He didn’t belong. In high school, the boys relentlessly hounded him. They chased him through parking lots, hurling accusations that he ratted on kids using drugs. He was small for his age. Apparently there wasn’t enough money in his family to straighten his crooked teeth.

His alcoholic father seemed non-existent, a shadow now and then in their tiny house. He felt hated by his mother. She once told him to go off and kill himself. I remember the tears that welled in his eyes as he recounted her words. His name was Scott.

My world was utterly different. My parents were stable, kind, and present. At school, I’d been ushered into the popular group, because I was dating a track star named Tony. Still I offered Scott my friendship. I baked him a molasses cake for his birthday and invited him to our Young Life club. I wanted him to know that God’s love was real. But his sense of self was damaged.

Author and teacher Arthur Burk says that personhood starts to form when we are very young—when you find a particular joy in something, such as loving to paint or learning to dance or collecting rocks. Simple things.

You start to feel like a son or daughter, says Burk, when you experience your parents delighting in you as you “enjoy your joy.” Maybe your mom cooed when you handed her your first finger-painting. Perhaps your father smiled when you showed him an assortment of stones from the driveway. Like invisible strands of love and acceptance, those seemingly mundane connections are profoundly formative, yet in dysfunctional families, they are often missing.Continue reading