‘Tis the Season: Dealing with Fallen-Away Family
By Jacob King, President of Dropout
It’s December and the holiday preparations are here and getting real. And, if your family is anything like a growing number of Catholics in the United States, you are also mentally preparing for the interactions with many family members who aren’t actively practicing their faith anymore.
And while there is plenty else to talk about, there will be that elephant in the room (especially with it being, you know, Christmas.) So, how do you prepare? How should you deal with your family members who have fallen away from the faith?
My one and only tip: Believe.
I know, I know. Thanks for the Hallmark Channel inspiration. Yawn. Hey, Josh Groban called and he wants his Christmas song back. But the more I sat and prayed with this idea, the more I realized God’s artistry within it. So why is it important to believe?
As a Church we have largely stopped actively believing in His power to change minds and hearts – especially the ones that seem the most distant — the there-is-NO-WAY-this-could-happen-to-them ones. (Those are Jesus’ true specialty.) I don’t know if it’s because two-thousand years is just a long, long time ago, but we, as the Righteous Brothers would say, have “Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” towards those scary outsiders who don’t believe and behave like us — we’ve lost that lovin’ feelin’ that Jesus possessed in a truly “amazing and terrifying” way (Mark 10:32). A study was done that showed that out of all major religions (except Hinduism), Catholicism ranked dead last in its ability to draw outsiders into their pews. Judaism ranked higher, which should be a signal things aren’t great, since, as a whole, our beautiful Jewish brothers and sisters don’t evangelize. That’s a Jesus thing, my creative compadres. Yet they are even outdoing us. What is going on?
It seems we as a Church have also stopped actively believing in the great commission: the command left for us by Jesus to actively believe he can melt the hardest of hearts, like when he changed Mary Magdalene from a prostitute into one of the most beloved daughters of the Church – with some seriously genius-level wordsmithing, might I add. Or like when he converted the murderous Paul, killer of Christians, who went on to become the incarnation of evangelistic power — a man who endured shipwrecks, beatings, and ultimately death because he actively believed in the power Jesus had to change hearts and minds of outsiders.
Somehow, from that moment until now, something changed. We have stopped desiring the scandal and the mess of the Gospel. In some ways, we’ve forgotten that Jesus came “not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17). We the “ninety-nine” have forgotten his crazy desire for and belief in the possibility of the “one’s” resurrection.
If we just had a mustard seed of Jesus’s active belief in the “one’s” ability to change in grace, this superpower could move mountains. It would clear a path for our “none” family members to find themselves someday kneeling before a nativity set. I have met so many parents in my work who are in complete despair about their kids who no longer believe in Jesus anymore – some who are seriously suffering because their children have lost their sense of meaning. It seems impossible that they would ever again have that sort of grace-filled life, “and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).
But I know it’s possible to come back from the brink of none-land.
How am I so confident of this? Not only because of countless Gospel teachings and Jesus’ own example; I know it most also because of my own lived experience.
Jesus resuscitated my heart and resurrected a deep sense of meaning in me as a young adult when anyone around would have said it was utterly impossible. Except someone never stopped believing it was possible for me. And that hopeful desire, that active belief, no doubt, changed things for me.
Out of 136 kids in my high school class, I was academically ranked 134. My best friend was 135 and we never knew who 136 was, but he must have died during the school year if he got worse grades than we did. And needless to say, because of my horrendous grades, I dropped out of high school. But I wasn’t always number 134.
Growing up I was a sports junkie. I wrestled year-round and was on a traveling baseball team. I had straight A’s and big dreams. But things changed with my dad’s drug addiction. As he began to fade out of my life because he was dopesick, all I had as a guide for happiness were my post-pubescent physiological desires—and a half-functioning frontal lobe (thanks to the evolution of the teenage brain).
You name it, I probably did it.
Yet nothing seemed to really make me happy. My life started to become very empty, very fast. Two of my friends committed suicide. And it didn’t take long for me to hit rock-bottom. One night of mailbox smashing led to a cop pulling me over. Well, he tried to pull me over… instead of stopping, I turned off my headlights and gunned it down several dirt roads, leading a high speed chase for five miles before I almost ran into a house.
But someone’s active belief in my ability to change – which seemed insane at the time – ultimately led me to Jesus. And the person who channeled that superbelief into my life was the innovative mastermind named Steve Jobs. No, not really. It was my grandma. But don’t discount her. She was also a high school dropout who left because she became pregnant at 16. She continued to live a life outside of discipleship for most of her adult life until she encountered Jesus in a big way. And that encounter changed her life, and mine as well. She was transformed into the grandma with a holy water font in her foyer, and a “Jesus is my Security System” sticker on her front door.
She began Eucharistic adoration at our hometown parish, and for a long, long time, she prayed for me and believed the impossible about me: that I could and would become a true disciple of Jesus as well. We always knew my grandma had a strong faith. The thousands of Jesus and Mary pictures in her house that haunted us, especially when we were hungover, made that very, very apparent. Yet she didn’t judge, she loved. And she never argued with us. She instead mustered all the creative juices she had to tell stories of Catholic miracles that were beyond scientific explanation and that fostered a deep sense of curiosity in my soul. And, most importantly, she was joyful.
This didn’t convert me on the spot – oh no, no, no – but her super-belief and pre-workout stories led my soul into a divine setup. She didn’t try to control the process but left my conversion ultimately in the hands of God’s innovative mind, and her active belief in His creativity didn’t disappoint. At 19, I met two friends at a warehouse where I worked. These friends were Christians and, despite saying the f–word every other word, they stuck with me and brought me to see The Passion of the Christ when it was first released. This piece of creative media shocked my heart and opened me up to so much more. And the rest is this recovering dropout’s history. But it must have been one inventive setup because, 19 years later, I am here writing to you. Kudos, Jesus.
Belief is not fancy. Nor is it immediate. Neither is it passive. There is no such thing as an “8 minutes for Buns of Steel” workout (despite my mom’s VHS tape’s claim), and there is no such thing as cheap and easy grace. This belief takes work. It means to pray so much for Christ to be born within their hearts that our longing for them to belong begins to bleed out. It means not using the easy and “wide-road” of judgment and argument but pushing ourselves to use the harder, more “narrow path” of mustering all our creative energy into intriguing their curiosity, like my grandma did for me. But if you lean in with all your heart and actively believe in the impossible, God will also be working on a truly innovative setup with you. And, I would say, that is about as reassuring as it gets for those who desire what Jesus desires: your family and loved “ones” to be truly home with us “ninety-nine.”
