In your church, how many hurting parents are there? Some are quite visible, with kids who have rejected their parents’ authority and instruction and have, as a result, become “messed up.” Other parents may be living with deep wounds which the congregation knows nothing about. As you look over the parents in your church, are you sensitive to what’s going on between them and their children ?
Perhaps you, as a hurting parent, know more about the pain of raising children than anyone you know.
In searching for a book that would effectively help Christian leaders minister to parents experiencing this common crisis, we chose Hurting Parents (Zondervan Publishing, 1980) for two reasons. First, Hurting Parents doesn’t dwell on the roots of parent-child conflict. It doesn’t focus on the “What did we do wrong?” questions; rather, it offers understanding and direction for parents who are asking, “Where do we go from here?” Second, the hook is written by a parent well-acquainted with firsthand family conflict.
In the uncut manuscript, Margie M. Lewis shares her own story about a son who left home without a word, moved hundreds of miles away, and rejected any pleas to come home. In our excerpt we cautiously omitted this section in favor of a host of illustrations the author shared about other parents who were hurting even more than herself, and the insights they found through prayer and fellowship in caring communities.
Pain seems to be part of the job requirement for most parents. Parenthood begins with the gripping pain of labor and delivery. It continues as mothers and fathers vicariously experience every pain and hurt their children face-from scraped knees and bloody noses to disease and even death. As their offspring grow, parents suffer the agony of watching them blunder through the initial stages of independence. And those parents who survive the physical and emotional cuts and bruises of childhood and adolescence feel another kind of pain when they finally cut the umbilical cord of adulthood and see their grown-up child step out on his or her own. All these pains are normal; they come with the territory of parenthood.
But many parents know a different, deeper kind of hurt. In short, hurting parents are those who feel they have failed at their divinely appointed task of Christian parenthood. They’ve attempted to fulfill their biblical injunction to “train up a child in the way he should go.” They’ve worked to build family unity on a firm foundation of Christian faith and to teach their families love and obedience toward God.
These parents are crushed when their children cast off those family ties. The hurt may set in when a son leaves home without any word of explanation. Or when a sobbing fifteen-year-old daughter admits her pregnancy. The pain may begin with a child’s involvement in a non-Christian lifestyle- drugs, a strange religious cult, living together before marriage. A high schooler may resist going to church with claims of boredom or lack of relevance. An undergrad exposed to the new intellectual atmosphere of college may question or even feel he’s outgrown his parents’ beliefs. The hurt could be prompted by an announcement of homosexuality, or simply by growing, adolescent rebellion.
The crisis point varies, but the results are always the same-parents hurt with the frustration of what they see as their own failure. And they judge themselves guilty with the constant question: What did I do wrong?
After scores of interviews with parents from all parts of the country, and after numerous discussions with pastors, counselors, and Christian psychologists, I’m convinced that the hurting parent problem is common to every church and community.
Ministers’ families are often among the hardest hit, perhaps because preachers’ kids are held up as examples for others to follow. Most of us know of ministers whose children don’t practice what their fathers preach. Consider the frustration and pain of pastors and pastors’ wives who see their children ignore, reject, and even trample on the standards and beliefs to which they as parents have dedicated their lives. In their hurt, they more than anyone must wonder what they did wrong.
Yet it’s not my purpose to answer the “Why-did-this-happen-to-us?” questions. Hurting parents- ministers as well as lay persons-don’t need to dwell on mistakes they may have made; they need to ask, “Where do I go from here? What can be done now to redeem the situation? How can I win my son or my daughter back to our family and to God?”
Isolation of Shame
Many hurting parents have talked to me about the isolation of shame. Their reasons have varied from adult children whose drug-dealing made state-wide headlines to a high school freshman’s conspicuous absence from his parents’ pew on Sunday morning because he was bored with church.
Most of us who have children are victims of parental egos. Our children make up such an important part of our lives that we begin to draw much of our own identities from their lives and behavior. Their successes and accomplishments become feathers in our parental caps. Their mistakes, failures, and troubles become reason for our own very personal shame. And that shame is a common, understandable yet troublesome trap into which many hurting parents fall.
One respected educator-counselor I talked with described shame as a vicious cycle. “Something can be done about guilt, a wrong committed,” he said. “But people suffering from shame are going round and round in isolation and alienation-with a lack of language to express their true feelings.”
A perfect example of this is the story of a widow who was forced to raise her children without a father. When her oldest son got kicked out of her church’s denominational college, she withdrew in her embarrassment from the fellowship of her Christian friends at church and in her neighborhood.
“But even in hiding, the shame kept growing inside me,” she said. “I couldn’t reach out for help and no one on the outside could reach in. I was literally a prisoner behind walls of my own making.”
This mother’s humiliation isolated her from everyone who could or would have tried to help her deal with her family’s problem. It focused her hurt and attention inward and prevented her from seeing the real nature of the problem, let alone finding the remedy.
In other cases, parental shame has directly interfered with possible solutions. I recently heard of one wealthy family who made a great pretense of respectability in their community. Their married son went through a messy, painful divorce and caused his parents great embarrassment. His disastrous marriage resulted in such emotional trauma that he committed himself to a state institution for mental and emotional help. His parents saw his decision as the ultimate disgrace for them and the family, so they used their influence to check him out and bring him home. The son tried again and again to find professional help, but each time his parents snatched him home again to live “as if everything was fine.”
However, the biggest danger in the shame trap is not that humiliation is self-centered, that it isolates a person from help, or even that it may interfere with possible solutions. Shame wreaks the greatest damage on the parent-child relationship.
Humiliation acts as one more wedge between the two parties. If a son senses his father’s shame, any guilt, anger, or feeling of alienation can be greatly compounded. In some cases, a parent’s obvious humiliation actually serves to reinforce the problem-perhaps even acting as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The most graphic example of this was shared with me by a young woman named Karen. She kept her abortion when a seventeen-year-old a secret for two years, hoping to spare her parents deep hurt.
“But my guilt grew heavier and heavier,” she said, “until I couldn’t carry it alone anymore; I had to tell someone. Just deciding to tell my folks gave me the first sweet feeling of release I’d felt for months. I knew telling them was going to be the hardest thing I’d ever done. But I was sure they would be relieved to know it was over and I was willing to confess to them.
“I wanted to break the news gently. But there was no way. So I just blurted it out and tried to explain.
“My mother acted the martyr. She spent the next two days hiding in her bedroom. The third day when our paths crossed in the hallway she exploded. She called me a whore. ‘I can’t even stand to look at you,’ she muttered as she fled back to her room and slammed the door.
“I was crushed. Didn’t she know I’d suffered enough? I had already felt forsaken by God. I couldn’t live with my own guilt. And now my own mother couldn’t stand to face me. I had worked up my courage to make a confession to the only people I felt could ever understand my feelings. But their shame overshadowed everything.
“From that moment I hardened my heart, stiffened my neck, and said, ‘World, here I come!’ I made a determined decision to take a plunge into the depths of sin and I didn’t surface again for years.”
Stories such as Karen’s, and conversations with people from all walks of life from all across the country, have confirmed in my mind that shame is one of the most common and dangerous reactions hurting parents experience. The emotion and isolation it causes must be faced and overcome.
Remedy of Fellowship
Annie Mueller was a model daughter and junior high student. She made the honor roll every term, won awards as a debater, took leadership in numerous school and church functions, and wholeheartedly engaged in any and every family activity. Her parents had reason to feel proud.
But within months of the time Annie started high school everything changed. She began bucking authority at school and at home. She joined the staff of a radical underground newspaper school officials had banned. Her grades dropped. She skipped church unless she was forced to go.
As the months passed, Annie became a stranger to her parents, especially to her father, Eric Mueller, who was a family counselor by profession. For some reason Eric couldn’t understand, his little girl had suffered a terrible Jekyl and Hyde transformation
Annie was caught smoking pot in her father’s car, parked in front of her school. Eric suspected his daughter was experimenting with other drugs. And he was frustrated with his own inability to deal with the situation. But he wasn’t genuinely worried until he found the letter.
He found it lying open on the living room coffee table. Eric didn’t even know whose letter it was until he read the salutation, “Dear Annie,” and discovered the writer was Carl Monroe, the son of a local minister friend. Eric knew Carl had been on drugs during high school, but he’d straightened out and was attending college several hundred miles away.
For three handwritten pages Carl lectured Annie on the danger of drugs. The convincing arguments encouraged Eric as he began to read. But by the time Eric reached the end of the letter, he realized Carl’s warnings were a direct response to a previous letter from Annie-a letter in which Annie had evidently tried to impress Carl with stories of her drug experiences. As the realization of his daughter’s involvement began to sink in, so did a soul-wrenching fear.
In the midst of his emotions Eric felt a sense of gratitude toward Carl Monroe. Carl represented hope-a single voice of sanity to which Annie might listen. Eric decided to call Pastor Monroe and thank him for his son’s letter and concern. Besides, he thought, I need someone to talk to who can understand what I I’m if going through-so1lzeo11e who s felt what I feel.
Rev. Monroe answered his phone and the two exchanged greetings. When Eric started telling about the letter, he could feel his friend go cold- even over the telephone lines. The minister hadn’t realized Eric had known about Carl’s drug trouble, and he was obviously too embarrassed to discuss the subject. He cut off the conversation.
In the following days and weeks communication between Annie and her dad deteriorated to nothing outside of an occasional confrontation and shouting match. Annie finally announced she was leaving home to move in with some high school roommates. During the argument that ensued Annie paused and asked accusingly, “You don’t like me any more, do you?”
Eric glared at his daughter and answered, “You’re right. I don’t like you. I hate you for what you’re doing to your mother and me.”
Annie smiled a little sadly. “Dad,” she said, “when you say you hate me, at least you’re being honest. And I appreciate that.”
Those words ripped into Eric’s heart. He retreated to his study, closed the door, and sank to his chair in utter defeat. “For years as a counselor I had objectively dealt with the problems of other people, other families,” he said. “But I couldn’t take the realization that I’d failed as a father.”
Eric emerged from his study a discouraged, beaten man. “I’ll never speak on families again,” he told his wife as they prepared for bed. “If a family counselor can’t deal with his own family, he doesn’t have anything worth telling others.”
Ten minutes after Eric made that pronouncement the phone rang. The pastor of a large church asked Eric if he would be able to speak at an interdenominational conference his church planned to sponsor. Instinctively, Eric accepted the invitation. The pastor promised to send more details and the conversation was over before Eric realized he’d broken his new vow.
In the weeks before the conference, Annie moved out. And Eric vowed anew that this would be his last address as a family expert.
The first day of the conference went smoothly. Eric spoke twice on the subject “What is Love?” But on the second day Annie kept invading his thoughts. He began to feel a prodding, “Get up and tell these people about your problems with your daughter.” The longer he sat, the more sure Eric felt that God wanted him to share his hurt.
But I can’t do that, he told himself. What’ll they think if they know the truth? Everything I’ve said at this conference will go right down the drain.
Finally, reluctantly, Eric gave in. He faced the crowd and began to speak. He had no idea what he was going to say when he started; but the words just came. He told of the breakdown in communication with his daughter. He confessed he had no answers. And he admitted his frustration, his discouragement, and his hurt.
When Eric sat down another man stood up to address the group. Then another and another. For the next three hours broken people stood to admit honestly their problems and their needs. Dozens of parents like Eric rose to confess their own and their families’ hurts. Men in high denominational positions admitted they had always tried to project a self-sufficient, together image, then told of long-hidden family heartaches and asked for the group’s prayers.
“That afternoon session was the turning point of the conference,” Eric said. “It became a sharing, supporting fellowship of needy Christian brothers and sisters. In fact, I still have a close, open fellowship with a number of those people.
“My own confession at that conference marked a turning point in my problem with Annie. Once I opened my hurt to others I no longer felt I had anything to hide. My frustration and shame dissolved; I felt liberated. For the first time I was able to reach out in acceptance and love to Annie and her problems. When she called a few weeks later I told her I’d come and get her. She agreed to come home and we began to rebuild our family.”
Eric Mueller’s feeling of helpless aloneness, like shame-forced isolation, is symptomatic of one of the biggest, and yet most common problems hurting parents have shared with me. That problem is a lack of meaningful, supportive fellowship.
Tragically, many shamed hurting parents go for months or even years without finding any fellowship. But stories like Eric’s have convinced me of the importance and benefits of open, supportive relationships with like-minded people.
Fellowship helps pull a hurting parent outside of himself or herself. It focuses some concern on other people’s problems, and sharing gets the problem out of the hidden recesses of the mind and heart into the open where it can be better understood.
Encouragement is another obvious benefit of meaningful fellowship. We can be weighted down and discouraged by the circumstances looming around us, but other people are more objective. Sometimes they can point out the progress and bright spots we are too close to notice.
If the benefits are so great, why isn’t there more fellowship among hurting parents? Perhaps the most common obstacle is fear of emotional hurt. We naturally want to protect ourselves, to avoid vulnerability. Like Eric Mueller who argued with himself, “What will they think of me?”, many of us try to hide our crisis with our children because we’re afraid of being viewed as failures.
Our strong cultural attitudes of independence and self-sufficiency also prohibit the seeking of fellowship. We want to deal with our own problems in our own way. Or we just ignore or repress our feelings so we don’t have to admit to anyone, including ourselves, that we need help.
Fellowship means risks. Honesty makes us vulnerable. Every hurting parent needs to be aware of a few cautions. Some friends might not be able to continue to accept your son or daughter if they knew your worries and concerns; you want to be careful not to risk damaging your child’s relationship with others. Some people shouldn’t fellowship together; they react to and feed on each other’s suffering and discouragement. T hey only multiply each other’s misery.
Perhaps the best gauge of helpful fellowship is the list of benefits previously discussed. If you’ve been sharing your hurts with someone and you’re not seeing at least some of those plusses, you aren’t getting meaningful, positive fellowship. You need to start looking elsewhere for the supportive fellowship you need. Where do you find people willing to share and care with you?
Meaningful fellowship for hurting parents needs to start at home with honest sharing between a husband and wife. One mother whose son was in and out of trouble from the time he was ten years old until his early twenties said, “I would have sunk into despair without my husband. He constantly reminded me we dare not dwell in our own hurt. We needed to try to understand our son and his problems.”
Correspondence can be another effective means of fellowship. A friend I’d known for twenty years wrote me to tell of her dread of the coming Christmas season. Alice’s son Allen was coming home from school for the holidays and he was bringing his girl friend who had no Christian sensitivity whatsoever. Alice wrote, “I don’t think I can stand to listen to her language again. Last time she was here it was awful.”
Almost a month passed before I felt an urgency to answer Alice’s letter. I tried to write a note of encouragement, but I don’t remember exactly what I said.
However, the next time I saw Alice, months later, she thanked me profusely for the letter. “It came at such a crucial time. I was near physical exhaustion from worry and home from work that day. When I’d psyched up enough energy to go out to the mailbox, I found your letter. I tore it open right there, and as I read it walking back to the house, tears of joy and gratitude streamed down my face God spoke to me through your admonition: ‘You can only love and accept Allen and his girl friend where they are; only God can change them.’ You’ll never know how those words helped me through that Christmas sea son and the months that have passed since. I praise God for the fellowship you and I have.”
All I did was write a note of encouragement. But because Alice and I had been willing to honestly share with each other-both in person and by letter-we’d established a spirit of fellowship that has strengthened us both.
Churches should be an open-armed source of fellowship, strength, and support for all kinds of hurting people. Sometimes congregations fail at these tasks, but those churches that do fulfill their divinely appointed tasks of caring can have a powerful impact on the lives of hurting parents and their children.
I think of friends whose son gave up the faith he was taught as a child and decided to marry a Jewish girl. The parents were anguished over their son’s decision. But when time came for the wedding, a dozen people from their small church flew hundreds of miles with the family to attend the ceremony. These fellow church members knew the hurt my friends were suffering and wanted to lend their support. Think what their caring said to these parents, to their son, and to the Jewish family of the bride.
Rejection or Acceptance
Every hurting Christian parent feels a barrier or wall of misunderstanding and disagreement between himself and his child. But that barrier is usually of the child’s construction. Rejection, on the other hand, is a parentally constructed barrier that actually reinforces the existing wall. The resulting double wall is almost impossible to knock down.
This double wall is illustrated in the case of Will, a young Army social worker who told his Christian parents he was going to marry his fiancee with or without their approval. “I knew they weren’t happy,” he said. “But the letter I got from my mom was a complete shock. She said, ‘Don’t bother calling home. As far as we’re concerned, you were killed in Vietnam.’
“Of course I tried to call. But the moment my folks heard my voice, the phone would click and I’d be cut off. I wrote letter after letter, but they weren’t answered. I was a pretty strong person with training in psychology and counseling, but this rejection devastated me emotionally. After five months of isolation from my family I felt dead.
“Eventually we reestablished contact. But I can’t feel my parents love me anymore. After fourteen years now, that old rejection still affects every contact I have with my parents. And it will be an emotional handicap the rest of my life. I can’t box it up and forget it. The memory is there in the back of my mind all the time.”
Parents too can suffer in the aftermath of their rejection of their children. A visiting speaker had just concluded a luncheon address about the needs of youth to a civic club in an eastern Canadian city when a big, burly man stepped in front of him and shook his hand.
“I want to show you something,” he said to the speaker, pulling out his wallet and pushing aside a couple plates to clear a place on the table. Carefully, one at a time, he took five, well-worn photos of young men from his billfold and placed them side by side. “Those five boys are my sons,” he said, his voice catching. “And I drove every one of them out of my home!”
He went on to say he’d been a military man all his life. Discipline was his lifestyle. And as a Christian father he expected obedience from his sons. He laid down the rules and if they didn’t like them they were free to leave. All five boys had left home after high school. “And I haven’t seen a one of them since,” the man said.
Again he reached into his billfold. This time he pulled out a picture of a grinning ten-year-old boy and put it down beside the other five. “That’s my youngest. He’s the only one I have left. I swear to God I’m not going to make the same mistake with him.”
This father was a broken, remorseful man. He’d resorted to rejection as a last-ditch effort to control his sons and he had failed.
Where rejection only creates resistance, acceptance softens, melts, bridges, and soothes. A number of hurting parents’ sons or daughters, who have since turned to God and the faith of their parents, have told me, “Their acceptance kept the channels open and made me want to hold on to my family.”
But acts and attitudes of acceptance can do more than bridge and prevent potential rifts. Acceptance has a constructive power of its own. Carl Rogers emphasizes this in his book, On Becoming a Person, when he says, “If I accept the other person as something fixed, already diagnosed and classified, already shaped by his past, then I am doing my part to confirm this limited hypothesis. If I accept him as a process of becoming, then I am doing what I can to confirm or make real his potentialities.”
“Follow me,” said the young man as Bruce and Millie Crane handed him their tickets. Silently he led them down the long aisle of the still-empty auditorium. He didn’t stop until he reached the second row in front of the stage. “Here you are,” he said as he turned around. “Best seats in the house. Hope you enjoy the performance.”
“I expect we will,” Millie responded. “Our daughter’s in the play.”
It had been nearly a month since their daughter Andrea had called long distance from Boston to announce excitedly that she’d won a big dramatic role in her community theater and to invite them to come for this performance.
“Of course we’ll come, Honey,” Bruce Crane had assured her. “We wouldn’t miss it.”
The eight hour drive to Boston didn’t matter. Bruce and Millie were anxious to capitalize on any and every opportunity to show their acceptance and affirmation to Andrea and her husband Ed.
There hadn’t always been such need for concern. When Bruce, a hospital chaplain, had performed the marriage for Andrea and Ed, they had been a committed, Christian young couple just out of college- excited about their futures. But after they’d moved to Boston for Ed’s graduate work, their faith had been slowly eroded by their academic and social environments.
Over a period of three years Bruce and Millie had watched Andrea cast off the values they had always taught. They learned she had begun smoking and drinking, and they suspected her experimentation with other drugs. The growing strain between Andrea and Ed was obvious.
Though they anguished over their daughter and son-in-law, the Cranes kept a close check on their own feelings. “We didn’t say a word about the things we observed,” explained Bruce. “Andrea and Ed knew where we stood. Millie and I felt it was much more important to maintain communication and contact by showing our love and acceptance.” But that acceptance sometimes came hard, as it did when the Cranes reached Boston the day before Andrea’s play. “From the minute we arrived, we were shocked by her toughness,” Millie said. “She smoked right in front of us as she spewed tough and vulgar talk. She wore her callousness proudly.”
The impact of their daughter’s newly acquired bitterness weighed heavily on them as they sat and waited for the performance to begin. Only a few minutes of the first scene passed before Andrea made her entrance.
“I can still feel the awful wrenching in my stomach as I watched her traipse onto the stage and parade shamelessly back and forth in her suggestive costume. I can still feel Millie squeezing my arm, and the lump that rose in my throat when she whispered, ‘O Bruce, can this be our sweet little girl?’ “
Bruce couldn’t bring himself to respond. He shifted uneasily in his seat and forced himself to endure the rest of the play. “It was one of those risque English dramas of a century or two ago-a play about the life at court where everyone was scheming to sleep with everyone else.”
Andrea was occupied backstage after the performance; she had planned to go to the cast party. So Bruce and Millie drove back to their daughter’s apartment alone, brimming with mingled emotions.
When morning finally came after a restless night, the Cranes had to face their daughter. They agreed before they went out to the kitchen for breakfast that they wouldn’t condemn or criticize.
“But we were tense as we took our seats at the table,” Bruce said. “Andrea eagerly poured us hot coffee, seemingly intent to continue her flaunting of the last two days. She barraged us with questions: How did we like the play? What did we think of her part? What about this scene or that scene? Eventually, conversation flowed more easily and she ceased her attempts to get a heated reaction out of us.”
During the months that followed, the Cranes’ phone bill rose as their daughter’s marriage became more and more troubled. Finally the day came when Andrea called-almost in hysterics. One of her drama friends had tried to rape her. Emotionally devastated, Andrea was on the verge of a breakdown. Ed said he couldn’t cope with her anymore.
So Bruce and Millie invited their daughter to stay with them for a few weeks. They did everything they could to encourage and support her. Bruce even footed the bill for some surgery Andrea had been putting off for years.
One night after an outpouring of despair about her marriage, Andrea retreated to her room. She picked up a bottle of prescribed drugs from the nightstand and threw herself on the bed. As she lay there, seriously contemplating suicide as the only solution to her troubles, she cried out to God.
“Something happened that night,” Bruce recalled. “She later told us it was as if Christ came into the room and reentered her life. I know something dramatic happened because she was a changed woman. A short time later she went back to Ed and they began to rebuild their lives. Today Andrea and Ed have a Christian family and are actively involved in the ministry of their church in their community.
“As I think back over the struggles and hurts we had with them,” said Bruce, “I’d have to say acceptance was the single most important factor through which God chose to work in their lives. If we had rejected them or been critical of the things we saw, Andrea would never have been willing to come home. And I hate to think where she and Ed would be now.”
Anger, False Guilt, and Despair
Hurting parents cannot afford to ignore their anger. They can’t pass off the occasional tirade or vindictive punishment as merely a harmless outburst of temper any more than they can smother those inner hostilities by pretending they have their feelings under control.
The explosions of intra-family warfare create dangerously unpredictable fallout. A sobering illustration of this was told to me by a father whose 16-year-old daughter Cori ran away from home. She returned ten days later-a sorry sight. She obviously hadn’t had a shower or shampoo in days. An ugly red streak was visible through a hole torn in the leg of her blue jeans. Cori’s mother insisted on inspecting the red streak on her leg. But Cori refused.
“That’s when. I blew up,” her father said. “She struck at me and I swung back-harder than I intended. One of my blows actually added a black eye to her other bruises.” ,
Later, after taking Cori to the doctor for treatment of her blood poisoning, this father began to suffer terrible guilt for hitting his daughter. “Sure, she had some punishment coming,” he said. “But my anger had burst out of control. So right away I asked Cori and God to forgive me.”
Cori and her father began rebuilding their relationship after that. And several years and numerous ups and downs later, Cori is a Christian today. But that’s not the whole story.
The final repercussions weren’t discovered until six years after Cori’s runaway scene. Joni, a younger daughter who was by then a teenager, disappeared one day when she left home on a household errand. Hours passed before her parents found her at the house of one of her friends several miles away. On the way back home they talked to Joni about the cause of her unhappiness. Joni hesitantly confessed, “Something has bothered me for a long time. Remember that time Cori ran away and Daddy beat up on her and made her all black and blue and red all over?”
Her father gasped. Oh God, has she thought for all these years I did all that to Cori?
Immediately he called a family sharing time. He figured if the incident had bothered Joni, the other children probably had their own questions.
There in the living room, this father explained what had happened with Cori and admitted his part of the blame. He told about the guilt he had felt and about asking for forgiveness.
“Thank God we finally got everything out in the open,” he said. But in the meantime, there is no way to tell how much damage had been caused in his relationships with his other children as a result of that one angry scene.
Guilt works like an inescapable video-tape machine that refuses to forget the mistakes we’ve made as parents. It plays them over and over again in our minds, in slow motion and from every conceivable angle.
One father told me he feels guilty now because he’s convinced he used the wrong disciplinary tactics on one of his sons. “Looking back I can see he was different from our other kids. He needed more love and assurance than the others. But I tried to dole out those things in equal measure,” he said. “He was a sensitive boy who would have responded better to love. But I badgered and hounded him and tried to force him into the same mold as our other kids. I realize now the damage I did to our relationship and to him as a person. I feel guilty because I know I caused much of his rebellion.”
All of us look back over our years of parenthood and find real, justified reasons for our guilt. But I’ve discovered that much of the guilt which plagues hurting mothers and fathers is unnecessary, false guilt.
For years, from the moment a son or daughter is born, our sense of parental responsibility demands we control or answer for that child’s actions. It’s just a habitual part of our duty as parents; we almost instinctively view our children as extensions of our own persons. This is why most of us have a difficult time relinquishing our feeling of responsibility for a child’s decisions and behavior. But there comes a time when we have to let this go. As we allow a child a growing independence, we have also to wean ourselves from accountability.
Dick Manville trusted his daughter Marie. She had never given her folks a moment’s trouble. He never worried about her relationship with her boyfriend, Andy, until the morning Dick came down to the kitchen for an early breakfast and saw Marie at the sink. She slipped something into her mouth and washed it down with a swallow of orange juice. As he passed her open purse on the counter, he saw them-birth control pills. After Marie left for work, he was still sitting motionless at the table when his wife Martha came in ten minutes later to fix breakfast, wondering if he’d really seen what he’d seen. He didn’t tell her why he wasn’t hungry.
Dick went to the office. But all he could think about were those pills and their implications. That means Andy and Marie . . . how long?
By noon Dick felt a sickening responsibility for Marie’s sexual entanglement. He berated himself for being so lax in the restrictions he had placed on Marie. Why hadn’t he said something when Marie had started turning down dates with other guys to date Andy?
As he reviewed the last few years, a number of parental mistakes flashed like bright neon signs in his mind. And he sank further into guilt with the thought that he should have recognized them all before.
After a week of plaguing guilt, Dick talked himself into broaching the subject to Marie. After all, he was her father; he was responsible. The least he could do was discuss with Marie her relationship with Andy. But the attempt failed miserably, for Dick could never quite bring the real issue into focus. When their discussion ended, Dick felt more guilty than ever for failing again.
The more he thought about his guilt in this matter with Marie, the more Dick wondered about his older kids. They all professed to be Christians, but none of them was really moving or growing in the Lord. He began to feel he had failed as a Christian father.
He finally told Martha what he knew about their daughter, and he confessed his own guilt and self-doubts. Martha tried to encourage him,. arguing that he had been a wonderful father, and saying she knew all the kids felt that way. But Dick refused to listen.
The guilt was worst when he’d lie awake in bed at night waiting for Marie to come home from a date. He wondered where she was and what she was doing. And he would examine his life in search of every mistake he’d made as a father.
I should have spent more time with Marie. We should have insisted she only date boys from church. Did we let her start dating too soon? If only we’d talked about dating and relationships more openly. …
Dick Manville’s guilt loomed over him like a mountain of depression, crippling every relationship in his life-with Marie, with his wife Martha, with his colleagues at work, and even with God. He withdrew into his own private world of suffering.
How should a hurting parent deal with the guilt he or she feels? The answer depends in part on whether the guilt is false or justified.
The only effective means of dealing with false guilt is to recognize and face it for exactly what it is. One of the usual signs of false guilt is that it fails to focus on any specific action which is biblically wrong; it’s more likely to dwell on merely something that can’t be changed.
False guilt needs no forgiveness, so there’s no reason to confess it to God. It’s better just to ask him to help you forget these feelings and get on with life. I John 3:18-20 suggests this strategy: “. . . let us love with actions and in truth. In this way we shall know by experience that we are on the side of truth and satisfy our consciences in God’s sight, because if our consciences condemn us, God is greater than our consciences and knows everything.” Hurting parents don’t need to be paralyzed by false guilt; they are to get on with the business of loving and accepting their children.
Despair is probably the most dangerous, most difficult-to-deal-with emotion which plagues hurting Christian parents. Its cloud of darkness can deprive us of the light we need for our physical, emotional, and spiritual health. And its continued shadow can eventually cripple us in many areas of our lives.
Parents who get backed into a corner with no easy way out are prime candidates for despair. One mother told me about a teenage daughter plagued with emotional problems who was in and out of trouble at school. One day a social worker called to inform the parents the girl had been arrested for shoplifting, and to ask whether they wanted her thrown in jail or committed to a mental hospital.
“We didn’t know if her emotional condition was the reason for the behavior, or whether her continuous anti-social behavior was prompting the emotional problems,” the mother admitted. “We were faced with two horrible choices and we couldn’t be sure what would be best for our daughter. We finally had her committed for therapy. But we couldn’t be sure we’d done the right thing.” Despair feeds on that kind of uncertainty, when we just don’t know what to do.
The root cause of despair for many hurting parents is disappointment with God.
One father said, “I always looked forward to the caring attitude and inspiration I received from the mid-week prayer and Bible study at my church. But one night the pastor asked if people had something fresh and up-to-date to share about how God was working in their lives. One rather pious old lady stood up and told a trivial tale about misplacing some “important” book, and how she prayed and the Lord directed her right to the spot where it was. As I listened I had to ask myself, ‘What kind of God cares about lost books and won’t answer my prayers for the lost son I haven’t heard from for months?’ “
What happens when we pray for a son or daughter and God doesn’t act? What do we do when there is no miracle? If we surrender to our feelings we begin to doubt everything but our worries and our hopelessness. And before long we fall victim to despair.
Despair pulls even harder when we think we’ve reached a solution, or at least see major progress, only to have our renewed hopes dashed to pieces with a setback.
“We finally had a grand and glorious answer to our years of prayers,” a father shared. “Our son had a real and marvelous experience with the Lord. He was miraculously freed from drugs, and even gave up the cigarette habit he’d had since he was fifteen. For the first time in years, my wife and I felt joy in our lives. Our son shared his new faith by telling anyone who would listen what God had done for him.
“Then it happened. After six wonderful months he started shooting heroin again. The faith that had stood us through seven years of his addiction was shaken to its core.”
There are no simple solutions for despair. However, for the parents who despair because healing progress is halted or interrupted, or because prayers aren’t answered, or because they can’t see any change or progress, it’s crucial to remember that God is working all the time, whether we see him or not.
Psalm 139 is very reassuring as it describes the omnipresence of God. “This is too glorious, too wonderful to believe! I can never be lost to your Spirit! I can never get away from my God! If I go up to heaven you are there; if I go down to the place of the dead, you are there. If I ride the morning winds to the farthest ocean, even there your hand will guide me, your strength will support me. If I try to hide in the darkness, the night becomes light around me. For even darkness cannot hide from God; to you the night shines as bright as day. Darkness and light are both alike to you. How precious it is, Lord, to realize that you are thinking about me constantly! I can’t even count how many times a day your thoughts turn toward me. And when I waken in the morning, you are still thinking of me.” We need to claim this Scripture for our children.
What is our part as hurting Christian parents? How do we go about restoring, redeeming, and rebuilding our relationships with sons or daughters who have rejected our faith or the Christian values we believe are so important?
We can’t possibly overestimate the power of forgiveness. The appealing attraction of loving, accepting forgiveness draws every sinner toward the open arms of our heavenly Father. The same kind of forgiveness will draw our sons and daughters back to us and to faith in him.
The tendency of many hurting parents, though, is to be stingy with forgiveness. We place behavioral conditions on our forgiveness. The most common one we impose is illustrated by the many parents who have said to me, “I’m ready to forgive. But he (or she) hasn’t asked my forgiveness.” We too often content ourselves with our inner feelings of forgiveness and load all the responsibility for reconciliation onto our children. But God doesn’t do it that way. He holds out his forgiveness and waits for it to be accepted. If we’re going to follow his example as a father, our forgiveness needs to be as aggressive and as obvious as our acceptance and our love.
How do we as imperfect, hurting Christian parents exhibit God’s brand of forgiveness? The first step is to recognize that forgiveness starts not as an emotion, but as a deliberate act of the will. Many hurting parents are looking and waiting for a relieved, comfortable, “everything-may-turnout-allright-anyway” feeling. But that’s not forgiveness.
A second step to total forgiveness is forgetting; and for many parents this seems to be the hardest. They can make the conscious decision to be forgiving, but they never can quite forget the hurt they’ve felt. Every time a new crisis comes along in their relationship with their child, they hash over past hurts and resurrect old feelings they thought were dead.
One father who illustrated this said, “Our money paid for the semesters of school she flunked. Our money paid the plane fare home when her boyfriend deserted her in France. Our money paid a doctor bill when she returned home sick. So every time she hints at needing a little cash, these memories keep coming back, and I want to blurt out, ‘You’ve squandered enough in riotous living.'”
A number of people with whom I’ve talked have failed to see the importance of this forgetting aspect of forgiveness. Usually it’s someone with no experience of parental hurt who asks, “Shouldn’t a child know how a person feels, how deeply a parent hurts?”
I have to say no. Guilt is always a separator. Children will only recoil further from it and us if we try to arouse it. I think if we experience real forgiveness, we will lose all desire to tell a son or daughter how they’ve hurt us. And I’ve seen from my experiences as well as others’ that God will equip us with that kind of forgetful forgiveness if we ask him.
Finally, the most powerful resource hurting Christian parents can use is unconditional love.
Parental love can be powerful; it is instinctive up to a point. But unconditional love is even more powerful and it’s not instinctive. It’s unnatural.
In my research I’ve come across numerous miracles worked through the unconditional love of hurting, parents. And in every case the parents shared at least one thing in common-an active love. Their affection was more than an attitude; it was expressed. Active love travels long distances in the middle of the night to rescue a deathly sick son; it writes letter after letter without waiting for a response; or, it enthusiastically hugs a son who only reluctantly accepts affection.
Unfortunately, many hurting Christian parents never get down to acting out their love, because they’re hung up with guilt over the fact that they don’t always feel the love they know should be there. They go through the anguish one respected Christian author and teacher did when his unmarried daughter came home one day and said she was pregnant.
“The resentment against her was so strong, my
deepest feelings were closer to hatred than to love,” this father confessed. “Yet I felt so wrong. I’d always preached love and had even written a book about John Wesley’s concept of perfect love.”
What this man came to know, and what every hurting Christian parent needs to remember, is that unconditional love is not always an overwhelming, uncontrollable feeling. Unconditional love is a conscious choice. It’s as much a matter of the mind and will as the heart.
Further evidence of this is the Apostle Paul’s description of love in I Corinthians 13. He didn’t discuss the subject in ethereal, emotional, or philosophical terms. He defined love with a practical list of what it did or didn’t do.
Henry Drummond, in The Greatest Thing in the World, his classic commentary on the Bible’s love chapter, breaks love down into a number of ingredients. Many of these speak directly to Christian parents.
Patience. Sometimes not acting is an act of love. In fact, Drummond says patience “is the normal attitude of love; love passive, love waiting to begin; not in a hurry; calm; ready to do its work when the summons comes.”
One mother who typifies patient love said, “We’ve been waiting years for a time when our son Adam needed us. But any attention or love from us has always been rebuffed. He accused us of favoritism and even refused to attend his brother’s wedding. Adam wouldn’t cooperate when we wanted a complete family portrait. He’d refuse to get together with the rest of the family when we wanted to celebrate a holiday together. But we never quit trying to include him and show our love.
“Now, after eight years of marriage, his wife has divorced him. In his sorrow he’s come home to live with us. This is the chance we’ve been waiting for to prove our love.”
Kindness. If patience is love waiting, kindness is love active. It’s often so simple, but it’s the most obvious and effective expression of love. Think about Jesus. How much of his ministry was spent doing kind things for the people he met? He set an example for us and then challenged us with the assurance that any kindness done “to the least of these” was the highest brand of service we could offer him.
A seminary student told me, “When I was eighteen and went into partnership with a buddy to buy a tavern, it nearly broke Dad’s heart. But he and Mom always expected me to come home for special Sunday dinner. And he was always ready to drive across town and help me fix my car when it wouldn’t start. This demonstrated love was what kept me open to them and to God, and helped bring me back to where I am today.”
Unselfishness. We often think of unselfishness as meaning the giving up of our rights. Drummond says, “Love strikes much deeper. It would have us not seek them at all, ignore them, eliminate the personal element altogether.” Unselfish, unconditional love is love without calculation.
A hurting parent can look at a son or a daughter and justifiably argue, “What about the commandment to honor parents? Doesn’t he (or she) owe me some respect?” Yes, but that’s the child’s responsibility. If our love is truly unconditional, we’ll ignore and even forget those rights. We’ll just love unselfishly without thought about what’s due us.
A most impressive example of this kind of sacrificial love is a minister and his wife who were serving a small rural church in the deep south a few years ago. They had a bright, attractive daughter who was a joy to their lives until she entered high school and began dating mostly older, more experienced boys. The more concerned her parents became about her relationships, the more rebellious and wild she became.
These parents had held high hopes for their daughter, but little by little they watched her abandon their educational dreams and goals in an attempt to melt into the provincial atmosphere of her little rural school. When she fell in love with a senior boy of questionable character and negligible ambition, her parents decided to act.
The father resigned his church and moved his family to a New England community with a highly respected school district where his daughter could get a first-rate education and exposure to a more enriching environment. He moved despite the fact he knew he wouldn’t find a church to serve. He was a self-taught man with only an eighth-grade education; and the churches in their new community required men with seminary training. So he gave up regular ministry and took other work to support his family in order to provide his daughter with the kind of environment he thought best for her.
“If we hadn’t moved,” said the daughter who told me this, “I’d be pumping gas and helping my husband manage some little corner station in a little Mississippi crossroads town, far from where God wants me to be.”
Instead, she’s a respected Christian author and speaker with a beautiful family and an immense debt of gratitude to a hurting father who willingly surrendered his own career out of concern and love for her.
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