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My story begins as Liberia, West Africa was in the midst of civil war. Atrocities were being perpetrated on people by the government. Horrible brutality including, flogging, persistent rapes, summary executions, castrations and dismemberments were a part of life from the early 1990’s until recently.
I was shot by drunken soldiers who were on a killing spree outside the John F. Kennedy Hospital in Liberia. The soldiers, thinking I was dead, threw me in the back of a dump truck with other bodies of my tribesmen who had been executed moments before. They dumped me in the heap of bodies on the beach of my homeland between the water and the bush. As night fell I crawled to the bush and then into town where I spent the night in a dumpster outside the Nigerian Embassy. At dawn, I made my way back to my house to discover that it was burned to the ground and my wife Betty and our five children were missing. I fled to the Ivory Coast and at the American Embassy I found refuge. But my family was presumed to be dead.
In September of 1993 in Dallas, Texas, I started to rebuild my life. After three years of separation, I heard the miraculous news that Betty and my children, Emmanuel, Nancy, Peter Jr., Peterian, and Mehn were alive and in a refugee camp in the Ivory Coast. I immediately began the process to reunite with them here in Dallas. After some months the process was complete and the reunion was one of the sweetest moments of my life.
Another important day was May 26th 1996, when my family and I became
members of Lovers Lane United Methodist Church.
We were looking for a church where we could worship. We wanted to find
a congregation that would open its arms to us with acceptance and with
the love of Christ that we so desperately needed after all the trauma
we had experienced. Our church has been there for us since the first day
we stepped inside the sanctuary. I have said before that we found our
refuge in the United States but our sanctuary—safe haven, we found
in the sanctuary of the congregation so rightly named, Lovers
Lane. Lovers Lane made us understand
that we mattered to them and to God.