By Michael Sullivant
One of the outstanding tasks required to achieve full “childhood” maturity (age 4-14) – according to Dr. Wilder’s 20+ years of research across the centuries and cultures – is to learn to do hard things that might even cause some pain. Generally, this was a big gap in my childhood development. I was a savvy kid and somehow managed to wriggle out of these kinds of tasks again and again. My folks were not firm enough to hold me to engage in and/or complete these kinds of assignments. The one arena I did learn this in was competing in team sports. But that kind of hard work and pain was a lot of fun for me. It was the not so fun jobs that I expertly escaped.
Because of this void, I do have a vivid memory of a time when I was required to complete this kind of a task. One Spring, when I was about 12, we were visiting my grandparent’s cottage on Morrison Lake in Coldwater, Michigan. We normally visited in the summer when the dock was already set up on the shoreline. However, this time the dock sections and posts needed to be put into the lake. My favorite uncle, Jim, was a man’s man. I watched him tackle one hard task after another during our summer vacations together at our adjacent cottages as I was growing up. My siblings and I referred to him as “the strongest man in the world”. He truly enjoyed rugged work and I looked up to him in a wonderful way. We were securely attached and he had gained the natural relational authority to help shape my character by his example and his words.
On this occasion, Uncle Jim determined that I was old enough to help him assemble the dock in the cold, cold water. I was scared and honored at the same time to be asked to work beside him. So in a couple of hours, we managed to carry all the dock posts into the lake, twist them into the lakebed, carry the heavy dock sections down into the cold water and secure them to the posts. I remember the strain on my young muscles, my body shaking from the cold, a sense of a bit of danger and adventure, and an unexpected flood of manly courage rushing into my being. I was working to accomplish a noble and necessary task alongside my beloved Uncle Jim and I was holding my own!
When we were finished, my folks and grandparents came out on the porch to meet me with a change of clothes in hand, blankets to warm me after I changed, and hot chocolate to help warm my body. They also verbally affirmed me for a hard job well done and expressed their appreciation on behalf of our whole family who would now have a secure dock to tread on the whole summer. Though it took a while for my body to warm up again, my heart was burning with a sense of satisfaction and joy.
I come to tears now as I am writing about this “golden” memory. Oh, how I wish that I had tackled more of these kinds of hard things when I was a child.
Fortunately, God has seen to it that this gap in my maturity would be back-filled after I became a believer at 18. Getting married to Terri at 22 in 1977, raising 5 children together, and becoming a church leader did indeed require me to learn to do many hard, even painful, things. However, those emotional tracks had to be laid against some of my tendencies to escape doing hard things … tracks that ideally, would have been laid in my childhood. Thank God, it’s never too late to grow and transform with His help and that of our people.
