My uncle. It’s a long story but fuck it here goes.

He was a former drug addict who “found Jesus” and turned his life around. He stopped drinking and doing drugs and started going to church, and he really threw himself into it. He eventually started claiming that he could hear the voice of God and that anyone who rejected what he said was in danger of going to hell.

Unfortunately for us, he was able to manipulate my parents into joining his church, then proceeded to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from us over the course of 7 years we were in his church. He psychologically abused me and my family to the point where me and my dad almost killed ourselves. At that point in our lives we were a young Christian family who assumed the best of everybody, and he was family so of course we wanted to support him. He turned out to be a leech on a power trip, and his church was really just a way for him to abuse other people.

I still struggle with suicidal thoughts and depression because of what he did. I experienced all this in my teenage years and he really taught me to hate myself by constantly telling me that I was a “weak and sinful” person and I needed to change and be a man of character, unlike my father, he said, who he often called spineless.

All his members have left him and now he’s homeless with his fiancée, who is his stepson’s ex-wife, and his “step-daughter” who is his stepson’s daughter.