Mentally Tortured by Parents for Her Sabbath Faith

But the schoolteacher says her faith never wavered.

By Andrew McChesney, Adventist Mission

Her mother drenched her with water as she prepared to leave for Sabbath School.

Her father followed her as she walked — and then ran — to church.

Every time she heard the chain rattle on her father’s locked gun box, she feared he was coming for her.

“I was very, very scared,” said Margaret Wilfred, recounting the years after she was baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist Church. “I was a nervous wreck. To this day it still affects me.”

But Wilfred, 61, who recently retired as an Adventist grade school teacher in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, has no regrets about enduring years of psychological torture for her faith.

“I am enjoying my walk with God,” she said. “I am getting all the peace I can have now.”

Wilfred was raised by Sunday-keeping parents near the campus of the Adventist-owned University of the South Caribbean in Maracas Valley. She remembers joining classmates in taunting children from the Maracas Seventh-day Adventist Primary School on the campus. She and her friends also laughed as Adventist pastors conducted baptisms in the Maracas River.

But Wilfred also felt drawn to the Adventist Church. She loved the music wafting from the campus church on Sabbath. Student singing bands sometimes visited the valley on Sabbath mornings.

It was music that attracted Wilfred to an Adventist evangelistic series organized near her home when she was 19. She was baptized at the end of the meetings.

“I used to tease people who were being baptized,” she said in an interview this week on the university campus. “Now I was being baptized.”

She feared the reaction of her parents. Only three other people — the pastor, a theology student, and a friend — witnessed her baptism in the Maracas River.

But her parents found out, and they were furious. Wilfred fled to an Adventist friend’s home, where she lived several weeks. Relatives intervened and convinced her to move back home.

“That is when the mental torture started,” she said.

Her father mocked and threatened her. He locked her out of the house. Once he followed her halfway to church.

“I ran all the way because I was scared of what he might do,” she said.

On another Sabbath her mother threw water over her.

“I got a good drenching from my mother after I dressed for church,” she said.

The rattle of the chain on her father’s gun box terrified her. She feared that her father would beat her or worse.

“Life wasn’t happy for me at all,” she said.

Despite the anxiety, Wilfred never considered abandoning her faith. She said she was convinced that she had found the biblical truth. So she clung to Psalms 34:7, which says, “The angel of the Lord encamps all around those who fear Him, and delivers them” (NKJV). Another favorite was Psalms 27:10: “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me.”

Welcome support came from church friends. “Keeping holding on,” they said. “Don’t give up. We’re praying for you.”

“People encouraged me in the church, and I think that kept me,” Wilfred said.

Eventually, tensions began to ease at home. But Wilfred was teaching at a grade school affiliated with her former faith, and its principal regularly told her that she should quit and transfer to the Adventist school.

At the first opportunity, Wilfred did exactly that. Receiving a state scholarship to further her education, she enrolled at the Adventist university. Upon graduation, she took a job at its grade school, teaching first and second grade for 35 years.

“God really smiled on me and opened a place for me,” she said.

While her parents never embraced her faith, Wilfred said they finally accepted her back as their daughter.

“I know they ended up being proud of me,” she said.

But more important, she said, is the assurance that she has that God is proud of her.

“I know that I am the apple of God’s eye,” she said. “He will see me through anything.”

A portion of the Thirteenth Sabbath Offering in first quarter 2018 will go toward a new church for the University of the South Caribbean, which has never owned a church building and worships in an auditorium.