I was 13 years old in high school and I just assumed this is what happened to people. No one ever talked about it and so I never talked about it. And then it's only as I grew and matured and I thought, hang on a minute, this wasn't right what happened to me. Then I began to get very angry. I think I was in my 20s. I had grown up with sexual abuse and in my 20s was the first time I think I realized, oh, I was sexually abused because it was just life. It was normal. I didn't know anything different and I didn't know that other people didn't experience that.

And so then you go through a whole processing. In that time, walk us through, like, look at your life. God has redeemed and done so much. But what was your belief about God in those years growing up? Yeah, I grew up in a religious family, obviously. So, you know, I sort of believed in God as a kid with no rational belief systems.

It must be something out there. I think I mentioned in the book, I tried praying as a kid and saying, you know, Lord, please help me and do this, that and the other. But nothing was happening.

So I just thought this is nothing that I'm wasting my time. And as I got older and sometimes I'd hear people talk about God and I would be very, very like, I'm not having it. God doesn't exist.

And if he does exist, he's one sick individual. And so, yeah, I became more and more. But as soon as I hit my sort of late teens, sort of 16, 17, started getting heavily involved in drugs and crime and stuff, then I had lots of anger and frustration. In those years when you were being abused by your stepmother, was your father aware this was happening to you? We have this discussion and, you know, he says he wasn't and I largely believe him. But at the same time, he must have had some inkling what was going on. To be fair to him, the only time you really saw her beating me, she was beating me with a big brass ornament over the head. That's the time he kicked her out and she never came back.

And again, you know, I look back, I reflect back on that. And again, I don't want to justify things for my dad. I love my dad. He was a young guy in his 20s. No way could he be responsible for two children. In fact, he was probably, to him anyway, just a glorified babysitter. He was always out with his pals, watching the football, drinking, always down the betting shop. I mean, ironically, his gambling caused me the most pain as a child. Explain that.

What do you mean? Well, you know, it was the same every Friday. You'd get paid and he would go straight to the bookies, the betting shops. And he'd do his own wages on the horses. And if it was a bad Friday and nine times out of ten it was a bad Friday, all his wages were gone. He would roll in drunk and I would get absolutely tortured for it. Sometimes she would send me out on a Friday.

I'm talking five, six, seven years old, you know, barefoot down the road to the bookies. I had to go in, try and get him to come out. If I didn't get him to come out, I got beaten. I don't think he quite realizes that we have talked since he's not read this book.

He's read the first one, but I don't think he quite realized how some of that behavior, his behavior actually affected me and my sister detrimentally. That's what I was going to ask about your sister. Was she going through all the same kind of abuse?

Oh yeah. And it was for her. She was disabled, so she had a bone missing in her legs. She was absolutely hammered.

She's a year older than me. And often we'd be separated and sent into different foster carers and stuff like that. So it was chaos. You wonder how children survive it. Even I wonder now. We just got on with it. How did you survive it? I had no idea.

And I love to give you the cheesy, the grace of God answer, and I'm sure that's correct. But I survived it by reading books. I was a little book smuggler. I could read apparently from the age of three from a book.

And I believe, I can't remember a time when I've not read. But I had to be careful because I would be beaten. Sometimes she would strip me naked and make me stand outside in the cold as she caught me with a book. And so I had various hiding places out in the garden and in walls down the road.

And I like to read and it was sort of like my escape from reality. Was being beaten something that was happening to you daily, weekly? Oh yeah, daily. Daily? Several times. Oh yeah. And was there ever a time as a seven year old boy that you picked up a stick and threatened her, tried to fight back at all? No, no.

Why not? I was too small. I was a small little fella. The first time I remember fighting back in that sense, well I think I was about 12 years old and she was kicking me in the face for something. I can't remember what it was. And I remember I just sat up and I just said, look, I've had enough of this and you're not my mother.

Get away from me. That stopped her in her tracks for half a day anyway. I did see her. She left when I was about 14, I think. My dad married when I was about 14 or 15, remarried. But anyway, she left because I was halfway through grammar school, which I got tortured for. Meaning you were tortured because explain what grammar school is. So grammar school, there's a dual system in the UK at the time.

There still is to some degree. And there's a national exam that children age 11 would take called the 11 plus exam. And that would establish whether you went to a comprehensive school, which is sort of like a normal comprehensive high school, or you went to what's called a grammar school.

That's for children who fall into this top 2% intelligent pupils in the country. And I won a place to grammar school. Which was amazing and exciting for you, I'm thinking. I was buzzing, but she was absolutely incandescent about that. So she's upset because... Because you're smart. I don't know.

Yeah. She told me, you're thick, you're stupid. You're a moron. You're a loser.

You'll never be good at anything. You're just like your dad. All that was drilled. And then when I came home with that piece of paper, that was a glorious moment. Let me tell you. Tell me what happened. You brought home the paper that was going to tell whether you were going to grammar school or you were going to comprehensive school.

Yeah. And I took it and I passed. I passed with actually a lot of distinction.

I could have picked any school I wanted to go to. It was of my marks. And she kicked me up and down the stairs that day. But I loved it.

Bring it on. It was brilliant. What do you mean?

She never called me stupid again. Let me tell you that. When you say you loved it, bring it on.

What do you mean? I took it. It was a sweet beating. We used to call them sweet beatings, me and my sister.

There's beatings and they're just, I know it sounds a bit mad, but when it's been happening for a decade, it's like breathing. And so some were sweet. That was a particularly sweet one. She could have beat me all day long. Wouldn't have mad. Wouldn't have taken the joy out of it for me. So did you just lay there and take it?

Yeah, I took it, yeah. Did you curl up? I curled up, yeah. The rule is protect your kidneys at all costs. That's the painful one. So try and get your back to the wall if you can. Took me a couple of years to learn that one. And so as long as I didn't get a kick to the kidneys, I could take the kick to the face and the head.

You just protect your head and all you get really is bruised arms. Mez, you said that early you just assumed that this was normal, that all kids were getting this kind of behavior. This is what life's all about. When did it dawn on you?

This is not how it's supposed to be. Was it while it was still going on or after you were older? When I was a bit older. So what happened was, I mean, I went to this grammar school. I wasn't really accepted there. I came from a really poor housing estate. You know, these were kids who came from private school education. And so I stood out a little bit.

Got into a bit of trouble there. Yeah, my grades were great. My grades were A's. And then a teacher one day was just trying to humiliate me in front of the class about where I came from. You know, I didn't have the right uniform, clothes on, because I wasn't given clothes. We get money from social services to buy me clothes, but they weren't exactly, you know.

Seville Row, huh? Yeah, so I looked like a homeless kid. And so I got a lot of stick for that. And one teacher was particularly trying to humiliate me. And so I picked up a chair and smacked him around the head with it.

And I think it might have been about 13 or 14. And then I was taken to the headmaster's office and there was a big thing about you can't behave like this. And I'm like, well, how will this everybody back right up? I can't lose my temper and hit someone. That's fine.

But I've been taking this now for 11 years and not one of you people have helped me. And then after that, I was lying there. I'm like, I am now going to be uncooperative to anybody in authority.

So you told them, basically, this has been my life growing up. Was there any response or reaction? Nothing. Just like, your pave is unacceptable.

We don't care. It's like, fine. So after that, then I just drew a line in the sand and thought, right, well, I'm not having this. Then I got sucked into drugs and stuff. Yeah, very early then. So of course, you have grown up with incredible anger, unresolved things.

I'm thinking self-hatred, all kinds of things that took you on a path of drugs. Yeah. And then you end up in prison. That's great. Yeah. Well, we've been listening to the first part of a conversation we had recently with Mez McConnell. And you hear Mez's story, which he has shared in a book called The Creaking on the Stairs, and you think, how does God take someone with this background and bring life back into him and then use him for the kingdom?

Yeah, it's one of those, if you look at his story, read it on paper, you say there's no way this young man even survives. Right. And then when I hear Mez talk and read his book, I'm like, this is the but God in Scripture. This is the darkness.

This is the desperation. But God, through his grace, through his mercy, has saved us apart from God. There is no – but with God, there's a miracle.

That's what I was going to say. With God, all things are possible. It's a miraculous story that's really inspiring. Yeah, and we just heard really the first part of it. In fact, Mez tells the story in a book he's written called The Creaking on the Stairs, Finding Faith in God Through Childhood Abuse. And we've got that book available for our listeners. If you'd like a copy, go to familylifetoday.com or call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY to order. Again, the book is called The Creaking on the Stairs by Mez McConnell. Find it online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-358-6329 to order your copy.

That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. You know, the reason we have these kinds of conversations is because there are so many families with so many challenges, so many people who are trying to start a family today, raise their own kids, and their background is horrific like Mez's. They've experienced the same kind of abuse or dysfunction, the hurt, the trauma that sometimes happens in a family setting, and it's hard to know how to chart a new course when your own experience is as horrific as Mez's was. At Family Life, we are convinced that God is able to bring beauty from ashes, that he's able to equip and strengthen and empower people to put a stake in the ground and to chart a new legacy. Dave, you've talked about that many times.

That's a part of your story. And we want to be here for you regularly with practical, biblical help and hope as you seek to effectively develop a godly marriage and family. The resources that are available online at familylifetoday.com are audio library that can be accessed for free anytime with programs you can listen to on a wide variety of marriage and family subjects. We're here to help equip you in the most important relationships we have in life, your relationship with God, with your spouse, with your kids, with your extended family.

That's what Family Life Today is all about. We want to say thank you today to the folks who make Family Life Today possible for all of us, those of you who are regular donors to this ministry, either monthly legacy partners or those of you who from time to time will pitch in to make this program possible. You're helping to change tens of thousands of legacies through your investment in the ministry of Family Life Today, and we're grateful for that. If you're a longtime listener, you've never made a donation, we'd love to have you join us today. Go to familylifetoday.com to donate online or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate.

And on behalf of those who will benefit from your investment in them, thank you for making that investment. And we hope you can join us again tomorrow when we're going to continue to hear more from Mez McConnell about his experience and find out how he wound up in Bible school preparing to be a church planter. That comes up tomorrow. Hope you can be with us for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapeen. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.