Photos by Ralph Freso / Slideshow
Chris Brown revealed that he sported 32 marks on his backside 10 days after being punished by his Christian school principal as a third grader and how he managed to hold in his rage after his young daughter was smacked in the face by a bigger, older boy at an East Los Angeles playground.
Those were just two of several raw stories shared at Monday’s Chapel by Brown, lead pastor at North Coast Church in Vista, California.
But his chilling experiences led to a common theme.
“Even when life is unfair, God is still there,” he said at GCU Arena.
Brown conveyed his initial skepticism with Psalm 139, which stresses that God is everywhere.
As a child, Brown disclosed that his family once attended a church in West Texas where women were forbidden to wear pants or jeans, card games were banned, kids could not watch cartoons because “animation was a sign of the devil,” and boys and girls could not swim in the same pool.
He also assumed he deserved getting hit by a wooden stick by his principal even after his parents asked him why he did not tell them.
Fatherhood, however, reinforced Brown’s faith of God’s presence – even after his prayers to have a boy did not crystalize and he was briefly devastated.
Brown became taken by his daughter’s “wisp of blond hair and little blue eyes,’’ describing her sprint a “dangerous wobble.”
The trips to the park were especially enjoyable, as Brown displayed a video of his daughter climbing up the stairs to the top of a slide with his assistance while testing his patience as she puts her legs through the ladder.
Brown reverts to Psalm 139:13, in which David seeks forgiveness for his sins.
“It’s always been about you, and I failed to realize you weren’t a suffocating God,” Brown recites. “You weren’t a God who was trying to trip me up. You were a God that said, ‘Let me catch you every step of the way. You were a God who knit me together. That’s why I love going to the park.”
The trips to the park were put to the test two weeks after the video. Brown said his wife went to San Diego to visit her sister, while he and his daughter stayed in East Los Angeles. They planned a day at the playground.
He couldn't talk his daughter out of climbing a tower so she could slide back down on a curly slide.
After climbing the ladder and crossing a bridge to get near the slide, a larger boy approached. She let him get by while saying, “Hi.”
The boy, said Brown, reached to grab her collar and, “Bam, bam, bam!”
“I was filled with rage,” said Brown, adding that the boy laughed before jumping into the rocket ship portion of the slide.
Brown grabbed his daughter and put her on his shoulder. “With one hand, I can still kill a kid,” Brown said.
His daughter is asking “why, why, why?” as she tries to catch her breath.
“I can’t tell her,” Brown said. “I can’t get into her head.
“It’s a jacked-up world. This kid is raised by wolves, and maybe this is what he’s seeing at home, and I have no idea why a boy would do that.”
With a flock of parents merely watching, the boy rides down the slide before sprinting away.
As soon as his daughter stops crying, Brown realizes she may never want to return to a park.
“Mean boy,” Brown was told by his daughter.
Brown suggests they ride together, even though he is too large for the slide and they're moving at a snail's pace.
“Daddy, you’re too big,” Brown hears.
But they continue to ride repeatedly. Brown cannot beat his daughter to the bottom of the slide, and at the end, she's laughing.
“You have a God because he made you for a purpose and a skill set in this world that says, ‘I will go down the slide with you,’” Brown said. “I will hold you in the midst of this (stuff) that is going to fall into your life.
Here is the kicker, according to Brown.
“(God) loves you,” Brown said. “Maybe not what you’re doing, not what you’ve made of your life. You are his little dude, his dudette.
“He cannot, will not, take his hands, his eyes off of you because he’s deeply, madly, passionately in love with you. You know you don’t deserve it. You’ll never earn it. You’ll never live up to it. He’s in love with you.”
GCU News Senior Writer Mark Gonzales can be reached at [email protected]
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