At age 3, Maria was too young to understand the stigma of being an illegitimate child but she was keenly perceptive to notice that people were gossiping about her. It hurt her to know she was different from everyone else and she felt she was an outcast. It wasn’t normal for little children to feel so much pain, she thought. She wondered why she was even born. She was rejected and abandoned. She felt as if nobody cared for her and she belonged nowhere. Throughout her early childhood she felt the emotional and spiritual pain associated with being an unwanted illegitimate, fatherless child.

When she overheard her mother and stepfather talking about a man named Thomas Emmanuel and that he was her father, she never forgot that conversation. She prayed that one day her father would want her and come and get her. She was the reason for the frequent fights between her mother and stepfather. Her stepfather often reproached her mother about having to raise a child that was not his. Her mother repeatedly nagged her with “You are the biggest mistake I made in my entire life!!”

At age 5, her stepfather brought her to her father’s house in an attempt to hand her over but her father rejected her and chased her stepfather away with a gun. From 1st to 5th grade, she ran away from the tension at home by climbing the apple tree to hide there. It was there that she cried, tried to clear her head, and prayed. She spilled her heartaches out to the apple tree. For many years, the apple tree was always there for her. She stopped climbing it only when she reached the 6th grade.

Maria’s journey to restoration and wholeness began when she accepted Christ into her life in 1960. She became more optimistic, hopeful, compassionate, appreciative, and less withdrawn.

After years of longing for and praying for her father, Maria decided to find him as a promise to her dying mother. Maria met her father in 1985, when she was forty-five years old. It seemed like the beginning of a beautiful relationship…. But Maria was soon in for a rude awakening.