Freedom Is Wild - Chapter 3

A Serialized Memoir of Life and Death

11/15/2023

This will be the final chapter I publish from my book about our life with our late daughter. This gets at the meat of how we came to see the world and ourselves differently as a result of our struggles. I may publish an afterword that contains the transcript of the remarks made at her funeral by her brothers and me. Still undecided about that.

A very good friend asked me if it was cathartic for me to publish these chapters. I told him, “No”. The truth is that, before I press “Publish” on every one of these, I fight through a wave of nausea. I’m sure I’m no great shakes in person, but I’m not remotely as much of a downer as the subject matter of these chapters makes it seem. I am actually fully human and possess an active sense of humor. But I have been posting these chapters in the hope that some other parent, one who is struggling with a self-destructive child and finds himself similarly disoriented and confused, will find what I’ve written. We ourselves were so bereft of any resource that offered a coherent point of view on what we were going through that if, having posted these chapters, it happens to help even just one family find its way out of the emotional chaos sooner than we were able to, it will have been worth it.

“…the thing that I dreaded has happened to me, and what I feared has come upon me. I have no ease, I have no quietness; I cannot rest; trouble has come upon me.” Job 3:25-26

The front door burst open on that Sunday afternoon and my wife walked in with tears streaming down her face. She had been to a baby shower and the woman from our church, with whom she had ridden, informed her on the way there that the reason we had lost our daughter, the reason that she wandered the streets of Los Angeles with our having no knowledge of her whereabouts or even her continued existence, was because Mary had “never experienced unconditional love.”

Well.

Rightly or wrongly we had chosen to be transparent among our church community regarding our family struggles. Not that we had stood up on Sunday morning and announced anything. But in our personal relationships we had been honest about our struggles and sought the prayers and support of other believing confidants.

We were naïve at that time, and had not yet learned that when you have lost a child, one who is involved in very public moral failings, some of your brothers and sisters in Christ will blame you.

People very often say dumb things; indeed I have my own robust track record in this regard. But for sheer relational obtuseness, I think it would be hard to top the act of telling a grieving mother, one who has very literally come close to being consumed out of love for her daughter, that it was actually her lack of love that was the cause of her daughter’s failures. It never seems to occur to those who are superstitious about the therapeutic benefits of unconditional love that, was love’s ability to affect the recipient of it absolute, the entire world would have already thrown itself down in gratitude at the foot of the cross. If these superstitionists had any imagination whatsoever, or had they even just reflected momentarily on the constancy of their own human nature, they might have recognized that every one of us is very often the recipient of loving kindness that we neither perceive, appreciate, nor understand.

I suspect that fathers and mothers everywhere, who are serious about their faith, agonize night and day, as we did, in a desperate search for answers. Every moment you’re haunted by the prospect that maybe this is your fault. Perhaps there was something you could have done. Perhaps, even now, there’s something you can do or say to change her course. Your mind goes round and round as you brainstorm for answers.

We eventually came to believe that there was a fundamentally false assumption baked into our search for answers within ourselves regarding our daughter’s choices. The false idea was in assuming that our daughter’s choices were primarily the product of her environment. That people do nothing more than act out their programming and, when their actions are bad, it is because their inputs (i.e. environment) were bad.

These kinds of assumptions are in the very cultural air we breathe. Since at least Sigmund Freud, people have embraced various forms of the idea that our actions today are generally reflective of the environment of our youth or some aspect of our relationship with our parents. You might call it “potty training über alles” as an explanation for human moral choices. There is a widespread implicit acceptance of environmental determinism – that our environment determines our actions.

At first, we too looked for answers in her environment. Had something happened to her? Had she been sexually abused without our knowledge? Was there some traumatic experience in her childhood or adolescence that might explain the horrific choices she was making now? Without really examining our presuppositions, we desperately looked for answers there.

But all the while, other questions rattled around in the back of my mind.  Was this pervasive notion, that a person’s moral choices were largely the product of her upbringing, really consistent with a biblical worldview? Was it really reasonable to just blithely accept that the moral failures of one person should be laid at the feet of another? What, exactly, does the bible have to say about moral culpability? Are people really so fragile that, regardless of a parent’s good intentions, random accidental deficiencies in a child’s upbringing doom them to a life of self-destructive prodigality? Is parenthood really such a deadly minefield of accidental destruction? Ultimately, we came to ask ourselves if freedom was real. Are people free to make their own moral choices, or are they merely the product of their childhood environment?

Where Do These Ideas Come From?

Where does this notion, that pathological or self-destructive choices originate from environmental circumstances, come from?

Well, one of the most widely adopted points of view in western cultures during the 19^th and 20^th centuries was the view that humans aren’t really free in the truest sense - that there is a mechanistic core to human existence. To whatever extent our choices emerge from our preference, this view holds, our preferences are determined by some combination of environment and heredity. We are, in effect, determined by circumstances over which we have no control.  American novelist Theodore Dreiser puts it this way in his 1925 novel, “An American Tragedy”:

“All of us are more or less pawns. We are moved about like chessmen by circumstances over which we have no control.”¹

Dreiser captures the spirit of the idea in describing human beings as chessmen. In the determined view of mankind, people are mechanistic and programmable. In such an environment, freedom is not real - human choices only exhibit the appearance of actual freedom.

There are at least two kinds of determinism on offer in the western marketplace of ideas – environmental determinism and biological determinism.

Environmental Determinism

Perhaps more than anyone else, Sigmund Freud popularized the view that our actions are programmed by our environment and our life experiences.  Freud even suggested that the malleability of the human personality ended in childhood.

“The nature and quality of human child’s relation to people of his own and the opposite sex have already been laid down in the first six years of his life. He may afterwards develop and transform them in certain directions, but he can no longer get rid of them.” ²

According to Freud, everything about the way you interact with other people is established by the time you’re six years old. Much about Freud’s ideas have been discredited in the intervening years, but the notion that a person is primarily the product of their environment and experiences has sunk deep into the popular imagination.

If Freud’s assumptions were right, then almost everything we have ever believed about human moral responsibility would be wrong. Psychologist B.F. Skinner followed Freudian logic right where it led. He “went there”, making the argument that our environmental influences are so strong that human beings can’t necessarily be held morally accountable for their actions.

“In the traditional view, a person is free. He is autonomous in the sense that his behavior is uncaused. He can therefore be held responsible for what he does and justly punished if he offends. That view, together with its associated practices, must be re-examined when a scientific analysis reveals unsuspecting controlling relations between behavior and environment.” ³

So in Skinner’s worldview, freedom is illusory because of the “controlling relations” between the way we behave and our environment. If freedom isn’t real, he says, we need to rethink notions of moral culpability. Because it isn’t as if a person has made a bad moral choice so much as that a person’s environment controls them.

Both Freud and Skinner basically maintain that environmental things outside of our control exert a controlling influence our behavior and determine our choices.  Freedom is illusory, according to their ideas, because people are entirely programmed by their environment.

Biological Determinism

More recently, the impact of genetic and biological influences has been put forward as a reason to deny human moral responsibility and the existence of freedom. Rather than past life-experiences and external environment determining our choices, with genetic determinism it is our biology that eliminates our moral culpability.

This view was probably popularized early on by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene.

“We are enslaved by selfish molecules…They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence…They go by the name of ‘genes’, and we are their survival machines.” ⁴

Dawkins is a thoroughgoing materialist and he offers, here, a thoroughly material explanation for human behavior. The entire field of evolutionary psychology has grown up as an effort to apply the notions of genetic determinism to questions of human behavior.

“The most unwelcome conclusion of evolutionary psychology is also the most obvious: if evolutionary psychology is true, some form of genetic determinism must be true as well.”⁵

Evolutionary psychology is an effort, then, to explain the origins of human behavior, not in terms of moral freedom, but in terms of genetic inevitability. Viewed through this lens, selfish and pathological choices are not moral failures so much as part of a person’s unfortunate biological programming.

In fact, for both environmental and genetic determinism, the common thread of ideas is that moral freedom is illusory and, whether through environment or genetics, a person’s choices are not his own.

Robert Trivers, an American evolutionary biologist who happened to write the foreward to Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, makes the point that moral freedom isn’t real in this way:

“The time is ripe for a general theory of deceit and self-deception based on evolutionary logic, a theory that in principle applies to all species but with special force to our own.”⁶

In other words, human beings are uniquely a product of their biology where moral choices are concerned.

These ideas carry enormous social and public policy consequences. If no one can be rightly held accountable for their choices, what are we to make of criminal justice? What is the justiciable basis of imprisonment?

If our environment or biology programs our actions, for example, self-absorption is not a moral failure but something more akin to a sickness. And on and on it goes.

Both of these forms of determinism, environmental and biological, ground themselves in purely material explanations for our lives. Christian apologist Nancy Pearcey describes materialism this way:

“Materialism is committed to the dogma that physics explains all of chemistry, chemistry explains all of biology, and biology explains the human mind, with nothing left over.” ⁷

Thus, according to the determinist view, there can be no human freedom in a purely material world, and no moral responsibility in the absence of true freedom.

For many decades, we have been subjected to a continuous drumbeat of messages suggesting that environmental and biological programming hold the explanatory power for our actions.

Christians Dabbling in Determinism

But I’m a person of faith. I’m a believer. I don’t embrace a purely materialistic or mechanistic view of the universe. How did it happen that these ideas affected us in dealing with Mary?

Well, I can only say that believers are not immune to the ideas that slosh around in the culture. If you had asked me if I believed that people are programmable by their environment or by their biology I would have said, “Of course not!” But if you evaluated what I believed by where I desperately went searching for answers when Mary went off the rails, you would, with furrowed brow, have said “hmmm…”

So many sleepless nights were spent wracking our brains looking for, on the one hand, environmental answers to explain Mary’s choices. And, on the other hand, seeking that magical piece of information we could convey that would turn the lightbulb of understanding on in Mary’s head.

It actually took us far too long to consider the possibility that Mary’s problem wasn’t that she had some traumatic event lurking in her subconscious but that she herself loved darkness. It wasn’t that she had fallen in with a bad crowd. She herself was the bad crowd. Or, at least, had become the bad crowd everyone warns their children about.

We discovered, to our chagrin, that we were far from alone in our instinctive belief that some environmental deficiency explained Mary’s pathological choices. We found that the idea of our choices being inevitably a product of our environment, amounted to almost a default, automatic assumption within much of the Christian community.

One example of how we experienced this occurred one day when my wife met with a group of ladies from our church for a bible study. It so happened on this day that one of our daughters-in-law went with my wife to the study group and was there to witness what occurred.

At one point, the leader of the group asked a question along these lines: if you could ask God for a specific personal answer regarding something that is happening in your life, what would it be?  This was a good question for getting a discussion going, because who hasn’t wanted, at some time in your life, for God to give a specific explanation for some confusing or disturbing situation?

They went around the room with different women sharing different things about which it would be nice to have God-given specificity. When it came my wife’s turn to share, she said, “I would really love to know if there is anything I can do or say to make the lightbulb go off for Mary and help her see that the path she is on ends only in disaster.”

At the time Becca made this statement Mary had run away from a “Christian” rehab facility in southern California. We had taken her to a rehab well outside the geography of where we were living because we were afraid that, if she was doing rehab close to where she maintained unhealthy connections, she would run.

As it turned out, she just made new unhealthy connections and ran anyway.

So Mary was living, at this time, on the streets of Los Angeles without any identification. We received an infrequent collect call from her letting us know she was still alive. In between calls we had real reason to wonder if she yet survived.

We were both operating during this time with the assumption that Mary’s choices were the product of either misinformation or bad influences. We believed that if we could just find the right words, then Mary would realize the error of her ways and come to her senses. What had not occurred to us yet was the possibility that Mary was neither confused nor misinformed about her choices but merely preferred the life she was living. We had never really given much thought to the implication of the apostle John’s statement in his gospel that “men loved darkness” in preference to light. The idea that people, with eyes wide open, might choose chaos with full knowledge of what they were doing, had not really occurred to us.

We implicitly, if unconsciously, accepted the claims of determinism and just assumed that the only way someone might make the destructively self-absorbed choices Mary was making was that something about her environment was askew.  If Mary’s choices were the product of bad information, as my wife’s question presupposed, then “bad information” was just the environmental context which explained the choices Mary was making.

It was after my wife shared the question that was on her mind when it became apparent that at least one other woman in the ladies’ group had strong opinions about what was going on with Mary.

“The problem you have is that you’re trying to control your daughter too much.” This was the sentiment, about the comment my wife shared for all the women, by one of the other attendees. After opening with this “insight”, she proceeded to lecture my wife, in front of our daughter-in-law and all the other women, about how Mary’s pathological life choices were a consequence of her parents being too controlling.

These words came from a woman who knew almost nothing about us, our family, or our approach to parenting. She was a casual acquaintance we knew from the church we had been attending for a year or two. Even if we had been “controlling”, it was not something this woman would have had any first-hand knowledge about. But she was operating from the perspective of determinism. And she knew, she just knew, that something about Mary’s parental environment explained her choices. As will become apparent, this woman didn’t really know anything about Mary’s choices or our family situation. Which illuminates the extent to which, in one form or another, environmental determinism has insinuated itself into our collective thinking. This woman had formed strong opinions about the explanatory power of Mary’s environment without needing any information about Mary’s actual environment.

When responding to people who are deeply immersed in darkness, our experience with other Christians has been that mostly they assume some environmental deficiency is involved. The implications of biblical ideas like fallenness, or the affections of the heart, are usually interpreted through the lens of environment. It never seems to occur to anyone that Adam and Eve benefited from a perfect environment, and perfect parenting, but they still threw it all away.

Back to our story. The lady with accusations about my wife being controlling had been elaborating on this train of thought for several minutes when my wife finally said, “Excuse me. I don’t know what you know about our situation, but right now Mary is living on her own on the streets of Los Angeles and most of the time we don’t even know if she’s alive or dead. I fail to see how I could be controlling her any less.”

Awkward.

To this woman’s credit, when Becca shared some actual information about our situation, the woman readily apologized and admitted that she didn’t really understand what we were dealing with. This was nice of her and all, but the larger point I’m making is that Christians, like this woman, have largely ingested the cultural assumption that providing a perfect environment is the key to achieving perfect outcomes.

I think we were susceptible to this kind of thinking because, like many Christian parents, we wanted so badly to be able to ensure a happy outcome for our children. The subtle attraction to some form of environmental determinism is that it ipso facto puts the parent in control of the outcome.

I have come to believe that the desire to ensure a happy outcome for our children led us to silently embrace certain foundational assumptions of determinism. And the tragedy that ensued was, in part, that our unexamined presuppositions about determinism led us to waste a huge amount of time looking in all the wrong places for answers.

The desire of Christian parents to ensure a happy outcome for their children is, of course, understandable. We love our children so much that the idea that they might be lost to us seems too much to bear. And for Christian parents, whose hopes are set on forever, the stakes are very high indeed.

Os Guinness, touches indirectly on this parental desire in his book “Fool’s Talk”.  In his book, he’s not dealing specifically with Christian parenting so much as the general idea of Christian persuasion.  But he speaks movingly about the general conundrum of feeling so strongly about wanting to guarantee a happy response from another person regarding an issue that is central to their future wellbeing.

“The desire for a surefire, foolproof approach to sharing faith is understandable – if only because there are people whom we love so much that we wish them to come to faith decisively, people we love, for whom anything short of success will seem a heartbreaking failure. That is only natural. But as we shall see repeatedly, we live in a fallen world in which any thoughts are thinkable, any arguments arguable and any doubts doubtable. In other words, there are people for whom no amount of evidence will ever establish any claim if they have determined to deny the claim no matter what. We might say they would deny the claim ‘even if God makes the claim’. For they see God as the great interferer, the ultimate spoil sport they must fend off at all costs.”⁸

This passage by Os Guinness immediately resonated with me when I read it because it so aptly described both our own states of mind and Mary’s. For our part, we desperately wanted a failure-proof way to ensure that Mary embraced a life of faith. Mary, on the other hand, didn’t lack understanding but was nevertheless determined, for her own reasons, to fend God off at all costs.

Determinism is attractive because it suggests the possibility that there are parental guarantees available if only you will create the right environment for your child. This might explain the degree of faith in parenting technique that you find in some of the Christian parenting books on the market.  

Since at least the early 1970’s, probably in response to the widespread cultural assault on the very idea of family, Christian publishers began publishing a wide array of books focused on Christian parenting. I feel sure these books appeared, and continue to appear, as part of a laudable sentiment oriented toward equipping families with helpful tools.

But while the techniques taught by many of these books may be constructive and helpful, what is less helpful is the way some of these books suggest that the employment of specific techniques will guarantee certain outcomes for your child. The techniques taught by the books are often presented, not merely as useful tools, but as the very means through which a child will be transformed. This confidence in technique highlights the deeply rooted acceptance of the claims of determinism that so hampered our own response when Mary started down her self-destructive paths. To be honest, the idea that both the cause and solution to Mary’s problem lay in something having to do with her environment caused us to spend so much time seeking out environmental explanations that we spent far too little time thinking about where her issues ultimately originated.

On a random visit to a Christian bookstore, I happened across a good example of this Christian commitment to the controlling power of environment when I noticed a book entitled Have a New Kid by Friday: How to Change Your Child’s Attitude, Character, and Behavior in 5 Days by Dr. Kevin Leman. Now, I have no reason to doubt that Dr. Leman offers useful and constructive ideas and, even, techniques in regards to influencing our children. And it may be that Dr. Leman was not the source of his book’s title. It may even be the case that the content of the book is more modest about what is achievable through technique than the title implies. But just going by the title, it’s a pretty bold claim to say that a parent can, using certain techniques, fix a child’s character in 5 days. As I write this, I’m 59 years old and still in the process of having my own character fixed. The idea that a person’s character can be externally controlled by anyone, even a parent, is biblically dubious. But in only 5 days?

In no way am I objecting to the principle that a parent should teach and influence their children. My objection is to the idea that our use of constructive techniques ensures specific outcomes. By all means, as parents we should be faithful in training our children. But if moral freedom is real, we need to come to grips with the truth that the techniques we employ are more a matter of parental faithfulness than they are of controlling the future choices of our children.

Human beings are far more elastic and morally adaptive than they are mechanistic. We are not merely systems or machines that react in programmable ways. We are choosing creatures. In fact, one might even say that our great moral task in life seems to be for us to take whatever influences we have had - parents, genetics, environment - and hold them up against the light of truth and ultimately choose how to respond. As we are about to discover, this seems to be the entire point being made by the ancient prophet Ezekiel.

Biblical Ideas About Moral Culpability

We painfully searched for answers to these questions and one day, in the midst of a very dark time, we came across a remarkable chapter in the Old Testament book of Ezekiel.

In the 18^th chapter of Ezekiel, God speaks to the people of Israel and takes exception to a popular saying of the day.

“What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel: ‘The parents eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’? As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel.”

It becomes clearer as you read further into the chapter, but what God took exception to in this saying was the embedded notion that a child’s own moral choices are the result of choices made by his parents. God proceeds to make the strong statement that each person is responsible for his or her own choices, and that he wants Israel to stop blaming their own guilty choices on their parents.

“Suppose there is a righteous man who does what is just and right….

Suppose he has a violent son, who sheds blood or does any of these other things (though the father has done none of them)…

But suppose this son has a son who sees all the sins his father commits, and though he sees them, he does not do such things…”

So God lays out a series of hypotheticals in which each succeeding generation makes choices entirely at odds with what has been modeled by its father. He is building up to the larger point of the entire chapter, and for which he objected to Israel’s little proverb, that each of us is responsible for our own choices.

The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. 

This is a vital understanding for every parent of a wayward child: you do not share the guilt of your child’s actions. Our children’s actions are their own. God’s hypotheticals very clearly undermine the whisperings of conventional wisdom that our children are merely the product of their environment. If that were true, the son of the violent man described in Ezekiel would be destined to model his father’s behavior. But in God’s illustration, each succeeding generation chooses to act in opposition to the conduct modeled for them by the previous generation.

Each generation is able to choose its course, regardless of the way it was raised.

There is nothing about the choices of our children that is predetermined by our own actions. Every child is free to make right choices regardless of the failures of her own parents.

When you step back from this chapter in Ezekiel and think about the big lie that so pervades our thinking, it is obvious that if perfect parenting is required to produce decent human beings, then all children are completely doomed. There are no perfect parents. There are no perfect marriages. There are no perfect families.

And yet, according to Ezekiel, that is no excuse.

In a simpler sort of way, the message of Ezekiel 18 could be summed up as:

“Stop blaming your parents for your own choices. You’re responsible for your actions and your parents are responsible theirs.”

Sigmund Freud is probably turning over in his grave. Let us hope that in secret Freud was actually a fan of God’s views on psychology, but I am harassed by doubts.

The only perfect parent in all eternity has been God and, no irreverence intended, just look at how his kids turned out. Why then, do we ourselves expect to escape the very same losses in our own lives that God himself has experienced in His?

Within a single generation of creation God’s grandchildren were so off the rails that they were murdering one another. Adam and Eve had a perfect father, a perfect environment, and a perfect moral character. They even existed in an un-fallen state and without the kinds of temptations that we experience living in fallen bodies and in a fallen world. And yet, their perfect environment was insufficient to guarantee that they would choose truth over falsehood. In fairness, the New Testament says that Eve was actually tricked (the apostle Paul describes her as “deceived”.) But to our horror, Adam was not. He knew he was choosing untruth. And so, like many more who came after him, though light was in the world, Adam chose darkness. In the midst of truth and love and gentle guidance from a loving father, Adam and Eve chose self-destruction.

For us, in the midst of grief and loss and confusion over the choices our daughter was making, the message of Ezekiel 18 represented a crack in the mantle of fog that had fallen over our lives. The blinding disorientation began to give way to an understanding of what we were dealing with and the nature of our own role and responsibility before God.

We finally started to understand that parenting is much more about faithfulness than about guaranteed outcomes. Our calling as parents is to be faithful to teach, guide, and train but, if Ezekiel 18 is true, our children are nevertheless still free to choose their path, and they are the ones who own the accountability for their choices.

This may all seem obvious to you, dear reader. Indeed, it is entirely possible that we were just late in our lives in coming to this understanding. For my part, I’ve worked the business of being the last to know into an entire field of expertise. So it wouldn’t be the first time that everyone but yours truly understood some fundamental truth. But based on our interactions with other parents, I’m pretty confident that we are far from being alone in our misconceptions. Almost every month I speak with other grieving parents whose grown children have completely abandoned the principles and wisdom offered by their parents. And I consistently find that these parents are struggling to find a coherent explanation for what happened to their child and the loving relationship they used to enjoy. In almost every case, parents have an initial tendency to blame themselves. They are inevitably searching for illumination by combing through the history of their child’s environment like some half-crazed prospector looking for a gold nugget in a pile of rocks.

But there is no environmental explanation for a child who chooses darkness. According to Ezekiel, a child’s environment is no excuse for his choices. Freedom is real and children are not merely the product of their environmental conditioning. Even when offered a perfect environment, men chose darkness over light.

Existence Proofs and Hypotheticals

People sometimes feel a deep, internal resistance to accepting the biblical principle that our children’s life choices can’t be excused or explained by looking at their environment. Some of this resistance may be fair, particularly if what you hear me to be saying is that parents have no influence whatsoever. But that is not at all what I’m trying to say.

I’m saying that while parents do have an influence, it is not absolute. I’m saying that, notwithstanding a parent’s influence, for good or ill, a child yet remains free to choose his own course. And with such freedom, God is just to hold the child accountable. 

Only when we faced up to this hard truth did the paralyzing search for excuses finally give way to an honest appraisal and understanding of what Mary’s pursuit suggested about the state of her heart. The hard truth was that Mary’s choices didn’t reflect a lack of information or some kind of accidental experience that constricted her understanding.

Mary’s problems didn’t spring from a lack of understanding, they sprang from a depraved appetite: she had grown to love the wrong things.

When you’re oppressed by the big lie, you scan the horizon for any telltale evidence that what your daughter is pursuing is some gigantic accident or misunderstanding. But we ultimately learned that we could not really help Mary, nor ourselves for that matter, until we took off the Freudian veil and embraced a biblical perspective concerning moral freedom.

Because many people tend to mistrust the use of hypotheticals, I suspect that someone is reading this and saying to themselves, “this knucklehead is way over-interpreting Ezekiel 18. God never meant for those hypotheticals to be taken at face value.”

To which I then say: let’s move the discussion beyond the realm of hypotheticals.

Josiah

There’s a beautiful, expansive coffee shop on the main drag near the campus of the University of Illinois in Urbana/Champagne. I had flown into Chicago and driven a rental car down the frozen highway to the campus that morning, because I was scheduled to deliver a lecture to a group of computer science students on campus in the afternoon. I had grabbed a cup of coffee, set up shop in a corner booth, and connected to the wifi network to get some work done.

This was during a time that the dark oppressiveness of our lives was such that ever getting any work done required a hellish mental and emotional exertion, merely to overcome the weight of my fears. When your child is slipping away, your legs feel like they’re encased in concrete and every step you take requires a Herculean effort. So I sat back and got comfortable with the ever-present black cloud over my head, and began to look around the room.

The large sitting area was liberally populated with UIUC students. They sat individually and in small groups, most with laptops and backpacks. They were reading books, typing papers, and sitting in various study groups working on group assignments of some sort.

As I sat there that day observing the students, it occurred to me with some surprise that no one in the room seemed to be obviously trying to destroy themselves. I realized even then, of course, that I couldn’t see into anyone’s head and know for sure. But, without exception, everyone seemed to be industriously engaged in something constructive.  I found this reminder - that not all young people led lives of dissipation - refreshing. I remember thinking at the time, “kids from imperfect homes could make healthy choices. Who knew?”

Josiah knew.

It’s hard to overstate the degree of dysfunction in the family tree of King Josiah of the Old Testament. His grandfather, Manasseh, was the longest reigning king of the southern kingdom and was infamous for his depraved attachment to everything opposite of God’s instruction. He set up and worshiped idols in the temple, practiced witchcraft, conjured the dead, and burned his own children to death in ritual sacrifice to the god Molech. His surviving son, Amon, was just as perverse, reigning only two years before his own servants rose up and murdered him.

Amon’s 8 year old son, Josiah, was then made king.

In 2^nd Chronicles 34:3, the bible says this:

In the eighth year of his reign, while he was still young, he began to seek the God of his ancestor David.

So this young man of 16 years old, having lived with a murderous father and grandfather, having survived the bloodletting and perversion, as a teenager chose to follow after God.

The story of Josiah’s family is almost precisely the hypothetical described in Ezekiel 18. Josiah’s great-grandfather, Hezekiah, was a man who followed God. Hezekiah’s son was the infamous and evil Manasseh who chose precisely the opposite path of his father. Manasseh’s son Amon followed in his father’s footsteps but Josiah chose to reject the path of his father and grandfather.

Ezekiel 18 is more than a hypothetical. Josiah was a living, breathing example of a child who chose a path very different than his environment would have predicted.

Every person is free to choose, even in the face of an imperfect parental influence.

Making Excuses

As the plane I was in landed at Los Angeles International Airport, I thought back on the horror of the last few months. Mary had abandoned a rehab facility and for some time now had been living on the streets of LA, homeless, with no identification or resources. She had recently phoned and for the first time sought help and exhibited some signs of remorse. I was in Los Angeles to pick her up. She had been in hiding, having recently escaped from someone who sought to do her harm. She was brought by a “friend” to the lobby of a hotel near the airport. Her friend had been hiding her in a nearby town for several days. Mary’s body was riddled with disease and she was sick to the point of needing to be hospitalized.

During the very dark time of Mary’s homelessness, we had no knowledge, for weeks at a time, of her whereabouts or even if she was still alive. Infrequently, we would receive a collect call from her during which we would plead with her to change her life.  Many of the activities she had been engaged in before leaving home actually put our other children and even ourselves in physical danger. Some of the people she was spending time with were a very real threat to others. Even so, we stood ready to embrace her if only she was willing to make some changes to her life.

It was while Mary was homeless and wandering the city streets that my wife and I were invited to attend a fund raiser for a charity in Seattle.  Ironically, the charity was one that reached out to provide food and shelter to homeless youths.  I remember sitting there that night as speaker after speaker stood and spoke of how the explanation for the kids on the street was broken and abusive homes.  Throughout the auditorium people nodded their heads and furrowed their brows and dug deep into their wallets to help these young people who were uniformly presented as victims of their environment.

For my part, I sat there that night wondering how many welcoming homes and broken parental hearts were behind the kids who were being fed and sheltered by that ministry. Not once, in any presentation, was there any indication that the ministry had attempted to contact the parents or family of these homeless kids. Nor was there any indication that it had ever occurred to anyone that perhaps some of these kids, at least, were living in opposition to everything good and true. I don’t mean to say that there were no broken homes nor abusive families behind these kids on the street. No doubt there were. But did not even one of these kids have families whose hearts were jagged and bleeding from having been torn out by the disappearance of their child? Was there really only one explanation for the “why” of these homeless kids? Was our own experience with Mary so entirely unique in the world?

There is a strong superstition regarding the causes of youthful rebellion that pervades within the culture. Youthful rebellion is strongly romanticized and many of these cultural superstitions adhere even within the church, I’m afraid. We have seen it up close and personal.

That is why I am fairly certain that someone is reading this and thinking, “you’re just excusing yourself and letting parents off the hook for their own failures”. Indeed, I have seen this very reaction, almost invariably coming from people who have never experienced losing a child to the world.

There is also a cruel accusation at the core of this objection. No loving parent, who is witnessing the slow-motion destruction of everything they hold dear, reacts instinctively by trying to absolve themselves of blame. Loving parents, thankfully, are very different from United States congressmen in this regard. To suggest, as some invariably do, that an honest forthright effort at dealing with questions of moral accountability, as taught by scripture, is to somehow seek excuses, well, such a person is already very deeply immersed in the big lie.

Besides, merely making the observation that parents are not to blame for the moral choices of their own children is hardly to relieve parents of the responsibility to be faithful in their own obligations in raising such children. Our responsibility to be faithful parents is not changed by the truth regarding a child’s own moral culpability.

But this understanding regarding how accountability is assigned actually plays a significant role in the depth of our suffering as parents. In our own personal experience, part of the agony we felt was the haunting fear that by some unintentional mistake – a mere accidental deficiency in our approach to parenting – we had somehow nudged Mary toward the abyss. And what I want to say, what I believe the bible says, is that our children, regardless of our abilities or actions as parents, are yet free and accountable to make their own choices. You, dear parent, even with all your imperfections have not doomed your child. There is no accidental flaw in a child’s upbringing that leads them, inexorably, to self-destruction.

Every honest parent reflects back on their years of raising children and recognizes their own flaws and deficiencies. After all, every child ever born has had imperfect parents. But does it follow that every child is therefore doomed to self-destruct?  

As it happens, self-destruction is a choice.

Ultimately, it came as a relief to us to when we finally grasped that there was nothing that we could have done that would have condemned Mary, inevitably, to a life of rebellion. This knowledge however, didn’t alter the still very sobering truth that a rebellious child is fully and consciously choosing darkness over light. The implications of such knowledge can be profound. For if a child is unprogrammed and free to choose, then we need not give way to despair. If the truth of the matter is that you haven’t doomed your child by your actions, then there yet remains hope that they will change theirs.

The insidious, subtle despair of the big lie drains the hope from our expectations and saps the energy from our Christian walk.

Just this morning, I was on Skype with a friend who rolls up his sleeves and mentors young kids at his local elementary school throughout the school year. While we spoke he told of a 3^rd grade boy he is spending time with whose home life is in complete disarray. He has been in and out of foster care and his mom is in and out of trouble with child protective services. My friend told me that when he met with the little boy yesterday he told my friend that he had not been allowed to sleep for three days.

“It seems like this kid is on a hopeless trajectory,” he sighed.

But Josiah.

And I reminded my friend, for my sake as well as his, that we need not give way to despair because Josiah proves that people are free to choose their path. No one is doomed by her circumstance.

My friend’s eyes immediately lit up and he smiled. “Thank you for reminding me about that story.”

The author of despair whispers his lies. “People can never overcome their upbringing.” “You have accidentally ruined your child.” “Abandon hope.”

At first, the big lie took the form of unexamined assumptions. But when we finally dragged it out into the open, we began to see its debilitating effects for what they were.

And so we choose as well. We choose not to despair for Mary. We choose to consciously embrace the truth that none of us is doomed by our childhood influences. We choose to accept that God holds each of us accountable for our choices, because we are able to make them unhindered.

The Afterword is here.

1. “An American Tragedy”, Theodore Dreiser, 1925

2. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works”, vol. XIII, pg. 243, 1914

3. “Beyond Freedom and Dignity”, B.F. Skinner 1972

4. “The Selfish Gene”, Richard Dawkins, 1975

5. “The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions”, David Berlinski, Basic Books 2009

6. “The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life”, Robert Trivers, 2011

7. “Finding Truth”, Nancy Pearcey

8. Os Guinness, “Fool’s Talk”, Intervarsity Press, 2015 pg. 35