Written by: David Daniels

Bio

Frank Salazar is different things to different people. To the city of Los Angeles, he is a 31-year-old civil engineer. To his church, Reality LA, he is an active member and prayer team leader. To his family, of which he is the eldest of five siblings, he is the inspiration — whose boldness God used to tear apart its household. Tearing apart may not be a typical method to achieve reconciliation but neither is reconciliation under the circumstances that scarred his family.

Frank Salazar: Forgiving the unforgivable

Protecting family from his abusive father grew tougher when Frank Salazar moved a 40-minute ride away from home to the University of California, Irvine.

“I would drive from Orange County to LA, knock my dad out and go back to school to finish my work,” Salazar said.

Growing up, Frank regularly fought his alcoholic father, Francisco, to defend his mother and four younger siblings. Consequently, anger defined Frank’s childhood as much as any emotion. His aggression bled out on to the football field and into arguments with his siblings 

Daniel and Sandra, the second and third oldest Salazar children. 

Weekly church attendance failed to diminish Frank’s anger. Francisco and his wife Sandra Elizabeth, who had immigrated to Mid-City, Los Angeles from El Salvador, were deacons at a Hispanic church that taught legalistic theology. Their Sunday morning routine seemed hypocritical to Frank, given it only temporarily interrupted the conflict expected Monday through Saturday.

“I didn’t understand how my family could be experiencing all these terrible things in our home, but then at church, people thought my family was the best,” Jasmin, Frank’s youngest sibling, said. “I just felt like we lived two lives.”

Not faith, but an urgency to overcome his impoverished, gang-infested environment drove Frank to earn a full scholarship to UC Irvine, where he majored in civil engineering. After graduation, Frank returned home to work for LA’s bureau of engineering, but he shed his father figure role on the weekends to indulge. Cars, parties, fashion and women dominated his next couple of years, which alienated those closest to him.

Frank missed every game of his youngest brother David’s senior football season and barely communicated with Jasmin. He neglected Daniel and his best friend Marcelo, who had both repeatedly dragged his drunken self away from trouble for years.

Then in a single month, Frank’s betrayed friends left him, and his girlfriend accepted a job in Arizona, which quickly led to their separation. Alone, he started to seek God.

In 2010, Frank returned home from a one-year stint in Fresno to support his family financially. Around the same time, while attending UC Santa Barbara, David became a Christian through the church Reality Carpinteria, which conveniently had a sister campus in Los Angeles where he could direct Frank.

In March, Frank started to attend the church Reality LA with Daniel, who studied at UCLA. The sermon inspired Frank enough that he recruited his other siblings to worship with him.

Over the next nine months, Frank’s desire to learn more about God grew. However, his desire for alcohol and sex stayed the same. He ushered in 2011 with a drunken fling.

Driving from his hotel in search of fluids to rehydrate, though, Frank had an epiphany.

“Wait a minute. This is exactly what I’m trying to get away from,” he said, praying, “God, I need help. I truly need help. This is not the way I want to live.”

For the first time in his life, he realized that he could only be set free by grace alone — a foreign concept to his parents’ church.

Frank immediately stopped being a nominal church member and plugged into Reality LA’s community. A change in him became apparent over the next few weeks, but Daniel did not buy it.

“He was the one pulling me and dragging me out of night clubs,” Frank said. “He was the one always making sure that when I was intoxicated that I was safe.”

“I saw Frank at his worst,” Daniel said. “I was the biggest skeptic in the sense of my brother really becoming this new creation.”

By the spring of 2012, though, Frank had started studying the Bible at home with Jasmin, who had become a Christian during the previous year when Frank still frequented parties. He also joined a ministry that shared the gospel with people on the street in South Los Angeles. His transformation won over Daniel.

“Dang God,” Daniel said. “You must be real because I know this man, and that’s not the same man that I saw back in the day when I was taking care of [him].”

But as the Salazar children matured as Christians, Francisco continued to be emotionally, physically and sexually abusive — the latter of which Frank reacted to news of with extra rage.

“I nearly … I don’t want to say killed my dad, but I nearly choked him,” Frank said.

Even as a young Christian, Frank still knew that choking Francisco wasn’t the best way to stop his abuse. He sought counsel from Reality LA pastors, who pointed him toward Matthew 18:16-17 — a passage about dealing with sin in the church. Frank followed its steps, which ended in no confession from Francisco.

When Francisco returned home one Monday evening in 2013, his entire wardrobe decorated the lawn. Frank, Daniel and Jasmine had thrown Francisco’s clothes, and subsequently him, out of the house. The deacon, who had since been promoted to pastor, was rehabilitation-bound.

It was over. The man who had inflicted so much pain on his family no longer shared a roof with it.

Some Salazars were content with this — but not Frank. Rather than neglect his abusive father, Frank pursued him. 

He started with phone calls. Over the course of a year, calls turned into weekly Bible studies at a local coffee shop. In the past, sympathizers had told Frank, “You need to just kill your dad,” but instead, the same hands that Francisco had used to beat his family, Frank held to pray.

This, Frank said, he did not do on his own strength.

“I remember how the Lord pressed on my heart that the only way my relationship was ever going to change with him was by putting the word of God between us,” he said.

The seemingly irrational compassion that Frank showed Francisco not only helped lead to his recovery, but also reconciliation for the entire Salazar family, which was inspired to eventually follow in his footsteps.

“It just was really crazy because I had grown up seeing [Frank] sometimes physically fight my dad to get him to not do things to my mom, or seeing my dad attack him when he was just acting really foolishly,” Jasmin said in tears, “and to see that my brother Frank was able to forgive him, I don’t know any other way that he was able to reflect Jesus and what Jesus had done in his life so clearly.”

Today, all of the Salazar’s immediate family follows Jesus. Francisco returned to a leadership role in his church and, for the first time, became a healthy leader back at home. As for Frank, his compassion continues to impact his local community.

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