Locked up by unloving parents, Angela Darcy never thought she’d know peace and freedom
Little did Angela Darcy know that God would answer her and years later she would be able to trace her journey to forgiveness and freedom in Christ back to that desperate day.
As a girl Angela had been locked up regularly by her parents seemingly unwanted an
d unloved. The family would move from place to place around London and Angela lived with the anxiety of suddenly being bundled into the car to be moved to a new location.
Without the love of her parents, Angela was in a hazardous spiral of anorexia, then bulimia coupled with all things dangerous. Meanwhile her parents’ unstable finances, made for a house full of arguments, fear and rejection.
The love-starved girl grew into a young woman prepared to try anything to numb the heartache. The death first of her mother and then later her father led her to rock bottom, where she found herself jobless, penniless, practically homeless and now with a drink problem.
Angela says, “I thought my life was over so one day on returning home I opened wide the back door, the front door and then all the windows and cried out, ‘God, if you’re out there, come in’ whereupon I collapsed in a drunken sleep.”
Two weeks passed and a despairing walk along the seafront led Angela to sit on a bench overlooking the sea. There beside her, she spotted a week-old newspaper advert for a job with a printing company.
Despite her neglected appearance and ahead of many other hopefuls, Angela landed the job.
“I had joined a Christian printing company and was the first non-Christian they had employed,” she comments.
Committed to their God, this firm held regular prayer meetings and this included Angela who went “because that’s what everyone did.” Yet she would ask incredulously of her colleagues if they really believed everything they read in the Bible.
Her loveless childhood meant that she found it very hard to trust anyone except herself, so she started to read and research, saying to herself, “This Jesus is the one I need to find out about for myself”.
Some eight years after joining the printers, the truth began to dawn, “I fell more and more in love with the Father who cares for us and wants all of us to be saved”.
Nowadays Angela, who still works for the same firm, readily tells others that it is Jesus who has truly helped her to cope and has enabled her to fully forgive her parents. Though there are still things she is yet to understand, she explains that God is using what she has endured to help others as she studies the life of Jesus, gives words of encouragement to others and enjoys fellowship at Victoria Baptist Church in Eastbourne.
A life of fear, rejection and hurt has been transformed into fullness of new life in Jesus Christ who answered this child’s open-windows cry from the heart and the faithful prayers of her colleagues over the ensuing years.
Lisa Fairman-Brown