Jonathan Bellamy spoke with Gail Kreason

Gail Kreason

Gail Kreason has travelled the world sharing a message of encouragement and hope through her gifts of music and public speaking. Her message is born out of overcoming the horrific abuse she suffered at the hands of her father growing up, forgiving the men who murdered her first husband and discovering that Jesus is enough, even through financial ruin. Jonathan Bellamy heard her story.

Jonathan: You've had an incredible life in terms of the challenges you have had to face and also your testimony of how you have come through them. Could you start by sharing what life was like for you growing up as a young girl?

Gail age 6 with siblings

Gail: Well my life was not filled with a lot of fairy-tale, let's put it that way. My father was an abusive alcoholic and he was very abusive to my mother and to my brothers and sisters and I. We would go hungry a lot of the times because he wouldn't bring his money home to buy food. And he played Russian roulette with us at the dinner table and it's a miracle that I'm even sitting here talking to you, because there was a time that he brought a revolver to the table and put a bullet in the chamber. There were seven children and my mum and dad, so that would be nine, and we know that there's seven bullets in a chamber. Each one of us had to put the gun to our head and press the trigger and not one time did that gun go off. I know that was the hand of God that kept me alive, kept my mother alive, my brothers and sisters alive and even my father alive to the end of his life to have found God - and that's the great part that we can get into later about the mercy of the Lord. But, many times I would go to bed hungry, and we didn't have the proper care of nutrition or doctors, but God was always with us. My dad would have a drunken rampage and come home destroying everything in his path, but you could just know that God's hand was always upon my life and in my mother's ability to direct us, to take us to church: that was the saving grace, that my mother always took us to church and taught me about Jesus when I was just a little girl and that helped pull me through, with the foundation that she placed underneath me, knowing that God, even as a little girl, loved me and was going to take care of me.

Jonathan: Having such serious circumstances like that taking place, with your own father, must have been devastating and caused you deep wounds. Then he left you and abandoned you as a family as well. I guess at one level that removed a certain level of devastation, but it probably caused a different aspect there in terms of being abandoned. When you look back, what do you feel were some of the wounds that happened to you and occurred in your life as a result?

Gail's dad

Gail: You're absolutely correct. His abandonment created all kinds of other circumstances and weaknesses in my life. As a young girl, you want to know your father loves you because then you're not looking for attention from somebody else outside of your safety zone, which is your family. So when your father leaves you, you feel totally vulnerable and you're looking for someone to love you, so you want to be good so that somebody will. As a child, because I was seven years old when he abandoned us, I was looking for the acceptance from friends and church and pastors and people and even family members. Then you build up in your life that you've got to please somebody, you've got to be good to be loved; if you're good enough they won't leave you; if you do the right thing they'll be nice to you and if you're perfect they'll love you. That was totally the opposite of what God was saying, or what God says about us. That's what happens when you're abandoned though, you fill it with things that you think are the right things to do and that cause another problem in your life, which was thinking that if I was good enough then I would be loved and accepted. Of course we know that you can never be good enough for God to love you: He loves you just the way you are. And so I'm just grateful that later on in my life I was able to come to that understanding as I pressed through those circumstances and difficulties.

Jonathan: Explain a little bit about how you found some healing in that area, then. How did you first recognise that that was a part of your heart where you were looking for that affirmation?

Gail: Because of the things that I did that didn't bring satisfaction, they didn't bring the peace that I was looking for; looking for the approval of man and the approval of a teacher, or the approval of a pastor, or even trying to approve myself. There was nothing that could do that because every time you search inside into the natural, into the carnal, into the things that are not what God wants for us, it brings that emptiness and void, because you're seeking in wrong places. The approval and the seeking of man's approval really will take you down a path of anger: you'll become so angry because they're not going to approve you anyway because their love is not God's love. It leaves you empty.

Jonathan: A man that we know, a man called John Smith, says, "You can't get out of another person what you can only get out of God."

Gail: Exactly. And we're all searching for that part - God puts that place in us that only God can fill and if we try to find it in a man, a person, a job, a place, something in life, it will not satisfy.

Jonathan: From seven years old, God led you on a singing career. You started off by singing at the age of seven and you became very successful with a group called The Lanny Wolfe Trio. Do you look back and see that that was something of God's doing to give you that in your life?

Gail cover Lanny Wolfe Trio

Gail: I do, absolutely. It was absolutely a God-send because I had been singing from a very young age at the church - but started out humbly, singing to the homeless in a men's shelter, a mission, with drunks and alcoholics and people that didn't have much of a life. I would sing to them with my brother and sister and I always knew that God's hand was on my life: I loved Him from a very young age. I believe that seed of the Gospel that my mother put in me helped me grow and keep singing. We would many times sing as a family to cope with the pain that we were going through as children - and that's how I began to sing, it was just because of the pain. But then I kept pressing in and believing that God had a call on my life and He loved me and that He wanted to give me peace and joy and to touch others that were hurting too. I was just simply laying across my bed one day and a friend of mine that I knew from going to a church camp when I was a kid, he had told this Lanny Wolfe about me. He had heard me sing at camp. And to me it was just a miracle because Lanny Wolfe and his group were already travelling worldwide and had already recorded many compilations of songs. So for me to get that call one day as I was lying across my bed, one summer afternoon crying my eyes out before the Lord God: "What are you going to do with me? I feel so broken, so lost, I'm fatherless, I have no hope other than you God," and the phone rang and it was Lanny Wolfe: it was a miracle! It would be like in today's day having Bruce Springsteen call me out of the blue, to me that's how much it felt to me, if I can compare it to something, that's what a miracle it was. It changed my life, Jonathan!

Jonathan: It changed your life and it added a lot in at that time, which made it all the more devastating, I guess, when your life totally changed through tragedy. I know that you lost your husband of 10 years through a murder. Rather than me tell the story, would you like to share something of what happened and describe that time?

Dan & Gail with son Andrew

Gail: Yes. It was a wonderful time in my life. I had found the man that loved me unconditionally, like a father should have loved me. He was everything: he was like my best friend, my husband, kind of like a father, because he provided: it was finding that true love that I always longed for when I was a little girl. I had it all wrapped up into my husband Dan. We had met in college and I was singing with Lanny Wolfe and so my career was taking off. Now I was marrying a man that was a preacher. We ended up going to San Francisco and starting a church in that Bay Area and the church was growing and thriving and we had a son at the time and he was seven years old. We had come into a wonderful place, our church was growing and thriving, I was singing, I was travelling all over the country and doing God's work, which is what all my life I wanted to do. Then one day he was studying for his message in the church and I had taken some time with some women, because the next day we were going to put on a women's conference, and I went shopping. While I was gone shopping a tragedy occurred, while my husband was in the office studying while I was out enjoying myself, some robbers came into the church and they were robbing the coast, the San Francisco Bay Area all the way up the California coast. When they came to our church, I guess my husband was the only one that resisted. They had come in and asked for a drink of water and when he came back with the cup of water they pulled out guns and he thought, "Well I can take this guy, I can rustle him to the ground and preach about it tonight." But when the gun went off there were others outside and they came in and they fatally wounded him. He ran outside of the doors and lay fatally wounded, at the bottom of the stairs of our church - but on the other side there was another stairwell that went down: the men were taking equipment out of the church and robbing the church while my husband lay dying on the other side of the stairwell. It was very devastating to get the call that the police were coming to get me to take me to the hospital to identify a body. When I got there I didn't even know who it was at first because, you never believe that something like that could happen to you. That was the beginning of a very long, arduous journey for me.

Jonathan: Tell us a little bit about that. How did it feel? Because I guess there would still have been a lot of the legacy, with your father and growing up as a young girl. I imagine God had healed different aspects, but then when something like this happens, particularly the level of tragedy and the level of closeness you would have had, what did that do to you?