How God Restores Shattered Lives
Posted by David Wheaton | Friday, July 16, 2010 | 5:42 pm CT
Podcast: Download (Duration: 50:49 — 8.7MB)
Guest: Frank Pastore, author, Shattered
“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away;
behold, new things have come” 2 Corinthians 5:17.
No doubt you know someone who grew up in a “dysfunctional” family. Maybe you did yourself. Of course “dysfunctional” really just means “lots of sin” whether in the form of multiple divorces, re-marriages, children out of wedlock, abusive words and relationships, lying, deceit, and you name what else.
Of course sin is present in every family and if allowed to run its destructive course, everything is turned upside down from the way God intended the family to function.
Frank Pastore, former Major League Baseball pitcher, current radio talk show host in Los Angeles, and our guest this weekend on The Christian Worldview, grew up in a highly dysfunctional family. In his new book Shattered: Struck Down, But Not Destroyed, Frank tells his captivating story of family, marriage, and baseball, and how God amazingly rescued him from bringing the dysfunction of his past into his own family.
If you have ever felt hopelessly mired in your own family’s dysfunction, or know someone who is, please tune in to The Christian Worldview this weekend to find out how God can restore even the most “shattered” lives.
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The Christian Worldview Transcript
Date: July 17, 2010
Host: David Wheaton
Topic: How God Restores Shattered Lives
Guest: Frank Pastore
DAVID WHEATON: How God Restores Shattered Lives. That is the topic for today on The Christian Worldview where the mission is to think biblically about all matters of life and faith so that we can then live accordingly. And to share the Good News that Jesus Christ is who He claimed to be, the Way, the Truth and the Life and that His Word is both relevant and our basis for living in this modern world. I am David Wheaton, the host of The Christian Worldview. Our official website is TheChristianWorldview.com.
Our National Presenting Sponsor is Summit Ministries, the very best in Christian worldview resources, conferences and curricula. Their website is Summit.org. We are also supported by two other national sponsors, The Masters College and The S. Lewis Johnson Institute and of course, listeners like you.
Today in the program you are going to be encouraged especially if you have come from what is called a dysfunctional family background. Our guest is Frank Pastore. He is the author of a brand new book entitled, Shattered. He is the host of the Frank Pastore Show on KKLA in Los Angeles. Frank was also a pitcher in major league baseball, most notably for the Cincinnati Reds. Let me welcome my friend, Frank Pastore to The Christian Worldview.
FRANK PASTORE: David, I want to say I am so proud of you. I remember meeting you years ago when you were starting in radio and of course, taking your wonderful tennis talents and all of that accomplishment and have poured all of that into radio. I continue to hear great things about you and The Christian Worldview and I love the name of your show. I love The Christian Worldview because at the end of the day, that is what it is all about. It is my pleasure to be here David. How are you doing?
DAVID: I am doing great and anything nice you say about me, I am going to have to deflect that and say it is by God’s grace. I know you think the same thing about your own live as well. I think we have so many similarities in our lives with one very big notable difference which we will get into today. But there are so many similarities, the background in professional sports, the things we came to understand about Christ through professional sports. I am looking forward to talking to you about those things today. The one big thing we have that is different about our lives is our family backgrounds. I grew up in a “good family.” You use the word dysfunctional family in your book a lot. That word is thrown around a lot. Could you define what dysfunctional actually means and tell us a memory or two about how your childhood exemplifies that?
FRANK: Lucky you, count your blessings on being from a “good family.” I didn’t grow up with that. I thought it was at the time. So many kids think that their family is ok and that is how you cope with it and how you understand it. I came to the place where I realized that my family was indeed dysfunctional. I didn’t find out until I was an adult that many of the things that my mom had told me regarding how she met my dad and they got married and had kids and all that stuff was all a lie. It was all a lie. I was told that they had met and that they dated and then they got married and she got pregnant and all of that but that is not what happened.
I wondered why it was, David, when I was growing up that I never saw my parents kiss. They never showed any romantic interest in one another. They slept in separate bedrooms my entire life. We moved constantly and they never had any friends. My mom didn’t have any girlfriends that she would talk with on the phone. I just thought that was normal. You always think your family is normal but that is not the case.
What I found out David, and this is one of the shatterings that happened and I think a lot of people can realize this, that the story she had told was not true. She was on her failing fourth or fifth marriage. She was raising a little ten-year-old girl in the mid-50s in Los Angeles. She was shacking up with a guy and got pregnant and chose not to have another abortion; she had several. She decided ok, I am going to have the baby. I will hook him into making alimony payments and then I will divorce him. That is my dad. He was 43 and she was 40 when I was born. My older sister moved out when she got pregnant at 15. I never really knew her. I only have talked with her five or six times my whole life.
I grew up an only child in a very cold and sterile emotional environment. I was always the new kid in school. I had horrible diet and hygiene habits. My mom never told me to brush my teeth. I am nine years old and I go to the dentist for the first time. I had 21 cavities. It was really messed up.
I learned all of this later on and it is like, what can you believe? There are so many lies here. She stole money from me. I don’t want to bash too much, but the idea is I can identify with people who come from a dysfunctional family. I came from one.
My father and I were not close but we played catch all the time. He was a high school dropout, an Italian ghetto ironworker, the guy who walks on the high steel. He had never been married and got hooked into marrying my mom. They stayed together for me. I was the wishbone that was being pulled in two directions; do baseball because that is what dad wants and do well in school because that is what mom wants. They were both trying to live their lives through me. I grew up with this tension and this cold passive aggressive hostility in my house. I poured myself into baseball because that was the one thing I did pretty well. I couldn’t hit and I couldn’t run. I literally was the last kid picked in 7th and 8th grade P.E. I couldn’t play basketball, I couldn’t run, tennis are you kidding me? All I could do was throw hard and thank goodness there is a sport where they will pay you to throw things hard.
In this environment, I grow up as an atheist. My mom hated religion. She grew up as a Southern Baptist in Birmingham, Alabama as one of the girls in a family of twelve. She had earned early on, the nickname of Rebel just because she rebelled against everything. I had an open hostility towards Christianity and towards all religion. It was all something to mock and make fun of and it was silly. Life is a pain and then you die. The point of life is to get rich and famous and then you are happy.
Of course, my game plan from being a fat little nine-year-old kid on was ok; I am going to be a major league baseball player. Out of high school, I signed with the Cincinnati Reds and started my career. By the way, in high school, here is what is interesting, I was getting recruited to come to the local Catholic boys high school to play baseball. Mom found out that tuition was cheaper if you were Catholic so she said we are going to get religion, we are going to be Catholic. We will meet the people; we will lie to the people and convince them that we are Catholic. So we met with the priest, she and I, about a dozen times and she would laugh about how effectively she had deceived and lied to him saying that she believed in things that I knew she didn’t, so we got the tuition break. She told me don’t blow it or else they will kick you out, which they wouldn’t have. So I kept my mouth shut in school, going along with it and going to mass and mocking it inside of me and talking about how silly it was with her.
One day in a religion class, I remember asking a sincere question of the priest. I asked the standard questions, why do you believe in God? How do you trust the Bible? What about all the denominations? What about hell? I threw all that out there and I am about 14 or 15 years old. I remember the answer I was given and it was basically this is not about facts, it is not about evidence, it is about having faith. I translated that faith for these religious people means trying to believe what you know isn’t real. It is not about evidence; it is about faking it. I get it and I know how to play this game and I did.
DAVID: From what I heard you say and all the things that were going wrong in your family with your parents, the lifestyle and the lies, dysfunctional to me is what I am hearing you say is that there are a lot of sin present in the family. So when I say I come from a good family, I specifically said I didn’t come from a perfect family because there is no such thing as a perfect family. There is sin in every family. So when you say dysfunctional family, it just means that there is a whole lot of sin going on that manifests itself in a lot of different situations.
FRANK: Right, there is a lack of health, big time. You typically have a mom and dad that love each other, that love their children. Of course there is sin and problems but they go through is together. I didn’t have that. I had a mom and dad who were at each other constantly. The fact is that I was the barter chip. The way I coped with all of that was to block off all of my emotions completely, to not even go there because that was a hurtful place. Thank God that is a defense mechanism that children are given when they go through trauma, physical abuse or emotionally. They can block that off. Of course, that was a problem I had to deal with later on.
DAVID: Where do you think most unbelieving families are today in this spectrum from being a really godly, God-fearing, Bible following traditional family on one end of the spectrum all the way down to a highly sinful, dysfunctional family. You said you thought you grew up in a normal family. You looked at other families and thought they had everything together but do you think the really did? Do you think that more families actually have the type of sin that your family had in it?
FRANK: Just look at the sociological research that is being done on the family right now. There is no guesswork here. We have the ongoing breakdown of the traditional family. When young people are polled, the majority still say they want to have a life partner forever but they really don’t have an expectation of having just one. They think they will be married several times. Twenty somethings are putting off marriage and shacking up, living together. You are going to have even more fatherless families and more breakdown in the couples that are committed to one another, therefore more unhealthy children will have that expectation and the cycle continues. That is going on. We especially as Christians, people of the Book, for whom the living God is alive, we need to break that. Of course, my book is about that. My book is about how the generational chains of bondage and sin can be broken. I should not be married to the same woman for 32 years with two great kids and I am happily in love and I love my wife and I love my family. That shouldn’t have happened. I should be even more screwed up than I am. I think it gives people hope that when you get your life right with Christ and you start understanding that His strategy and His plan for you is a lot better than what the world offers, you can break those chains and I have broken them in my family. I dedicated the book to my grandson Michael because I wanted those generational chains of bondage to be snapped and they have been. Michael is growing up in a completely different family than I did and my kids grew up in a different family than I did. There is hope in Christ for those who come from a “bad family background” to break that so that they don’t have to repeat is and continue the cycle.
DAVID: That is exactly why I have you on the program today because your story is so compelling in that regard. The topic is How God Restores Shattered Lives and that is why this book is so great. The book is Shattered. Our guest today on The Christian Worldview is Frank Pastore. He is the host of the Frank Pastore Show on KKLA in Los Angeles. He is a former major league pitcher as well.
Let me ask you this Frank. Do you think there are any positives that resulted from growing up in this dysfunctional family?
FRANK: Yes, overwhelmingly there is one that just jumps out immediately. Here I was literally the last kid picked in 7th and 8th grade P.E. I was not at all physically talented. You would not call me an athlete at all. Because I could throw stuff hard, I poured myself into that. My dad and I would play catch every day. He was my Little League coach. With all this trauma, this pain and dysfunction going on in my family, I poured myself, more than any other kid that I knew, into baseball. I spent hours throwing a ball against the block wall in the backyard in the many houses that I had. In fact one of the stories that the athletic director of the high school, who has now passed away, shared at some banquet we were at, he remembers being on campus and hearing this click, click, click. He came outside and saw me at 7 a.m. throwing a baseball against the gym wall. I did this almost every day of school. He said he had never seen such dedication in a young athlete. Is there a good thing out of this? Yes, I poured myself, as my escape route, into baseball and I think that is what helped make me into a major league baseball player.
(break)
DAVID: Our topic today is how God Restores Shattered Lives and our guest is Frank Pastore. He is the author of the book, Shattered: Struck Down But Not Destroyed. Frank is also the host of the Frank Pastore Show on KKLA in Los Angeles every weekday from 3 – 6 p.m. pacific time. His website if FrankPastore.com.
I don’t want to go into the whole story of how your married your wife Gina because I don’t want to give it away. It is a great part of the book. You were twenty years old, she was sixteen and she was underage. You eloped and there was the whole story of her dad and getting out of town. It is just unbelievable. Looking back at that, you did end up eloping. You went off from California to Nashville and you were married there against the approval of Gina’s father at the time. You have been married 32 years to Gina. Do you look back, because your father was already intending to give you approval to marry her after she would graduate from high school, a couple of years later. Do you wish in retrospect that you would have waited until the time when her parents would have approved?
FRANK: Gina and I have talked about this a lot and it is somewhat awkward because here we are in Christian radio in L.A., doing your show and Focus on the Family and we have this story that I don’t want anyone to repeat this. It was both of our dysfunction. Thank God, literally, thank God that it worked out because all the statistics would say this thing is going to crash and burn and here we are married 32 years. This is the “don’t try this at home” kind of thing. Look what God is able to do even in the midst of this. Of course, that is part of the story of Shattered.
DAVID: Again, Frank Pastore today on The Christian Worldview. His website is FrankPastore.com. with his brand new book Shattered. The title of the book, Shattered, has to do primarily with what happened when you were pitching in the major league but also lots of other moments that were shattered throughout your life. We will talk about some of those, but tell us about the major league turning point. You were doing well pitching for the Reds in the big leagues. I think you were six or seven years in and all of a sudden, what happened?
FRANK: Let me set it up this way for everyone listening. What is your dream? If you are a singer, to play at The Metropolitan Opera. If you are a writer, to win the Pulitzer. If you are an artist, have your work hung in a museum somewhere. For a baseball player, your dream is to pitch in the major leagues. I had done that for six years. The strategy I had for a meaningful life to get rich and famous so you were happy was to get to the major leagues and then buy all the stuff that society tells you will make you happy.
Here I am in the major leagues. It is June 4, 1984. I am beating Fernando Valenzuela, who is great, in Dodger Stadium. I am very mediocre, so this is a big deal. This is way before ESPN and Sports Center so it is the one game a week on Monday night that the whole country would watch. The Reds are beating the Dodgers. I am beating Fernando. I throw a down and away fastball to Steve Sacks, their second baseman, he hits a line drive directly at my face. I flinch and I put my elbow in the way of this careening line drive and there is a shattering. I grab my elbow and I can move pieces around of it like an Oreo in a baggie. David, I knew instantly that my world was shattered. From the time I had been that little 9-year-old fat kid that could throw lemons farther than anyone else in the lemon grove, I had been treated special because I could throw so hard. Now I knew I would never be able to throw as hard, as well as I had.
What do you do when your dream is shattered as an atheist? I had nowhere to go. There is no God to complain to. There is not belief that good can come out of evil. What am I going to do? I signed out of high school. I had no college. At that moment, I thought what in the world am I going to do with the rest of my life? I am only 27 years old. If you are a singer, think of having an injury to your throat or an artist, a painter and you go blind. What are your going to do? For a major league athlete, what are you going to do when as a pitcher you shatter your elbow?
It was at that moment that I come off the field and I had been hanging out with the Christians, not by choice by the way. My wife Gina, on our very first road trip back in 1979, had found out that things happen on road trips and she didn’t want her brand new young husband partaking, so she basically said, you are going to hang out with these people and not these people on the roster. It ends up that the people I am supposed to hang out with are the Christians. These are people I had made fun of my whole life and I have to hang out with them. The reason is, they have the reputation of not doing coke and cheating on their wives. That is who Gina wanted me to hang out with. They have this interesting habit, if anyone listening knows any Christians they may do this as well, but Christians have this habit of when something goes bad in your life, like having a bad game, of which I had many, they would want to come over and console you and “share” with you, which is of course, believe everything I believe and you will be happy. I learned how to shut them up. I learned that if you simply asked questions, since most religious people, especially Christians, can’t answer them, you can shut them up. So whenever the Christian would come over after a bad game and try to console me I would fire these questions on them. They would go back and get re-enforcements and come back and gang up on me in something they called fellowship. This little dance went on for five years until that injury. I walk off the field and go up in the training room and they come in and want to pray for me. At this point in my life, I had had it. These stupid, naïve, gullible religious people need to take a science class and realize that life is a pain and then you die. Our relatives our ferns, frogs and slime not this Creator God and get over it. There is a reason it is called the dark ages and the enlightenment. Get out of the dark and into the light and realize there is no God.
I had had it. I made a decision that I am going to save these people from religion. I am not going to allow them to be in the dark. Long story short and I tell the story in Shattered, we get together and they challenge me to disprove the Bible. I thought, this won’t take long. So they give me three books to read, Evidence Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell, Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and some other stuff. I didn’t know Christians wrote those, David. I had never met an intelligent Christian in my life. I thought it was an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp.
Here I am reading this C.S. Lewis guy and it is like, I have never heard this. Mom never told me about this. I never got this at the Catholic high school. I never knew that there was as Lee Strobel would say, a case for faith or a case for Christ. I never heard this stuff. So in Pittsburgh, of all places, showing that God does indeed have a sense of humor because we hated the Pirates, I realized that I have lived as a secular atheist for 27 years, this injury has happened and maybe there is a God. If this happened, if there really is a Christ, if He rose from the dead and had redeemed fallen humanity and our sin has separated us from God, if all of that is true, that changes everything. My life is not over. There is more to me than what I do and who I am. There is more to live for and I want to be a Christian.
I made that prayer literally in the stall of the bathroom. If flush my previous life away and I come out and Tommy Hume, who is our chapel leader for the Reds and our bullpen ace, had been watching me read these books along with four or five other Christians on the team. I walk over to Hume and I go, Hume I am a Christian. He went, praise Jesus, he is Pentecostal you know and I said shhhh. I shushed him because just moments ago, I was on the outside looking in and I knew what the Christians looked like to everybody else on the team. They couldn’t answer questions, sort of bumper sticker theology, not in the real world, sort of goody-goodies. That is not what I had signed up for. I had lived as an atheist and it doesn’t make any sense. It is bankrupt and if Christ is real, then everything is different. That is what I signed up for. I said, Hume, let’s get back together with the guys at the hotel. He is thinking, we can teach him all the words to the songs now and it is like, no.
We are going to get back to the hotel and I was already a player rep, so I was comfortable talking to the guys. I lock the hotel room door, five guys are in there and I basically said this. This is the big point of Shattered that I want every Christian to listen to. I told the guys, look for five years we have been hanging out together and I have been asking you great questions, not obscure, bizarre questions, but just why do you believe in God? Why do you believe in the resurrection? Does it change your life? Is there life after death? I was asking great questions and you have been giving me really lame answers saying it is all about faith and that doesn’t cut it. You are in rebellion. In 1 Peter 3:15, you are commanded in Scripture to be able to give to every man a reason for the hope that is within you. You couldn’t even answer your own question. I asked you why you believe and you couldn’t answer it. I could have gone to Hell because you don’t know why you believe. It wasn’t like I was in rebellion, I really knew God was there and I wanted to live out in sin, I didn’t think it was real. I thought it was some kind of fable or fiction and I could have gone to Hell. When I asked this, you should have said this. David, I taught my first class of apologetics about two hours old in the Lord.
DAVID: Let me just defend your Christian teammates. We are speaking with Frank Pastore here on The Christian Worldview today about his book Shattered. This is a perfect time to do it with the major league All Star break coming this past week. You rebuffed attempts by these Christian friends who wanted to “share” with you and have fellowship with you and so forth. These guys were trying. They at least had it in them to try to share what they knew to be the truth, the Good News of Jesus Christ with you. Weren’t they doing what they should have been doing? I know they could have done it better and been stronger apologetically or is there a much different way that you think they should have been approaching the whole thing with you, intellectually or something rather than saying, hey this is what we believe is the truth and God loves you and He can restore a shattered life. What should they have been doing?
(break)
DAVID: We are speaking with Frank Pastore today about how God restores shattered lives. He is talking about his book, Shattered. At the end of the last segment, I asked Frank about his Christian teammates on the Cincinnati Reds who had been trying to witness to him for years.
Weren’t they doing what they should have been doing? I know they could have done it better and been stronger apologetically or is there a much different way that you think they should have been approaching the whole thing with you, intellectually or something rather than saying, hey this is what we believe is the truth and God loves you and He can restore a shattered life. What should they have been doing?
FRANK: Here it is and everyone listening this applies in your life. They did something wonderful for me, they loved me. They were there. They kept coming back. I liked these guys. They had great marriages. They loved their wives. They loved their kids. They had something I didn’t. There was a sense of stability and reality in their lives that I didn’t have.
When I started asking these apologetic questions, they should have gone to their local Christian bookstore and got me a book earlier. So everyone listening, you don’t have to have everyone else’s answers, but you better have your answer on why you believe. If your kids or someone at work says why do you believe in God? Why do you believe the Bible? Why do you believe the resurrection? What about Hell? Is there life after death? You better have your answer and if not, go get it. Then if you run into someone who asks questions that you don’t have an answer for, go to a Christian bookstore. Get a Christian book. Ask the person behind the counter, hey I need a book on apologetics. It doesn’t mean I am sorry, it is giving an answer. I need an answer.
I just wish I had gotten it sooner rather than later but these guys loved me. When the disciples asked Jesus, how are they going to know You sent us? It wasn’t, you are going to have an answer to all their questions. It is by you love for one another. They loved each other and they loved me enough to care about me. We talk about this. I have had these guys on my show and we talk about it. I compliment them and say you kept coming back, you loved me, you modeled for me and I am in heaven because of you guys because you loved me. But I wish you had given me a resource to answer some of the questions I was asking.
Thank God now David, we have a bunch of stuff out there that is available and I know a lot of it is available through TheChristianWorldview.com.
DAVID: We are certainly not short on materials that give good evidence to having a well-reasoned faith. Of course there is faith to it. We can’t see or touch or hold it in our hands and do a scientific experiment on God or creation but the evidence is beyond reasonable for anyone to go out and see.
Again Frank Pastore joins us today on The Christian Worldview. FrankPastore.com. Let me just read a short paragraph from pages 124-125 in your book Shattered. It says this, “I began to realize in a way that I couldn’t or wouldn’t articulate that I may have had all the external signs of success, but there was something wrong. Something was missing. There was a hole in my life that more wasn’t filling. I tried to fool myself that the next good game, the next sports car, the next winning season or the next big contract would do the job but they never did. I began to lose faith that baseball would ever make me happy and fulfilled.”
I am not going to ask the question about you. We know why you felt that way because God was acting on your heart and showing you that these things were unfulfilling in your life, I want to ask you about your encounter with Pete Rose. He was the player-manager of the Reds. He let you go from the Reds and you had quite a contentious encounter. He was criticizing you for being a Christian. Pete Rose was going after all those things in his life and his life ended up being shattered as well, but he didn’t get it. Tell us about that encounter and what it told you about that quote I just read.
FRANK: There are two guys in the country that I know of that are vying for the position of the most evangelized man in America. One of those is Pete Rose and the other is Dennis Praeger. Pete was the perfect icon for what the world has to offer. He was releasing me out of a guaranteed contract and I tell the story in Shattered but there was an interesting exchange that I share in the book about the moment he is releasing me, I realize that God has something different planned for my life. They are making a rational decision. I am not that good anymore. I just wish they had told me the truth early on and not sent my luggage up to Cincinnati with my kids. Pete says, aren’t you going to hit me? Aren’t you going to get angry? I said, no and he says, that is what is up with you Christians. You have lost your passion, you have lost your drive. You have to think about number one. You have to be out for yourself. No one else is going to be out for you. He started repeating all the things I believed as an atheist. I said, Pete that is not the case. He asked me, why are there retarded children? That is a great question; I remember asking that. If God is so good, why would He allow retarded children?
I realized at that moment that here is a man that I feel sad for. He is living what the world offers and he believes it. Now we know in hindsight what has happened in his personal life and it had become a mess. I just feel sad. There are so many people like Pete and like I was who are doing the best that they can with what they think is true and real. They think religion and Christianity is silly, naïve, and false. If that is the case, then you should be a fighting, mating machine. That is exactly what we teach our kids. Why should we be shocked when they act it out in college.
For me, the Pete Rose thing is a perfect illustration on, ok that is our culture. Look at what is going around the world today, especially in our country. There is this value system that is out there that is not just politically and socially wrong, it is destroying lives. There are so many people running so fast on the little wheel on the rat cage that they never stop and ponder, what is this all about? In professional sports, David as you know, you can reach a pinnacle of success in your 20s, early on and you realize that this isn’t it. I want to challenge people with this question. How is your plan right now, regardless of your circumstances, for having a meaningful and fulfilled life going? If you are empty, if it isn’t going well, I strongly recommend you check out the claims of Scripture, the Bible, Christianity and all that stuff. Don’t judge Christianity by Christians. That is the number one mistake. Judge it by Christ and just see what He says. If it were true, would it make a difference? I have found that it has.
I just want to encourage people to pursue what is true and what is real. Base it on evidence. This isn’t about fairy tales this is about facts. It really happened. If it did, it will radically change your life. You can take the broken pieces of your dreams and your life and God will put it back together again in a way you never say coming. There is no way, if you had talked to me at 25, you are going to be a Christian, no way. You are going to be happily married for 30 years, no way. You are going to have two great kids and a great family, no way. You are going to go to seminary. You are going to do a Christian radio show. You are going to be on the David Wheaton show, no way. Only in hindsight can we see what God was up to. He took all these little broken pieces from my life and professionally and my family and put them back together in such a way that I now realize that the Lord is exactly right. In our weakness, He has made strong.
So for those listening, whatever has happened in your life relationally with your marriage, your family, your kids, drugs, booze, addictions, whatever it is, God can take those broken pieces right now and put them together in a way you never can see coming and it can be beautiful. Those broken little colored pieces of glass in to a beautiful mosaic is all about His plan not our plan. He loves and He is there. He is patient. He is a gentleman and He is not going to force Himself into your life but when life happens, where do you go? When your dreams get shattered, where do you go? For me, I thought all of this was silly and false and I was challenged to disprove it. I examined it and realized based on the evidence that this happened and I invited Christ into my life to become the Lord of my life. I know that sounds like a bumper sticker but there is reality to that. He calls the shots and it has radically changed my life.
DAVID: It is how God has restored a shattered life. Frank Pastore’s life and all our lives are shattered to some extent. We may not have had the extreme background that you had, but we are all born sinners and to some extent, the shattered parts of our lives are caused by ourselves. We sin and we fall into sin and you are right, when we examine the claims of Christ, He said, I am the way, the truth, the life; no one comes to the Father buy by Me. That demands a response. To not even look into it to see if that claim is true or not is going through life willfully ignoring what God has presented for you.
How did the “dysfunction” or the sinful upbringing in the family that you had rear its head for you as an adult. It wasn’t like you grew up in this dysfunctional family and you found Christ and it was all behind you and it was all past. You never had any trouble with it again. A lot of people will experience that and say my dysfunctional family from my childhood still follows me and affects me to this day. How were you able to overcome that?
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DAVID: Sin in one’s family often rears itself later in life. I asked Frank how the dysfunction or the sin in his family during his youth has reared itself in his adult life and how God has helped him overcome it.
FRANK: It happened as a result of what happened in ministry, my professional shattering, if you will. I was at Biola University and a series of events happened where that dream, too was shattered. I was ticked off at God; just what are You doing here? I am the innocent one in this and yet I am the one that is out. I will let people read that in Shattered. For anyone who has been on church staff or worked for a non-profit, in corporate America in a job and you end up losing that dream, getting fired or whatever and that dream ending, I can relate. I have been there.
So here is what happened. My wife, Gina, invited some friends over who were very concerned about me going through all this process because I basically split off and separated again relationally from a lot of people as a result of the pain. That is just exactly how I dealt with it as a child. They loved me, like the Reds on the team, these people who loved me came around me and the question that really rocked my world at that point was, Frank how are you feeling? I gave the typical male answer out of my to-do list, my accomplishments and what I was busy doing and the said, no how are you feeling? You answered what you are doing, what are you feeling? I said, I don’t even know how to answer that.
Long story, and I tell it in Shattered, but I end up going to Christian counseling. In counseling and I share a couple of the stories in Shattered where the dots get connected for me, David. I realize that I have split off from my emotions in dealing with what was happening with me professionally and the pain of what had happened with my career at Biola and my baseball career and all that. I had cut that off just as I had as a child. So when my counselor, Dr. G asked me how are you feeling, that is like asking how tall is purple? I have no idea how to answer that question. She goes, well maybe this will help. She went over to her desk and brought back this sheet that you give children at the doctor when you ask them how much does it hurt. It is these little emoticons with faces of pain. That little sheet became by little box of crayons that I could start coloring with emotionally meaning before that I had been blocked off, I had been in my head but not in my heart. I hadn’t connected the two because of all of the pain of my childhood.
DAVID: Last question for you Frank and I so appreciate you coming on the program today. The book is Shattered. Tell me about your relationship with your mom today.
FRANK: Mom died and I am so glad you brought this up. This is important. One of the things that Focus on the Family was worried about because they did the book, was this doesn’t end with a happy little pink bow on the top. This ends rather awkward and uncomfortable. Let me share this and it is ok that you asked that question in fact I am thrilled you did. Here is the deal. My mother was so toxic to my children. She wasn’t interested in having a relationship with Frankie or Christina, my son and daughter, or with me. One example, was when my father died. She didn’t want to go to the funeral because she said she didn’t have shoes to wear. We came over to visit and to gather some of my father’s things and she had not seen my son for probably three or four years. He was probably 13 or 14 at the time. The first words out of her mouth were, so well you are tall and handsome, are you going to become a bum like your father? That was the first thing she said. There are worse things in the book. Mom got to the place where she was so toxic that we just had to break off the relationship. We tried, Gina and I tried, three separate times to try to have a relationship because as Christians we are going to do the right thing. The Lord says, heal this and we will all be a happy family like the Walton family and it didn’t. We came to the decision that it was probably best that she is not a part of our lives right now. This was after trying three times and getting Christian input from leadership on laying it out and what do you think and you are right, it is toxic. So she died and one of the things I say in the book is that in an interesting way she had died in the years beforehand. I am ok with broken pieces of my life. I am at peace with the pieces. Sometimes it doesn’t turn out well and you just have to trust the Lord in that.
At the very same time that my mom and I and our family with my mother ended up completely estranged, my dad ends up coming to Christ on his deathbed with my aunt. Here I am, this Christian apologist guy and I tried to have these conversations with my dad and got nowhere. He is in the hospital dealing with a stroke of which he eventually died from and she said that he prayed with her to receive Christ. He had a stroke and all he could say was to mumble a couple of things but when she asked him Frank would you like to know you are going to Heaven? Would you like to receive Christ in your life to forgive you for your sins? Squeeze your hand yes. She did the prayer with him and he did yes with his hand again, closed his eyes and prayed with her. When he opened his eyes after praying, he said in perfect clarity, “Go tell Frankie” and died within a few hours. It was like, Lord thank you for that. It is not all lost. He redeemed that and it was the kindness of the Lord.
When you asked about Mom, it just didn’t end well, it was severed. Some people have relationships that are toxic. You have done everything you can, what the Lord has asked you to do to try to forgive and redeem and move on and they are not interested. Sometimes those relationships are toxic where you just have to leave it there.
DAVID: At some point, you did what you were called to do to try to help her but at some point you realize that you can’t have that sin come back into your life or your children’s lives. You did your best; you did what God called you to do. At some point decisions are made by people and there has to be a parting of the ways as opposed to letting that dysfunction come back into your life.
Frank Pastore thank you so much for this book, Shattered. I am so glad you were able to come on The Christian Worldview today. Even more so, I am encouraged by your life story. I had no idea until I read your book and I am so encouraged by how God does in fact, restore shattered lives. God Bless you and all you do to serve Him.
FRANK: Right back at you. I am so very proud with what God is doing through The Christian Worldview and your radio program and your outreach and your ministry. You know what, God gets the glory. It is not about you and me, it is about our great God that we serve. Hopefully we can demonstrate to the world our love for Him. I go back to what I said about the disciples asking Jesus, how are they going to know You sent us? It is by your love for one another. Let’s just become better lovers. David, thank you.
DAVID: Friend, if you have had a shattered life there is one thing you can count on to restore you, Jesus Christ and His Word are the same yesterday, today and forever. Until next time on The Christian Worldview, this is David Wheaton encouraging you to think biblically and live accordingly.
