Good morning…
“When parents are positive, you become positive, and hopefully you pass that positivity to your children,” our subscriber concluded in yesterday’s post, Make Good Lemonade. Next my mind asked the flip-sided question, “What happens when parents are negative?”
Well, we know “negative” and “positive” are relative terms, and all parenting lives on a subjective spectrum. “Good parents” have bad moments and “bad parents” have good ones. Yet relentless negativity can contort a life.
I saw this truth firsthand when I worked summers during college at the Berea Children’s Home in my hometown of Berea, Ohio, a facility founded in 1864 as a Methodist home for orphaned children whose fathers were killed in the War. By the time I worked there in the early 1980’s, many of the children we served had been spoon-fed destructive family dynamics since birth and these mistreated kids often acted out in dramatic ways.
I remember a young boy who arrived one day behaving much like a wild animal, antsy, agitated, aggressive. Crazy, chaotic, out of control. Then I learned of his history. As a baby he was put in a dark closet, no human contact, no tender touch for months on end. Periodically food and drink were slid in by his overwhelmed mom. When authorities found him, he was starving and his diaper had to be surgically removed because of the hardened, caked layers of feces.
I remember my first thought: “I would be just like him, acting crazy and destructive, if I had to endure those horrible conditions.” The story of this little boy motivated me to apply to Marriage and Family Therapy school after completing my undergraduate degree in psychology. I enjoyed being a play therapist for hurting children for ten pivotal years.
“People do not develop hardened self-destructive defenses in a vacuum,” I realized right away. Relentless negativity can contort a life. Following the lead of my creative clients, I would deepen down to the root of the problem: the family system in which painful patterns were set in motion before they could walk or talk. Yet as a person of faith I instinctively trusted the strong shaping Voice of love tucked like a seed inside of each person, a Voice whispering a deeper and earlier truth before human interruption.
Nothing about me is hidden from you! I was secretly woven together deep in the earth below, but with your own eyes you saw my body being formed. Even before I was born, you had written in your book everything I would do. Your thoughts are far beyond my understanding, much more than I could ever imagine. I try to count your thoughts, but they outnumber the grains of sand on the beach. And when I awake, I will find you nearby (Psalm 139:15-18, CEV).
Before that little abused boy was shaped by the negative neglect of imperfect parents, he was secretly woven together by the unconditional love of the one perfect Parent. His story is my story and my story is yours. Once we were born into this world, our imperfect parents influenced us, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively, but before that we were seen, we were formed, we were intentionally knit together by our Heavenly Father, woven just so, for eternal purposes.
Corrie ten Boom, in her beloved book The Hiding Place, taps us into the power and the beauty of a faith that knew God’s love in the most severe starvation, the most powerful pain, and the heaviest humiliation of the Nazi concentration camp. Corrie describes the moment her dear sister, Betsie, died beside her. As Betsie breathed her last in the freezing sleet amid the horrors of that place, she whispered, “We must tell people what we have learned here. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still. They will listen to us, Corrie, because we have been here” (211).
Since the early 1980’s, I have prayed for that young orphaned boy who also had “been there”. I continue to pray that over his lifetime he has personally experienced God’s truth: “There is no pit so deep that our loving Father is not deeper still.” Regardless of the negative or positive influence of our earthly parents, each morning we awake to find our first doting Father intimately nearby.
…Sue…
