Murder at 12

Buddhists, Mormons & Jesus is available on Amazon

You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good. He brought me to this position so I could save the lives of many people.

~ GENESIS 50:20, NLT ~

One day after school, I returned home to find that only David was home. He was watching TV in the living room of our apartment, so I decided to play games on my game console, which was in our bedroom. While I was on the second stage of the game, my parents came home in full-out war: yelling, screaming, slamming doors, threatening to kill each other. Sadly, this was the norm in our family. After a few minutes, my dad left the house, leaving my mother and us at home. I could hear my mother preparing dinner, chopping meat as though she was killing a rabid animal.

During the argument, my brother retreated into our bedroom, climbing up to the top bunk, and asked me to change the game I was playing so that we could play each other. I asked him to wait until I finished the round, so I could save my progress. Suddenly, before I finished the round, my mother, in a fit of rage, walked into our room and told us to clean up our room, to turn off and put up our games, and get ready for dinner. I did almost exactly as I was told and went to the living room to see what goodie my mom had cooked. She was the best chef in the world. However, in my waiting, my mother realized that although I had put up the game controllers and turned off the television, I left the game system on so that I could resume the game after dinner.

Disobedience was not tolerated in my home. I was twelve years old at that time and received weekly beatings, many times involving a bamboo cane while fully naked, lying face down on the bed. My beatings would only last fifteen to thirty minutes but would leave me with red welts, split skin, and bruises from my upper back to the bottom of my feet.

For most of my childhood, I did not realize that most children were not violently beaten as a form of discipline, until my grade-school teacher and nurse questioned me about some scars, scabs, and bruises they saw on my lower legs. I remember covering for my mother, telling them that some of the marks came from a fight on the playground while other marks came from my clumsy nature.

Upon realizing that my mother found out that I had left the game system on, I panicked, as fear flooded my heart, and I ran back into my bedroom to find my brother on the top bunk and my mother fuming with anger. Before I could defend myself, my mother started violently punching me. She started hitting me with a dictionary and then some wire coat hangers that were left on the floor of my closet. I could hear the swoosh that the hangers made cutting through the air just before they made contact with my bare legs. Then she grabbed me and threw me against our toy shelf, knocking over all our toys, and continued punching me relentlessly and hitting me with any object she could grab.

I was in complete shock and rolled up into a ball in the corner of my room screaming and crying for help. I caught a glimpse of my brother on the top bunk frozen in terror. My mother had succumbed to complete, blind, uncontrollable rage.

I cried and pleaded while trying to escape her wrath, but she was too quick, too mad, and too armed with a room full of workout equipment, toys, and other objects. Then, after about thirty minutes of the worst violence of my life, I finally broke free and ran out of my room. She caught up to me in the hallway and threw me face first onto the kitchen floor. Lying on the floor, I realized that I had made a very bad calculation in the direction I ran because I ended up in the room with the most dangerous weapons. My mother grabbed the solid steel spatula from the wok and started to beat me with it. Eventually I grabbed hold of the spatula and wrestled it from her. I watched as her eyes turned toward the wok. She picked it up and pummeled me with it. By this point, I was stuck on the floor of the kitchen for more than twenty minutes. Once the porcelain bowls and plates started flying toward me, I knew it was only a matter of time before she grabbed the knives, so I made a decision to start fighting for my life.

I closed my eyes and kicked her in the chest, as hard as I could, knocking her to the ground. I got up and ran toward the front door, but she pounced on me before I could unlock the door. She grabbed my left arm while punching me in the head with her free hand. I pushed her back and broke free again and ran to our patio sliding glass door, where she caught up to me and slammed my head into the frame of the sliding door, splitting the skin on my forehead. I fell to the ground and noticed our baseball bats.

She saw the bats, too. Once again, I started to scream and plead for my life. Suddenly, I heard my brother’s voice. He sternly screamed in Chinese, “That’s enough! Stop, Mom! You need to stop!”

My mother slowly turned her face toward my brother and, with anger in her eyes, responded, “You want to die next?”

My brother looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “Sorry, Jonnathan,” and retreated into the sanctuary of our bedroom. I did not blame him for running because I believed that my mother wanted to take a life and I would rather have had it only be mine.

By this point, I estimate that I had been violently beaten for more than an hour. I looked up at my mother as she began hitting me with our wooden bat. First my back, then my hip, then my thigh. Everything turned numb and moved in slow motion. The last thing I remember was looking up at my mother as she held the bat with both hands over her head, like an axe, and started the motion down toward my head. Then BOOM, everything went black!

The next thing I remember was flying through the three floors of my apartment building and suddenly spilling out into the sky. I was free from fear, free from pain, free from life, and free from the memory of what just happened. I felt amazing. As I made it up to the first set of clouds, I heard a faint crying. The crying amplified as I stopped my upward progression and hovered in the sky. I was very confused about what was going on, but I knew that I needed to find the source of the crying. After looking all around, I finally looked down at a tiny apartment complex in the distance. As I focused on the complex, the crying became wailing. Suddenly, I heard someone saying, “Jonnathan, go back. Your mother needs you.”

“My mother?” I thought. With that one thought, a flood of memories filled my mind. When I looked back down at the apartment complex, I saw all the way through the roof, through the third and second floors, into my living room, where I saw my mother sitting on our couch with her arms wrapped around her legs, her face buried in her knees. I closed my eyes and said, “Okay,” and suddenly felt myself fall from the sky and slam back into my body.

I woke up with a gasp while face down. It took me a few seconds to realize where I was and what had happened. I turned to my right and saw my mother on the couch, arms around her legs, face buried in her knees, still wailing, as I had seen from the sky.

I pushed myself up to my hands and knees and crawled over to her, and I noticed a pounding headache forming. Just as I made it to her, I reached out my hands and grabbed both of her feet. My mother screamed. It was a sound of shock and terror. She fell down to her knees and met me on the floor. She grabbed my tear-soaked cheeks and screamed, “You’re alive. Thank God, you’re alive. I thought I killed you. You weren’t breathing. You didn’t have a pulse, and I was trying to figure out what to do with your body.”

A chill filled my body as the reality of the situation set in. In an instant, I replayed my ascension through the three floors of my apartment building building into the sky, then my sudden fall from the sky back into my body. “Had I died?” I wondered.

Then looking at my mother, I said to her in Chinese, “Mom, it’s okay. I’m back and I’m alive. If beating and killing me will keep you, David, and Dad safe, you can beat me as much as you want.”

With that statement, my mother fell face down onto the ground, pleading for forgiveness while saying, “Mommy will never beat you again.” She kept that promise and I was never beaten again.

—– FROM THE AUTHOR —–

At this point in my journey, at only twelve years old, I had barely heard of Jesus Christ and certainly did not know Him as the Son of God. I had never heard the gospel He commissioned all of His followers to preach. I only understood living in fear of punishment and performing for love. At this time in my life I was Buddhist, broken, and completely hopeless. However, twelve years after this event, while finishing my last semester in college, I cried out to God for the first time, just before attempting to commit suicide, and Jesus answered. And, since that miraculous day, my life has never been the same.

If you grew up like me, in a home of violence, pain, and rejection. Know that no matter how painful your life is and the violence and abuse you endured, Jesus Christ loves you and He died for you.

For more chapters, purchase Buddhists, Mormons & Jesus today on Amazon