We Never Owned a Dinner Table Again

This morning, I sat sobbing in my office.

If you had told me even two months ago that I would be writing over twenty essays and a full-length book, and crying as I did a deep excavation of my life, I would have laughed and thought you were crazy. Not because men shouldn’t be emotional. I think modern American culture has done great damage to the idea of what a real man is, specifically around the idea that a grown man doesn’t need to cry. But I never thought the tears would come through writing out my own story.

The past month has been more emotional than I could have imagined. The book I’m writing slows down and lets the scenes from my essays breathe. Yesterday I wrote about the most pivotal time in my entire life, the year I turned fifteen. So many things happened that year that changed the course of who I was and who I would become. But this morning was the first time I gave myself permission to slow down and fully enter into what that fifteen-year-old boy felt.

The first thing I wrote about was the police raid on my house.

Honestly, most of the emotions of that night are buried deep. My internal protector was in full gear. As I wrote about it, I realized how much of the pain my subconscious had buried. I have very specific memories. The police coming into the house with guns drawn and screaming at us to get on the floor. Being handcuffed with my hands behind my back for over an hour in a police car. The wreckage of my house after they left. But what I can’t access is the grief. What my body did to protect a young child in that situation was suppress the weight of grief that should have accompanied it. To truly sit in that pain at that age, with no adults to hold me, would have been devastating. I didn’t have the luxury of processing it. I had a house to clean up after they left. I had a small town to face. I had a job to go back to and a school that would know all of my family’s chaos. The protector needed to make sure I could survive, and for that, I am thankful for what he did.

Then I wrote about my conversion to Christianity, which followed shortly after.

I wrote about the night I thought I was going to die, when I prayed to God without knowing anything about Jesus. I had only heard about him in passing, that he could “save me.” So I asked him to, over and over. I didn’t know if the laced drug I’d smoked was going to kill me, and I was paralyzed with fear, reaching for anything that could save me.

I woke up the next day and resolved I’d never smoke pot again. I have kept that to this day.

But the following weekend, I decided to get drunk. For some reason my mind thought this was different, that alcohol was milder. I had been getting drunk since I was twelve and always had a good time. This time was different. A deep depression set in that night and would not lift. Even worse, when I tried to think of the things that normally made me happy, like leaving the small town, getting a good job, being away from the chaos, I couldn’t feel the joy I used to feel reaching for them. So I called my mother, who was living with her sister, and asked her to come get me.

A friend found out I had suddenly moved and invited me to summer church camp. I agreed to go.

The reason I was sobbing this morning was the realization of what that fifteen-year-old actually experienced at that camp.

In my first draft of the chapter, I had condensed the whole week into a single sentence. I’d basically written that it was amazing, without going into why, without letting it breathe. I naturally stray away from flowery prose. It isn’t how I talk or who I am. My default register is matter-of-fact and direct. But writing has forced me to slow down and look at what was happening in my body in ways I wouldn’t normally allow.

So this time I wrote about what made that week amazing.

I wrote about the way people talked to one another at camp. There was no attacking language. No threats. No name-calling, no shame. People spoke words of encouragement. I would have made fun of people who were that positive before this week. But that week, I allowed my body, and more specifically my internal protector, to rest. I took in the encouragement. I let myself feel empowered by the words. I tasted what it felt like to live in a completely different way than I had for most of my childhood.

But the thing that truly set the tears off was the realization of how profound a dinner table is to a dysregulated child.

When I was very young, before the chaos began, our family had a dinner table and we ate together. Ironically, that table is also where my first memory of my father losing control of his temper took place. After we moved from that house, we never owned or sat at a dinner table to eat as a family again. I didn’t realize until this morning how completely a table can stand in for a connected family.

At camp, we ate every meal together at a table. We laughed. We were present with each other. There was no television to distract us, just one another. And there were adults I could feel safe around. They were there to support and care for the children at the camp. I didn’t have to absorb the chaos of their lives. I could just be what I was, a kid.

This morning, the profoundness of losing my faith hit me in a way it hasn’t since I left it in October of 2023. I felt the weight of the safety that fifteen-year-old boy had experienced that week, and I felt it as a loss for the first time. And I let myself imagine what it would have meant to him to never have had it at all. And more than that, I began to reflect on what that week actually meant to that scared child.

A cynic would say: See, you just needed a family that was present and didn’t speak harshly, and a dinner table to sit at. You didn’t need Christianity.

But that misses what created the situation in the first place. I am not claiming Christianity is the only thing that could build a place like that for a hurting child. I am saying it is the thing that built the one I walked into. The faith is what moved these particular people to organize a camp, to welcome a child they had no connection to, and to care for him as if he were their own.

I have had to sit with the complexity of acknowledging that the faith wasn’t just a cover for what the experience really was. It is true that my conversion was a bodily experience, biological and psychological. But it is also true that this experience happened because the faith had moved adults to care enough to build a space where a traumatized child could hear a message and feel something that changed the trajectory of his life. The theology was the fuel. The embodied actions, the safety, the table, the encouragement, were the outputs produced by the engine it ran. And that engine allowed a deeply abandoned child to feel safe.

The weight of that complexity is something I am still wrestling with. I can no longer hold the literal truth of that faith the way I once did. But I cannot deny the truth of the embodied experience either.

So I am left with a question I do not know how to answer. If I can no longer hold onto the literal truth of the faith, is the embodied reality that held that fifteen-year-old boy now forever out of my reach? Can a faith that lets go of the literal still build a space where an isolated, frightened boy finds the comfort he found?

And if it cannot, that is the answer I am most afraid of. Because it would mean the literal was never just a belief I could set down. It would mean the literal was the thing holding up the archetypes of the faith that I still champion now. I do not have a resolution on this. Like Jacob, I’m still trying to wrestle God to the ground.