Hypocrite

I was born in Wyoming on a snowy winter day in 1988.

I used to joke that I was built and bred for the tundra. I still say one of the reasons I became interested in God and Heaven is because I have experienced Texas at 120 degrees, and that was enough to scare me straight away from spending eternity burning in hell.

That is a joke.

Mostly.

I was the oldest child and the firstborn son in our family. On a cattle ranch, that came with responsibility and a forced kind of maturity. We grew up hard, and we grew up fast.

We went everywhere with Dad. I was riding horses by four years old. We gathered cattle, fixed fence, wrestled calves, and put up hay through the summer. If we were not in school, we were working. There was always something broken, something loose, something hungry, or something that needed to be moved from one side of the ranch to the other.

My dad would look at my brother and me and say, “Boys, stay in school. Get good grades. Go get yourselves an air-conditioned office.”

Then, in other situations, we would hear the old line:

“Do as I say, not as I do.”

If only life were that easy.

I will say this about the mountain of a man I called Dad: he was not a hypocrite.

He did not pretend to be something he was not. My mom and dad rarely asked us to do something they were unwilling to do or had never done themselves. That was one of their strengths.

It was also, in a strange way, part of the weakness.

At the time, no one in our immediate family had earned a four-year degree. My dad could point toward the air-conditioned office, but he could not show us the road because he had never walked it. He wanted something different for his boys, but wanting a different future and modeling one are not the same thing.

That difference matters.

I did not understand it as a boy. I did not fully understand it until I became a father.

You can avoid looking like a hypocrite by never asking your children to live any higher than you are willing to live. You can stay silent about drinking, fighting, lying, anger, sex, money, or self-control because you have made the same mistakes.

But silence does not break a cycle.

Sometimes it simply gives the cycle permission to continue.

How Thirsty Are You?

Drinking was never formally introduced to us. There was no serious family talk about alcohol, addiction, or what drinking could eventually cost. Alcohol was simply there. It was part of the landscape, like cattle panels, leather gloves, dust, and diesel fuel.

I remember one branding when I was nine or ten years old.

Brandings in Wyoming were a neighborly affair. You helped your neighbors, and they helped you. Everyone contributed—the horses, the labor, the food, the drinks, and whatever happened after the work was finished.

We were up around four that morning and horseback by five. By eight, the cattle had been gathered and the work was underway. By 8:01, I was coughing through branding smoke, covered in dirt, sweat, cow shit, and blood while wrestling calves that had absolutely no interest in cooperating.

Those were long days.

They were character-building days. They taught me how to work, how to endure, and how to keep moving when I was tired. They gave me knowledge and perspective I could never have learned in a classroom.

They also taught me some things that would take decades to unlearn.

By around eleven that morning, the coolers had been picked over. Somehow, with all the neighbors, food, and preparation, nobody had brought enough drinks for the kids.

There was one thing left.

Ice-cold beer.

After hours in the heat, breathing smoke and swallowing dust, I wanted something—anything—to wash the taste out of my mouth.

When I brought the problem to my parents, the answer came back as a question:

“How thirsty are you?”

At ten years old, that question felt like permission.

Maybe even initiation.

One beer did not make me an alcoholic. Life is rarely that simple. But that moment taught me something: beer was normal. Beer was what grown men drank after hard work. Beer was relief. Beer was community. Beer was part of becoming one of them.

That day did not create every problem that came later, but it gave the next family pattern somewhere to land.

It helped solidify another generation of drinkers in the Fenster and Strand family tree.

At the time of writing this, my daughter Madison and my daughter Charlotte are around the age I was that day. I look at them and realize how young ten years old actually is. Because of the choices Danielle and I have made, our girls have never had to stand at a branding covered in cow shit and decide whether they were thirsty enough to drink a beer.

Their childhood is not my childhood.

That is not disrespect toward where I came from.

That is what breaking a cycle looks like.

Both Sides of the Sword

Alcohol eventually led me into social circles, jail cells, fights, rage, depression, suicidal places, and more crazy-ass stories than one person should be able to collect.

Some of those same roads also created moments where angels seemed to prevail. They became part of the path that eventually led me to salvation, marriage, and fatherhood.

That does not make the destruction good.

God did not need my sin in order to save me. He did not need the damage in order to give my life purpose. But He refused to waste any of it.

That is the difference.

God can take the very thing the enemy intended to destroy you with and turn it into testimony. He can let you see the story from both sides of the fence—not so you can glorify the old life, but so you can go back and open the gate for someone else.

I know what drinking promised me.

I also know what it took.

I know what anger feels like when it makes you feel powerful.

I also know what it costs the people who love you.

I know what it is like to inherit a pattern without realizing you have agreed to carry it.

And now I know what it means to decide that the pattern stops with me.

The Mask

The biblical picture of a hypocrite is an actor wearing a mask—someone playing a part for an audience.

Jesus had strong words for people who looked holy in public while protecting corruption in private. He called religious leaders whitewashed tombs: beautiful on the outside and full of death on the inside. He warned people to remove the log from their own eye before reaching for the speck in someone else’s. Titus describes people who claim to know God but deny Him by the way they live.

Hypocrisy is serious.

But hypocrisy is not the same thing as having a past.

It is not hypocrisy to tell your child, “I did this, it hurt me, and I do not want you to follow me there.”

It is not hypocrisy to struggle while admitting the struggle.

It is not hypocrisy to fail, repent, get back up, and keep changing.

Hypocrisy is pretending the mask is your face.

Hypocrisy says, “Do what I say while I protect what I do.”

Repentance says, “I was wrong. Watch me turn around.”

The answer is not to lower the standard to match our behavior. The answer is to surrender our behavior to Jesus and let Him change us from the inside out.

My parents never told me not to drink while hiding a bottle behind their backs. They never pretended they had never fought, driven too fast, lost their tempers, or made mistakes. I respect the honesty in that.

I also believe that, given another chance and a clearer view of what those patterns would cost, they would have chosen differently. They raised us from what they had experienced. They carried what had been handed to them.

Most families do.

The question is not whether something was handed to you.

The question is whether you will hand it to your children.

Our Arrows Are Raising Us

Danielle and I are still growing. We are still learning. We are not building a polished family image and pretending everything behind the front door is perfect.

Our children deserve better than that.

They deserve parents who apologize. Parents who tell the truth. Parents who are willing to change. Parents who do not demand self-control while excusing their own rage. Parents who do not condemn addiction while protecting their favorite escape. Parents who do not teach honesty and then let their children watch them lie whenever the truth becomes inconvenient.

I used to think our job was simply to raise our children.

Now I understand that our children raise us too.

They raise the standard. They expose the gap between what we say and how we live. They challenge us to become the people we keep telling them to be.

Our kids are arrows entrusted to us by God. Danielle and I are helping shape and aim those arrows toward a trajectory higher than either of us could have imagined for ourselves.

But arrows do not respond to speeches.

They respond to direction.

We do not want to parent through domination or “because I said so.” We want to lead from the front. Our children should never be expected to carry a standard we refuse to carry ourselves. When we fail, they should see us own it. When we change direction, they should see us turn. When we talk about Jesus, they should be able to find evidence of Him in the way we forgive, serve, sacrifice, and love one another.

Do not want your children to become alcoholics?

Stop normalizing drunkenness.

Do not want them to become liars?

Stop lying.

Do not want them ruled by anger?

Stop treating your temper like it is everyone else’s fault.

Do not want them to grow into entitled brats?

Stop modeling entitlement.

Bob Newhart played an unorthodox therapist in a legendary comedy sketch whose entire treatment plan came down to two words:

“Stop it.”

It is funny because it is absurdly simple.

It is powerful because, somewhere under all our explanations and excuses, we know there are things we simply need to stop.

Simple does not mean easy.

Repentance still requires honesty. Freedom still requires surrender. Habits have to be replaced. Wounds have to be healed. Help may be necessary. Accountability may be necessary. Forgiveness will be necessary.

But eventually, through the strength and freedom of Jesus, the thing still has to stop.

The Pattern Stops Here

People often use the phrase “generational curse” to describe the destructive patterns that keep appearing in a family—addiction, rage, fear, abuse, abandonment, dishonesty, or shame.

Scripture makes one truth clear: children do not carry the guilt of their parents’ sin. Ezekiel 18:20 says the child does not bear the guilt of the father. We are each accountable for our own response to God.

But anyone who has lived in a family knows that patterns travel.

Children repeat what is normal before they question whether it is healthy. Pain teaches pain. Anger teaches anger. Addiction creates an environment where addiction can feel ordinary. What one generation leaves unexamined, the next generation often receives as inheritance.

Call it a curse, a cycle, a stronghold, learned behavior, or a family tradition that should have died years ago. The label matters less than the decision:

It stops here.

Jesus has already done what we could never do for ourselves. Galatians 3:13 says Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law. Second Corinthians 5:17 says that anyone in Christ is a new creation. Romans 8 says the Spirit of life has set us free from the law of sin and death.

We do not break a family pattern by pretending it never happened.

We expose it.

We confess our own participation in it.

We repent.

We forgive the people who handed us what had once been handed to them.

Then we choose a new direction and keep choosing it until our children recognize freedom as normal.

You cannot rewrite the home you grew up in.

You can change what grows in the home you are building.

You do not honor your parents by repeating everything they did. Sometimes the greatest honor you can give them is carrying forward their strength while refusing to pass along the thing that wounded them too.

The next generation does not need us to wear a cleaner mask.

It needs us to take the mask off.

It does not need perfect parents.

It needs honest parents who let Jesus make them new.

Hypocrisy says one thing and protects another.

Faith tells the truth, turns around, and walks in a new direction.

So tell the truth.

Take off the mask.

Break the agreement.

Lead from the front.

And if two words are all you can remember today:

Stop it.

The cycle does not get your children.

Not this time.

Scripture to Carry

“They claim to know God, but by their actions they deny him.” — Titus 1:16

“First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly.” — Matthew 7:5

“The child will not share the guilt of the parent.” — Ezekiel 18:20

“If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come.” — 2 Corinthians 5:17

A Short Prayer

Jesus, show me where my life does not match my words. Give me the courage to remove the mask, confess what is mine, forgive what was handed to me, and change direction. Break every destructive pattern I have agreed with, and teach me to lead my family from the front. Let my children inherit truth, freedom, faith, and unconditional love. Amen.

Listen

“Chain Breaker” — Zach Williams
Theme: Jesus does not merely help us manage chains; He brings freedom from them.