My Past Is No Longer My Future 
By Julieann Hartman

If you had known me even slightly a few years back you might have said, “Wow, that girl has everything. I wish I could be like her – a great career, a great husband, great body, very bold and very honest. I wouldn’t want to mess with her.”

But, if you really knew me, if you really knew what was going on inside me, you would have felt so sorry for me. The only “religion” I knew back then was the “Let’s-all-go-to-church-and-humor-grandma”-on-Easter-Sunday kind of religion.

I was born in August 1962 in Burbank, California, the youngest of three girls. My parents loved us girls very much. At first glance it appeared that we had everything going for us: a nice house, a nice car, and a dad who seemed as though he was the funniest, most loving father in the world. He was … until our front door closed for the day. Then his true, darker personality would reveal itself. I know now what went wrong in his life growing up. He was raised in a small town in Pennsylvania. His mother was a “born-again Christian” who knew scriptures like the back of her hand, but she was also the town prostitute. His dad (my grandfather) worked on the railroad and traveled quite a bit.

When his father would leave town, his mother would have men lined up at the door waiting to be “serviced.” My father also had a brother who was eight years older than he was, but he wasn’t around much (I don’t blame him for that). My father had no one to confide in, no one to talk to. His mother would get pregnant often with the men she slept with. She would have my father help her abort the unwanted babies with coat hangers in a warmly drawn bathtub. One day his father came home and found her in bed with another man. He went and got his shotgun and shot the man right there in their bedroom. The next day the incident was on the front page in the local newspaper. My father was talked about and ridiculed for months. His friend’s parents had forbidden their kids to play with him. I’m sure you can see what kind of future lay in store for my father.

On the other hand, my mother, the second daughter born to a very strict Italian father, had a great life. My grandfather was a self-made millionaire, an immigrant from Sicily. He had disembarked at Ellis Island, settled in Brooklyn, New York, and later moved to Glendale, California. He was a very successful clothing designer, but my mom says his strictness “drove her out of her house” at eighteen. When she met my father, he showed her an exciting, fast way of life. A life “living on the edge,” and she went for it.

Because of all the problems my father faced as a young person and the fact that he was so confused about who God was, and with nobody to teach him, he was doomed from the start. My mother, sisters, and I left him when I was nine years old. I do not have a lot of pleasant childhood memories because there really aren’t that many. I was the baby, and I was “his” baby. He never abused me like he did my two older sisters and my mom. He would discipline me (when he was sober) if I misbehaved, but never beat me just for the heck of it. That luxury was reserved for my sisters and mother.

As far back as I can remember he always took lots of medication. He called them his “tranquilizers”. He would take Valium and drink, drink, and drink. As we know now, the two do not mix well. He would then become a monster, constantly picking on my mom and my sisters. He was a very jealous husband. My mother was never allowed to work because he thought she might meet someone and leave him. He was very strict in the way my mother was allowed to dress and with whom she was allowed to talk. When she went to the grocery store, he would tell her how much time he thought it would take her to shop and drive back home. If she was gone one minute more than the allotted time, he would be on the phone calling the grocery store, or wherever it was she went, and having her paged to make sure that she was really where she said she was going to be. Too bad cell phones had not been invented. It certainly would have saved her a lot of embarrassment. She was also not allowed to socialize outside of the family.

My father was a car salesman. He was excellent at what he did, which most of the time consisted of ripping people off. He could be a very funny man and show off a great personality. Who wouldn’t want to buy a car from him? When I became an adult and his colleagues would tell me what a funny and great dad I had, I would think, “Who are they talking about?” They had no idea whatsoever what was going on inside his head or inside our home. He was a gambler whose habit left us houseless, car-less and almost baby-less. He lost a lot of money betting the horses. He would let my sisters pick a horse from the racing form by pointing to a name, but if the horse they picked lost the race he would come home and beat them. “Well, after all, it was your fault!” is what his sick mind would think.

When my mom was in labor with my middle sister, the hospital wanted payment when she arrived to give birth. My father told my mother that he was really sorry, but he had gambled the money on a basketball game and lost. My mother sat in a wheelchair in the hallway of a hospital, in heavy labor, trying to figure out how she was going to pay to have her baby. Even though her father was absolutely the last person she wanted to call for help, she had no choice. So, because of this episode and many others like it, my mother’s side of the family did not care for my father. My mother, for various reasons, had to call her father and ask for money many times throughout their sixteen years of marriage.

When you’re the child of an alcoholic you become very sensitive to things that most people wouldn’t even notice. When my sisters and I would see the headlights of his car shine across our bedroom window, we would pull the covers over our heads and pretend we were asleep. I often wondered what thoughts would be going through my mom’s mind at those times. Was she as frightened as we were? I always felt so bad for her. We could tell just by the way his key went into the lock how many drinks he had, and how drunk he was. As he would walk down the hallway, we could tell by every footstep if he was “mad drunk” or simply “happy drunk”. Most of the time he was mad drunk. He would always wake up my mom and argue about something or make her do something she didn’t want to do. We would stay awake with our ears at the crack of the door and listen until we knew he had passed out.

Being a salesman, he often traveled. When he did, we would celebrate our freedom. Every so often, out of the blue, he would even stage his own death. It would be 2 – 3 o’clock in the morning and there would be a knock at the door. It would be the police telling us that they had received a call from (wherever he had gone) and there was a terrible accident and that my father was found dead. Well, the first time it happened we were frightened, shaken, and even devastated. But after the third, fourth, fifth, and even sixth time, my mother would say to the policeman, “Are you sure this time?” The policeman would say yes and she would jump up and down for joy. Now I’m sure the police thought we were a very strange family, but they didn’t know our side of the story.

One thing my mother could never bring herself to do was to leave him for good …. until one night. It was a night like any other. My father was drunk and on Valium. He requested a seven-course meal, as he always did, which my mother always prepared. We were very frightened, not knowing just what the heck he was going to do to us that night. My mother made him something for the main course that he apparently considered not suitable. Because of that, he started to push her around. Finally, he put a knife to her throat and began yelling at her, saying he should cut her throat for not doing what she was told! Needless to say, that was it.

As soon as my father left the room, she said almost in a whisper, “Come on, girls. Get your coats. We’re leaving!” We left that night with the clothes on our backs and nothing else except the twenty dollars my mom had put away for a time like that. As we walked the dark streets of our neighborhood, a car, driving very fast, suddenly came screeching alongside us. It was my father. We all started to run, scattering in different directions and finding a tree to hide behind. My father got out of the car and started yelling at and chasing my mom. He was gaining on her, almost grabbing her hair when we all yelled, “Mom!” She sped up, running faster than she had ever run in her life. He finally gave up and ran back to his car.

My sisters and I came out from the behind the tree when, suddenly, he drove his car up on the sidewalk and tried to run down my middle sister! While running for her life she stepped in a sprinkler hole and twisted her ankle very badly. She fell to the ground and dragged herself behind another tree where she could hide from him. It was very foggy that night and he finally lost sight of all of us and went home.

From that point on we never looked back.

We lived with different relatives for a while until my mother could find a job. She had no work experience and had barely received a high school diploma. She then went on to marry a man who had been married four times. He was a contractor, very hard working, and he loved us very much. Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to communicate with his new family. He had a very bad temper, and instead of becoming physically abusive like my biological father, he was verbally abusive. He had a very foul mouth.

I couldn’t do anything to please him. As far as he was concerned, I was stupid. I could do nothing to live up to his expectations. I believe he did the best he could with what he knew. You don’t realize how such experiences dictate your everyday choices and attitudes, bad experiences that affect you so deeply that you have to shove them down in denial will eventually come back to haunt you – if you don’t know how to deal with them. There was so much fear instilled in us girls at such early ages. You either learn to live with it … or you let it consume you.

But unforgiveness is a blessing blocker. You cannot harbor unforgiveness. You have to forgive and move on. On the outside, I was a very tough young girl with many dreams about being somebody, but on the inside a very scared without much hope. During my childhood, I was constantly reminded that I looked like my father, walked like my father, and even talked like my father. At a very young age I came to the conclusion that, since my father was what we called back then, “the devil,” then I must be the devil, too.

I started smoking cigarettes at thirteen. I drank alcohol. I tried drugs. However, being a person who always had to be in control, drugs really weren’t for me. I went through my life anxiety-ridden and panic-stricken. Again, you would have never known it because I learned how to cover it all so well.

When I first started dating, I chose every alcoholic/druggy guy I could find, because that was all I knew how to relate to. I would deliberately put myself in situations with men just so I could live in drama, and then I would find myself so deeply involved that I wouldn’t know how to get free. I was more comfortable living with constant turmoil and drama than I was with peace. In fact, I didn’t know what peace was.

I was constantly running from my thoughts. You really can’t love anyone else when you hate yourself so much. I didn’t know that I could have the power and authority to cast those thoughts down as fast as they came to my mind. I tried everything I could to run away from myself. I would work out for many hours, seven days a week, but I would never feel satisfied with my workouts and would condemn myself on the way home for not doing one more repitition or one more mile. I would keep myself so busy that I would literally fall into bed at night, exhausted. I did this for many, many years. I also decided to stop eating because, in my mind, if I looked different, then maybe I could be different and not be who I really was. I was anorexic for several years. I was so afraid to eat. It wasn’t so much a weight-loss issue as it was a fear that if I went back to eating normally then my past would come back and I would be right back where I started.

I wanted so badly to be different from the way I was. I had always wanted to be an actress. So when I graduated high school in 1980 I moved out of my mother’s house and went to live in Hollywood. I did all the compromising things a struggling actress would do to get a job. I was on a constant search for inner peace. Since God was never talked about in my house, I didn’t know to call on Him. I was always taught that I was alone in this world and if I wanted anything, I would have to do it myself.

Well, we all know how far that will take you. Remember, man thinks of himself as limited because men are limited. God thinks of us as unlimited because He is limitless. Infinite.

While I struggled to be an actress, I found work on the game show Jeopardy. I ended up staying there for fifteen years. I thank God for that opportunity. I made good money and was allowed to go on acting auditions any time I needed. Best of all, I didn’t have to wait tables! I did a lot of local theater, a few parts in movies and then moved on to stand-up comedy, which is where I eventually met my husband, Butch. I only did stand-up long enough to meet Butch, because after I met him I had no desire to ever do stand-up comedy again. It was the most depressing job I could have ever had. Can you imagine performing in front of a bunch drunk people who are smoking and yelling silly comments at you every night?

Butch had come to see a friend perform, and was planning to leave immediately after his friend finished. I took the stage right after his friend, and Butch decided to stay and watch me. Now, we’ve been married for thirteen years. My life really turned around after I met Butch. He loved me from the day he met me. He knew how to tell me, and he knew how to show me. My self-esteem was so low at times I just couldn’t see how he could love me so much. Still, no matter how much a boyfriend or a husband loves you they cannot give you inner joy. My husband loved me so much that I knew it was different compared to anyone else I had ever dated. No one had ever treated me that way before. He supported me then, and still does now, in anything I wanted to do. He would always ask what he could do to make me happier. I would say this or that, but after I got it I would still be unhappy. I am sure it was very frustrating for him at times. The devil can talk you into all sorts of lies. He will keep you searching in the dark so much that you’ll think there is no light anywhere. There were so many times that I would do stupid things just to make my husband mad. Our first couple years together were tough. We were both trying to adjust to each other’s past.

Depression was a household word in my home. Even if I weren’t depressed I would say I was. I would think, “Well, that’s just the life of an actress, an emotional roller coaster – ‘sometimes up, sometimes down, and sometimes level to the ground,’ ” as Dr. Frederick K.C. Price, my pastor, would often say about his own life before he realized his authority in Christ. That totally explained my life at the time.

There was a point where I began having a particularly hard time. A friend of mine who belonged to a church in the San Fernando Valley asked me to go with her to see if it helped. That night when the pastor did the altar call, he said, “if anyone here would like the opportunity to make Jesus Christ the Lord of your life, please lift your head and look in my direction.” The building was dimly lit, but when I raised my head and looked at the pastor, it seemed that all of a sudden all the doors to the building swung open and light came shining through! The only things missing were angels singing! It was awesome. I knew at that point that I had made the best decision of my life.

My husband and I had married with the agreement that we would have no children. Since our own childhoods were so messed up, we felt that we would not bring a child into this world and mess them up. After attending that church for a couple months, one day as we were standing on the corner heading to our car, we suddenly both turned to each other and said, “We have to have a baby.” I could tell then that there was some “loosening of yokes and bondages” going on. This was a big step for us.

The church was very large and impersonal. I couldn’t understand why the pastor would be speaking in a strange language to a predominantly Caucasian/American congregation. He was speaking in tongues, but he never bothered to explain or teach the benefit of it. Even though we stayed at that church for a couple of months, I never knew what speaking in tongues was about, and I certainly didn’t know that I should do it, too.

We ended up leaving that church because we had moved farther away and begun attending another church. This new church turned out to be what we now call a “spiritually dead” church – NO tongues, NO altar calls, NO getting into the Bible and showing members how to live our lives according to God’s Word, NO teaching on salvation, redemption – nothing. Each week, all that was given us was a “sweet pill of emotion.” After each service I wouldn’t even make it out of the parking lot before I would revert right back to my old, nasty disposition. In spite of this, we ended up staying at that church a couple of years. We also ended up having two daughters! (I guess we broke our no-kids agreement!)

One Sunday, a good friend of ours was getting an award at his church and he invited me to come. I walked into that church – Crenshaw Christian Center – and knew right then and there that I was home! I told my husband that evening that I had found a new church home.

“Where is it?” he asked.

“South Central L.A,” I said.

“No way,” he replied.

After a few months of attending by myself, he finally said one Saturday night, “I would like to go with you to church tomorrow.” I could tell he was just humoring me, but he went, and to this day, five and a half years later, we’re still there! Dr. Price showed us how to completely turn our lives around in a very short period of time. He is a man of integrity and consistency, and we thank God for him everyday. He is a teacher; He does not preach! He teaches. You would have to be deaf, dumb and blind to not understand his teaching!

He told me that, in order for me to change my life and renew my mind I would have to immerse myself in the Word of God. That’s exactly what I did. We began attending church every Sunday and Bible study on Tuesday nights. I began to fill my ears with the Word while driving, running errands, exercising or using the Internet. Kenneth Copeland did a whole series on attacking fear. He even came to Crenshaw Christian Center in January 2002 and prayed over our congregation to release the spirit of fear once and for all. I left there that day and I knew my life had changed. I watch Brother Copeland on The Believer’s Voice of Victory on the Internet everyday. Dr. Creflo Dollar has also been a big part of my spiritual growth. He has taught me so much about having confidence in knowing the authority that I possess as a believer. I watch his Changing Your World broadcast daily. I can never get enough of the Word.

It helps to have friends around you who are also in the Word. You can talk, ask questions, answer questions, and just fellowship. You help each other out. That is why I love being a Tae Bo instructor. I have been teaching Tae Bo with Billy Blanks for seven years now. I started off as a client fourteen years ago. I had gone to the Billy Blanks World Training Center to learn how to do martial arts for a movie audition. I never got the movie part, but I continued going to the Tae Bo classes. It was there that I learned so much about myself, about other people, and especially about the Lord. All my life I knew I wanted to help people. I originally thought I would do it through acting, but the Lord knew just where to place me. He put me into physical fitness. In fact, He did better than just put me physical fitness; he put me with Billy Blanks. See how awesome God is? I love to work out.

I love being with Billy and Shellie (Billy’s daughter), and I get to help people everyday. Billy and his wife Gayle are very special to my family and me – Billy, for constantly pushing me to reach deep down inside, correcting me, and for his uncompromising love for Jesus Christ; Gayle, for her love of God and for people everywhere. She has shown me throughout the years how to love people, even when they don’t deserve it. I thank God that He put Billy in my life, just in time, to save me and to chasten me. Billy could see right through my phony “tough-girl” façade – as he does with most people – and would call me out on all of my “bull (you know what).” I’ve also had the honor of being his personal assistant for the past seven years.

My two daughters are both unique, beautiful, and intelligent. They know God and love Him for what He is to them, and what He is to their parents. Our house is filled with the Word – Bibles in every room, Scriptures carved in stone on the walls, drawers full of cassette tapes, cars full of CDs, all with the Word. If there is a place to sit in my house, there is a place to hear the Word. We are a praying family. We are a tithing and offering-giving family. We speak the Word daily. I have to live my life this way. I cannot do it any other way. I know where I came from and I know that I am never going back.

My life is awesome. I am 42 years old and I have learned from the Word of God that I can have and do anything I want. As soon as we became members at Crenshaw Christian Center, my husband grabbed on to the Word and has never looked back. He has so much knowledge and power now. It does not depart from his lips – ever! We don’t argue anymore. If we disagree about something, we go right to the Word to see what God has to say about it. We keep our egos out of the situation. If we could all humble ourselves long enough to be quick to listen and slow to speak, I believe there would be a lower percentage of divorce in this country. God has taught Butch how to be such a man of integrity, wisdom and anointing. You see, God not only gave me what I wanted in a husband but he gave me something even better!

The key to freedom from your past is forgiveness. Grab ahold of what I say and act on it: You have to release yourself from the strongholds in your past – like anger toward a parent. My father has been dead seven years now. Can you imagine spending your days being so angry and hurt by someone that’s been dead for seven years? What a waste of time. I couldn’t even show him how much I hated him because he was D E A D!

I was out jogging one Sunday morning at 6 a.m. It was raining, and I don’t know what came over me at the time, but I suddenly dropped to my knees, stretched my arms up to the sky and yelled as loud as I could, “I forgive you!” Right then and there I forgave my father, my mother, my stepfather, and all the family members that I thought had done me wrong in the past. I sat there on my knees in the middle of the street, in the rain, crying and thanking God for delivering me from my past. I knew at that point that I was ready for God to do a mighty work in me. I was free to believe it and free to accept it. I knew then that I was a new creation in Christ, old things had passed away, and, behold, all things had become new (2 Corinthians 5:17). I would say that over and over. I had to speak it into existence everyday so that I started believing it.

So whatever you do, don’t let your past destroy your future. Step out on His Word. The Bible says “try me now in this” (Malachi. 3:10). He will “never leave you nor forsake you” (Hebrews13:50).

Start your day off in that blood-bought authority. Don’t settle for less. Wake up every morning and say these words to your spouse, kids, dog, cat, or look at yourself in the mirror and say: “SOMETHING GOOD IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU TODAY”!