The Boy Is Listening

This morning started with a phrase I’ve said for years without thinking much about it.

“Better than I deserve.”

It sounds humble.

Maybe sometimes it is.

But today it opened a door.

Behind that door was something older.

A voice I’ve been carrying since I was four years old.

A voice that says I’m stupid.

Worthless.

Trash.

A voice that sounds a lot like my father.

The hard part is that after enough years, those voices stop sounding like someone else’s. They start sounding like your own.

For forty-one years I’ve listened to that voice.

For forty-one years I’ve been trying to find ways to survive it.

Sometimes that looks like overeating.

Sometimes it looks like slowly punishing myself.

Sometimes it looks like standing still because moving feels impossible.

Today we talked about the different ways this wound shows up in people.

Some become overachievers.

They spend their entire lives chasing approval. Every accomplishment becomes another attempt to hear the words they needed as a child.

“I’m proud of you.”

Others become self-saboteurs.

They decide the voice must be right and spend their lives proving it.

If they are worthless, they might as well act worthless.

Then there are the people in the middle.

Not succeeding enough to silence the voice.

Not failing enough to surrender to it.

Just exhausted.

Pulled back and forth between proving the voice wrong and proving it right.

That is where I live.

The tortured middle.

Then we opened the Bible.

Two verses stopped me cold.

Something shifted.

The closest image I can find is kintsugi.

Broken pottery repaired with gold.

The crack remains.

The damage isn’t erased.

But the wound becomes part of the beauty instead of evidence of failure.

And for the first time, I saw David differently.

Not King David.

Not giant-slayer David.

David the overlooked son.

The one left in the field while everyone else was called.

The one his own father didn’t think to bring.

God didn’t choose David after the wound.

He chose him with it.

The wound wasn’t disqualifying.

The wound became part of the story.

At one point during the session, the younger part of me started to come forward.

And I interrupted him.

That hurt more than I expected.

I was frustrated with myself afterward.

But eventually we found our way back.

And now something feels different.

He’s listening.

He believes those verses.

He’s deciding whether he wants to speak.

We’re not fixed.

The wound isn’t gone.

Tomorrow won’t suddenly be easy.

But something real happened today.

A crack filled with gold.

A lie challenged by truth.

A small voice that has been hiding for decades finally realizing that someone might actually want to hear what he has to say.

And for today, that feels like enough.