By Mark Ellis —
She grew up in a Catholic family with nine siblings. Her father worked for RCA and traveled frequently, so she didn’t see him much of the time.
“I always had something that was different with me,” Daphne Salazar told God Reports. “I was kind of emotional and shy compared to my other siblings.”
At parochial school in Cocoa Beach, Florida, Daphne began to have trouble. “For some reason I couldn’t understand these teachers and I was failing. The times tables really got me, and I didn’t understand that you were supposed to memorize them,” she recounts.
Failing in school, Daphne was transferred to public school. “They sent me to psychiatrists that summer wanting to figure out what was wrong with me. I was kind of a visual learner, not a book learner and it messed me up.
“I started gaining a lot of weight. One day my friend said that if I couldn’t flip over the monkey bars, I was too fat to be her friend. I couldn’t do it, so I ran home crying.”
As a result of this painful experience, Daphne developed an eating disorder. “I was in sixth grade, and I quit eating that day. I started fainting in school,” she says.
She went from four foot seven inches in height, weighing 135 pounds, to five foot two, weighing 67 pounds.
Television was restricted in her home, but Daphne worked out a deal with her mother to watch Gidget Goes Hawaiian in exchange for doing extra chores around the house.
After the program started, Daphne’s father arrived home. He had been drinking. “I was watching the TV show and he told me to shut it off and go to bed.”
“I don’t have to because I earned it,” she told her father, suddenly realizing the peril of talking back to her father. “Daddy, please, Mommy said I could.”
“Did you not hear me?” he barked, with anger rising in his voice.
Then he did something he had never done before. “He kicked me like I was a football and I landed across the room against an upright piano.
“I was hurt pretty bad, and I ran upstairs screaming and crying, and he came up into my room. That was the first time and only time he molested me…that set me in a very strange place.”
Two weeks later, Daphne was outside playing with her neighbor. Her friend’s parents asked, “Oh, how’s your Mom and Dad doing?
“Oh, they’re fine,” Daphne replied. Then something unexpected came out of Daphne’s mouth, “But my father’s dying of a brain aneurysm.”
Her father wasn’t sick at the time. The neighbors came over to offer condolences.
“What are you talking about?” Daphne’s mother asked.
“Daphne said Paul is dying of a brain tumor.”
Daphne’s father called her into his room. “Daphne, why did you say that? Why do you say that? he asked.
“I don’t know, Daddy, I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. The words just came out. I didn’t mean it.”
Daphne’s father died two weeks later of a brain aneurysm. He was 44.
“I started eating again at his funeral,” Daphne recalls.
A couple months later, Daphne and her sister took a swimming class together. “The teacher was having us dive, but she was teaching us in three feet of water. Well, my sister was taller than me, but she was in front of me in line. I asked the teacher if I could please jump in front of her and she said, ‘Nope, everyone will jump their turn,’ and my sister jumped, and she didn’t come up.’
“Oh my God, there’s something wrong with my sister!” Daphne cried out.
Then the teacher admitted she couldn’t swim. “She got the track team to get my sister out. They lay her on the sidewalk. And all I remember is my sister says, ‘Don’t move my head. My nurse books say don’t move my head.’ She had always wanted to be a nurse. Well, she was paralyzed from her neck down. To this day, she’s still paralyzed, from the waist down.”
At 13, Daphne entered a depression and ran away from home. “Mom would try to discipline me and she didn’t know how to do it. She was just yelling and screaming all the time and I couldn’t take it.”
Daphne moved from house to house, staying with different friends. “Sometimes I would hide in our garage or on a porch. I would shower sometimes in people’s backyards with their water spigot in the middle of the night, just crazy stuff. I would come home and steal money or food. I had a couple of wild girlfriends and we would get in trouble together.”
Hitchhiking across the country with a girlfriend, Daphne and her friend were detained at a park in Hendersonville, Tennessee as runaways. Because there was no space at a youth detention center, they were placed in the men’s jail. “My girlfriend got out the next day. But my mom thought I was in a detention home and told them I could stay. They forgot about me there and I was there for the rest of the summer. It was not a nice place. It was really a bad place.”
“I had my own cell and they never did break in, which was amazing. They tried. The guy in the cell next to me was a mass murderer and rapist. I couldn’t eat the food. I got exercise by playing I was a monkey on the bars. I was kind of going a little nuts.”
Because there was no privacy, Daphne waited until the middle of the night to use the toilet in her cell. She never had a shower or bath during her incarceration. “I finally get out after a social worker heard there was a young girl in the men’s prison. She came in to find out if it was true and got me out.”
Faced with a choice of going to a state home, or a place called The Seed in Vero Beach, Daphne chose the latter. It was a very structured environment, involving tasks and counseling sessions. “You’d have to say something about how you felt about certain things. And I didn’t understand what they wanted me to say. I tried to answer the questions, but they would always tell me I was wrong. And it just got me so frustrated,” she recalls.
“One day I was going into the shower. It was two stories up, and I jumped out the window with my towel, and landed in a tree.” Then she ran into the woods and ended up on a golf course, where a man gave her his raincoat and she hitchhiked home.
At 14, Daphne overdosed on drugs. “I remember sitting in this room with all these people that I barely knew.”
Suddenly, Daphne floated above her body and was looking down on herself. “The next thing you know I’m up in heaven. I go up through this light tunnel, and I’m standing outside the gates of heaven.
“And I stood before this beautiful one. All I could do is say ‘I’m sorry, please let me go back, I’ll be good.
“He looked at me and it was Jesus. He was so beautiful. And we would talk through our minds. And I just begged him because all my sins and I said I didn’t know that was wrong.
“He let me peek into the garden. It was the most incredible thing because the plants were so alive. To me, it seemed like they were human. The colors were so amazing. As soon as I saw that, he let his love come into me. As soon as I felt his love, I said, ‘Please let me stay with you. I want to stay with you.’ And that’s when I woke up.”
When Daphne woke up, she was covered up, riding in an ambulance.
Despite her dramatic near-death experience with Jesus in heaven, Daphne did not surrender her life to Jesus as her Savior and Lord for another decade.
“From when I turned 18, I started working in this bar and then for the next 10 years I worked in the same bar.
Daphne married for the first time at 29. “I was not a believer yet, but I got a card at my wedding that said, ‘It takes three to make a marriage work. And it was talking about Jesus. I didn’t know how to find Jesus. So from that point on after I got married, I was on a search for God.”
One day a woman came to visit Daphne with her grandbaby. “Oh, sister Daphne, you’ve got to get the Holy Ghost,” the woman said.
“What are you talking about?” Daphne asked.
“You know, the Holy Ghost,” the woman repeated. “When the Holy Ghost comes in, Jesus comes in, and the devil’s come out.”
The woman further explained to Daphne how she got delivered, set free, and filled with the Holy Ghost.
“That’s what I want!” Daphne exclaimed. “Where do I get it? I want the living God. The one I can talk to, the one I can feel his presence.”
As Daphne reviewed her life, she knew she was ready for change. “I was so over myself and every sin and drinking and all that stuff. I was so over it.” She also smoked three packs of cigarettes a day.
First Daphne visited her friend’s church on Sunday, then they went back on Wednesday. Between the two services, Daphne prayed that Jesus would come into her heart.
At the mid-week service, a spirit of repentance fell on Daphne. A “magnet” pulled her up and she went forward for prayer. “All these ladies with the buttons, no jewelry, long hair, long dresses were praying for me.”
Feeling somewhat downcast by the revelation of all the sin in her life, she turned to leave.
A man stopped her and said, “You know, Jesus is kinda like chocolate. You take one bite, you want more and more.”
“I don’t think he wants me because he just showed me how bad I was.”
“No sister, you just have to yield.”
At that moment, Daphne yielded her heart and the Holy Spirit fell on her. “I did get baptized in the Holy Spirit that day. I knew I got saved a few days earlier. I don’t believe that you have to speak in tongues to be saved. I believe you can be saved without speaking in tongues.”
I was literally knocked for a loop that day. I couldn’t get up from the church benches. Tongues were coming out; I felt like I was drunk as a skunk in the spirit. I couldn’t stand up. Every time I tried to stand, I would fall back down.
“Finally they had to take me home. They put me in the back of a van took me home, and I was still speaking in another language.”
By the time Daphne got home, her husband was upset. “I don’t want to be married to no damn Jesus freak,” he said.
“It’s too late now,” she replied. “Now I know He’s real and I ain’t ever leaving Him.”
Despite the opposition from her husband, Daphne began to grow in the Lord. “The Lord would speak to me so clearly. And I thought, Oh, my gosh, you’re the voice.
“That’s when I realized He had always been with me, and He had always spoken to me.”
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