Once at Willow Creek, I told that story about my wife and I having a fight. There was a reporter from Forbes Magazine, and they were doing an article on Willow Creek. And when Forbes Magazine printed this article it stated that Val and I had almost been divorced early on and some other nonsense. I had not read the article, but Val was reading the article while we were lying in bed. We couldn’t believe it! What a terrible mess.

And that’s a danger when you disclose. There is the danger of your story being taken and expanded and used against you. I think it is that kind of stuff that has really helped me taper back on what I share and how I share it. Just about everything is taped nowadays. It can really be taken the wrong way by somebody.

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It is critical that my children not feel used and that my wife doesn’t feel that I am using our marriage or our family to further my own deal. One of the first stories I told was about my son. It had to do with a particular worship chorus: “You are mighty; You are holy; You are awesome; You are God.”

Well when my was son about five, he would just run around and sing that same melody, but he kind of got the words mixed up. He would go: “You’re on my team: You’re in my house; You’re in my room . . . ” He would change the words, but some great theology was coming out! I was going to tell the story. But even with such an innocent story, my wife said, “You need to ask.” He is five years old. He is not going to know that I am doing it. He is in the nursery. But I went to him and said, “Kyle I would like to tell people how you sing that song because I think it will really help people to think better about God. Are you OK with that?” And he said, “Yes.”

But there have been other times when I have posed a question like that to him or one of his brothers, and they have said, “No, I don’t want you to tell about that.” And I have had to honor that.

Claypool: You need to be very careful about not casting them in a bad light or not disclosing a confidentiality. But I think that is pretty tricky when it comes to experiences with family.

Going back to what I said earlier about my relationship with my mother, I am happy to say that she and I worked through a lot of our issues. She died in ’94, and I think I had come to accept that her intentions were very good, and that she was operating out of a pool of experiences. She had never been particularly blessed by her mother. Trying to fix everything was kind of the way she had been treated all of her life. And I was able to reperceive her mercifully and compassionately, as I hope she reperceived me.

When she died, a pastor sent to me this little book by Alice Miller called Prisoners of Childhood. Miller says that we all come out of childhood with two forms of woundedness: We come out with grievances because none of us were born to angels. Our parents had their own needs and their own weaknesses that impacted us. But we also come out guilty because we haven’t done it any more perfectly than they. This realization was a very, very significant thing for me to work through.