by Smith, T. L.
So when his fellow servants saw what had been done, they were very grieved, and came and told their master all that had been done. Then his master, after he had called him, said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?’ And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. “So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses.”
When did the word compassion get in there? Compassion is defined as sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.[1]
As a 7th grade English teacher, I am required to teach point of view, which is the perspective from which the story is told. One of the things I have always encouraged my students to do when analyzing a story is to put themselves in the character’s shoes and to look at the conflict through someone else’s lens. I failed to take my own advice when thinking about this particular scenario. I never really stopped to view the situation from my father’s point of view.
In the first portion of the parable in the scripture, we see a debt collector forgiving the debtor’s financial obligation. This master wanted his money, but he released the servant from this responsibility out of compassion. In that moment, I realized that I could continue to rehearse the trauma or I could release it.
Forgiveness was hard for me because I incorrectly assumed that releasing the negative emotions meant acquiescence to, or agreement with, unacceptable behavior. I questioned if releasing the pain would invalidate it or minimize the severity of the infraction.
Although I had been in a position to be forgiven many times, I was in a state of perpetual judgment with my father. I, the debtor, had become the harsh debt collector. For a long time after this, I measured every word and interaction I had with him through the lens of this pain. The hypocrisy of my position became clear to me after having a conversation with my youngest child as I was driving her to school early one morning.
She told me that she was concerned about how she would respond to her father when seeing him after an extended period of separation. She was anxious because she honestly had no clue how she would react. This one-time daddy’s girl was trying to navigate the warring emotions that were whirling within her heart.
My advice to my child was simple. I told her that her emotions were valid, but she couldn’t be controlled by them. I told her that, ultimately, her goal should be to do what would please God. I encouraged her to acknowledge her emotions and, when the time was right, address them with her father.
This opened my eyes to the fact that sometimes we expect people to provide us with things that they are incapable of giving us. This incapability could stem from being ill-equipped to handle the demand or simply an unwillingness to bear the responsibility. In either case, the need goes unfulfilled. Looking at the situation from only a personal perspective could lead to a fascination with only one part of the story.
Watching my girls deal with their daddy issues forced me to confront my own. I learned that many times the actions of others really don’t have anything to do with you. Regardless of how vile the behavior and the impact that behavior has on your existence, it really has nothing at all to do with you. The behavior is simply a manifestation of their own unresolved issues.
I never really thought about the desperation my father must have felt to even consider concocting the insurance fraud scheme let alone pulling his oldest daughter into it. I never really factored in the traumas he suffered in his own past that led to his style of decision making. It took maturity to understand that we all deal with something. It doesn’t excuse the pathology, but to some degree, it explains it.
Perpetuation or Confrontation
2 Corinthians 10:4-6, NKJV
For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, and being ready to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled.
Have you ever been overlooked for a promotion? Turned down for a date? Had a credit application denied? Been picked last for the kickball game in gym class? These are the types of rejections that are pretty commonplace and generally don’t send the average person over the edge. They sting, but most people manage to move beyond this type of rejection in a reasonable amount of time.
But what happens when the rejection you’ve experienced taints your very outlook on life? What happens when the trauma you have experienced causes you to implement defense mechanisms that repel pain, but also entraps and isolates you? My dear friend, you are dealing with what is referred to as a “stronghold” in the scripture above.
A stronghold is defined as a fortified place or a place where a particular cause or belief is strongly defended or upheld[2]. Spiritually, this means that my thinking, attitude and actions were entrenched in error and stood in direct opposition to God’s Word. In my case, I had built emotional walls to protect myself.
I grew a hard outer shell as a defense mechanism to experiencing anymore pain, especially relating to my father. The funny thing is, I was in complete denial about it for a really long time. During this process of healing and introspection, I couldn’t get away from the word rejection. I heard it in church during weekly messages. I heard it in conversations with family members and I even found it to be the major theme in movies on television.
As crazy as this may sound, this is one way that I feel God talks to me. When I am confronted with the same issue, again and again, I know it is time to dig a little deeper.
Earlier in the book, I talked about how I felt detached, which is a form of rejection. I grew up in a two-parent family—they just weren’t my biological parents. Children are very observant. It doesn’t generally take them long to figure out that their lives don’t look like the lives of those around them. Although I was loved and cared for, I understood that my uncles and aunts had both their parents, but I didn’t.
Children also crave acceptance. Humans have an intrinsic desire to feel connected to those who created them. There is a longing to be loved and valued. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much to bring this sense of connection and self-worth into question.
As a parent myself, I understand every decision made concerning my childhood and why. Regardless of the validity and logic of these reasons, my family dynamic created an emotional void within because of how I internalized those events. Even after I began to live with my mother full-time, a part of me still felt like I had to prove my value and worth.
In his book Destroying the Spirit of Rejection, John Eckhardt (2016) wrote:
We try all kinds of ways to cover up rejection: people pleasing, attention seeking, perfectionism, anger and bitterness, hard-heartedness, pride, isolation, addiction to drugs or alcohol, and sexual promiscuity. We use any number of things to either gain love and acceptance or to protect ourselves from being hurt again. Rejection is a vicious cycle that takes us deeper and deeper into sin and destruction. After it does its damage, rejection leaves lives desolated and in ruins (p. 2)[3].
As a Christian, I believe that I have a real enemy who uses tactics so subtle that he led me to believe that my perception of my childhood, my value as a person and my idea of how little I thought I deserved were “normal”. Viewing life through the lens of rejection skews or taints every part of it.
I took something like scholastic achievement and what I perceived as success as a type of armor to justify why I deserved to be loved and accepted. I created a cycle of performance and perfection that became more and more difficult to maintain. I got tired of working my way into people’s good graces.
Any pathology that isn’t resolved will be perpetuated. I found myself entrenched in various relationships that I found emotionally draining. I was often perceived as the res
cuer, or to be brutally honest, the enabler in my marriage and in several of my friendships. I couldn’t figure out why I was putting out so much and getting very little in return.
I was smart enough to understand that the only thing in any given situation I have the ability to change is me, so I turned on the light and took out the microscope. I became very introspective.
One of the biggest questions I had in counseling was why I chose my husband as a mate. I needed to understand why I made that decision so that I could avoid making it again.
When I was ten years old, my mother married a wonderful man who has treated me like nothing other than his child. He has been a quiet and supportive influence in my life since then. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t the model I used when it came to choosing a partner.
Ms. Weiler explained that people often choose mates to fill an emotional void. That made perfect sense. My pastor has always said that there is something in you that draws and connects the people that you associate with. The wounded little girl inside me drew the wounded little boy inside my husband.
My husband was the product of an adulterous relationship. He was embraced by everyone in his father’s family but denied by his father. Subsequently, we both had daddy issues that negatively impacted our relationship.
The brokenness in each of us created toxicity. There were needs that we each had that were impossible for either of us to fulfill. There was friction and chaos from the very beginning of our marriage. We found ourselves in a downward spiral of separation and reconciliation that proved more exhausting than dealing with the tension that became the norm at home.
Spiritually, I couldn’t figure out how two people who professed their love for one another couldn’t honor the covenant that they made before God and man. One of the reasons why I fought for my marriage so long was that I naively thought having two parents in the household would prevent my children from having the same abandonment issues I struggled with most of my life. I also naively thought that because we both attended church and shared a common faith in God, we would both use His principles to help us to overcome the obstacles we were facing.
Unfortunately, I didn’t find this to be the case. The fact of the matter is marriage only works when both parties are willing to put in the work to make it last. The more I worked on me, the less I liked who I had become for the sake of saving the marriage—or saving face, because I had to prove all of the naysayers wrong. The more I worked on me and established the boundaries that I needed to be able to look myself in the mirror every day, the more I realized that the cost of saving the marriage had become too high. I realized that we were on a merry-go-round to nowhere.
We were only teaching our girls that strife and disrespect were normal. We had inadvertently allowed our desire to provide a two-parent household for our children to be used by the enemy to recreate the same dynamic of rejection and abandonment that we both struggled with.
Ephesians 6:12, NKJV
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
This season in my life really began to show me who my real enemy was. My eyes were open to the fact that my issues ran much deeper than what was obvious. Although I was willing to take ownership of my choices, I also began to take note of the significance my family history played in the formation of these circumstances. I realized that I could find similar patterns in the lives of prior generations.
In his book Blessing or Curse You Can Choose, Derek Prince (2006) writes:
There may be forces at work in our lives that have their origin in previous generations. Consequently, we may be confronted with recurrent situations or patterns of behavior that cannot be explained solely in terms of what has happened in our lifetimes or personal experiences (pp. 33 – 34)[4].
Without sounding like a Twilight Zone episode, I now understand that there are behaviors we repeat because we are not aware we are making them. We simply walk haphazardly into traps because we are not paying attention to the signs, and we consider some forms of dysfunction normal.
For example, I know that alcoholism runs rampant through the maternal side of my family. I have consciously decided not to drink. To me, this is an obvious generational curse that I have chosen to avoid. But others are more inconspicuous.
Her Story
My maternal grandmother was eighteen years old when she married my grandfather. They remained married for 52 years before his death on November 2, 2004.
Mama started having children at the age of 19 and didn’t have her last child until she was 39 years old. Unlike her children, my grandmother was born when her mother was just 14 years of age. She, along with four of her siblings, was raised by her grandparents. She was the oldest of eight children. My grandmother never finished high school, but she remains an avid reader.
My maternal grandfather was the youngest of three children conceived during the marriage of James and Ezzie Smith. However, my grandfather never even met his father because he died before his birth.
My great-grandmother later remarried. In total, Mama Ezzie had nine children, two of which died as infants. The house I grew up in actually belonged to my great-grandmother. She died when I was a sophomore in high school at the age of 89.
It was Mama Ezzie who taught my grandparents how to farm the land to provide food for their large family. My grandfather was the sole breadwinner, working for the railroad for years until he was forced to retire on disability due to a serious back injury.
His Story
My paternal grandfather was born in 1922 to Ruby and Curly Gordon. From their union, eleven children were born, my grandfather being the second oldest. The two later divorced.
My great-grandfather moved away and remarried approximately five years later, having five more children. This marriage also resulted in divorce.
In 1952, my great-grandfather moved to Gary, IN and married again. He remained married until his death on January 7, 1972. My paternal great-grandmother never remarried but had two additional children from other relationships.
My dad’s father, who we affectionately called Paw Paw, married my paternal grandmother and had five children. My grandmother had a child prior to marriage. My grandfather worked as a carpenter and a farmer. The two established their lives in Calhoun City, MS. I do know that my grandmother was a teacher and the owner of a small café.
My father has no real recollection of his mother because she died when he was around two years old. According to one of my father’s older sisters in her autobiography, my grandfather was married a total of twelve times. He remarried one of his wives twice. He went on to have three more children from these unions.
I have heard stories of how the women my grandfather chose to marry weren’t always kind to his children, even abusive. In her book Whoever You Are, Wherever You Are, It’s Okay (2010)[5], my aunt describes how several of my grandfather’s wives brought additional children into the marriage. This dynamic often created strife because of the perceived favoritism shown between the groups of children.
Looking over my family history reveals a thread of predominant patterns that are so prevalent that they had become normal for me. It became a normal pattern of behavior for grandmothers to raise their grandchildren on the maternal side of the family. Fatherlessness and abandonment—either through illegitimacy, divorce or death—is another recurrent theme that runs throughout both sides of my family tree.
Although my mother’s generation had the luxury of being raised with both their parents, a significant number of children in the generation before and after did not. Paternally, divorce is a theme that we see over and over again for at least four generations. The awareness of these themes arms me with the ability to ward against them. I am mindful of how the decisions I make as an adult impacts the lives of my children and possibly even my grandchildren. It empowers me to stand against the enemy by doing
the necessary research, understanding the spiritual and emotional impact of these curses and disseminating information to my children to prevent the persistence of these behaviors.
Victory Over My Past
Romans 12:2, NKJV
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
So, where do I go from here? How do I move forward and leave behind the mistakes of my past?
The rug has been lifted and all the junk that I have avoided dealing with has been uncovered. Wounds are being healed. Divorce papers have been filed and a truce has been established between my estranged husband and me. Peace has once enveloped my existence and I truly believe that I have finally entered a season of rest and restoration.
Although it took a couch in a counselor’s office to get to the root of my emotional angst, it was my faith that pulled me from the depths of my despair. For a long time, I wallowed in self-pity. I realized that my choices created the circumstances that were overwhelming me.
In my mind, the only thing to do was take full responsibility for my mistakes and ride the tide. I felt like a failure in so many ways.
I failed to hold my marriage together. I failed to honor the vow I made to myself to raise my children in a two-parent household. I failed to advance professionally because I allowed the chaos of my personal life to consume so much of my energy that I lost the ambition and motivation to actively pursue a promotion.
I had stopped using my spiritual weapons of prayer, meditation on God’s Word and faith-filled confession to combat the attack the enemy was unleashing on my mind. I fell for the trap the enemy had set for me by focusing on the negative circumstances happening in my life and adopting a destructive self-perception.
