Life Vocations

Before I get into the reflection.

Everyone has an origin story. Mine is not special; in fact, it is very ordinary. It will never be made into a film. There is no chosen hero, no rising score, no third act where the music swells to tell you the wound has finally healed.

I offer it without comparison. Our histories and traumas do not sit on a common scale. Mine is simply where I started: the long, unglamorous work of becoming who I am and who I will be. We all carry a story worth learning from and worth telling, if only so someone else knows they are not alone in theirs.

I wrote this while doing the internal work counseling asks of anyone who hopes to sit across from another person in pain. You cannot guide someone through territory you have refused to walk yourself. So, I returned to the places I had spent much of my life avoiding, as any good momma’s boy ought to. It was uncomfortable then, and it remains uncomfortable as I prepare to share it.

I am not trying to pathologize my life or build a case file for my wounds. I am taking these experiences as they are, without assigning them a verdict beyond their value for understanding, connection, and how I carry them forward.

This is radical acceptance, as Marsha Linehan describes it: accepting what was and what is without blame, resentment, or the demand that it should have gone another way. There is peace in that, though peace may be too small a word. What I mean is closer to shalom: the wholeness that comes not from setting the books straight, but from a peace that is itself a kind of justice.

Deeper still, it is a cruciform acceptance: not a wound explained away, but a wound carried honestly, the way the cross does not erase suffering but bears it.

I share this because an honestly told story can reach across distance and find someone carrying a similar one. If you find a part of yourself in these pages, the writing was worth it.

That is the strange grace of an honest story: you, reading this now, and me, who wrote it before I knew you, meeting in the middle of something neither of us chose. The distance between us is smaller than it feels.

Whatever you are carrying, you are not carrying it alone.

We are more than just connected; we are truly companions.

I am here.

In philia, Bryan

My Reflection and Testimony as It Stands Today

Reflection Prologue

Born in Death

I was born in death.

I was born to care for my mother. At least, that is what I told myself for as long as I can remember.

I do not say that to be dramatic. It is not a cry for help or an invitation to feel sorry for me. It is simply 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 am honest, it still does.

From the moment we take our first breath, we inherit more than life on this earth. We inherit the ground in which we are planted: its depth, the stones buried beneath it, what will grow there and what will not.

We inherit the weight and sin of what came before us, the hopes of the people who made us, the things that happened to them, and the things that happened to us before we were old enough to understand.

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 everything bound up in it, is the 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, so many decades ago. There was no slow unraveling, no long illness, no warning I was ever told about.

It happened in an instant. A decision, a sound, and then a family that would never be the same.

Five children and a widow, and the baby who would grow up in the silence the gun left behind.

I do not grieve my father the way you might expect a son to. I cannot. To grieve someone in the familiar sense of bereavement, you must have known them, and I never did.

Do not misunderstand me. I 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 do not speak. The shape of it is correct; the meaning is empty. No voice I can recall. No scent. No smile or 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. I know him only in part, refracted through windows others built, which may be the only way any of us is ever known.

In that way, he was never mine to lose.

So this is grief for the unanswered potential, for what could have been. It is the grief of a family shattered and reformed, never fitting together in quite the same way again.

This is what I have come to know as stacked grief: loss layered on loss across different dimensions, never resolving so much as accumulating.

Remarriage, addiction, abuse, shattered trust. It shapes and reshapes.

Divorce. It shapes and reshapes again.

Death, sickness, isolation, and debilitating loneliness. It shapes and reshapes again.

And again. And again.  And again.

Copies of copies, each generation a little less clear, a little less whole.

Except for one piece that held: my mother and I, stuck together throughout my childhood and adolescence in the snow squall of trauma and dysfunction.

What was mine from the beginning was my mother and 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.

Somewhere in the wordless logic of a child, I understood my role before I could have explained anything at all.

I would be the constant.

The anchor.

I would not go.

I would be the momma’s boy. I would be her Bryan.

To her last breath.

In retrospect, I wonder whether I was strong enough, whether I lived up to that silent promise, especially in the last moments of her life.

I do not know. Moments are abstract things. One lasts the blink of an eye; another stretches toward eternity. And when I return to those last ones, I catch myself choosing, keeping the good over the bad, like a best-of soundtrack of my life.

The answer belongs to a reckoning I have not yet written. Perhaps I will never understand it completely, not on this side of the grave.

I took that yoke of momma’s boy on willingly and carried it for nearly fifty years. It cost me things I am only now learning to name.

The first one was this: for much 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 house’s weather.

As a boy, I did not understand any of this or how familiar the dynamic had become. It took me a lifetime, and a great deal of grace, to come home to the person I am. This Grace I have come to think about it as a kind of breathing, something received before it can ever be earned—not considered but given.

I have come to think of life as a series of flashpoints: rare moments in the soundtrack of a life that change not only your circumstances but also who you are.

I have many smaller moments that refine and nudge, but three sit at my core.

The first is 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 itself 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 tell 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. That, I have come to believe, is the essence of vocation.

No matter where you find yourself or what was handed to you before you had any say in it, you are not trapped there.

Your history does not have the final authority to name you. In Christ, your deepest identity is received rather than achieved and is bigger than you can ever imagine. Yet within that given identity, you remain responsible for how you respond, what you practice, and who you are becoming. Free choice. Yes, freedom.

This freedom begins within and shows itself in what you do. It is not manufactured by sheer will, nor is it imposed from the outside. It is received as a gift and lived as a responsibility.

George Bernard Shaw said it more bluntly than I 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 and, well, might be the death of me in the end.

You do have to get up. No circumstance ever improved because the person inside it waited politely for it to change.

But Shaw makes getting up sound lonelier than it was for me, as though the will were something a person manufactures out of nothing through 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.

The strength to rise was supplied to me, not made by me. What I did once standing was mine to answer for. God gives us the capability; the reckoning is ours. I have never found that unfair because responsibility is simply the price of freedom being real.

I know this because one of those people was a fourteen-year-old boy in a bedroom in Spencer, Wisconsin, in the last months before his bolted-together, reshaped family came apart, who wrote a poem of sorts, perhaps more.

That boy was me.

I do not remember the night I wrote the page or what I thought I was creating. But I kept it, tucked among the knick-knacks, carried through every move and through boxes that lost nearly everything else. And on that page, in pencil, a boy who did not yet understand that the road had already split beneath him wrote down a voice he heard in the darkness.

The poem speaks of a voice that walked him to a fork in the road, where the choosing was his. It told him the road would be long and hard, filled with steep hills and low valleys. It told him not to give up or sit down. And it promised that, at the end, 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.

At the time, I thought I was writing a poem, as many in their early teens do. I thought I had invented it. I now think I was writing down something I had already been told. Not a poem after all: a plea, and perhaps a prophecy. 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.

Yet I did not choose it alone, nor did I draw the fork myself. The road was already there. Something was already speaking.

This is the paradox to which I keep returning: the freedom I thought I was seizing was really a freedom I was receiving, not asserted but handed over.

Proverbs gives words to something I could not have understood 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.

That is the hidden architecture of every real decision.

The most important thing Shaw got wrong is the thing the Gospel of Mark gets right.

Shaw measured the road by its arrival: the world gained, the circumstance seized, the self enlarged. But Jesus asks the question that quietly unmakes that measure:

“What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”
—Mark 8:36, NIV

The voice in that bedroom never promised me the world. It promised hills, valleys, and a road too long to see the end. It promised that the climb would be hard and that I would want to sit down.

Then it promised something Shaw’s account could not hold: not a summit on which I would plant my flag, 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 earn.

Shaw was right that you have to get up.

He was wrong about what the rising is for and about who stands at the end of the road.

The road was not imaginary, and neither were the circumstances from which it began. There is even a clinical language for some of what was handed to me.

Doctors and counselors use a questionnaire called the aces score, short for Adverse Childhood Experiences. It adds up some of the losses, absences, and wounds a person accumulates before the age of eighteen.

On most days, I score a seven. On a harder day of reflection, an eight; perhaps more.

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, like your past, is not destiny.

A score and a history are not a life sentence.

There is hope.

There is light.

Yes, a brilliant, blinding, but warm and comforting light.

I will not pretend that light comes cheaply, or that you can reach it by going around the hard thing.

You reach it by going through.

Before the light, there is darkness, and the way out leads inward and above, under 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.

That is the direction of life. Wholeness is not a cup to be filled but a depth into which we grow.

In and down first.

Then up toward the light, stretching our arms into the sky.

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, and never in ours.

We vainly look, perhaps it is more of a frantic grasp, 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. It tries to read God’s favor from the surface of things, from success, status, and the visible markers of having arrived.

It looks at the impressive figure and infers depth.

It speaks to our vanity but never to the soul in its dark places.

God meets us somewhere else.

He meets us in the broken and whispering places, the places we do not want to go, in the weakness and shame of Christ crucified.

He works through loss and through moments that appear, from the outside, to be defeat, despair, and isolation.

The theology of the cross expects God to work in the hidden, the lowly, and the overlooked. The cross was an instrument of death and humiliation, and God made it the place where the world’s deepest hope was born.

The losses, detours, and moments I once filed away as setbacks: looking back, I can see God’s hand in them.

Not loud.

Not flashy.

But there the whole time.

The cross, it turns out, is not only a doctrine to study.

It is the shape of a life.

“In their hearts humans plan their course, but the LORD establishes their steps.”
—Proverbs 16:9

If I can be candid, this has been the great epiphany for me: the darkness.

As I have sat with these words, something has become clear. All that I have done, all that I am doing now, and whatever comes next point to the same work: helping people in the darkness of pain, despair, anxiety, and uncertainty.

People get lost there. They scramble and hurt. Sometimes for a season. Sometimes for a lifetime. Sometimes, they fear, for eternity.

And here I must be honest, because it would be easy to write as though I were past all this. I am not. I still get lost. I fall. I scramble. I look for the light and find, on some days, nothing but bitterness and fear. Then the glow of the cross breaks through. There are days I am too tired to crawl toward it. But I get there.

In this weakness, there is the work: being a beacon, showing a way through.

Sometimes directly through the cross. Sometimes through vocation, in whatever form allows the light to shine: counseling, teaching, mentoring, conflict resolution, community, or business.

No matter who you are, what you have done, or how old you are, we all need help in the darkness. All of us, including me.

So pick up your cross in humble reverence.

Trust in the means of grace.

Persevere.

Yes, persevere.

With Jesus.

With the cross.

I am a cross-bearer.

You, my friend, are one too.

The Apostle Paul, writing from his own afflictions, charted the same worn path we are all trudging: suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.

He offered no detour around the dark ground. He gave only the promise that we, rooted deeply in Christ, like a mighty tree, will in time rise from the darkness toward the light.

That is the pattern of things.

Light cuts through the darkness, not around it.

This is my story, the darkness and the light both, or at least the beginning of it. It is the path God has laid before me and the daily decision to act or hold back, to persevere or give up, to receive what has been given and answer for what I do with it.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Let us begin.

And let us walk together.

---

P.S.

As I was updating this, I was moved by how many of the other writings lean into the same truth, each one quietly holding up the others. It’s a tender reminder that, when we look back, we can see how lovingly our path was laid out to bring us here.

P.S.S.

The Light Shines in the Darkness

I developed this song from my work learning to use music as a therapeutic tool—a way to reach places words cannot. Music moves through the mind, settles into the body, and gives shape to emotion we don’t yet know how to name. In counseling, it can become a bridge between thought and feeling, memory and meaning, despair and hope.

It’s written from the perspective of someone in the depths of depression, but it aligns with the idea of being a cross-bearer. It doesn’t rush past the darkness. But it refuses to believe the darkness is the end of the story. Viktor Frankl taught me that unbearable suffering can be met with meaning; Carl Rogers, that healing often begins not with answers but with being deeply seen. And underneath both, as a Christian, rests my first and deepest hope. In a God who steps into the shadows rather than calling to us from a safe distance.

The Apostle John puts it plainly: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it”(John 1:5, NIV). That promise is where this song lives.

I hope it meets you somewhere true. The lyrics are mine, and the video generation is a creative development app’s work.