Unwanted Child

By Ralph West

Forty years of misery and loneliness come to an end when Ralph uttered the words, "If you are who they say you are, keep me from doing what I am about to do!" Coming to and finding his wheels six inches from a three-hundred-foot cliff began a journey like no other Ralph had ever experienced""the journey that took him deep in the bowels of prison, dealing with the very dregs of society, the lost souls that God still loved, and being tempted to strike out by the human side and given grace by God. Ralph didn't challenge God but requested to be shown the power of the Holy Spirit, asking as a small child would ask his father. If you have the tears, read this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781098000318

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Unwanted Child

Ralph West

Copyright © 2019 by Ralph West

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Family

The FBI

Praise God

When God Brings You to Your Knees

Hunting with God

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.

—Psalm 139:13–16

There was ice on the inside of the single pane windows on a cold and snowy morning in Ohio when this unwanted child was born. The first words he remembers hearing at the age of three or four were I wish you had never been born! Little could he know the lasting effect those words would have on his life thereafter. There were more words than that to be correct. His mother was in bed feeling sick, which meant little to a child, and he was making a noise like children do over and over.

Mother asked him to be quiet, but he kept repeating the noise. That was when he heard her say, You little son of a bitch, I wish you were never born! This was forgotten in his mind until he was forty-seven years old. However the phrase son of a bitch caused him to go in a blind rage of fighting, who ever said it until it came to light as to where it came from years later. He was an unwanted child and told so many times, A change-of-life baby that was a mistake.

He was the fifth child, and his nearest sibling was ten years older. His parents were forty-two at the time of his birth. When he brought home a failing grade, his parents would just say, Well you did the best you could.

He never learned how to play basketball or baseball or even dance. He was destined for prison but not for the reason one would think. Beyond what would have been a good reason to hate his folks, he found himself loving them, making excuses for his dad not teaching him what other boys had. He was given no social skills and never remembered ever having a tooth brush. Only remembered one birthday cake which was white with white frosting that cracked when the cake was cut, the only birthday present was when he found a matchbook next to his plate with a fifty-cent piece in it, wrapped in toilet paper. This only happened once, and he never asked why, thinking that was all he deserved.

Family

If it wasn’t enough to be born as unwanted, the structure of this family was hard to believe compared to the early TV shows like Leave It to Beaver! If love could be exchanged for money, this family couldn’t get out of town. They were of German descent and some say that accounts for the stubbornness that was and still is displayed. The mother was Catholic, and his father was Protestant—which caused problems. His mother was expelled from the Catholic church for marrying his father and told their children would remain in Limbo, unless money was paid to pray them out.

Needless to say, they had to eat fish on Friday, and this separation bothered his mother to no end. At different times, his mother would bring out a picture of a guy in uniform and say, He was supposed to be your father! She had no idea how this information would affect an unwanted child’s mind at this early age. Evidently it was a lost love on her part.

With three sister and a brother, he became a low man on the Totem Pole. They mostly fought with each other, and one day, his dad’s steel-toed work boot went flying right into his nose, breaking it. That was the first broken nose he would have. His closest sibling was a sister, and one Christmas she did buy him some comic books. Other than that, it was a pair of socks or a shirt. His brother did give him a BB gun, and he became the terror of the neighborhood. Police took it from him years later.

His mother belonged to a card-playing club called the Cackle Club. She had taken him with her, but at five, he got bored and noticed a straw sticking out from under this really large woman’s chair, so he picked at it, not knowing about wicker chairs and was somewhat startled when her behind fell through, almost landing in his face. After that, there was a lot of screaming, and his mom was kicked out of the Cackle Club. He was branded a trouble maker. I guess they would have been considered as poor, living on the wrong side of tracks, but he did get a pair of tennis shoes in the spring and a pair of leather shoes for winter.

He was around four when he discovered a new way to play and make money. There was this old guy called Sam, and he would walk by the house on his way to the tavern, not talking to anyone. On his way back, as Sam staggered from one side of the walk to the other, he would say, Hey, Sam, got any money?

Sam would stand there swaying back and forth as he reached into his pocket and give him a quarter. I guess you could say he was rolling drunks at four. He watched his mom canning peaches and discovered that the peach pit had a seed inside and was told that’s how trees grow. Later as he was eating a Hersey bar, someone noticed that he was saving the almonds and asked why.

Well, I am going to plant them and grow a candy bar tree, he told them.

It‘s a wonder he didn’t get the short bus, but they didn’t have one. Even at six he had an intense desire to go hunting, and his dad did take him once and would promise they would go again come Saturday morning. He was up at day light and dressed in his winter clothes and boots, sitting quietly waiting for dad