Nearly got blown up numerous times as a kid

My parents were missionaries and always believed I was supposed to be in the ministry. They raised me accordingly. Dad would ask me if I wanted to come on missions trips, but I’d have to earn my keep if I wanted to be with them. He’d often threaten to leave me behind or even deport me when I had an attitude or if I wasn’t in god’s will. I began traveling with my parents when I was a baby; I began preaching when I was five. Ofc I was homeschooled too.

A number of the trips we went on were to places with active terrorist threats or places that were hostile to Christianity. I knew I could get blown up or captured at any second. If we got captured, I could have been tortured, sexually abused, turned into a child soldier, trafficked, or imprisoned.

I lived in fear of hell and persecution, but it’s interesting to realize I’d faced those threats more directly than I expected. For example, my dad threatened, hit, guilted, and interrogated me over several days. He also locked me out. I was nine. Plus there was the mock execution, in which he was beheaded in front of me and I was made to believe it was real. I was seven. There’s the times I was hit hard enough to break the comb or have swelling (age five), or the time I would get punished for being afraid by having to write verses and even by getting locked out at night in a foreign country, at night, in a place with large undomesticated guard dogs (I was seven and terrified of dogs).