Dan Lyons: Sold for $500 - A Story of Abuse, Faith, and Forgiveness

"You can have Daniel and Lyndall for five hundred dollars." That’s the sentence Dan Lyons’ mother used when his father tried to gain custody of him and his sister - the price she put on her own children. In this raw and confronting conversation, Dan takes Karl Faase back through years of alcohol-fuelled domestic violence, a mother who turned her own pain into abuse against her son, and the homeless, drug-affected years that followed - before two schoolmates and a four-word prayer changed the course of his life. This is a story about the long, unglamorous work of healing, and what it looks like to lead, parent, and forgive when you never had a template for any of it.

Dan Lyons is the Director of Missional Culture and Leadership at Carinity, the care arm of Queensland Baptists, where he leads a team of pastors and around 100–125 chaplains serving in hospitals, prisons, aged care facilities, and schools across Queensland. He has been married to his wife Anita for 28 years, they have four adult children, and he recently became a grandfather for the first time. Behind that role is a childhood marked by extreme domestic violence and abuse, teenage homelessness, and a decades-long journey of faith and healing - which he shares candidly in this episode.

Listener note: this episode discusses childhood abuse, family violence and suicide. Please take care while listening.

Key Moments & Highlights

Dan’s current role tethering Carinity’s ~2,000 staff and 100+ chaplains back to "the person of Jesus," and what "mission drift" really means for faith-based organisations

Growing up moving across Queensland with his mother and three sisters, and the Friday-night ritual of alcohol-fuelled, rage-filled domestic violence between his mum and her partners

The abuse turned personal: being interrogated, beaten, burned, and stabbed with a fork by his own mother

The one adult - his boss at a butcher shop - who noticed the bruises and dared to intervene

The night Dan finally pushed his mother off him and ran through the rain, hand-in-hand with his sister Lyndall, to find safety with his biological father

His mother’s chilling offer to give up her own children for $500

Becoming homeless at fifteen, sliding into drugs and self-loathing, and a suicide attempt interrupted at the last second

The four-word prayer: "God, please help me" and how two Christian classmates befriended him days later with no idea what he’d been through