Episode 1: Queens

Episode 1: Queens

Childhood. 

All of us have had one, right? We are all from some family somewhere and have been shaped by those family dynamics, by the ethos of that specific place. Interestingly, this is even true of Christ. Have you ever thought about that? That in the incarnation, Jesus did not just appear fully grown, dropped out of the sky like Arnold in The Terminator. Nope. Christ was sent into this world into a home, born as a baby to be raised by a dad and mom, alongside brothers and sisters. Jesus grew up running the streets of a neighborhood called Nazareth, on the wrong side of the tracks, in a community of messy and imperfect people. And all those experiences shaped his character and his self-understanding, and helped prepare him to be who he was called to be. 

It’s the same for all of us. Any good counselor or therapist will tell you, there is no way to make sense of who we are without tracing back to where we came from. To our what our childhood was like: the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

Now our childhoods, whatever they were like and as influential as they were, are not to be seen as curses that have spoken over us and get to dictate or handcuff our futures. We are all moral agents who can change, who can take the good and throw out the bad and, by God’s grace, even heal from the ugly. Another way to say it is that the gospel frees us to not see our backstories as prisons but as providences of a good God, who gives us our dads and moms and childhoods to ready us to step into the story he intends to tell through us.  

For my dad, it was growing up among all the joys and the dysfunctions of a small home in a little neighborhood a few miles outside of New York City.

For more information on the “Yeah, That’s My Dad” podcast, go to kruse.studio/dad.