The chronicles of a PK

When  I was little, there was one fear that eclipsed everything: the rapture. In the Pentecostal church, it wasn’t some vague idea tucked in the back of a dusty Bible. It was urgent, imminent, and terrifying. Every revival service seemed to end with warnings— Don’t be left behind. Get your heart right with God tonight, because He could split the eastern sky before morning. I was just a child. And I would wake up in the middle of the night, the house silent, shadows shifting across the walls. My heart would start to race— What if they’re gone? What if I’ve been left behind? More than once, I couldn’t find my parents. Maybe they were outside, maybe in another room, but in those moments I was convinced I was alone forever. I remember once breaking down completely, sobbing in the middle of my mom’s bedroom (they slept in separate rooms). My breathing would get tight, my chest would ache, and I would have what I now recognize were mini panic attacks. Sometimes I’d think about ba...

I don’t know exactly when I realized that being a preacher’s kid—“a PK”—was shaping me in ways I couldn’t put words to yet. Maybe it was the pressure to be “good” all the time, even when I was hurting. Maybe it was the way people treated our family like we belonged to the church before we belonged to each other. Maybe it was in the quiet moments, when I felt like I couldn’t tell the whole truth about what was happening at home—because too many people were watching, or too few were listening. Being a PK wasn’t all bad. There were hymns I still find beautiful, Sundays when something felt almost sacred, people who meant well. But woven through it all was a constant tension: who I was allowed to be versus who I actually was. There’s a kind of performance built into the role—smiling, staying quiet, keeping the faith even when the walls are crumbling. It didn’t leave a lot of space for doubt, for fear, for pain. And for some of us, it didn’t leave space to name the harm done behind closed do...