Everyone has an origin story. I am not particularly special. Very ordinary, actually. Mine will never be made into a film. There is no chosen hero, no swelling score, no third act where the music swells to tell you the wound has finally healed. It is just where I started, and the long, unglamorous work of becoming who I am.

I wrote this as a side reflection while doing the internal work that counseling asks of anyone who hopes to one day sit across from another person in pain. You cannot guide someone through territory you have refused to walk yourself. So I went back. I made myself look at the places I had spent most of my life not looking.

I share it now for one reason. Not to draw attention to myself, but because I have come to believe that an honestly told story can reach across the distance to someone carrying a similar one. If you find some part of yourself in these pages, then the writing was worth it. You are not as alone in your story as it can feel. We are connected. You are not alone. — Bryan

REFLECTION PROLOGUE

Born in Death

I was born in death.

I was born to care for my mother. [At least this is what I told myself as long as I can remember.]

No — that isn’t a dramatic way to open. It isn’t a cry for help or some melodramatic act, and it isn’t an invitation to feel sorry for me. Not a flowery word salad, either. It’s just a fact, the way the date on a birth certificate is a fact. Death came into my life before I had words for it, before I had memory, before I could do anything but lie in a crib and be cared for. It shadowed me from the start. It shaped the way I see the world, and, if I’m honest, it still does.

From the moment we take our first breath, we inherit more than life. We inherit the ground we are planted in; its depth, the stones buried in it, what will and will not grow there, and we inherit it long before we have any say in the matter. We inherit the weight of what came before us with the hopes of the people who made us, the things that happened to them, the things that happened to us before we were old enough to know they were happening. And, for a certain kind of son, we inherit a tether. An unbreakable cord between a mother and her boy, pulled tight by a single moment and never quite loosened again.

That tether, and its connections, is a subject of this reflection. So is the moment that pulled it tight.

Three months after I came into this world, my father left it. He took his own life in the basement of our family home in a quiet town in northern Wisconsin among the whispering pines. There was no slow unraveling, no long illness, no warning I was ever told about. It was instant; in an instant.  A decision, a sound, and then a family that would never be the same. Five children and a widow, and a baby who would grow up in the silence the gun left behind.

I want to be clear about something, because it sits at the center of everything I’m going to tell you: I don’t grieve my father the way you might expect a son to. I can’t. To grieve someone — in the sense of bereavement, of lamentation — you must have known them, and I never did. Don’t misunderstand me. I do grieve. Just not for him, exactly. When I say the word father, it comes out of my mouth like a word in a language I don’t speak. The shape of it is correct, the meaning is empty. No voice I can recall. No scent. No smile, no embrace. He is a man made from newspaper clippings, one or two photographs, and the occasional sentence from an older sibling. He belongs to other people’s memories. He was never mine to lose.

So, this is grief for the unanswered potential, for what could have been. The grief of a family shattered and reformed, never fitting together the same way again. It shapes itself and reshapes. Addiction, abuse, shattered trust. It shapes and reshapes again. Death and isolation. And again, and again. Copies of copies, with each generation a little less clear, a little less whole — except for a few pieces, my mother and me, stuck together in the snow squall of trauma and dysfunction.

What was mine, from the very beginning, was my mother. The quiet, unspoken job of being the one who would never leave her, as my father had. My brothers and sisters were nearly grown. They would build their own lives, as they should have. But I was the baby, the last one, the one whose whole life would be lived in the shadow of that spring. And somewhere in the wordless logic of a child, I understood my role before I could have told you I understood anything at all. I would be the constant. The anchor. I would not go. I would be the mamma boy. I would be HER Bryan. To her last breath.

I took that yoke on willingly. I carried it for nearly fifty years. It cost me things I’m only now learning to name. One of them was this: for most of my young life, I could not have told you whether I was happy, because my happiness had never been mine to begin with. It lived outside me. It rose and fell with my surroundings, like a microclimate, warm or bitter depending on the weather of the house. As a boy, I didn’t know that. It took me a lifetime, and a great deal of grace, to come home to the person I am.

I have come to think of life as a series of flash points. The rare moments that arrive and change not just your circumstances but who you are. I have many smaller ones that refine and nudge, but three at my core. The first is the one I have just been telling you about: the spring my father died, before I had words for anything. The other two are still ahead of us in these pages, and both are pure gifts. The second is the day I took a young woman’s hand in a church, a joining that fused into my soul, and found in that church body salvation in its truest sense. The third is the day I looked into the screaming eyes of my son, on the first floor of an old concrete building in downtown Seoul.

I’m telling you this now, so you know where we are going. A story that begins in death can be rewritten by the grace of God, and by the people He sends to help carry what we were never meant to carry alone. These realizations brought me to a truth I had been slow to learn that no matter where you find yourself, no matter what was handed to you before you had any say in it, you are not stuck there. You have the power to change. To make things better. To become the person you were made to be and to step, at last, into your true vocation.

You are not defined by who you were, the old Adam. You are defined by who you are, by who you are still becoming, and in Christ’s identity; an evolution known only to God and written on your heart. Your core identity is not a fixed point you are condemned to stand on; it is something you move toward, and something you choose. Whatever the circumstances, the choice remains ours. Yes, free choice.  And that freedom begins within, and is shown in what we do. It is never handed to us from the outside in.

George Bernard Shaw said it more bluntly than I ever could: “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.”

Shaw is half right, and the half he gets right is the half that kept me alive. You do have to get up. You do have to go looking. No circumstance ever improved because the person inside it waited politely for it to change. But Shaw makes the getting-up sound lonelier than it was for me. As though the will were something a person manufactures out of nothing, alone, by sheer refusal. That has not been my experience. I have come to believe that the people who get up are, more often than they know, people who were spoken to in the dark first.

I know this because one of them was a fourteen-year-old boy in a bedroom in Spencer, Wisconsin, in the last months before his bolted-on reshaped family came apart. That boy was me, many years ago. I don’t remember the night I wrote it, or what I thought I was making. But I kept the page, carried it through every move after, through boxes that lost nearly everything else, and on it, in pencil, a boy who did not yet understand that his road had already split beneath him wrote down a voice he heard in the darkness. The voice walked him as far as a fork he had to choose between. It told him the road would be long and hard, full of steep hills and low valleys. It told him not to give up or sit down, and it promised that at the end of it, someone would be waiting. Then the voice was gone, and only the instruction remained: Start your journey. Get on your way. I will be with you.

I thought I was inventing it. I think now I was writing down something I had already been told, and that is closer to how anyone survives a hard beginning than Shaw’s clean account of the self-made man. Yes, I got up. Yes, I chose the long road over the easy one that ran downhill and never reached the end.  Not cleanly, not all at once, but I chose it, and I am still on it.

But I did not choose it on my own, nor did I draw the fork myself. The road was already there. Something was already speaking. Proverbs have a line I did not have words for at fourteen: “In their hearts humans plan their course, but the LORD establishes their steps.” The boy was planning his course in pencil. The steps, it turns out, were being established the whole time.

The most important thing Shaw got wrong is the thing the Gospel of Mark gets right. Shaw measured the road by its arrival. The people who get on in this world — that was his whole gauge: the world gained, the circumstance seized and bent to your wanting, the self enlarged until there was room for nothing else. But in Mark, Jesus asks the one question that quietly unmakes that gauge: “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Mark 8:36, NIV).

The voice in that bedroom in Spencer never promised me the world. It promised hills and valleys and a road too long to see the end of. It promised the climb would be hard, that I would want to sit down, that I should not. And then, past all of it, it promised the one thing Shaw’s clean account has no room for — not a summit I would plant a flag on, not a circumstance I would finally master, but Someone who would be waiting. I will be with you. That is not the creed of the self-made man. It is the promise made to a boy who could not make himself, kept on a road he did not pave, toward an end he could never have earned. Shaw was right that you have to get up. He was wrong about what the rising is for, and wrong about who stands at the end of the road.

I want to be honest with you about the circumstances I was handed in my life.

There’s a questionnaire doctors and counselors use called the ACE score, short for Adverse Childhood Experiences. It adds up the hard things a person lived through before the age of eighteen: the losses, the absences, the wounds a child never asked for. On most days, I score a seven. On a harder day of reflection, an eight. By the numbers, I am not supposed to be the man writing this reflection. By the numbers, I am supposed to be a cautionary tale, the one you watch out for, or the one you pity.

But a number is not a destiny. A score is not a life sentence. There is hope. There is light. Yes– brilliant, blinding but warm light.

I won’t pretend that light comes cheaply, and I won’t pretend you can reach it by going around the hard thing. You reach it by going through. Before the light, there is the darkness — and the only way out is in, by the weight of a cross.

A tree knows this better than we do. It does not find water by spreading its branches wider; it finds water by driving its roots downward, through the dark, into ground it cannot see. Down and in first, then up toward the light, stretching its arms into the sky. That is the direction of life.

As Christians, we have a name for what I found in that darkness. We call it the theology of the cross. In the simplest words I know: God does not usually meet us where we go looking for Him in glory. We vainly look for Him by sight, in the places that would bring us glory of our own: our strength, our success, the polished self we present online, at work, even at the dinner table; like a performance art of sorts. Martin Luther called that search the theology of glory, the hunt for God in power and visible majesty.

But God meets us somewhere else. He meets us in the broken and whispering places, in the weakness and shame of Christ crucified. He works through loss, through the moments that look, from the outside, like defeat, despair, and isolation. The cross was an instrument of death and humiliation, and God made it the very place where the world’s deepest hope was born.

So pick up your cross in humble reverence. Trust in the means of Grace. And persevere. Yes, persevere. With Jesus. With the Cross. I am a cross bearer.

The Apostle Paul, writing from his own afflictions, charted that same worn path: suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. He offered no detour around the dark ground. He gave only this promise: that we, rooted deep in Him, will in time, rise into the light from the darkness.

That is the pattern of things. Light cuts through the darkness, not around it.

This is my story — the darkness and the light both. This is the start of it, anyway. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Let’s begin.