Abuse victim found all things possible with God

By Michael Ashcraft –

By the time his family found him locked in an outdoor freezer on a Mississippi farm, Victor Marx was unconscious, clutched up in a ball, where his molester had left him to die because he realized the 5-year-old wouldn’t keep quiet about the rape.

Today, Victor ministers to kids in juvenile hall. He’s a 7th-degree black belt in martial arts and trains cops and military. He ministers in war zones in what he calls “high risk mission work.”

“The closer we are to danger, the more we’re helping people,” he says on his podcast. “I minister to these kids because I know where many of them have been. I know where God wants to take them. That which was meant for evil in my life has actually turned for good.”

How did Victor Marx heal the innumerable childhood traumas and become an effective minister of the gospel?

His biological father became involved in the Louisiana mafia, pimping women in honky-tonk bars and selling drugs. Dad didn’t cut or shoot up people like the Italian mafia in New York; he fed them to the alligators in the swamp, he says on the self-made documentary of his testimony.

Because Dad was splitting with Mom around the time of Victor’s conception, he never acknowledged him as his own child.

At five, Victor was taken advantage of by a neighbor who invited him into a room between two chicken houses where he threatened him with death if ever told. Since the neighbor got the idea that Victor would tell, he locked him in the commercial cooler to die.

“I remember being unbelievably terrified,” Victor says.

Victor kicked against the door and screamed until he succumbed to the pain, the horror and the intense cold. He curled up in a ball and passed out.

Meanwhile, his family began to miss him and began to search about. They looked around the pond and woods and checked the chicken houses, the building, and finally the freezer.

“Thank God they checked the freezer,” he says.

When Victor regained consciousness, he told them what happened. His family administered “country justice.”

“They kicked down his door and beat him in front of his family,” Victor relates. “They took him outside and hogtied him to the tractor and they drug him outside the house. They drug him all the way around. There was this one big pecan tree. They made a noose and threw it over this limb. They hooked it to the back of the tractor.

“They pulled the tractor, and he started going up, choking, trying to grab. They waited for him to go limp, and they cut him down and left him. They didn’t want to kill him and go to prison. They just wanted to put fear in him.”

His family’s crude justice did nothing to free Victor from the PTSD. Nor did it free him further trauma.

His stepdad – called Mr. K. – beat him mercilessly with a belt. A raging drunk and former military, Mr. K threatened 7-year-old Victor with a gun, smacking the muzzle while it was cocked against his forehead.

“When that cold barrel hits you in the head and you see the hammer back, I was just waiting for it to go off and splatter my brain,” Victor remembers.

“He was a crazy, mean alcoholic who would beat the hell out of you. Growing up with Mr. K., it was a terror. He was always abusive, mentally, physically, sexually to Mom and kids. There were four of us. He had been trained in the military with psych ops. He knew how to get into your head. He was always reinforcing that he could kill me.”

He held Victor’s head underwater for 25 seconds. When Victor could stand it no longer and passed out from oxygen deprivation, Mr. K. administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

“Boy, I’m the one that gives you life,” Mr. K. sneered cruelly when Victor revived.

One day because the electric bill was too high, Mr. K. blew out all the lights with his pistol in a drunken rage. While Victor and Mom hid behind a locked door, Stepdad growled threats.

“I know you’re in there,” he snarled. “I’m coming to get you.”

But Mom prayed. By now, she had gotten some exposure to the gospel and cried out to God for protection.

God brought a temporary blindness and confusion. Mr. K. couldn’t find the door, despite his threats and snarls.

They waited until he passed out under the effects of liquor. Then they snuck out the window and ran for their lives.

That was Victor’s childhood – 14 schools, 17 different houses and six different stepdads through Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

When he got older, he joined the Marines. He became a sharpshooter with the M-16, able to hit the chest of man from a distance of five-and-a-half football fields without a scope. He learned martial arts in his spare time.

“I was driven,” he recalls. “Ain’t nobody gonna touch me ever again.”

Once in Tijuana where he purchased a wooden martial arts sword, Victor and his buddies were accosted in an alleyway they had ducked into as a shortcut. Two menacing muggers confronted them. One had a switchblade and demanded their money.

But Victor didn’t speak Spanish. When his buddy explained they were being mugged, Victor adroitly used the wooden sword to knock the switchblade out of the would-be mugger’s hand. He and his buddies sprung into action and chased the other mugger off.

Sometime afterwards, Victor received a very strange letter from his biological dad, who after becoming a warlock and going through psychiatric treatment, had finally given up his life of wickedness and come to Jesus.

He called Victor “son.” This was the first time he recognized his own son.

He told him that previously he had been crazy but now was crazy for Jesus.

He invited Victor to come down and visit. When he did, Victor attended church with Dad.

For the first time in his life, Victor realized he was a sinner. He had done bad things. But God loved him despite those bad things.

Victor went up to the altar and cried to God for forgiveness. He tried to hide his tears behind a Bible because tough guys and Marines like him, he thought, don’t cry. It was June 22, 1986.

“I surrendered that day,” he says. “I stopped blaming other people for my sin. I asked God to forgive me, and I felt his love washing me from the inside out.”

As Victor remained at the altar crying for an inordinate amount of time, an elder eventually approached and asked to pray for him. He put his hand gently on Victor’s shoulder.

“When he did that, I didn’t like to be touched. I actually jumped up. I grabbed this guy by the scruff and I put my fist back,” Victor remembers.

“You touch me again and I’ll break your jaw. Don’t touch me,” he snapped at the startled elder. “This is between me and God.”

The elder apologized. Victor fell back to his knees and continued praying.

When Victor got married, he suffered flash backs and panic attacks. He reacted to his wife with inordinate anger, sometimes throwing her stuff out the window.

Eventually, Eileen insisted he seek therapy. She knew about a few of the things he’d suffered as a child. Many other things Victor blocked out. Therapy helped him to unearth and deal with all the damage buried in his heart At age 40, Victor made 100 visits in nine months to his therapist.

The therapy peeled back layers of hurt and helped Victor to become more reasonable with his kids and wife. The next step was to go find Mr. K., he says.

“I needed to forgive this guy, otherwise I would stay hard and mean,” Victor says.

He found him dying in a trailer next to a river, reduced to nothing after years of abuse and prison.

“It was very uncomfortable,” Victor says. “When I found him, I actually had to wrap him in a blanket and carry him to the hospital. His insides were destroyed by all those years of drinking and doing them drugs. The horrible lifestyle had caught him. He was in so much pain.

“When you see a man and he’s dying, you look at him different,” Victor explains. “Then I felt God’s Spirit wanting to show that man love through me. I had to die to myself because part of me thought, you finally getting what you deserve. Yet God was saying, I care for him, I died for me.”

Victor offered to read Mr. K. the Bible in his last days in the hospital.

With his wife next to him, Victor read scriptures to him daily. That hardened sinner remained hardened until the last. He didn’t want to accept Jesus except until the very end.

Burdened, Victor prayed and weeped for him. “I was shocked more than anybody else,” he remembers.

One day, Mr. K. confided in his nurse.

“Hey nurse, this is my son. I’m proud of him. He became a preacher man, the only one out of all of us. He’s been worrying about my eternity. Tell him not to worry anymore. I made it right with God last night.”

Victor was thunderstruck. “It was such a holy moment.”

“Very clearly the Lord said, ‘Tell him you love him,’” Victor recalls. “I told him, ‘Dad, I love you.’ For the first time ever, he said, ‘Boy, I love you too.’

“It felt good on the inside. I felt redemption between someone you thought was your dad when you were a kid, after all the abuse,” Victor says. “That’s what a lot of people don’t understand. Kids always want to connect with their parents no matter how bad they may be. Guess who got free? Me. Bitterness is like drinking poison and hoping it will hurt somebody else.”

His outreach ministry is called All Things are Possible Ministries.

 

If you want to know more about a personal relationship with God, go here

About the writer of this article: Pastor Michael Ashcraft is also a financial professional in California.