Chapter Two

The Cross as Family Crisis

If you asked me my favorite holiday, I would probably say Christmas or Easter, but I wouldn’t want to risk saying that while hooked up to a lie detector. The polygraph would probably jump around erratically until I blushingly admitted the truth: it’s always been Halloween. I’m reluctant to admit that, because some of you will think poorly of me. I know I’m supposed to hate Halloween. Because I’m an evangelical Christian, of the more conservative sort, some of you will expect me to dismiss All Saints’ Eve as “the devil’s holiday.” Many would expect to see me manning the bobbing-for-Bibles booth at a church Fall Festival, or helping blindfolded children at the Reformation Day gathering play “Pin the Theses on the Castle Door.” Some would think that Halloween night would mean my family turning off all the lights and pretending not to be home, while the costumed children of our neighborhood find gospel tracts on our doorstep where a Jack O’Lantern should be. I’m supposed to hate Halloween, but I just can’t do it. Since I was a very small child, Halloween brought to me, well, tidings of comfort and joy.

As a child, I took seriously what the old people said about the holiday as a “devil’s night,” about the veil between the spirit world and ours being especially, and dangerously, thin that night. That was what I liked about it. Halloween, it seemed, took seriously what I intuitively knew to be true: the world outside was terrifying.

The night also seemed to reinforce what I read in my Bible, that the universe around me was alive with invisible forces, some of which meant me harm. Halloween seemed to be the night when grown-ups would admit this, at least a little bit. It seemed to my younger self, too, that if there were scary realities out there, the idea of calendering out a night to recognize them for what they were made sense.

The best part of the night for me had nothing to do with candy or costumes, but was rather when the night was over, when I was tucked away in bed, knowing that my parents were asleep on the other side of that sheetrock wall. The night outside might be howling with witches and werewolves, but all was safe at home. That seemed far from pagan to me. It seemed, as a matter of fact, right in line with my biblical ancestors in ancient Egypt. The angels of death could lurk around outside the house all they wished, but the blood was on the doorpost, and all would be well.

There is another reason I couldn’t pass a holiday polygraph, though. The lie detector wouldn’t let me get away with saying that this is the sole reason for my love of Halloween. Some of it was because, unlike Christmas or Thanksgiving, there was never any family drama on Halloween. No one packed us up to drive to the house of some great-aunt or second cousin on Halloween. No one sat us down at a card table for a meal someone frantically stressed about getting just right. No one would compare this Halloween to the Halloweens of years past. No one would get his or her feelings hurt, or upend Halloween with a fiery dinner table discussion about how Uncle Ronnie drinks too much. No one had to pretend that this was the most wonderful time of the year. No one slammed a door and cried out, through tears, “You’ve ruined our Halloween!”

However scary headless horsemen and swamp things could be, sometimes a Christmas dinner or an Easter egg hunt or a wedding reception or a child’s birthday party can be even more terrifying than a haunted wood. Family, though, is supposed to be a refuge from all that; it is supposed to be warm and tranquil and sentimental. That’s certainly the image most of us project in our Christmas cards. To be sure, these presentations are usually true so far as they go—most people don’t just make up that little Connor won the science fair this year or that Emma made partner in her law firm. Most people don’t announce there that the rumors of the restraining order against Aunt Flossie are “fake news.” But much goes unseen and unsaid, for obvious reasons.

Much of what goes on in our families is underground, whether that’s the annoyances of emotional conflict or the very real trauma of some family secret. That’s because, in our culture and in many others, family is often an arena for winning and displaying. Our family mirrors to the outside world the kind of person we want others to see us to be. If something is awry with our family, we are afraid that people will conclude that something is badly wrong with us. And so, despite the fact that family can sometimes scare us half to death, we smile our way through it. A friend of mine likes to say that he knew that parenting would be humbling; he just didn’t know that it would also be humiliating. Even when all is going well, one never knows when a toddler will tell his Sunday school class the new words he learned when Mommy was yelling at Daddy last night. And that only increases. As a child ages, every day could bring word of a catastrophic pregnancy or a failed school term or a lost job or a broken engagement or a car wreck. And, it seems, there is nothing one can do about any of it, except look back on pictures at how sweet that baby used to be—and all the ways you failed as a parent.

The truth is, though, that it is not just parenting that humiliates. Virtually every part of life in a family becomes humiliating, if only because we ultimately reveal in our families just how dependent we can be. Being a husband or a wife, a brother or a sister, a son or a daughter, humiliates too. In relationship with people, we are bound to disappoint, and to be disappointed, to wound and to be wounded. As part of a family, it is almost impossible to maintain the image of ourselves we so carefully construct for the world, and for our own sense of meaning. Perhaps you, like me, have looked at all your family failures and wondered, “Why does this have to be this hard?”

If you are like me, you have searched for information to learn how to navigate all of this in a way that isn’t humiliating. What I tend to want is a list of surefire principles to help me navigate life in a family—and I always have, no matter what stage of life I was in, no matter my place in the family at the time. As a boy, I wanted a foolproof guide to get my parents to understand how hard Algebra was for me—that a “C” really was good enough—and to show me how to meet the way-too-high expectations of my grandmother next door. As a teenager, I wanted a list of principles that could guarantee I could resist sexual temptation or, better yet, show me a loophole that would allow me to yield to it and stay a good Christian. More truthfully, I wanted principles that would show me how to get a girl to like me enough that I would have temptation options to actually overcome. As a young man, I wanted a step-by-step guide to choosing the right kind of wife. After marriage, my wife and I both wanted a list of steps that would ensure we wouldn’t end up like other couples we had seen—in divorce courts scrapping it out with each other or, somehow even worse, lying together in middle-age, in a loveless, sexless, resentment-filled bed. I wanted a list of all the things expected of a Christian husband, from which chores I should do to how I could make sure my wife feels loved enough that she will never seek the attention of some soccer-dad in the produce aisle of the grocery store.

On into our marriage, I wanted the exactly worded prayer to cause us to conceive children when that turned out harder than we expected. After the children came, we wanted to know whether to schedule-feed them or to attachment parent, whether to schedule preschool violin lessons or roller-derby instruction. I wanted a comprehensive guidebook for how to keep my children from getting drunk in high school, drug-addicted in college, or divorced in a mid-life crisis. I’m sure one day I’ll want explicit directions on how to guarantee that I will relate well to my future grandchildren as they soar above me on their hovercraft, communicating telepathically with their artificially intelligent cyborg friends. At every stage, I want an exhaustive list of steps for how to stop comparing everyone else’s shiny, happy lives with what seems, for me, like my keeping just one step ahead of disaster, every second.

There are many reasons, of course, why family is so difficult. The most important reason, though, is one we rarely talk about. The stakes are high; that much most of us know. Some people rage against their parents all their lives, even after the mother and father are long dead. Others spend years resenting their children for all the trouble they put them through. We often see the stakes as high but we don’t often see why. Family can enliven us or crush us because family is about more than just the life cycle of our genetic material.

Family is spiritual warfare.

* * * *

The family is one of the pictures of the gospel that God has embedded in the world around us. Through a really dark glass, we can see flashes in the family of something at the core of the universe itself, of the Fatherhood of God, of the communion of a people with one another. Not every personal being likes what it sees in that. Even more than Halloween, the Bible tells us the truth about what’s out there. If the Scriptures are right, then ancient cultures were right that there are invisible and hostile powers afoot in the cosmos, and these powers rage against the picture of the gospel, wherever it is found, because the gospel is a sign of the end of their reign, of the crushing of their heads. That’s why the fall of humanity, presented in the earliest pages of Scripture, is not simply a story of personal guilt or shame. The Fall immediately splinters husband from wife, brother from brother, father from daughter, uncle from cousin—all just in the opening chapters of Genesis. If the family is not wrecking you, it’s only because you don’t know what is going on.

Into all of that, the Bible does not give us a family manual. The Bible gives us instead a word of the cross. By “the cross,” I don’t mean shorthand for Christian principles or “family values.” By “the cross” I mean the tangled mess of a murder scene outside the gates of Jerusalem.

The Bible says much about family, but it does not do so from the warmth of the hearth, but from the Place of the Skull. As a matter of fact, the most important truths about life in the family are not found in the passages we think of as “family” passages—those we are likely to hear preached on Mother’s Day or Father’s Day or at a wedding ceremony. The most important passage related to the family is probably in the account of Jesus, “bearing his own cross, to the place called The Place of a Skull” (John 19:17), where, in the agony of execution, Jesus would cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It would be easy to conclude—as those standing around no doubt did—that this was the complaint of one who was rejected and utterly abandoned by his God. But Jesus here was not spontaneously venting a complaint to the empty skies. He was quoting a lyric from a song.

Every account of the crucifixion in the Gospels is riddled with references to Psalm 22, a song of David, from this cry of anguish to the soldiers gambling for his clothes to the agony of thirst. Psalm 22 is a song meant to be sung by the worshipping people of God, a song that tells a story, from seeming desolation all the way through to a realization of the steadfast love of God. This song from the cross has everything to do with the family.

One of the hardest things for us to grasp as family members—whether as sons or daughters, husbands or wives, mothers or fathers, even as spiritual brothers and sisters within the church—is just how complicated it all is. I don’t just mean the mechanics of getting along with one another, of modeling good marriages or good parenting, of honoring our father and mother. I mean the unique mixture that comes with family of joy and terror, of beauty and brokenness. A new study will come out every once in a while that shows that parents are happier than those who have no children, or that married people are happier than people who are single. And then another study will come out that will show the reverse, that parents are more depressed than those who have no children, or that married people have more anxiety and regrets than their non-married peers. Families grow us up, and make us stable, one study will show. Families destabilize us and drive us crazy, the next study will show. I suspect that both sets of data are true. Family is awesome. Family is terrible. As Christians, we already have a category for that. The cross shows us how we can find beauty and brokenness, justice and mercy, peace and wrath, all in the same place. The pattern of the Christian life is crucified glory—this is as true for our lives in our families as in everything else.

As he is crucified, Jesus is, on the one hand, utterly alone. The sign above his head reads, “The King of the Jews.” This is a sarcastic reference, seemingly contradicted by the very fact of its location. The sign demonstrated that he was rejected by the Roman Empire around him, and by his own people, right down to his tribe and his village. He seemed cast out and doomed by his family, his people, his God. The song on Jesus’ mind tells a different story, though.

David there in Psalm 22 did indeed sing of his godforsaken state, but he didn’t stop there. He remembered his family history: “In you our fathers trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them” (Ps. 22:4). And he remembered his own immediate family story: “Yet you are he who took me from the womb; you made me trust you at my mother’s breasts. On you was I cast from my birth, and from my mother’s womb you have been my God. Be not far from me, for trouble is near, and there is none to help” (Ps. 22:9–11). Even as Jesus’ disciples fled from him in shame, he could cite Psalm 22 while looking out from the cross at his mother. In the moment of his greatest desolation, Jesus could see the invisible outline of God’s mercy and presence there in the one from whom, in his human nature, he learned to trust a fathering, nurturing God. He learned that from his mother. And there she stood. Jesus said, echoing his ancestor David, “I can count all my bones” (Ps. 22:17; John 19:36). The horror of the scene was not the whole story. And Jesus knew the whole song.

As she watched her son ripped apart by nails, struggling to gasp for air, Mary no doubt remembered the words of the prophet Simeon, in the first days of her baby’s life at his eighth-day dedication at the temple. Simeon foresaw that the child would be “appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed” (Luke 2:34). Looking at Mary, the aged prophet said, “A sword will pierce through your own soul also” (Luke 2:35). She could hardly have imagined this soul-rending sword would be a Roman cross. And yet, she was not alone in the collateral damage of the crucifixion. Jesus said that all of us must carry the cross. We can only find our lives by losing them, by being crucified with him. We will be broken too.

I am not sure what your family situation is, as you read these words on the page. Maybe you dread another Thanksgiving with some aunt asking, “So are you seeing anyone special?” Even worse, you dread the day she stops asking, because that will mean she’s given up on you ever finding someone. Maybe you’re newly married, and you’re scared. You look at the smiling faces in your wedding pictures, and you can’t help but notice the same sorts of smiles in your parents’ old wedding photographs. You know those smiles didn’t last but degenerated into hatred and acrimony. You are in love—but so were they. You’ve made vows—and meant them—till death do you part. But so did they. Or maybe you resent every baby shower invitation you get, because you keep seeing month after month that one pink line on the pregnancy test instead of two. Or maybe you sit in church hoping no one will know that your daughter is in prison or that your son is on a sex-offender registry. Or maybe you’re just lying on a bed, in a room smelling of ammonia, asking the nurse one more time if anyone called for you, knowing from her wincing, forced smile that the answer is no. You can tell she feels sorry for you, and that she fears ending up like you. All of that can be scary and exhausting.

On the other hand, you might have the family that others around you envy. Maybe your parents are exactly the ones you would have chosen. Maybe your marriage is affectionate and growing in intimacy as you age together. Or maybe your children are well behaved, successful, and constantly in touch. And maybe, then, you wonder how long this can last. That can be scary and exhausting too.

Family is hard because family is unpredictable. You cannot plan out your life. You cannot choose your parents, or your genes, or your upbringing the way you choose your career path. You cannot know everything about your future spouse, or fit your children into some preexisting life plan. Family means vulnerability. You can be hurt. You will be hurt, and you will hurt others. You will learn to love others so much that you wish you could protect them from what’s out there: being bullied at the bus-stop, that fiancé who breaks the engagement, a bone-marrow transplant in an oncology ward. And family also exposes who we really are, stripping us of our pretensions and our masks. Family will, sooner or later, reveal that we are not the person our families need us to be. We are naked before our illusions, and those closest to us eventually learn that we do not have it all together. In the fullness of time, we will feel not only the cross on our back, but the sword through our soul.

And yet, from the Place of the Skull, Jesus joined his song to that of David. He knew not only the dark passages of that song but the whole thing. When he sang of what he learned from his mother, he could see her there, and not just her. The psalm ends with David announcing, “I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you” (Ps. 22:22). There, Jesus could see from his cross the disciple he loved, John. Even from the cross, Jesus was occupied with family matters, arranging an adoption, handing responsibility for Mary’s care over to John. “Woman, behold your son!” he said to his mother, and to John, “Behold your mother!” (John 19:26–27), and from that hour, John recounts, he took her into his own home. In something as seemingly mundane as arranging care for a parent, Jesus demonstrated that the little burdens of family matter and that they are part of a larger burden of a cross. Moreover, he was showing us that we need one another. We cannot be families if we are not disciples first. We must recognize the joys and responsibilities that come with being part of a family formed not by the blood of biology but the blood of crucifixion.

The church has often failed at this point. In too many cases, we have turned congregations into silos packed with countless minivans full of individual families, coming to receive instruction and then return to their own self-contained units. The end result, especially in a rootless, hyper-mobile American culture, is the reality of mothers who are lonely and fear they’re failing but who don’t want to say anything for fear of being judged or starting up the Mommy Wars, or fathers who are lonely but who aren’t supposed to signal that they don’t know what to do about their son’s pornography addiction or their daughter’s anorexia. Our churches are often filled with unmarried or divorced or widowed men and women who believe that they are without family because there is no one to stand beside them in the church directory picture. And yet, the cross shows us that we need one another. We will never be godly families until we are brothers and sisters to one another.

Years ago, I was serving as a minister in a church and would lead our Wednesday night Bible study through a time of taking prayer requests. One night a woman came up after the service was over and said, “I didn’t want to say this in front of everyone, but can you pray for my daughter?” She looked furtively over her shoulders, as though scouting out the presence of enemy spy drones, and whispered, “She’s gone away to college and become an atheist.” I promised to pray but asked why she was whispering. “Oh, I don’t want everyone to wonder what we had done to make our daughter an atheist,” she said. “I didn’t want to embarrass my husband like that.” Something has gone terribly wrong when a Christian feels she must protect herself from her church, for fear that her daughter’s spiritual crisis will be discussed as part of a debate over whether she should have breastfed longer or whether they should have chosen homeschooling over public school. That’s especially true when literally every family in Scripture, without exception, has prodigals, including that of God the Father.

* * * *

Family is humiliating, yes, which is one reason I hesitate to even write this book. Family discloses sooner or later that we are not the experts we think we are. When my oldest sons were just learning to read, they would sound out the words on the billboards we would pass in the car where we lived at the time in Louisville, Kentucky. One day we passed an advertisement for Budweiser beer, with just the words of the abbreviation “Bud Light.” My son Ben asked, “What is Bud Light?” Not really wanting to get into the whole discussion of alcoholic beverages and all that comes with that, I just said, “It’s a drink some people drink.” A few weeks later, I saw a gaggle of senior adults at a church where I was preaching, gathered around my little son. He had, I learned, just announced to them, “You know what my Dad’s favorite drink is? Bud Light!” Now, I do not drink even a thimble-full of beer or any other alcohol, and I serve what is perhaps the most anti-alcohol church communion in the world. I was tempted to just go ahead and form a committee to investigate myself. Parenting only became more humiliating from there, with many moments where I’ve wondered, as I have with marriage, whether I am competent to do this. But if it were not so, we would not need to seek the power of one another, or of the Lord in prayer. God told his children in the desert wandering, that he had humbled them, made them to hunger, and disciplined them as a man disciplines his son, so that they might know “that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8:3).

If family were easy, we could do it in our own fleshly self-propelled willpower. If we could do it on our own, we would not bear a cross. And if we are not bearing a cross, then what we are doing would not matter in the broad sweep of eternity. Family matters. That’s why it is hard. As the songwriter Rich Mullins once put it, “I can’t see where you’re leading me unless you’ve led me here, where I’m lost enough to let myself be led.” Family will do that, but not with our pride and self-sufficiency intact. Thanks be to God.

Family can be humiliating, but what’s more humiliating than family is being naked, covered in blood, hoisted on a pole, while people gamble for one’s clothes. And yet, we’ve all been there, in Christ. Once we’ve been crucified, and survived to tell the tale, one would think we could admit to one another that we need help in the spiritual warfare that comes with life together in our families. One would think we could humble ourselves and confess to one another, to ask for forgiveness, when we hurt or fail one another. One would think we could deal honestly with the pain of our own childhoods without fearing that we are predestined to live out our parents’ mistakes or to live our lives performing for their approval for whatever they expected of us.

Jesus could count all his bones. Everything else was falling apart, but no bones were broken. At first glance, that seems to be cold consolation. After all, what difference does it make if one has an intact skeletal system if one is executed in the most torturous method possible? Jesus did not have bones made of titanium steel. He was not surrounded by a force field. His bones would have snapped, just as easily as did the legs of the crucified murderers and terrorists on either side of him. Why did, and why does, this matter?

The lack of broken bones there at the cross was a sign to Jesus, along with the face there of his mother, that whatever happened could not go any further than God’s purposes, and that God’s purposes were good. Whatever the soldiers were doing, their actions were not random and chaotic. The veil of the temple was ripped asunder, but the seam in Jesus’ garment was not, nor were the bones in his legs. God might seem to be absent at the cross, but he was not. He was there, as elsewhere, providentially ruling, even through the most wicked actions imaginable. Your skeletal system is the last identifiable piece of who you are, or who you were, the last to decay away into dust. That’s why a skull can be so startling to see. Jesus could count all his bones because of the mystery of God’s providence, which works behind, and through, even the most awful things that happen to us. God handed him over to the curse, to judgment, to death. But, even then, God did not utterly break him. Jesus’ intact skeleton was a sign that no matter how much it seemed that he had been abandoned, the steadfast love of God would not depart. God was still there.

Being a part of a family—whatever the part, and whatever the family—is essential to our flourishing as people. And being part of a family—whatever the part and whatever the family—is difficult. That should be neither surprising nor dispiriting for a people of the cross. All of us are failures at family. That’s because all of us are part of families, and all of us are fallen. The cross shows us that the family can be an arena of God’s mercy and God’s glory. Being a child can point us to our dependence on our God, a dependence seen most perfectly in the helpless figure of a crucified Christ, committing his spirit to his Father. Our sibling relationships can point us to the joys—and the difficulty—of being part of a bustling band of brothers and sisters in the church. Marriages can point to the union of Christ and his church, a union sealed at the cross. Parenting can point to the Fatherhood of God, a Fatherhood seen in the darkest moments of the cross as well as in the vibrant moments of resurrection and exaltation. All these seemingly mundane relationships then are not just about what it means to be happy. They all are, in some way or another, part of the training ground for our ultimate destinies as joint heirs with Christ, and heirs of the universe.

We need practical wisdom on the family. The Bible gives it to us. We need to know how to honor our parents without being enmeshed with them. We need to know how to honor marriage without idolizing it. We need to know how to discipline the next generation in a way that is neither harsh nor negligent. But before all of that, we need to see the vulnerability of family within the prism of cross-bearing.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want that. I would rather protect myself from the possibility of hurt, with a hard, exterior shell, not the soft vulnerability of breakable bones. Nothing opens one up to more potential for hurt, for more vulnerability, than being part of a family. Parents can nurture you, but they can also reject you. A spouse can love you but can also leave you. Children can bring joy but just might one day ask for that inheritance early and head off for a pigsty of rebellion in a far country. I don’t mind working hard for my family, but I wince at the thought of one day needing my family to empty my bedpan and wipe my drooling mouth. And yet, that vulnerability is what God uses to conform us to Christ. He does not make us holy through Pharaoh-like exercises of power but through the hidden dynamism of the cross. That sort of vulnerability means, of course, that bad things are possible. Your parents might disown you. Your spouse might find someone else. Leukemia might ravage your child. The gospel doesn’t hide any of this from you. The gospel doesn’t promise you prosperity and tranquility. But the gospel does promise you that you are never outside the reach of the fatherly providence of God, a providence that fits you with a cross not to destroy you but to give you a future. Your skeleton is safe, even at the Place of the Skull.

* * * *

That cross brings the freedom to be family. And freedom is precisely what we need. Because family is an aspect of spiritual warfare, it can seem crushing. Because family is an aspect of cross-bearing, it can seem excruciating. We often seek an exit. Some find an exit through evading the responsibilities of family altogether. Think of the child of a contentious divorce who is forever fearful of commitment, to avoid getting hurt the way his parents did, or the way they hurt him. Some find that exit by a kind of stoic resignation, that concludes whatever will happen with one’s family will happen. Some find that exit though self-medicating with some addiction or self-sabotaging through an affair, or even by walking away from one’s family altogether. Still others find that exit by binding up their identities with their families, so that their life consists in a blur of soccer games and debate competitions, one extracurricular activity after another to ensure that the next generation is a little better off in opportunity so that parents will be able to face themselves as having been “good enough.” None of that is freedom. It is instead soul-deadening and heart-defeating. Those who neglect their family responsibilities and those who deify them end up in the same place, at giving up. That’s no freedom at all.

We have a different sort of freedom, a crucified freedom. Our families are important but not ultimate. The devil doesn’t mind marriage experts or parenting experts. The devil doesn’t mind class valedictorians or a mantle full of trophies. The devil does, though, tremble at a cross. The end result of our mission as families is not to impress our peers that our kids are well-behaved enough not to keep us awake at night, but that they are, like us, crucified with Christ. To go back to Jesus’ cross-hymn from Psalm 22, the end result is to be that “it shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation; they shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn, that he has done it” (Ps. 22:30–31). That he has done it; not that we have done it. Family humbles us. Family humiliates us. Family crucifies us. That’s because family is one of the ways God gets us small enough to fight the sort of battle that can’t be won by horses or chariots but by the Spirit of the Lord.

Our families shape us. We shape our families. The cross should shape both.

* * * *

Glory shows up in broken places. The psalmist tells us that “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1; 8:3–4). Looking into the night sky can fill us with a sense of God’s creative power and wisdom, along with our own smallness before his cosmic reach. And yet, most of the stars visible to us in the night sky above us—or above David as he wrote that psalm—are dead, their light reaching us long after they have burned out. They declare glory nonetheless. This should not surprise us when we look at our own lives. Our outer self is wasting away, the Bible tells us, and yet in the middle of such weakness and death, there is hidden the glimmers of an “eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:17). We have the treasure of the gospel in these jars of clay, “to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us” (2 Cor. 4:7). We then carry death with us, but from this death comes life, for us and for the world (2 Cor. 4:11–12). And the cross takes us right back to Halloween.

If you stop by my house come Halloween, you might see me walking around our neighborhood, with my sons in their costumes. I can predict that, just like every year, the neighbors down the street will have homemade chili and root beer on their porch, with enough for everyone. I can also predict that my youngest son will tense up and grab my hand when we pass this one particularly creepy house around the corner, the one with the lit-up skeleton on the porch. He will be scared, and I will too. I’ll be scared of a different sort of skeleton, my own, of what will happen after all my life of perpetual motion is over. Will my wife know that I loved her? Will my children see something in the way that I fathered them to point them to the Father God who always loves, who never leaves, who comes with both authority and mercy, both truth and grace? My son will be afraid the skeleton on the porch will eat him. I’m afraid that the skeleton in my future casket won’t measure up to the image I project right now, even on this very page. And that my family will know it.

But on that autumn night, I will take him in my arms, again, and I will say, “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere. And I’ll protect you from that skeleton. It can’t hurt you.” In that moment, I will remember what I, as a child, loved most about Halloween. The fear will be there, not hidden away, not rationalized out of existence, not avoided in polite conversation. But behind the fear will be the kind of safety that comes only with a parent’s protection. The monsters are out there, and in here, but they will not win. That’s just one night of the year, but that’s what a Christian vision of the family is about all year long.

The family isn’t really summed up in Halloween alone, and the family isn’t summed up in Christmas, at least not the way we celebrate it in our sanitized culture. The family is summed up in Good Friday. Your family can teach you that your intuitions are right. You want peace in your home. You want a legacy that outlasts you. A cross-shaped life in a storm-tossed world shows us that we will never get there as experts but only as sons and daughters. You can find family only by entrusting it to the One you can trust with your very soul.

Family takes you to the cross. If you are in Christ, everything in your life leads you there eventually. But from there you can see an empty tomb. Family shows you, once again, that the only way you can gain your life is to lay it down, that the only way you can win is to lose. The wisdom of God and the power of God are hidden there, in the place of crucifixion, in ways that can terrify us. The cross exists to disturb and disrupt the perilous quiet of our lives. “The cross is the safest of all things,” Martin Luther wrote. “How blessed is he who understands!”1 Family takes you to the Place of the Skull but shows you there that though you can take nothing with you, not even your clothes, not one of your bones is broken.

Your skeleton is safe.