THE STORY OF ANTHONY MILLER, JR.
I’m so very thankful to God for saving my life by sending His one and only Son to die for all of our sins. He was sent here to save us and not condemn us for all we’ve done. Once we finally realize that, then life becomes so much simpler and endurable. We come to the realization that we’ve been under a cloud of deception for most of our lives and without a life-changing revelation, we stay submerged under this darkness. Had I not gotten arrested when I did, I surely would have died before I ever truly lived. This is described by some as divine intervention or divinity intervening. My life was spiraling out of control at a very rapid pace and I couldn’t it see it, nor did I care if it was. I was so blinded, due to my own self-captivity, that I really never cared too much at all about what happened to Anthony. I was usually too worried about others and what they thought as opposed to what Anthony thought. I guess what I’m really saying is Anthony really didn’t matter to Anthony and Anthony didn’t know how to matter to himself. Anthony was too busy being angry at himself and the world and not knowing why that was. He was secretly suffering and dying inside, and it made him angry because he didn’t know why this was happening. He lashed out, he showed out, he swore, he blamed, he accused, he dominated, he preyed on others, and he was the type of person he hated. No matter how much he wanted that person he saw in the mirror to be someone else, that person never changed until Jesus showed him the Truth. The Truth is the Word of God. Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life, no one can get to the Father, but through the Son. Anthony needed Jesus to see the truth about the man he saw in the mirror and the truth was he hated others because he hated himself. The hurt of being abandoned (or so he thought at the time) by his mother deeply affected him without him even knowing it. Because of this hurt, he began slowly killing himself inside and out, starting at the age of 6. That hurt directly affected every aspect of his life from childhood to adulthood. Every relationship, from family to friends to girlfriends to wives to co-workers and beyond, were all affected. He grew up with a huge chip on both shoulders. Now some people have a chip on their shoulder but imagine having two and trying to navigate this crazy thing we call life. He always wanted people to be close to him but couldn’t allow them to get to close because of trust issues brought on by being abandoned at such a young age. You want love but your fear won’t allow you to completely accept it or allow it all the way in. You can’t love others if you don’t love yourself, and you can’t love yourself without the revelation of God’s Love for us, all which is Jesus Christ. Had he known God’s Love early on, he would have been able to deal with the death of his daughter, Whitney Ann Miller, on September 3, 2O04 a lot better than what he did. He did ok, don’t get me wrong, but he could’ve been a lot more open about how much pain he was enduring at the time. He could’ve been more supportive for his other children and their mother, who were also in a lot of pain at the time. The events in Anthony’s life were a part of a life plan that only God could reveal when the time was right. Anthony was released from his internal prison when he came to his external prison here at Dick Conner’s Correctional Center. Now, because of this, he is on his way to complete freedom in a life that has only known unrealized, self-inflicted barriers. “When pain in one’s life goes unacknowledged, then one can never be free because fear will always rule.” If anything could be learned from the story of Anthony Phillip Miller, Jr., it would be, “If you want things to change in your life, then the person you see in the mirror has to be the beginning of that change.” Like Anthony, the change begins for all of us with the man we see in the mirror every day.
I’m not here today to preach to you, but I am here to remind you of God’s Love through the eyes of my life. I’ve been changed in so many ways that I can’t even begin to describe without running out of time, so I’ll just say that instead of seeing myself as a liability, I now see myself as a form of liberty for my fellow man to strive for. I now see myself as a leader and not a lost child wondering aimlessly through life’s forest trying to find something, but not knowing what that something is. God has seen fit for me to see myself as freedom for others who are in the binding chains of themselves, to shine light into their self-inflicted darkness that they didn’t even know existed. We never really know how dark it is until someone shines a light in or on us, then we’re able to truly see what’s really been going on all along. I’ve been sent here to represent what the Statue of Liberty was meant to represent to those lost souls, coming in off the eastern harbor, the something they were so desperately seeking. People from all over came here with hope and faith that what they heard about this place called “America” could help them break free from whatever bondage they may have been in. They were tired of being bound but didn’t know how to achieve that until they heard of this place called America. They were depressed, oppressed, starving, unwanted, angry, sad, and very fearful of the future. On faith they got in boats, from just about every coast you can imagine, and set out on a voyage seeking a better life, hoping for a new beginning. It was a long treacherous voyage through rain, sleet, snow, hunger, sickness, despair, and the burning hot sun. Nights turned into days and vise versa, a week quickly turned to a month; some passengers got off, some died, some stayed, and others joined the journey. Just as they began to question their choice or even began to give up on their faith ride to this new beginning, suddenly, out of the darkness appeared a very Iarge shape to which they all became fixated on. The closer they got, it became more and more obvious that this America they’d been told of and desperately hoped for was finally right in front of them. In a sense you could say they were finally able to see the light in the darkness from which they were once consumed. That ”light” was their freedom from all the chains that had once bound them to themselves. That feeling that they all felt with the sight of the Statue of Liberty and New York harbor is the very same feeling that God gave me the day I gave my life over to Him. That is also the feeling that He wants me to convey to others through my daily example, so that when you see me, you see freedom, the same freedom those refugees so many years ago were also seeking. He wants my life to say to yours, “If he can be free, then you can be free indeed.” A great poet once said, “If you believe then you can achieve, just look at me.” My testimony is freedom and that is what I have become, that’s what I see when I look at the man in the mirror.