We Cannot Control the Ones We Love

This article is by Bryan Halferty:

One of the most annoying parts of being human is how few things we can actually control. I can’t control how quickly my retirement grows and I can’t, really, keep it from shrinking. I can’t control other drivers on the road, often infuriatingly so. Then there is weather and coworkers and a neighbor’s dogs and on and on. The world is wind and none of us are God.

I, in complete transparency, wish I could control my kids. There it is. I’ve written and deleted that sentence for about a half-hour now, but saying it plainly is perhaps the best plan. Don’t worry, my kids are not cutting loose on malt liquor and dice in some alley somewhere — they’re twelve and nine. They are not anywhere close to “out of control.” And neither am I some tyrant of a father that demands a scared soldier’s obedience.

When my daughter mutters under her breath “I’m so dumb,” while we’re working on her math, I tell her, “Babe, it’s ok. Let’s take a few deep breaths and a short break.” Right there, at that moment, I wish I could control her. I want to keep her head from dropping on the table. I want to prevent heavy, desperate sighs. But I cannot control my kids. I can form and corral and discipline and reward and offer an example, but I cannot dictate the course of my child’s life. I’m convinced that this, in large and small ways, is every parent’s pain.

For years there have been reports put out by polling companies that all telling the same story: children are leaving their parent’s faith. Catholics, Mainliners, Baptists, evangelicals; none are immune. And if the pollsters are right, it’s happening with increasing speed. The frequency and redundancy of these reports can create a pseudo-inoculation, preventing the experience of the disease, while the disease goes on in strength. Soon, numbers like “32%” or “2/3s” get relegated to the stacks of some left brain inventory and are left forgotten.

I’ve been attempting to fight this inoculation. I’ve started imagining a father who hears his son say, “I’m done with the church.” The son drives off in the dark, music loud, oblivious to the cut he gave his father. The father then putzes around his woodshop, wondering if he was too hard when his boy was young. There are others that I imagine as well. They are mothers whose prayers are soaked in questions. They are daughters who ache for God, without knowing. We parents cannot control our kids — sometimes that is a snarky joke at a cocktail party and other times that is weeping and prayed-over pain.

Every night my wife and I try to read and pray with our son and daughter. I have memorized a part of scripture that I sing to my son while I hug him and “poof” he’s ready for sleep. My daughter needs more time. I climb onto the bed and lay on top of the covers, bartering with her about how many minutes I will stay. We lay in the dark and I talk to her about my day. I tell her I love her and that she is beautiful and that she is safe. I do this in a thousand ways and over and over again.

I guess I’m realizing, even as I write, that this is what parent’s offer their children: a prayer, a quirky scripture song, and our presence in the dark. None of us are much like God but in this way we are. Like God, we cannot control the ones we love.

Healing and Childhood Nostalgia

For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited. -C.S. Lewis

Paradoxically, as we become more and more like Christ we become more uniquely our own true self. -David Benner

It could have been that I wanted to connect to a more ‘street’ crowd upon moving to Tacoma. Or maybe it was watching my youth flee as the trudge towards 40 got closer. Most likely it was a mixture of these and other reasons I’m unaware of. Regardless, at 37 I started skateboarding again.

When I was fourteen I told my dad that I no longer planned on going to college, I would become a professional skateboarder within five years. My small crew and I would take the 252 bus from Kirkland to Seattle every Saturday. We’d skate the Seattle Center park and then roam around downtown, looking for a spot with a curb or a few stairs and no security guards. We’d shoot videos of ourselves and collect bruises like some would baseball cards. I never got sponsored, and not even close to the dream of “Pro.”

Within a year, increasingly destructive drugs would lure me away from the dream, making any long term plans with skateboarding a stoned reverie. Then, after getting clean enough to convince my parents that I was completely clean, I started running track and cross country. The skateboard was buried in a closet somewhere.

There are some things you forget and when someone tries to remind you, you look at them as if they are mad, as if they are talking about another person. Then there are other things. Things you never forget but are buried under a busy life and middle-age responsibility. But then you hear a conversation at a coffee shop, or maybe it’s just a kid walking down the street, or it’s something simple like the smell of rain and you’re reminded of what you were once close to but never quite reached. It conjures joy and ache and longing. The feeling can become destructive, sabotaging a decent life, or it can offer healing.

Just over a year ago I took a skateboard with me to San Diego. I was meeting with other pastors, learning from some that had written books. The second day of my trip I planned on being late to a meeting. I booked an Uber that dropped me off at a skate spot that I’d found. After a half hour of almost landing things that I wanted to land, but couldn’t, I grabbed my phone. The batteries were dead. I had a rough idea where the meeting was so I aimed my board in that direction and started pushing.

I rode fast down hills with the San Diego air gushing past me and bobbed through the downtown business class crowds. Phoneless, I asked for directions multiple times. I considered not going to the meeting. I thought about looking for a spot that had a curb, or a few stairs. I had, by some act of grace, right there in downtown San Diego, become both 14 and 39. I was the kid with the dream, but without the noose of drugs and the emotional wounds that would strangle the soul. I was a healed version of my younger self.

As a pastor there are many things I want to tell you to do. Read your Bible. Confess your sins. Pray. Gather as a community. As a response to grace, these practices can form you to look more and more like Jesus. I’m wondering, though, if I might recommend something else. Not skateboarding per se but the uncovering of what life has taken away. Follow the trail of nostalgia and longing and you’ll find it. It’s often buried under busy-ness and coping mechanisms. If you find it, it may tell you to show up late to a meeting. Like a neglected child, it will tell you that it too is important and needs to be listened to. I recommend listening. It may just form you, more and more into a healed version of yourself.