Chapter Twelve

Family Tensions, Family Traumas

A friend of mine, whose children are a bit older than my own, recently dropped his firstborn son off at college. My friend said that he left his son’s dormitory room and wept bitterly, despite the fact that the college was just a few miles from his front doorstep. An older Christian man came upon my friend and asked if he was alright. My friend said that his emotions weren’t so much due to sentimentality, although there was some of that, as much as to guilt. My friend is a musician, who must spend much of his time touring on the road. “I realize now that I had such a limited amount of time with my son,” my friend said. “And I was gone so much. Why wasn’t I home with him more? And when I was home why did I ever waste time watching television?” The older man looked at my friend and said, “Oh, the Lord redeems all of that.”

My friend said that one sentence was liberating. The man did not do what he expected—reassure him. “If he had told me that I had been a good father, I would have just rationalized that he didn’t know the whole situation,” my friend said. “And if he said my absence didn’t matter, I wouldn’t have believed him.” Instead, this wise stranger pointed to the cross. The Lord can redeem this story, by joining it to the redeeming work of the cross. Instead of a word of reassurance regarding my friend’s performance, he offered something better: a word of grace.

I listened carefully, because while I haven’t reached the “empty nest” yet, even partially, I know all too well what it means to feel like a parenting failure. None of us will make it through life without hurting and being hurt by others. Often those hurts will happen within the context of family—sometimes from people grievously long gone, sometimes from people who are annoyingly, persistently still here.

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Jesus told us to expect tumult and suffering. The apostle Peter, likewise, told the churches to which he wrote, “Do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you, to test you, as though something strange were happening to you” (1 Pet. 4:12). The sense of God’s presence and purpose behind pain, though, does not lead to a Stoic fatalism or a kind of Buddhist calm in the face of evil and hurt. The cross makes it clear that evil is real, and calls for the judgment of God. The cross also makes it clear that none of us need be undone ultimately by what has been done to us, or, sometimes even worse, by what we have done to others.

Knowing how to apply the cross-shaped nature of our gospel to our often confusing family lives and situations, though, can be difficult, especially when what troubles us can range sometimes from mild tension to real trauma. How do we know how to walk toward the future God has for us in the gospel when what ought to be the most secure element of our identities—our families—fractures or even falls? Some of this will mean walking through the ordinary tensions of the family, and some of it will be about looking backward and forward at the very real traumas we face. As Jesus moved toward the cross, he had many who knew something of what he was about, and were actively seeking to kill him. There were others, though, who just did not yet understand, failing to see who he was and what he was saying. Neither derailed Jesus’ trek to the cross, nor did he confuse the one with the other.

Working often with families formed through adoption, I regularly hear from grown children who were adopted talking about the difficulties that come along with sorting through identity questions. One of these Christians said to me, “You just can’t imagine what it is like to sit across a table from people who are a mystery to you, to think to yourself, ‘I am nothing like you! How did I end up in this family.”

I said that, to some degree, what she was experiencing was due to the adoption, but a great deal more of it is far more universal than that. “I actually do know what that’s like,” I said. “It’s called Thanksgiving.”

As much as we idealize family, this idealism tends to fade when we deal with the very real frictions that can happen between members of a family with different personalities and different perspectives. Some of this is just navigating what conversations to bring up and which to avoid. Some of it is more serious: family members who are hostile to your faith, for instance. Or maybe you are someone who thought you were an empty nester, now dealing with a son or daughter back in his old bedroom, maybe with a spouse or a partner or some children now in tow. That’s difficult enough with one’s family of origin, where at least one has had the training ground of a lifetime to know, as they say, “where the bodies are buried.” When one adds to that the mix of in-laws, often with their own very confusing dynamics, unspoken feuds and peace treaties, and complicated backstories, this can become even more fraught. How do we then carry the cross when tensions inevitably come?

First, the gospel calls us to peace. Yes, Jesus tells us that he brings a sword of division, and that this sometimes splits up families (Matt. 10:34–37). But there’s a difference between gospel division and carnal division (1 Cor. 1:10–17). The Spirit brings about peace (Gal. 5:22), and the sons of God are called to be peacemakers (Matt. 5:9) so we should “strive for peace with everyone” (Heb. 12:14). Often the divisiveness that happens within extended families is about conflicting spiritual worldviews, but occasionally the divisiveness is not about an unbelieving family member persecuting a Christian, but rather because a Christian decides to go ahead and, at the family table, sort the wheat from the weeds right now, rather than, as Jesus told us, waiting for Judgment Day (Matt. 13:29–30). Yes, the gospel exposes sin, but not for the purpose of condemnation (John 3:17). The gospel strategically exposes sin in order to point to Christ. Antagonizing unbelieving family members because they think or feel like unbelievers is not the way of the cross.

Some Christians think their belligerence is actually a sign of holiness. They leave the Christmas table saying, “See, if you’re not being opposed, then you’re not with Christ!” Sometimes, of course, divisions must come. But think of the qualifications Jesus gives for his church’s leaders—that they must not be “quarrelsome” and they must be “well thought of by outsiders” (1 Tim. 3:3, 7). That’s in the same list as not being a heretic or a drunk. Your presence should be, as much as possible, one of peace and tranquility. The gospel you believe ought to be what disrupts.

Moreover, the Scripture calls us to honor. We are to fear God, to obey the king, and to honor (notice this) everyone (1 Pet. 2:17). If cousin Hattie Jo does tequila shots in her car outside the family gathering just to take the edge off of her cocaine, well, she still bears the imprint of the God you adore. You cannot do the will of God by opposing the will of God. That is, you cannot evangelize, for example, your unbelieving father and mother by disrespecting them. God tells us to honor those to whom honor is due. That means showing, everywhere possible, respect and gratitude.

This calls also for humility. Part of the reason for many of our tensions within extended families is because we see differences over Jesus as of the same sort as our differences over foreign policy in the Middle East, or the chances of our favorite sports team to make the playoffs this year, or who deserves the most gratitude for preparing the family meal. As Christians, we cannot be those who, like the professional polarizers in our culture around us, value having the last word. Jesus, not once, sought to prove he was right. And he was accused of everything from being a drunk to being a demoniac. He rejected Satan’s temptation to force a visible vindication—by throwing himself from the temple pinnacle and being theatrically rescued by God—waiting instead for God to vindicate him at the empty tomb.

We often veer toward Satanism with our extended families—especially those who are nominal Christians or unbelievers—because we pride ourselves on knowing the truth of the gospel. That’s why we feel rage when Uncle Ronnie pontificates that “many roads lead to God.” Uncle Ronnie is wrong, but we must not want to prove ourselves right more than we want him resurrected. We find ourselves here when we forget just how it was that we came to Christ in the first place. This wasn’t our brilliance, like being accepted into an Ivy League university, or our exertion of will, like learning a winning chess strategy. “What do you have that you did not receive?” the apostle Paul asked. “If you then received it, why do you boast as though you did not receive it?” (1 Cor. 4:7). Satan wants to destroy you through this primal flaw, pride (1 Pet. 5:7–9; 1 Tim. 3:6). He doesn’t care if that pride comes through looking around the family table and figuring out how much more money you make than your second cousin-in-law or whether it comes by looking around the table and saying, “Thank you Lord that I am not like these publicans.” The end result is the same (Prov. 29:23). Unless you’re in an exceptionally sanctified family, you’re going to see failing marriages, parenting crises, and a thousand other shards of the curse (and you’re going to experience many of these personally as well). If your response is to puff up as you compare yourself with others, there’s a Satanist at your family gathering, and you’re it.

This calls then also for maturity. If we are following the way of the cross, we will follow the path Jesus took: from temptation to suffering to crucifixion and then ultimately to glory. Often we think of those tests as big, monumental things, but they rarely are. God might bring you to maturity in Christ by your fighting lions before the emperor or standing with a John 3:16 sign before tanks in the streets of Beijing. More likely, though, this testing will be in those seemingly little places of temptation—like whether you will bear patiently with the belching brother-in-law at the end of the table who wants to talk about how the Cubans killed President Kennedy or about how he can make you rich by joining his multilevel marketing business selling herbal laxatives. One of the questions we must ask ourselves is whether the tension we feel should be attributed to our own immaturity, and sometimes the answer is yes.

In any case, though, see the tensions around you as more than something you would undo if only you were part of a different family. They will always be here. Remember also that the cross points us to a Day of Judgment when we will give an account for every idle (that means seemingly tiny, insignificant, or unmemorable) thought, word, or deed. We will see then that the Spirit has led us to carry our crosses into every possible arena in which to live out the gospel, including Aunt Flossie’s dining room table.

Here I am using the word tension to speak to those everyday frictions that require patience and wisdom, but which don’t usually threaten the family itself, while speaking of “trauma” as those experiences of harm and hurt that imperil one’s very sense of self and community. Sometimes the line between the two is fuzzy, especially when it relates to relationships between parents and wayward children. I don’t like the phrase “prodigal children” much because it tends to presume that the children are the ones who have gone away to the far country while the parents have stayed at home. That’s not Jesus’ point, though. All of us are prodigals—just at different places in our redemption stories. It would be just as accurate, often, to speak of “prodigal parents” and “prodigal brothers and sisters” and “prodigal churches.” Of course, there is also a wide spectrum in what we see as “wandering children,” ranging from families that are intact and love one another, but where the children have not received the faith tradition of their parents, to situations in which the children express resentment and hatred toward their parents, and even are involved in dangerous or socially destructive behaviors. There is a special kind of agony that comes, though, when a parent—whether a literal parent or a spiritual parent—sees a child wandering away from the way he or she was taught and into self-destruction. If, as the apostle John wrote, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth” (3 John 4), then surely the mirror image of that is true as well.

Sometimes this hurt is intensified by an inadequate sense of sin and grace, not on the part of the “prodigals” but on the part of those waiting for them to return. Some parents can feel a kind of betrayal, as though the child’s unbelief is itself an act of hatred directed toward the parent, because the child owes his family his own conversion and discipleship. A parent may act shocked that a child would rebel—“How could he do this after the way he was raised?” or “What a lack of gratitude she has for us when we have done all this for her!” If you are finding yourself thinking this way, realize what is happening. You are missing what God has revealed to us at the cross. The reality is, you are not just dealing with a “prodigal child,” but God is dealing with a “prodigal cosmos.”

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Sin and rebellion against God is universal (with the only exception being Jesus) in the entire stream of the human race, including you. All of our stories include our awareness of God, our awareness of his revelation in our consciences, and nonetheless our turning away in ingratitude toward the self and the idols we can construct (Rom. 1:18–23). Knowing this about ourselves is essential to relating well to those who disappoint us with their disbelief or rebellion. To be shocked that our child, or our mentored protégé, could commit any sin, or walk in any path, is a sign that we do not really get what the cross has taught us about human sin and the human heart.

Sometimes—usually unspoken—there is a feeling of betrayal by God himself, for not intervening to save the child. Often, this is rooted in a transactional view of what childrearing is all about. Some parents in our contemporary milieu, as I observed earlier, think of childrearing as the equivalent of raising cattle or programming code into a computer, a relatively simple matter of cause and effect, input and output. Christians sometimes adopt the exact same viewpoint, even early in life, watching a fussy baby and judging her parents for not putting her on the sort of sleep-schedule that would ensure contentment. This becomes even more pronounced when Christians do the same with a spiritual mechanism instead of a technical one. “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Prov. 22:6) is a passage many parents of wayward children will “claim” as a “promise” that God will, in the end, save their child. This, of course, is not what the book of Proverbs teaches.

There is no prosperity gospel of parenting. The text, as do many of the proverbs, speaks of a general principle: parents’ direction of their children is formative, in some way, for the rest of their lives. That’s certainly true. This does not mean, though, that a child reared in a Christian home will inevitably turn out to be a Christian, even if that child was reared in a very good Christian home. In many cases, a child who grew up with the Bible and hymns and the warm ecosystem of the gospel all around him will nevertheless walk away from all of it. Sometimes this is—like the prodigal in Jesus’ parable—for a short period of time, as he is trying to find an identity distinct from his parents. Sometimes it is for life.

This does not mean that the parents’ gospel instruction and modeling was all for naught. We are all confronted—for good or for ill—with our backgrounds, sometimes increasingly as we age or in moments we least expect. Many who grew up in Christian homes are not Christian but are, as Flannery O’Connor would put it, “Christ-haunted.” That is to say, their affections and hidden intuitions keep drawing them into a confrontation with the Christ they do not want to find. Sometimes this “Christ-haunting” becomes a poltergeist, noisily prodding the conscience from embedded memories of old Sunday school songs or family Bible readings or the example of a parent who prayed with him at night. Sometimes this leads to conversion, maybe even long after the parents are dead. Sometimes it does not. Knowledge of facts, and even immersion in the things of God, does not guarantee new birth. The guards who witnessed the events of the resurrection, Matthew tells us in one of the most subtly disturbing passages in all of the Bible, were given a “sufficient sum of money” to deny what they had seen with their own eyes: that the most momentous event in cosmic history had, in fact, happened. What on earth could be a “sufficient sum” to do that? We do know, though, that the Spirit can convict anyone of sin and bring anyone to faith in Christ, even after years of running. The Spirit blows where he wills, and we cannot track him. We can only see the leaves as they scatter in his wake (John 3:8).

Sometimes what parents experience is not a sense of entitlement but a wrong-headed sense of guilt. Either they spend all of their time second-guessing their own parenting decisions or failures or omissions from days long past, or they feel guilty for the way they are presently handling the situations of a child in active or passive rebellion. I will never forget an older man, an impressive, godly Christian, who once came to my office and broke into tears, saying that he feared he was going to hell. He clearly held to the gospel, so I asked why he would think this. He said that he knew that Jesus said that whoever denied him before men, he would deny before his Father in heaven (Matt. 10:33). And this man believed that he regularly denied Christ.

When I pressed him on this, he explained that his grown daughter, not a Christian, was involved in a long-term, sexual, cohabiting relationship outside of marriage, and that she had a little boy through that union. Guilt-ridden, he told me his daughter knows what her parents think about the morality of marriage and sexuality, but that he does not always turn to the topic when they are together. He also explained he regularly visits his daughter, and that they have “normal” father/daughter conversations, often filled with laughter. And I learned, that he is involved, almost constantly, in the life of his grandson. What this man didn’t realize is that he was living out life heroically. He was a Christian model for parenting and grandparenting, but he felt as though he was denying Christ because every conversation with his daughter was not a sparring match over biblical texts on sexual morality. This is the sad result of the kind of adversary culture, in which the church in our zeal to defend the faith has sometimes unintentionally presented the picture that our interactions with unbelievers ought to be constant arguments. This is not how God dealt with us.

In truth, sometimes people turn around as the result of losing an argument, but I rarely see that. Usually, a word is strategically spoken, bearing witness to Christ, and then the one giving that word has the patience to wait for the Spirit to apply the word. As Jesus taught us, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how” (Mark 4:26–27). This seems too slow and plodding for some of us. We want to win an argument, see our children saved, and then move on with our lives. That is not, though, how God works. Many years ago, I experienced a broken relationship with a friend (as much my fault, or more, than his), but, at the time, he would not respond to notes I had sent apologizing for my part in the disagreement.

In talking to a wise older man, I said how haunted I was by guilt in this unresolved conflict. The older man said, “I think the problem is that you are a narrative thinker and you want narrative closure here. You want a plot resolution, and you just have to realize that your life is not a book. You may not ever see ‘closure’ here, and you should trust God with the plot.” He was exactly right. Almost as soon as I saw this, and said to God that I accepted the fact that I may never see this friendship reconciled, my old-and-now-new friend contacted me, with apologies accepted and apologies of his own to offer. That is not a prescription for forcing God to act, just the reverse. In my case, though, I think God wanted me to crucify my need for a life of “plotline consistency” before I would experience the grace of resolution.

Most people—including prodigal family members—wrestle with the gospel, as all of us do, for long periods of time before they walk toward Christ, if they do. In many cases, the precipitating factor is not a lost argument but instead exactly what it was in the parable of the prodigal: a crisis.

A group of researchers some time ago did an experiment in which they read the parable of the prodigal son to groups in various places around the world: Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, North America. The researchers would then ask people in each of these settings to recount back for them the story. There was one detail that people in the developing world always mentioned that those in the developed nations always left out: the famine. The son, you will remember, took his inheritance, went to the far country where he spent and squandered it. He only “came to himself” and came home after, Jesus said, “a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need” (Luke 15:14). Those in affluent contexts didn’t remember this part of the story because it seemed to them to be a minor detail. For those who lived regularly with the threat of famine, this seemed to be a major part of the story.56 It is indeed. When dealing with those who are wandering away from the faith, we must recognize that sometimes they will not start evaluating the deep questions of their lives until they find themselves in a situation in which they don’t know what to do. We must be the sort of parents and grandparents and churches that have kept open every possible connection: so that our prodigals will know how to get back home, and know that we will meet them at the road, already planning a homecoming party.

That requires, though, a death to self. The pain over a wayward child is real, and ought to be present in the life driven by the Spirit. Jesus wept over Jerusalem (Luke 19:42–44). The apostle Paul said that he wished he could himself be sent to hell and cut off from Christ “for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh” (Rom. 9:3). This pain should not be confused, though, with our carnal demand that we display to the world around us what “blessed” and “successful” families we have. In many cases, the real tragedy in a family with rebellious children is not that their parents hurt for them, but that their parents are embarrassed by them. If “good” children were merely the result of technique, then we could boast of our own righteousness through the lives of our children. It is not.

The same is true in the opposite situation. If we think that something is deficient or shameful about a family with prodigals, then we must conclude that something is deficient or shameful about the Family of God. Families, though, are not about us and our presentation to the world. Sometimes what it may take for a child to see the cross in the lives of his parents is to hear those parents say, “No matter what you do. No matter where you go. You will always be our child, and we will always be glad to say so. We may not like what you are doing, but we are not ashamed of you.” This is, after all, the same sort of kindness our Father showed to us, the kindness that brought us to repentance in the first place (Rom. 2:4).

Even in happy endings of such situations, rarely is there an obviously definitive darkness-to-light transition, no more than it is for any of us. God forgives people immediately upon faith and repentance. He then spends the rest of our lives shaping us and forming us, pulling us away from old habits and affections toward new ones. God is infinitely patient and gentle and kind with us. We must be as well. The son or daughter who, for example, has spent time in the far country of substance addiction, might suddenly have no more desire for the drugs he used to do, but this is unlikely. Usually, what ensues is a long struggle for holiness, often with some knocks and backslidings along the way. We should not despair over this, nor should we constantly hold over the head of a repentant child what it was he did “to us.” If we really believe the gospel of the cross, then all of that is crucified and behind us. We should instead show patience and the same sort of lack of remembrance of old hurts that God himself has shown to us. “As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us,” the psalmist sang of God (Ps. 103:12).

In the first of the Narnia stories, the brother Edmund commits mutiny against Aslan the King and against his siblings, allying himself with the evil White Witch, drawn along by her hypnotizing Turkish Delight. Eventually, of course, Edmund comes back. The other children see the lion walking and talking with the erstwhile rebel, though they cannot hear the conversation. Aslan approaches them, with Edmund. “Here is your brother,” Aslan said. “And there is no need to talk to him about what is past.”57 That is all of our story. We are all Edmund. We should then show the same grace to those who have disappointed or sinned against us, even—maybe especially—if they are our own children.

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Sometimes Christians speak of being “pro-family” and of having “strong family values” as though this would be, to everyone, a positive picture of Christianity. For many, though, the idea of “family” is terrifying. Many people have found their deepest suffering, even profound trauma, at the hands of family members. One woman who had been through profound suffering at the hands of her stepfather told me that she didn’t think she could ever be a Christian, and the cross is the reason why. She heard the gospel preached, about the account of Jesus crying out, “Father, forgive them, they do not know what they do” (Luke 23:34). If this is Christianity, she told me, she wanted nothing to do with it. She knew what she had experienced, and she could not simply wave that away as though it were nothing. I understand what she meant. If I thought that were the gospel, I wouldn’t believe it either. But it’s not.

Many throughout the centuries have sought to protect the reputation of God by downplaying his wrath. To some degree, the impulse here is good, because many have a false view of God as an angry, sullen, punitive Deity, not as the God of overflowing love Jesus revealed to us. God’s wrath is not a temper tantrum. On the other hand, those who would point us away from the wrath of God do so at the peril of eclipsing God’s own revelation of himself, as holy and just, the One who “does not leave the guilty unpunished” (Exod. 34:7 niv). At the cross, the apostle Paul wrote, God “condemned sin in the flesh” (Rom. 8:3). This is important for us to know, especially those who have survived awful things in their backgrounds.

The skeptical woman I talked to was right in her intuitions. She was not vengeful. She knew, though, that someone who would cover over what had happened to her is someone unjust. God agrees with her. He embedded in our consciences the understanding that the one who “justifies the wicked” is evil, as is the one who “condemns the righteous” (Prov. 17:15). Indeed, a major obstacle to belief in God is precisely what this woman senses: the fear that many acts of horrifying injustice get covered over and are never brought to justice. That ought to trouble us even more than it does. Our innate sense of justice, and disposition to oppose injustice, is part of our most basic humanity, not due to the Fall but due to our creation in the image of God. This is true even of those who would claim to be horrified by the idea of a wrathful God.

The Civil War-era song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is direct with biblical imagery of God “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored” and wielding a “terrible, swift sword” against the evil of slavery. This is important because the Americans singing the song were reminding themselves that slavery was not merely a matter of regional conflict, but of moral accountability, an accountability that would have begged for resolution even if the war had not succeeded. Likewise, the civil rights movement grounded its non-violent resistance to Jim Crow wickedness in the same terms, with Martin Luther King Jr. speaking against the violence of the Alabama police forces by saying: “We will leave them standing before their God and the world splattered with the blood and reeking with the stench of our Negro brothers.” He was pointing to a Judgment Seat where evil is held to account. He was saying what, in the same era, the folk-singer Odetta would sing to the terrorist forces of the Ku Klux Klan: “You may run on for a long time, but, let me tell you: God Almighty’s going to cut you down.” All of this is grounded in the Scriptures themselves, both Old and New Testaments; God does not turn a blind eye to evil. If anything, the cross reaffirms that.

Sadly, this hurt woman’s view of the gospel probably came from professing Christians who wrongly represent God as she described. To our shame, many do this especially as it relates to the most hidden, and most horrifying, acts of physical or psychic horror against defenseless children. How many times have we heard of silence against some shocking act of the abuse of a child or of a spouse or someone else being covered over by religious people, sometimes even churches, because the predator is “forgiven by the blood of Christ”? This sort of cheap grace is not the good news of Jesus Christ.

Wherever there is the abuse of the powerless by those in power over them, the church should demand accountability. Where such misdeeds are violations of the civil law, the church should immediately alert those with the commission, given by God, to “carry out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (Rom. 13:4): that is, the civil authorities. Moreover, the church should do everything possible to see to it that predators do not use the spiritual cover of the name of Christ to commit their horrors. That includes the disclosure of any potential act of harm, and diligent cooperation with investigative bodies any time there is the suspicion of any harm to a child or a spouse or anyone else. Even as we do so, we know there are people walking about, maybe even in our own pews, who assume that because they were never caught in their physical or sexual or psychological abuse that this means they have escaped accountability. We should be the ones reminding such people that there is “nothing hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light” (Luke 8:17), if not in this life, then in the one to come. At the cross, God’s wrath and God’s love come together; they do not cancel each other out.

The late Anglican pastor John Stott argued that he could never believe in God were it not for the cross. As he put it, in a world of such horrors—burned children and battered women and concentration camps and genocides—how could one believe in a God who was agnostic of all of that? Stott wrote that he had visited temples in Asia in which he stood before the statues of a placid, remote-looking Buddha, with arms crossed, eyes closed, softly smiling. His imagination was forced to turn away and to turn instead “to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me!”58 Indeed, this is the God who is there. At the cross, Jesus aligned himself with those who are abused and maligned and powerless and ashamed. He stood with us, or hanged with us, there. And in that powerless act, he also delivered the deathblow to the reptilian power behind the evil every one of us has experienced. Jesus is not distant from your pain; he is crucified by it—with it and with you.

If you’ve experienced awful things, though, you may still wonder what the way forward is for you. How can you, you might ask, come to worship God as Father if you have never seen anything in a father but anger or violence or predation? It may well be, though, that you are being prepared by God to be the most likely to communicate to others what it means to have God as Father. You know what God is not like. And you may well long for, wish for, in the midst of your pain, a parent who loves you, accepts you, protects you. Frederick Buechner wrote once that Christianity is mostly wishful thinking. By this, he didn’t mean that Christianity isn’t true; quite the contrary. He wrote that even the part of us that, when something unspeakably horrible has been done, longs for something like a judgment or a hell is, he wrote, “reflect [ing] the wish that somewhere the score is being kept.” The wish for a Father who is not like the horror you have known is not merely your imagination. You know the difference between what should be, and what has been for you. “Sometimes wishing is the wings the truth comes on,” Buechner concluded. “Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it.”59

What has happened to us in our past, of course, shapes us, and that’s especially true when terrible things have happened in what is to be the primal place of safety: the family. Some have concluded that this means that their lives are permanently, maybe even eternally, wrecked by the fear or the shame or the anger that has come out of what has been endured. Again, remember that you follow a crucified Christ. We cannot know why God permitted you to undergo what you have lived through. There are no answers for such mysteries, and it probably wouldn’t help us much even if we had all of the answers to our questions of “why.” Sometimes people misunderstand the famous passage “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28). They wrongly assume that this is just another way of saying “Everything happens for a reason,” or “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” No. The Scripture does not say that everything that happens to you is good, by no means. The Scripture says that, in all things, God is at work for your good, to conform you to Christ. Crucifixion is not good. And yet, even in the cross, God was at work, turning evil against itself, defeating it with its own artillery. You cannot know why you’ve endured what you’ve endured. You can know, though, that you survived. You bear wounds, yes, and they make up part of who you are. When you first encounter the Lord Jesus at your resurrection, notice, though, his hands and his side. They still bear the marks of Roman spikes and spears (John 20:24–29). And yet, he is no victim. He is the triumphant Lion of Judah, the One who is the heir of the universe. In him so are you.

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So between now and then, how does one cope with the wounds of a family trauma? Perhaps you have the misunderstanding mentioned before of what forgiveness means. Forgiveness in light of the cross does not at all mean that sins are excused. As a matter of fact, the cross ensures what God had already said: every sin and every injustice will be judged either at the cross or in hell. Part of the confusion about what it means to forgive is that some would say that the gospel means we should forgive everyone, while others would say, no, that we are to forgive as God does: those who repent and apologize. The disagreement here is not so much over what the Scripture commands of us, namely to forgive in order that we may be forgiven (Matt. 6:14), but rather over what we mean when we say “forgiveness.” Those who would say we should not forgive apart from the person who has harmed us repenting are including the idea of reconciliation in forgiveness, rather than mere nonretaliation. I would agree with them that you should not necessarily reconcile with someone who has harmed you. For one thing, depending on the circumstances, such a reconciliation could be harmful to you or to other people. Or, sometimes, the cost of the reconciliation, from the other person, is essentially that you help cover up whatever happened. This, obviously, you cannot do both for the sake of integrity of conscience and out of love of neighbor for those who could be next to be harmed. The Bible tells us to “live peaceably with all,” but qualifies this with “if possible, so far as it depends on you” (Rom. 12:18). Sometimes this is not possible, because it does not all depend upon you.

Forgiveness, biblically speaking, does not, in my view, always result in reconciliation. Yes, God is reconciled to us when we repent and believe, coming into union with Christ. But, even before that, God is “kind to the ungrateful and the evil” (Luke 6:35). Forgiveness includes, even when not including reconciliation, a refusal to demand vigilante justice—to see to it that sins against me are avenged by me. That does not mean that justice is not done. When we are persecuted or reviled, we are told to “never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay’” (Rom. 12:19). This does not mean that one does not seek justice, only that we do not “repay . . . evil for evil” (Rom. 12:17). Calling the police when there has been a crime is not repaying evil for evil. Keeping one’s child away from the home of an abusive grandparent is not repaying evil for evil. A church disciplining a neglectful husband or father is not repaying evil for evil.

Many believe that they are free from their pasts, simply because they do not feel angry toward those who have failed or hurt them. Sometimes this is because the pain itself has left the person numb. You might be angrier than you think you are, with your anger submerged deep within. First of all, note that anger itself is not a sin; personal retaliation is. Often, anger is not contradictory to being merciful to others but a part of being merciful to others.

A counselor told me that the thing he most often hears from those who were severely neglected or even abused by their parents is, “Well, they did the best that they knew how.” This sounds commendable, and even spiritual, but in most of these cases, it is not forgiveness, but self-protection. The person doesn’t want to face up to the fact that he or she had a parent who would be so unloving and cruel, so it is easier to rationalize away what happened. This does not, though, lead to healing, because it is hiding from the reality behind an idealized image.

If you’ve been through a disappointing or traumatic background, though, even a deep trauma, you need not hide that dark reality from yourself. In the cross, God has displayed and absorbed the scariest possibilities of fallen human existence. You cannot go back and undo the past. Sometimes those who wish that they had not lived through scary or traumatic family situations will replay the scenarios over and over again, asking, “What could I have done differently?” or “What if this detail had been different? Might I have avoided this catastrophe then?” Sometimes this is even in terms of blaming themselves for things they know, at the rational level, were not their fault (such as a child blaming himself for his parents’ divorce or a wife blaming herself for her husband’s affair). You can grieve over your past, but you cannot change it. You can also, though, know that while you are shaped by your past, you are not defined by it. Whoever has hurt you has really hurt you, but they have not defeated you. You have survived. Your life is hidden in Christ. Your future is not that of a victim but of a joint-heir with Christ. The poet Christian Wyman writes of the “mild merciful amnesia” of his life being interrupted by the realizations of what he has endured in the past. “How is it now, like ruins unearthed by ruin, my childhood should rise?” he writes. “Lord, suffer me to sing these wounds by which I am made and marred.”60 You may well feel marred by your wounds, but listen deeply into your life and see how you also have been made by them. Sing the wounds. By that I don’t mean to sing them away with cheeriness, but sing them the way Jesus did Psalm 22 from the cross—with honest lament at the seeming absence of God while also clinging to the flashes of reminders of his presence.

The cross-shaped vision of reality means that the church must know how to lament, including when we talk about family. We can easily sing together in worship with the prophet Jeremiah, “Great is thy faithfulness” (Lam. 3:23 kjv), but hardly any other passage of the book. Who can conceive of singing in a worship service, again with Jeremiah: “You have wrapped yourself with a cloud so that no prayer can pass through. You have made us scum and garbage among the peoples” (Lam. 3:43–45)? Instead we often practice a forced cheeriness that is part of the ad hoc liturgy of many evangelical churches. As the service begins a grinning pastor or worship leader chirps, “It’s great to see you today!” or “We’re glad you’re here!” As the worship service closes, the same toothy visage says, “See you next Sunday! Have a great week!” We tell ourselves this is because we are “joyful in the Lord.” And yet, many hurting people wonder if the sort of giddiness and happiness that we associate with life in Christ has passed them by. People—including those who have been abandoned or hurt by those closest to them—assume that to be “Christian” is to learn to smile through it all. The cross speaks a different word, though.

Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matt. 5:4). In the kingdom, we receive comfort in a different way than that prescribed by modern culture, certainly not by pretending we’re happy. We are comforted when we see our brokenness, our sin, our desperate circumstances, and we grieve, weep, and cry out for deliverance. That’s why James, the brother of our Lord, seems so out of step with the contemporary Christian ethos. “Be wretched and mourn and weep,” he wrote. “Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom” (James 4:9). What would happen to a church leader who ended a worship service with, “Have a wretched day!” or “I hope your week is full of crying!” It would sound crazy. Jesus always does sound crazy to us, at first (John 7:15, 20). The truth is, though, few of us are as happy as we seem to be. Maybe the best thing we have to offer to the family is more tears, more cries for help, more confession of sin, more prayers of desperation that are too deep for words. Maybe then the lonely and the desperate among us will see that the gospel has not come for the happy but for the brokenhearted; not for the well but for the sick; not for the found but for the lost.

* * * *

Maybe, though, you have not so much lived through trauma, but you can look back on your family life and see the pain of regrets that you have, for things you have done or things you’ve left undone.

A few years ago, I felt my knees buckle as I knelt down during the closing hymn at the church where I preached at the time, to receive a trembling little four-year-old boy who took my hand and said, “Can you please pray that my Mama and Daddy don’t get a divorce.” I stifled tears as I heard in his voice, and saw in his face, the sense of powerlessness he felt. I steamed internally with self-righteous anger at these parents. How could they, I asked myself, put their own bickering—whatever it was about—over the security and identity of their own defenseless child? But then I felt a sense of horror hitting me not long after when I realized how, in the frenetic “busyness” of my ministry, I hadn’t been home to pray with my own sons at dinner or at their bedtime in over a week. I was a failure. I needed repentance, and sought it, but I needed more than a course correction; I needed mercy.

Perhaps some of you look back on a parent, now dead, that you wish you had told that you loved. Maybe you look back on words you wish you could take back. Maybe you broke your wedding vows in an affair, or in abandoning your spouse. Maybe you left your children, or left them to the side as you poured your whole identity into your work. You cannot undo the past either. You can, if the family members you have disappointed or hurt are still living, apologize and ask for forgiveness. Do not, though, expect that they must immediately forgive you. A woman who had broken up her marriage with an affair with another man apologized to her grown children for what they were forced to live through in their childhood and then, when they didn’t immediately accept her apology, went into a rage, quoting Scripture at them about their lack of forgiveness. This displays not repentance, but entitlement. We cannot micromanage the spiritual formation of other people’s hearts. We can ask for forgiveness, but then we must give them the room to extend that forgiveness, or not.

It may be that your past, whether as the one hurt or the one hurting others, leads you to conclude that you are doomed to repeat all of your old patterns or all the old patterns that were imposed on you. You may look at your family and wonder, as one who has lived through brokenness, if you are predestined to break their home now. Such is not the case. Perhaps you feel, even now, the pull to walk away. Perhaps it seems too difficult, especially if you haven’t had good models, to be a faithful brother or sister within the church, a faithful husband or wife, a faithful father or mother, a faithful grandfather or grandmother, a faithful son or daughter. The pull itself is no sign that you are doomed to dissolve the family. It is instead a call to spiritual warfare, to cry out for the Spirit, to walk in the way of the cross. It is a call to exercise, as J. R. R. Tolkien once wrote to his son who was growing cynical about the state of the church, “the virtue of loyalty, which indeed only becomes a virtue when one is under pressure to desert it.”61

But again, you cannot go back and undo the past, even if you were to reconcile with an ex-spouse or start speaking to an estranged child or drop the lawsuit against your parents over your grandmother’s will. Sometimes what leaves you paralyzed is the guilt and remorse and regret you feel looking backward on how you have fallen short of your duties to others in your family, and even how, in your selfishness, you have robbed yourself of lasting joy. Look to the cross.

That is far more painful than it sounds. When the Israelites were in the wilderness, wandering between the land of slavery and the land of promise, disobedient to the God who delivered them, they were cursed with an attack from fiery serpents. In their pain and dying, their leader, the prophet Moses, intervened with the Lord, who provided a vehicle of healing for them in a bronze serpent aloft on a pole. In order to be healed, they looked to the very image of what afflicted them: a snake, high and lifted up before them (Num. 21:4–9). Jesus said, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14–15). In order to be delivered, we must look to that which frightens us most, to that which exposes us for who we really are, in all of our sin and all our brokenness. We look to the crucified Christ, bearing for us the curse we have brought on ourselves, and upon him. That’s true in every aspect of our lives, but is perhaps especially painful and difficult when it deals with our failures within our families, revealing as these often do the vast distance between who we are and who we pretend to be.

As Fleming Rutledge has rightly noted, one sometimes assumes that he, by his own power, comes to repentance and then God’s grace is activated. In so doing, this person forgets that it is by God’s grace that awareness of sin is awakened in the first place. “When this recognition dawns on us, we are already standing within God’s grace,” she wrote. “Were it not for the mercy of God surrounding us, we would have no perspective from which to view sin, for we would be entirely subject to it,” Rutledge writes. “That is the reason for affirming that wherever sin is unmasked and confessed, God’s redemptive power is already present and acting.”62 This is indeed the case. If you are longing for deliverance from the hurts you have caused, or the hurt you endure, you are not waiting on God’s grace to find you. God’s grace is already there. As the wise man told my guilt-stricken empty-nester friend, “The Lord redeems all of that.”