Tag: hope

A Year Worth Naming

Here on the verge of me turning another year older, I look back on a year past. 

It was a year worth naming. 

Not many are.

But 2024 was a year like none other. 

The first time I can remember naming a year was about 10 years ago––2016. I was forming a habit in that decade of doing “year-in-retrospect” journals each December. Most years don’t need a name, because they just weren’t that remarkable. But for awhile there, things were pretty tumultuous for us.

2016, The Year of Suffering. 

2017 was The Year of the Lord’s Provision.

2018, The Year of Victory.

I recall “busy” (that’s certainly unremarkable) for 2019, but not a ton else.

Oddly, 2020, which left such a mark on so many, hardly registered for us. We’d been sheltering at home since The Year of Suffering. 

2021, though, was only too painfully remarkable. 

The Year of Trauma. Nothing to do with the virus, either. That story got documented in earlier entries here.

So. Four named years and a tie score. Two positive names and two negative. 

A name for 2024 would break the deadlock. 

Drum roll, please… 

It’s positive! [Note: As of this writing I am in quarantine waiting for word on a medical test result. I find it so curious how one has to stay on one’s toes to remember how that ‘positive’/‘negative’ calculus gets flipped in the medical world. As in: “I’m waiting for my results” and everyone goes, “Praying for a negative result!”As in, a positive result. Derived from the negative result of the test.]

Back to 2024. It was nothing short of shock and awe––in all the good ways.

And personally, not professionally/occupationally.

It was The Year of Healing. 

The few who had a front row seat for the journey––my wife, sometimes kids, a couple of Men’s Coffee friends, and one or two others––were my hope and stay, throughout. Others have played a crucial role at one juncture or another.

The year contained three seminal events, each more tumultuous than the last. As I look back on them, they stand out sort of like three mountaintops launching me into the next valley or plain of additional slogging, learning, working, repairing. 

Healing Event #1 was already chronicled in this blog entry here. It would turn out to be just the beginning of the healing, 

If I take my cues from 2016 and 2021, I can confirm that weeping from suffering is awful, and weeping from trauma is terrifying. But weeping due to healing can be just plain weird. Of course it can hurt, too, but it is deeply complex and certainly never always bad. Sometimes, you’re just mystified at why you’re even crying at all. All told, it’s a slam dunk that there were more tears in 2024 than in 2016+2021 together. 

Along the way, I’ve gotten pretty invested in this feeling thing. I tell my counselor that a session where I haven’t at least teared up was probably sort of a failure? I’ve never gotten any refunds, though. I worked hard at the feelings thing for years, and over the years felt increasingly adept talking about them. But this year smacked me in the head with how enamored I am with my thoughts about feelings––and how little I know my actual feelings. Here all this time I’d thought those were my feelings. Ha!

But I’m convinced: feeling more is being alive more. And it’s more human. Who doesn’t want that?

Seismic Healing Event #2 took place alongside a group of less than twenty other occupational ministers. Strangers all, we dove right in and shared our deepest traumas so that we might bear witness to each others’ stories and see the good that comes from shining light on wickedness. And when some of those wicked things have been done in the name of Jesus by people claiming authority in the name of Jesus, well… there’s just no one you’d rather have around than others from the ministry world who know exactly what you’re talking about. People who have seen what you’ve seen. What you still see, and can never not see. 

However, I’d signed up for this thing hoping (at the time) for help healing from 2021’s lies still messing with my mind. But now I was attending after having gotten that tremendous healing in February. So, in the end it was a good thing, because I was able to share far differently––more broadly, and about my whole life. And God used that caring audience to bring to the surface two very unexpected things. One, a deeply formative childhood event I had need of renaming––I’d never used the term “molestation” before––and two, a lifetime relationship with Shame I’d never, ever seen. The whole experience left me wide-eyed, a bit shell-shocked, but grateful. 

And the timing was the most crucial part. For that very same day, I received an email invitation that surely any other week of my life I would have deleted, thinking, “That’s nice. For those who need that.” But that week––I saw that invitation as being for me. 

A month later, courtesy of two generous donors, I was on a plane to a weeklong event led by Dan Allender’s Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. Little did I suspect I was hurtling towards one of the most disruptive experiences of my life. So much so that, afterwards, even a chronic over-sharer such as myself has been generally unwilling, if not unable, to formulate words to describe it most of the time. Let’s just call it “Healing Event #3.” 

What really matters is the change effected afterwards. 

And isn’t that the point of therapy and counseling? We don’t dig into our pasts for the sake of navel gazing; we dig into our past for the sake of recognizing where the harm we received or took on or believed affects us, still. We look into our past so we can love in our present. We gaze at what we received for the sake of stopping what we inflict. Doesn’t everyone wish to bring more blessing and less curse? That trajectory only becomes possible if we are open, not only to acknowledging the harm we received, but to delving back and finding that younger version of ourselves in such desperate need of our compassion. 

I was open.

And so possible it became.

~

I returned from Seattle just in time for an epic summer road trip with my family. While packing, I sat some of them down and said, “List out your favorite snacks for me” and I wrote them in my shopping list.

“What are you doing, Dad?” 

“Getting snacks. It’s a long drive.”

“Riiiight…but when have you ever sat us down and asked what kind of snacks we would want for a road trip?” 

“What! It’s a long drive!”

I chewed on their question on my drive to the store. Never had I?

Later, after buying their stuff, and multiples of many, I added a variety of drinks and grabbed a bag of ice. 

When a daughter next saw me, she asked which of their snacks I’d gotten.

“Well, all of them.”

“Seriously?! You bought all of them?”

“Yesss?”

Her brother walked in later. 

“Hey. Remember our snack list? Dad bought everything.” 

“No way. Wait, what?! You’re serious? You bought everything?” He had to go through the bags and check for himself.

He looked at me with a grin, “What kind of dad is this!?”

“And get this…” my daughter added, “He’s got a cooler. Filled with drinks and ice. Ready drinks on the road.” 

“What?!?” He laughed incredulously.

I made laughing noises, too.

What was the big deal? 

But part of me was certainly not laughing.

I didn’t do this to go out of my way to try to be “a good dad.” I was just thinking of the trip. What they might like. After all, it was a long way. Snacks and drinks would be fun for them.

It was huge for them.

But what about the rest of their lives? Hadn’t I been there? What could have possibly so preoccupied me down through the years that buying them road-trip snacks was so unheard of?

How could this be such strange behavior from me?

I imagine I was often preoccupied? That cheap? Worried? Anal? Paralyzed?

Absent, somehow.

The reason for the sudden, unconscious, unpremeditated difference hit me: I’m healed.

I’m simply… free. Free to be myself. 

Be present.

Be fun.

Free to love.

It is no big deal.

But it’s a huge deal.

I wanted more. 

~

On that trip, we had a unique fight. 

The “What kind of dad is this?” son, who had possibly never yelled at us, yelled at us. 

That’s odd, I thought. I guess he’s feeling free, too!

I made the wise decision (sure haven’t always, over the years) to let him let it fly.

It got uglier before it got prettier.

And (eventually), it was a tremendous learning opportunity for me.

I named, owned, and apologized for the harm I was inflicting on him that day. And saw: it hadn’t just been that day.

The most noteworthy thing he said was a suggestion that I have a similar conversation with his older brother. 

“Really? You think so?”

“I know so.” 

“Huh,” I said, “I’ll look for that opportunity.” 

He countered, “I think it’d be better sooner.”

So I reached out. Extended this invitation:

“Son, would you be willing to make a list for me of all the times in your life that I harmed you? I’d like to fly you home the week before your wedding and have you read it to me.” 

“So, fly me there, fly me back, only for me to turn around three days later and fly there again?”

“Yes.” 

Just before his coming, I could tell his main issue was dread he’d just have to listen to me defend myself. 

Hearing that this was his fear revealed a lot to me about myself. I skipped pointless assertions: “No, really, you have nothing to worry about!” 

We “wasted” the first evening and the next day just doing regular stuff with the family. Nearing the evening of the second and final night, I said, “Well, it’s now or never,” so we sat down in the basement about 6:00 and got to the list. He read. Some of it was familiar and some of it he had to jog my memory. I spoke little. Listened mostly. Asked him to repeat or to clarify, or sometimes what he was feeling in this moment, sharing a particular thing. 

By some point he came to realize that I truly never was going to defend myself or even proffer my point of view. So he began to back off, having compassion on younger me by making qualifying statements or gracious assumptions about why it was understandable I’d done or said something. 

“No, son. Not tonight. There will be time enough later for me to have compassion on myself, and I will. But you must name the harm, for there will be healing in the naming. Name it because that’s what it was. I harmed you. And I don’t need you to soften the blow. Nor does it matter right now if blame rightfully goes back to someone else––my dad, his dad before him, or anyone else. What matters is the harm I did you. Tell the truth.” 

It was such a strange conversation.

We didn’t have any emotional breakdowns or even breakthroughs.

It came with zero swelling orchestral crescendos in the background.  

It was a list.

Sometimes ugly, other times petty, once in awhile slightly funny. Much of it pained and chagrined me.

Like I said, it was strange.

Around 2am, we petered out, six hours in. We hugged and went to bed.

~

The following week, our family was traveling again, this time to the home town of his fiancé to join them in celebrating their wedding. The night before, we had a crowd and limited time for setting up the venue. It was a bit chaotic, never my strong suit, but exponentially exacerbated when the Wedding Coordinator was lost to a slip and fall. I had to step in and run something resembling a rehearsal. The next day, I was the officiant. 

Throughout the weekend, opportunities for any number of the usual sparks, tension, or family snafus abounded. But never, not once, was it anything other than peaceful and enjoyable (plus exhausting, sure). Not once did I have any of my customary perturbation at my son’s lack of judgment, poor choices, or anything else. Never did I feel annoyed or frustrated. It was his (and her!) day, and I was content being myself and happy with him being himself. It was simply the most beautiful day, ever.

I wondered how many of our difficult past moments––where I’d assumed it was only my son who still needed to grow up––also owed their tension to my lack of healed-ness? I’m sure plenty.

It’s good to be free. (Or free-er. Long ways to go, yet.) And good to enjoy people for the gifts that they are, just as they are. 

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got more healing to get to. And doubtlessly more kids to sit and listen to! 

More looking back, so I can better move forward.

May 2025 be a year in which you, too, find––and offer to those you’ve harmed––healing.

Curse Replaced with Blessing

Yes, yes it has been.

Curse broken. Perhaps for good.

The ball got rolling on a Wednesday night in a coffee meetup. Had you been there and heard the deep sharing and easy laughter between me and the couple I was with, you’d be forgiven for thinking we’d known each other longer than we had. The man had been in significant pain since I’d met him. A family picture later that summer had shocked me into wondering what a stroke for me would do to our family. But no one could explain to my friend exactly what had happened to him to produce that half slack, half frozen face. And the pain continued unabated for months, specialists all across North America mystified. Until one doctor put down her instruments and said, “Tell me the whole story.”

At the end of it, her conclusion had not been remotely suspected. “I think you’ve been cursed.” She followed by asking if they wanted to join her at her church’s prayer meeting that night. Sure, why not? Who would have guessed––that night the shroud lifted. Pain-free for the first time in six and half months.

Say, WHAT?

“Wow, I really don’t have any kind of neat box to put that in,” I admitted out loud.

“Yeah, neither do we! Someone cursed me. That curse has now been broken.” 

They even figured, looking back with 20/20, where, when, and via what object the curse had come. Still, our Western, excluded-middle minds struggled to accept what it meant. But who can argue with suddenly re-straightened face muscles? 

The six months of debilitating pain had never been illness. The summer’s stroke-like event…wasn’t. All along it was a real, honest-to-God––well, some very different Being, to be sure––curse. Too weird. My friends laughed in assuring me that this was the most natural and self-evident explanation for every last member of the First Nations community in which they lived, eh? Way up there where only the Ice Road takes you.

“Of course!” Of course someone cursed you. 

Really?

The next day I found it hard to stop thinking about. 

Come Saturday, I was still thinking about it, and while listening to a podcast, my ears perked up as curse was brought up there. The host meant it more like I understood it. Curse, the opposite of blessing. Curse, the negative, untrue thing I say about myself, even if only in my head. Curse, the result of experiencing harm. 

Then this landed like a ton of bricks:

“Curse will never be fully gone until it is replaced with blessing.”

In that moment, I knew what I needed. 

In that moment, I saw myself in some sort of ritual done in community. I’d ask Tammy to lead it. For I, like my friend, hungered for release. I wanted curse replaced with blessing. I’d been entirely sick of my trauma still affecting me for awhile now. Really, really fed up. 

I’d processed. I’d dealt. I’d healed. But not enough, cause here it was, hanging around. Waking me up. Dragging me down. Filling up brain space. Unshakeable. 

I wanted to be done with it.

I didn’t want to dwell, anymore. 

I didn’t want those men any longer encroaching on my mental space. 

I was more than satisfied with the number of times I’d chosen and re-chosen forgiveness.

I no longer cared what actual lies had been told about me, or why so many people believed them or did nothing about them.

I. Just. Wanted. To Move On.

Really and truly. New life, new job, new community, and fine enough with forgetting the old. I’d embraced the new start but was failing, still. 

And sick of it, did I mention? 

I have no interest in wondering ‘Why…’ or ‘What if…’. So why can’t I stop? 

Cause curse. 

Curse in my life had become a curse on my life.

I preferred sleep. I wanted rest. I love peace.

Stop the Regret-A-Whirl, I wanna get off. Bring the floor back up to my feet, please, so I can get off this wall.

Sleep, rest, and peace eluded me more than I liked, which only piled on an anxiety about being some kind of failure, so I cursed myself for not being able to stop. Which made me believe more lies. Which confirmed that feeling of failure.  

One particular lie had always topped my list, especially in those months after the groundless firing. My battle with it had been more difficult and more damaging than all battle with all the rest, together:

I must be some sort of high-functioning, half-______.” 

I dare not even put the actual accusation in writing. 

But from the inside––and some of you will know this––“believing a lie”is a poor description of what is actually going on in our heads. 

Sure, with some things, we’re aware it’s a lie. We can face the mirror and prepare ourselves to face the day. You might need to be a certain age to say this exact phrase, but we self-coach with some version of a daily, “I’m good enough. I’m smart enough. And doggone it, people like me.” It does the trick. 

But other things are way more insidious. In fact, we’ve been convinced: It’s not a lie, something’s wrong with me. It doesn’t feel anything like believing a lie. Not on the inside, for we think what we’ve actually done is accept an unfortunate, but unshakeable, truth. We are self-aware! And making the best of things. We swallow the shame and move forward.

Or so we believe. 

More than once through tears I’d asked my wife, “Why has no one in my entire life loved me enough to shoot straight with me on this [and tell me I’m defective]?”

Yup, trauma.

I couldn’t see that at the time, though; instead I was battling to integrate and make sense of the messages of my trauma. 

Because IF this is a lie, wouldn’t more evidence to the contrary be forthcoming? 

When it isn’t, we believe it’s the truth. And if we ever want to get over whatever hump we’re stuck on, the sooner we admit that the better. 

Except I’d been trying that for a long, long time. 

Why wasn’t it working? 

Simple. It wasn’t the truth. 

It was curse. 

And one does not rid oneself of curse by integrating it.

One rids oneself of curse by replacing it with blessing. 

On that Saturday––with the perfect storm of my friends’ story and a podcast––I knew: Time to take the bull by the horns, Dann, and get help. Replace curse with blessing. 

Via texts and calls, I gathered a trusted community. A group of seven to bear witness with me.

Tammy led our ritual. (My simple definition of ritual is just some kind of solemn ceremony which includes bodily, sensory actions.) Together, sitting in a circle, we would take on these curses that I had been unable to shake alone. 

I named that first and biggest lie. The first person wrote it on a slip of paper.

I imagined I’d probably make it all the way ‘round the circle and give everyone something to write. 

It wasn’t long and a number of them were crying.

They knew me, but they hadn’t known this about me.

Even I hadn’t consciously known all of these lies. They began to tumble from me.

Dann deserved this treatment.

So-and-so truly knows and understands Dann. They were wise to do this.

Dann is not wise, he’s blind. Dann does not understand. 

Dann’s kids deserve the trauma they have undergone (and still are)––that’s how bad Dann was.

When I was done, there’d been enough lies for every person to have filled out three slips.

Then Tammy had me start over at the very beginning.

First person, first lie. I read it aloud, then listened to the group in unison:

“This is a lie; this is not the truth.” 

Burn the paper. Hear the noise. Watch the smoke. Smell it. Hug the person who’d written it.

Next I was instructed to declare the opposite of the words I’d written and just watched burn. Tell the truth.

Some were easy:

Hell no, Dann’s kids did not deserve this. Doesn’t matter what he did. (Indeed, “Heaven, yes” could have been chosen by any number of people during our family’s hellish journey.)

Others required a deep breath. And trust in my present community that they could see clearer than I could:

Dann is beloved and wanted.

One at a time. Round and round the circle.  

On my second go-round, after burning a slip Tammy had written, I got My Bonus Gift. 

Since before Thanksgiving, I’d oft repeated out loud a conclusion I’d reached in counseling: “I think my body is telling me I need A Really Big Cry. Something purging, cathartic, body-wracking… And move on from there.” 

I wasn’t going to force it, but I was constantly on the lookout for it, because tears get triggered by the funniest things, sometimes, don’t they? Yet along with anticipation came fear that it would come at the wrong time. I wasn’t afraid of crying in front of anyone, for who cares? It’s human. But I was, I decided, totally not up for uncontrollable sobbing in front of a big room full of people, for instance. That kind of situation where everyone can hear the blubbering? But has to crane their neck to figure out where it’s coming from…?

I wasn’t cool with that. 

But weeks and months went by, and though my tear ducts made a number of modest efforts, nothing ultimately satisfying ever really materialized.

Now, standing in front of Tammy, it was here, unlooked for.

The group just waited. Tammy just held me.

When it had passed, I completed my third and final round. 

“This is a lie; this is not the truth.” Burn. Hear. Watch. Smell. Hug. Tell the truth. Repeat.

I finally sat down.

Slow breaths. 

“I think I feel good,” I cautiously reported. I knew I wouldn’t really know until I got some distance.

But sure enough, the next day, driving around, I had two distinct realizations:

Oh! Today is the third anniversary of Day 0. The Day That Started Everything. That’s crazy.

And:

I feel something… What is that feeling? Lemme think for a sec, this is familiar… Oh, my word!! 

I feel like… MYSELF.

It had actually taken time and effort to identify it. How faint the familiarity had been.

I have not fully felt like my own self in three years?! What the…

Tell your stories, people. Your stories of pain, trauma, church hurt, all of it.

My replacing curse with blessing was a great, great day for me, and I feel grateful and relieved over how it all went. It has lasted. Your story has been different, and your healing may come different. I tell my story simply so that it may stand on its own for what it is. Yours is yours. You don’t need my ritual, you need…well, decide in your community what you need. Because at the bottom of it all, we’re the same. Image bearers seeking to live more fully into our own agency, voice, and value. Silence… advantages the status quo and usually the wrong people. Speak. Pull back the curtain on your trauma, and do not do it alone. 

Displace curse. 

Replace it with blessing. 

God be with you. 

The Good Kind

“Did God say anything to you, today?”

My question—phrased something like that—was a bit out of the blue, I suppose, but I didn’t expect the blank reactions I got around our dinner table that night.

One of our younger ones, after a couple of false starts, concluded, “I don’t know what you mean, Dad.”

“Like…”  a chewing teen deadpanned, “a voice? Nope.”

Yikes! Who’s raising these kids? 

I feel like every day is me craning forward, desirous of hearing God’s voice. 

Maybe I haven’t talked about it out loud enough with these guys? 

Only to have another teen chime in and relieve me that I’d at least been doing some child-raising all these years. 

“Guys, listen!” he said. “God speaking is like something inside you, not something in your ears, necessarily. He puts things in your mind when you’re reading the Bible, or listening to a song, or in church…” 

“Exactly,” I went on. “Guys, I’m just meaning to ask if he put something on your heart, led you to do something, say something, filled your mind with a thought from a verse, anything like that.”

“Oh…!” came the chorus. “Why didn’t you say so?” Our time took an upswing as I asked one kid after another, with clearer wording, I guess, and we all got to listen to some very sweet answers. 

I think the only kid that didn’t get asked was Everett. Not that I did it on purpose. I wasn’t sulking from having had a particularly hard day with him, nothing beyond the normal surviving him. He wasn’t behaving “badly.” The day had held no tantrums or sabotage or big lying. 

I chalked up my inadvertent exclusion as legitimate byproduct of his maturity level.

Only to get twinged by the reminder that our faith is a faith for children. It calls me to be like a child. 

But it was no big deal, right? What was he going to say? He didn’t even seem to notice, and I was sure the whole thing would be forgotten before we left the room. However, I could identify some regret in the fact that, in that moment (and I know there are others), Everett hadn’t gotten from me the grace that our Heavenly Dad always extends to us. 

We went up for bedtime. A half hour later I was lying on the floor guarding his door because now there had been problems. An ugly fight with Hope. Blatant defiance of Tammy. Yelling, stomping, and what looked like another tantrum brewing. 

I just let him be.

Time helps him these days. It never did in the beginning. Past a certain emotional point, it was always going to go all the way over the edge into violence. But we’ve moved beyond those days, and sometimes, now, he can stop himself.

I gave him time. Didn’t even say anything when he got out his headphones and music, though he often needs to be kept from playing or goofing if he’s in the middle of defying us or acting like there isn’t broken relationship in need of mending… But I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and believe he might actually be trying to calm himself down. 

5 minutes. 10. Not long after that, he takes off his headphones. 

“Dad, I’m ready.” 

Our signal that an episode is over. He’s ready to make things right. Wow.

“OK, Everett, good words. I’m glad. Ready for what?” 

“To say ‘sorry’ to Hope.”

“That’s wonderful, son, but I think Hope’s about asleep. We’re probably going to have to do that part tomorrow. You could make things right with mom. And me.”

“Could I just call to Hope from the hall?”

“That’s really good asking bud. OK, let me see if she’s still awake.”

“She is!” Eden (who lies awake for hours every. single. night of her life) yelled over, saving me from getting up.

And Everett went out in the hall and did just lovely. 

Coming back to where I was lying on his floor, praying through some silly stresses about money, my conundrum of a son knelt down and whispered in my ear.

“Jesus talked to me.” 

Eyes popped. I cocked my head to look at him. “What do you mean?”

“In my music. A song came on. John 13:thirty…something. It said ‘love each other,’ So I had to talk to Hope.”

 

The tears Tammy and I shared as I told the story before we fell asleep that night were not the usual tears we’ve cried over this son. This time, for a change, we got to cry the good kind.