by Scott Sauls, Pastor at Christ Presbyterian Church
As I write this, Patti and I are preparing for the day when we will launch our Abby, now a high school senior, into adulthood. Four years later, we will also launch Ellie. Very soon, both of our daughters will go off to college and assume ownership of their lives.
College will represent a new milestone in which they will have fuller decision making responsibility—decisions about what they do with their time, how much or how little they sleep, what and when they eat, whether or not they exercise, who they choose to socialize with and to date, the activities they get involved with, how much they do or do not study, and whether or not they become part of a church or a campus ministry or continue at all with the faith in which we raised them.
Sometimes this scares me. It feels vulnerable. And yet…
Abby is intelligent and an incredibly hard working student. Her GPA is above a 4.0. She made the dean’s list every single semester in high school and scored in the 97th percentile on the ACT. She is a highly sought-after babysitter because she is outstanding with children and always leaves the house in better shape than she found it. She pays for half of her gas and most of her clothes and recreation out of the money she has earned. She volunteers as a group leader for middle school girls. She carves out time to live in community with people who have special needs. She traveled to China last summer to spend a week making vulnerable orphans smile.
Abby is globally-minded, a product of her New York City upbringing, and values the image of God not merely in terms of her own culture or tribe or economic position or politics or nationality or skin color, but based on the Bible’s vision of one people under Christ from every nation, tribe and tongue. Whatever she does in the future, she hopes to help make the world a little more just and a little less mean.
I’m proud of Abby, yet despite the hundreds of ways I can praise her, I struggle that I will soon be letting her go, releasing her into the hands of God more than ever before.
My friend Mitch left Christianity when he left home for college. Mitch grew up in a home much like ours. Like our girls, he was a pastor’s kid, active in youth group and regular in his church attendance. But when Mitch went off to college, he distanced himself from the things his parents had taught him, distanced himself from the Bible, distanced himself from church, distanced himself from Christianity, and distanced himself from Jesus.
When asked about what he believed, there was a time when Mitch would respond, “I don’t know what I believe, but I do know one thing. I know that I hate Christianity.”
Years later, Mitch is now a pastor to college students. Eventually, he returned to the faith of his childhood, much more convinced about Jesus and the Scriptures than he had ever been before. But his path back to God and into the ministry included a prodigal season, one that no doubt had his parents up at night and on their knees regularly.
Once I asked Mitch why he thinks he strayed from his faith in the way that he did. His answer terrified me. He said, “I strayed because by the time I got out of high school, I was done with everything that looked, felt, or smelled like the world of growing up in a pastor’s shadow.”
Gulp. And yet, I understand.
The-Pastors-KidWhen you are raised in a pastor’s home, even if your parents do everything they can to normalize your childhood, your childhood is not normal. You are never just “Mitch.” You are “Mitch, the pastor’s kid,” which means that almost every day of your life, you feel a disproportionate amount of pressure—whether other-imposed or self-imposed or both—to play the part of the “good kid” who is the example for everyone else’s kids.
Upon occasion, our kids have also felt this pressure. One time, an adult pulled one of them aside and told her that because she is “the pastor’s kid,” she should be a good example to the other kids, “because people are watching.” Though these words were well intended, they were not helpful. Such words communicate that a “pastor’s kid” is a different breed of human, and is not allowed to just be “a kid” like everybody else. It’s like Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, in which the town adulteress must wear the letter “A” on her chest whenever she goes out in public, as a reminder that she is the bad girl. Similarly, wearing the letters “PK” (Pastor’s Kid) whenever you go out in public, as a reminder that you are supposed to be the good boy or girl, can be a hard calling. Because just like Hester Prynne, you live a disproportionate amount of your life in a fishbowl.
I long for my daughters to spread their own wings and develop identities that are unique and less tied to me and especially to my job. I’m excited for them to be able to live their stories outside the shadow and the nest. I pray that outside the shadow and the nest, they will be able to pursue faith on their own terms and at their own pace, and as they do, grow to love Jesus more.
And yet, sometimes I wish that I, not God, got to decide how their future stories would unfold and how their love for Jesus would grow. I want my kids to experience the current chapter of Mitch’s story without having to go through the middle chapters. Honestly, there’s a part of me that wants to coach God on how to write each chapter of their stories.
Oh me of little faith…
early-work-1240513Regarding those we love the most, people like me need to remember that we are terrible authors of other people’s stories. Only God is able to be the author and perfecter of their unique stories and their unique faith. He, not I, will complete the good work he has begun in them. And he will do this in his way, in his time, and through his chosen process for them. Their lives are in his hands, not mine. It is his sovereign care over the details and chapters of their stories that will get them where they need to be.
Their story is not mine to write. More Faith Stories Here
