Be a Good Boy: My Journey from Self-loathing to Self-love

Robert Finertie was only eight and a half years old when his mother passed away. Her last words to him, lying in her hospital bed, were clear: “Be a good boy, Bobby.”
He took this deathbed directive to heart—and in the ensuing years, it became a refrain that haunted him.

Little Bobby had already learned to “go away” when something bad happened to him; it was a skill he’d learned years earlier, first when he was subjected to the humiliation of enemas at four years old, then again when his uncle molested him at his grandparents’ house only a couple of years later. Now motherless, he was left with a detached, often cruel stepmother who seemed bent on pointing out his every defect; a raging, alcoholic father; and an overwhelming sense of never being quite good enough. Even after hearing the call as a young man and becoming a pastor, these feelings of inadequacy persisted. Would he ever be free of them?

Often heartbreaking, but ultimately inspiring, Be a Good Boy chronicles Finertie’s journey toward realizing that no amount of trying to be good and no amount of “going away” would fix the brokenness inside him—a realization that allowed him to finally find his way out of self-loathing and into self-love.