I'm so happy to be here!

The Ties That Bind: Stories of Love, Family, & the Legacy We Leave

darin

I’m composing a series of posts for my author/writing website that will, through the course of the series, tell the story of my wife’s and my relationship–and how it somewhat paralleled that of my parents’ relationship. The notes on my parents’ relationship come from my mom’s handwritten story of her life, marriage and family that I came into possession of after she died (at 86). We lost my dad many years earlier (when he was only 54 and she was 52). I am hopeful this series will especially be a blessing to my children and my siblings (and extended family and friends). I’m calling the series The Ties That Bind and I’m going to call this first entry ...

The Roughneck & The Valedictorian

Let me tell you a story.

Long ago, there was a beautiful young girl of 16, devoted to her studies, on her way to becoming Valedictorian, busy with extracurricular activities—captain of the cheerleading squad, student-government treasurer, class activities planner, chorus, and so on—she also worked part-time in a lakeside diner to help out her family. 

There was this hot-rodding, roughneck character who started hanging out down by the lake. Like Jungleland’s Magic Rat, he “drove his sleek machine” (an immaculate, souped-up ‘47 Ford pickup truck, banana yellow with polished chrome,), “over the [town] line,” revving its loud engine and making a scene. 

Once he’d laid eyes on the girl, everywhere she went he’d show up, revving his engine when he saw her. If she looked, he flashed a smile. If she didn’t, he’d rev the engine again. He’d strut into the crowded diner like he owned the place and try to scheme his way into her section. He’d position himself to flirtatiously block her path as she served, forcing her to step around him, smiling as they made eye-contact. He was annoying. “A real pain in the ass.” 

But charming.

One day the girl came home from school and her mother met her at the door. “A boy named George called. He wants to stop by,” she said. The girl was thrilled. She thought George Hintzman, the captain of the basketball team, was coming over to ask her out on a date. 

Then she heard the roughneck’s loud hot-rod pulling in. 

The girl’s mother was very strict. ‘This guy has no idea what he is walking into,’ she thought, certain that once her mother saw that this boy was actually a smart-ass young man from Libertyville, and heard that his plan was to drive her daughter, in that hot-rod, far away from Grayslake where they lived and into downtown Chicago to see the Harlem Globetrotters, she just knew his plan would be dead in the water and that he’d be “out on his ear.” She sat in mouth-wide-open-shock when her mother said yes. He’d pick her up Saturday.

Saturday, she slid into that hot-rod next to him … and never left his side.

I got a ’69 Chevy with a three-ninety-six, Fuellie heads and a Hurst on the floor,
She’s waiting tonight down in the parking lot, outside the Seven-Eleven store;
Me and my partner Sonny built her straight out of scratch, 
and he rides with me from town to town,
We only run for the money, got no strings attached,
We shut ‘em up and then we shut ‘em down.
Tonight, tonight the strip's just right, I wanna blow 'em off in my first heat,
Summer's here and the time is right, for racing in the street.

[Bruce Springsteen, "Racing in the Street," track 5, Darkness on the Edge of Town, 1978]

Working on the car with Dad was a right of passage in the Shaw family—each of the five of us Shaw kids had our turn. The stories are legendary in family lore. Cherished memories. 

So many invaluable life lessons Dad taught me along the way … like how to turn a can of WD40 and a lit cigarette into a flame thrower! No kidding, as we were working on the car one night, I watched the old man take out a nuisance flying hornet, mid-flight. He pulled the lit cigarette from his lip, lined it up with a can of WD40 … Aim. Fire! POOF! Torched!

Hornet ash rained down. The, without missing a beat, like a gunfighter holstering his smoking side-iron, Dad twirled that cigarette right back onto his lip, took a deep drag, and went on working like nothing happened. 

Each of us siblings have stories of working on our first car with Dad. Mine was the cream-colored, classic ’65 Mustang Dad brought home when I was 14, giving us plenty of time to “tinker on it,” as he liked to say. 

That whole “she slid into the seat next to him …” thing, you could say the beginnings of Shari’s and my story was written in my DNA.

To be continued … 

Did'ya blow?

The Emotional Toll of Loving Someone in Pain

darin

For over twenty-one years in pastoral ministry and decades spent navigating the intersection of faith and mental health, I have sat on every side of the recovery table. I have been the one crying out from the bottom of a dark valley, and I have been the one standing on the rim, desperately looking down, trying to figure out how to pull someone I love out of the shadows. 

If you are currently loving someone who is in deep emotional or psychological pain, I want to say something to you right now that you might not hear within the walls of a typical church building: It is incredibly heavy, and it is okay to feel exhausted.

When someone we love is diagnosed with depression, battling debilitating anxiety, or sorting through the fragmented shards of trauma, our immediate Christian instinct is often to go into “fix-it” mode. We pray harder, we quote scripture, or maybe we accidentally slip into those well-meaning but incredibly painful pat answers. We say things like, “Just surrender it to the Lord,” or “Joy comes in the morning,” as if a chemical imbalance or a deep psychological wound can be swept away by a neat spiritual catchphrase.

But when those quick fixes don’t work—when the morning comes and your spouse still cannot get out of bed, or your child is still paralyzed by a panic attack—a quiet, insidious shift happens in the heart of the one who loves them. You begin to carry an invisible emotional toll.

You start walking on eggshells in your own home, constantly measuring the emotional temperature of the room. You watch the person you love slip further away into an ocean of sadness or fear, and the gap between what you believe (“God is good”) and what you are seeing (“my family is breaking”) begins to feel like a vast, terrifying sea. In the quiet, lonely hours of the night, you might even find yourself fighting your own unexpressed anger—anger at the illness, anger at the situation, and sometimes, a deeply guilt-inducing anger at God for not stepping in faster. 

Religious culture often tells us that if we just have enough faith, we shouldn’t feel broken by the storms of life. But when I look at the gospels, I see a completely different Jesus. I see a Savior who looked at people in pain and was moved with profound, gut-wrenching compassion. When Jesus encountered the marginalized, the broken, and those crushed by the heavy burdens laid on them by the rigid religious leaders of His day, He didn’t offer a lecture or a reprimand. He offered Himself. He sat with them in the muck and the weeds. 

Loving someone in pain means you are participating in a holy, sacrificial kind of love. But it also means your own heart is sustaining real, measurable bruising. It is not a lack of faith that makes you feel tired; it is the reality of human love in a fallen, fractured world. 

In our book, Sanctuary Devotional: A Mental Health Journey Towards Hope & Healing due out this fall, David Hoskins and I wanted to build a literal sanctuary for both the person who is struggling and the one who is walking beside them. You do not have to pretend to be whole while your internal world is fracturing under the weight of someone else’s suffering. The Father’s hands are not resting on the shoulders of the prodigal because the prodigal has it all together; those hands are there to offer comfort in the midst of the brokenness.

If you are the one holding the line for someone else right now, take a deep breath. You don’t have to fix them today. Jesus is not judging your exhaustion. He is inviting you to pull up a chair, sit beneath His gaze, and remember that you are a beloved child of God, completely independent of how well you perform as a caregiver. 

Darin Michael Shaw, MDiv, MA, is a collaborative writer, researcher, and veteran of over twenty years in pastoral ministry who has navigated his own seasons of brokenness to find a deeper identity as a beloved son of God. Along with David Hoskins, he is the co-author of the soon to be released morning and evening devotional, Sanctuary Devotional: A Mental Health Journey Towards Hope & Healing.