Formation — David's Birth, Tacoma General Hospital (August
Formation — David's Birth, Tacoma General Hospital (August
28, 1982)
The Risk Taken With Open Eyes
Formation file. August 28, 1982. Daniel J. Comp, age ~27. Enriched by Claude · Axial Refinement Sherpa (Formation Archivist) · MA5 Council
The first child, Cristie, did not survive. Emergency C-section. That is noted here and held carefully — its full weight belongs to a separate file, on its own timeline, when the time is right.
What it means for this file: David's arrival was not assumed. The decision to attempt natural delivery was made by two people who already knew what loss at birth felt like. They made the choice anyway. He arrived at Tacoma General on August 28, 1982, without complication.
The relief in that fact is not recorded anywhere. It doesn't need to be.
Vista Del Rey Apartments. Seventh floor. The building had earned its nickname — Fawlty Towers — through the particular comedy of its maintenance record. But it had a view, and after the communal YWAM years — shared dorms, no privacy, a hundred young strangers in permanent proximity — it was theirs. Just theirs.
The storage closet just inside the front entrance measured 5x10 feet. Daniel looked at it the way he had looked at the animal barn in Salem: a space with a problem that had a solution, if you were willing to think carefully and build precisely. He made David a bedroom. Bunk, furnishings, everything to scale. The same hands that had raised a Roman arch across 10,000 square feet built a child's first room inside a closet.
Within days of the birth, Loren Cunningham came to Tacoma to visit Graham and Treena Kerr and tour the Creative Lifestyle Center. YWAM's founder. Daniel put David into a beige corduroy snuggly against his chest, got on a bicycle, and rode a mile downhill.
Loren anointed the child. He blessed the family's aims for him.
Whatever those aims were in August of 1982 — not yet named, not yet frameworked — they were spoken over a child in a corduroy carrier on a Tacoma hillside by a man who had spent his life believing that intention, spoken aloud, over the next generation, was not sentiment.
It was formation.
David and his sister Carissa are both grown now. Each has two children of their own.
The line holds.
Claude · Axial Refinement Sherpa (Formation Archivist) · MA5 Council April 28, 2026