Break the cycle - A confessional with a lazily shoehorned Christmas moral

Pressure pushin' me from all sides Insecurities of all kinds Yeah, I'm a hostage to my own pride Most important things in life to me are things I know I can't buy

(Pictured above: The only photo I can find with all three of their heads turned)

I have a bit of a surreal thought. It occurs to me that, if your mother and I are given a lot of grace and wisdom and somehow get things right when it comes to raising you, then you will grow up with a fairly different background to me. 

I've often mentioned this in my ministry and I'm sure that at some point I would have shared this with you, but I grew up with a lot of personal insecurity. When I was young, the important adults in my life spent a lot of time telling me how smart I was. They never passed up an opportunity to remind me that I was gifted. 

But what I didn't often hear was that I was loved. 

The other day I heard a well-known Australian family counselor say that every child fundamentally has three core needs: They need to feel loved, safe, and known. In my line of work I've met many children from immigrant backgrounds who report that growing up they always felt safe, and some of them felt known, but not many of them felt loved. This is a common experience, as many mothers and fathers struggle to physically express affection, even if inside they do truly love their kids in meaningful ways. They protect, and provide. But they don't hug. 

Many parents in my generation have made a conscious effort to break that cycle and rise above what their parents were able to provide. And I'm no different. When I was young I knew that I was loved. I always felt safe. But I wasn't sure if I was known. I was a complicated child. Like you kids, I had a complex inner life that I didn't understand. I needed someone to help me understand myself and sit with myself and be okay with myself. But my mother and father (grandma and grandpa) struggled to be the empathetic, stolid presence that I needed as an overly anxious, too self-aware, too self-conscious kid. How could they? They didn't know what we know now. They didn't have the tools or resources that your mother and I have. There wasn't talk of a child's emotional development or mental health back in the '90s. When I was emotionally overheating, when I was distressed because I couldn't understand or put words to the storm in my heart, they didn't know what to do. There wasn't social media or online resources or an abundance of Christian professionals with counseling backgrounds to teach them about emotional dysregulation in children, and to normalize it and to give them simple tools to weather it with me. And my tempestuousness probably set off in them their own traumas and triggers and personal baggage that they had to carry from when they were children themselves. 

"Break the cycle" has been a huge theme in my life ever since you guys came along. Like every parent, I'm desperate to rise above, to give you what I never had, to learn from past mistakes, and to raise you whole so that you will never have to know in your heart the emptiness and brokenness that I had to learn to overcome. 

But what I want is impossible. No man can go beyond his circumstances. I am the sum of my own experiences and background; how can I give more than I was given myself? It would be like asking a glass to fill up a jug. 

The only way anyone can truly rise above their circumstances is by being pulled up. The bootstrap is a lie. If there were a bedrock truth about the human condition, it would be that we cannot save ourselves. And it is for this reason that I am so, so thankful for this season. 

"The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth." John 1.14

Christmas is about the time that God came to save those who cannot save themselves. In many ways I am still the same child that I was thirty years ago. Violnt storms arise within me; I feel like I'm being tossed about with no control. I can't get a grip, no anchor, nothing solid to grasp onto, nothing to cling onto just for a moment so that I can catch a few desperate breaths, just endless waves crashing on me, pulling me under and flinging me in all directions at once. 

Are we not plunging continually? 

Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? 

Is there still any up or down? 

Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? 

Do we not feel the breath of empty space? 

Has it not become colder? 

Is not night continually closing in on us?

This is the hope that Christmas represents to me. God came to me. And he sat with me. He didn't berate me. He didn't tell me to calm down. He didn't belittle me or trivialize my pain. He condescended but wasn't condescending. He came to give presence. To know and to make sure I knew that I was known. 

When his friends Mary and Martha wept because of death, Jesus wept too. When I look back on my childhood, grandma and grandpa were at their best when they just sat with me and wept with me. There were nights when all I did was yell and scream and cry and my mom just sat on the side of the bed and let her heart be broken as she didn't know what else to do but simply not leave until I cried myself to sleep before dawn crested. Despite everything, they came through for me over and over again. With no help or training they figured it out. My childhood was for all of us a journey of painful self-learning. 

I want to give you security. I want you to feel safe, known, and loved. I want for you not to have to fight the battles that I had to fight or to figure out from a place of poverty what I had to figure out. But I want you to know that anything good I've ever done towards you in my life is a result of grace. I can rise above because He came from the outside to pull us up. Because my parents were saved, I can have better than they did. And because I was saved, you can have safety. In every sense of that word. 

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