Over the past few years I\u2019ve been coming to terms with my own childhood experiences, and this series is where I\u2019ve started exploring what\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Remembering is the easy one. It\u2019s 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\u2019t ask what else was happening underneath it at the same time.<\/p>\n
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\u2019ve 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
What re-remembering actually gave me, was a recognition that \u00a0I 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\u2019t control, how to read what someone\u2019s behaviour is protecting rather than flinching from the behaviour itself. I needed someone to do exactly that for me, and mostly they couldn\u2019t. That\u2019s the theological claim sitting underneath everything I\u2019ll be writing about in this series: every person carries something sacred that their worst behaviour never manages to erase, and mission that doesn\u2019t start from that belief is just management wearing a collar.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t expect to finish asking it. I\u2019d genuinely like to know what happens if you turn the same question on something in your own past, not the version you\u2019d tell at dinner, but the one underneath it. What was it actually teaching you, without your consent, that you\u2019re only now starting to name?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over the past few years I\u2019ve been coming to terms with my own childhood experiences, and this series is where I\u2019ve started exploring what\u2019s actually been sitting underneath my contextual missional work all along. This first post opens with the … Continue reading