Dear Tristan,

I’ve written 24 letters to you now, in which I’ve shared my love for you, my hopes for you, and my advice for you. My last several letters have focused on truth . . . caring about it, seeking it out, and recognizing it when you have found it.

I think it’s appropriate, as your very first Christmas Day draws to a close, for me to share my thoughts about the One I believe to be the source of that truth. I’ve written several times in these letters about God . . . about how I believe He created us and seeks relationship with us. Today I want to share what I believe that looks like.

I believe God created us, from the start, built for relationship – both with Him and with each other. He recognized that it wasn’t enough just to create one of us, but after He’d created both man and woman, He described the result as “very good.”

I believe God created us with real freedom. He gave Adam real choices, such as the freedom to name the animals. And most importantly, he gave Adam and Eve the freedom to mess up . . . the freedom to tell Him “no.”

Which they did. It wasn’t God who severed the perfect relationship we had with Him. It was us. God gave Adam and Eve the complete run of the garden, except for the one thing He knew would bring them pain and suffering and regret. For their own protection He warned them against eating from the one tree that would harm them.

And do you know the first thing He did after they broke faith with Him? After they decided to believe a lie about His motives rather than trusting that He was acting in their best interests?

The very first thing He did was . . . showed up as usual for their regular evening walk together in the garden. It wasn’t God who hid from them. They hid from Him. He never stopped wanting relationship.

I believe He continued tenuously reaching out to us, gently drawing us back into relationship with Him. Look at the stories of the Old Testament . . . look at how it describes his interactions . . . His relationships . . . with Abraham, with Moses, with David.

So much of our common perception of the Old Testament is that of an angry God just looking to destroy this person or that person . . . this nation or that nation. But that’s not the picture I see there at all! I see a God who relentlessly pursues those He loves . . . but who is constantly being rebuffed. At Mount Sinai, God sought to speak to the Israelites directly, but they were too afraid and sent Moses to intercede for them instead. So God acceded to their wishes . . . and ended up having a relationship with Moses that was so deep, so personal that Deuteronomy describes it thus: “Since then, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.” And what of the rest of them? They didn’t want a relationship, they wanted to know what to do . . . how to appease the God who terrified them.

So where He wanted to give them Himself, He gave them the law instead.

After that, God kept reaching out to His people, continuing to seek relationship. Continuing to work through individuals like Gideon, Deborah and Samuel, but always seeking to directly interact with His people.

Then they decided they wanted a king. Once again, they wanted someone to stand between them and the God they feared.

So God gave them a king . . . several in fact . . . and with a few exceptions they turned out to be universally awful. After David, whom God described as a man after His own heart, God’s relationship with the kings over his people went steadily downhill. The early part of Solomon’s reign showed great promise, but the latter half saw a drifting apart of the early relationship. After the kingdom was split under Solomon’s son, the kings of the northern half universally rejected God, who ended up working through individual relationships with prophets like Elijah and Elisha. In the southern kingdom, a bare handful of the kings actually followed God’s rules, but most did not. And of the ones who did, only a couple: most notably Josiah and Hezekiah, actually sought relationship with God. As far as the following of rules, God told his people through prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah that the rules weren’t the point . . . and that in fact, their sacrifices, ceremonies, and feast days . . . the one’s He’d told them to observe . . . made Him sick.

So He obliterated the two kingdoms, scattering their people across the region.

And what message did they take from their misfortune? 400 years later, when we pick the story back up, it seems that the message they’ve taken is “you need to do a better job following the rules.”

This time, God doesn’t send a judge, or a king, or a prophet. This time, He’s had enough of intermediaries . . . had enough of people not only refusing a direct relationship with Him, but refusing to listen to even his representatives and proxies.

This time, He shows up Himself.

That, I think, is the message of Christmas. God wants a relationship with us so badly that He came Himself, giving up His unlimited power to become the very weakest type of person . . . a helpless newborn baby.

And in that human form, He demonstrated the very empathy I’ve been talking about in so many of these letters . . . the creator of the universe put himself in a human body – a body capable of suffering wounds, of suffering hunger, of suffering temptation. A body capable of feeling.

And what does He do with that body? Most people interpret the sacrifice of Jesus as a story of that same mean old God of the Old Testament (the one who just wants to slaughter people), needing to beat up on somebody for the sins of the world. The role of Jesus, they say, is to step in front of a blow from our angry Heavenly Father that is intended for us.

I don’t believe that at all. I don’t believe the “Father” God wants to be to us is an abusive one. I believe He’s desperately trying to restore a relationship with us. The problem is, we’re sick . . . with a sickness that makes such a relationship impossible. The sickness of sin. Like the victim of some virulent infectious disease, we are quarantined away from the God who is free of any hint of exposure to the illness that is killing us.

But God isn’t called the Great Physician for nothing.

Do you know how chemotherapy works? Chemotherapy is one of the few effective ways we have of combating cancer, like the cancer that killed my mother, your Grandma Pat. Chemotherapy works by poisoning the bad cancer cells that are killing the sick patient. The only problem is, the chemicals also poison the cancer patients themselves. The way it works, when it does work, is to kill off all the bad cells before it kills the patient. Many times, it doesn’t work because the patient isn’t strong enough to survive the process.

I think sin is like that. I think sin is a cancer that eats away at us. I think we are in desperate need of a cure, but the only thing strong enough to cure us is too strong for us to handle without it killing us.

Except for Jesus . . . God Himself in human form.

I think what He did in His life, and especially, in His death, was the equivalent of injecting Himself voluntarily with our infection so that He could create a cure without himself falling victim to the sickness of sin. As the antidote to the Lie to which we fell victim in Eden . . . the lie that said “you can’t trust Him,” He offers Himself as The Truth . . . not just “a truth,” or “something true” . . . The Truth. The Truth is a Person . . . a person who wants to share Himself with you, and with me. A person who, in the ultimate “power with” moment, became a man, giving up His “power over” the entire universe, so He could restore us to relationship with Him.

And now, in the final step toward restoring that long-lost relationship, He offers us the cure He has made. He offers us Himself.

Richard Wurmbrand, a pastor and author who worked behind the Iron Curtain of Communism, and who knows something about discovering truth amid a culture of lies, wrote this:

The Bible is a wonderful book. It is the truth about the Truth. It is not the Truth. A sermon taken from the Bible can be a wonderful thing to hear. It is the truth about the truth about the truth. But it is not the truth. There have been many books written about the things contained in the Bible. I have written some myself. They can be quite wonderful to read. They are the truth about the truth about truth about the Truth. But they are NOT the Truth. Only Jesus Christ is the Truth. Sometimes the Truth can be drowned in a multitude of words.

Like I said in my letter yesterday, I hope you are always curious; always seeking. Like I’ve said in several recent letters, I hope that when you seek, what you are looking for most of all is truth.

I hope you find Him.

Sadly, too many of us, even today, reject His offer of relationship. Others continue to look for an intercessor, someone to stand in between them and God and tell them what to do, and what to think. Still others remain locked in the “rule-following” paradigm. To them the Old Testament was a big rulebook, and Jesus came in and changed the rules, and left us with the New Testament . . . which is just a smaller, gentler rulebook.

For myself, I believe the Bible . . . all of it . . . is much less “Black’s Law Dictionary,” and much more, “Lord of the Rings.” That is, it’s not a law book given to us so we could know how to follow the rules, it’s a story! It’s the story of the grand sweep of Human history, and the God who has been desperately searching for His lost people the whole time! More than a story, it’s the archtype that has been followed by every story since.

I hope you can come to know The Truth . . . as well as the truth . . . in the same way I am learning to do myself. I hope you will not, as I have done for too much of my life, drown The Truth in a multitude of words. So very often we miss the point of Jesus: We think of him as a prophet, a teacher, a good man, a sacrifice to appease an angry God, a judge come to punish bad people and reward good people . . .

. . . None of these, though, capture the point of who Jesus really is. Some of them, in fact, get Him exactly wrong! His life, death and ultimate defeat of death by returning to life again, are God’s mechanism for restoring our relationship with Him! And like my relationship with you, the relationship He wants is not dependent on our being “good” by following some rulebook. Not only are the rules not the point, they never were! The relationship has always been the point with God! In my very first letter I told you, there is nothing you can do to make me love you more, and nothing you can do to make me love you less. My love for you is not something you can earn, and not something you can lose. My love for you just is.

That is the kind of love God has for us. There is nothing we can do, no rules or codes or laws we can follow, that will make Him love us more. He just loves us! There is nothing we can do, no evil or wickedness, that will make Him love us less. No matter what we do, He will pursue us to the end of the earth, and beyond.

He just loves us . . . all of us! Not just the ones who agree with Him, or do what He says, or follow His laws. John 3:16 says that “God so loved the world! All of it!

And in the end, just as He has always done, He loves us enough to give us the freedom to choose. For those who choose a relationship with Him, that’s exactly what He gives them . . . a relationship with Him that lasts for all of eternity.

For those who choose not to have a relationship with Him, that’s exactly what He gives them . . . separation from Him for all of eternity. We usually think of this separation as a punishment for our wickedness . . . or at the very least, a punishment for not accepting Him. I think, though, that just as He did when He gave Israel the law instead of Himself, and later, a King instead of Himself . . . that final separation from Him for all eternity is simply Him giving us exactly what we ask for. It’s Him loving us enough to pursue us to the ends of the earth . . . and loving us enough to let us go when we give Him that final “no.”

I dearly hope that you come to love the God who, living outside of Time, loved you long before you ever were. I dearly hope that I as your father can model for you the love your Heavenly Father has for you, and wants to share with you.

I hope that a relationship with Him comes to mean as much to you as it does to me.

Love,
~Dad

Dear Tristan,

Your life is a story.

My last few letters have centered on truth: What is it? What isn’t it? How do you know it when you see it? Can you know it when you see it? How do you go looking for it?

Today I want to write about where it fits. I want to share my thoughts about the story that is your life.

You see . . . like I said in my last few letters. “Truth” is not mere facts . . . data points . . . bits and pieces of information. These can all be “true,” but they are not “truth.” Truth requires context. It requires history. It requires story.

I’ve always loved epics: epic novels, epic movies, epic stories. I love how wide such stories are . . . the fact that they don’t, as so many movies and books do, focus all their energy on a few hours, days or weeks in the life of their characters. I feel so much more connected to the characters in such a story when I can follow them along for years at a time . . . when I can experience with them the grand sweep of their lives.

I think it’s important for each of us to understand that we are in the midst of the grandest, most sweeping epic of all . . . the epic of human history. I also enjoy fantasy literature . . . I enjoy the creativity with which a truly good fantasy author can spin a new universe into existence and drop the reader squarely into it to discover things as they do not exist in our own universe. But the disappointing thing about fantasy is its scope . . . J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings and his other books about the world of “Middle-Earth,” Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, George R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire . . . these are all amazing fantasy epics, each of which spans many volumes . . . but none of them can compare to the story of your life. For your life has all of human history behind it . . . even including the lives of the authors of these great works of literature.

There’s a common cliche we use when we want to put one another “in our place.” I’ve used it myself to describe someone who I’ve found to act in an annoyingly unthinking and inconsiderate manner: “Who does that guy think he is, the center of the universe?”

In a very real sense, the answer to that question is yes. We are each at the center of our own universe . . . the title role in the stories of our own lives. There is nobody else who will experience his or her story quite like you will yours, because you are the only one who will experience it from your perspective. From your perspective, the universe as you observe it stretches out from you in every direction. From your perspective, you are the center of your universe.

This realization is a big part of the empathy I wrote about in some of my earlier letters. While we usually mean the whole “center of the universe” paradigm to describe someone as rude, thoughtless and unobservant, the truth is that when we realize that we are all at the center of our own, interlocking universes, it allows us to be less rude, thoughtless and unobservant. When you realize that the person driving the car that just cut you off, or the person in front of you in line who is rifling through his pocket to try to find enough coins to pay for his lunch, or the person who took fifteen items in their cart through the “five items or less” aisle at the grocery store, is each dealing with his or her own story, it becomes much easier to empathize with them. When you start seeing the bigger story, it helps you to see the people in it as people and not just as props. Maybe that person in the other car just got laid off and is distracted by trying to figure out how to feed his family. Maybe the person in line at the checkout is trying to figure out how he’s going to pay for this meal and still have enough left over to pay for gas so he can get to work. Maybe the person at the grocery store is trying to hurry home to a sick child. Maybe . . . maybe a million different things. A million different stories.

And it’s the story of your life – and the lives of those with whom you have relationships – that make up the truth as it appears to you . . . the truth from your perspective, which is not the same, in some very important ways, as the truth from my perspective, or anyone else’s. Like I said in my earlier letter about Truth, 2+2=4 may be a true statement, but it is not “Truth.” Similarly, “Tristan is a boy” is a true statement . . . but it falls far short of “the truth,” because it doesn’t tell us anything about your life. It doesn’t tell how you struggled through 48 hours of labor to be born, your heart beating steadily away the whole time, as we waited anxiously to see if it would drop and we’d have to take you and your mom to the hospital to get you out. It doesn’t tell how you have this way of knowing just what you want at any given time, and how you refuse to be placated when your mom or I can’t quite figure out what that is, and try to offer you something else instead. It doesn’t tell about how you dearly long to be able to stand, and walk, even though you don’t have the strength or balance to do so . . . and the look of wondrous rapture on your face for the few fractions of a second after I let go of your hands and leave you suspended on nothing but your own two feet, before you come tumbling back down into a sit. It doesn’t tell of the peals of laughter you let loose upon seeing yourself in a mirror. It doesn’t tell of the look of pure joy that covers your face when your mom or I come into the room, even if we’ve only been gone a few moments in a different part of the house.

These are pieces of the story of your short life so far . . . a story of strength and determination and playfulness and curiousity and love. Your story.

I remember a conversation with a good friend of mine in college, who was expressing the desire to learn more about some of our classmates . . . to get to know them better and more deeply, as she put it. I remember telling her that to me it sounded like something else: it sounded like rather than wanting to know them, she wanted to know about them.

I think we all have this tendency . . . and that’s what facts and bits of data are able to do very well . . . they can tell us a lot about someone. But learning about someone is easy! Give me a few bits of data about someone: name, email, phone number, address and so forth, and within half an hour I’ll be able to tell you a lot about them. It’s a whole lot harder to actually know someone. To know someone, you have to not just learn pieces of data . . . you have to get to know their story. And the only way to really do that is to become part of it. And the only way to do that is to have a relationship with them.

Your mom and I were once having a conversation with another couple who was having a really rough time in their relationship. The husband was trying to communicate with us, and with his wife, his disapproval of some of the decisions she was making. He asked us, by way of analogy, if we saw someone (meaning his wife, in this case) driving their car in a dangerous direction and headed for a cliff, what we thought the best way would be to get them to stop. He said that the only thing he could think of was to react in a way that might seem harsh – to “run them off the road,” he said – but would ultimately save their life.

We hunted around trying to think of how to put a kinder, gentler answer for a while. There was talk of putting up roadblocks and gently steering them in a safer direction. But finally I figured out what it was that had been bothering me about the whole conversation . . . there was no relationship in it. It was all very passive, very detached . . . almost theoretical . . . almost clinical.

I sort of sat and brooded on how to say what was in my heart for awhile, until your mom noticed that something was bothering me. She asked me what it was, and I said, “You don’t run them off the road. You don’t put up roadblocks. You get in the car with them!”

That’s what a relationship looks like . . . that’s what it means to become a part of someone’s story, and to let them into yours. It means you are willing to share life with them even when it’s hard, or dangerous, or you disagree with them, or you don’t like some of the choices they’re making. It means you trust them with a piece of your heart, even knowing it might get broken.

It means that the person is more important than the rules. After all, Jesus Himself said that the whole law . . . all of the rules and regulations and “do’s” and “don’ts” and “should’s” and “shouldn’ts” in Scripture come down to two relationships: “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

That’s the story of human history at its core: The story of you and your neighbor . . . and all your neighbors in this little cul-de-sac of the universe that we know as “Earth.”

So be aware that you are the lead character in the story of your life . . . and not just the lead character, but a co-author. Like we discussed in some of my earlier letters, God created us to make choices, and He has given you some very real choices in your story . . . given you the opportunity to write major sections of the plot.

Treasure that! Treasure your story, your place in it, and the fact that – unlike those movies or books – you have the ability to alter its course in meaningful ways. Make the most of those choices. Make the most of your story and your place in other people’s stories. When you see people as people . . . as the center of their own stories and universes rather than a collection of statistics wrapped up in skin, that’s when real relationships can happen. And those are the relationships that will change your life forever.

Love,
~Dad

Dear Tristan,

Yesterday I wrote about knowing . . . about whether it’s all that important – or even all that possible – to know without doubt that what you believe on any given matter is right.

I wrote and urged you, instead of loving knowledge, to love learning the process of adding to what knowledge you are able to gather for yourself.

To truly love learning, though, you must dive deeply into something that is essential to the learning process. It is dangerous, because you can never predict where it will lead you, or what your life will look like when you get there. In truth, this is something you’ve already exhibited . . . something that perhaps all babies at your age exhibit, before we adults kill it off as you grow.

I’m talking about curiosity.

We have this cultural milieu that says too much curiosity is dangerous. “Curiosity killed the cat,” they say. Often, this shows up as the flip side of the culture of “obedience” that I mentioned in one of my earlier letters. Children are taught both, “do as you’re told,” and “don’t ask too many questions.” When a baby reaches out and touch something his parents don’t want him to have, he gets his hand smacked. When a child asks “why?” when told to go do something, he gets a spanking. Our natural tendency toward exploration is under assault almost from the moment of birth, when the hospital nurse takes us and swaddles us up tightly, cutting off our ability to reach out to what is around us. Or alternatively, our hands are covered in hospital mittens, cutting off the most accessible area we have for exploring our sense of touch.

Is it any wonder that this same culture feels threatened when we grow up into adults who insist on questioning everything?

A question is a very, very powerful thing. You remember in my letter yesterday I wrote about Socrates. He was the guy who was wise enough to know that he didn’t know anything. He was

a teacher of others, but instead of telling him “this is what I know,” he would ask them questions. He would force them to think on their own: to develop their own answers . . . their own worldview, even . . . rather than merely parroting something he’d taught them.

Here’s what a question can do. A question can allow you to share deeply with another person, without coming off as threatening. As I mentioned yesterday, in our culture, we see knowledge through the “power-over” dynamic. If someone has knowledge they’re trying to share with me, they must be trying to exert power over me . . . to demonstrate their superiority. The fact that this may or may not be their intention is largely irrelevant, the point is that this is how we often interpret such an action, regardless of the intent behind it.

But what if, instead of sharing a bunch of knowledge, I simply ask a question? “Have you considered . . . ?” “What do you think about . . . ?” “How do you feel about . . . ?”

Now, instead of coming across as the stronger party in a “power over” relationship, you’re inviting the other person into a “power with” relationship. And at the same time, you’re not only indulging your own curiosity . . . you’re stimulating theirs at the same time!

A question, then, can be a powerful tool for learning, as well as a powerful tool for nurturing relationship. Curiosity can stimulate you to learn more about others, more about yourself, and more about the world around you.

As I said at the beginning of this letter, though, curiosity is a dangerous thing. That’s because curiosity is limited only by the power of your own imagination. Anything you can imagine, you can seek to discover.

Some, as I mentioned earlier, will feel threatened by this. New discoveries always threaten the status quo, and there is always someone invested in the way things are, who will resist any results of your curiosity . . . and will likely try to head off those results by discouraging you from indulging your curiosity in the first place.

But curiosity’s dangers do not only come from others. Some of them come from within yourself. For as you search, you might not like what you find. You might learn something that completely undermines a deeply-held belief. You might discover something that is harmful or detrimental to you. You might discover that you want it anyway.

That’s why, as I said in some of my earlier writing, I want to teach you discernment. You don’t need discernment to blindly follow orders and do what you’re told. You do need discernment if you’re going to set your imagination free and explore the world to discover what you think for your self, because you will need to know how to search wisely, and how to choose what you do with what you find. You need discernment to determine whether the new discovery negates the old belief. You need discernment to determine what discoveries may or may not be harmful for you, before they actually do harm you. You sometimes need discernment to tell you when one of them is already harming you, and it is time to stop.

Discovery is dangerous. I hope that as you grow and learn and discover you’ll trust me enough to let me help you, and help shield you from some of those dangers. But I also hope against hope that the mistakes I’m bound to make as a parent don’t do anything to kill off the innate curiosity you were born with. I’ve already seen it at work in the way you desperately stave off falling asleep in order to take one last inquisitive glance at the room around you, the way that you try to peer around the back of a mirror to see where that other little person is coming from, the way you grasp for things just out of your reach, and the way you get so incredibly frustrated when you can’t get to them. I hope you never lose that. I hope you learn to always set your imagination free, and follow it wherever it takes you.

In the meantime, I’ll be there searching right along with you. I’m excited for us to share with each other what we find.

Love,
~Dad

Dear Tristan,

Yesterday I wrote about Truth. I wrote about what it is, and what it isn’t. I wrote about how I love to seek it out, as elusive as it is, and how I hope you come to love the same thing.

But how do you know when you’ve found it?

I’m not entirely sure you ever can. I’m not sure any of us can ever really know something with absolute certainty. Sure, you can “know” what your senses tell you: the things you see and hear and feel, and so forth . . . kind of. But senses can be decieving . . . and they are most certainly subjective.

They can be deceiving because we are human, and therefore subject to limitations. For example, it’s been estimated that approximately 1 in 33,000 people suffer from a type of color-blindness that removes their ability to see anything other than shades of gray. Others suffer from additional forms of color-blindness that make it difficult to distinguish, for example, between red and green. In other words, their sense of sight deceives them. They cannot rely 100% on what they see.

But more than that, our senses are certainly subjective. Sticking with the color example, you might look at a particular shade and perceive it as “red” where another person would perceive the same hue as “purple” and another might perceive it as “pink.”

But what about those things that we “know” from sources other than our own senses? The simple fact is that all “knowledge” comes from either direct observation, shared information or logical reasoning. Logical reasoning shares the same flaws as direct observation in that it relies on our limited, sometimes outright flawed, perception, and therefore we can be reasonably sure that we’re right, but never absolutely certain. Shared information has these same problems, with the additional burden of having been transferred through multiple individuals – each of whom has the same sorts of limits in his or her ability to perceive. Through this process, it becomes not so much “knowledge” as “conventional wisdom” . . . which is sort of the lowest common denominator for information. It’s knowledge that has been diluted just enough to be acceptable to nearly everybody without causing much of a fuss.

Virtually all of what we think of as “knowledge,” then, is either erroneous or subjective, or both. Oh, sure, there are those who point to examples like mathematics and say that it is entirely objective, but that’s only true in its purest theoretical form. The minute you want it to become practical, it again becomes subjective. Take, for example, the fact that 2+2=4. This is an objectively true statement. However, what happens when you add two things to two other things? Well, that depends entirely on the nature of the “things.” If you add two letters to two other letters, you can make words, and those words of four letters can be anything from a name, like “Mike,” to a curse word you use to attack another person. If you add two cups of flower to two eggs, you don’t get four of anything . . . instead you get part of the recipe can be used to bake a tasty dessert. On the other hand, when you add two pounds of sodium to two gallons of water, instead of getting “four” of anything, you get a concoction that blows up in your face!

So yes, you can say for certain that “2+2=4.” But that doesn’t actually mean that you truly know anything, unless you can answer the question “Two of what, under what conditions??” In truth, that information is just another building block like the ones I wrote about in yesterday’s letter: Perceptions, opinions, categorizations, interpretations and the like . . . those building blocks that can be both integral to seeking out the truth, or can be applied to twist or obscure it.

So what I want you to learn from today’s letter is this: Be very, very wary whenever someone comes to you and tells you that they “know” something. Be even more wary when they tell you that their knowledge obligates you to take a certain course of action.

Here’s an example:

As I write this, most of the industrialized world is in the midst of a grave financial crisis. There are about 7 billion people on the planet, and you could probably find nearly that many opinions as to what the cause of this financial crisis might be. In my opinion, though, most of these alleged causes can be traced back to one central issue: There are too many people who think they “know” how the global economy works, and think their supposed “knowledge” entitles them to make economic decisions on your behalf, and mine, and everyone else’s.

There are a few simple economic calculations that are almost as certain as 2+2=4 . . . calculations like “if you increase the supply of something and keep all other factors equal, that thing will become cheaper” . . . part of the law of supply and demand.

The problem is that most of these calculations, along with many others that are much more complex, are just as meaningless as 2+2=4 until they are applied to a practical situation . . . because “all other factors” are never equal! So in this country, and others, we have seen our government leaders running around as if they know what they’re doing, using our money to engage in all sorts of speculative ventures and assuming that those ventures will yield certain results. They haven’t, and most of them have made the whole situation worse. If you forge ahead with running a nation’s economy based on overly simplistic calculations, while assuming that the system will remain completely unaffected by anything you didn’t happen to plan for, you create all sorts of side-effects that cause (as they are currently causing) the whole global economic system to run completely off the rails!

“Knowledge is power,” you will hear from many people throughout your life. This cliche is one we most often hear from those who have some bit of knowledge in a certain area they wish to share with us. But it is almost always used to further the dynamic of “power over” that your mom and I have written about in some of our earlier letters. “Knowledge is power” they say, but what they mean is “my knowledge gives me the power to tell you what I think you should do.” We see this drama played out in politics all the time. Members of one faction assert that their knowledge is superior, and therefore they have the right to tell others what to do. Members of the other faction asserts that, no, their knowledge is superior, so they should be the ones in charge.

Very, very rare is the person who comes along and says, “None of us has enough information to truly know what the right answer is in this situation, so we should just leave it alone and not tell anyone what to do!”

That would, after all, require them to surrender some of their “power over” the rest of us.

What, then, do we do with our imperfect knowledge?

Here’s the thing: It is not always necessary to have perfect knowledge in order for that knowledge to be useful. For example, textbooks for most of the last hundred years have shown images of what atoms, among of the tiniest building blocks that make up our world around us, supposedly “look like.” These pictures say atoms are made up of three types of even smaller particles: protons and neutrons clumped together in the center, with electrons spinning around in circles around that central clump.

The fact that scientists have since learned that this picture of what an atom “looks like” is completely and totally wrong, has not prevented this notional concept of an atom from enabling all kinds of scientific breakthroughs in the last century or so.

In other words, knowledge does not have to be perfect in order to be useful. It only becomes dangerous when we assume that it is perfect (or that the gaps and imperfections do not matter), and use these imperfect results to compel a particular course of action upon others, or allow that course of action to be forced upon us.

What is the alternative? I think your mother exemplifies the best answer to that question. She has a wealth of knowledge gained from many, many years of experience and instruction in the proper way to play the violin. Coupled with that technique is her passion for music, and her passion for life that is expressed in her music. But she would never, ever say that she “knows all there is to know” about how to play or teach the violin.

She has a great deal of knowledge, but it is still imperfect. Yet she has dedicated her life to sharing what knowledge she has with children . . . the next generation of violinists who will grow up and either share their love of music with others, or use the experience of learning a difficult instrument to make them stronger, healthier people in other areas of life. All the while, though, I’ve heard her talk many times of the many, many things she has learned from her students, even as she spends her life teaching them.

In other words, by acknowledging that her understanding is imperfect, and by seeking to build up herself as she builds up others, she has developed a “power with” dynamic that she can share with her students, learning and growing herself, even as she helps each of them learn and grow.

Virtually any “knowledge” we possess is only as good as the assumptions and presuppositions behind it. This viewpoint will not make you very many friends, because we all like to think that we know what we’re doing. In truth, though, the concept of “faith” is not just something that fits in religious beliefs. Even the most rigorous scientific experiment is just an exercise in the faith that this time, things will work out just like they did last time, and that all possible factors have been accounted for. And like religious faith, such scientific faith can at times be misplaced, and can turn out to be wrong.

So beware of certainty. In anything. Live life with humility, realizing that at any time your most heartfelt beliefs could turn out to be wrong. Be open to those moments! Don’t cling to something your heart and soul tell you is no longer true . . . or was never really true in the first place.

Sure, if you rely on your own judgment, you’ll end up being wrong sometimes. You, like all of us, are limited and flawed. But you will be wrong for the right reasons. You will be wrong because you sought out the answers for yourself, and came up short of the truth . . . which means you can try again and improve on your previous result. When you instead turn out to be wrong because you relied on the wrong person to tell you what you should do, all you can do is wait for someone else to come along and tell you something different, because you’ve trained yourself to let someone else do your thinking for you.

This is, I think, the difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher. A poor teacher tells you what to think. A good teacher tells you how to think.

The ancient philosopher Socrates was a good teacher. He believed the first step to true knowledge was recognizing one’s own ignorance. He considered his own wisdom to be based in the fact that he didn’t know anything. So he went around talking to people . . . not telling them what they should think . . . or even what he thought. Instead he went around asking questions . . . making them think about why they believed as they did.

When we believe that we know something, that little bit of knowledge blinds us to any potential alternatives out there . . . for if we “know” it, then how can it possibly be wrong? And if it can’t possibly be wrong, then there are no possible alternatives! If, on the other hand, we understand that we know nothing, like Socrates said, we are free to take that first step on the road to truly understanding.

So instead of loving knowledge, love learning . . . love the fact that in all this wide world you will never, ever run out of things to learn, to explore, to discover. Love the fact that, no matter how much you think you know, there is always more to find out.

And always, always beware of those who are eager to tell you what you “should” do, based on what they “know.”

Love,
~Dad

Dear Tristan,

In yesterday’s letter I wrote about effective communication. I’ve spent much of my life trying to learn how to be a better communicator, and I have learned one thing above all else. There is no substitute for truth.

In my career as a communicator, I have learned this from personal experience. I have learned that it is possible to create a very effective communication that is very persuasive and plays to the sensiblities – hits all the “right notes” – of your particular audience. It’s possible to dress up failure to look like success . . . to dress up inefficiency and waste to look like necessity. It’s possible to convince others, if you are persuasive enough, that up is down and black is white.

However . . .

I’ve learned that it’s much more effective when what you’re trying to communicate happens to actually be true.

We humans are extraordinarily adept at lying to ourselves. In fact, our brains are built to help us do just that. Take a moment and try an experiment. Take a sheet of paper and draw two small shapes on it, about three inches apart, a square on the left and a circle on the right.

Now hold the paper at arms length, close your left eye, and focus on the square. Keeping your eyes focused on the square, bring the paper slowly closer to you.

Eventually, you will see the circle disappear.

That’s your brain lying to you . . . as the circle passes in front of the “blind spot” where your optic nerve connects to the back of your eye, your brain sees the rest of the paper, and tells your eye that what you see on the rest of the paper (that is, nothing but paper) is what you should see in that spot as well.

Your brain is a natural pattern-recognition machine, so when it recognizes an empty spot in a pattern, it fills in what it thinks should be there, whether it actually is there or not.

Because our brains function by recognizing patterns, we do the same thing our whole lives, usually without realizing it. Your mind sees “blank paper” and assumes it knows what should be there, when it is not. Similarly, your mind may look at a person and see “Catholic” or “Muslim” or “Hindu” or “Democrat” or “Republican” or “Conservative” or “Liberal” or “Rich” or “Poor” or “Black” or “Hispanic” or “Asian” or “Middle Eastern” or “Man” or “Woman” or any one of an infinite number of labels, and may think it knows what to fill into the blank spaces of what you don’t know about that person, based on what you do know. But categories are not truth.

You’ve read a lot of letters from me and your mom so far . . . letters in which we try to share our beliefs, opinions, hopes, dreams, philosophies and worldviews. But beliefs are not truth.

You will hear me, or your mom, or others, mention something that is going on in the life of another person, and what it might or might not mean for that person. But perceptions are not truth.

You will hear me, and others express an opinion about politics, or current events, or some other thing you might read about in the news. But opinions are not truth.

You will, as you grow up, hear lots of passionate discussions about what is or is not true. People will use a lot of big words and try to convince you that they are right, or that someone else is wrong. But passion is not truth.

You will hear me and others read to you from the Bible and tell you what we think this or that passage means, and how it might apply to your life. But interpretations are not truth.

I and others will teach you things . . . things about history, science . . . things about how the world works, and how it has worked in the past. But information is not truth.

You might, as I have done, spend a great deal of time searching your own soul and determining for yourself what, and how, you think, feel and believe. But introspection is not truth.

You will probably hear me, and others, say some of the same things over, and over, and over. Hearing something multiple times, and perhaps, from multiple people, can make it more persuasive. But repetition is not truth.

All of these things are tools that can help you arrive at truth, or conversely, tools you can use to lie to yourself. So I caution you against using any of these to attempt to make a determination that you have discovered the truth.

I want to tell you something dangerous now. I want to tell you this:

Anytime that anyone comes to you and tells you that they know the truth . . . about anything . . . they are lying to you. They may be lying to themselves as well, but they are certainly lying to you.

None of us . . . not a single one . . . knows the truth. If we are very diligent, or sometimes, very lucky, we might catch a glimpse of a piece of the truth in some small area of life. But because we are all human, we are all limited in our perspective. We are bound inside space and time, and therefore are only capable of seeing a very small piece of the truth at any given time.

You can look up at the full moon and say “the moon is round,” and that is a true statement. But it is not the truth about the moon. It is only one small fact about the moon. This is the case with anything you observe, anything you believe or think you know. The human mind is not capable of fully comprehending the truth . . . it’s too good at seeing what we want to see – no more, no less. So where we think we have “the truth” all we ever really have is our interpretation of what we are observing. As Wayne Jacobsen, a philosopher, an author and a friend of mine, likes to say, “The most dangerous person in the world is one who doesn’t realize he’s interpreting. When we mistake opinions and perceptions as truth, we are able to justify the use of a variety of coercive and judgmental behaviors in acting according to that supposed “truth,” and forcing others to do likewise. People have been justifying such violence and judgment to support their interpretations of “the truth,” for the entirety of human history.

But when you think about it, if what you believe in any given area really is true . . . why do you need to back it up with violence toward another or judgment of another? If a thing is true, it is true. And while you might desire to persuade someone else of that truth, there is a world of difference between speaking the truth under duress, and believing the truth. Even if you could be absolutely, 100% certain that you knew the unvarnished, unfiltered truth in a given area (you can’t), there is never a good reason to coerce someone to speak a truth they do not actually believe.

That’s not to mention the fact that a relationship with someone you have persuaded of a particular bit of truth is nourished by that persuasion, while a relationship with someone you have judged for their lack of truth is damaged by that judgment. So when you’re beating someone over the head with what you think is true, what you’re really doing is touting your own superiority over them . . . placing yourself above them . . . saying to them “my beliefs, perspectives and interpretations are more important than you are as a person.”

“But dad,” you’re probably thinking by now, “you said at the start of this letter that there’s no substitute for truth . . . and now you’re telling me it’s all but impossible to obtain! What’s the point of all this then?”

The point is this: While you can never hope to grasp the entirety of the truth, it is possible through the effective use of all the tools I mentioned above: beliefs, perceptions, information, introspection and all the rest, to broaden your perspective in order to glimpse just a bit more of it. Think of it as sitting in a dark room trying to make out something of the furniture around the room. Imagine that you have just the very faintest of lights . . . enough to catch a shadowed glimpse of the outline of a single table. Each time you employ these tools, you brighten the light ever so slightly. Given your limited human ability to see, there is no way to know the truth about the room . . . to know every air molecule, every speck of dust, every microscopic germ that wafts through the room. But if you turn up the light, you can certainly grasp a bigger portion of the picture than when you were sitting in almost complete darkness.

I said earlier that what I was telling you was dangerous. Here’s why: This search for truth can be an incredibly frustrating process, and like I said at the start of this letter, we’re much better at lying to ourselves than we are at seeking the truth. There are certain segments of our world who are utterly convinced that, rather than interpreting truth, they have discovered it outright, and are obligated to come down as hard as they can on those who disagree with them in order to save them from “error.” There is even an entire segment of our culture that has given up entirely on even the search for the smallest bit of truth, and has comforted itself for its failure by saying “there is no truth” (except, of course, for their self-contradictory belief that the statement “there is no truth” is itself true).

But the only logical extreme of that argument is nihilism . . . for if nothing is true, than nothing is at all! The belief that my perception is all that exists, leads to the logical conclusion that my perception is all that matters . . . which can be used from there to justify all of the exact same abuses as the ones engaged in by someone who believes he or she has stumbled upon absolute truth and must impose it upon you by force.

Some of us, though, believe that truth is indeed out there . . . and realize that we cannot grasp it absolutely, but still aspire to grasp as much of it as we are able.

There was a time in my early 20′s when I went through a lengthy period of deep depression, as I began to discover that much of what I thought I knew to be true turned out to be built on several layers of lies – many of them lies I’d been telling myself, many of them for several years. I doubted my faith, the knowledge I’d gained through four years of college and two years of graduate school, my abilities, even my sanity at times. Two things got me through that time. One was a series of letters and conversations I had with a few very close friends, particularly your mom (who was a very good friend at the time). The other was this quote by French philosopher and Christian mystic Simone Weil:

“A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again and look with terror at the wall, until one day he begins afresh to beat his head against it; and once again he will faint. And so on endlessly and without hope.

One day he will wake up on the other side of the wall.”

Sometimes it seems as though the only thing on the other side of that wall is another wall . . . but as each wall crumbles I feel as though I know a little bit more about truth . . . and a little bit more about the ultimate Truth – which is, I believe, the same God who invites us daily into relationship with Him.

Many of the parents I know, both from my own parents’ generation and from mine, believe that pointing their children toward God is the most important thing they will do as parents. The problem is that, far too often, when the foundation of that relationship is questioned later in the child’s life, their children realize that they only believe as they do because it’s what they have always been taught. When they are beginning to discover who they are for themselves . . . when they are calling into question some of what they have been taught, and deciding for themselves what they believe . . . too often the only basis they have for that relationship is “this is what I’ve been told.”

Often, it’s not enough.

Instead, what believe is more important is to instill in you a love for truth. That way, you can search out for yourself what is true. And I believe that when you do that, you will discover that a relationship with God is the truest thing there is.

When the only basis for someone’s belief is a lifetime of habit, the basis of the relationship is fear . . . fear of change, fear of the unknown. Fear of “if not this, then what?”

But Truth, like I said earlier, can stand on its own. I believe if I teach you the little I’ve discovered about what a relationship with God looks like, and instill in you a love for truth, you will not only come to cherish that relationship as much as I do, but the truth that I’m able to teach you will not satisfy you, and you’ll be out there relentlessly seeking to discover for yourself things that are even more true.

That, at least, is my hope. I can’t tell you The Truth . . . all I can do is show you what I think I’ve been able to grasp about it. I dearly, desperately hope that taste is enough for truth to become a driving force in your life, as it has become in mine. I hope you come to love the truth, even when you can’t see it. I hope you come to be utterly dissatisfied with anything less.

Love,
~Dad

Dear Tristan,

Yesterday I spoke about coercion, and how too many of us use it to short-circuit the pursuit of our desires, instead forcing others to do as we wish, say what we wish, or believe what we wish them to think.

Today, I want to write about an alternative means of pursuing your desires. Today I want to write about effective communication.

See, there is something very important to realize about coercion . . . about being in a position to force others to do, say or think as you wish them to.

The ability to coerce someone does not make you right.

Instead, if you really value truth, and if you really wish to share that truth with others rather than beating them over the head just because you can, you need to be an effective communicator.

This is something near and dear to my heart, as I’ve spent much of my life, including my entire adult career, seeking to discover more of what it means to be an effective communicator. Your mom and I have already written about effective communication as part of our letters on other topics like empathy. But here I wanted to address the broader issue of communication as a whole, and what I hope for you with regard to communication.

To begin with, the starting point for effective communication is effective listening. Part of this is, as we’ve discussed in other letters, taking on the perspective of the person with whom you’re communicating and empathizing with them. Another part is foregoing coercive communication (the antithesis of the “non-violent” communication your mom and I have both written about). Coercive communication manipulates the other person in the conversation by means of the carrot/stick methods we’ve already talked about . . . the carrot of praise and the stick of judgments. There are times when the use of force in communication is warranted, just as there are times when physical force is warranted . . . but there is a tradeoff in both cases, as both physical and rhetorical violence are antithetical to building and nurturing relationship. Therefore, they should be used sparingly, and are counterproductive when the goal is to nurture your relationship with the other person in the conversation.

In addition to these NVC-derived ideas though, there is another aspect to perspective-taking that is important to keep in mind. I can tell you from personal experience that it is all too easy to slip into the habit of listening with the intent to rebut what you hear . . . that is, not really listening so much as taking notes in order to form a more effective argument in response. This instantly turns the conversation into a debate – and the point of a debate is entirely different than the point of a conversation. The point of a conversation is to share what’s on your mind or heart with another person. the goal of a debate is not to persuade the person with whom you are debating, but to demonstrate to a third party that your position is superior to that of the other party to the debate. So conversation nurtures relationship, while debate inhibits it. Depending on who is listening, there are times when debate is still a productive form of communicating your perspective, but if there is no third party and all you are doing is debating the other person, then all you are doing is starving the relationship between the two of you. There is no up-side!

That said, I intend to teach you the principles of effective debating for several reasons: First, there’s a lot of overlap between a persuasive debate argument and a persuasive perspective shared in conversation. They’re framed differently, but built on a lot of the same foundations. Second, I want you to be able to recognize bad arguments when you come across them, rather than being persuaded by them. Third, I want you to be able to effectively persuade third parties when the opportunity does arise, and finally, the biggest up-side to learning how to effectively debate is that doing so requires you to recognize the good and bad points on both sides of an issue . . . so being an effective debater can also make you more effective at the perspective-taking and empathy we’ve discussed in other letters, if you let it.

Here’s something that might come as a shock to you. Each and every one of us is communicating. All. The. Time. Maybe not with words, but with our facial expressions . . . our gestures . . . the sounds that we make . . . the looks in our eyes . . . even with the words we don’t say. We are always communicating something. And what I’m communicating will often tell you a great deal about how to effectively communicate back with me. After all, effective communication with me looks totally different than effective communication with your mom, which in turn looks totally different than effective communication with you.

There are three main building blocks to effective communication: Logos, Ethos and Pathos . . . logic, ethics and passion. Logos speaks to the coherence of the argument: Is it internally and externally consistent with what you know to be true, or have observed to be true? Ethos speaks to a shared values system between the communicator and his or her audience, and therefore relies heavily on the credibility of the speaker. Pathos speaks to the emotional appeal of what is being communicated. Each are necessary in order to communicate effectively.

Personally, I tend toward overreliance on logic, at the expense of ethics and passion. This can lead me to write very dry, boring, academic-sounding communications . . . perhaps you’ve even thought that about some of these letters! An overreliance on ethics, at the expense of logic and passion, can make a persuasive attempt very vulnerable to the personal foibles of the speaker . . . and since we’re all human, and therefore flawed, any communication that relies too much on ethos shares this vulnerability. An argument that relies too heavily on passion, on the other hand, is very easily undermined by pointing out simple facts that run counter to the (very passionate) point being made.

All three of these building blocks are necessary, but crafting an argument to appeal to a particular person will require, in each case, a different mix of the three. Determining the appropriate mix is a matter of listening, both to what is said, and what is not said, by the person or people with whom you are communicating.

Poor communication, then, might just blurt out whatever it is trying to communicate, without listening first to determine how that information will be received. (Pathos) As my dad always used to tell me growing up, “think before you speak!”

Fair communication, on the other hand, might listen to the other person and use their preferences to craft a persuasive argument that appeals to their own sensibilities and preferences. (Pathos + Ethos)

Good communication, though, will seek to communicate the truth in a powerful, persuasive way that is tailored to the listener’s sensibilites and preferences. (Pathos + Ethos + Logos)

So I hope to teach you how to become an effective listener, on the way to becoming an effective communicator.

Part of that process will, I hope, be modeling effective listening for you, by effectively listening to you. This goes back to what I was trying to share yesterday about the way we often treat children. There is this belief, very strongly ingrained in our culture, that “Children should be seen and not heard.” Like I said, though, we are all communicating, all the time. So too often, we adults block out the communications from the children around us, as though they weren’t even there.

I don’t want to do that to you. I want to have empathy for you, and to be honest, for myself as well. I may not remember what it’s like to be seven months old, but I remember what it was like to be a child . . . to be rebuked in public as a proxy for the undesirable behavior of a whole roomful of kids; to be cut out of conversations and have my perspective dismissed – even on issues where I’d had the opportunity to form a real, well-informed opinion – because I was supposedly “too young to understand”; to be told that this was not the “time and place” for a particular type of behavior, even though all the older people around me were engaging in precisely the same behavior . . . I hope I never put you through these things, as some of the adults in my childhood did for me.

I hope I never stop listening to you. For in truth, you’ve been communicating with me since before you were born. I remember putting my head down next to your mom’s tummy and urging you to “come out and play with dad” . . . and I remember your little kicks in response. Now, even though you can’t yet communicate with words, nobody who spent two minutes with you would mistake that for an inability to communicate at all. Your cries, your gestures, and most of all those amazing eyes that light up whenever your mom or I enter the room, are always communicating something. And I always want to be open to “hearing” that, and working to try to understand what you’re trying to say. That’s why, when you’re crying inconsolably, I don’t see it as “throwing a temper-tantrum” . . . but as the only way you can presently communicate displeasure. When you’re getting into things I’d rather not have you playing with, I don’t see it as “misbehaving” . . . but as your only option for communicating boredom. When you wake up crying at night, there are certainly times when it’s difficult for me to pull myself out of my groggy state and help to calm you down . . . but what I feel most is compassion for the fact that you are scared, or lonely, or hungry, or uncomfortable, and have no other way to tell me.

So as hard as it is sometimes to run upstairs and hold you after you’ve woken up from a nap for the fourth time in twenty minutes, I hope you never stop communicating with me. I know so many children who have a wonderful relationship with their parents as toddlers and small children, but who shut down and stop sharing life with them when they’re teenagers or older. I sincerely hope that by keeping the lines of communication open with you now – by teaching you how to effectively express your feelings, needs, opinions and beliefs . . . and by always being open to having you share them with me – I can still have a relationship with you into your teenage and adult years that is based on trust, openness, candor and mutual respect.

I’m doing the best I know how to do, trying to lay the foundation for such a relationship right now.

Love,
~Dad

Dear Tristan,

On Saturday, I wrote about pursuing your heart’s desire. Yesterday I cautioned against forgetting what is important as you pursue your ambitions. Today I want to talk about the limits of these pursuits.

The simple fact is, pursuing your heart’s desire is hard.

What is much, much easier is simply getting someone else who has what you want to give it to you.

By the time you’re old enough to read this, you will probably have heard me say the words, “my right to swing my fist ends at your nose.” Too many people, in pursuing their desires, forget this idea, or choose to ignore it. What does this pithy phrase mean? Simply that while you have the right to pursue your desires to whatever lengths you choose, that right does not extend to coercing others to fulfill your desires for you.

Our society today seems gripped in the talons of an entitlement mentality. The general feeling is, “I want something. You have lots of it. Therefore, you should give it to me.” Never, ever fall victim to this mindset. It is nothing more than theft, surrounded by good intentions and flowery words. Pursue your desires with all your heart . . . but don’t let those desires blind you to the fact that you’re not the only one out there who has desires, and is pursuing them. And you have no right to take by force the fruits of someone else’s pursuit of their desires, any more than they have the right to take yours.

People with this mentality read in the Declaration of Independence that we are endowed with the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They mistake this to mean they are entitled to life, liberty and happiness.

Never buy into that. Nobody owes you happiness. And if you believe they do, you are much less likely to pursue that which makes you happy, and much more likely to simply take it by force from the nearest, or the weakest, person who has it.

Unfortunately, this comes all too naturally to us. It is part of human nature to choose what is easy rather than what is hard. And there are more types of coercion than brute physical force. There are those who would never pick up a weapon to do someone else harm, who would not hesitate to wield the organs of political power to bend their targets to their will. There are those who would choose neither of these two types of coercion, and would simply manipulate someone psychologically through the skilled use of words.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking these are any less coercive, simply because the force used is not physical.

Then too, there are people who would never take what doesn’t belong to them, but who wield any of these three types of force in order to compel a change in belief or behavior. But using force in an attempt to compel someone to do as you want them to do, or worse, to change their personal beliefs to suit yours, is just as bad as using it to steal their possessions. In fact, I would call it worse.

And that is a big piece of why I’m writing these letters to you: to help you learn to recognize when others are attempting to coerce you . . . and to assure you that such coercion is never my intent with you.

Yes, there are times when protective force is justified, even necessary. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t pull you out of the street if you started to run out into traffic, or that someone who is being physically assaulted should just stand there and take it. But force should always be a last resort, after you’ve already tried logic and reason, or in a situation where there isn’t time to employ these or other alternatives. If I have to resort to force, there is a sense in which I’ve already failed.

But too often we tend toward force as a first resort. Because it’s easy, and because it’s effective. It’s easy to compel someone to do, or think, or say what you want when you have a gun to their head.

But that’s not the relationship I want to have with people. It’s especially not the relationship I want to have with you.

We have this idea in our culture that there are some things that are beyond the pale of acceptable conduct in a relationship: Things like physical or verbal retaliation for behavior we deem inappropriate . . . or ignoring one of the participants in a conversation and just talking over them as if they weren’t there . . . or rebuking and shaming someone in public in front of others. These various coercive behaviors are considered rude and inappropriate.

Except when we do them to children.

Then they’re considered not just acceptable, but advisable.

And that’s what I want to share with you in this letter. Just as I told you up front that coercion is not an acceptable replacement for pursuit of your desires, the same is true for me. If I want to see you become a healthy, well-adjusted adult, coercion is merely a shortcut . . . a way to compel a particular set of behaviors in the immediate present and near future, but not really an effective method of actually achieving my desire to see you grow to be a wise, discerning person.

It all comes back to what I’ve said in several of these letters . . . it’s not about behavior. It’s not about me compelling you to run and do what I want you to do right away. That’s just the shortcut . . . the cop-out. Your mom wrote in her letter for yesterday about requests and demands, and how demands have no place in a relationship. But we make demands on children all the time, as a matter of course. The idea of requesting something of a child seems almost ludicrous to most people in our culture.

Because after all, if we request something, there’s a chance they might say, “no.”

It all comes back to that coercion . . . back to the fact that many of the same people who are horrified by the thought of taking someone else’s possessions by force, or through the coercive power of government, have no similar compunction about breaking the will of a child through that same coercive force.

As for me, though, if I’m going to sit here and advise you against taking shortcuts to achieve your heart’s desire, I can hardly follow that up by doing so myself, can I?

Because my heart’s desire is not that you behave in a way that suits me. My heart’s desire is not that you do what I want out of some coerced, external motivation, but that you learn to make wise, internally-motivated choices about what youwant.

There was a time in history when families had a “motto” (and some older families still do) that characterized them and set them apart from other clans and families in their respective cultures. If I were to have such a motto for our family, it would be “Live Free, Love Well, Choose Wisely.”

That is my heart’s desire for you . . . that you grow to be someone who lives free, loves well and chooses wisely.

And coercion has no place in that process.

Love,
~Dad

Dear Tristan,

Yesterday I wrote about desires, and how we often choose to kill them, rather than nurturing them. Today I want to talk a bit more about one desire in particular that we humans often choose to nurture, but not in a particularly healthy way. Today I’d like to share my thoughts about ambition.

To introduce the topic of ambition, I’ll turn to a very accomplished, very famous man who died earlier this year, and whose life has already touched yours in some profound ways . . . the way your mom and I monitor you while you sleep, the way we communicate with each other about your needs when we’re in different parts of the house, even the way you and I were able to communicate face to face with each other from different parts of the country not long ago. This man, Steve Jobs, led the company that developed your mom’s computer, and the phones both of us use. He described ambition thus:

“We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why else even be here?”

A lot of us have that sort of ambition . . . the ambition to leave our mark in some profound way. The knowledge that after we’re gone, someone . . . preferably lots of someones . . . will remember who we were.

But there’s another quote from Steve Jobs I’d like to share with you. He allowed a biographer very intimate access to the most private areas of his life . . . he gave interviews, shared stories, and talked with the biographer for hours on end. Shortly after his death, Sony bought the rights to his biography for a million dollars.

When asked why Jobs, a very private person, was indulging his biographer to such an extent, he said “Because I want my kids to know who I am.”

Jobs was a truly great man, a visionary who did indeed leave a dent – several in fact – in the universe. He transformed not one, but several companies – not one, but several industries.

But he needed to hire a guy to write the story of his life, so he wouldn’t be a complete stranger to his kids.

That is, too often, the price of ambition.

It’s striking to me how often great accomplishment comes at the price of a lousy set of relationships with one’s family. The biblical accounts of the prophet Samuel and King David are two examples that come to mind. The historical example of John Adams is another. All three men accomplished amazing things. Adams had a famously close relationship with his wife, but his relationship with his children suffered greatly because he spent so much time away from them.

As for myself, There was a time when I wanted to “put a dent in the universe” by leaving my mark on history. When I first went to college to study government, I had lofty ideas of becoming a politician and running for Congress someday.

And while that’s what I think Jobs meant by what he said . . . the kind of long-term impact that made his a household name . . . I don’t think it has to be.

Your mom was one of the ones who first taught me that. Back before we were married, I remember her telling me a story about a conversation with a mutual friend of ours. He’d asked her what she wanted to “do when she grew up” . . . what sort of impact she wanted her life to have.

She completely floored him with her answer. She said, “I want to be someone who loves well.”

Recounting that conversation with your mom was one of my first steps toward realizing one of the things I’ve been writing a lot about in these letters: That our actions – our accomplishments – do not define us . . . or at least they don’t have to. Someone who loves well may not become a household name . . . may not, to be frank, have time to do the sorts of things that make one a household name! Instead, they’re busy pouring their hearts and souls into their relationships.

And you know what? Even if nobody outside their family and their circle of friends knows who they are, they’ll still make a dent in the universe. Your mom has become the person she wanted to be . . . I know from personal experience, as do you, I think, that she is someone who truly loves well . . . perhaps better than anyone else I know. She has made choices that will result in her being less well-known than she otherwise might . . . but she has certainly made a dent in my universe, and in yours.

As for me, I still like the idea of writing a book or composing a big piece of music, or even running for office someday (if I can convince your mom, that is . . . she’s not terribly sold on the idea). My reasons, however have totally changed. I now think about doing those things beause I think they’d be fun . . . not because I need to do them in order to convince myself that my life is worth living. Instead, I think of them in the same category as going skydiving someday, or visiting certain exotic locations. They’re things I would greatly enjoy doing, but if I never do them, that’s ok too. They do not define me, either to myself or others.

In other words, my motivations have gone from being external (seeking fame and the attention of others) to being internal (seeking to do what I enjoy and believe to be meaningful. I no longer need to ask, as Jobs asked, “Otherwise, why else even be here?” Because like your mom, the most important things in my life now are not my accomplishments, but my relationships.

And I’m not talking about some cliche’d way in which I hope to make my mark on history by helping you grow up and do something great that makes you famous. Even if I never do anything noteworthy, and never have any impact on anybody who does anything noteworthy, it is enough to know that I nurtured my relationships. I would much rather write you these letters than write a best-selling book. I would much rather make up silly songs to sing you to sleep than write a famous hit single.

Because you’re more important. Because, like your mom, loving you is more important than accomplishing something for the sake of being noticed by others.

I think it’s important for you to know this about your mom and me . . . that along with each other, you and any siblings you have in the future will always be our top priority. It has meant a lot to both of us to know that all four of your grandparents made this same choice. Your Grandma Carol and your Grandma Pat, who you never had the chance to know, both decided to forgo a job or a career, and stay at home to take care of your mom, and me, and our siblings. Your Grandpa Barry and Papa Fred both made decisions in their careers that sacrificed advancement and prestige because they wanted to put their families first.

Your mom and I are incredibly grateful for their sacrifices. And their examples are part of the reason this is something so very important to us. Like them, you will always take priority over any job, career, hobby or ambition.

That’s not to say ambition is a bad thing in every case, or even that we should only do things we find pleasant (like spending time with you and your mom). There are certainly times when I do things I don’t find especially meaningful or fulfilling – take on jobs or tasks I don’t particularly want – in order to reach a bigger goal. But the goals are mine. I’m doing it for me . . . because those choices will help me reach something I do want, which is usually the ability to create a better life for the three of us to share.

That, I think, is healthy ambition . . . an ambition fueled by one’s own internal desire rather than out of a desire to earn notice and notoriety with others. An ambition that never loses sight of the fact that people are more important than things or achievements. An ambition aimed at making a “dent in the universe” by nurturing our relationships, rather than at the expense of those relationships as Jobs seems to have intended when he uttered the two quotes I wrote about earlier.

For myself, I have had people say, after a political discussion or debate, that I should run for office someday. I have had people say, after reading a sample of my writing, that I should try to get it published. And I must admit I enjoy hearing both.

But far more meaningful to me . . . more meaningful than just about anything I’ve ever been told by anyone, are the times your mom watches me with you and says, “You’re a good dad.”

That, I hope, is my dent in the universe.

Love,
~Dad

Dear Tristan,

Yesterday I wrote about regret and what a good job we humans do of trying to keep it under wraps, or kill it off altogether.

Regret, though, is not the only feeling we treat in this way, though. Perhaps as a way to avoid ever having to experience regret, we end up doing the same thing to desire. This can, and often does, extend to our desire for a particular kind of life, a particular kind of vocation to spend our life on, or a particular person to share our life with.

When you were born, of course, your “wants” were pretty much synonymous with your “needs.” You wanted, and needed, nourishment, sleep, connection, a dry diaper, and not a whole lot else. Now that you’re seven months old, you’re starting to want other things . . . things that aren’t necessarily “needs.” Things like help to practice standing up, or a particular toy to play with. Nothing as lofty as the desires I mentioned above, but desires nonetheless.

I want to make sure that desire is something I nurture in you. Rather than telling you “no” because it’s inconvenient for me or I don’t feel like doing something for you right now, I want to go out of my way to feed your desires as much as I possibly can without harming you (for example, when you’re watching me wrap a Christmas present, I’m not going to indulge your desire to play with the scissors). But within reason, I’m going to do as much as I can to give you what you want. As you get older and more capable of seeing to your own desires, I’m going to stay out of your way as much as possible (again, within reason) and let you achieve that which you desire . . . and do what I can to help you, as much as possible.

Most of us don’t learn to live like that. Too often, we tell ourselves that it’s better not to desire anything, because that way we can’t be disappointed. We make up stories that we tell ourselves about the things we desire – stories like: “That’s not good for me,” or “I’m better off without that,” or even “God doesn’t want me to have that.”

And sometimes there is a grain of truth to the stories we tell ourselves. There are a lot of things that I might want, that are not good for me, or that I’m better off without . . . certain foods, certain hobbies or certain habits in which I might desire to indulge would, in the long run, do me harm.

But acknowledging that fact, and my choice to do (or sometimes, not to do) what I know will be healthier for me in the long run, is very, very different than trying to tell myself the lie that I don’t actually want it in the first place. And it’s even more insidious when I tell myself these lies solely as a way to avoid dealing with the disappointment of failing to obtain something I really do want.

Let me tell you a couple stories of my own desires, to try to explain what I mean:

When I was a child – roughly between the ages of about 11 and 17, I was fairly active in local musical theater. I wasn’t a great actor, but I could sing pretty well – and I was cast in several roles based on that ability.

There was one role in a local production that I really wanted. I auditioned, but as it turned out, I was all wrong for the director’s vision for the role, and he instead chose someone who was older, who fit the role better, and who was a much, much better actor than I was. My younger sister, on the other hand, got the lead role in that particular musical, and went on to turn it into one of her most successful and well-played roles ever (and she was very good at just about all of her roles, so that’s saying something).

And while I was sitting in the audience enjoying her success, I convinced myself of two things: First, I hadn’t really wanted the role anyway – had been pretty sure I wouldn’t get it, in fact – and had just tried out for it because I wanted the experience of the audition. Second, that I wasn’t really into this whole musical theater thing anyway – that I didn’t like the craziness of the lifestyle or the time commitment it took to be involved in theater, and that I didn’t really want to be spending my time on it anyway.

I think, if I’m not mistaken, that was the last time I ever auditioned. And now I miss it. A lot!

Here’s another story. As I mentioned, while I couldn’t act all that well, I could sing. I could also play the violin – not so well as your mom can (or could, even then) but I was one of the more accomplished kids in my town (a big fish in a very small pond, so to speak). Our local symphony had an annual competition where they would choose soloists to play or sing with the orchestra each year. Several of my good friends had won the competition in past years and had played or sung with the orchestra. I competed two years in a row, in both singing and violin. The second year I competed – the last year in which I was eligible – I had been doing a lot of rebuilding in my violin playing, and was not particularly ready to compete. But I did anyway, just to see if I could do it.

In the singing competition, I placed second out of about five or six contestants . . . good enough for a prize, but not good enough to sing with the orchestra. In the instrumental competition, I placed . . . second. Out of two.

That was about the time I convinced myself that I didn’t really want to do this violin thing long-term anyway . . . I’d been wavering back and forth between going to college to study music, or to study government.

I chose government. I went to a very small school where, when I did play my violin or sing, I was still a big fish in a fairly small pond, and where I didn’t have to do a whole lot to seem pretty good to those listening. Not long after college, I stopped playing almost completely. And what singing I do now is mostly concerned with trying to get you to go to sleep at naptime or bedtime.

You might be reading this and thinking these stories apply more to yesterday’s letter about regret . . . and I certainly regret some of the decisions I made during those times. But those stories are not just about making decisions I would later regret . . . they’re about convincing myself that the things I desired did not matter . . . and not just that they didn’t matter, but that I shouldn’t be desiring them in the first place.

I remember a conversation with my best friend, sometime after these two stories occurred . . . around the time when I was just barely starting to get an inkling of what I was doing to myself with this, and with some of the other things I believed at the time. I remember my friend saying, “We’ve been taught that wanting things is not ok. We’ve been taught that, if I want that, it must be wrong!”

I grew up believing some crazy things . . . but I think this was one of the most damaging to me personally. I crafted this belief system for myself that said, “If God wants you to have that, He’ll give it to you. If He doesn’t want you to have it, then you shouldn’t be sitting there wanting it in the first place!”

And to tell you the truth, I still believe the first part of that statement. I think God will give us what He wants us to have.

But I think the second part is complete hogwash. It goes back to what I’ve written in several of these letters. It goes back to choice. There are some areas, certainly, where God very clearly asks certain things of us. But I think those areas are much fewer and further between than most people believe. And I believe there are certain areas where He gives us the freedom to express, and pursue, our own desires and preferences.

And while we might not succeed at achieving something, I do not believe . . . not any longer . . . that it is wrong to want it in the first place! I believe that wanting and pursuing and achieving (or not) is part of what it means to grow closer to the heart of God . . . to become more familiar with what He wants out of His relationship with each of his children.

What’s more, I believe there are things God, in his roles as the loving, caring Heavenly Father, gives us just because we want them! I think it’s pretty clear in the Bible that He’s done that throughout human history, for those who have a real relationshio with him. I don’t believe that by “wanting” something and working to achieve it, we are working against some grand plan that God has for our lives. I’m pretty sure he’s wise and powerful enough to work with our lives and do whatever He’s going to do, whether or not we get a certain role in a play, or perform in a concert, or any of the other things that different people might desire. In the case of the stories I mentioned, if I’d decided to do more with my singing or violin, that choice would have led me to a different school. If I’d gone to a different school, I might never have met your mother, and you would not exist. So in the end, I’m very, very happy with the way things ended up. but I’m fairly sure God could have worked it all out even if I’d made different choices 14 or 15 years ago. And even if I still ended up in the exact same place, doing the exact same things, sharing the exact same life with the exact same people, I would have spent a lot less time in the interim being angry, depressed, and doing my best to destroy some of the most significant relationships in my life.

That’s the real kicker . . . the reason why talking ourselves out of our desires can be so devastating. It can profoundly impact our relationships . . . those same relationships that I’ve told you I believe are the most important things in my life. In the case of that musical, after I convinced myself that theater wasn’t for me, I let that belief damage my relationship with my sister. As I told you, she was much better than I was, and after that role she went on to a number of other roles in that and other local theater groups. In some cases, I judged her very harshly for the roles she chose to take, and the choices she made in how she lived her life . . . choices which were, frankly, none of my business. I think, as I look back, the person I was really judging was myself . . . for wanting to make the same choices she was making, and for believing that it was wrong of me to want that. She and I have done a lot of repair work in our relationship and have healed the rift that was once there between us, but much of that would have been unnecessary if I’d just allowed myself to want what I wanted!

So I squashed my desires, and judged her for not doing the same. And for a time this put quite a strain on our relationship. We did not see eye to eye on many things, didn’t get along . . . didn’t really even talk much, and when we did, we were usually fighting over something.

Because I wouldn’t let myself desire.

Please don’t make that choice. I can tell you right now that you will almost certainly not get everything in life that you desire, but please don’t let that stop you from desiring in the first place. When you’re not able to see a desire fulfilled, grieve that fact, but don’t let it discourage you to the point where you convince yourself that it’s not ok to desire at all.

This one is up to you. I will, of course, reiterate what I’m expressing here throughout your life . . . and I will, as I said, do what I can to help you achieve your desires. But the inner struggle of whether or not to let yourself want is something that may well take place completely without my knowledge. I know, for example, that some of the people involved in the stories I wrote about above are reading these letters to you as I’m posting them online . . . and are hearing most of this for the first time. I hope that this is the sort of inner struggle you’ll feel comfortable sharing with your mom and me as you go through them, but I can’t know that from here, so I’ll give you as much help as I can give you, here and now.

Let yourself desire. Pursue that which you desire with all your heart . . . and in those times when your pursuit does not end up as you hope it will, keep on desiring anyway.

Love,
~Dad

Dear Tristan,

Early on in the evolution of this list of Christmas letters I planned to write to you, I was going to write a letter about responsibility. As I began writing, though, I realized that responsibility, rather than a topic for a single letter, is kind of the theme of the whole list. Responsibility for yourself, for your actions, your thoughts, your preferences, your beliefs, is what lies behind most of these letters.

Yesterday I wrote about expectations and how they play into the paradigm of internal vs. external motivations that I’ve mentioned in other letters.

If, however, you live a life of internal motivation as I hope you choose to, you will discover something. You will discover regret.

As I mentioned in one of my early letters, none of us is perfect. I will make mistakes as a father, and you will make your own share of mistakes too. But when other people are making your decisions for you, you don’t have to have regrets, because your actions aren’t “your fault.” When you’re motivated by external factors such as the desire for reward, fear of punishment, or approval of another person, the only thing to regret is not having received the reward, or avoided the punishment.

That’s not true when you’re internally motivated, though. When you’re the one making your own choices, the probability of regretting some of those choices is somewhere right around 100%. But I think this kind of regret hurts more, because the failures carry so much more meaning with them. Instead of failing to achieve a reward or avoid a punishment established by someone else, you’re failing to live up to an internal goal you’ve set for yourself – and it can feel like you’re betraying a piece of yourself in doing so. Trust me, I’ve done it enough to know.

But the very first thing to realize about regrets is that they don’t have to feel like that. In her very first letter, your mom wrote about failing to live up to ideals. One of the things she wrote in that letter was,

“I hope this is something I will be able to model for you – to never, ever give up. Even if you’ve failed at something, to pick it up and try again. To not just go for the easy things in life. The truth is, the things most worth doing ar hard. The things most worth doing are things you might fail at many times before you finally succeed.”

The simple fact is that you will make choices you will later regret. And it will hurt. But that doesn’t have to be the end of the story. Like your mom wrote, a great success can be preceded by many failures, and the great epic narrative of humanity is, after all, a story replete with failure and redemption.

But there’s another reason it doesn’t have to feel like you’re betraying yourself every time you don’t succeed in living up to your own ideals. Too often we approach regret from a place of judgment – we subtly buy into the paradigm I’ve been trying to refute throughout these letters, that we are defined by what we do. We agree with that insidious notion and we condemn ourselves for our actions or lack thereof. And so, when we judge ourselves (and we humans are especially talented at being our own harshest critics), we don’t judge only the action, but the part of the person . . . the part of our self . . . to which each action is tied.

But those deeds do not have to be a reflection on who we are. You are so much more than the sum total of everything you’ve done, or not done . . . we all are! Earlier in these letters, I urged you to reject being defined by others as a product of your actions. Now I urge you to resist defining yourself that way as well. Just as I urged you to have empathy for others even when you are upset or frustrated as a result of their words or actions, I urge you to have the same empathy for yourself!

Once you do that, regret becomes a powerful ally, rather than an enemy.

Let me give you an example. When your mom and I got married, very early in the process of planning our wedding we decided that one of the areas we were NOT going to skimp on was photography. It was important to both of us to capture not just what the day looked like, but what it felt like . . . something a good photographer can do, where a less-skilled one would have difficulty.

We researched many photographers, and interviewed a few whose work seemed to be what we were looking for. We ended up choosing a photographer who was very experienced and highly recommended. And our pictures turned out . . . ok. Not bad, not great, just ok.

It turns out neither of us really knew the specifics of what we wanted. We didn’t really know what to look for in a photographer. We had a vague idea of the sort of photos we liked, but nothing behind the mechanics of how to get those photos, or which photographers typically preferred those mechanics as opposed to different sets of preferences that yield different results.

We both regret that decision, and it’s not because we didn’t get what we wanted at the time (a skilled, experienced photographer). We did get exactly that. No, the regret is in ourselves . . . that we didn’t learn more about the way photography works, and refine in our own minds what it was that we wanted.

But rather than being a source of self-judgment and discouragement, this regret has spurred us both to not only become more knowledgeable about photography, but to work toward becoming exactly the type of photographers we wish we’d had at our wedding. That’s why you always see us – especially your mom – peeking out from behind the big funny-looking black box that is so often pointed in your direction. Your mom is now running a budding photography business, and I’m coming along behind her learning more slowly, but learning none the less, how to capture moments in camera the way I wish that some of my favorite moments had been captured on the day your mom and I got married.

Regret can be an unhealthy thing if you use it as a weapon against yourself, judging yourself for your failures and allowing those failures to define you. But if you take responsibility for the decisions you make, if you act from a place of internal motivation, doing what you choose to do, owning that choice and, after the fact, providing empathy for the self that made that choice even when it turns out to be the wrong one, regret can be a powerful way to learn more about yourself, grow more fully into the self you want to be, and ultimately, share that self fully in relationship with others.

And really, that’s what it all comes down to . . . why regret is such an important thing to let yourself feel. Because we’re all human, and therefore capable of failure, each time we squelch the regret when it wells up in our hearts and tells us something is wrong, we kill off a piece of ourselves. When we live life out of a commitment to never regret, then when something occurs that is worthy of regret, we deny the piece of our soul that tells us that, and try to go on blissfully with our lives.

I say “try to,” because when that happens . . . when we smother the regret as soon as it first shows signs of life . . . we’re not really killing it. We’re just burying it, and it will rear its head in the future whenever something else occurs to trigger a reminder of that moment. Enough buried moments of regret can, when triggered, turn to heartache. Worse, they can affect your relationships, both with your own heart and soul, and with those you care about.

So I urge you not to try to live your life by the mantra of “no regrets.” I can tell you from personal experience that if you try, you will almost certainly fail. Instead, regret the moments that are worth regretting. Let them teach you who you are, and who you want to be. Then share that person with me, because I’m so excited to get to know him.

Love,
~Dad