by Jen Hatmaker
So don’t hear me say the teenage years are always a dreamy dream or, heaven forbid, that I love these years because my teens are all well-mannered missionaries-in-training. For the love, mine are pastor’s kids, so they are predisposed to, say, for instance, “vape” with a friend in the bathroom at a football game and land two days of detention. (My girlfriend: “Vaping? Ugh. I’d be less concerned that he was an addict and more concerned he is just an ass.”)
Side note: it is incredibly helpful to have girlfriends who aren’t too precious about this phase. If your friends clutch their pearls at every teen wobble, it is like booking yourself a first-class ticket on the Failure Train. Trust me: you want truth-telling friends raising normal teens in the real world. If another mom tells you she is certain her teenage son has never even considered porn (oh dear), you may want to de-board because this might not be a safe or honest place for real life. Yes, we maintain solid expectations for our teens, but they are normal kids just like we were, and they will screw up just like we did, and our tribe needs to handle this stage with solidarity and grace, not shock and superiority. If you want judgment, call your mom.
The Hatmakers have real stuff going on well beyond e-cigarettes, and we’ve failed each other more than I thought possible these last few years, but I am here to tell you the teen years are not to be feared or approached with dread. Even better, face them with joy! There is no formula for sailing through this parenting stage. No template works in every family, no list of rules will prevent catastrophe, no one story is exactly like the next. But I can tell you a tiny handful of truths that have carried the Hatmaker clan thus far and still left us liking each other.
We promised our kids early and often: You can tell us anything. We won’t freak out. You can’t shock us. Nothing is a deal breaker, and everything is up for discussion. We primed the pump by broaching plenty of sticky conversations ourselves:
•Who is already having sex in your grade?
•What about God do you have trouble believing?
•How do you and your gay friends talk about sexuality?
•What do you struggle with?
•What have you heard lately that you don’t understand?
•What questions do you have about your own body?
Obviously these questions are met with deer-in-the-headlights paralysis sometimes, but our kids have no doubt we meant what we said; we clearly aren’t afraid of any conversation, any subject, any issue. We removed the cloak of silence that often suffocates hard topics, and with it went much of the corollary angst. For many teens, the hardest thing imaginable is even talking to their parents about real life, so once they do and discover that no one dies, it paves the road for all sorts of dialogue. Don’t wait for them to make the first move here, because teens are notoriously secretive and weird.
Then is the follow-up of actually not freaking out. If you could hear the things our ears have heard in this house while managing to not fall out of our chairs, you would nominate us for awards and prizes and parades. Sometimes your brain has to tell your face to pull it together while your adrenaline loses its crap invisibly. You want to shut down communication? Fall apart, scream, overreact, shun. When you have no earthly idea how to respond yet, just say: “Tell me more about that,” or “I’m listening and need a bit of time to think about this,” or “I’m glad you told me, and we will work this out together.” Keep it open, keep it mutual, stay on the same team instead of isolating your kid. Our teens need to know that we are for them and with them, not just when they are performing well but in struggle, failure, calamity. This is, after all, exactly how God loves us.
Brandon and I also took a page out of my parents’ handbook and decided to have fun with our bigs. We laugh, we tease, we joke, we tell funny stories, we send ridiculous memes. Determined to be the destination for teen fun, when parks and children’s museums ran their course, we bought a used boat and guaranteed ten more years of loyalty. We virtually never say no to their friends coming over. Loving your teens means loving their friends, and the formula is easy: feed them constantly and ask good questions about their lives. The end. Be the home where the teen tribe is welcomed, and you’ll rack up credits quicker than expanding their data plan.
We permanently opened the yes valve on teen shenanigans that hover north of dumb but south of harmful. Fill up the back of your truck with an inflatable swimming pool and drive around the neighborhood? Sure. Host a mancathalon in the backyard with events like Eating Hot Peppers and Trampoline Volleyball? We have insurance. Unless we have a strong reason otherwise, we say yes, thrilled they are mudding in a pasture instead of sneaking out of a super-restrictive home. Can they ruin this freedom? You bet, and they have to earn it back over time, but our relationship thrives better when the reins are clearly in place but not pulled too tight.
Perhaps no parenting stage requires levity more than raising young adults. If you can, at every turn, in any circumstance possible, lighten up. This season is a blink, a tiny bitty handful of years in an entire lifetime in which our children have lost their ever-lovin’ minds (to be more exact, their minds are underdeveloped and impaired; it’s the puberties). It is a millisecond and then it is over, and we surely don’t want to damage our relationships beyond repair during these few years our kids struggle through the painful process of growing up. We can hold the line knowing full well they will not always roll their eyes, come home late, lie to our faces, or sulk like it is their job. In a New York minute they will be grown-ups, and just like we did, they will look back on these years with laughter and plenty of face palms, remembering parents who stuck by them and with them, daresay even enjoyed them despite it all.
Expect to love these years, and even when they are hard, you will.
I, for one, was hanging on to my son’s ankles, barely believing his time under our roof was over. It went so fast. Everyone was right. After moving him into his dorm, I clung to that boy at the airport curb and thought I might never breathe a full, deep breath again. Launching the baby that made me a mother sliced our story in half: when I raised him and when he left. I cried the whole way home. Why do they have to go to college right when they get the most awesome? Why can’t we send our kids to college between fourth and seventh grade? (Kidding. Well, I’m mostly kidding.)
These are the kids of my dreams, and I like them so much. I cannot believe we got to raise them. Their teen years have brought me more joy than I dared imagine. These hooligans are both exactly what I expected and beyond what I hoped for, because who really knew what kind of humans they would turn into? I had an inkling, but then they develop into these amazing, nuanced, better versions of your early caricature, and you realize that they are whole, complete people with bits of you and lots of them and, as it turns out, they belong to God after all. When they were little, I said, “They are on loan from God,” but I didn’t really mean it because it seemed like they actually belonged to me and would forever, but then one enrolls in college seven hours away and it becomes painfully and awesomely clear: Oh my gosh. There he actually goes. Bye, baby.
They are going after all, mamas. Let’s send them off adored, believed in, enjoyed, treasured, lest they forget that until our last breath, our doors are always open, our tables will always be full of food, their people are welcomed with open arms, and no matter what they say, they will always be ours.
Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.1
— HELEN KELLER
CHAPTER 23
REWOVEN
Matching my mother-in-law’s comprehensive skill set is a thing that will happen to me never. She can do pretty much anything: garden, cook, fish, cross-stitch, golf. She started a food pantry. She knows everything about accounting. She knows everything about holistic oncology. She knows everything about tax codes. She lived in Europe. She lived in Hawaii. Perhaps this simple sentence will help you understand: Jacki once went on a four-day elk hunt in the Rocky Mountains in the dead of winter, shot an elk, t
hen skinned, quartered (is this the word?), and packed the animal down the mountain alone on her horse. She also made my sister-in-law’s wedding dress by hand, because don’t all horseback elk hunters also sew?
In addition to doing everything, she crocheted custom baby blankets for all her grandchildren. These are heirlooms that we all cherish. Jacki made a particularly complicated and elaborate blanket for my daughter Sydney, and when she was still little, our dog at the time, Satan’s own mongrel, went absolutely Tasmanian devil on it and tried to bury it in the backyard. The blanket was destroyed.
I was beside myself. I picked up the tattered yarn and sobbed at the dog, “THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS!” I delivered the pile of slobbery, filthy yarn shreds to Jacki to see if anything could be done, because sure, she could make a replacement replica, but these were the threads that covered my sleeping baby girl. I didn’t want a new blanket; I wanted the old one put back together.
Jacki washed the shredded yarn pile by hand, sorted out all the tangles and knots, and slowly, tenderly, over weeks and weeks, put the blanket back together, slightly different than before but using all the same threads. “Bonus,” she told me, “it’s actually sturdier than it originally was, so you can wash it in the machine now!”
Put a pin in that story. We’ll come back to it.
God’s sovereignty. (I know. Where is this little narrative going? Stick with me for three more minutes.) I have a thorny relationship with the concept of God’s sovereignty, this spiritual idea that God is entirely controlling all things at all times in all circumstances, that nothing happens without His say-so, nothing occurs outside of His decree. This discussion in spiritual circles often confuses me. Maybe it is just the semantics, primarily a function of the language used or perhaps the words left out. It probably has something to do with living longer, seeing more, and diversifying my exposure, which challenges my doctrine.
Either way, I have to overcome my anxiety at being placed outside the camp here for asking these questions—belonging is a serious bedfellow of mine. But then I remember what Bob Goff said on Twitter about camps: “God didn’t give us anything to join, except Him.” If we’re doing this thing right, the family can stay intact through hard questions, disagreements, and a severe wrestle with divine mysteries.
Questions like: Why do really heinous things happen to really innocent people? Why does God intervene in some circumstances but not in others? Why does praying in faith not heal everyone? What do faith and prayer even mean? If God is going to do what He wants, then why doesn’t He fix more stuff? And why do we even need to pray? Do our prayers move God? If they do, it doesn’t feel like He is that sovereign if human people can change His mind. If God is in control of absolutely everything, does sin have any real effect? Does Satan have any real effect? Is there any factor that can operate outside of God’s sovereignty? What does it mean, “He allowed suffering”? How do we understand God when He stays His hand in the face of injustice or abuse?
Sometimes it seems like God can either be sovereign or benevolent but not both.
Isn’t this such a light little conversation?
If those questions made you feel faint, I’ll say this: I am no longer afraid of spiritual investigation. I’m confident in the end game, which is that God is good and He loves us and He could not possibly be unfair, arbitrary, cold, or abusive. He couldn’t be. It is outside the possibility of His character. It isn’t just that God is loving but that He is love itself. I am so certain of that. I possess full confidence in God but a healthy skepticism of the human understanding of God. (I used to be the opposite, and I miss the days when I knew everything.) So in this case, I can see the clear answer at the end of the problem and realize I simply don’t understand the equation. I know the final answer is right, but I haven’t worked out the spiritual math.
Back to the questions.
With anything as viscerally devastating as suffering and all its messy appendages, it is difficult to explore thoroughly without unintentionally becoming dismissive. But, still, the Christian community has long tried to explain it. We want to understand God’s role because it goes to the heart of His character, which goes to the heart of our perceived belovedness. At its core, the question boils down to: Am I just a bit part in the greater story of God’s glory? Or am I truly a loved daughter?
What we typically want to know when tragedy strikes is why. It is hard to reconcile arbitrary suffering with a loving God, isn’t it? We want an unambiguous explanation instead of the mysterious cocktail of sovereignty, the common human experience, God’s glory, and redemption.
To this end, the church has a history of formulizing suffering, giving it tidier origins and endings, and whitewashing the debilitating middle. We assess the complicated nuances of sorrow and assign it categories, roots, principles. Or, uncertain, we default to sovereignty in a way that feels so lonely and cold, it makes God out to be a heartless pursuer of His own fame at any human cost. That just feels gross.
Here is what we know about suffering from Scripture:
•Sometimes people suffer because of self-inflicted misery and sin. Humans have long been their own worst enemies. We are a self-destructive people who prefer to blame. Adam, Eve, Jonah, David, Saul, Judas.
•Sometimes people suffer because of the sins of others, which God would never cause, endorse, or initiate. It is contrary to his perfect nature. Bathsheba, Daniel, Tamar, Hosea, the beaten man in the Good Samaritan story, Paul.
•Sometimes people suffer through no human fault at all. The best of God’s saints had their dark nights. This is no indicator of divine disfavor. Life is simply hard.
•Sometimes people suffer specifically for the gospel, which the Bible said we would.
•Sometimes people suffer because loved ones get sick and die. This happens to every person, family, and community on earth. Even Jesus wept salty, human tears at death and the grief of his friends.
•Sometimes people suffer because we live on a physical earth involving tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfires, tsunamis. Natural disasters are a part of any living, shifting, fluctuating planet. (And the longer we irresponsibly plunder and harm it, the greater it will groan and creak and protest, but that is a different essay.)
•Sometimes people suffer because we have a vicious enemy who hates us and is out to steal, kill, and destroy everything redemptive and beautiful. That is real.
The point is, there is no formula for suffering. There is no one answer. There is no pat explanation. Scripture clearly identifies numerous root causes of suffering, some entirely incompatible with God’s character. Because He is so good at being God, He uses everything, He can heal anything, He wrestles glory from all things. Paradoxically, adversity can be so good for us, and He knows that. So regardless of why or how life delivers pain, God makes the absolute most of it.
Back to Sydney’s shredded baby blanket.
In Genesis 50, Joseph told his brothers after they sold him into slavery in a fit of jealous rage (WTH, brothers?): “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good . . .” This is important: Meant is the Hebrew word for wove. In other words, you wove evil but God rewove it together for good. After his brothers went Tasmanian devil on him and essentially tried to bury him in the backyard, Joseph deposited all the tattered shreds of his life into the careful hands of God, who just picked up the threads of hate and deceit and abandonment and injustice and refashioned them into a truly beautiful story.
God used all the same threads. He didn’t create a replica. He didn’t start from scratch. He didn’t throw the destroyed original in the trash and begin again with all new material. God rewove what was torn into a stronger version than the first.
This is a perfect depiction of sovereignty to me. He is Lord over all, no matter how it began, how it was meant, how it harmed. He reigns over intent, over agenda, over loss. Nothing escapes His reach, nothing is beyond reclamation in His hands. If someone or something sewed threads of suffering in your life, even if
that someone was you, God’s sovereignty says: I’m bigger than that, stronger than that, more powerful than that. I can make this beautiful again and use it to heal you and make you sturdier and, while we’re at it, other people too. At its most altruistic, loving center, God is indeed glorified through our suffering, not because He is an egomaniac who profits from our losses, but because, truly, nothing bears a better witness than watching God resurrect someone’s life. That is a God who folks want to know, a God worth His glory.
So in the face of brokenheartedness, there’s no need to counsel people in the way of spiritual explanation, for we are guessing at best, misrepresenting God at worst. Nor should we push them into tidy grief. God will reweave the threads in time—the approximate gap between Joseph’s brothers selling him into slavery and him standing before them as the second-highest leader in the country: twenty-two years. We don’t need to hustle others through their stories. Or ourselves.
Here is what we can cling to:
•God is impossibly loving. He loves us. He loves our families. He loves creation.
•God restores things; all of history points to a God who makes sad things right.
•God is very much paying attention. He is on the move—healing and transforming. He can do this. This is what He does.
•There is nothing too broken that God cannot mend and redeem. Really. Nothing.
•God doesn’t tempt, abuse, endorse wickedness, abandon, or hate. Let’s not lay evils at His feet that don’t belong to Him.