Living Inside and Outside the Boundaries of The Creator

By Pastor Keith N. McDonald MA Sr.

This book is a biography of my personal transition and transformation with the Creator known as God. The title depicts the transition from my personal living inside and outside His boundary.

The cover begins with a dome or a firmament that covers the earth. The firmament refers to our minds or consciousness to where the Spirit of the Creator dwells. The environment under the firmament is the boundary that we exist in, and it is called earth; the physical earth is representative of our bodies. Inside the firmament is a dark and light side, which represents the chaos and conflict that we experience in our minds. However, that chaos in our lives is met with the Spirit or the intelligence of the Creator.

The outside of the firmament represents the abode of the Creator and His desires for us to ascend our minds to the heavens of His presence to obtain the information that is needed to cast down the chaos that seek to control our functions.

Therefore, as you read this book, allow the Holy Spirit to guide you to the liberating principles that are written as they will be derived from my personal experiences as well as my limited research of the Creator.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662423420

Book preview

Chapter One

From Death to Life

From Death to Life

My Beginning

My childhood family structure consisted of a sibship of six—myself, two brothers, and three sisters—and a single mother. We resided in a low-income three-bedroom apartment in the projects of Peoria, Illinois. We were surrounded by individuals who were also growing and being developed within the same environment or ecosystem. Living in the projects isolated me from the outside world, as this environment was a world within itself with its own limitations, boundaries, and confinement. The isolation and boundaries prevented me from experiencing life—or the world—outside the walls of the projects. Rarely did I venture outside these boundaries. My upbringing became the responsibility of my single mother and other single mothers in the environment we were confined to. I was raised by a single mother and developed by the projects.

I can recall some of the few events that we would experience in regards to us departing from the projects. Most particular was when my mother would have extra money and would take all of us children to the movie theater. That excursion consisted of a family walk to the downtown theater, which was approximately three to five blocks from the projects. I can remember seeing some John Wayne movies, Tarzan movies with Johnny Weissmuller, and a few others. However, I can recall vividly one movie in particular that my mother took us to see, and that movie was entitled The Greatest Story Ever Told. That was my first relative experience and understanding of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and that experience stuck with me for the rest of my life. The seed was planted within me that has now taken root and blossomed. However, at that time, it was not able to provoke an inward change in me to come forth. The Bible says in 1 Corinthian 3:6 that one man will plant the seed, and another will water it, but God will bring the increase. That movies was the seed that was planted.

I can also remember those Sunday mornings that we all would pile into a taxicab and ride to church. That cab ride was awesome! This was the time of the sixties, and the cabs were big and spacious. The cab had a rear bench seat, as well as stools that could be raised up from the floor that existed between the rear and front seat. My mother, because of the influence of my father’s mother, my grandmother, and also her pain of separation from my father, became the driving force to us going to church. My grandmother was known by my mother as mother-in-law, and she was very influential to my mother. As we continue to go to church, my mother became a member of the Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church. Going to church became conflicting for me. That old traditional Baptist Church experience of worship was more emotional than instructional. You would hear the preacher preaching a very high-spirited, emotional sermon to which the older women would get what they called the Holy Ghost. They would get so emotionally involved in the message to where they would become overwhelmed with emotions and would begin to exhibit an outpouring or an outburst of praise. Those outbursts or screams became very troubling and dreadful for me because, as a child, I did not understand what was taking place.

I can also remember my father getting baptized. However, I did not know he was being baptized; I barely knew that he was my father. However, you have to know what goes on in these old Baptist churches. In those old Baptist churches, they were not like the modern churches of today. The baptismal was in the lower cellar of the church sanctuary, and in that cellar, there was a pool in which the water was very seldom changed and the water was freezing cold. I remember seeing my father proceed down into the cellar to be baptized, and eventually, he went out of sight; I wondered where he went. However, after a while, he reappeared, and when he reappeared, he was shaking as if he saw something very scary in that cellar; for me, that cellar was considered underground. And in my inquisitive mind, I was wondering what did he see down there, and therefore, fear came upon me, and church became an obstacle for me, and as I grew up, I really did not want anything to do with the church at all.

While growing in the projects, I do not recall the presence of father figures or male role models there. Children were raised primarily by single mothers. As a result, most mothers gave nonverbal permission to one another to discipline or correct a child’s behavior.

My upbringing was absent of parental love, which I believe to be one of the most important essentials that would have molded me into the Creator’s image and likeness. From childhood to adulthood, I was not taught, nor do I recall experiencing parental love. I cannot recall experiencing parental love or nurturing from either of my parents, nor can I recall experiencing love through physical touch, such as a hug or through a verbal expression affirming love.

Like many children in the community where I was raised, a father’s presence in the home did not exist. Although my father and mother were, in fact, married, we were victims of a bureaucratic welfare system that disallowed fathers to be present in the home if the mothers were receiving benefits called Aid to Dependent Children (ADC). I recall occasional visits where my father would come to the home, pick me up, and take me to his small-efficiency apartment; however, I believe this was primarily due to his need to justify spending time with me or, simply, to satisfy my mother’s complaints.

While visiting with my father, I would see him socializing with other women, including a woman who is now his current wife. My father’s wife was an oblivious, innocent, but a willing participant in my father’s affairs. Overtime, I have come to love her like a mother as she treated me and my siblings with common decency and respect. I believe that she genuinely cared about us. I believe that this experience stimulated my thoughts, need, and desire to function in noncommittal relationships as I grew older up until the day I gave my life to the Creator. For most of my adult life, my innate need to function in noncommittal relationships, as well as my having witnessed many broken relationships over the years, has hindered my ability to give and receive love.

My mother worked many years as a maid, providing cleaning and other services to the community hospital doctors. In many instances, she worked twelve-hour days. Upon her return from work, she was plagued with fatigue and developed a daily routine of feeding her children and then herself, and she would then retire to bed. This routine didn’t allow her much time to spend nurturing and developing maternal love with her children. Of the siblings, I was probably the least affected by her absence as I developed a high level of personal independence at a very young age. The lengthy absence of both of my parents afforded my siblings and I free reign of the projects until the streetlights came on—our nonverbal curfew.

Having grown up in this environment, my siblings and I were constantly learning and experiencing adult life at young ages; thus, we were subjected to many inappropriate experiences and behaviors. One of my earliest memories of an inappropriate experience involved sexual promiscuity with older females. Today, this experience would be called sexual abuse or sexual molestation and is criminal in nature. At the time, I did not know if these females were grown women or young teenage girls; nonetheless, they were older than me. The molestation that I experienced was not forced upon or demanded of me. I easily became a willing participant. From these experiences, I gained an insatiable appetite to be in the company of females, and this became a new priority for me. In retrospect, these experiences have helped to define my mental state of functioning to this day.

This small community where everybody’s experience was subject to rumors, gossip, innuendos, and in many cases, falsehoods became our vehicle for learning. Talk between adults, other teenagers, and people of the same and/or different age groups were all subject to spreading and/or receiving unguarded, misguided, and misleading information that would be used by the enemy of the Creator to spark the curiosity of the innocent.

Many were innocent and vulnerable to the spiritual development of the unclean spirit that dwelled within the environment of the projects. These experiences began to penetrate my young immature mind and awaken my fleshly appetite—it gave birth to my lust. Children raised in an environment that lacks the presence of structure, discipline, foundation, and parental leadership, particularly that of a father, generally are more vulnerable and susceptible to psychological, physical, and sexual abuse among other dysfunctional behaviors (Dr. Jawanza Kamjufu, An African Centered Response to Ruby Payne’s Poverty Theory). My experiences and involvement in sexual behaviors at a very young age have affected the direction of my life, both favorably and adversely. The Scripture says that all things will work together for my good (Rom. 8:28 King James Version). Therefore, I have learned to accept my experiences, both good and bad, as a part of my total development.

Family

Parents are the most important essentials of Elohim’s creation of the family structure. Each parent equally, individually, and collectively bears the responsibility of teaching their children how to represent Him. Proverbs tells the fathers to instruct their children and for mothers to teach them—teach them what? What the father has instructed them. However, parents who are not rooted in his love are likely not able to adequately and spiritually guide their offspring to his love. Love is the essential ingredient in the future generations’ development. Because my parents’ relationship was not based in his love, love was not communicated or reciprocated from my parents to myself or my siblings. Therefore, I was not developed in love, nor did love govern my way of thinking. Consequently, I did not have a full understanding of the concept of what Jehovah’s love is.

While living my life outside the boundaries of the Holy Spirit, I fathered five children: two boys and three girls. My first child was a biracial baby girl to which I had no inclination or involvement of and with her existence and development. She was born in 1976. Her birth and identity as my child was what we call hearsay. Therefore, she was raised by her adopted parents for twenty-eight years until the day that she found me. The relationship that I shared with her mother was what I would call casual and brief. We never had the opportunity to grow and develop into a monogamous relationship; the dark spirit of prejudice was prevailing within her family.

At the time of my transition from adolescence to adulthood, I had two primary relationships—two women that I considered to be my main squeeze. From these two relationships, I fathered four more children. My second child was a baby girl also. She was born in 1976. My third child was another baby girl born in 1977, six months later. I then fathered two sons from these two relationships, and they were born in 1980 and 1981, one month apart. As you can see, my life was picking up and was being paralleled from my father’s way of functioning. After fathering these children, I was not able to disseminate the love of the Holy Spirit to my offspring because I had no knowledge of the power. With the absence of the power of love, I was unable to love myself, my offspring, or my immediate family. As I grew older, I continued to find it difficult to express the full love of the Father to my own children in their lives.

When I transitioned from life to light, I discovered that the knowledge of Jehovah’s love that illuminates in our spirits gives us the ability to apply His Word, principles, and way of thinking into our own minds. His method of thinking produces His ways. Isaiah 55:8 says, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord." It is very clear from this Scripture that the reason we cannot produce His ways is because we do not think like He thinks, and His ways are not like ours because He does not function like us. Therefore, there must be a transformation in an individual’s life in order to be able to experience Jehovah’s love and be able to transfer it downward and outward. In order for us to experience Jehovah’s love, we must experience a transformation. This transformation will also give us the ability to disseminate that love to our offspring, family members, and then to the world.

As I reflect on the generations of both my mother and my father, I’ve learned that while there are many differences in each of their upbringings, there are also many similarities. I learned that my mother grew up without either of her parents being directly involved in her development. Her mother, who grew up on a plantation in the south, died at a very early age from tuberculosis. That event robbed my mother of any opportunity to bond or receive love from her. However, my mother was raised by her maternal grandmother, who made a living as a madam—and owner of a brothel.

My father’s upbringing, in direct comparison to my mother’s, in many respects was very similar. Like my mother, he, too, was not afforded the opportunity to experience maternal love. My father, the oldest in a sibship of ten, had parents who were sharecroppers in the South. The responsibilities of parenting many children, sharecropping, and other experiences made it virtually impossible for his mother to provide any of the children with individual or collective maternal nurturing. In addition, he did not share a close relationship or bond with his father. Because of the significant distance between father and son, my father wasn’t able to retain much of what he may have learned from his father. As a result, it became very difficult for my father to generate and transfer paternal love to his children.

My Paternal Grandparents

My paternal grandparents were very spiritual people who relied heavily on Jehovah to guide, provide, and protect them and their family. I knew very little about my father’s father other than the few stories I was told by my father. My grandfather was a very private individual and disclosed very little information about himself or his past. He was married to my grandmother for approximately fifteen years, and they had six children together: five boys and one girl, of which my father was the oldest. My grandfather was a very spiritual man, always immersing himself in the reading of the Bible. He was approximately fifteen years older than my grandmother; he married her at her young age of thirteen. Back in those days, that was a common union within the Black culture.

They left Mississippi together in the early to mid-1930s and moved to Peoria, Illinois. My grandfather eventually died in 1949 from a heart attack when my father was eighteen. My father soon met my mother and was forcefully encouraged to marry her because of an early pregnancy in the early 1950s, and soon after, I was born in 1956.

My father’s mother, my grandmother, was a very influential force in my life. Her spiritual wisdom, guidance, and direction were instrumental in supporting the spiritual seed that was planted in my life. Although my grandmother was a very spiritual woman, she was plagued with demonic attacks. Because she married at an early age, she never had the opportunity to experience a life as a teenager. She was under heavy spiritual attack in regards to the absence of the many different options that normal teenage adolescents would experience. Lust and worldly desires began to invade the spiritual innocence of my grandmother. She began to play cards and indulge in alcoholic beverages; those were customs that she never participated in!

My grandmother was enamored with movies, and as an avid moviegoer, she would often interpret many of life’s situations through the movies she had seen. That basically was the totality of her life’s entertainment that she would participate in whenever she got an opportunity and the extra money to go to what she called the picture show. Through her ministry to me, she would often illustrate past movies that she had viewed to establish a biblical principle. She was under the impression that the Lord allowed her to know Him and to see Him and to understand life through the interpretations of movies.

My grandfather, as told by my father, was an excellent provider. However, it was difficult for him to express and demonstrate love and affection for my grandmother. This deficit in their marriage caused her to seek love and affection from other events, places, and people.

My grandmother once shared the story of how she and her close friend and neighbor admired each other’s husband; my grandmother’s husband was very spiritual, settled, and mature while her close friend’s husband was more worldly, young, and a womanizing man of the streets and not spiritual in nature. After several conversations and comparing of one another’s experiences, the two women got together to discuss the idea of switching husbands. My grandmother and her close friend facilitated mutual divorces and basically traded husbands.

My grandmother, who was initially married to the spiritual man, was now married to the worldly and very handsome, womanizing man of the streets. I’m sure she did not have any idea of this individual’s character. However, she was infatuated by his good looks and charm. My grandmother remained in this marriage and never divorced; however, she did eventually separate from him after approximately fifteen years of marriage. Aside from the four beautiful daughters produced from this marriage, my father recalled that this man practically ran my grandmother crazy.

To this day, I believe that it was the very difficult challenges that my grandmother faced in this marriage that helped in her decision to return to the Lord. My grandmother’s spiritual knowledge was deep-rooted; thus, through her knowledge and understanding of Jehovah, she diligently sought Him and became very committed in her relationship with the Lord. At one point, she shared with me that she asked that the Lord to deliver her from the difficult marriage she was in because her husband would not, at that time, permit her to leave him. She was able to testify during her lifetime that the Lord intervened specifically and answered her prayer. She had particular practices and rituals that she would propose to the Lord, and through those outcomes, she believed that the Lord would answer her prayers. And according to her, he did on many occasions. I eventually tried one myself and truly did experience a direct answer from the Lord.

My grandmother was a very wise and influential woman. She lived the rest of her days maintaining an excellent relationship with the Lord. She was known as the prophetess at the New Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church. After reaching a point in her life where she felt she had lived a very long and productive life, and due to her increasing age, my grandmother was no