A Happy Ending

Finally...It's Over

My parents recently signed the papers to end the twenty-some-odd-year season of hurt and struggle that many people commonly refer to as "marriage."

You might think that this is overstepping boundaries-that I have no right to share any such things with the world. After all, it wasn't my marriage right?

HA! WRONG!

You're right… it wasn't my marriage, but this grand catastrophe profoundly affects my life. Covering it up helps no one and only perpetuates the problem. My intent is not to share their junk, but to tell you my experiences and what I learned from living with a less-than-ideal marriage.

A child, though not fully able to comprehend his or her surroundings, can pick up on the subtle issues of his or her parents. I was no exception.

Here are the three things that I learned as a teen dealing with a broken marriage.

1. Fear Suffocates

Whether you cause it or experience it, fear is poisonous to a healthy home environment. Fear can cause us to say and do a lot of crazy things. It enslaves us to the whims of others, keeps us from speaking out against injustice, fosters irrational thought about our relationships, or isolates us from the very people who can help us.

Several kinds of fear wrecked our home. The fear of abandonment, the fear of pain (emotional and physical), the fear of failure, and the fear of social shame.

It was not loving.

Love is not oppressive. It isn't manipulative and controlling.

Instead, love fosters creativity, freedom of thought, safety and security to speak honestly (in a respectful manner) without fear of punishment. It is patient and it approaches others with grace and understanding. This is what my parents needed in their marriage. This is what our home needed as a whole. Instead, we all suffocated within the walls that were supposed to be our sanctuary and our family's place of safety.

Fear reigns when there isn't...

2. Humility and Honesty

Pride can lurk near environments of fear. It is often the very source of fear, or the root of what causes one to instill fear in others. Pride keeps us from being honest with ourselves and with others.

Pride kept certain members of my family from admitting their faults, while simultaneously keeping others from seeking community and processing with others; lest they be thought of as weak or stupid.

As a young adult, I still struggle with trust and with fear.

I fear I will be like my parents.

This is, in part, due to my parents pointing out my faults and manipulatively connecting these flaws to the other parent in an attempt to motivate change. This, of course, only made the whole of our family struggle much worse.

I wish I could have had the courage to speak my mind as a teen and had not lived on in fear. I wish I had been able to speak boldly what I knew was true and face the consequences of my actions with strength.

But sadly I was too deep in insecurity to know that I had what it took to stand up, to revolt.

The lack of humility and honesty was further cultivated by...

3. The Unhealthy Idolization of Family Ideals

I had a lot of pressure put on me to be happy and to be fully invested in a family that I didn't feel safe in. I often heard the phrase "if you can't trust family, you can't trust anyone" in response to my seeking external community and aid. This attempt to inspire me towards a family-centered worldview strongly influenced the way I approached the world.  

My desire to be free of the tension and stress and to build relationships elsewhere was met with shame and sought to keep me trapped within the social structure that bore down on my psyche and hindered my growth as an individual.

To compound these matters, I was often commanded to not share my pain. I was told "family issues stay within the family." This philosophy fosters fear in other areas of life: Fear of social reprimanding, fear of consequences, fear of dishonoring my parents, and fear of crossing boundaries.

I found myself believing that it was wrong to speak ill of anyone in my family, even if it was an attempt to process with a friend.

I was taught to have undying loyalty to family, even though it was family that was most disloyal to me of all of my relationships.

The bible does not center salvation around family, though it talks about families and family ideals. It does not permit that families behave as clichés nor as individualized communities. The gospel of Christ tears down these concepts and breaks the barriers between bloodlines.

It says we are all one family, one people under one King.

 "What happens in the family stays in the family" is false. It is a means of control that fosters fear and pride. We are bound and enslaved! The Church suffers far more disunity than the splitting of denominations, but in the separation of family units. Satan has masked a very serious threat as something that "God prioritizes." It is a subtle tactic that cut us off from meeting our true potential as a people unified under one Lord. Do not place trust and faith on family.

Place trust and faith on God.

This grim fairy tale has met its happy ending. Take my experiences and learn from these errors. Use them. Take the first steps to liberating your life where fear, pride, and false idols are enslaving you; preventing you from the healthy, fulfilling life that God wants you to live.

Grace and Peace,

Stephen

Until Morning

Loneliness hits when you least expect it sometimes. Like a sudden storm, it moves in and overtakes the skies; blocks out the sun...

I sometimes feel like a fraud at work, telling my kids that there is hope; telling them to keep going and to push through when I myself am at war with my heart to stay hopeful and to not give up.

Tonight I find myself in the midst of that familiar storm. I've weathered it before, but it still catches me off guard even after having experienced it so many times. 

It sucks. Sometimes it takes all you have just to not grow cold and to not succumb to it's power. My wicked heart demands relief. Temptation to look up porn, to fantasize, to wallow in my sorrows, to cycle through old thoughts of self-hatred. etc come creeping in. It's in moments like these when I feel like God isn't listening or that He doesn't care. I know it isn't true. My life has been proof of that, but the feeling is still there and it overrides my logic. 

I hide it from my students, but I too am insecure, hurting, lonely, and craving for love and purpose. 

I know that God will see me through. I know that God is here in this moment. I have had many moments, even recently, when He made Himself known to me and stepped in. He loves me. 

Loneliness is here for the night and she will will be my guest, but I know that she will not stay long. God will always come in to help me pick up the mess she left behind and help putting things in order again. 

"Sorrow will last for the night...but joy comes with the morning."

On Eagles' Wings

When you're a kid, and the world is small, it is easy to imagine that you can make a difference; that you can save the world. Which is ironic cause most kids can't tell you why the world needs saving. They just know it does.

When I was young I fantasized about being a hero. I imagined that I could fly--that I could sweep in and save someone from harm and take them away to my secret hideout in the side of a mountain where nothing evil could reach it.

As I grew older and my world changed, I began to daydream that that same safe haven wasn't so safe. Family situations began to develop and my ability to comprehend the dysfunction started to shake the paradigms that I had developed within my concrete, 5-year-old mind. In my imaginary world I found that I would have to defend my sanctuaries against attack. Regardless, the place I had conjured in my mind was safe because I fought to keep it safe. Looking back as an adult, I can see the direct correlation between my imagination to my real life issues that I was trying to process out through story.

By the time I was a teenager, my imagination begat fewer and fewer beautiful realities and replaced them with stories of pain and struggle. Stories that didn't always turn out "happily ever after." And everything around me screamed that this...this was normal.

                                                                               ***

There is darkness and suffering. That's undeniable. It's everywhere we look. The beauty of the Gospel is that all can (and will) be redeemed! Christ, our great hope, is the foundation for believing and chasing after a world that is filled with peace and unity! In Christ, we can dare to believe that the impossible can happen; to believe that skin color, gender, and a thousand human variables don't have to divide us and that, in Christ, they won't!

Behold! the Light has come and the darkness cannot understand it!

***

Life has a tendency to clip our wings and strip us of our armor. It's easy to fall into the trap of hardship and despair; to forget that as kids we once flew above the tree and fought against ghosts and goblins. We have grown cold in our elder years with the pain of love and loss. The kingdom of elves has been closed off. The land of golden rivers and sapphire tress has all but vanished. 

"It's time to grow up", they say, not even knowing what they mean or why. 

Should growing up mean that we lose our wonder or that hope must be tucked away in a chest like it's just another child's toy that is no longer relevant or acceptable to play with? 

What would happen if we allowed ourselves the opportunity to hope again? to hope for a unified and peaceful humanity? to dare to believe that we can put an end to racism? to live in a world where border control wasn't needed or travel warning lists could all be burned?

What if we dared to believe that we could fly?

To Become a Jedi (No Spoilers)

I frappin' love Star Wars and have since the re-release of the original trilogy! So with the release of the new film I can strongly feel the weight of anticipation as my long time favorite franchise resurfaces!

When I was a kid (and lets admit it...even now) I wanted to be a Jedi! I wanted to be a laster of the Force and the Lightsaber, defending the galaxy from evil! Sadly, God did not gift me with telekinesis  of super advanced technology. Yet there was something more about being a Jedi than chucking rocks with the mind or carrying blue swords that cut through nearly anything. There were principles, goals, and presence created by Jedi in the midst of the never ending shadow. There was the theme of being a person of Light in the midst of a Dark universe.

I think this is something we can understand. It seems like the tendency to do wrong and the World's undercurrent of pain and shadow might overwhelm us and steal us of life. Yet there is that calling out of the void that says "Live....be Light."

I learned that Dark Lords and evil regimes will rise, but the Light will always persist; it will always fight. I knew that I could never do what I saw as Jedi, but I knew that I could become what they represent. Keepers of peace. Warrior of Light. To chase ideology while embracing realism. Finding balance, and clinging to all that is good.

I may not be a Jedi, but I'm a Christian. Quite frankly, that's pretty darn close.

Grace and Peace,

Stephen

Burn It Down

In his book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton wrote about the prerequisites for true change. He stated that for someone to change something they must A) hate it enough to want to change it and B) love it enough to think it worth changing. Nestled between the two is the spot in which action can create true change. To do this, one must often be willing to raze it to the ground to accomplish the desired outcome. Sometimes we need to just stop patching the holes and blow bigger holes in the walls instead. tear it down and start over.

Life is not a Bob Ross painting. You can't also paint over your "happy little accidents", although it is possible to do at times. No, sometimes our lives are a complex acritextureal feat, and in the midst of our building we realize the foundation is flawed. Therefore, instead of continuing we tear down all that lies above the foundation so that we might fix it. Then, and only then, do we start again. One might tear down their structures a hundred times, but anything worth making with worth making perfectly, and anything worth making perfectly is worth burning down again and again until it can stand a thousand years.

Plans, ambitions, goals, activities, projects, art, buildings...the tangible and intangible. These things often need to be trashed and started over. The question is that do we hate our flaws enough to want to change them, and we love the flawed thing (ourselves, others, relationships, businesses, cities, nations, etc) enough to believe it worth changing?

Grace and Peace,

Stephen