Merry Christmas from the Tates!
We love our new little town in France. It’s starting to feel like a second home.
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– John Hugh
Merry Christmas – or as we say here Joyeux Noël! We hope your Christmas is special. It is always revealing and indicative of how we measure ourselves and where our true joy comes from.
I was up late last night, as I always do, looking at our kids – they always sleep under the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. I was messaging people – friends who were alone or lonely on Christmas Eve.
Even though Christmas means light coming into the darkness, this also means Christmas brings darkness to the fore. To really see the light, you have to see darkness – and the gospel is about the darkness in you and me.
That brings to mind a favorite Christmas movie of mine, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I love cinema history, and I’ve recently listened to some podcasts about the film. Many attest their love for it now, because it is so dark. You may be reading this and think – it’s total cheese or fluff. It is not.
It’s a dark film. It’s the darkness of a man dealing with shame, depression, and unfulfilled hopes. It affects his family. It takes him to the edge. Yet ultimately there is redemption and, without spoiling anything, the main character comes to see great light in the darkness. Many love this film because they relate to it.
I have always tried to be open and authentic about struggles in life, marriage, and ministry. I have tried to get to the heart of things. Yet even I realize, I can certainly hold back. Why is that? For me, ultimately it is of shame. That’s where a lot of fear comes from. Look at Genesis 3.
There are genuine challenges in ministry, both in the USA and also in France. Often what happens is challenges from the outside begin to reveal inconsistences on the inside.
So what can happen? You begin to see you are a different person in public than in private. I can talk all the time of having integrity, but often, I still project my fears into the marriage and home-life.
I don’t want to feel like a failure or fraud yet I certainly can, and do often. The best step forward is to admit it. Marriage is challenging, and there is the added pressure in ministry to look the role, to look the part, or to be the ideal for others. I identify with this need to be the ideal and I have looked up to others, pastors, or families that I can emulate. Yet we can forget, people are people, and the idealized Christmas card, the look, or the happy couple is really not the light of the world.
It’s actually not light at all. Instead, it’s broken people who are trying to hold things together often for themselves, for their spouse, for their children, or for loved ones. It does lead me to empathy. It leads me to think about where our real joy and hope come from.
The answer is a raw openness and vulnerability, but also having friends to keep me accountable. I find it even better if some of those friends are outside of formal ministry. The game of comparison is rampant in ministry and deadly amongst pastors. It’s hard to accept criticism, but it is important to receive it from those who deeply care.
Yet I can still admit things. Such as saying I want to quit or go back to the USA. Blaming my wife for my own shortcomings and mistakes instead of seeing the good gifts God has given her. Using ministry as both a crutch and pedestal to elevate myself. Linda is much more articulate and specific about struggles and walking to redemption. I am trying to be, but I admit, it’s hard. I am, however, joining her in this walk, open to being more transparent in real struggles and empathetic to both her and others.
Why now? Because we’ve witnessed challenges in ministry, everywhere, that elevates individuals, allows for a public & private life disparity that I want to change. Christmas is light coming into darkness. The darkness still exists for now. The main challenge is never to mistake Who is the real light.
For me, this means seeing there is darkness in me, not just in the world around us. The supernatural is not just needed to be spoken or preached, but lived out in my life. Not just praying more or meditating on Scripture, but also being honest and free to repent openly, and trusting the Holy Spirit is really real and really can change me.
Francis Schaeffer said: “Would we as Christians or the Church look any different if we took prayer and the Holy Spirit out of our language and the Bible? Many would not.”
For fear, shame, and pride to die, I have to more comfortable with things that are not of this world. And the beauty of Christmas is a noteworthy and glorious time to start more wholeheartedly.
“The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.”
I hope even this little blog post inspires you to give your hopes and fears wholeheartedly to Jesus – or even just to start.
Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones!
-Linda
2024 is coming to a close. It has been a difficult year in ministry due to challenges with ministry in France. John Hugh knows I never let suffering go to waste. I love to investigate if God’s handiwork is afoot when suffering comes our way. That is “Christianese” for there are reasons we endure difficult times that can feel overwhelming or random.
There is a reality of God with us this Christmas.
We can face hard truths even in festive times.
We can see “God with us” because Jesus brings incredible courage on our part.
Suffering in a Season
For some seasons, the reason for the suffering is obvious. For other seasons, it takes years for me to piece it all together. Sometimes the story of redemption from the suffering is still being written, and I have to trust God wholeheartedly. This last one is the case with my family of origin story – still very painful.
For this season in France, it’s John Hugh joining me at the final finish line to admit we have never had an easy nor a perfect nor an ideal marriage. There have been really good things in our marriage. We have found joy when John Hugh and I could not meet eye-to-eye.
Yet John Hugh’s natural instinct is to make it a pretty picture and pretend the problems don’t run as deep as they do. And my natural instinct is to allow it because I desperately want to avoid a repeat tragedy of my family of origin. A blog post for another day, but this has even spilled into parenting challenges from 2024.
Ever since participating in a great Christian workshop in 2019 connected to friends in Mississippi, but based in Alabama, I have realized, over time, that I am deserving of better treatment in my private life – from my husband and from my kids.
I have one relationship I cannot exit out of – my mother who has been a widow for 22 years – and it’s a very hard, at times very condescending, relationship. I have always struggled with loneliness due to family wounds, so I have endured much more privately than I should have over the years. The Lord, thankfully, has still exponentially grown me in ways I never expected and is still doing so.
Marriage Struggles
I have written about our marriage struggles since 2009 – in some form or another. This year, I became more bold to share with John Hugh patterns I see in him and sadly in many pastors.
We have grown much, but over time we have had the same fight. I give feedback that I disagree with him on something (small or big), he takes offense that I don’t love him or I am crazy or too difficult and insults me. We get in a big unnecessary argument, and over time, if we table the topic long enough, he sees his fears often override his good judgement and insight.
Ministry is difficult because you have to be able to handle criticism. We are here to serve in love, regardless, and it’s amazing to find so many pastors who can’t handle criticism.
When you can’t handle criticism, you will find ways to justify half truths to avoid the full truth that might embarrass you. Or you will be impatient or demanding or demonizing of others, so you don’t have to sacrifice or see your weakness.
You might say that this is not a big deal because we all do that for self-preservation. I would respond back and say my husband is a pastor, and it’s a higher calling. Character never outpaces gifts in ministry – ever.
Idolization of Reputation
It’s been a slow death of the idolization of reputation by John Hugh. We have different ways idolizing reputation that can play out in different cultures.
We can idolize happy marriage as normative or perhaps singleness as freedom. We can idolize perfectly behaved children and pretty Christmas cards. We can idolize financial independence or more travel or work opportunities than the next person. We can idolize beauty or the appearance of a ministry or job chugging along seemingly so well.
Reputation is how others perceive you or the beliefs held by others of you. It may not be grounded in truth or reality, but we chase it with our social media algorithms, pretty pictures, and the selective truths that we share.
When John Hugh isn’t fully honest about his failings with me as a wife to our church, to his peers, to our supporters, it’s a bigger deal to me because he is a pastor. I feel like it’s a betrayal of who we are as a couple when we are not honest. It is so important for me not to fake my Christian walk.
In recent days, I have asked some people at our local Paris church to hold John Hugh accountable – in very clear, precise, and tangible ways. These are people who walk with him weekly, who care for him deeply, and who have wisdom and maturity of their own.
I am so thankful for church community when it functions well. It’s the plan A of the world. There is no plan B. We have invested our lives on this truth.
Cognitive Dissonance
The logical question is why haven’t you said anything more explicit earlier Linda? I think all of us, unfortunately, learn to live with some form of cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort a person feels when their behavior does not align with their values or beliefs. It allows a person holds two contradictory beliefs at the same time.
Character may matter less in our politics and our business circles, but it still is the bar of qualification in Christian ministry and rightly the bar for disqualification when it comes to spiritual abuse, embezzlement, or sexual abuse that has rocked Christian evangelical leadership in recent years.
For me, I would feel trapped in having to hide things about our marriage. Each relationship is different, but for us, when I feel trapped and mocked in a private space, my anger will flare and lead to a terrible cycle of anger on my part and mocking on John Hugh’s part. It’s a cycle that feeds on negativity and doesn’t end until you decide you can no longer live with cognitive dissonance.
So why did I allow the cycle to continue for so long? For the classic reason many of us use: to protect my loved ones and my kids.
I think we can all relate to cognitive dissonance on some level. For example, when a loved one passes away, and we can’t handle the grief, we can avoid the discomfort of grief and eat more than we should, drink more than we should, work more than we should, and the list goes on. We don’t want to feel those uncomfortable feelings, and we indulge in behaviors that don’t align with what we value. We are often scared to see or face the negative impulses we all feel.
Being away from family and our natural social network in the US, watching the same patterns among pastors unfold in France as in the US, it became evident that God was aiming this hard year in France to address something closer to home – our marriage.
Dealing with Hard Truths
This circles back to John Hugh because we are actually in the same boat, but coming at it from different angles.
For both of us, we have struggled to deal with a particular hard truth. For me, the hard truth is my family of origin will most likely not have a pretty ending, and it will be an ongoing wound that will affect how I am married, how I love my children, and how I define hope. For John Hugh, it is the reality of accepting, for all his amazing gifts, he is insecure in certain areas and has impulses to condescend to protect himself.
What is our natural instinct with these hard truths (in Christianese, we call this the flesh response)? Manipulative tendencies with others, self deception to ourselves, or broad, convenient distortions of truth is our way of sidestepping total depravity. What is total depravity? We are far worse than we ever imagined if we were to stand before the one, holy, and true God.
We soothe ourselves with the power of positive thinking or what we can call “my truth” or at worst with religious language. We can say to ourselves: I am already changing; I am really not that bad; I am really a good person who is a work in progress – all to avoid looking at how my sin is utterly distasteful to God.
We minimize our sin or avoid transparency, so we don’t have to see clearly that something is terribly wrong in this family or in this business or in this relationship in the name of protecting our loved ones, protecting our kids, or protecting our investment.
It’s our natural reflex not to seek truth courageously, but to self protect – to run and hide like Adam and Eve when God comes to the garden of Eden to find them.
Gospel Truth
Although John Hugh and I have always believed this, living out the gospel dictum that ”I am far worse than I ever imagined, and far more loved than I could ever dream” takes courage. You have to be as open as Paul who says unapologetically “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.” (1 Tim 1:15)
I have always known I am far worse than I imagined. The incredible beauty of receiving undeserving, never ending love by an eternal, personal God still brings tears to my eyes – perhaps because deep loneliness is the perfect recipient for this love. But I have struggled to apply that principle to my kids and my husband – to not rescue them constantly in order to avoid feeling like a failure again in family life.
No is a hard word for me when it comes to my husband and my kids. I have indulged their selfishness instead of letting them feel pain of their sins. It has also cheated them of feeling God’s glorious love when I scurry to make things easy for them when God intends hard things to drive them to Him.
It’s the irony of it all. We try our best to raise good families, to protect our children or loved ones, to have a happy marriage, and it’s the brokenness – often the unexpected- that is God’s real tool for courage and growth.
Redemption
As I said in the beginning of the blog post, I am always searching if God’s handiwork is afoot when suffering comes our way.
One of the beautiful things God has changed in me during this entire marriage and parenting experience is how deeply I can feel others’ isolation or drifting in life – likely due to things that are taken away unexpectedly or not working according to worldly expectations.
Just as God has been so incredibly faithful in His love to me even with my family of origin, I have great joy chasing after others to show God’s deep love for them. If people are surprised by my persistence and care, I feel like the Lord will only surprise them even more.
I always believe as Christians we need to be the most honest people in the room. We have no problem sharing our failings because it is in our humility that the Lord changes us from the inside out. Regardless of the hard truth you or a friend may be avoiding, hiding, numbing, or dismissing this Christmas season, God is ready to bring healing and grace to it.
If you see change in me or John Hugh, it’s supernatural. That is the difference between myself and a non believer. I am allowing myself to be changed by the one true God. It’s not iron will nor determination nor positive thinking. It’s the reality that God is with us. Jesus will eventually grow from a baby to an adult who dies on a cross – a cross that symbolizes the sin God cannot ignore in us and the love God cannot stop having for us.
Merry Christmas to You and Yours!
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