How Our Pain, Our Past Is Pasted On

What If Sin Isn’t What You Think It Is?

How Our Pain, Our Past, and the Person of Jesus Invite Us to Rethink Sin

By Dan Foster

My great-grandfather saw things no human being should have to see.

He fought on the Western Front in World War I, where horror was measured in inches and survival came at the cost of your soul. The trenches were filled with mud, blood, rats, gas, and grief. Men lived for weeks in waist-deep sludge, surrounded by the stench of death, flinching at every sound because the next shell could end everything. Whatever name they gave it at the time — shell shock, fatigue, nerves — it was trauma. Deep, disorienting trauma that rewired the brain and left a permanent mark on the heart.

When he returned home, his son was nearly five years old. They had never really met. My grandfather had spent his entire early childhood without a father and was suddenly expected to bond with a man who had been shaped by violence and silenced by pain. There was no therapy, no language, no tools for connection. Just distance. Just damage. Just two strangers trying to pretend they knew how to be family.

My grandfather grew up wild and angry. During his teenage years, he was constantly in trouble with the law. By the time he was old enough to be charged, he was caught stealing two sacks of wheat and sent to juvenile detention. A few years later, he enlisted and went to war himself — this time World War 2. Another boy swallowed by violence. Another layer of unprocessed pain folded into our family story.

These aren’t just stories from the past. They’re a blueprint. A pattern. A truth hiding in plain sight. When you trace the pain backwards, you start to see the deeper question forming. What if sin isn’t simply the bad choices we make? What if it is the unspoken grief, the unresolved trauma, the ache passed from one generation to the next?

The Problem with How We Define Sin

If you grew up in a typical evangelical church system, like I did, sin was pretty straightforward. It was the bad stuff you did. The swearing, the porn, the lies, the drinking, the sex, the rebellion. It was the choices you made when you knew better but didn’t do better. You were a sinner, they said, because you chose sin over obedience. You broke the rules, and God couldn’t be near you until you got your act together.

Sin, in this model, is always conscious. Always deliberate. Always your fault.

But then life got more complicated.

I began to notice that not everyone who did “wrong” seemed to be choosing it in the way I’d been taught. Some people were stuck in patterns that didn’t look like rebellion so much as reaction. Others carried pain they didn’t have language for. There were people who seemed to be repeating something handed down to them, even when they hated it.

The categories I’d grown up with couldn’t explain that. They didn’t account for the family histories, or the psychological bruises, or the silence that wrapped itself around entire households. There wasn’t room for the sadness beneath the behavior. There wasn’t space for trauma.

It became harder to say that sin was always deliberate. It became harder to believe that every harmful act was the product of selfishness or pride. Sometimes it looked like fear. Sometimes it looked like loneliness. Sometimes it looked like someone doing what they were taught without knowing there was another way.

Eventually, the old definition stopped working.

And slowly, I arrived at a different question, one I hadn’t been taught to ask. What if sin is more than the wrongs that we do? What if it is also the wrongs that were done unto us?

The Inherited Wound

In my family, the pattern isn’t hard to trace.

My great-grandfather returned from the Western Front carrying trauma no one had the tools to name. The war may have ended, but it stayed in his body — in his silence, his absence, the distance he kept from the people who needed him most. When he finally came home, his son was already five. Whatever chance they had to build a bond never really took root.

That boy, my grandfather, grew up angry and volatile. He was in trouble with the law throughout his teens and ended up in juvenile detention after stealing wheat during the Great Depression. Later, he fought in World War II. Another man shaped by conflict. Another generation taught to survive, but not to feel.

And then came my father.

He was different. A gentle man. Steady. Loving. But also a hopeless workaholic. He poured himself into his work with the same intensity that others might pour into alcohol or rage. He wasn’t violent. He didn’t disappear. But in a way, he was still carrying the same wound: the inability to stop, to rest, to be fully present. I know he loved us. But I also know there were times when we had to fight for his attention, because his worth had been quietly tethered to performance.

That’s how these things move through families. Sometimes loudly, in the form of violence or addiction. Sometimes quietly, in the form of overwork or emotional distance. What looks like personality is often protection. What looks like preference is often pain. We don’t pass down the exact same behaviors, but we do pass down the unresolved.

As Pope Francis once said, “Sin is not so much a stain to be removed as a wound to be healed.”

That sentence reshapes everything. Because when sin is seen as a stain, we rush to scrub it away, to hide it, to feel ashamed. But when it’s a wound, the approach changes. Healing takes time. It requires gentleness. It starts with asking what happened, not what went wrong.

When I look at the men in my family, I don’t just see a list of wrong choices. I see people who were doing the best they could with what they had. I see a lineage of unhealed pain, passed down like an heirloom no one asked for. I see how sin can show up not as active rebellion, but as quiet resignation. A short fuse. A hard heart. A compulsive need to prove your worth.

We often think of sin as something we do. But I’m starting to believe it’s also something we carry. And until we name it for what it is, we’ll just keep handing it on.

Jesus and the Wounded

If sin is a wound, then healing — not punishment — must be at the center of the story.

When I look at how Jesus responded to people, I see someone who moved toward pain. He didn’t begin with correction. He began with presence. He noticed the people others ignored. He listened to their stories. He gave his full attention to those who had been pushed to the edges.

The woman who had been bleeding for twelve years wasn’t shamed for being unclean. He stopped everything to acknowledge her. The man living among the tombs, tormented and out of his mind, wasn’t treated like a threat. Jesus restored him. The tax collectors, the beggars, the outcasts — they were not projects to be fixed. They were people he ate with.

Even the people who had done wrong — the ones who had actually caused harm — were not treated like problems to solve. They were still welcomed. Still invited to come close. Jesus told the truth, but he did it in a way that made people want to be whole, not just behave.

And then there is the cross.

Growing up, I was told the cross was about Jesus paying for my sin. But that understanding never really accounted for the way he lived. It never made sense of the tenderness, the touch, the way he refused to cast stones. Over time, I began to see the cross differently.

Jesus did not die to appease an angry God. He died because the woundedness of the world always resists healing. He died because those in power would rather preserve control than face the pain. And he chose to enter into that suffering rather than avoid it.

For me, the cross has become a symbol of presence. Of God not watching from a distance, but entering into our pain with us. Not to condemn it. Not to explain it away. But to be with us in it.

That changes the tone of everything.

So What Is Required of Us?

If sin is a wound, then behavior is only ever a symptom.

For most of my life, the focus was on managing behavior. That was the sign of spiritual growth. Less swearing. More church. Less doubt. More self-control. You kept the rules, and that was how you proved you were taking God seriously.

But when the wound runs deep, behavior management doesn’t work. At least not for long. You can try to control the symptoms. You can build a life around appearances. You can put all your energy into looking fine. But eventually something leaks through. The body keeps the score. The ache doesn’t go away just because you’ve learned how to mask it.

So what does God want from us, if not control?

I think the answer is honesty. Not performative confession, but a willingness to tell the truth about what hurts. A willingness to trace the pain back. A willingness to see that the parts of ourselves we most want to fix or hide might actually need to be listened to. A willingness to look back through the generations to find the source of our wounding.

In that sense, perhaps Exodus 34:7 is not a threat but an observation. “He punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” Not because God is cruel, but because unhealed pain tends to echo. The consequences of sin — especially the kind rooted in trauma and disconnection — often carry forward, not through divine punishment, but through human inheritance. What isn’t acknowledged gets repeated. What isn’t named gets passed on.

That’s why healing, not punishment is the answer to “sin.”

When we stop trying to punish the wound and start paying attention to it, we begin to see what healing might involve. It might not look very religious. It might look like therapy. Like rest. Like learning to speak gently to ourselves. Like asking for help. Like breaking cycles we didn’t create but have the power to disrupt.

Obedience has its place. But without healing, it becomes another mask.

God doesn’t need us to be impressive. God needs us to be real.

That is where healing begins.

An Invitation

If the word “sin” has always carried a heaviness for you, I understand. I spent years believing that if I just tried harder, prayed more earnestly, and repented with enough sincerity, I could become the kind of person God wanted me to be. But in the end, trying harder didn’t bring healing. It just taught me how to hide better.

When I look at my own story — at the men in my family and the wounds we’ve carried — I don’t see villains. I see men shaped by silence, loss, and pressure. I see people doing the best they could with the tools they had, even when those tools were blunt and incomplete. I see survival strategies that looked, from the outside, like sin. But inside, they were often responses to pain no one had words for.

It’s taken time to see that not all sin comes from defiance. Sometimes it comes from injury. Sometimes what looks like moral failure is actually a person reaching for something to numb the ache. That doesn’t excuse harm, but it does help us tell the truth about where it starts.

If you’ve carried patterns you don’t understand, or if you’ve spent years fighting something you can’t name, maybe it’s time to stop asking what’s wrong with you.

Maybe the better question is: where does it hurt?

Dan Foster is the author of “Leaving Church, Finding God: Discovering Faith Beyond Organized Religion.”