Seeing Our Parents Through a Different Perspective

One thing that can help us overcome the hurts of our past is learning to see things from our parents' perspective.

Where were they coming from? Did they set out to hurt us in this way or that? Or were they dealing with their own problems, missing a lot, misunderstanding a lot, and not knowing how to be good parents? Perhaps they didn't even realize they weren't being good parents.

Did they really have evil intentions, or were they doing the best they knew how, however inadequate that may have been?

When Christ was on the cross, he prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). We don’t sin intentionally. If we understood the harm that sin does to us, we would never engage in it. As Paul says in Timothy, he sinned in ignorance and unbelief. He didn’t go out and kill Christians knowing that Christ is Lord. As he says in 1 Corinthians, if they had understood then they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. Peter makes the same point early on in Acts, that the people responsible for killing Christ acted in ignorance. All the moreso, our parents didn’t screw up in order to ruin our lives. Their own parents had issues that they probably had to recover from, and so they just were not in a good enough place to be great parents, but they probably did the best that they could under the circumstances. 

This doesn't mean that what our parents did was right or that the hurt wasn't real. But understanding where they were coming from can change how we see them, and how we see our past. It can help us move away from resentment and toward understanding and forgiveness.