Blame, avoidability, and TCK struggles with faith

 I'm in a Facebook group for third culture kids (TCKs) - a term used to describe individuals who grew up in multiple cultural settings and eventually created an amalgam of all that serves as their own sense of culture. The topic of TCKs is a bit niche, although increasingly relevant as globalization is mixing us all up. TCKs have a lot of strengths - linguistic, cultural, assimilative, and internal. They also frequently have deep-seated identity conflict and the subset of mental illnesses that come from an unstable childhood home or contextual setting. 

In the realm of TCKs, I belong to the subset of children of parents who worked for an openly religious organization. Missionary kids (MKs). We are TCKs with the added layer of overriding religious identity. Whether or not we endorse a faith as adults, it was a part of every component of our childhoods. For many people, faith is a protective health factor. It is linked to improved mental health, stronger family structures, longer lifespans, and even improved physical health. Religion often fills the gap of "meaning" that every person needs to feel whole. But religion is a powerful, volatile, far-reaching thing. And when it is woven into the fabric of a transitive, conflicted, loss-and-change-filled childhood, it can start to feel like a monster. 

So a lot of hot topics in MK circles are related to faith. Individuating in or outside a faith community, practicing faith in ways that are consistent with one's amalgam of cultures, finding a sense of home despite the overall homogeneity of most monocultural faith communities, figuring out one's beliefs - especially when many of your childhood friendships or significant relationships have been with the kind of people who build their lives around an openly faith-centered organization. 

Someone posted an article to the Facebook group yesterday - a sweet, sincere post full of a mother's grief over her struggling child. I commented that I wonder every day if these kinds of situations are avoidable. The poster asked why and it is easier to share my response as a blog post, so I'm posting it here. 

If you're not a person of faith or interested in niche faith issues, this post may feel really pointless for you. If it isn't your experience, it will probably feel overwrought and dramatic to you. It's okay if you stop reading now. :)

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E. wrote, "How could [a TCK's loss of faith] be avoided from your perspective?"

I don't actually know. I really just wonder. 
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Most of the discussion I've heard around this topic ping pongs blame - which implies avoidability, I think. The blame gets placed on the child, the parent, the context, or God.

I've been the good kid that tried to cling to faith, the bad kid that decided to walk out, and the honest confused one who meandered back to a new understanding of faith and tries to figure it out now. 
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So I will give you my thoughts here, with the caveat that I am still young in this life and in my faith, and that today is a Things Are Angry I am Sad kind of day.

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1. Blaming the Child
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Blaming the child is accurate as a reflection of individuality. And I hold that we are each ultimately fully responsible for our choices. Like Elizabeth Elliot said, "Every freedom can be taken from a man except the freedom to choose his attitudes."

But blaming the child is inadequate. Blame is a distractor from choice. And claiming choice is the only way forward, ever.

When I stepped away from my faith for a time, I did it. Me. My step. Mine. Attributing that decision to anyone but me would not only have been completely wrong, but it actually would have demeaned me as an individual. I *wanted* to be recognized for my choice to step away. I had felt so little power over my choices before that. It was my decision. It was good for me to feel that it was my decision. It was good for me to own that decision - I had felt powerless most of my life.
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Discovering the power to choose God or not choose him, discovering the power to own my choice, discovering the power to tell my story myself - these are the things that created a space in my life in which I could have a true friendship with God. In them I discovered that God respected me. In that time I also discovered that the people who truly loved God were able to see into the heart of why I was doing what I was doing. They were able to hope for wholeheartedness for me and trust that I was also seeking it - even if I was outside the safe limits of good behavior and good projection. The way that the people who truly loved God were able to respect and hope for my choices also empowered me to find a God who didn't just want me powerless and behaved. (Although I still can't get through a day consistently believing that. Recovery is never over.)
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So maybe blame and avoidability are the wrong words when we think about the child. They make the child the passive player. And for most of the TCKs I talk to, one of the deep hurts fueling the need to step away is feeling powerless. 

We should avoid using words that frame someone as powerless. To identify only or primarily as a victim is to become even more powerless. 

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2. Blaming the Parent
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Blaming the parent is not again not inaccurate. They are typically the primary caregiver, primary acculturation, primary source of faith. But in many cases blaming is not adequate or fair - especially if we believe the parent truly loves the child. Especially if we respect the child enough to let their choice be theirs and not just lament it as avoidable or pass around the blame for it.
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Yes, parents shape us more than anything else in this world. Yes, parents create the shape of a parent God in our lives in ways that can be profoundly difficult to shake off. Yes, parents can trap us into expectations that keep us from actually looking for wholeheartedness. At the same time, parents probably deserve the greatest grace and mercy in our perspective of any person at the table of lost faith.
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I am older now than both my parents were when they had me. I am completely certain I would do a worse job being the image of a mother God to my child than my mother did, even on her bad days. I am often paralyzed, terrified, and simultaneously self-righteous. I hold others to harsh standards, or just roll my eyes. I do not balance grace and truth well, even though I had the rare gift of growing up in a home that sought that, and still being very close to a mother who lives it.
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Every one of us makes mistakes. Every one of us is a poor image of the heart of God... if someday the worst someone can say about me is that sometimes I failed as a mother but at least even my failures came from deep love - that would be the greatest compliment I could ever receive. And in most cases, those words are the truest way we could describe the TCK's parent: making mistakes out of deep love.
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So again, maybe blame and avoidability are the wrong words when we think about the parent. Mistakes are unavoidable. It's what we do with them that is our choice. And we often don't know what to do. 

Like Ruth Bell Graham wrote during a season of harsh criticism of her best attempts at parenting: "Remind them gently, Lord, that you - have trouble with your children, too."

3. Blaming the Context

I think this is the easiest thing to do when you recognize that blame doesn’t fit well for the child or the parent. Shift the discomfort and sadness onto an entity, a thing. 

It’s hard to pin down the central trauma because the individual has decided to own it, or the parent is hurt because they feel they couldn’t avoid it. Or because there is no person in this world that doesn't have central trauma (genetic, adaptive, or we'll never even know the reason). So we find a source of peripheral trauma. A mission board. A school. A church. A culture. Being homeschooled. Being public schooled. Boarding school. The transition to life in the states. If only these things hadn’t happened, there wouldn’t be the scars and fibrosis now cutting off blood supply (sorry I’m a nurse in med school). If only the wound never happened, it wouldn’t have abscessed. If only the child had been spared these hurts, they’d be well.

This line of thought has some validity. Things do hurt us. Old scars do choke arteries. Punctures leave bacteria and bacteria with a nice blood supply and some yummy cells to munch are among the greatest forces of nature.

But. 

But easy is rarely right. We are not our scars. We are not the things that puncture. We are much more than victims. 

We are the persons with choice, or we are not persons at all. We are the person who take the reins of our thinking. We are the person who acknowledges something is wrong and that thing is going to destroy us if we don’t seek help. We are the person who says it hurts. We are the person who finds a doctor. We are the person who holds our arm still when the anesthetic doesn’t work, fighting the reflex to pull away from debridement, fighting beyond pain for life, because we choose to live. 

Or, we are the person who decides to die. We sit somewhere far from help shielding our necrosis, repeating our traumas without transcendence in our minds and in our words, keeping company with the wound and its sequela, asking for sympathy while it kills us.

Did growing up having stones thrown at me for my skin color, being told what I could do with my life because of my sex, being labeled by my parents’ faith before I knew what it meant to have one of my own, being pushed aside and stigmatized for the way my parents chose to educate me, hurt me in some ways? Yes. Did those external choices I didn’t get to make write themselves all over me? Yes. Do those choices still rob me? Yes. Yes they do. Is it their fault that I sometimes don’t live wholehearted? That I grieve pieces of my life that can’t happen now? That I have to get the same abscesses debrided over and over and over? Yes. 

Yes, but.

But these things don’t take my power from me. I choose to hold power from these things. I choose to call my thoughts and actions mine. I sit, mostly silent, at the tables of racism, sexism, religious discrimination, rejection – often unacknowledged or even greeted with anger when I speak, because I don’t look (white, a career woman, happy at my church, externally comfortable) like I should know them intimately. And in my silence I choose for my inner prayers take on a deeper compassion. I look at the wounded like siblings. I look at the wounded like they are bigger than the traumas.

I offer to be with them while they get the abscesses debrided. I'll go to the dean or the charge nurse with you. I'll go to the doctor with you. I'll recommend a counselor, a pastor, my mother. I'll tell you what it's like to be on or off the meds. I'll hold you after someone tells you they just won't date someone with your background. I believe in your power to choose healing. 

It is too small to blame the context. It is incomplete. Healing comes from recognizing the wound AND having it debrided.

The context is actually where our place of responsibility and power begins if we are not the individual or the parent in the situation. We can’t take away the wound. The periphery hurt this child, hurt this parent. We can become a new context. Recognize the child as owner of their choices. Support the parent who is trying to love with greater wisdom. Stop suppressing our own memories of the times we have been every actor in this repeating play.  Acknowledge and lay to rest our inner victims. And come alongside with compassion and empowerment.

When we stop blaming the context, we transform it. We become the new context. 

4. Blaming God

Hello darkness, my old friend.

This is my personal place of being stuck, the place where my sense of power stutters out. If the rest of what I’ve written sounds empowered… good. In the past 15 years I have taken all the power that bled out of my early life, absorbed it back in my mind from parents and context. But I can’t get around the fact that “you are God in heaven and here am I on earth, so I will let my words be few.”

Warning: there is anger and fear and helplessness ahead. You may not want to keep reading. You may have your own page of struggle that you don't need my bleeding ink leaking into. And it is ok if you want to stop here. 

There is nothing I can say to relieve God of his power, and therefore, of his responsibility. Against him only have I sinned, oh yes. And by him, by his word, by his Great Plans, by his unflinching eyes on obedient Abraham, have I been trapped.  Isaac was a grown man and Abraham was old and the servants were waiting in the valley. Do we really think there was no point in that journey up the mountain, in lying on the altar, on watching the knife, that Isaac couldn’t have walked out? 

What held Isaac to the altar was not ropes or hands or love for his father – today I suspect it was knowing that he was nothing if not the child of the promise. (Tomorrow I may think otherwise because every day I project me onto Isaac.) Was it a choice? I don't know. I doubt it felt like one to him. The whole story of Isaac is the Great Plan beyond him. It’s God’s. God’s promise. God’s delays. God’s laughter. God’s… sacrifice. My name is Isaac, and I am named for others' laughter. Never in the story of Isaac is he said to laugh, himself. The last laugh is God’s, always God's. God of the Great Plan, God of the Everything Plan. Is there any laugh in this story that isn't actually God's?

I will lie here and await it the laughter. Maybe someday it will be mine.

The only reason that blaming God is wrong is that it’s also too small. He is God in heaven, and here am I on earth, and I have to let my words be few because that’s all they are. Small. Empty. Inadequate. What can I possibly say to this author except that I hope he enjoys the story he wrote about me?  .... this Choose Your Own Adventure where it feels that even though the choices are mine, even they are already written. 

At these moments I play Regina Spector. "No one laughs at God in the hospital. No one laughs at God in a war. No one's laughing at God when they're starving or freezing or so very poor. No one's laughing at God... we're all laughing with God."

"I will let my words be few..." because I don't really have any, do I? 

I have one thing to say. I say it every minute. Sometimes I breathe it.

I say, "God of Isaacs, don’t leave me. I don’t know if I could climb off this altar even if I tried. I have never been able to leave the mountain, or the path, or my name. So I don’t know if it means anything when I say that I’ve chosen now not to climb off this altar. But when I shut my eyes here and see your face in the darkness behind my eyelids, let me still see love on that face."

And I can’t ask anyone else to say what I say, pray what I pray. Choose to stay, as I now think I do… some days. I know what it feels like. I know what it costs. I don't know if I will choose it tomorrow. It's that crazy senseless kind of thing they call a miracle I chose it today, and yesterday, and the day I stepped back to faith. 

Nor can I predict what a person who has felt trapped all their life will choose when they discover their own feet. All I can say is that it is good for us to discover our own feet and learn to move them. It is good for us to discover our own minds and hearts and learn to walk with, not against, them.

My only persisting hope is that on the other side of every moment I will find that I am still not abandoned, and that not being abandoned is still good.

So, how could loss of faith be avoided? 

I have no idea. What I do know is that blame and avoidability are inadequate ways to think about it. Talking about avoidability doesn’t help while your friend is holding their arm still for debridement. 

I think the only - albeit imperfect - answer is the way we live with each other. 

So here - other people living with me, this way, is what helps me: 

"I'm proud of you. You are trying to be well. You are taking hard steps to be whole. Your life matters. Your heart matters. Your wellness matters. You are making mistakes. You have made mistakes. You will not stop making mistakes. But you are making your choices. I know you are doing the best you can. If there is a God that's worth knowing, a faith that's worth having, a love that's worth finding - then they are here for the truth of you. Open up that truth. Cut open the old wound. You will cut through this trauma and scarring and death. You will open up for a new kind of healing. And while you do, I will not leave you. You can belong with me. You can be angry with me. You can tell me the truth. Thank you for telling me the truth. I love you. Hold my hand. I know this hurts. You are brave. You are strong. On the other side of this, you will be a more whole-hearted you. 

"Regardless of the reasons and regardless of the outcome, I will choose you while we learn to choose. On the other side of everything, you and I will be together."