Over the past few years I’ve been coming to terms with my own childhood experiences, and this series is where I’ve started exploring what’s actually been sitting underneath my contextual missional work all along. This first post opens with the difference between two ways of looking back, remembering and re-remembering, and I want to invite you into that conversation with me, not just as something that happened to me, but as a question worth turning on your own story too.

Remembering is the easy one. It’s the version I tell my kids at the dinner table: the chaos, the Dennis the Menace childhood, black and red stripes and an unbothered relationship with boundaries. Remembering only asks one question: what happened. It doesn’t ask what else was happening underneath it at the same time.

Re-remembering asks that second question, and it took me most of my adult life to be willing to ask it. Same childhood, looked at again from inside the years I’ve since spent training as a youth and community worker, sitting with trauma, safeguarding, human development, theology. A working life spent watching what happens to people underneath their behaviour. Looked at that way, a chaotic childhood with no boundaries at all stops being just a funny origin story. Growing up around a father whose drinking made the house unpredictable, and a mother who stayed and loved a broken man, carrying, I’ve since re-remembered, not just his brokenness but the trauma that had made him, reaching back further than either of us. None of that excuses what the chaos cost the people inside it. It just means the story was never only mine to tell as a funny one.

What re-remembering actually gave me, was a recognition that  I did not become a youth worker despite what happened in that house. I became one because of what it taught me early and without my consent: how to stay present inside chaos I couldn’t control, how to read what someone’s behaviour is protecting rather than flinching from the behaviour itself. I needed someone to do exactly that for me, and mostly they couldn’t. That’s the theological claim sitting underneath everything I’ll be writing about in this series: every person carries something sacred that their worst behaviour never manages to erase, and mission that doesn’t start from that belief is just management wearing a collar.

This is the hermeneutic the whole series works with: not new theology arriving from nowhere, but thirty/fourty years of mission practice gone back over with older eyes, asking what else was actually happening underneath the story I told about it at the time. I don’t expect to finish asking it. I’d genuinely like to know what happens if you turn the same question on something in your own past, not the version you’d tell at dinner, but the one underneath it. What was it actually teaching you, without your consent, that you’re only now starting to name?