He Should've Been Another Tragedy.
Featuring Randolph Maynard — born in Antigua, broken in California, restored in St. Thomas. A story about who gets to be a father.
Maynard was born in a small village in Antigua. His mother left for the Virgin Islands when he was a baby. He was raised by his grandmother until she died, then by an aunt who never passed along the clothes and food his mother sent for him and his sister. They were filthy when their mother finally came back for them. She cried when she saw them.
In St. Thomas, the stepfather she had married drank and beat him. When Maynard graduated high school, he packed his belongings into a $55 trash bag and left without looking back. A year later, on a sidewalk in downtown St. Thomas, two strangers asked him if he wanted to accept Jesus. He prayed with them. For three days he felt like he was walking on air.
The years that followed were not a straight line. Ministry school in Texas. California. Drugs. A youth revival in Yosemite. A move back to St. Thomas. A wife. A restaurant. Children of his own. He says becoming a father gave him the chance to be the father he never had — and to find the one he had been missing all along.
“In my conversion, God became my first father.”
Randolph Maynard
A husband. A restaurateur. A father who became the father he never had.
Maynard and his wife Haga run a restaurant in St. Thomas and have raised their children there. He calls fatherhood the place where the long arc of his story finally made sense. He still attends the same church the pastor of which first walked into his restaurant years ago. He says God became his first father — and that gave him everything he needed to become one himself.
📍 St. Thomas, USVI
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