Point North † Tidings

Ed.: I want to start right off to ask about your ministry. From looking at your web page it seems intensely interesting and has us wanting to know all about what you are doing.

Daina:  My ministry is at Church on the Way, where I am a pastor for single moms.  I have been a single mom for 23 years.  That is my church ministry; however, I also have a deliverance ministry where I help the down and out as well as people addicted to drugs and alcohol.  I also do a lot of counseling.  I love helping people find their way from the world to Jesus. He’s the only Person who can make them happy.  Basically because of what I’ve been through, I try to help others get their life straight and find their place in this world.
Ed.: What led you to this ministry?
Daina:   It was the Lord. When I first got saved I was in the entertainment industry and doing drugs.   I grew up in a middle-to -upper class family and I didn’t do drugs in high school.  I came out to California and got involved in modeling and entering beauty contests.  I was trying to find my way and what I was going to do with my life when I was approached by Playboy magazine to be a centerfold.  It wasn’t something I wanted to do; I was very adamant against it.   There were all kinds or stories about what Playboy was and what they were offering the girls that got involved.  But after many rejections, they offered me a tremendous amount of money and eventually I did give in and said yes.  However, it wasn’t long after I shot the pictorial when I had a change of mind.  I decided I didn’t want to go through with it.  Since it was a two-year contract and they had given me half the money up front, they said it was too late to get out of it.  They said I could either change my name or write my own story.  I wasn’t going to change my name because my name is who I am.  So they let me write my own story which was called “Decidedly Daina.”  I even wrote in the story that I had great reservations.  Immediately, I found myself in world of riches, politicians,  celebrities, Mafia, you name it.  It was the Devil’s Candy Store.  All of a sudden people were calling me to do this or that movie or television show.  I had gotten married in June of 1975, before I did Playboy and it was absolutely a nightmare for my marriage.  There was so much turmoil we ended up separating, and one night I drove to the Playboy Mansion to spend the night while I was fighting with my husband.   Hugh Hefner asked to see me and I was very nervous when we met - I was 20.   He asked me to be his girlfriend.  I said “I’m married. “I think that’s called adultery, right?”  I don’t remember what he said after that, I only remember having great hopes of saving my marriage.  Then I saw them pull my December cover, and I lost what I thought I deserved, Playmate of the Year!  As I look back on it, I know that the Lord was totally and completely protecting me; but at the time, I saw it as rejection, and that spun me off into a world of rejection.  I wasn’t an actress I was a “Playmate”.  I wasn’t a wife; I was a “Playmate”.  I didn’t know who I was on the inside.  I was a beautiful girl to others, but when I looked in the mirror, for all the success I had, I was empty.  I felt like a failure.  I started to drink and I was introduced to drugs.  There was a four-year period when I did drugs and I drank all the time.  I believe it was 1981 when I took a lot of sleeping pills and prayed to die in my sleep.  I woke up the next morning and said, “Okay, God.  If I’m going to live, I’m going to live.” I just got mad and I remember that my drug dealer at that time came by my house to see if I wanted to get high and I said, “No, I’m going to live.”  Literally I was delivered from drugs completely.  I never entered rehab and never went through any kind of 12-step program.  I called up my sister, who was thirteen and a born again Christian, and she said, “I’m going to take you   to Church on the Way.” It was the beginning for me.

Ed.: I understand this wasn’t the end of your quest for salvation.   So many people assume that once you become a Christian it guarantees a bed of roses.  You still had a long way to go.

Daina: Before going to church with my sister, my agent literally told people that I was out of the country because I would go to interviews and I would be high.  I would be up all night and I would make a fool out of myself.  I was completely and totally broke even though I had made a lot of money.  I frivolously spent all the money I had.  The day I called my sister I had been eating rice for three days, because my unemployment check hadn’t come.  No one knew this.  Everyone thought I was living a life that was grand.  I was at the bottom of the barrel.  So my sister picked me up and took me to Church on the Way.  I got born agai and was baptized in water.  Thus my life as a Christian began.  However, it would be another ten years before it was complete.  It wasn’t that I didn’t know who God was.  I was trying to be sanctified, to make my life work as a Christian, but I found myself being pulled back to my old life, or any easy money, thus always compromising my walk with the Lord.  I was modeling, doing television shows, but doing parts with titles like “Easy” and playing Will Smith’s side kick’s girl friend in a bathing suit.  I still couldn’t find myself or figure out what the whole Christian thing was all about.  I wasn’t living a holy life.  I had one foot in the world and one foot in the Kingdom.  The dance was continual. I had met my son’s father in 1984.  Three years after I was born again.  He served a dramatic purpose in my life.  It was good for me to be accountable to someone who did not touch drugs, was very upstanding, except for when I got pregnant with our son Tyler.  He wanted nothing to do with the pregnancy and he left our life.  So I decided, “it’s me and my baby.’  In fact I called up Mike Marx and said, “I have no where to go, and I’m pregnant and I don’t know what to do, and I have no place to live.”  So he said ‘You can come and stay on my couch for as long as you need.”  So I stayed on his couch for two months until I could get myself and my finances together enough to get my own apartment.  I will be forever grateful to him…

My son was born in 1986 and he was delivered by C-section.  I was in a room with the baby on my chest and all these lights.  And the Lord suddenly spoke to my spirit.  Almost audibly he said to me, “In seven years you will come into your own.”  I thought, “Wow what was that?”  Usually when you have a birth it is very quiet.  With a C-section delivery, there are lights and people all around but I could not hear what they were saying.  I could just hear the Lord.  So I began to raise my son while I was working three jobs.   I had this little baby and trying to live a straight life, but I was working in a bar where it was really not conducive to Christian living.  I was trying to get back in the industry because it was the only thing I knew I could do, because I didn’t go to college.   I didn’t know my capacity for education.   I had lived off my looks for so long I didn’t even know I had a brain.   Nobody ever said to me “Why don’t you try using your brain?”  I knew that I knew things, but didn’t know I could make a living that way.   I finally quit working in a bar and got a call from my agent and said “You’re going to audition to play a role similar to Tammy Faye Baker.”   I played a preacher and the episode was called “God’s Will.”  When I walked in and looked at the producer, he said “Can you preach?”  I had never preached before in my life and he gives me the script.  I did the sermon and he said it was perfect and I was hired.  I looked at the script and said, “Okay, God’s Will” and I am playing a preacher. Talk about prophetic.”  So I did the part and things started to change in my life.
Ed.: And now events were happening that would lead you to meet Jesus.

Daina: Yes. In January of ‘94 there was an earthquake.  It was really a major earthquake.  In fact, it was also an earthquake of my soul.  I remember after it happened, literally everything I had, had been preserved, untouched.  Nothing in my house was broken. I had my phone and nobody else around me did.  I was holding my hands on a gigantic picture of Jesus I had on the wall praying, “Father, if you let us live I’ll do anything to serve you the rest of my life.  Just don’t let us die. If you do this I will do anything you want.”  I just felt this whispering in my soul, “Okay”  A week later I decided to go to the church with my son and we got baptized together.  Well, I got baptized with the Holy Spirit.  Shortly after that I was sick in bed and there was a Christian gentleman who was mentoring me.  You talk about boot camp. He was boot camp for Jesus.   He said, “You’ve got demons, you’ve got witchcraft, you’ve got pride, and you’ve got perversion and lust.  You need major deliverance.  Instead of being insulted, as I would have been before, I said, “Okay, let’s do this Jesus thing!”  He said, “You’ve got to learn to pay your own bills, and do it with truth and with purpose.”  I did everything he told me to do.   Later he was reading the Bible to me next to my bed because I was sick with a cold, he was reading from Jeremiah 13:17 where it says, “But if you will not hear it, My soul will weep in secret for your pride; My eyes will weep bitterly and run down with tears, Because the LORD’s flock has been taken captive.”  I cannot remember the exact words, but I looked at him and said “Pride, I don’t have any pride!”  He replied, “Oh yes you do.”  At that moment I said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute.”  He said “What?”   I said, “It’s a man, it’s a man, its Jesus at the foot of my bed!”  He asked me if it was scary and I said “No.”  I closed my eyes and He was still there, I opened my eyes and He was still there, after a few moments I said, “Okay, okay, okay, I know you are real, I know you are real.”  In the past I had asked, ”If You are real, I need to know You are real.”  I know some people believe in their heart, and their faith is so easy and they don’t question it, but I couldn’t get it from  my head to my heart.  I kept asking Jesus to make it real to me.  I didn’t really believe it; I wanted to really believe it.  So He showed up at the foot of my bed.  He said, “Daina, when you were in the world, wherever you went I went with you.  I followed you wherever you went.  But I’m not following you any more.  You’re following me.”  He spoke to me and my spirit.  Then the vision went away and I looked at my friend and said “It’s real.  I get it, I get it.”   For the next three months all I did was read The Word.  I got baptized in the Holy Spirit and my life changed completely.  This was 2 days after my son’s seventh birthday.  When I was in the hospital and God said, “You’ll come into your own”, I was thinking I would get a call with a big role offer, or a big modeling job or commercial.  I had all these delusions -aspirations about what God meant, but what HE meant was that I would be following hard after HIM in seven years.  By this time the sanctification process began to work.
I didn’t know what to do; I had no means of making money.  I didn’t want to wait tables; I told my agent and manager I was quitting show business.   I had sold my soul to the Devil once and wasn’t going to do it again.  I knew that I had to trust the Lord.  Let me tell you something… That was the hardest year of my whole life.  I was 38 years old, I had a child and I didn’t know what I was going to do to make a living, I just knew I was following Jesus.  I didn’t know what I was going to do, but knew I was on my own.  No more rich boyfriends who paid my bills, no more parts playing prostitutes.  So I started looking in the newspaper and said “Okay, Lord, you have to show me.”   All of a sudden my fingers started throbbing like a heart beat and I looked down to where they rested on the article and it said, a “pre-school teacher” was needed at a Christian school.  I said. “Okay, I’ll go be a pre-school teacher.”  I walked in for an interview and they asked about my experience.  I had done child care at Church on the Way.  They asked if I had ever worked a computer and I said I had.  The pastor’s secretary was out on pregnancy leave and I was asked to take her place until she came back.  Then they could use me in the pre-school.  I said, “Okay God, I get it.  I’m going back to pre-school.”  After all the years doing things MY WAY, I was offered seven dollars and twenty five cents an hour.  I had no car so I walked.  I had borrowed a car to get to the interview.

When they told me the wage I remembered I had received twenty five hundred dollars a day doing shows and signing autographs. At first I thought, “I can’t take this job”, but I took the job anyway.  Someone in their congregation had a house, a two bedroom guest house, they rented it to me for $400.00 a month and every miracle possible that could happen started happening to me. 

Ed.:  We understand that this was just the beginning of your journey.

Daina: I quit almost every bad habit I had and I quit dating.  Everything in my life changed.  Two years after working for the church pre-school, I went back into the world and went to work at an insurance company and started doing accounting.  Then I became a personal manager and started working with different people in their estates and managing their money.  I was finding I could make money using my brain.  In the meantime I did childcare at church, I went on missions, I was singing on the platform, and I worked with a drama group that took the message of Jesus into the world through plays.  I was on the Board of Directors for Safe Passage which was a home for women and their children who suffered from domestic violence. I helped put up tents in Hollywood with my girlfriends and held tent revival meetings.  We had Benny Hinn and all the big preachers come. It was one thing after the next.  One day I woke up from a dead sound sleep saying, “The kings are anointed.”   I asked, “What does that mean, the kings are anointed, the kings are anointed?”   I looked at I Kings, II Kings, Chronicles, Samuel, and I couldn’t figure out what the Lord was saying to me.  A week later I was walking down a hallway at Church on the Way and I looked up and saw a sign on the building that said King’s College and Seminary.  I thought, “Oh no, I’m 48, I don’t want to go to college.”  The Lord said, “You’re going to college.”  So I enrolled in Bible College, and I graduated with honors.  I made straight A’s.  I realized that this is such a passionate thing for me.  The Lord has been saying, “We’re going to go here, we’re going to go there.”  A year after that He said, “We’re going to get your license.”   A year after that He said “Now, we’re going to write the book.”  I’m two hundred pages into the book and I have publishers and it should be out the first of next year.  That’s where I am today.

Ed.:  What a fantastic witness.  Normally I would ask about the TV shows and films you have done, however I hesitate as I don’t want to take away from the main point of your story.

Daina:  That’s an important part of where I was and how I got here. I did Starsky and Hutch, Houston Knights, Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Dukes of Hazzard, and I am especially pleased to have done the 700 Club. I did movies with Zsa Zsa Gabor, Robert Mitchum, Susan Sarandon and Henry Fonda. I did all the TV shows in the seventies and the eighties.   It started when I took the title of The Most Beautiful Girl in California.  Part of the prize was acting lessons and money.  When I was in the world I was just basically trying to make money.  When you come to this town (Hollywood) you discover a whole new world.  They find a fresh face in town and you either survive or you don’t.  Luckily for me I was only in to drugs and alcohol for four years.  I tried to kill myself and get it all over with.  I just said, “No.”  I look back now and my mom’s parents were doctors and they were elders of the Baptist Church.  We were raised with great morals and values.  I was a very good kid and never got in trouble.  But when I was exposed to so much out here I was trying to find, “Who am I.”   It took God to point me to “Who am I.” The answer to “who am I” can only be answered by the God of the universe who made you for a purpose and a destiny.  It is His plan.    The Lord is in complete control of my life and I like it that way.  He put such a great obedience in my life that He has become my Husband.  I was married before as I said, but now I am single now.  I’m not sure if the Lord has a Godly husband for me - His will be done!  If not, praise the Lord as He is my strength and I will live for Him the rest of my life.   The Lord has opened new portals to me and I have had dreams and visions.   I love helping people and it is not about me, it’s all about giving God the glory.

Ed. Note: For more about Daina House and her ministry check out her web site. http://www.dainahouseministries.com/