PODCAST TRANSCRIPT | EPISODE 320: Your Past Does Not Define You, Part 1

LIFE TO THE FULL w/ Nancy Campbell

EPISODE 320: Your Past Does Not Define You, Part 1

Welcoming Pam Fields to the podcast today. Pam has done five podcasts with me in the past, but for the very first time today, she shares the story of her hidden past.

Announcer: Welcome to the podcast, Life to The Full, with Nancy Campbell, founder and publisher of Above Rubies.

Nancy: Hello, ladies! I’m always so blessed to be with you. “Life to the Full” is for the purpose of blessing you and encouraging you, and yes, sometimes challenging you as a wife and mother. So, I trust you will be blessed again today.

Now, I have a guest with me today. It’s going to be wonderful. But before I introduce her, I want to share a Scripture with you. I was reading this yesterday and I found it in Deuteronomy 4:6-7, “Keep therefore and do them,” that’s God Word, “for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them, as the LORD our God is in all things that we call upon him for?”

What a wonderful promise, dear ladies! God reminds us here that He is near us. Oh, you couldn’t get anything more wonderful, could you? That the God of the universe is right near you! Yes, with you—in your kitchen, where you are with your children, even in all your mess, and all your overwhelmingness, He is with you. Right near you!

Maybe you don’t really feel like it. You don’t feel that at all. You feel as though, “Help! Where is God in the midst of all this?” But we’ve got to acknowledge the truth. Ladies, we don’t live by our feelings. We live by the truth of the Word of God. If you are born again, if you’ve received Christ to come into your life, you have Jesus Christ living within you.

“Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).

He’s in you, He is with you, and He’s right near you. Don’t listen to your feelings. Look up to the Lord and thank Him. Say, “Oh, thank You, Lord, I thank You that You are near me. You are with me as I mother my children, as I get through the day. Lord, I thank You for Your nearness.”

You may begin to say this not really even feeling it. But as you acknowledge this, as you confess this truth, you will begin to experience more of His nearness with you. That’s my prayer for you today, that you will know His nearness. Whatever you're doing, whatever is happening in your home, that is one of the greatest blessings that you can know.

So, who have I got with me today? Well, it is my dear friend, Pam Fields. I’ve known Pam for so many years. Pam has done podcasts with me before. Maybe you’ve missed out on them. I’ll have to tell you what ones they are, because after hearing Pam today, you might want to go back and check them out. The first ones we did together . . . Pam, by the way, you’d better say “Hi!” so they’ll know you're here!

Pam: Hello, I’m so glad to be here. I wish everybody could experience the hospitality of coming to the Campbell home. It feels like I’m going to Grandma’s house. I appreciate this opportunity so much.

Nancy: Yes, well, the first one we did was way back, I don’t know when, but it was podcast number 30.

Pam: I think it was 2018.

Nancy: Really? Wow, you were still living in Oregon then.

Pam. Yes.

Nancy: Now the Fields have moved to Tennessee. They decided to leave woke Oregon and come to Tennessee, which they have enjoyed doing. Pam spoke there about how she got this idea of making prayer bracelets. I often talk to you about prayer boxes, but Pam got a lot more personal with prayer bracelets, and how she has a bracelet with the name of each one of her nine children. Then she prays for them. I do this too, and we haven’t got our bracelets on, do we?

Pam: Neither of us have them on today!

Nancy: We are disgusting! [laughter] But when you’ve got your bracelets on, you can pray for one child even as you're going around the house. When you pray for that child, you can put it on the other hand, so you know you’ve prayed for all your children when the bracelets are all on the other hand. You haven’t missed out on any. But she tells you in that podcast how to go about it. That’s a great one to check out.

Then we talked more about homeschooling because Pam has been a homeschooling mother for how many years, Pam?

Pam: Probably about 23. Something like that.

Nancy: Whoo! 23 years! Yes, she has two married children, and one is getting married next month. So, the years go on, don’t they?

Then you came again, well, you’ve come lots in between, because Pam visits me quite often, Then number 101 was the vision of connecting older moms with young moms. That was a good podcast. Then we did number 263, “Life’s Not Perfect. What Can I Do?” Talking about the many griefs of life, but no matter what we’re going through, to end strong.

Those were great podcasts, but today we’re going to do something special. In fact, Pam is going to share the testimony of her life, something that she has never done before. When you look at Pam, you look at this wonderful, overcoming mother of nine children, who’s homeschooled them all throughout their lives. She’s such a blessing to so many other mothers, an encouragement, and an inspiration.

But I guess most don’t know her background. This is the amazing thing. I’ve known Pam’s background. I’ve always looked at her and thought, “What a trophy of grace! She has come out from confusion and delusion and deception into the most blessed life!” So, no matter what you’ve been through in your childhood, God can do anything. We’re going to hear about behind the scenes today, aren’t we, Pam?

Pam: Right. I have shared a little bit here and there, but we haven’t just sat down, and lingered, and talked deeply. We’ll see how this goes.

Nancy: And then, we’ll see. May the Lord guide us. Oh, before we get into it, I should say that Pam also now has her own podcast called “The Mom Next Door.” She interviews women, those who have been through all kinds of things in their lives. She interviews them. Want to say something about that, Pam?

Pam: Well, really the inspiration to start my podcast was being at the Above Rubies retreat. I love the testimony time when people stand up, and they share, on the last day of the retreat. Hearing people’s testimonies, what the Lord has done in their lives, has been such an encouragement to me.

When we hear what He’s done in somebody else’s life, we realize how amazing God is, and how powerful. No gone is too far gone, no far is too far off. He’s the Redeemer, and our Savior, truly. That’s why I started my podcast, to have an opportunity to hear the testimonies and the stories of the faith of women because I know it encourages my heart.

Nancy: Oh, yes. So, you can get onto that and listen to these wonderful stories. Like you, Pam, I love testimony time at our Above Rubies retreats. In fact, it’s a lovely time for me. I sit down and listen! I’m usually speaking! But then I can sit and listen, and I am always amazed.

I look at these women. Women will get up, and they’re . . .  this lovely mother and they’ve been homeschooling for years. And then you hear their testimony, and goodness, they’ve had about six abortions and goodness knows what! Your mouth’s wide open and you can’t even believe it, because there’s no taint upon them. Amazing what God does, isn’t it?

Even my girls like Serene and Pearl, they’ll often, when I get home, they’ll say to me, “Oh, Mom, did you hear a new juicy story?” Because they always loved testimony time when they would come to Above Rubies retreats too. It’s just amazing! God is in the business of restoring and redeeming and making whole, isn’t He?

So, let’s start a little bit. Start where you think you're going to start, OK?

Pam: OK, well, it’s all on me now. I think that when we meet somebody, we often see them, and we think, “This is who they are. This is who they’ve always been.” We don’t realize, until we throw out the anchor, and say, “Tell me about your life. Where did you come from? What is your family history and family of origin?”

Nancy: The interesting thing is, I was just asking you before, I said, “Pam, you've had this beautiful life of raising your children. But you shared with me how recently you went for counseling. But what on earth did you go to a counselor for?” You can tell us why you did. It’s interesting.

Pam: Sure. I am 52 now. I can’t remember if it was 49, or right about 50 when I first went to a counselor. The only reason I went was to prove my medical practitioner wrong because I had never been to a counselor.

I was in a position where I was starting to lose my words. I couldn’t think of the word, “You know, that thing across the room. I need you to move it from here to there. I can’t think of what that is.” The other person would say, “That chair?” “Oh, yeah, yeah, that chair. I need you to move the chair.” Just the simplest words, I started to lose. Putting well-functioned sentences together was becoming difficult for me.

I started thinking that maybe I was dealing with early memory loss, Alzheimer’s. “What is the deal? I’m losing my mind!” It was such an extreme brain fog where it was hard to concentrate. Now, as I’m starting to podcast, and starting to write, I’m really using my words a lot. Just the difference, even, of my life, as my children are growing. I thought, “What in the world is the matter?”

After we looked at blood tests and different things, the practitioner said, “I think you need to go to a counselor and work through some of your PTSD.”

I said, “That is the silliest thing ever! I don’t have PTSD!” She told me a counselor to go to, a biblical counselor.

I walked in, and she said, “Tell me about your stress life.” I said, “I don’t have any stresses in my life.” I’m sure she was thinking, “You have nine children, you just moved 2,000 miles from Oregon to Tennessee. How do you NOT have stress in your life?”

Then she asked me about any past traumas in my life. I said, “I don’t have any traumas. Are you kidding me?” As we started to unpack my story a little bit, she asked me about my childhood and my life. She was like, “Well, that was trauma. That’s another trauma. That’s another.” I didn’t ever recognize it.

I think we’ve become very focused, at least I did. I became very focused on what was in front of me, the people in front of me, and what the Lord was calling me to do, right now at this moment. I became very invested in those things. I think maybe as my children grew older, it shifted. Some are brain focused. The Lord maybe protected me to not have full memory and a desire to work that out, because I was so needed hands-on for the raising of my children.

Nancy: I think that’s very interesting too, because I believe motherhood has saved you. The Word in 1 Timothy 2:15 says “You shall be saved in childbearing.” The word sozo is not just “saved.” It means, “saved, delivered, protected, healed.” That’s body, soul, and spirit.

I think, as you were pouring your life into motherhood, that pouring your life into your children saved you from having trauma of your past life. But then, as your children grow, somewhere along the line, OK, it's going to come out. Now that they’re growing up and you have reached a season in your life, around about menopause, it all comes out. So now, you've had to go back and face this rather interesting life. So, carry on!

Pam: Right. I knew I had a different childhood. I even knew as a child that my life was a little different from my other friends. Other children weren’t allowed to come play at my house or spend the night at my house. I knew our family was a little different, but I also knew all families are different. They’re all different from each other.

I don’t think I really understood the capacity or the depth of how different it was until, one, I started parenting. I became a mom. I started; it was like glimpses then. I knew when I got married and when I became a mother, that I did not want to be like, and raise my family the way that I was raised.

Really, that probably started at the age of 15. My grandmother sent me to a Christian summer camp. I looked around and I thought, “All these people have something that I don’t have. I want to live my life completely differently than how I have been living, how I have been raised.” At 15, I knew that.

I think it’s incrementally that He gives us new vision. One, at 15, I wanted to live my life differently. Then when I got married, “How do I live a godly life as a wife?” And then as I moved into parenting, there was that. I think that it was when my oldest was just a few months old that somebody handed me a copy of Above Rubies magazine, and said, “You’ve got to read this. This is so great!” He’s 28 now, so for 28 years I . . .

Nancy: That’s quite a long time, isn’t it?

Pam: Yes. I’ve been getting the magazine, and you had just published The Power of Motherhood which really counseled me in the different aspects of motherhood. I had thought my goal was to keep this child alive and make sure they stayed out of jail. That was what moms do!

Then when I looked at that book, each chapter counseled me that there was more to it than that. Then at one point, I was able to come listen to you speak. Finally, down the road, I was able to host retreats. Each step of the way I’ve learned. And I’ve completely forgotten the question that we started with! [laughter]

Nancy: Oh, yes. Well, I don’t know where we were. That doesn’t matter. I think you're sharing now . . . keep sharing about why it was different in your home? You didn’t realize at the time. But, of course, now you look back, and see what a delusion it was.

Pam: Right. Yes, I think I was saying how I always knew we were a little different. I wanted to do things differently within my home. But when I went to that counselor, I was confronted with a lot of memories that I had forgotten. They had been pushed aside. I hadn’t had to deal with them.

They were not important for that day-to-day work that I had to do in parenting, although in retrospect, they did affect the way that I did parent my children. I think there were some things that I could have done differently as a mom, there are ways that I could have nurtured differently. In some regards I was not trained to be a nurturer, and I did my best.

But in some ways, I was still learning. I think we always look back, and we go, “I wasn’t perfect. I could have done things better.” And then I go, “No, that’s OK. God gave you those children, in that season, for that purpose. He will work out His story in their lives with what He gave you at that moment.” Each child needs something different. In His divine placement for each child in our lives . . . They each learn different things from me, and I learn different things from them.

Nancy: OK, well, tell us a little bit about this lifestyle.

Pam: I’ll just really briefly say that my parents met at a Christian youth camp. He was the lifeguard, and she was the camp nurse. They fell in love and decided that they would be missionaries and do ministry together. From the get-go of their relationship, that was their purpose.

Of course, I have an older sister, and I was the middle child, and I have a younger brother. I don’t have a lot of distinct memories of that childhood and of those years. I really don’t remember. I’ve seen some pictures, but I don’t remember much until about second grade.

My parents, most of their work was with North American Indians, and we did live on reservations when I was a child, and anywhere near Native American populations. There was that. And then around second grade, to help another missionary family, we moved to the state of Montana so my parents could take care of or look after another missionary family while they were at language training. Our family all went with. We were available.

I went to school there. That is one of my earliest recollections of family life. They weren’t great. When I think through that, our family game night was a Ouija board. My dad passed pornography around. I remember sitting in a circle, and he said, “I want you all to go pick out your favorite picture and tell me what it is.” I remember thinking, “I don’t like any of this! I just want to leave the room.” I wasn’t allowed to leave the room until I pointed to a picture.

That Ouija board, I didn’t not want to play with that. I didn’t want to touch it. I remember being afraid of it. But I had no knowledge of what it was. I remember my dad with his hand on mine, forcing it onto the device, whatever it was. I was actively trying to pull my hand away. I did not want to have part of that.

There was alcohol in the home. He provided it, and suggested, and gave us alcohol as children, as kind of a funny thing. “I want you to test this out.” I think his philosophy was, “If I provide my children with this now, in a safe place, they will not have a desire to go figure it out on their own. Therefore, I have more control to protect them.” I think that was his philosophy. It came to bear in some later years, in some situations where that was what he said. That was part of our life when I was in second grade.

We moved back from Montana, and we had a little apartment for our family of five. The memory I have in that apartment is there was a guy. I have no idea where my dad found him, or what his circumstance was. He lived with us for a while with his extremely large boa constrictor. That was a little frightful for the children and my mom but also humorous to the men that were in the home. That was my one recollection of landing back in Oregon.

About this time, I think now that I recognize trauma, sometimes our brain can play tricks on the exact timeline and the circumstance. I slow down, and I’m like, “What? I’ve got to remember this right, because I want to be truthful, and speak well.” I’m always a little careful as I step into here, but it was about this time that my parents, with their heart for North American Indians, had purchased a piece of property a few miles down from the Indian school. It was a boarding school for high schoolers, just for Native Americans.

They purchased this plot of land so that they could do ministry there. About that time, there was a church across town that was doing this huge renovation and rebuilding. They had a parsonage that needed to be gone. To support our ministry, which was an official ministry by then, with supporters, and people donating for this Indian mission, the church sold us the building for one dollar. It went up on the airplane movement wheels. We carted that house across town and put it on a foundation.

That became known as “Samawah Chapel.” The name of the Indian school down the road was Samawah Indian School there in Oregon. So, we had this ministry center in this little church building. In the basement were rooms for residents. Those were runaways, or people who had recently gotten out of jail and needed a place to stay.

My dad very regularly picked up hitchhikers. It was not uncommon to be . . . Maybe he’d pick us up after school, and we’d be driving home, and he’d just pull over. He drove a pickup truck, so he’d say, “Scoot over and let him in.” We’d have hitchhikers or homeless people in the truck with us. We’d go home, and we’d give him a place to stay. They’d stay in our basement.

On the main floor was the kitchen and the dining room. We had a VHS player, and games in my dad’s office, where he counseled people. He was an ordained minister. He wore one of those black shirts with the little white collars. He had gone to Bible college. He also did prison ministry at the time where he would go in. He did prison ministry.

Back to the home, at the top level was where our family had our bedrooms and our bathrooms. It was separated out, so we did have a protected space that was just for us. That was the house we lived in.

You’ve got to keep me on track again.

Nancy: Yes. So, how many years did you live in that house?

Pam: We lived there from, I believe, about second grade until, I believe it was the summer right at the end of my eighth-grade year.

Nancy: Yes, and that was when one day you were brought a message from somebody.

Pam: Well, my sister and I were driving home from school in her little orange VW bug. There was a friend of my parents . . .

Nancy: You were driving home?

Pam: We were driving home.

Nancy: She had her license?

Pam: She had her license. I didn’t. I was about in eighth or ninth grade. We were fairly close to the house. There was a woman on the side of the road who was literally waving her arms to flag us down. She said, “Don’t go home! It’s not safe! You need to go find somewhere to be and call into your grandma’s house. She’ll give you the next instructions.”

We looked over, and what we saw was a police raid on our home, on that ministry center. Police cars all over. We never looked back. We went to a safe place, my sister’s friend’s house, and called into my grandmother’s house for next instructions.

Nancy: OK! So, what happened that the police raided the house?

Pam: Well, my dad was under investigation for charges of furnishing alcohol to minors, furnishing pornography to minors, and sodomy with a minor. This was in the ‘80’s. I don’t know if those would even be charges today, you know, but it was definitely not acceptable. I would like to research the police records and see if I’m even remembering everything accurately. Were there more charges? Or how things went.

We were taken out of school to attend his arraignment hearing. My dad explained to us that “It’s very important that you come, because the judge will be more lenient on me if he sees that I’m a family man.” We left school that day, and we went and sat in the gallery or whatever they call it.

In the end, my dad was let out. They called it “ROR,” released on his own recognizance. Then at one point, the charges were dropped. He never went to jail, never did anything, but we still never went back to that house. Of course, it hit the newspapers, and all the churches that funded us, our ministry, dropped us, as they well should have.

Nancy: It’s amazing that he wasn’t tried.

Pam: Right. And again, as a young child, I don’t know all the pieces to that. I’ve asked my mom some recently, and she doesn’t remember. I know it was a lot for her to absorb, and a lot to remember now, this many years later. There might still be some mystery, but I don’t ever know the exact details.

Nancy: Yes, yes. So then, did your father carry on this kind of lifestyle? He had this heart for people, but he wasn’t walking a straight road.

Pam: Absolutely. Yes.

Nancy: It was very disillusioning, wasn’t it, to think you were in a supposedly ministry house, and here you are, facing all this evil stuff in the house.

Pam: Right. Yeah. As a little child, and again, bits and pieces of my memory, I do remember he would take some itinerant pastors, or somebody’d be on vacation. He’d go and teach that Sunday. We would get put up on the stage to sing “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus.”

Then they would pass the offering basket for us to support our ministry. He would preach the sermon, but I remember, as we would leave the churches, he would make fun of the church people. It was such a distorted view of Christianity.

Nancy: And then you never went to church, did you?

Pam: We did not. We did not go to church at all. The only time we talked of faith or anything, was those times he was preaching as a sub. I really didn’t step into going to church until I was 15.

Nancy: Yes, yes. So, OK, so now, people are not going to support this ministry when he’s exposed of what he is. How did he support the family after that?

Pam: Well, he took a vow of poverty back before all this began. He really did not support our family at all.

Nancy: So, it was your mother who was supporting your family.

Pam: Yes. My mother was an operating room nurse. I think she’s close to 40 years as an operating room nurse. She worked very long hours. Probably 50 to 60 hours a week? Because we had bills. The ministry, as a missions organization, brought in funding that was then spent on some of the mission’s expenditures. But not completely, and it didn’t provide for our personal things as much.

It turns out that at some point during all this, my dad really started spending a lot of money on alcohol. It’s just so distorted. When he would counsel people, in his office, he did not want them to feel that they were being judged, so if they wanted to smoke pot or drink alcohol, he would do that with them, to put them at ease. So, it was convoluted, and probably very expensive. Then, when it came to a screeching halt, that was a new chapter of our lives in a lot of ways. But then, still, some other things continued on.

Nancy: So, your mother working such long hours, she would hardly have been there for you, or had time to cook for you.

Pam: She was very faithful. In the morning, before her work, and I don’t know how she did it, she would always make several casseroles and put them in the fridge so that when we came home from school (and this is the latchkey kids’ generation). We came home from school, and we had instructions of what temperature and what time to put that casserole in the oven. Then we could feed ourselves our dinner and put the leftovers back in the fridge. She was faithful to that.

Nancy: So, you just ate your meals on your own. Where was your dad then?

Pam: Sometimes he was driving around, rounding up more people. Sometimes counseling, sometimes out working. He taught some life skills, kids how to change spark plugs or oil, things like that.

Nancy: Goodness, our time is up, so I think you’ve got to finish this story. We’d better have another session together.

Pam: Right.

Nancy: Oh, Lord, we thank You again so much for the way You love to restore and redeem. And Lord, we’ve been hearing some of Pam’s lifestyle. But Lord, we thank You that You redeemed her from this, and You’ve brought her into Your kingdom, and into Your culture, and into Your ways. Lord, we look forward to hearing more of that in the next session.

Bless all the mothers listening today, I pray. Bless their homes, and Lord, I pray that You’ll lead each one closer and closer to You, and that they will truly know Your nearness. In the Name of Jesus, amen.”