Converge magazine // 15

7 family portraits // adoption // house-husbands // murder in the church // Divorce

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2 | CONVERGE. November - December 2013

Issue 15 // November - December 2013

Reflections

5

Where two kingdoms meet Life

Translating a father's love Longing for more: Secondary infertility

7 8

Field Notes

Dating, with children Dating is already hard enough as it is. But what happens when you throw a kid in the mix?

Shorts

Oops, I was born Dispatches

The parent trap ReDefining headship Mister mom Of Fathers And Affairs Reviews

Reading old books Last Word

Getting to the Roots

What’s inside This FAMILY AFFAIR?

11 22 24 26 28 30 46 48

Exposing the complexities of families: pain and joy live here

Feature reading Modern Families

14

On what it means to be a family, despite the pressures of it all.

Family + artists Single + career Multi-generational Family + business

Single + parent Family + social justice Single + community

Heartbreak of The Everyday The joys and pains of parenting seem to hang on expectation. What adoption does is bring those expectations into the light.

32 Separated

Sanctuary to a Murderer

Just because you've grown up in a broken home, doesn't mean you have to be defined by it.

A pastor's wife shares how she lived through the most savage of nightmares.

38

42

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sales@convergemagazine.com contributors

Brett McCracken, Chelsea Batten, Craig Ketchum, Flyn Ritchie, Jenn Co, Jolene Friesen, Jonathan Fajardo, Julia Cheung, Kyle Stiemsma, Matt (Living Waters Canada), Michael Lee, Michelle Sudduth, Randy Maas, Samantha Matheson cover

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Editor’s letter

what DO families look like?

W

Flickr photo (cc) by mariko2

hen it comes to stories, some of the best ones are about families. Classics like Pride and Prejudice, Les Miserables, or even The Godfather illuminate the kind of complexities at work in households. Family stories are most often messy and beautiful at the same time. We find the particular kind of dysfunction found in them shockingly (and sometimes hilariously) relatable.

Telling and consuming stories about family is only natural — our history is literally in our genes. We agonize over our past, where we come from, why we are the way we are. We reckon back to the good ole days. We long for healing and forgiveness.

To be honest, I’m feeling a bit self-conscious. It’s my inaugural issue as editor of Converge, and as it is with most firsts, I’m nervous. But it fits that my first issue is about family, because I feel like I’ve gained one. Days before I started the job, I attended a brainstorming session at the Converge offices with some writers and contributors. As we got personal, the level of honesty and acceptance and excitement for Converge was palatable. I felt humbled to be so welcomed, and terrified at the responsibility that lay before me.

Because at the end of it all, I’m accountable to this Converge family. I care deeply about what they think, and I want to make them proud.

And in biological families, the stakes are even higher. We love the people in them more than anyone else in the world. And as a result, they’re the

people who can hurt us the most. They’re our greatest influences, our worst critics, our biggest fans.

Family is supposed to be around until the end. After all, whether we like it or not, we can't choose the family we're born into.

When we first came up with the concept for this issue, we wanted to expose the complexities of family, its ups and downs. No family is without pain; conversely, very few are without some kind of joy. Times of severe brokenness, as in Julia Cheung’s “Sanctuary to a Murderer,” are juxtaposed by Craig Ketchum’s understanding of his father’s love. We feature a story

by Chelsea Batten about the composite factors involved in adoption. And on a more light-hearted note, Jolene Friesen blames her very existence on a negligent birth control factory worker in St. Louis.

This issue gets gritty. At times it’s in-your-face. At others, it’ll make you laugh out loud.

I guess that’s a lot like what family is.

Leanne Janzen editor

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“But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” John 1:12

Where Two

Kingdoms Meet

By Brett McCracken

Flickr photo (cc) by Tinkerbrad

Brett McCracken is a Los Angeles-based journalist and author of the recently released Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism & Liberty, as well as Hipster Christianity.

Follow him on Twitter @brettmccracken or at his blog, stillsearching. wordpress.com

It’s the thread linking every human being on this earth together. And it’s something that connects even the most diverse of people.

We are all someone’s son or someone’s daughter.

God, probably due to his Trinitarian character, created humans to exist within families. We may not all have spouses, siblings, or children, but every last one of us has, or has had, parents. Family is the reality that gives rise to our very existence. It helps shape who we become.

But families are made up of imperfect people.

They give grief and pain as often as they give gladness and healing. Little else in life can grow us as much as family at its best, and few things can shackle us like family at its worst.

Such is the way of life’s most precious gifts. “[Family] hurts just as much as it is worth,” wrote essayist and novelist Zadie Smith in an essay on joy. Family is tough and often painful, yes. But its potential gifts are incomparably magnificent.

At its best, family grants continuity in a world of discontinuity, a glimpse of permanence in a world of change. Amid relentless transience and uncertainty,

family provides stability. When all else fails, family will always be family. And if things go according to design, our family will always offer us unconditional love. Little else in life is as permanent as that.

Family, and its close corollary “home,” also offers shelter and comfort in the midst of a hostile world. At its best, we come home to a family and find forgiveness and healing, a place of warmth and love where we are known. Or home may be simply a place where we can sit around a table and eat Mom’s spaghetti while talking about jobs, school, or soccer practice. It’s a pause button, a space to decompress and recalibrate.

A gift.

Family, I’d suggest, is the primary earthly structure that echoes our heavenly home. The kingdoms of earth and God meet in the concept of family.

That’s why Christians use the phrase “family of God.” We are brothers and sisters in Christ. We are adopted into a heavenly family more permanent and (one day) more perfect than our earthly family will ever be. We have been given the right to become children of God. As pleasant as all this sounds, I often find it hard to think of my fellow believers as “family” in the same sense as my own relatives. It feels forced and abstract — an artificial construct wherein people who are vastly different from one another play at being “brothers” and “sisters.”

But I’ve come to realize kingdom-of-God-things always feel a little bit real and a little bit fake. They occupy liminal territory, bridging concepts that couldn’t feel more earthly (like union with our own relatives) with concepts that are hard to fathom (like union with the God of the universe and all His children).

This transitional nature of family is what makes it so great. It grounds us in the now like nothing else can, even while it offers the clearest-possible glimpses of the not-yet.

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LIFE

Throughout my childhood my parents were selfless, supportive, caring, and assertive. They were excellent conversationalists; I watched them connect with friends on the mission field, engage local people, and charm supporters back home. (Our family did the expected song-and-dance for supporters in Western Canada and Southern England, prompting compassionate churchgoers to supplement my father’s modest mission aviation salary.)

Dad

The only way

he knew how Translating my father’s love

By Craig Ketchum

Illustration by Samantha Matheson

Craig’s life has been an international adventure, spanning 35 countries over four continents. He now teaches and writes in the Vancouver, BC area. He loves to connect people, and is passionate about the creative arts (particularly music), and discipleship.

I

am the product of two headstrong, vibrant, daring lives coming together.

In the early ‘80s, a young Canadian pilot and a young British teacher moved to Ethiopia. He went to fly famine relief, she to teach at a missionary school. They met there, dated, survived a long distance stint, and then got married. I was born in Ethiopia, along with my two beautiful sisters after me.

My father is always keen to do things. He’s one of the most driven people I know. An excellent organizer, manager, and leader, he propels himself and others headlong into projects and pursuits. An engineer by trade, he understands metallic, moving, mechanical things. When these things break, he fixes them. As I grew up he would pull me into projects like fixing toilets, building sheds, or restoring tree houses. We went mountain climbing, spelunking, sailing, white-water rafting.

Because I love learning, I took great pride in the skills he taught me. My hunger for an adrenaline rush was satiated in those outdoor adventures. But as I grew into myself, I found I was no longer quite as keen to be the mechanic’s assistant, rather finding my strengths in language and creativity. I watched my sister jump at the opportunity to fill the space by my dad’s side. Shame — the feeling of being small — seized me as I spent less time with him.

In the world of mechanics, accomplishment seems blissfully black and white: if you fix the broken object, you succeed. If it works better than before, you have done your job. But my head was in the dreamy world of the arts, and it can be hard to praise things that are so abstract and abstruse.

Something in me began to perceive a validation void. Sometimes I felt unappreciated because being good enough meant having a tangible accomplishment to be praised for.

Love Languages It’s true: in my teenage years I didn’t feel like my dad loved me enough. But it wasn’t due to any lack of love on my dad’s part. Although he’s not overly emotional, he has loved me intensely and constantly from the day I was born. I see it now in a way I’ve never seen it before. How could I have missed it my entire childhood?

After reading Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Langauges, it all began to make sense. I realized I receive love in a different way than my dad shows it. I wasn’t able to fully appreciate his love because he showed it to me in a way that didn’t resonate powerfully to me.

Chapman’s premise is that human beings can give and receive love in five basic ways: physical touch, gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, and acts of service. I’ve found Chapman’s observations to be insightful, incredibly helpful, and true overall.

Understanding differing love languages gave meaning to the mysterious void of affection and validation I had sensed as a teenage boy, though I knew in my head that my dad really did love me.

Out of the five types, my dad shows love mostly through acts of service. For my dad, doing something for someone is showing love. This is a significant difference between us because I understand love as being with someone. For me, affinity grows through quality time, physical touch, and affirming words. A disconnect formed when my dad’s time spent with me was geared convergemagazine.com

|7

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8 | CONVERGE. November - December 2013

CONVERGE

around an activity like a job; I wrongly interpreted this as distraction. It left me with the impression he didn’t appreciate me, so I would shut down. I looked elsewhere for the undivided attention I craved.

Many people whose primary love language is quality time detest it when others appear distracted from them in communication. It makes so much sense now.

Looking back, I’m astounded at the acts of service I can recall and can now rightly interpret as love. For example, my high school girlfriend lived across the city, and my dad frequently drove me the 40 minutes to her house and back. In hindsight, I see the incredible love and care in this act of service. Back then, I saw it as a chore he was doing for me, and it just made me feel guilty.

Father Matters British counselling psychologist Lin Button has written a book entitled Father Matters which expounds upon the effects of not properly receiving a father’s love.

Wounds we sustain from fathers and father figures create deep emotional and psychological scars on our sense of personhood. Not receiving my father’s love created other issues of inferiority, insecurity, people-pleasing, fear of failure, and fear of God the Father. Gary Chapman’s book was an important first step in helping me heal, and learning about father wounds brought me further along in that process. As an adult, all these years later, the realization that my dad actually loved me, and was trying to show it in the way he knew how, has made a huge difference. For those of us who have not known our father’s love, God the Father is asking whether you will allow him to repair you through discovering His love.

Knowing I was loved started a snowball of healing in my sense of self. I gave God the Father permission to walk through the walls of my heart. As a result, He began to put things right — restoring my worth, empowering my will, and giving me a mission to find out how to love and how to receive love. Especially with you, Dad.

What’s your love language?

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Field notes life, onto you.” That was my way to protect his heart. It made it easier on him; it made it tougher on me.

Jamie: I sometimes thought about the potentials if things got serious between us. I certainly would not have minded starting a family with that girl, but I don’t really think either of us had any of our priorities straight at the time. I was thinking of going back to college in a completely different city, and she was a bit lost in what she wanted to do with her life.

Chris: I think it’s a positive and a negative. It makes you look at people more than, “I’m just going into this having fun.” You think a lot more about it. If it doesn’t work out, it’s not only you that’s hurting; it’s your son that’s hurting. He’s wondering, “Why didn’t you fall in love?” It puts a lot of stress on the parent because you have to explain that sometimes love doesn’t work out.

DATING,

WITH CHILDREN Playdates. Actual dates. Two guys share their dating-with-kids experience

By Chelsea Batten

I

only started to really like dating when I took my mind out of the future.

It was fun and liberating, to just enjoy meeting new people, playing by my own rules.

But when I imagine throwing a kid into the mix, suddenly the rules seem a lot more important. Your poor choices affect more than just you — they affect an impressionable child who is picking up cues for their future relationships from...gulp...you.

I found a couple of guys to talk to who have had experience in the whole dating-with-kids thing. One of them, Chris, has kids of his own. The other, Jamie, doesn’t have kids but has dated a girl with one.

Flickr photo (cc) by SingleDadLaughing

Chris: I’m quadruple as protective of my son as what the norm would be. I’m a big fan of not bringing people — women, or women bringing men — in and out of [my] kids’ lives. I feel like that’s not a good thing. I feel it’s very confusing for the kid. At the same time, when you’re a single parent, your kid starts to ask, “When am I going to have a mom? I really want a mom.”

Jamie: I wouldn’t say I felt more pressure than in other relationships. [My girlfriend’s] little girl actually acted as an initial buffer between us. She helped [us] become closer because I think [my girlfriend] saw how good I was with her kid. So the pressure was definitely not more, but different, in that I had to make sure to pay attention and care for more than one person in the relationship.

Chris: For the first year, I didn’t date anybody. I hung out with people, but I’d tell everybody straight up, “I’m a 100 per cent single dad. I don’t want to put that stress on my son, my role in

Jamie: At the time we dated, I was very close to not only her and her child, but also her entire family. I was spending most of my days at their house, just hanging out with her dad, her mom, her, her sister, and most importantly, her kid. I really grew to love that little girl. Those thoughts of getting serious were a dichotomy of pleasant and scary. Pleasant because I really enjoyed that family, and scary because I was in no real way ready to settle down.

Chris: I’ve been dating someone for about six months now. It took about four months before I felt comfortable enough to introduce this person to my son. As a parent, you know — you should know — who a good person is for your son. And who isn’t. This is somebody who’s very loving, very caring, very understanding, has a very tender heart for my son. Just the other night he was saying, “You guys are boyfriend and girlfriend, aren’t you?” I said yeah. And he said, “When are you guys getting married?” That’s the next step of stress!

Jamie: The most important thing I learned from this girl was the ability to care for a child properly. I think those months I spent with her and her daughter will benefit me in ways I probably won’t realize when I hopefully have a child of my own. But we both knew that I was not the man to be her husband. I had and currently have far too much growing up to do.

Chris: A lot of times, I over think things. We both do it. She’ll [ask] me, “How do you feel? Do you see me as somebody you want to marry down the road? Do you feel like I’m a good mom for your son?” Sometimes it’s fun to dive into something you’re not sure about, and that’s part of life. Sometimes you might think too much about it. It’s all somewhat [of ] a game. It’s all about taking a risk and trying to be as cautious as you can, choosing the [right person]. It’s tough.

Chris and his girlfriend are currently figuring out how co-parent together.

Jamie has remained friends with his former girlfriend. He is also her daughter’s godfather. convergemagazine.com

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12 | CONVERGE.

November - December 2013

Starters

Longing for more Dealing with secondary infertility

By Chelsea Batten

K Flickr photo (cc) by 55Laney69

arin is very honest about the struggles of infertility.

Specifically, she’s honest about her inner conflict of faith in God. He’s given her the desire for a child, but then hasn’t given her the ability to have one.

“I scoured the Internet [and] came upon a website. They said it’s for anybody, but you could tell that it’s mostly for infertility without any children. I was almost embarrassed, afraid to say, ‘It’s so devastating every month I’m not pregnant.’ But I could just imagine them saying, ‘You have three kids.’ I just felt like I didn’t belong anywhere.”

What Karin is talking about is known as secondary infertility.

Yes, she has three biological kids. But she and her husband want more. They didn’t always — in fact, for the first few years after

her last child was born, Karin says she was pretty settled on not getting pregnant again.

“We decided our family was complete,” she says. “We looked at it from a very human standpoint — we were tired and overwhelmed. We enjoyed the kids we had, but we were done.”

But she says she and her husband were provoked by a message they saw in Scripture, that children are a blessing to be sought after. More than that, she says they felt God was urging them to desire more than the three they had.

“What surprised me was the feelings that followed — after being terrified that I would have another child, to becoming sad every month that we weren’t pregnant. I’ll be very honest — it seemed almost like a joke. Like, ‘OK, God, I was happy and at peace. We changed our minds to what we think you want for us.... Where’s the baby?”

They thought about adoption, but Karin says the opposition from certain family members convinced them that pursuing adoption, at that point, wouldn’t be the best for their family. So Karin says they kept trying and praying for a baby.

“It’s been a faith-building struggle,” she sighs, recounting how it was worse because she couldn’t find anyone to share it with. “I’m going to end up saying something that somebody’s going to be totally hurt by, and I’m just sharing my journey. I don’t claim to feel the same as somebody who doesn’t have children. It is different, but it is also devastating to want a baby and not have a baby.”

She says she was at times depressed, as Karin and her husband kept it hidden from her friends and family.

“I think what the Lord really did was [say], ‘Stop looking everywhere else. Look to me.’”

The answer, Karin says, doesn’t lie in getting pregnant, or even in finding companionship in her sadness and struggle. She says what really helped Karin and her husband cope was coming to grips with why they wanted another baby in the first place.

“We’ve always tried to view having kids as a ministry anyways. These are just ours temporarily, to bring to the Lord,” Karin says.

Whether it’s the spectral presence of a child they don’t have, or the actual presence of the three children they do have, Karin says it’s the same challenge not to make parenting about her own fulfillment.

“I want to say they’re this little reflection of me. But I need to say, ‘I’ve got to not put all my hopes and dreams in you, just serve you.’ My mission statement in raising kids is to raise adults who are dependent on [God].”

Her experience has also changed her perspective on the idea of adoption — which is a good thing, since their objecting family members had a complete change of heart on the idea only in the past few months.

Because Karin and her husband have been trying to have a baby for three years, she says her desire to adopt is less of an emotional baby rescuing mission and more about a ministry opportunity. Specifically, they’re looking into open adoption, as Karin says it has possibilities for ministering not just to a baby, but to a birth mother and grandparents.

While it’s exciting, at the same time, Karin says she can find herself second-guessing this decision, especially when she hears stories of adoptions gone terribly wrong, or when she confronts her own limitations.

“If I don’t look to the Lord, I freak out,” Karin says. “But for the past year, it’s been more about God’s will overall.” She says she has peace, knowing it's God's decision. convergemagazine.com

| 13

modern families Careers. kids. burnout. Time. singleness. multiple generations. Can we have it all?

Interviews by Jenn Co Photos courtesy of the featured Families

Mom, Dad, two kids, and a dog named Spot.

Or...not.

14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Family + artists Single + career family + social justice Single + Community family + business single + parent multi-generational

14 | CONVERGE. November - December 2013

Parents to Zac 11, Jaedon 9, and Zoey 6

Stacy & Marika Siewert Owners of Emerton Records & Siewert Entertainment Group Stacy (Husband) // 33 // Photographer Marika (Wife) // 33 // Professional recording artist & songwriter How do you juggle being creative entrepreneurs and having a family?

M: Being purposeful with what you do and don’t do. There are seasons for focusing on certain things. When the kids were younger, I launched my radio singles, but I didn’t tour like a crazy artist. Now the kids are older, [and] our biggest lesson is making decisions out of rest — working within the grace of

Photo by Cathy Cena

Family isn't as easy to define as it was 60 years ago. So what makes a family? And how does a family survive amidst career and life pressures?

God. When God brings the opportunities, it’s way better than us working for no reason, just because we feel we’re supposed to be working.

S: We balance it well, because we’re in it together. We know where we’re going, and we make decisions when it comes to work, play, church, people, and friends according to our goals.

Angela Strikwerda 29 // Air Canada flight attendant and flight attendant instructor

What are some of your family’s goals?

M: In the past, we had this big goal to take over the music industry and be positive influences. We still want to do that. But we’ve learned God wants us to enjoy our lives. So it’s less about the mission and more about loving people.

It’s not this evangelistic mission to go and save the world.

Jesus has already saved the world. Our job is to simply love others.

S: Doing everything as a family — that’s always been our biggest priority. It would be easier to send our kids to school and have time to ourselves. Instead, we’re homeschooling. We’d rather have less time doing other things so we can be together. For example, we’ll take the whole family out when the kids audition for commercials or movies. As long as we’re doing it together, it makes everything easier because family has been our center focus.

M: We don’t necessarily do things for the money. We know God provides. He’s already given us everything we need. It’s whether we believe that or not. This gives us the ability to do things because we want to, not because we have to.

Q: As a single person, how do you juggle pursuing career and a future family?

A: It’s definitely a struggle. Since I’ve been single for this long, I’ve had to provide for myself and think about my future. So money has become a higher priority for me. When it comes to making our own way in the world, it can be very difficult for our generation. In a way, adolescence is dragged out another decade compared to 30, even 20 years ago.

Q: How will your career choices play out in a marriage/family context?

A: There are people who say that as soon as you get married and have children, you derail yourself professionally. One of the advantages of being single longer is you’re able to build a more stable career. For example, at my age, I’m able to leave my flight attendant position and return to it after pregnancy. I want all my single years to count; if I frame it that way, it’s easier to make peace with being single for so long.

What do you love doing?

Q: You’ve been independent for some time. What will change once you find a life partner?

S: I love showing people they are valuable. I also love being an example of a husband wherever I go in the entertainment industry, because that’s rare, to have a strong family structure.

A: Decision making may feel like a sacrifice. Had I gotten married younger, with perhaps less financial pressures, it would have felt more like being rescued. But because I’m older and more set in my ways, decisions may potentially feel like a sacrifice since I’m used to doing whatever I wanted all the time.

M: People want the reality of God — not just the concept.

God has done it all already. Our job is to rest. Our whole company and lives are structured around empowering and equipping people in the entertainment industry. That’s what we love to do.

Listen to Canadian GMA Convenant Awards nominee Marika’s Unstoppable single.

Nominated for both Pop Song of the Year and Pop Album of the Year.

Q: What advice would you give someone younger who’s wrestling with a career versus family?

A: I would tell them it’s OK to have a life that’s winding and unexpected; to be open to carving a path in the forest. I’d encourage them to not limit themselves by turning down opportunities but to be open to people’s suggestions — to test out new things.

And also, that it’s OK for adolescence to go on for another ten years.

Q: What’s your number one priority right now?

A: Quality of relationships: with God, others and self. In my devotions, friendships, even connecting with students, being open to relating with people and learning to listen and communicate. convergemagazine.com

| 15

Modern families

Parents to Benson & Tehilah (twins) 3.5 & Portland 1.5

they got their period. I doubt I would’ve cared so deeply or strongly before I had kids. I was just really bothered by it. I wanted these girls to know somebody noticed them. But I was also setting a standard for my own kids.

A: I want our children to have the highest platform possible to jump off to do their own thing. I want our daughters to have a mom who goes after her dreams, because this allows them to go after their dreams.

C: And sometimes, that’s all the fire I need — to look at my kids and think of the dreams inside of them. Then fear has to step aside. That’s what keeps me going. If I wasn’t a mom, I would have quit [the business] a long time ago.

Do you think career and family compete?

A: It could, but it doesn’t have to. I can watch the kids while Christina pursues her business. It’s been incredible.

C: My goal is to include the family into the business as much as possible, and the business into the family as little as possible. I take weekends off, which is hard for a start-up, but I want to create a stable environment for my home. I’m also very aware of what my family needs versus what the business needs. So if one child is acting up, I’ll stop everything and take that kid out for some alone time. Or, if I’m getting impatient with them because I’m too focused on the business, I’ll take a break from work because that benefits both.

Adison + Christina Norman Adison // 26, Industrial contractor Christina // 23, Founder of You&Her

How do you nurture and cherish family relationships in the heat of work?

A: For me, it’s practical. I used to work long hours, weeknights and weekends in my previous job, so I never really got to see my family. I would promise to do things but never be able to follow through because I was too concerned keeping clients happy. Now I do things with family. There’s no conflict with areas of life. It becomes one whole instead of a bunch of different parts. It feels fluid.

Last words for other young families?

You married young. Adison, you were 22 and Christina, you were 20.

A: It took eight months between us meeting to getting married. It was pretty quick. We just knew.

C: The transition from leaving my own family to starting one was pretty easy. I’ve wanted to be a mom since I was 16. So nobody was surprised when I got married and had kids right away.

A: We’ve always said, “Instead of waiting for all our goals and aspirations to be complete, why not have our kids along for the ride?” That way, they see the responsible decisions we make, especially with Christina starting this new business.

What has it been like, being young parents while launching your own business?

C: I definitely wasn’t looking for a cause. I read an online campaign accepting donations for “new and lightly used” underwear to give African girls, because they would stop schooling once

16 | CONVERGE. November - December 2013

A: Live intentional. Every decision you make is your choice.

Weigh the situation and outcome with purpose and clarity.

Then you’re able to eliminate a lot of problems and hurt.

Also, being a young family has its challenges. But the whole point of taking our children along on this adventure is knowing that though we may go through difficult times, our kids will see us work through issues [in a healthy way].

C: When people become parents, we think quality of life diminishes and time is eaten up. But the truth is your time becomes more valuable. You become wiser, stronger, more compassionate and open to addressing hurts and accepting people. Because you now see others as somebody’s child. You look at global issues seriously because your family is a part of the world. Having children enlarges you. It pushes you forward.

You&Her is a luxury lingerie and underwear brand that uses part of its profits to produce underwear for women in Africa.

Craig Ketchum 26 // high school teacher & writer

You’re a bachelor with a career. How are you preparing for a future family?

My dad’s parents and my mom were all teachers. I saw how they integrated work into their lives. I also love traveling. So I look forward to finding a wife who will travel with me. I’ve realized though, that teaching is so much about sustained relationships. It makes more sense to settle down in a community and work there for a few years.

What does family mean to you?

Photo by Haley Richelle

Family doesn’t have to be biological.

Family is the relationships you protect the most. As a single guy, I’m living in community with other guys — family with a “small f.” “Capital F” is the family I help to create and steward as a father and husband one day — whether through marriage, procreation, or adoption. So right now, I’m learning to love people as brothers and sisters and with agape love — and to protect these relationships.

Do you think career and family compete?

I think that’s the standard belief. But I believe God blesses both hard work and

family. Our lives are filled with the tension of boundaries, priorities and laying ourselves down. There are ways to honour both your employer and your family. This involves creativity, and you can experience blessing and flourish simultaneously in both areas.

This winter at Paciic Theatre...

How are you going to nurture and cherish your family relationships in the heat of your career?

By deliberately loving people the way they receive it best. It may mean me coming home after a day of teaching and doing homework with my kids and having family meal times together. The other thing is making sure that whatever I’m doing, I’m doing wholeheartedly. We feel frustrated when we’re neither fully working nor fully resting. When we’re out of energy, we need to learn to stop and rest. After that, we can get back up and work hard again. Lastly, it’s being intentional. So when I’m home, I’m fully home. When I’m at work, I’m fully at work. I don’t want my life to be one big messy blend that neither part gets the full attention they deserve.

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| 17

Modern families

Omar & Denielle Janmohamed 37 and 35 // Owners of NorthTrek Uniform & Branded Merchandise

Was it an intentional decision to hold off having children because of the workload?

O: Had I stuck with my family’s business, we would probably have been parents sooner because, in my mind, we would have had a stable source of income. But then we became selfemployed, and that created a lot of financial demands. Plus the fact we just got married. It was a bit overwhelming.

With growth came more growth, so I felt I didn’t get a chance to catch my breath at times. During those 11 years, did we try for a child? Yes. But we were both under stress, and you try for six months and it doesn’t happen. Then it begins to affect you mentally. So you try to convince yourself you don’t want a child. Or that you don’t know if you want a child or not. Long story short, we weren’t planning for a family, and it just happened. I’d venture to say it’s the best way it could have happened. Having Ayvah is our best accomplishment.

How has having a child changed the dynamic of your lives? parents to daughter Ayvah, 13 months

D: I would say we’ve become more organized and scheduled.

O: Because we’re more structured, I say we’re more effective.

You started your own business shortly after you were married 11 years ago. How was that?

D: When we first started, I was still in school and unsure about the direction I was going. I told Omar I would help him get the business started, but once it was running, I’d step back. I discovered once I actually got in the industry, I really enjoyed it. So I stayed.

O: I would love to tell you it was a brainwave, but it was more a reaction to circumstances and us needing to earn a living. I had experience in this line of work, so that’s where I gravitated towards. There was not much thought behind it.

18 | CONVERGE. November - December 2013

D: My worst fear [was] that I was going to get pregnant and become more tired and grumpy and not [serve] my clients well. So when we realized I was pregnant, we made a list. First, find a nanny. Second, set up a baby’s room.

We then started checking things off.

O: Since we had to factor the cost of a nanny, we cut back on eating out, we shared a vehicle. When faced with a task, obstacle or project, the anxiety is always worse initially, but then once

Mandy Nilson

42 // Student, direct sales representative, homeschooling single mother What does family mean to you? you’ve gone through it, it isn’t that bad.

I’m happier, more productive and energetic with Ayvah around.

D: When people hear I have a playpen in my office, they ask, “How can you be productive? How could you even bring your child there?” A normal person who goes to work from nine to five doesn’t see their child in those hours. So even if I get to see Ayvah for those 15 minutes in the office as I’m getting my work done, to me, those 15 minutes — that’s all Ayvah’s going to remember. She’s not going to remember she saw us at the office. She’s going to remember, I had quality time with Mom and Dad. O: Most of the time, our clients will ask us to bring Ayvah because they haven’t seen her in a while. So we’ll go have a lunch meeting and sometimes our clients will bring their kids as well. Everybody’s sympathetic about work and family life being demanding. If the people you work with are big picture thinkers, then they’re thinking about bridging work/ family gaps.

How do you create a happy, healthy family environment in the midst of a demanding lifestyle?

O: Prior to us moving into our current 3,300 square foot home, we were renting a three-bedroom 1,500 square foot condo. I can truly say, from the bottom of my heart, I had never been happier.

We were in very small quarters but we had enough space.

D: And having Jenny move in as Ayvah’s nanny was such an easy transition. She’s such a caring and loving person. And it trickles down to Ayvah. She’s happy all the time. Just like us, Ayvah is around positive people all day long. People are what make a happy home. We love each other unconditionally.

Unconditional love. Home is sanctuary. It’s where you can be who you are. There’s no judgement, no performancebased criteria to be loved.

How do you guard that sense of family?

I have very distinct boundaries. My family is made up of very close friends. Two months after my 19th birthday, I put everything I could into a backpack and left my house. I did not speak with my biological family for about 20 years. I walked out because I wanted my own Mandy with her son eric voice. I wanted to construct my own framework of self. I then created my own family. It came down to valuing the relationships I had and putting in the time for those friendships. My two closest friends I’ve had for 30 years. They’ve seen me single, married, become a mother, divorced and now a single parent. They’re family because no matter the pain or hardship I've gone through, I felt connected and grounded to them. In the midst of going through my own healing and making ends meet, I had to make choices — the most important [were] involving my son. He was my priority and I wanted him to have an amazing childhood.

That meant lots of laughter, lots of love. I had family around me [who] knew what I needed and were willing to give it to me so I could continue being the mom I wanted to be.

Who is your son's family?

Firstly, myself. Not just as a parent, but as he’s getting older, more as a friend. I want him to develop and be independent and to start envisioning who he wants to be in this family and to take ownership and responsibility over that. Secondly, our community. Realistically, there’s two of us. It would be so easy to get caught up in our own day-to-day schedule and be disconnected from where we live. I didn’t want that. So I put Eric in clubs and activities where he’s able to connect with people and build relationships.

Has being a single mother shaped your career aspirations?

In a way, yes. Whatever I do, I want to make sure I’m there for my child.

So there’s a trade-off. Many times I would start an essay at 9 p.m., finish it at 4 a.m., sleep a couple of hours, get up, hand it in, make breakfast for Eric, then take him to school. I want him to know Mom [is] always there no matter what. I would like to do some technical writing. Maybe start a blog. Eric and I want to create graphic novels and comic strips, because storytelling has been a huge part of what we’ve done together. I want to experiment in what I can do as a vocation. I believe my life experiences and how I’ve chosen to construct my family has allowed us to be bold and fearless when it comes to the future. convergemagazine.com

| 19

Modern families

The Harris Famiy

A multi-generational home

Greg // 20, Writer | Les // 82, Retired teacher Trudy // 52, Bookkeeper | Michael // 54, Musician & freelance video producer

Who is living under the same roof?

M: We built the house ten years ago. My parents had one side and my family had the other. But my daughter’s now married, and Mom’s passed away, so there are four of us left.

What led you to all live together?

L: My wife and I lived in one location for over 30 years and wanted a change. We also welcomed not looking after a house by ourselves.

M: The recognition that as my parents were aging, family proximity would help in the transition if one were to [pass away] before the other.

What are the joys and challenges of having three generations living under one roof?

L: Having french doors separating the two living areas instead of a wall allowed for the feeling of involvement, but kept the necessary privacy. We also share the same front door, so we learned to be watchful and sensitive to each other.

M: The joy is celebrating life together. We all come together for family dinner, so appreciating the insights and observations my dad and Greg would bring to the table. My dad’s really perceptive and has a great sense of humor. He’s also a voracious reader, so rather than me going through all this literature, he’ll give me the highlights.

20 | CONVERGE. November - December 2013

L: Michael’s very handy with tools and keeping the house in good working condition. That takes a huge load off my mind, that he’s there with his expertise.

M: And with Greg — I benefit from him sharing about all these cool new bands and music. People think I’m so tapped in.

L: Another factor is the considerable financial advantages of sharing common costs such as the utilities bill.

G: The greatest joy is simple proximity to family and relationship. Having three generations in one house gives me amazing perspective from completely separate times and places.

L: I’m getting older. Being close together adds concern and care to my son’s plate. I don’t like that. I like being as independent and in good health and having my own activities as much as I can. But the reality is, an aspect of having older generations in the house is being prepared to deal with illnesses or crisis.

M: Trudy and I can leave overnight, knowing my dad’s in capable hands because Greg knows what to do during emergencies.

How do you work through conflict?

M: When we first moved in together, my mom wanted to be on our side of the house a lot. She loves community. So we talked and established some boundaries, like knocking and asking permission before coming over. It worked out very easily.

L: An exquisite balance takes sensitivity and awareness. If I’m

watching TV, I keep the volume lower so not to impinge on the family next door.

M: Church friends come over fairly often. We let them know dad joins us for dinner. But if a couple needs prayer counselling, my dad would remind us, “If you need me to have dinner on my side so you can have more private time, just let me know.” Or if Greg has friends over, we’ll head up to the bedroom. It’s the necessity of boundaries and respect — we’re separate but not isolated.

L: I love seeing the purposeful life lived out by my children and grandchildren.

Hearing them share their struggles, choices, and victories — it’s incredibly rich.

G: Growing up in a multi-generational home provides autonomous freedom even though we’re family. We’re closeknit, yet there’s recognition that you make your own life, you find your own way. It’s not tough love nor coddling.

It’s parenting.

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M: We’ve also said that if something changes and God leads one party to go a different direction, it’s OK. We don’t assume it’s going to be forever.

We can hold things loosely and enjoy the moment while we have it.

G: I would certainly encourage living generationally. It’s beyond personal relationship and family ties. It’s what a home is. It’s about story and narrative and a connection to history. Between my dad and grandpa, I have over a hundred years of knowledge combined at my disposal. I get to see through their lives.

M: Boundaries, respect and humility are necessary. But it’s also honouring who they are and what they carry.

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| 21

Shorts

Oops, I was BORN My homage to Emko Foam and persistent sperm

By Jolene Friesen

i still blame my birth on a factory worker in st. louis. modern BIRTH CONTROL product.” (The clinical validity of You see, my father and mother had four children in a mere those two reports may be questioned by today’s slightly more four years. Their first son, Marlowe, was barely walking when he modern standards. And by my very existence.) was joined by their second child, Kevin. Then my sister Glendine Emko was located in St. Louis. I imagine its factory to be joined the family. After Glendine, a brief pregnancy ending in a a large, noisy building, fitted with steaming vats filled with miscarriage kept the tally at three children. brewing foam, a veritable distillery of pesticide for those nasty The miscarriage should have been a warning, as Mom’s fourth sperm. From the vats run conveyor belts, carrying the freshly viable pregnancy was fraught with difficulties; she suffered from brewed concoction to its various stations of packaging. toxemia throughout the pregnancy and had her leg in a cast for As the belt noisily twists and turns through the factory, I the last stretch. imagine a solitary worker, sitting at her station, her hair shoved Mom went into labour with Bentley after working through the into a crepe paper shower cap, wearing factory assigned grey night to can the final fall harvest of vegetables. After stacking overalls, a cigarette dangling from her angrily lipsticked mouth. the jars in the pantry, she finished a few loads of laundry, then She is the QUALITY CONTROL inspector. Even more, in my packed the three children into the car and drove them to their mental machinations, she is the NIGHT-SHIFT QUALITY caretakers.’

CONTROL inspector. And so, with ashes falling onto her lap, Since the drive was an hour each way, she nods off, just for a moment. once she arrived at the hospital, Mom But, as so many factory personnel are It’s likely this near-death was fully in labour. It was only then when aware, it only takes a moment for a mistake she let my father know where she was. to occur. experience brought Mom and Dad was out of town on business, of The faulty vial missed by the NIGHTDad to decide to purchase the course. (During one of the previous SHIFT QUALITY CONTROL inspeclabours, he had asked a nurse if he could tor is packaged into its Emko kit, and put unmentionable: birth control help. Her reply: “Haven’t you done into a feminine and attractive-looking enough?” Dad had been banished from case. From there, it moves along the line the delivery room ever since.) to be boxed with a larger quantity of identical Emko kits. How After numerous seizures, Mom recalls hovering over her body, innocent it looks, seated benignly with its sister kits. So innohearing the doctor say that if his last attempt to revive her would cent, in fact, the receiving druggist in Revelstoke, B.C. could not succeed, then he would be out of options. But revive her he not tell the difference between the regular kits and the single kit did, and Bentley was born. bearing its ominous ware. So innocent that my mother, a genuIt’s likely this near-death experience brought Mom and Dad inely wise woman, was also tricked by its packaging when she to decide to purchase the unmentionable: birth control. brought it to the counter for payment.

A few years ago, my mother gave me a box containing a When I was three, I watched with prune-like regularity and number of items from around the time I was born, includworshipful fervor as David Suzuki expounded on The Nature ing congratulatory notes and cards, my birth certificate, and of Things. One particular show revealed the nature of human an advertisement pulled from Family Circle magazine, March things born. I was fascinated. The rapidly fluttering tails of the 1968 edition. It was for Emko Foam, stating: “2 MEDICAL tiny tadpoles (unimpeded by any Emko products), their almost REPORTS show why thousands of doctors recommend this vicious attack of the egg that was so much larger than they,

22 | CONVERGE.

November - December 2013

followed by the climax of the story: the single sperm that badgers and weasels and snakes its way into the egg.

Armed with the entirety of formal sexual education I would receive until I found myself in my early 40s and in a therapist’s office, and bubbling with even greater levels of enthusiasm, I marched into the kitchen.

I told Mom that David Suzuki had taught me where babies came from.

It was, I am certain, with some trepidation that Mom asked me to elucidate on my new learning. My bold statement was witnessed not only by my mother and father, but also by a number of Sunday afternoon guests who were enjoying a post-church visit with my parents.

And she had reason to be worried: a few weeks prior, my mother had found me sitting on the kitchen floor with all muscles relaxed, like a floppy rag doll.

When she asked me what I was doing, I stated matter-of-factly, “I’m a loose woman, Mom.” And then, holding my hand above my head and turning it as if tightening the lid on a mason jar, I added, “Somebody needs to screw me.”

After I had declared the depth of knowledge David Suzuki had imparted to my fertile mind, the room quieted for my educated response. I felt like a highly revered teacher in front of those many guests, the pastor and his wife, the elders and their wives. I was an educated person now, about to reveal the mysteries of pro-genesis.

“The fish are all in a race, and the winner gets the prize.” What more did I need to know?

Unfortunately, there developed some confusion in my growing mind, as David Suzuki aired an episode about the salmon run shortly thereafter. To this day, I can’t look at an aquarium without my mind wandering to procreation.

Even now I imagine the millions of potential babies racing within my mother, each with its own personality, height, weight, promise and abilities.

Like the salmon, they race upstream to make fertile the purpose of their journey, a journey which will surely end in a form of death for all but one of the contestants.

They swim with purpose and aim and Olympian passion. They swim knowing this is their one chance, their one shot at winning the prize. Meanwhile, neither Mother nor Father was aware of the faultiness of the Emko product, momentarily mindless of the conception about to take place — their fifth child. All because of the inattentiveness of that paper-hatted, angrily lipsticked factory worker in St. Louis.

Well, thank God for her. convergemagazine.com

| 23

LIFE

her, taking care of her during the day.

At that point, their parents had also begun depending on Joe and Giulia financially. Well into their 20s, they were expected to continue living at home, but also expected to pay rent. Both of them surrendered most of their paycheques from full-time jobs as support for the family. When Joe finally decided to move out of the house, they say their parents had simultaneous mental and physical breakdowns. Lina, their baby sister, was seven, and her demands were more than their parents could handle.

“It was always ‘Lina, enough! Lina, be quiet!’” Giulia says. As a result, Lina started looking to her older siblings for acceptance and comfort.

“We were often mistaken for her parents,” Joe says. Giulia adds that they grew up not by making the usual “teen” mistakes, but through acting as teen parents: “It was a great way to learn self-sacrifice.”

The bond between Giulia and Joe, however, was fractured by Giulia’s feeling that he had abandoned her and Lina by moving out. Giulia says it wasn’t resolved

By Chelsea Batten until she realized she was using the same manipulative tactics towards Joe that her mother had always used toward her. And it was all out of fear. rom an early age, Giulia and Joe say they knew their parents “God told me really clearly, ‘You either need to fear me, or were different. They were creative, loud, imaginative, and fear your parents.’ That was really difficult to consider.” In the never hesitated to express their feelings without a filter. But end, she and Joe found an apartment not far from where their there was something more. Or maybe there was something less — a parents lived, so they could be available without being under the vulnerability, a lack of security, an underlying fear about life. same roof. Lina often came to live with them, on and off, during Joe was nine and Giulia was six when the week. Giulia says she was the glue they began acting as caregivers in their that held them together. family, as their parents both had signifi“Joe and I had so much anger inside, cant health issues. so much grief over everything. Through But Joe and Giulia say their parents parenting parents, resentment can build also drew the siblings into their marital easily. Joe and I had worked together for conflicts, each asking the children to take survival; I think Lina really taught us to their side and speak on the other parent’s work together for something good. It behalf. They asked the kids to contribute means so much more when you want to money for pizza night and for paying the rent. Their parents said protect someone, to foster something.” it was just part of being a close family. But for Giulia and Joe, the What that meant for them was learning to have fun, and not closeness felt oppressive. Especially because it consistently turned to have everything be about trauma and survival. Joe took Lina toxic. to the movies, while Giulia planned sleepover parties for her.

“Any time we heard ‘family time,’ it was going to go “There was always this refuge we had together,” nuclear,” Joe remembers.

Giulia remembers, “where we could kind of escape “And restaurant picking,” Giulia adds, “If you from how dramatic our home life was. It was our wanted to eat before two hours, you’d better have a own little world.” snack.”

Things have continued to change, even in the The conflicts that resulted from their “closeness” past year. Lina has graduated from high school, Joe meant that Giulia and Joe spent a lot of time in each has moved to another state, and Giulia is getting other’s rooms, finding ways to ignore the fighting ready to move as well. It’s hard, they agree, after so Chelsea Batten is an downstairs. With no one else knowing about their many years of being each other’s closest companion, itinerant journalist trauma, they became each other’s closest companion. to loosen that bond and move into something new. currently making camp “I dropped the whole ‘siblings are supposed to be Joe says he finds inspiration from “My Love Goes in southern California. antagonistic to each other,’” says Joe. “We became Free,” a song by Jon Foreman. “I thought it was She loves old cars and John Steinbeck, and actual friends who would talk to each other and hang about someone dying — it had that feel. But it was can’t fall asleep without out and have fun together.” more that concept of, if you love someone, you can’t the This American Life When their baby sister was born, Giulia says she was make it an issue of, ‘You need to be here for me.’ podcast. told by her parents, “You prayed for this, this is your That’s a form of imprisonment. It’s not sacrificial.

Follow @thechelseagrin on Twitter, baby.” From her sister’s infancy, Giulia and Joe say The core of love is a giving up of oneself, to someor drop her a line at they shared the responsibility of feeding her, bathing one else. It’s important to let people be free.”

The parent trap When siblings raised each other

F

chelseabatten.com

24 | CONVERGE. November - December 2013

Flickr photo (cc) by courosa

God told me really clearly, ‘You either need to fear me, or fear your parents.’

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How to be a Husband

worth submitting to On redefining headship

By Randy Maas

Randy is living his dream life with his beautiful wife Jacquelyn and their two kids, Teagan and Asher.

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I

could sense the tension in the atmosphere increasing as my new wife Jacquelyn and I sat reading the Bible together.

We both knew what was coming up, but we hadn’t figured out a way to comfortably deal with it. Who would read it out loud? In the end, it wouldn’t matter which of us did. Either way, we would both cringe a bit.

“Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife...” (Ephesians 5:22-23).

I would be making a gross understatement if I said the Apostle Paul’s command for wives to submit to their husbands is controversial. No one can really know how many people have left churches or have walked away from God because of

26 | CONVERGE. November - December 2013

it. It’s a statement that has been misunderstood and misused perhaps more than any other over the centuries. Because of the emotional wounds it can trigger, in our current cultural context, it may be more appropriate for a woman to write on that subject.

So as a man, I would prefer to focus on Paul’s equally important (and often overlooked) command for husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church.

Unfortunately, I think most people tune out for the remainder of Ephesians 5, as their minds are still reeling from the “wives submitting” part. But if we can keep it together long enough to really digest what Paul writes next, we may just stumble upon something that will radically change the way we think about our marriages.

I know there are a lot of wives who may think their husbands get the easy part of the equation. Women have to submit while men merely have to love. But have you ever tried to love like Jesus? Think about it for a minute. Not only has He successfully maintained a healthy, loving relationship with His own Father and the Holy Spirit for eternity, He also treats His Bride amazingly well.

So when Paul encourages us to love our wives like Christ, it’s no small feat. How did Jesus say, “I love you” to the church? It wasn’t as easy as picking up some flowers on the way home. The Apostle Paul gives us a hint when he says Jesus “loved the church and gave Himself for her.”

Now let’s slow down before we get caught up by some sort of martyr complex, trying to figure out how we’re supposed to give up our lives for our wives. It’s sometimes easier to take a bullet for our loved ones than to daily love them in our moment-by-moment, everyday lives. And if we want to love like Jesus, we need to follow the example He set for us prior to His crucifixion.

My wife, when she read the words, “wives submit to your own husbands” was struggling with what it meant to submit to me, her new husband. She assumed it meant her hopes and dreams would become secondary and that she would be forever forced into the background. She thought her life would be overshadowed by mine, consisting of only doing or supporting the things I wanted to do. I would lead as I saw fit and she would be required to meekly follow along, never creating or stepping out into anything new.

I never implied any of this, nor would I ever want that kind of relationship with my best friend. Yet both my wife and I could sense the lies floating through our minds

Illustration by Jonathan Fajardo

LIFE

E D M O N T O N, A L B E R TA

as we read the words out loud, almost speaking into existence a reality that neither of us wanted.

I knew something was wrong. I desperately wanted to help Jacquelyn be the free woman who I knew God had created her to be. I longed to grow in my own understanding of what God had in mind for our marriage, and I wanted to fulfill my part of the equation.

So, after stumbling through the passage, I grasped my wife’s hands and looked her straight in the eyes. I told her I accepted my God-given role as the head of the home, and I would lead us into living according to Christ’s example for us. I promised to do my absolute best to love her as Christ loved the Church.

Jesus had told His disciples they were no longer servants but friends; in the same way, I affirmed my wife that she has always been my equal and friend, never my servant. And because Jesus blessed His church to do even greater things than He did Himself, I blessed her, as my bride, to do and achieve greater things than I would. I encouraged her to follow the desires of

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I’ve seen firsthand that by empowering my wife, my own dreams and desires are being realized more than ever. her heart (Psalm 27:4), and I promised her I would give up my life and take the “hits” for her to be free and have an abundant life.

From that singular moment, so much changed in our relationship. We were both set free to love each other, to submit to God, and to walk in the abounding life He had planned for us. I learned something new about what it meant to be the head of my family. If I expected my wife to obey God’s command to submit to me as her husband, I needed to love her as Christ does, because as our Head, Jesus lovingly empowers and protects us.

When we submit to Him, His will is accomplished here on earth. And I’ve seen firsthand that by empowering my wife, my own dreams and desires are being realized more than ever. convergemagazine.com

| 27

LIFE

Don’t call him

MISTER MOM The life and times of a house-husband

By Kyle Stiemsma

Kyle Stiemsma is a full-time graduate student of theology at Regent College, an editorial intern at Converge Magazine, and a barista who takes far too much pride in his espresso.

He loves words, his new wife, the desert sky, and the theos in theology.

hardly more than an ant doubling in size. Weissmann cites out of all American married couples who have children under the age of 15, the number of stay-at-home dads has shifted from 0.3 per cent to 0.8 per cent.

These statistics are exaggerated, says Weissmann, as they don’t account for children born out of wedlock (which make up over half of births to women under 30). He goes even further: among twoparent households with working mothers, the percentage of men as primary caretakers has actually declined in the past two decades.

In Canada, the numbers are largely the same. In 1976, out of all single earner families with a stay-at-home parent, one per cent were dads. Now, men comprise 12 per cent of stay-at-home parents.

It's a huge increase, but it still highlights the disparity that exists.

But the statistics, on every side, are misleading for our generation. The paradigm of single earner households with one parent

“I see justice as a way we live out our faith; it’s the practical application I have been looking for!”

Restorative Justice student

Bachelor of Ar ts in Christian Studies, Church Leadership, Restorative Justice

28 | CONVERGE.

November - December 2013

Illustration by Michael Lee

M

y wife and I are both grad students with one major difference: she gets paid. So while I got a place to live out of the marriage deal, she got a share in my pile of student loans. My wife is a research scientist (fancy, right?); I write articles and study unknowable “humanities” type things.

So guess who’s more likely to be the main provider for our family? It’s probably not going to be me.

I knew this early on in our dating relationship. If I attached my identity and self-worth to the amount on my paycheque, this might really bother me.

While fatherhood is (hopefully) still far in the distance for me, the question looms: who will stay at home with the kids? My wife will likely have a higher income, better benefits, and better longterm opportunities. And let’s face it, I can read books and write articles from home.

We often hear about the shifting landscape of parenting, that women are taking over as the primary income earner and men are settling into the role of primary caretaker. This is not really the case. In a recent article in The Atlantic, Jordan Weissmann takes a closer look at what is actually going on.

While the numbers show the amount of stay-at-home dads has more than doubled in the past decade and a half, this is

as primary caretaker doesn’t really exist anymore. The landscape of parenting has changed. The increase in the number of unmarried parents, the need for two incomes, the growing opportunities for women; we don’t live in the same world as our parents once did. Raising children requires a different sort of partnership.

I encountered an example of this kind of partnership in James and his wife Skye. The two recently made the big move from Australia to British Columbia for the sake of their oldest daughter’s educational needs. They left family, friends, and an entire way of life. Skye had been enjoying life as a stay-at-home mom while James ran his own business as an electrician. With the new transition, Skye is entering into a full-time graduate degree program, and James has decided to stay at home, caring for the needs of their three children.

James was always involved with the kids, he says, but up until now it mostly

his arms. “We drop the girls off at school in the morning, and then I look at him and say, ‘It’s you and me, buddy. What do you want to do today?’”

According to James, the hardest part of being a stay-at-home parent is not letting the small things ruin his perspective. “It sounds simple, but as a parent there are so many little things trying to get in the way.”

James talks about how he tried to be “Mr. Mom” for the first couple of weeks he stepped in as primary caretaker. (The National At-Home Dad Network is actually trying to do away with this term altogether, finding it shallow and offensive. The 1983 movie may be a keeper, but clearly, the expression isn’t.) But James tells me, “It was far too stressful!” Skye is the planner, he says, always conscious of time, multitasking and organizing to keep a neat schedule.

James says he struggles with the simultaneous demands that come with having

We don’t live in the same world as our parents once did. Raising children requires a different sort of partnership. meant following his wife’s instructions and playing on the floor. Now, he tells me he has swapped shopping for cables with shopping for groceries, and now bargains behaviour, not contracts. He used to be able to start a project, see it to completion, and revel in the finished product.

James says being a dad is sort of like being in the movie Groundhog Day. By the time he’s done feeding the kids and cleaning the house, the kids are hungry again and the mess has reappeared.

One of the biggest issues he has faced, he says, is downplaying this transition, making too little of what he was leaving and too little of what he was taking on.

As a stay-at-home dad he is no less busy, and certainly no less stressed.

Although he didn’t come from hardship, he likens his present moments of frustration to the Israelites looking back to Egypt, failing to recognize that in spite of the difficulties of the present moment, they have seen the glory of God. “This is such a gift,” he says as his youngest son, Solomon, falls asleep in

multiple children at home and is often found running to the school in order to pick up the girls on time.

Skye doesn’t see this as a flaw, she says, because it is precisely his haphazardness that allows James to be fully present and engaged with the kids, leading to more spontaneous adventures.

Both James and Skye get flak from their parents back home. They want to know when James is going to get a job, finding it unimaginable he could be happy and fulfilled as a full-time parent.

When I ask Skye and James about the future, they say they have intentions to both stay at home on a part-time basis.

“I think the kids get the best deal that way,” says Skye.

As I look at the little boy asleep in James’ arms, I can’t help but feel optimistic about being a parent someday.

It made me want to go home and be a better husband, and practice good partnership now.

And who knows — maybe one day I'll be lucky enough to land a job as a stayat-home dad.

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| 29

LIFE

AND AFFAIRS Accepting who your dad is, and who he’ll never be

By Matt (*Surname omitted)

S

he was sobbing so much, I couldn’t make out what she was saying on the other end of the line.

At first I thought my mom had been in a car accident and she couldn’t speak clearly. But then, in between sobs, I heard this: “Did you know your dad was having an affair?”

In the weeks immediately following, I discovered not only had my dad been in an extramarital relationship, but he had lost his faith in the church, in the Bible, and in Jesus.

It was a lot to take in.

Over the coming weeks, my siblings and I learned what had been going on, and some of the reasons why. It was emotional, and at times volatile. My dad was particularly sensitive to being judged; my mom was afraid of anything that might further push my dad away. At times they told me and asked me things that you never want to hear from your parents.

I remember last year, in the midst of everything happening, a friend asked how I was feeling. All I could say was, “Tired.

Heavy.” For the first couple of weeks I was just trying to help my mom get through — she needed a lot of support and conversation.

30 | CONVERGE.

November - December 2013

A

s children, our parents symbolize the whole of reality to us. Our basic beliefs about the future — if life is good, if it’s safe, if we’re likeable, if we belong — are shaped by who our parents are and how they treat us. The fact that my parents had maintained a relatively happy 30-year marriage had left a reasonably positive picture of my future.

Even as we grow older and become more independent, our parents still paint a picture of what our future may look like.

Sometimes they model what it means to age gracefully. And other times the shadowy side of their humanity gives way.

I

was a rebellious teenager. Not that I was into sex, drugs and rock-and-roll or anything — on the outside I was a typical clean-cut, straight-laced Catholic boy. But by the time I was 15, my relationship with my parents was in really bad shape.

I was what they call a “non-compliant” child: strong-willed to the bone. And my parents, they’ll admit, didn’t know how to handle me well. So we constantly clashed.

Especially my dad and I. As a teenager, I despised my dad, rejected him, criticized him, dishonoured him. I’m ashamed to admit it. Our relationship had broken down, and both of us were just trying to survive until I was old enough to move out of the house.

During that time in my life, I would have told you my dad was in no way an example of who I wanted to be.

It took a few years away from home and a religious conversion on my part to begin to

Sourced Flickr photo (cc) by GallivantingGirl | Photo illustration by Carmen Bright

Of Fathers

But as things began to settle, I felt more and more unsettled.

Why did this happen? How did my dad become so different? Why didn’t my parents get help earlier? Why couldn’t he make up his mind? Why did my mom keep it a secret for so long? Would it be better if they just split up?

And what about me? Will I end up in the same place they are? Is a lasting marriage in the modern world really possible? Am I already so screwed up that I’ll never get married?

see that I needed to do something about the angry, reactive, bitter attitude I had towards my dad. We started to reconcile, working to slowly re-build our relationship. I started to open up parts of my life to my father, awkwardly, and he shared with me some of his own life questions.

So when I learned of my dad’s crisis of faith and of his marital infidelity, it didn’t shatter my faith or send me into an emotional tailspin, as my dad was afraid of. But it did shake some of the certainties I had been carrying.

It made me realize how quickly a marriage commitment can dissolve when communication and intimacy break down, and how irrepressibly powerful the need to be known and accepted is. It helped me to recognize just how powerfully seductive the world’s cult of “authenticity” and “the search for true self” can be.

“The sooner you can accept that your dad will never be who you wish he was, the sooner you’ll be able to stop reacting to him as an angry child and start accepting who he actually is, and become his friend.”

A

few years back, while I was processing some stuff with a therapist, we began to talk about what it was like growing up, and why I had grown to resent my dad so much. He pointed out that one of the dynamics at work in me, probably having begun when I was young, was that I had an image in my head of the ideal father I wanted. I recalled how I envied my other friends’ parents, comparing my family to theirs, and then criticized my folks for not being more like them.

I realized I was clinging to the picture of an ideal father in my head, that every time I related to my actual dad, I felt like a hurt and disappointed child because he wasn’t the person I wanted him to be.

Then my therapist said: “The sooner you can accept that your dad will never be who you wish he was, the sooner you’ll be able to stop reacting to him as an angry child and start accepting who he actually is, and become his friend.”

As this sunk in, something in me shifted. The “need” for my dad to be a certain person wasn’t actually a need. It

was a childish demand. And as an adult, with solid friendships and a living relationship with God as my Father, I could begin to accept my dad for who he is.

After this awareness, I reacted to my dad’s shortcomings less and less. I began to appreciate the good qualities he has — his wisdom, his sincerity, his heart of service. And I was able to see him, for the first time, with compassion.

I think this realization helped prepare me for hearing about the affair.

After I found out, when I spoke with my dad for the first time, I wasn't angry.

I didn’t feel betrayed. Instead, I felt sorrow and compassion. I felt the weightiness of the place he was in. I felt how human he is, how human I am.

M

arital unfaithfulness, from the point of view of a son or daughter, can seem like the worst kind of evil. If, over the course of the past few years, I had not experienced incredible compassion from God in my own brokenness and sin, if He had not been teaching me to accept and love my dad for who he is, I wonder how I would have reacted.

I doubt I would have had it in me to empathize or feel compassion towards him. I doubt I would have been able to listen. I doubt I would have had much capacity to love well.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve felt anger, frustration, and blame. I haven’t reacted perfectly in any measure in the year since I got that phone call from my mom. But, though it’s still small, there is a growing capacity in my heart to love my dad as he is, and to see in him a goodness, a beauty, and a dignity that I never want to undermine.

And as questions of the future come up for me — whether or not I’ll get married, stay married, or experience a loss of faith later in life — I am not as easily discouraged as I might have been before.

Yes, my parents’ experience highlights the possibilities of what may come. But their experience also shows that you can get through such times. It proves that love, hope, and faith can weather even the cruelest of circumstances. And I am coming to believe a little more deeply that if and when life’s circumstances break me, there is a greater Love whose unconditional acceptance will catch me in his hands.

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Matt works as a co-ordinator of The River, a youth ministry of Living Waters Canada, a community-based, Christ-centred discipleship ministry that deals specifically with relational and sexual brokenness. For more information about Living Waters, visit their website at livingwaterscanada.org. convergemagazine.com

| 31

the

heartbreak everyday of the

Exposing the blessing and pain of adoption

By Chelsea Batten

Note: All names have been changed out of respect to the families who have graciously allowed me to tell their stories.

32 | CONVERGE.

November - December 2013

A

ll they meant to do was find a way to adopt Malia, a girl they had grown to love. The couple had made a video about their vision of a family, and shared it with those close to them. Many gave money and prayed for them. The video was uploaded onto the Internet; soon, there were people across the country — complete strangers — who were inspired by the hope and beauty of this family's story.

When Malia started school, she felt different. It wasn’t because of her skin colour or accent; plenty of kids had those. It was her family that made her stand out. She was used to being around people who already knew her story. But everyone at school wanted to know why she hadn't been at school with them since kindergarten, why she didn’t know who Hannah Montana was, and why, at nine years old, she couldn’t ride a bike yet.

Then one of her classmates innocently Googled Malia's name during computer class. When he found the video Malia’s parents had made, he showed it to his parents. Who showed it to the teacher. Who showed it to the entire class.

All it did was make Malia feel really uncomfortable. After all, nobody else’s special story was being aired in front of the entire class.

Her parents, when they heard about it, took down the video and talked to the teacher. They wondered if it had been a bad idea to ever share her story in the first place.

A

doption used to be a fairly prosaic undertaking. There was no more shame in adopting an orphan for the purpose of helping you out around the farm than there was for sending your own kids away if you couldn’t provide for them.

This was the case as late as the 1940s. I recently spoke with a woman who, along with her seven sisters, was sent to live among relatives for most of her childhood. The family was reunited only once her mother got regular work in a factory during the Second World War. But something has changed since then: we think it’s normal to be rich and always be getting richer. Which means there’s a certain sort of guilt that comes with having so much. What better way to salve that guilt than by rescuing some unfortunate “Third World” child? (Especially when they’re so cute, exotic, and grateful.)

OK, that’s a cynical view. Unless you’re one of those celebrities, beneficence can’t be your only motivation to adopt. The legal process makes natural childbirth look like a breeze. There’s also the emotional seesaw occasioned by birth parents, very few of whom are completely resolved to give up their child. More than one adoptive parent I spoke with had an experience in bonding with a child who was whisked away from them at the last moment by birth parents who changed their minds.

If you’re going to make it through adoption, you need something more than guilt and goodwill.

And then, there’s the matter of raising a child.

convergemagazine.com

| 33

F

or Lily and her husband, being parents was more important than being pregnant. She says she didn’t have time to struggle with the emotions around infertility — within days of starting the adoption process, they met the birth mother of their daughter.

What was hard, she remembers, was the suspicion she and her husband were treated with, until the moment the nurses put the baby in their car and shut the door. “You’re such an outsider until you’re a parent,” she remembers. “The world definitely doesn’t look at [your baby] as yours, until it is yours.”

But in all other aspects, that adoption was easy. Before too long, they began looking into it again. Their next baby was mysteriously sickly and unhappy. Furthermore, the birth mother refused to withdraw — she called their house and wrote letters for the first nine years of their son’s life.

Between the screaming of the new baby and the persistence of the birth mother, Lily says she and her husband felt like they were nothing but babysitters.

Several years later, after two adoptions and one biological birth, Lily and her husband took the plunge and adopted a sibling group all at once. Everyone who heard about it loved their story, and loved the three new kids. They were very young — the oldest was barely three — so it seemed like the perfect time to introduce them to a new, loving family.

But during their teenage years, the oldest of the three kids started changing in ways they never expected.

“He hated being adopted, being different, being black, being in a big family,” Lily says. “He needed somebody to be angry with, and there was nobody but us.” She explains that his birth parents, his extended biological family, have never been involved in his life, so the only targets available were his adopted family.

“What I almost feel like is he never really bought into this family. No matter what we’ve done, tried, said, it feels like he just doesn’t want to love us.”

She pauses.

“I know that he does, on some deep level.”

Of course, it wasn’t really that sudden. Their adoption was a grueling three-year process of visiting the orphanage, talking with birth parents (some were on the verge of death, others simply couldn’t afford to feed their children), filling out paperwork, dancing through communication with foreign and domestic lawyers, court dates delayed at the last minute, knowing all the while their efforts may be in vain. The American embassy could still deny them permission to bring the children back.

Still, their adoption seemed sudden to the people who knew them. Henry and Jill had always been strong leaders in the church, but they’d never been those kind of Christians — missions trip junkies, social justice proponents, or radicals in any sense. They were simply folks who, having raised a good family, decided to start the whole thing all over again.

The most frequent reaction they encountered was what you could call the awestruck stiff-arm: “Wow, that’s amazing what you’re doing; I could never do that.”

Underneath that response, they tell me, isn’t an objection to the time and money involved in adoption, or even the adjustment in lifestyle. It’s the idea of parenting kids who aren’t “yours.”

“There is a difference,” says Henry, “and I’m OK with that.” But he says it’s not a valid reason not to adopt.

Henry adds it doesn’t mean everyone should adopt. Especially three kids at the same time. Even now, Henry and Jill are more than a little overwhelmed by the blitz of new responsibility. What they have to go back to, they say, is the same thing they started with: God’s call for their family.

And sometimes, that call doesn’t look like what you anticipate. In Henry and Jill’s case, it meant acknowledging one of the children they planned to adopt wasn’t going to work out long-term in their family.

“Actually,” Jill says, “Moses was the easiest. He progressed just like you’re supposed to. Tested us in all the ways they test, [then] started to quit doing that, started to bond…. If it would have just been him, it probably would have been fine. I think with all three at the same time, he took over. He was the focus all the time.”

Henry agrees, “It just became clear that to make this work

What better way to salve our guilt than by rescuing some unfortunate "Third World" child?

It's why Lily calls adoption “the heartbreak of the everyday.”

It's the pain of knowing you don’t have control, and learning you’re not entitled to the family you have imagined.

H

enry and Jill were a year away from sending their youngest son to college. They had just welcomed their first grandchild and learned another was on the way. They had paid off their house, and Henry was only a few years shy of retirement.

That was the year they went to Ethiopia and brought home three kids.

34 | CONVERGE. November - December 2013

was going to be extremely difficult, at best.... And to find out there were other options brought a lot of relief and hope. To find other people God gifts to clean up messes.” He clarifies, “Not Moses. Our mess.”

Their social worker told them about a number of families around the country who help with “disrupted adoptions” — people with unusual giftedness or expertise in helping children who, for whatever reason, prove to be incompatible with the family they’ve been adopted by. It was a hard decision for Henry and Jill; they went back and forth a lot, wondering if they were doing the wrong thing or the right thing, if they were giving up too easily.

If sending the boy they had adopted to another family would irreparably hurt him.

Then Moses’ prospective new father said something that turned things around for Henry — that he and his wife could never have gone to Africa.

Without Henry and Jill, they never could have become Moses’ parents.

That, says Henry, affirmed his sense of God’s calling.

“God’s plan was to have Moses in their home. He used us to make that happen.” His mouth twists a little, as he adds, “Not without some pain and heartache. There was an aspect of dying to our dream of having this all work out perfectly.”

E

sther and her husband assist in disrupted adoptions. She says her role comes naturally to her; before she married her husband (who came with three children himself ), she was a single mother of three.

Some of her children are rescues from abusive adoptive homes. Some children sabotage their own situations because of psychological or social disorders. Most situations are somewhere in the middle, where the child is resistant, and the adoptive family doesn’t know how to respond.

In some cases, there are clear reasons as to why the adoption didn’t work. Giving an iPod and a closet full of new clothes to a kid from a developing country, she says, is usually a roadblock to bonding. The child considers the family a meal ticket, rather than a group of people to give and receive love from. And sometimes the child brings a particularly thorny convergemagazine.com

| 35

Joy

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set of problems — she mentions the condition of Reactive Attachment Disorder, where babies deprived of care grow up functional, but unable to form relational or emotional bonds.

“It’s not the family’s fault,” she says.

“It’s something in the kid, the dynamics aren’t right, the family just doesn’t know what they’ve gotten into.” She tries to keep in contact with the former families of the children she and her husband adopt. Some of them visit regularly, some exchange Christmas cards and photos. Some simply fade away.

“It’s not that I know so much, and [other families] don’t. It’s just that sometimes, what a kid needs is just a new start. Sometimes, that’s all it is.”

Although she says being an adoptive parent isn't easy, every moment is worth it.

“Every once in a while I think, ‘Why did I do this to myself?’ People as old as I am, they’re going to Hawaii, to Europe, and here I am with another family. Then my nine-year-old puts her arms around me and says, ‘Mommy, I love you.’ And I realize, ‘Nah, I don’t want that. I want what I’ve got.’”

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fter having their first two kids, Rita and her husband Jesse started thinking about adoption. The influence of people like Dr. John Piper and organizations like Together for Adoption funneled down into local churches like the one Rita and Jesse attended. But while attending a seminar on adoption, they were both convinced that instead, their calling was to be foster parents.

“It was our mercy ministry,” Rita says. “We felt like it was a really good exercise for our kids, in sharing and making sacrifices like Jesus made for us.”

Jesse adds, “I remember a lady saying, ‘You don’t adopt to fulfill a need in your life — you adopt to fulfill a need in someone else’s life.’ I think we definitely went in with that attitude.”

There were six different kids, of several different ages, who came through their home before they were adopted by another family. Each child brought growth, in the form of redemption and pain, to Rita and Jesse and their kids.

The proof of the blessing was that Rita and Jesse kept at it — as soon as one child was reunited or adopted, Rita and Jesse welcomed a new one. But

then came a situation where one girl, whom they loved and even considered adopting, began to harm herself and others.

“I feel like a bad person when I think about it,” says Rita.

“I don’t think I’ve sorted it out. I have a really strong desire to parent her, to protect her. But then, there’s the issue of me protecting my own kids.”

They had really sweet moments with this girl, but there were times when Rita resented her presence. “I hate the sound of that. I don’t feel that it’s right.” She says she feels like the right, Christian thing to do is to give kids a home, to love them and care for them no matter what.

“Sometimes, I felt so weak.”

Of course, there are rewards to the process. In fact, Rita and Jesse tell me, those moments are even sweeter because they take so much patience and sacrifice beforehand. “We put in so much, and to see the victories in their lives, it just feels really good.”

T

he joys and pains of parenting seem to hang on expectation. What adoption does is bring those expectations out into the light.

With your biological children, Henry says, there are hidden expectations at bay.

“You feel this pressure from the church, from society, that your children are representing you,” Henry says. “It creates pressure. With adopted kids, you don’t feel that.”

His wife Jill adds, “You find out that you never really did own your kids — you’re just a steward of them.” She says she’s sorry she didn’t learn this lesson when she was raising her biological children.

Letting go of control involves letting go of past mistakes. It was only in the last couple of years that Henry, realizing the difference between parenting out of fear or out of love, changed his approach toward his youngest son.

“The change,” he says, “was in my parenting, not in the results. In a lot of ways, the jury’s still out. But I don’t think God calls a parent to scare your kid back into obedience. God calls me to be faithful. Just to be faithful today. That doesn’t mean today is going to be a great day.”

And for Lily, whose three youngest boys have now reached their teens, that principle is what carries her through the roughest patch she’s had yet.

“There’s not a lot about it right now that’s very rewarding — that’s brutally honest.” She says what keeps her and her husband going is knowing that God has called them to this life, though she’s sometimes unsure why.

“And honestly, we don’t like it very much right now. But we are going to do what [God has] called us to do.”

Underneath it all, she says, she had the core belief that family is its own reward. The struggles of the last few years have shown her that sometimes, it’s not.

“You realize how little control you really have,” Lily says.

“Having these expectations for family are absolutely fruitless.

They’re detrimental to everything.”

She says when she let go of this belief, it felt like something had died; now, she feels a sense of liberation.

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| 37

z

separated: Finding wholeness in broken homes

By Kyle Stiemsma // Illustrations by Carmen Bright

S

he’s sitting on the stairs, tears streaming down her face. In the next room her parents are screaming at each other, unable to connect on any level, disagreeing about their disagreements.

The two people who she looks up to for love are treating each other like garbage.

He walks briskly through the neighbourhood holding his sister’s hand, wiping away her tears and, without her noticing, his own. He doesn’t understand why his dad is throwing things into suitcases and loading up his car. He knew his parents fought every now and then, but could it really be this bad?

38 | CONVERGE. November - December 2013

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hen I got married over the summer, my wife and I were talking with our florist about bouquets, boutonnieres, and all that fun stuff. When she asked us for the number of bridesmaids, the number of groomsmen, and the number of parents, we replied in unison: “Four.”

Her jaw dropped, especially after we assured her we had no step-parents, either. She was legitimately surprised both of our parents were married, to each other. Both my wife and I left our giddiness in the flower shop and walked out.

Are the odds really that heavily against us?

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, 40 per cent of American children have divorced parents. that didn’t include a woman trying to play her second mom.

The Pew Research Center reports that in 2008, 25 per cent of Jackie tells me that when she entered her teenage years, she children 14 or younger were living with one parent. began to date. At the same time, so did her mom. Distracted by It seems like the North American ideal portrayed by The the anxieties of adolescence, Jackie says she hardly cared about Cosby Show and Boy Meets World seems to have been taken any of the men her mom brought around, including the man off the air. Today, kids of broken homes are not far from makwho would eventually become her stepdad. ing up the majority.

Jackie was an only child until she was 14. Now she has six sibI sat down with three friends and listened to their stories. lings: four half-brothers, one stepsister, and one stepbrother.

They each experienced their parents’ divorce at different Both of her step-parents had kids, but in her teenage years, stages in their lives. she says the babies seemed to come one after the other. She loves being a big sister. Jackie tells me, “I’ve always loved kids.

I almost feel like a mom. I get to watch them grow up and be a part of their lives, see them reach their goals.”

“Divorce is not always bad.”

It’s not the divorce that’s the big deal, she says, it is the separation that comes with the divorce. It is meeting the new person in their lives, and learning to love who they love. She thinks back with near fondness to when she was a child, as she remembers getting yanked in different directions. At least people were fighting over her, paying attention to her, she says.

As her parents continued their separate lives, Jackie says she was left in the middle, often with her grandparents. “My grandparents saved me.” ackie’s parents got divorced before her fifth When it came to decisions about raising her, her parents birthday. I vaguely remember running around were divided — always. Her grandparents served as the middle the neighbourhood, playing with Jackie while ground, and she says that’s often where she preferred to be. her parents packed up their things. She told me her mom and dad were no longer going to be livNext year, Jackie will be getting married. Her and her fiancé ing together. We laughed at how strange parents have been together over three years and, according to her and could be and continued our games. her surrounding family, they have a very solid relationship. She Jackie is now 21, and engaged to be married next describes her fiancé as her main support. When she has a bad summer. Her parents’ separation is pretty much day, she says she doesn’t have a mom or dad to run to for comall she has ever known. She says most of her early fort; they’re busy being mom and dad to their own kids. memories involve her parents arguing over who I ask Jackie whether she’s nervous to get married. By socigets what — including her. The first year was bad, ety’s standards, she and her fiancé are still rather young. and the second year wasn’t much better; but after “I think everyone is nervous to get married,” Jackie says, that things settled down. “I’m one of the lucky “but I have no doubts in my heart that [he] is the one for me.” ones,” she tells me. Her parents were friendly with Jackie tells me how she has watched her mom date complete each other as she grew up. jerks, how they would treat her mom like garbage and yet her The hard part for Jackie wasn’t the fact that mom would go back to them. Jackie says she made up her mind Mom and Dad split up — she was too young to at a young age: she would never stand for that. really grasp the weight of the situation. The hard She says a perk of her parents’ divorce is getting multiple part, she tells me, is when her split up parents perspectives on life. Instead of observing the good and the bad became two separate families. of one relationship, she has been able to observe several.

She was nine when her stepmom entered the She says although her parents are divorced, there is still a picture. All of a sudden, she tells me, her everylegacy of love in her family. One set of grandparents has been other weekend with her dad had to be shared with married 63 years, the other 47. “That’s what I want.” While she some strange lady. When her stepmom moved says her upbringing wasn’t all that bad, she doesn’t want the in, so did the hatred. Jackie says she knew how to same for her kids. navigate two homes and disconnected parents, but Jackie says she knows she can give them something better.

Jackie

J

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Nathan W

hen his dad moved out, Nathan was in the midst of high school angst, concerned with his own teenage world. He’s now in his early 20s, navigating a new career.

“All parents have disagreements and some fight,” Nathan says. “Mine did both from time to time, so I was sort of numb to their occasional disgust toward each other, but not oblivious.”

Nathan talks about how the experience as a teen affected his thought process. He doesn’t claim to have matured faster, but he says he grew to understand things that his friends seemed to still be oblivious to: “This world is not perfect, nor are the people in it.”

He says he spent a short time being angry, but he knew he couldn’t fix anything, and he wasn’t about to let his parents’ decision govern his life.

Nathan says he didn’t pay attention to all the effects the divorce was having on him; he was busy being a protective older brother to his sister.

“She would run to me crying because she was scared when my parents went at each other.”

He says all he could do was talk to her or take her out of the house. Having been exposed to so much of the fighting as a kid, he was determined to make sure she didn’t have to go through as much.

As with Jackie, Nathan says the divorce wasn’t the difficult part; his parents were separated long before they stopped living together.

“Both of my parents have asked me how I would feel if they got back together. I tell them, I’d love it. But if that meant for the fighting and unhappiness to return, I’d rather them stay apart. They’re happier this way, and that makes me happy. Seeing your parents at each other’s throats is not a great feeling at all.”

40 | CONVERGE.

November - December 2013

S

Sabine

abine’s parents divorced during her senior year of college, while she was living 1,200 km from the place she once called home.

She has since moved to California where she is pursuing a graduate degree in public health.

She says she has always known her parents’ relationship didn’t fit the North American ideal. “Their culture never endorsed The Notebook ,” Sabine says. She goes on to explain that all western notions of romance were considered to be a load of crap.

“Affection was never a thing.” Her parents immigrated to the United States in order to make something of themselves. For them, Sabine says, the family unit carried all the importance, not the marriage unit.

The separation before the divorce was suffocating, she says. “I remember sitting on the stairs as a little girl, listening to my parents fight, not understanding why they yelled so much.”

She tells me that through the years, the shouting slowly turned into silence. By the time she left for college, Sabine says, they were like roommates who stayed out of each other’s way.

“Yes. Totally. Or no…not even. I wish they would have tried harder sooner.”

She tells me she’s sure things would have been different had her parents just stopped to see where the other person was coming from; they spent so much time focusing on their differences, they never took the time to realize what was similar. Their divorce was a result of stubbornness, Sabine says.

“Together, they could have built so much.”

It would seem that culturally we have this notion that waiting until the kids leave home to divorce is the “noble” thing to do, but Sabine disagrees.

“Divorce is not easier when you’re an adult. That’s the biggest lie.”

She says the temptation and capacity to overanalyze and blame yourself is much greater than when you’re a child: “You come up with social cognitive theories and pull crap out of nowhere trying to answer a terrible thing that probably doesn’t have any answers.”

But she says every divorce is a unique situation and every child (young or old) deals with it differently. Her brother would tell the story differently, Sabine says. “I think he’s happy they waited.”

If the divorce has taught her anything, she says, it’s balance.

She describes her mom as a devout “super traditional” Christian who did everything by the book.

“That didn’t save their marriage.” Her dad is on the other extreme, she says, being too laid back and nonchalant. “That didn’t save their marriage either.”

Sabine tells me the divorce has given her a “raw” view of Christ.

“I’m no longer concerned with being perfect because I know that doesn’t exist. And even if it did, I’m not sure I’d want that.

I want to be real.” She says, her voice becoming soft and vulnerable, if her parents were real with each other, with God, with her, things would be so different.

They’re happier this way, and that makes me happy.

“When you know your parents don’t talk to each other outside of business and practical things, you want anything to change it — an accident, a catastrophe, or just one of them taking the first step and moving out.”

I asked her about details regarding what finally severed the cord between her parents, but she says she doesn’t really know.

That was one thing that made the divorce especially hard to deal with. “At 21, to the world, you’re an adult, to the family, you’re only a child. Everyone was trying to protect me.”

As she moved her life to California, her older brother joined her on a road trip. During that trip she says she remembers him telling her, “We are our own family now.” They sat in the car with stretches of open road ahead of them, she says, with questions that would never get an answer, choosing to lean on each other, acting as each other’s stability, giving each other someone to be accountable to.

Sabine tells me about one advantage of experiencing her parents’ divorce later in life: “I can critically think and look back on their whole relationship and see what could have been avoided, and what I need to do differently if I ever get married.”

She says there’s no sugar coating anything; she compares divorce to a mirror where she can see the qualities she shares with her parents. “I know the best representation of those qualities and the worst.”

I asked Sabine if she wished her parents had divorced sooner.

O

bviously, divorce is a horrible thing, and it shouldn’t be endorsed by the church. But maybe if the church encouraged people to ask the hard questions, fostering more honesty and fewer cover-ups, we might see divorce rates in our congregations plummet. Rather than encouraging a fluffy, phony notion of happiness, I think we need to encourage couples to face problems head on. Together.

Though each of my friends’ stories are about painful separation, I’m struck that none of them are sob fests. They reject being labelled “children of divorce,” and refuse to be defined by their parents’ relationship status. They all have felt the pain, learned from it, and moved on, determined to do things differently.

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Sanctuary to a

Murderer

By Julia Cheung

A church lives through a savage nightmare 42 | CONVERGE. November - December 2013

“Have you seen Lancy?”

James, a recently backslidden, now freshly re-committed church member was waiting for me at the main entrance of the church. His two-year-old son was perched on his shoulders, his hand clasped by his three-year-old son beside him.

James and his 27-year-old wife Lancy had been separated for two months. It was the first time since the separation that Lancy had entrusted James with the boys overnight.

“No. Why would I see her? You usually drive her to church,” I said.

His black bushy hair encased the top of his oversized head like a helmet. James was tall and stocky, but his narrow shoulders didn’t quite fill out his oversized polo that day. His intelligent, searching eyes announced his anxious urgency.

“I’m supposed to meet her here. She’s supposed to take the boys,” he insisted. Preoccupied by my Sunday school lesson plans, I brushed off his concern and quickly reassured him: I was sure she would turn up. She was probably just late and enjoying her first weekend away from her toddlers. v Up until then, I had but dim impressions of Lancy and James, even though I had known them for nine years. They had flitted in and out of my life like minor characters in a film.

They were both tall for being Chinese. James, 35, spoke in a rushed manner with a slight stammer. He always seemed to be arguing a point or trying to prove himself. Or he was outside, smoking a cigarette. He was an ambitious and talented computer programmer.

Lancy’s large, doe-like eyes took everything in with childlike wonder. She was quiet, friendly, and kind; her mouth easily relaxed into a smile and her laughter flowed freely. v My husband Andrew and I had planned a camping trip immediately after church that Sunday. After the service, we rushed back home to pack, and then headed out to the lake. We assumed Lancy had met up with James to retrieve her children. But on Monday night, Andrew received an agitated phone call from James, again asking if we had heard from Lancy. She was still missing. James said he had already filed a missing persons report with the police. He had to work the next day, and there was no one to watch his children.

We were completely stunned. There we were, my husband and I, laying side by side in our sleeping bags. We silently stared at the tent ceiling, speculating. Where was she? It was out of character for her to not take responsibility for her children. I knew her mother’s heart: we had wept and prayed together. She would never willingly abandon her children. She loved life; suicide was not a possibility.

Then the morbid thought hit me: what about James?

I remembered reading a statistic somewhere that stated if a woman is found missing or dead and if she has been in a relationship with a history of domestic violence, the abusive partner is almost always the perpetrator. I remembered the percentage being shockingly high. No, I argued with myself. That was impossible. Pure evil. Not James.

I banished the thought. convergemagazine.com

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xactly two months earlier, I had received an agitated phone call. It was Lancy’s good friend, Soo. “Julia,” Soo’s voice was panicky and breathless over the phone. “I feel like he is capable of anything. He’s so angry. I’m so scared.”

Soo explained to me that Lancy had run away from home and had fled to a women’s shelter in an undisclosed location. The boys were with Lancy, and James was livid.

This wasn’t the first time Lancy had fled from James. A few years before, Lancy had run, beaten and bruised to the police after one of James’ particularly bad outbursts. He was arrested, but she later dropped the charges. Lancy said after that incident that James had promised never to hit her again. He had promised to go to counselling and they had both agreed to work on their marriage.

But it had happened again. And now James was at Soo’s house, trying to hunt down his family gone MIA. I took a few deep breaths and tried to offer the strength and consolation to Soo I didn’t feel I really had. “It’ll be OK,” I said hollowly. “Don’t worry. God’s in control. Let’s pray.”

In those tumultuous months, praying was all I could do.

I

got to know Lancy fairly well at the parenting workshop I held at my house. I have a vivid mental picture of Lancy huffing up my back alley with the huge, clunky, rickety double stroller she claimed was an answer to prayer. She was dressed in a pink and white polo shirt and plain, slightly dated khakis, and her short hair was a little mussed. Sweat was trickling down her forehead, her glasses sliding precariously down the bridge of her nose.

She arrived for the workshop with her two adorable toddler boys in tow. The unflattering mommy clothes didn’t hide her proportioned, womanly figure. She said she was determined to be a better parent. And that she knew she shouldn’t, but she bribes the children with chocolate to stop their temper tantrums, giving in to their every demand. She said James couldn’t stand to hear the boys cry, so she worked tirelessly to keep all three men in her life happy. She confessed that her and James fought a lot over how to raise the boys properly.

She told me that James allowed her to go to church only when she prepared dinner beforehand and put the two toddlers down for their nap. How she often had to tiptoe out of the house in order to attend the afternoon service.

She also told me how she had been counselled by a Chinese pastor to submit to her husband. He had referred her to 1 Peter 3:1: “Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behaviour of their wives….”

Lancy said she took this pastor’s advice and was hopeful.

Submission seemed to be improving their relationship, she said.

There was greater mutual understanding. They weren’t fighting as much. She was letting God fight her battles. Soo and I told her she should still keep the battered women’s crisis hotline number on hand. Just in case.

But I wasn’t really expecting it to go that far.

44 | CONVERGE. November - December 2013

our Christian community distanced themselves from us...

A

few weeks after I saw her at the parenting workshop, Lancy did call the hotline. James hadn’t actually hit her this time. But she said the emotional and potential for physical abuse had finally taken its toll. So she packed her bags and her boys and left. This was when she called Soo, when Soo called me in desperation as James was pounding on her door.

Lancy was assigned to the only Christian women’s shelter in the area; three of its staff members are connected to our church.

This, I believe, can only be attributed to divine intervention.

The shelter had only housed Lancy for a month, during which time Andrew and I found ourselves thrust into the role of peacemakers. We observed James in an upheaval of emotions: at first he was angry, then disconsolate, then ultimately shattered. I spent countless hours on the phone with Lancy, consoling, comforting, counselling. But most of all, just praying. We shed many tears together over her future, her boys’ future, her family’s future. Andrew counselled James and encouraged him to be humble, to seek change, and to repent of his anger and control issues.

By the end of the month, the couple re-established communication, and James promised to rent a separate apartment for Lancy and the boys. They slowly worked toward reconciliation and rebuilding trust. James vowed to attend counselling and to attend church regularly with Lancy, to support her financially, and to work on their marriage for the sake of the boys.

And things started to look up. James seemed like he was a different person. He went to church with Lancy and the boys every Sunday. He took them to beach outings with other church families, and they even went on a family camping trip.

I remember seeing a video that had been taken during this time. Lancy was holding the camera as she recorded James, herself, and the two boys singing the hokey pokey. Their threeyear-old son danced for the camera. On his head he was wearing a huge paper bag mask. Laughter rang through the air.

W

hen Lancy would call me to talk and pray during their tentative time of restoration, there was sometimes fear in her voice. “I’m scared,” she told me.

“He hasn’t really changed. I can tell. But he’s their father. The boys need a father. I pray with all my heart that he has really changed. His actions show that he has changed, but I’m not convinced. I don’t see the change in his eyes.”

Again, all I could offer was prayer.

On the Friday before Lancy’s disappearance, she attended the women’s Bible study at my house. After our closing prayer, I vividly remember Lancy lifting her head, her eyes radiant and brimming with tears. “I need to spend more time with Jesus,” she murmured.

After the study, she got picked up by James. It was the last time any of us ever saw her.

W

hen Andrew and I returned from our camping trip, James asked us to put up missing posters where Lancy was last seen. Members of our church went out in teams to distribute posters and to pray. We were interviewed by police officers. The case was promptly taken over by the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT), even though no body had yet been found.

We were interviewed again, and the detectives told us she was most likely dead. But we held out hope, and the summer dragged on. Our entire church community was unsettled and perplexed. We cried out to God in prayer: “Bring divine intervention, God! Find her and bring divine intervention.” But He was silent. And we waited.

Until one sunny Saturday morning in September, when Andrew received a phone call from IHIT. “Reverend Cheung, we have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that we have found Lancy, and that she is deceased. The good news is that we have arrested and charged someone for the murder. It’s James. Would you be able to come in to the detachment to make a statement?”

The next 24 hours were encased in a desolately crushing, surreal, numbing kind of fog. When Andrew arrived at the police station, he remembers a detective shaking his hand, saying, “We actually had all the evidence against James, but without the body, there was no way for us to arrest him and press charges.

We really believe it was divine intervention.”

The detective went on to explain, Andrew remembers, that a fisherman had found a suitcase at the end of August. Inside that suitcase contained the remnants of Lancy’s body. Dental records had confirmed her identity.

It was the nightmare that came true.

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ames, single dad James, James whom we had pit ied.

James for whom we had prayed. James who had heroically performed t he job of mot her and fat her t hroughout t he ent ire summer, James who had not missed a single Sunday at church since Lanc y went missing. He would now evaporate from our lives as quick ly as Lanc y had. A nd perhaps f itt ingly so, for had t hat James been a craf ted persona, a f igment of our imaginat ions? The

We had unwittingly offered sanctuary to a murderer f lesh-and-blood James had been charged wit h murder.

The f lesh-and-blood James had been incarcerated.

The waiting was over. I remember blindly drudging through feelings of shock and betrayal, grief returning in waves.

How does a person even begin to recover from this? Not to mention a church? Our congregation was targeted by the media, and the culturally conservative and fearful segments of our Christian community distanced themselves from us. We had unwittingly offered sanctuary to a murderer. Indeed, we had been duped.

Does this attest more to our foolishness as a church body or to our complete and utter dependence on God? In the end, did God let the evil man prosper?

But God had answered that vital prayer for divine intervention. Justice, in this case, had been served. In the savageness of the nightmare, God’s grace surely appeared.

A year later, James pled guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 14 years. I suppose we as the body of Christ bookended their marriage. We were there to witness the beginning and the end.

As for the story in between, only God sees it all.

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| 45

Reads

Only by reading

old books

By Flyn Ritchie

contributors have provided. While there are innumerable commentaries of the classics already online and gathering dust in libraries, this particular book offers an ideal The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our starting place for those who actually wish to minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic acquaint themselves with classical authors about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes before diving in to the original writings. as we. But not the same mistakes.”

His approach is unabashedly Christian, — From C.S. Lewis’ preface to Athanasius: On the Incarnation. so that writers such as Boethius, Calvin and Wesley — who might be overlooked in more secular collections, despite their significance — find a place. But he does not slight figures such as Marx, Darwin or Nietzsche, even The Great Books Reader though they were not friends of the faith.

John Mark Reynolds (editor), Bethany House, 2011 It is, in fact, quite encouraging to see how faith-friendly so many of the great thinkers have been over the centuries, often No doubt there are people out there who look down shining an unfamiliar light on the issues . their noses at a book like this. John Mark Reynolds has produced what at first glance appears to be a Reader’s Digest version of the “great books.” It is a big book (656 pages), but when you realize his purpose is to Witness of the Saints introduce “excerpts and essays on the most influential books in Milton Walsh, Ignatius Press, 2012 Western Civilization,” it’s not so big after all.

The great majority of us are not well-read enough to look down This is a very Catholic book for a very Cathoour noses at The Great Books Reader. Most of us have not read lic audience. In the four volumes of the Liturgy of much, if any, Plato, Virgil, Boethius, Dante, or Locke, though the Hours, the official daily prayer of the Catholic we might be more familiar with a few of the later selections Church, there are nearly 600 readings from the (Austen, Tolstoy, Chesterton). church fathers and saints (along with Psalms and other passages Reynolds himself has reservations about the project. In his from Scripture). introduction entitled “A Brief Defense of a (Nearly) IndefenMilton Walsh, who has a doctorate in sacred theology from sible Project,” he acknowledges that “building a book of excerpts the Gregorian University in Rome, has organized these selecfrom great writers has risks.” tions by topic, according to the four pillars of the catechism of What if his readers were to stop with his book, rather than the Catholic church (the profession of faith, the celebration of being directed to the originals, as he intended? In other words, the Christian mystery, life in Christ, Christian prayer). This what if they took a Reader's Digest approach to The Great Books topical concordance allows the reader to compare what various Reader? What if they just adopt the views of one or another of authors have written on the same themes. the writers? What if the book were to be used solely as an ornaFor example, under “Life in Christ: Article 7: The Virtues,” ment on a bookshelf? one will find, in alphabetical order, entries by 35 authors from But Reynolds overcame his concerns, stressing that these 29 Ambrose to Gregory of Nyssa to Thomas Aquinas. selections are simply chosen to whet the appetite of any who read The entries can be read with profit by any Christian, or by any them. “If the introductions here become a substitute for reading person really, because their wisdom is timeless and ecumenical. the real things, then this book will have failed.”

And in that sense Witness of the Saints is by no means suitable Reynolds deserves thanks for the care taken in the readonly for Catholics. ings and for the brief but useful comments he and his team of Walsh addresses the point. He notes that “the Christians of the

46 | CONVERGE. November - December 2013

Flickr photo (cc) by geishaboy500

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. . . .

East hold the Fathers in great reverence,” and that “where formerly some Protestants may have seen the Fathers as posing a threat to the preeminence of Scripture, now they find that the patristic authors in fact safeguard the unique importance of the Bible ... the wisdom of the saints is the common inheritance of all believers.”

Having said that, some of the doctrines taught are specifically Catholic. While Catholics might want to read this purely for its intended instructional value, others will want to compare some of the teachings to those of their own tradition.

But that, of course, is the point of reading widely. If there is one thing C.S. Lewis, John Mark Reynolds, and Milton Walsh would agree on, it is the importance of learning from the brilliant minds of other times and places so as to deepen one's own understanding and faith.

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| 47

Last word

the roots

By Michelle Sudduth

W

ithin the story of creation, God is very clear that aloneness is a state that is “not good.”

He carefully ensured the world was free from the design flaw of loneliness by creating companionship.

From this union, a family would form and multiply, like the branches of a tree.

Michelle is a musician, writer, and worship leader.

Raised in Colorado, she spent her 20s in Nashville, and holds a Master’s degree from Regent College in Vancouver, B.C. She currently resides in Los Angeles, at a coffee shop or a piano bench.

48 | CONVERGE.

Our families go way back. I mean, way back — all the way to the beginning.

Think of how many members there are in your family tree: way too many to count!

We have a very big family, and we haven’t even met the vast majority of relatives that share the same branch.

Perhaps your personal twig on the tree is full of lush leaves, getting direct sunlight every day. It might even be the one that old couples, on their post-dinner walk, gush over. Or maybe it’s the exact opposite. Maybe you feel like your twig is weak, and seems to have some sort of microbial fungus. It doesn’t look all that pretty — heck, you’re just glad it hasn’t fallen off completely. If this is you, take courage. You are not alone in the world, though it may feel that way.

The rest of you are probably somewhere in between these metaphorical placements November - December 2013

No amount of positive thinking, denial, or overcompensation fixes family disease.

Flickr photo by Andy Magee

Getting to

on the big family tree of humanity; your twigs have a share of both beauty and disease.

Just as a twig takes its form from the branch it stems from, each of us reflect the beauty and disease of our families. Some of us have courageously identified where life has flourished, and where it has died as a result of generational blessings or curses.

Particularly difficult and important is the task of being gut-level honest about how the branches we come from may be infected. No amount of positive thinking, denial, or over-compensation fixes family disease. Any doctor will tell you that physical infections must be treated with antibiotics or they will result in the loss of a limb or even death. The diseased family tissues must be identified, opened, cleared, and healthfully reconnected to the tree in order for the beauty of God’s original design for relationship to be established.

This grueling process of regeneration is at the base of why relationships can be so hard, and most of us make it harder when we avoid owning the root of our greatest infections. It often takes a crisis to force us to take seriously the severity of our family’s disease.

At the end of Ephesians 3, Paul prays for the family of God to be rooted and established in love, so they would have the power to comprehend and be filled with Christ’s love. This power is what we need in order to be thriving twigs, with relational wholeness beyond what we ever could imagine. Instead of rotting at the base, our twigs need the nourishment of God’s pure, righteous, and good love.

We can’t fix infectious diseases ourselves — we simply don’t have the medicine. God has designed us to thrive within familial love. He beckons each of us to come to Him with all our infected parts, with everything that gets in the way of connecting to our neighbouring twigs.

God is the great arborist, the true Father, the originator of humanity’s big and beautiful family tree. In His kind and good love, we find healing for every broken, generational sickness. And in His kind and good love, we can grasp the hope of an eternity of familial wholeness.

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