January 5, 2026 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, what does it take to stop the cycle? Jason Wolfe knows. As a child, he lived through abandonment, poverty, and the kind of instability no kid should endure. As an adult, he became a tech pioneer, a single father, and a man determined to rewrite his family story. His journey is a powerful testament to resilience, healing, and what real fatherhood looks like when you refuse to pass your pain on to the next generatio
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. And now Robbie
brings us the story of Jason Wolfe. He created the
first online coupon site and was the first to seriously
developed software, the tract web browsing using what are known
as cookies. Jason is here to bring us the story
of becoming the father that he never had himself.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Here's Jason. You know, I think my very first memories
were when I was living in Virginia. My dad worked
in the CIA, so we lived in a place called Ruston, Virginia,
(00:52):
which was like a new suburb of Washington, d C.
Back then. I could remember having a bike in learning
how to ride a bike with my dad, and I
must have been maybe three or four, and I remember
going down this little hill that he was pushing me down,
(01:12):
and you know, basically being scared and then being happy
that I learned how to ride a bike. So, yeah,
it was my earliest memory something that happened in my
life that I remember that was like a pivotal thing,
probably one of my mom and dad got separated. By then,
(01:34):
it was nineteen seventy five, so I was six or so,
and I could remember my dad driving. He had a Volkswagen,
so like a station wagon Volkswagen, loaded all of us
up into the Volkswagen, drove up to Connecticut, and all
of us, meaning my brother and sister and I drove
(01:55):
us up to Connecticut and dropped us off with my
grandparents with my mom. My mom was acting strange. I
didn't know what was going on. And then he left
and that was the beginning of the divorce, and shortly
after that my mom turned out. Later I found out
my mom had mental illness, and so she was put
into a sort of a mental institution for a couple
(02:18):
of years. So for a couple of years after my
dad dropped us off, my mom was, you know, going
through trying to get herself back together. And yeah, those
are those are the that's probably the next milestone in
my life. I could remember when my mother was they
(02:40):
were trying to get her to take her into the
this mental institution whatever. She was put away for a
couple of years, and they somehow couldn't get her. She
was elusive, and I could remember my sister and I
going to this hospital and they were getting her there
under some other guys, some other trick to get her
(03:01):
to show up. So she shows up and my sister
and I are sitting out there by now I'm probably
a little older, six or seven, and I remember they
had my sister and I playing sort of games out
inside this room, and I remember hearing some screaming, and
I look over and here's my mother running towards me
with a straight jacket on, because they were trying to
(03:22):
put her into a straight jacket. And that was like
hugely pivotable and kind of crazy at that time. And
from then over the next course of a couple of years,
I mean, we lived with grandparents, I lived with an
aunt for a little bit, and then eventually moved in
with an uncle, and my mom came out of the institution,
(03:44):
tried to take us back, get back on her feet,
living in sort of you know, welfare life, not a
lot of money. Poor. I can remember a Christmas vividly
when I was around nine at this point and just
laying under a blanket, no heat in the house, and
getting a knock at the door, and at the door
was looked at the door it was a box with
(04:07):
a frozen turkey and some games for us. And you know,
we couldn't cook the turkey. We had no gas, we
had no gas like the stove. We're the poor people,
We're the what the I called the raggies, you know,
the raggies of town, the people that were real raggy
and poor and stuff that was us. And so yeah,
I remember that, and then living with an uncle and
then having to make a decision when I was about
(04:29):
ten whether I wanted to go to this new school
that they discovered that this nun that we were going
to a church I told my grandmother about down in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
It was a school for at the time, it was
boys school and they were just converting over to add girls.
And it was in the late seventies, seventy nine or so.
And we went down, took the test, came back and
(04:50):
my brother and I. My brother didn't pass the test.
I did, and they asked me. I can remember standing
at my uncle's house in the on the second floor
and they were asking me, do you want to go
to this school or do you want to go with
your uncle, aunt and uncle to go to California because
they were moving to California. And I decided to go
to Miltonhursty School alone by myself, which was hugely you know,
(05:10):
it was God's that was a God moment. There was
no real reason for me to choose to not go
with my family, but I chose to not go with
my family to go down to Milton Hearsty School. And
so on September twentieth, nineteen eighty it was a fall day,
crisp out football season, sunny, I'll remember just like yesterday,
and I could feel the air even right now, and
(05:33):
being dropped off at Milton Hersty School, and my mother
and my grandparents were there and inside this place called
the rotunda, which is a huge building at Milton Hersty School,
and I can remember mister Long standing there with me.
He was the person that had the intake of children
coming into Miltonhursery School. And I can remember standing with
mister Long and looking at my parents or my mother.
(05:56):
By now I thought my dad was dead because my
mom told us he was not alive, so he never
paid child sport, and we really thought he was dead.
So seeing my mother cry, my grandparents standing there and
then they walk away and and I'm alone. Now I
didn't realize but that I'd be on my loan for
a long time thereafter, and growing up in that school,
(06:16):
I remember not even a few months into it, maybe
crying every night, trying to put myself to sleep and
starting to try to get used to the school at
the time was a you know, corporal punishment was not
it was something that happened. It just happened, right, It
(06:37):
was part of discipline. And I could remember running away
and I remember getting paddled. I remember these things that
I wasn't used to and it was scary, and I
cried and I didn't want to be there. But I
learned to adapt and to change to figure things out.
Eventually I did, and eventually I excelled. I became played
three sports, football, baseball, and wrestling. Some of them I
(07:00):
was a captain on some of the teams I excelled in.
My grades were always good. I was in the top
group of our class, probably in the top you know,
handful of kids. And then you know, went on to college.
But before going on out to college, I remember sitting
a graduation day. Next pivotal moment was just sitting there
(07:20):
and you know, with a suitcase of clothes and a
hundred bucks, because they gave you a check at the
time of one hundred dollars. I think mine was less
than a hundred because I owed the school something for
something that I did I don't even know, and I
couldn't cash the check because I didn't have a bank account,
and I had a suitcase with the brand new clothes,
you know, three pairs of socks, ten pair of under
(07:42):
her or something like that, a bunch of pants, you know,
And I'm sitting there with this big suitcase of clothes,
this check I can't cash. And my grandfather had a stroke,
so he was on the last months of his life.
My mother was always, you know, dysfunctional. I wasn't really
sure what I was going to do, you know. So
I went up to Connecticut and I stayed with my
(08:05):
grandmother to help her to take care of my grandfather
until he died. And he passed away within a couple months.
And I didn't go to college. I wasn't sure what
I was going to do, and so I got involved
in like a lot of things that somebody who has
no family, really, who has no direction, no male mentorship,
(08:27):
christ not in my life to any large measure, and
so I got involved in things that were illegal and
I didn't do you know, I'm not proud about it,
but there was stretching my life right there that I
was led. I was kind of going down the wrong roads.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
And yeah, thankfully Jason, after a number of setbacks, had
a moment of clarity, and after years of hard work,
he created the first coupon website ever and then the
first real software to use cookies to track web browser,
which he sold for roughly twenty two million dollars.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
So that was two thousand and six, and by then
I was married. I was only married for a couple
of years, and I had a son, Morris, and I
end up going through divorce. I get the old you know,
you're locked out of your home type of deal. I
go to go into my house and all the locks
are changed. I was only married for two years. I
(09:24):
didn't know the person I was getting married to. I
only knew her for four months before I got married,
and I married her because she was pregnant.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
And you've been listening to Jason Wolfe tell the story
of his life, and what a story it is. When
we come back more of the life story of Jason
wolf here on our American Stories, and we're back with
(10:10):
our American Stories and with the story of Jason wolf
Jason's childhood was anything but easy. His mother was institutionalized,
his father leaving and later dying, or at least well
that's what young Jason was told. Down the road, Jason
had a son and got married. Unfortunately that ended after
a few years and Jason found himself in the middle
(10:32):
of a divorce. Here's Jason to tell us the rest
of the story.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
So during that divorce and after that divorce, it was
a time for me, I think to when God started
knocking on my door and saying, hey, all this stuff
you've got to do, You've got to be starting to
change the way you live and put God first. Going
through divorce wasn't fun. It was, you know, financially it
was a mess. It was because I sold a company
(11:05):
during the time that I was married and became a
maural asset and that was a big problem. And but
I started to go to church more. I started, I
was you know, invited into a men's group, and I
started the journey to change my life to bring me
as a man more towards Christ in a real way
(11:26):
as opposed to just saying that I'm a Christian. When
I got divorced, it was easy for you know, the
lawyers to say, hey, you know, let's just kind of
settle this disagreement and I'm signing papers. Honestly, I didn't
realize this, Robbie that saying that I have. I didn't
(11:47):
know the lingo men at the time. I didn't know
what primary custody meant compared to just custody. I didn't
know what legal custody meant. All I just knew was like,
you have the kid or you don't. I quickly figured
it out because I didn't have equal physical and legal custody.
I had sort of visitation rights. I think that's terrible
(12:08):
for dads at the time, and that's how it was
for me. And I had to then try to argue
with the court that I could be an equal father
and I wanted to be equally in Morse's life, and
his mom tried to stop that. And so for years,
from two thousand and six all the way up to
two thousand and eleven, we fought for equal custody. And eventually,
(12:32):
in two thousand and I think it was eleven or ten,
the governor at the time, Rendell Pennsylvania, was leaving office
and he put a change to the law or the
thing about parental equal custody. At the time I had
to prove that I was an equal father. I was
proved that I was instead of just automatically giving equal
(12:53):
custing into both parents and then disproving that the other
person couldn't be a parent. And so when he did that,
it allowed me to have fifty to fifty custody. It
was a wonderful thing, and I think that's how it
always should have been, but it wasn't that time. So yeah,
it took years for me to fight for him to drink,
just be in his life, you know, and he was
(13:13):
a big part of my life. We spent I didn't
get remarried until twenty seventeen, so for ten years it
was just Morris and I and my dog Toby, our
dog Toby, And you know, I spent a lot of
time with him. I focused on Morris. I did his
homework with him. I was involved in the school. I
(13:34):
was involved with his doctors. I was an equally involved
father as it should be, and I loved it. I
love to be involved in his life. He's older now, fifteen, sixteen,
kids change. He doesn't want to listen to me as
much as he did before. But that's okay. Since then
(13:54):
I did get remarried, and we have fostered and we
have adopted. So we have two girl roles now that
we've adopted, Danielle who's five, and Mira Gold who was eight.
We got them when they were three and three and six,
and so so we love them. We have two new girls,
and we have a boy right now too. We foster's
(14:15):
name is Jeremiah, and Jeremiah we hope eventually will be
our son. And so our family went from just Morris
and I and our dog to Susan, my wonderful wife, Danielle,
Mirror Gold, Morris, Jeremiah, the dogs, and my wife loves animals.
We have a donkey and a goat, two goats and
(14:36):
a pony. So yeah, things have expanded. That's good. All
these struggles, all these challenges that I had, I learned
later in life that you know, it was God banging
on my heart and my heart was getting broken over
and over and over, and it was because God wanted
(14:57):
to get into my heart. My heart was hard, and
so so I think these struggles have made my heart softer.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
And a softer, gentler heart was needed. When Jason had
to face the man he'd grown up thinking was dead,
the man who left his family when he was six,
his own father.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
And so I found out my dad was alive in
nineteen ninety two. I was twenty two years old, twenty
one years old. I was in college and found out
he was alive. We sent letters to my grandmother, who
wouldn't tell us where he was, and then she would
send the letters to my father and lo and behold,
wasn't dead. Found out he lived in New Zealand. He
(15:41):
had a whole different life. And I ended up going
down and meeting him, probably when I was twenty three.
It's spent about a month with him, got to know
him a little bit, and over the course of a
couple of years knew him a little bit more. But
I wasn't with christ yet, and so what I decided
to do was to say, my dad, I don't forgive
(16:02):
you unless you apologize. You need to apologize to my mom.
You need to apologize to my grandmother. Because I am
the judge. I didn't leave it up to God. I
lived it up to myself. I'm going to dictate this situation.
So he did. He sent a letter to my mom
and my grandmother, and now my grandmother and my mother
knows where he lives, right, and so now all of
a sudden, it's a lawsuit. It's my mom sue and
my dad because he never paid child support. Now my
(16:25):
dad's wanted and in the United States, couldn't come back here.
And if he did, he go to jail. And he
had a judgment against him a four hundred and eighteen
thousand dollars and back child support and interest in everything else,
penalties whatever. So he couldn't come back. And it was
because of me that that happened, and because of my
(16:46):
thought that I needed to tell somebody what to do
or I needed to be the judge of somebody else
that caused him that pain. So I felt bad about that.
And so when I sold the last company in twenty sixteen,
I hired a lawyer and I found the documents down
in Virginia, the divorced documents between her mom and my dad.
(17:07):
Found the settlement ant or the amount that they had
leaned against my dad, and I went up to Connecticut
and met with my mom and convinced her to allow
me to pay her on behalf of my father. So
I would pay her, I'd buy her house. At the time,
the house was probably worth one hundred thousand. I gave
her two hundred thousand. I gave her a commitment of
(17:27):
two thousand dollars a month over the rest of her life,
and gave her some other stuff in exchange for her
releasing my father of the debt that he owed her.
And she did, and so it was a proud moment
for me to be able to tell my dad, hey, listen,
I settled your debt to my mom. And I was
able to live that out because of my faith. Now,
(17:49):
my father, all his years was not very close to
the board. I don't even think. I think he was
probably an atheist or agnostic at best. And in the
last several years he married somebody, Rebecca, who is a Christian.
And now my dad, I like the seventy five years old,
is going to church and he's in a small group
(18:13):
at church. You can't make this stuff up and tell me.
And so it's been a really a great journey for
me with my dad. And you know, I forgave him.
I forgave him in the right way. I didn't forgive
him because of me telling him what to do. I
forgave him because Christ forgave me. And I think that's
been special for me.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
And what a remarkable piece of storytelling. Thanks to Robbie
for producing the piece, and a special thanks also to
Jason Wolfe for sharing his story my goodness, being abandoned
by his father, the mental illness of his mother being
alone all that time, then the divorce, then the fight
to get equal custody of a son, and he found
his dad at the age of twenty two, tried to
(19:06):
reconcile forgave him incorrectly the first time, incorrectly the second
and it changed everything. The story of Jason Wolfe the
story of so many men and women struggling to find
peace and healing in this world. Here on our American
Storage
And we continue with our American stories. And now Robbie
brings us the story of Jason Wolfe. He created the
first online coupon site and was the first to seriously
developed software, the tract web browsing using what are known
as cookies. Jason is here to bring us the story
of becoming the father that he never had himself.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Here's Jason. You know, I think my very first memories
were when I was living in Virginia. My dad worked
in the CIA, so we lived in a place called Ruston, Virginia,
(00:52):
which was like a new suburb of Washington, d C.
Back then. I could remember having a bike in learning
how to ride a bike with my dad, and I
must have been maybe three or four, and I remember
going down this little hill that he was pushing me down,
(01:12):
and you know, basically being scared and then being happy
that I learned how to ride a bike. So, yeah,
it was my earliest memory something that happened in my
life that I remember that was like a pivotal thing,
probably one of my mom and dad got separated. By then,
(01:34):
it was nineteen seventy five, so I was six or so,
and I could remember my dad driving. He had a Volkswagen,
so like a station wagon Volkswagen, loaded all of us
up into the Volkswagen, drove up to Connecticut, and all
of us, meaning my brother and sister and I drove
(01:55):
us up to Connecticut and dropped us off with my
grandparents with my mom. My mom was acting strange. I
didn't know what was going on. And then he left
and that was the beginning of the divorce, and shortly
after that my mom turned out. Later I found out
my mom had mental illness, and so she was put
into a sort of a mental institution for a couple
(02:18):
of years. So for a couple of years after my
dad dropped us off, my mom was, you know, going
through trying to get herself back together. And yeah, those
are those are the that's probably the next milestone in
my life. I could remember when my mother was they
(02:40):
were trying to get her to take her into the
this mental institution whatever. She was put away for a
couple of years, and they somehow couldn't get her. She
was elusive, and I could remember my sister and I
going to this hospital and they were getting her there
under some other guys, some other trick to get her
(03:01):
to show up. So she shows up and my sister
and I are sitting out there by now I'm probably
a little older, six or seven, and I remember they
had my sister and I playing sort of games out
inside this room, and I remember hearing some screaming, and
I look over and here's my mother running towards me
with a straight jacket on, because they were trying to
(03:22):
put her into a straight jacket. And that was like
hugely pivotable and kind of crazy at that time. And
from then over the next course of a couple of years,
I mean, we lived with grandparents, I lived with an
aunt for a little bit, and then eventually moved in
with an uncle, and my mom came out of the institution,
(03:44):
tried to take us back, get back on her feet,
living in sort of you know, welfare life, not a
lot of money. Poor. I can remember a Christmas vividly
when I was around nine at this point and just
laying under a blanket, no heat in the house, and
getting a knock at the door, and at the door
was looked at the door it was a box with
(04:07):
a frozen turkey and some games for us. And you know,
we couldn't cook the turkey. We had no gas, we
had no gas like the stove. We're the poor people,
We're the what the I called the raggies, you know,
the raggies of town, the people that were real raggy
and poor and stuff that was us. And so yeah,
I remember that, and then living with an uncle and
then having to make a decision when I was about
(04:29):
ten whether I wanted to go to this new school
that they discovered that this nun that we were going
to a church I told my grandmother about down in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
It was a school for at the time, it was
boys school and they were just converting over to add girls.
And it was in the late seventies, seventy nine or so.
And we went down, took the test, came back and
(04:50):
my brother and I. My brother didn't pass the test.
I did, and they asked me. I can remember standing
at my uncle's house in the on the second floor
and they were asking me, do you want to go
to this school or do you want to go with
your uncle, aunt and uncle to go to California because
they were moving to California. And I decided to go
to Miltonhursty School alone by myself, which was hugely you know,
(05:10):
it was God's that was a God moment. There was
no real reason for me to choose to not go
with my family, but I chose to not go with
my family to go down to Milton Hearsty School. And
so on September twentieth, nineteen eighty it was a fall day,
crisp out football season, sunny, I'll remember just like yesterday,
and I could feel the air even right now, and
(05:33):
being dropped off at Milton Hersty School, and my mother
and my grandparents were there and inside this place called
the rotunda, which is a huge building at Milton Hersty School,
and I can remember mister Long standing there with me.
He was the person that had the intake of children
coming into Miltonhursery School. And I can remember standing with
mister Long and looking at my parents or my mother.
(05:56):
By now I thought my dad was dead because my
mom told us he was not alive, so he never
paid child sport, and we really thought he was dead.
So seeing my mother cry, my grandparents standing there and
then they walk away and and I'm alone. Now I
didn't realize but that I'd be on my loan for
a long time thereafter, and growing up in that school,
(06:16):
I remember not even a few months into it, maybe
crying every night, trying to put myself to sleep and
starting to try to get used to the school at
the time was a you know, corporal punishment was not
it was something that happened. It just happened, right, It
(06:37):
was part of discipline. And I could remember running away
and I remember getting paddled. I remember these things that
I wasn't used to and it was scary, and I
cried and I didn't want to be there. But I
learned to adapt and to change to figure things out.
Eventually I did, and eventually I excelled. I became played
three sports, football, baseball, and wrestling. Some of them I
(07:00):
was a captain on some of the teams I excelled in.
My grades were always good. I was in the top
group of our class, probably in the top you know,
handful of kids. And then you know, went on to college.
But before going on out to college, I remember sitting
a graduation day. Next pivotal moment was just sitting there
(07:20):
and you know, with a suitcase of clothes and a
hundred bucks, because they gave you a check at the
time of one hundred dollars. I think mine was less
than a hundred because I owed the school something for
something that I did I don't even know, and I
couldn't cash the check because I didn't have a bank account,
and I had a suitcase with the brand new clothes,
you know, three pairs of socks, ten pair of under
(07:42):
her or something like that, a bunch of pants, you know,
And I'm sitting there with this big suitcase of clothes,
this check I can't cash. And my grandfather had a stroke,
so he was on the last months of his life.
My mother was always, you know, dysfunctional. I wasn't really
sure what I was going to do, you know. So
I went up to Connecticut and I stayed with my
(08:05):
grandmother to help her to take care of my grandfather
until he died. And he passed away within a couple months.
And I didn't go to college. I wasn't sure what
I was going to do, and so I got involved
in like a lot of things that somebody who has
no family, really, who has no direction, no male mentorship,
(08:27):
christ not in my life to any large measure, and
so I got involved in things that were illegal and
I didn't do you know, I'm not proud about it,
but there was stretching my life right there that I
was led. I was kind of going down the wrong roads.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
And yeah, thankfully Jason, after a number of setbacks, had
a moment of clarity, and after years of hard work,
he created the first coupon website ever and then the
first real software to use cookies to track web browser,
which he sold for roughly twenty two million dollars.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
So that was two thousand and six, and by then
I was married. I was only married for a couple
of years, and I had a son, Morris, and I
end up going through divorce. I get the old you know,
you're locked out of your home type of deal. I
go to go into my house and all the locks
are changed. I was only married for two years. I
(09:24):
didn't know the person I was getting married to. I
only knew her for four months before I got married,
and I married her because she was pregnant.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
And you've been listening to Jason Wolfe tell the story
of his life, and what a story it is. When
we come back more of the life story of Jason
wolf here on our American Stories, and we're back with
(10:10):
our American Stories and with the story of Jason wolf
Jason's childhood was anything but easy. His mother was institutionalized,
his father leaving and later dying, or at least well
that's what young Jason was told. Down the road, Jason
had a son and got married. Unfortunately that ended after
a few years and Jason found himself in the middle
(10:32):
of a divorce. Here's Jason to tell us the rest
of the story.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
So during that divorce and after that divorce, it was
a time for me, I think to when God started
knocking on my door and saying, hey, all this stuff
you've got to do, You've got to be starting to
change the way you live and put God first. Going
through divorce wasn't fun. It was, you know, financially it
was a mess. It was because I sold a company
(11:05):
during the time that I was married and became a
maural asset and that was a big problem. And but
I started to go to church more. I started, I
was you know, invited into a men's group, and I
started the journey to change my life to bring me
as a man more towards Christ in a real way
(11:26):
as opposed to just saying that I'm a Christian. When
I got divorced, it was easy for you know, the
lawyers to say, hey, you know, let's just kind of
settle this disagreement and I'm signing papers. Honestly, I didn't
realize this, Robbie that saying that I have. I didn't
(11:47):
know the lingo men at the time. I didn't know
what primary custody meant compared to just custody. I didn't
know what legal custody meant. All I just knew was like,
you have the kid or you don't. I quickly figured
it out because I didn't have equal physical and legal custody.
I had sort of visitation rights. I think that's terrible
(12:08):
for dads at the time, and that's how it was
for me. And I had to then try to argue
with the court that I could be an equal father
and I wanted to be equally in Morse's life, and
his mom tried to stop that. And so for years,
from two thousand and six all the way up to
two thousand and eleven, we fought for equal custody. And eventually,
(12:32):
in two thousand and I think it was eleven or ten,
the governor at the time, Rendell Pennsylvania, was leaving office
and he put a change to the law or the
thing about parental equal custody. At the time I had
to prove that I was an equal father. I was
proved that I was instead of just automatically giving equal
(12:53):
custing into both parents and then disproving that the other
person couldn't be a parent. And so when he did that,
it allowed me to have fifty to fifty custody. It
was a wonderful thing, and I think that's how it
always should have been, but it wasn't that time. So yeah,
it took years for me to fight for him to drink,
just be in his life, you know, and he was
(13:13):
a big part of my life. We spent I didn't
get remarried until twenty seventeen, so for ten years it
was just Morris and I and my dog Toby, our
dog Toby, And you know, I spent a lot of
time with him. I focused on Morris. I did his
homework with him. I was involved in the school. I
(13:34):
was involved with his doctors. I was an equally involved
father as it should be, and I loved it. I
love to be involved in his life. He's older now, fifteen, sixteen,
kids change. He doesn't want to listen to me as
much as he did before. But that's okay. Since then
(13:54):
I did get remarried, and we have fostered and we
have adopted. So we have two girl roles now that
we've adopted, Danielle who's five, and Mira Gold who was eight.
We got them when they were three and three and six,
and so so we love them. We have two new girls,
and we have a boy right now too. We foster's
(14:15):
name is Jeremiah, and Jeremiah we hope eventually will be
our son. And so our family went from just Morris
and I and our dog to Susan, my wonderful wife, Danielle,
Mirror Gold, Morris, Jeremiah, the dogs, and my wife loves animals.
We have a donkey and a goat, two goats and
(14:36):
a pony. So yeah, things have expanded. That's good. All
these struggles, all these challenges that I had, I learned
later in life that you know, it was God banging
on my heart and my heart was getting broken over
and over and over, and it was because God wanted
(14:57):
to get into my heart. My heart was hard, and
so so I think these struggles have made my heart softer.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
And a softer, gentler heart was needed. When Jason had
to face the man he'd grown up thinking was dead,
the man who left his family when he was six,
his own father.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
And so I found out my dad was alive in
nineteen ninety two. I was twenty two years old, twenty
one years old. I was in college and found out
he was alive. We sent letters to my grandmother, who
wouldn't tell us where he was, and then she would
send the letters to my father and lo and behold,
wasn't dead. Found out he lived in New Zealand. He
(15:41):
had a whole different life. And I ended up going
down and meeting him, probably when I was twenty three.
It's spent about a month with him, got to know
him a little bit, and over the course of a
couple of years knew him a little bit more. But
I wasn't with christ yet, and so what I decided
to do was to say, my dad, I don't forgive
(16:02):
you unless you apologize. You need to apologize to my mom.
You need to apologize to my grandmother. Because I am
the judge. I didn't leave it up to God. I
lived it up to myself. I'm going to dictate this situation.
So he did. He sent a letter to my mom
and my grandmother, and now my grandmother and my mother
knows where he lives, right, and so now all of
a sudden, it's a lawsuit. It's my mom sue and
my dad because he never paid child support. Now my
(16:25):
dad's wanted and in the United States, couldn't come back here.
And if he did, he go to jail. And he
had a judgment against him a four hundred and eighteen
thousand dollars and back child support and interest in everything else,
penalties whatever. So he couldn't come back. And it was
because of me that that happened, and because of my
(16:46):
thought that I needed to tell somebody what to do
or I needed to be the judge of somebody else
that caused him that pain. So I felt bad about that.
And so when I sold the last company in twenty sixteen,
I hired a lawyer and I found the documents down
in Virginia, the divorced documents between her mom and my dad.
(17:07):
Found the settlement ant or the amount that they had
leaned against my dad, and I went up to Connecticut
and met with my mom and convinced her to allow
me to pay her on behalf of my father. So
I would pay her, I'd buy her house. At the time,
the house was probably worth one hundred thousand. I gave
her two hundred thousand. I gave her a commitment of
(17:27):
two thousand dollars a month over the rest of her life,
and gave her some other stuff in exchange for her
releasing my father of the debt that he owed her.
And she did, and so it was a proud moment
for me to be able to tell my dad, hey, listen,
I settled your debt to my mom. And I was
able to live that out because of my faith. Now,
(17:49):
my father, all his years was not very close to
the board. I don't even think. I think he was
probably an atheist or agnostic at best. And in the
last several years he married somebody, Rebecca, who is a Christian.
And now my dad, I like the seventy five years old,
is going to church and he's in a small group
(18:13):
at church. You can't make this stuff up and tell me.
And so it's been a really a great journey for
me with my dad. And you know, I forgave him.
I forgave him in the right way. I didn't forgive
him because of me telling him what to do. I
forgave him because Christ forgave me. And I think that's
been special for me.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
And what a remarkable piece of storytelling. Thanks to Robbie
for producing the piece, and a special thanks also to
Jason Wolfe for sharing his story my goodness, being abandoned
by his father, the mental illness of his mother being
alone all that time, then the divorce, then the fight
to get equal custody of a son, and he found
his dad at the age of twenty two, tried to
(19:06):
reconcile forgave him incorrectly the first time, incorrectly the second
and it changed everything. The story of Jason Wolfe the
story of so many men and women struggling to find
peace and healing in this world. Here on our American
Storage
Host
Lee Habeeb
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