The Heartache of Fatherlessness

 

It was Father’s Day again. Greeting cards had all sorts of amazing Dad messages like, “You make this family fun,” and “There’s no better role model than you,” and “You’ve always been my biggest supporter,” and “You bring so much joy into my life.”

Flashy advertisements honored dads with sales on new lawnmowers, new BBQs, and new camping and fishing and hunting gear. The butcher section at the grocery store anticipated a busy Father’s Day weekend with discounted meat nestled in ice. Clothing stores proudly displayed their best t-shirts emblazoned with “Just a Dad who loves his girl,” and “Father: a son’s first hero, a daughter’s first love,” and “Dad Joke Champion.”

For many people who have a difficult relationship with their father – or don’t have a father in their life at all – the greeting cards stay on the shelf. They walk past the new lawnmower or fishing poles because that new stuff won’t be received the same way it was intended. Some hearts hurt all day because they can’t avoid restaurants and city parks where happy families celebrate someone truly taken for granted.

Deep down, all children want to be loved by their father, even if they barely know him, but many fathers don’t fit the happy norm. Fathers are an important part of God’s design for families, and when fathers are missing or hurtful or narcissistic or arrogant, they misrepresent what God intended fathers to be. And sometimes the contrast is huge between God’s design and formative experiences.

Psalm 103:13 says, “Just as a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him.” A father’s compassion toward his children is assumed by God. This is a natural connection. When compassion is lacking, children are understandably angry against such injustice.

Malachi 3:17 says, “They will be Mine,” says the Lord of hosts, “on the day that I prepare My own possession, and I will spare them as a man spares his own son who serves him.” A father naturally prioritizes and protects his son, and something is dreadfully wrong – even ungodly – when a father turns against his own children.

1 John 3:1 says, “See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are.” True love is love because of identity, not performance. When a child has to earn love, suddenly love becomes an unstable impossibility – and skews his or her understanding of God’s love.

Even the “normal” father of Matthew 7:9-11 can be terrifying for someone who regularly receives “stones” and “snakes” from the “benevolence” of a manipulative father: “Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!”

But the Bible doesn’t just compare our relationship with God with ideal fathers. The Bible also uses broken family situations with real heartache and real loss to pull our hearts to a Father who fills our longings more than any father figure could.

Psalm 10:14 says, “You have been the helper of the orphan.” Psalm 68:5 says, “A father of the fatherless and a judge for the widows, is God in his holy habitation.” Not all orphans have deceased parents. Some orphans are “fatherless” and now face adulthood alone, but God sovereignly plans circumstances and relationships in their lives to help them. He satisfies their sense of injustice with hope that He will vindicate them somehow.

Malachi 4:6 provides a glimpse of the Messiah who would reverse the curse in families and “restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers.” When family members are transformed by the Holy Spirit through the power of the gospel, they will also love start loving each other as God designed them to do.

Hebrews 2:10-11, describes Christ as an older brother who is unashamed of sinners – even broken, messy, dysfunctional sinners – and saves them so that He can bring them to God as His children: “For it was fitting for Him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to perfect the originator of their salvation through sufferings. For both He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all from one Father; for this reason, He is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.”

James 1:27 says, “Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” God cares about the distress of broken families, and He cares for them through the care of His people. Our real “family” is so much bigger than our biological one.

Even Jesus knew what it felt like to live without a father. His stepfather, Joseph, followed the Lord, cared for Jesus’ mother and siblings, and taught his Son a carpenter’s trade (Matt. 13:35). But at some point, Joseph vanished from Jesus’ story. Throughout His earthly ministry, Jesus had no father and was responsible for His mother even up to moments before His own death (John 19:26-27). But from an early age, Jesus claimed God as His true Father and refused the identity of “illegitimate” or “fatherless” (John 8:41-42). 

“Fatherlessness” doesn’t have to define us for the rest of our lives. No life is permanently ruined by a father’s failures and sins. The book of Proverbs is a great resource, not only for fathers who are trying to live out their mission but also for children who are trying to follow that mission, whether their fathers teach it to them or not.

The mission is simple: the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov. 1:7). Whether our father is the wise man – or foolish man – of Proverbs, we can seek true wisdom through a perfect heavenly Father who is everything we need, who provides everything we need, and who loves us so much that He willingly gave His only Son so that we could be adopted and treasured forever.

2 Corinthians 6:18, “And I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to Me,” says the Lord Almighty.

John 1:12-13, “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”

Matthew 18:3, [Jesus said] “Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

We may have a father who says unkind words or manipulates our words against us. We may have a father who is abusive and provokes us. We may have a father who wants nothing to do with us, or has abandoned our family, or comes in and out of our lives like a tornado taking and taking and leaving nothing but destruction in its wake. As Christians, how do we honor these fathers as the 5^th commandment says (Ex. 20:12), yet also stand for truth?

Genesis 9:20-27 gives the example of Shem and Japheth who honored their drunk father by turning their faces away and dealing with their father’s sin. They didn’t ignore Noah’s sin, nor did they mock him as their younger brother Ham did. So too, we can choose to forgive the failures of our father, the absence of our father, the hurts and disappointments from our father, and call sin what it is (truth) without compromising grace and compassion (honor). James 1:3 reminds us that our heavenly Father promises to give wisdom to those who ask by faith, and in these difficult situations, we definitely need supernatural wisdom.

There is nothing random about our journey. God is always with us, as a father ought to be. Through Jesus Christ, we have a new family name – “Christian” – and we can walk confidently in that name because of our Father’s love for us (2 Cor. 5:17). We are free – even commanded – to love Jesus first, even over family, and don’t have to feel guilty for it (Matt. 10:37). Through a biblical local church, we can seek help from spiritual fathers – godly, humble men of faith – who can advocate for us as the means by which God protects the fatherless (1 John 2:12-14).

And when a father breaks his child’s heart, whether intentionally or not, our heavenly Father promises to heal it with His love again and again. Psalm 34:18, The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.

WILDFLOWERS IN THE ASHES: Living After a Loved One Dies

 

DEVASTATION

Several years ago, I visited an area where a forest fire had consumed thousands of acres only two days before. It looked like a foreign planet of death.

Boulders were shiny and exposed after flames exceeding 1,000°F ravaged everything around them. Tree carcasses stuck up from the charred landscape like skeletal fingers from a dead man’s grave. The earth seemed stuck in an old black and white photograph, eerily still and gray toned, except for the cerulean sky above. No leaves fluttered in the breeze. No birds sang from the treetops. Ash puffed with every step and permanently blackened the bottoms of my shoes. Logs on the outskirts of the fire’s path still smoked and crackled, and my throat stung from the poisonous fumes. Like the empty eyes of a skull, the landscape had gaping holes where cabins and log homes were completely vaporized.

The devastation left me speechless.

When someone we love dies unexpectedly, it feels like a catastrophic forest fire. Beauty and life here one moment but completely gone the next. A strange moonscape of overwhelming memories, scarred family members, and eerie silence.

For everyone else, life seems to happen as usual, and we wonder if we’re caught in some strange nightmare that we’ll wake up from any minute. But as the days pass, the stench of loss chokes our heart, and we can’t escape the reality that someone we love is truly gone.

Seventeen months ago, my mother died in an unexpected head-on collision. A pickup accidentally slid on ice and crossed the center line from the opposite direction. She was wearing her seatbelt. She was only ten minutes from home. She was healthy and strong. And yet, she was killed instantly.

Seventeen months ago, I went from the happy routine of daily life to crushing paralysis. After my brother told me the news, I dropped everything, and we drove to my parents’ house without packing any extra clothes or feeding the dog. I looked out the window for hours without crying. It felt like this was a bad dream, and I waited and waited to wake up.

Seventeen months changed my family dynamic. Everyone processed it differently. She was my mother, my children’s grandma, my husband’s mother-in-law. She was a wife, sister, daughter, daughter-in-law, neighbor, church sister, friend. Some people moved on quickly. Some were traumatized for months as they coped with the fragility of life. Others talked about her unashamedly which brought up the reality of her death over and over. Skeletons in closets were exposed by the disaster, forcing grieving people to deal with issues that should have been dealt with another time.

Seventeen months is a long time. It’s strange that so much time has passed. The year of “firsts” is over, but the second year is so much harder than I expected. Last year was blurry and numb. This year, I feel like I’m learning how to walk as a cripple because the loss permanently changed my life.

ASHES

When I walked through the burned meadow several years ago, it was hard to imagine how anything good could come from it. But as the rain fell later that summer, it pressed the ashes into the soil. Animal footprints pushed the ashes in even more. Winter snow cloaked the ashes from being blown away, and in the spring, a symbol of death became a means of life.

Time didn’t fix it. Time didn’t cause rain to fall or the seasons to change. It didn’t perfectly unite nutrients with soil from ashes. It didn’t produce life again. When death suddenly flips our life upside-down, time doesn’t fix anything. It keeps pushing and prodding while we’re upside-down and all, uncaring that wounds need healing, and tears need crying, and prayers need praying. Time is simply the context where God can work. Just as time can’t resurrects new life from ashes, so God is the only life giver in our loss.

Isaiah 45:18, “For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (He is the God who formed the earth and made it, He established it and did not create it a waste place, but formed it to be inhabited), ‘I am the Lord, and there is no one else.’”

Jesus also experienced excruciating loss through the death of a close friend. John 11 tells the story of His friend, Lazarus. Martha and Mary, Lazarus’s sisters, sent word to Jesus that Lazarus was dying. If Jesus was really as close to their family as the Bible says, you’d think He would have rushed to their home without packing His bags or feeding the dog. Instead, Jesus stayed where He was. And then Lazarus died.

Several days later, Jesus finally came, and Martha and Mary were understandably upset. Mary stayed in the house, but Martha ran to meet Him, saying, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died. Even now I know that whatever You ask of God, God will give you.” (John 11:21-22)

Jesus surprises us. He had been compassionate before. Why didn’t He show compassion to His friends here? He had the power to stop Lazarus from dying, yet He purposefully waited where He was. How was God glorified by Jesus’s seeming cruelty, Lazarus’s death, and Martha and Mary’s grief?

John 11:25-26 shows us that Jesus planned it this way so that they would not find hope in anything but Him alone. Not by changing their circumstances, or the comfort of friends, or even knowing they would see their loved one again. Only Jesus is “the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.”

Jesus showed them that He was their living hope in this life and the next. He wept with them, showing that the heart of God sympathizes with human suffering. Then Jesus demonstrated His resurrection power by defying death and raised Lazarus from the dead.

So too, Jesus gives us this hope. 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14 says, “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus.”

If we are united to Christ through salvation, we’re also united to His resurrection. We don’t have to wait until our deaths to experience His power. We can see it in the way God redeems brokenness to new strength and purpose. We can see it in our victories over sin and temptation. We can see it in our spiritual growth through the means of grace. We can see it comfort us and sustain us when death of loved ones overwhelms our soul. Inevitably, our lives change when someone we love dies, but God will not abandon us here.

The following Scripture passage is a bit longer than usual but be encouraged by it.

1 Peter 1:3-9,

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,

who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope

through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,

to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable,

undefiled,

and will not fade away,

reserved in heaven for you,

who are protected by the power of God

through faith

for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

In this you greatly rejoice,

even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials,

so that the proof of your faith,

being more precious than gold which perishes though tested by fire,

may be found to result in praise,

glory,

and honor

at the revelation of Jesus Christ;

and though you have not seen Him,

you love Him,

and though you do not see Him now, but believe in Him,

you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory,

obtaining as the outcome of your faith,

the salvation of your souls.

                 

Before my mother died, I’d already gone through forest fires of dark trials. I was still in the midst of ongoing trials. I didn’t think I was strong enough for more.

Yet, God was in control of my mother’s accident, not the driver of the other vehicle, not my father, not my siblings, not my mother. God could have kept my mother alive, but He didn’t. The God who plans the length of our days is also the God who gives us life as long as we live. He is the same God who will “cause all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28), “so that the Son of God may be glorified by it” (John 11:4).

God is good. Even moments after I heard the news, I was flooded with a sense of wonder. The year she died, my mother had the opportunity to visit most of her extended family, children, and grandchildren for various events. Many were able to say goodbye one last time without knowing it. God’s goodness gives us a season with our loved ones. Rather than holding onto them too tightly for fear of losing them someday, we can enjoy the time we have with them as part of God’s goodness in our own fleeting life. 

God gives hope. We are afflicted, but not crushed; we are perplexed, but not despairing; we are persecuted, but not forsaken; we are struck down, but not destroyed; we groan, but we also rejoice because the life of Jesus Christ sustains us (paraphrased from 2 Corinthians 4:7-10). We may be broken by grief, but Jesus is our Great Physician. are broken Our hope is based on His life, and beauty will rise again.

WILDFLOWERS

One of the things my mother and I enjoyed was wildflowers. Every spring around May or June in the mountains, the hillsides would explode with color. As we walked through the grassy rainbow, I couldn’t help plucking a few flowers here and there until I had a bouquet. But sadly, the bouquet always drooped and faded by the time we reached the house.

Wildflowers are temporal, here today and gone soon after. But wildflowers are also resilient and bloom where greenhouse flowers would never survive. The Bible uses wildflowers as an example of the fragility of human life. Isaiah 40:7 says, “The grass withers, and the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely people are grass.” But the Bible also uses wildflowers to show us the tender mercy of the Lord toward us. Matthew 6:30, “But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you?”

The meadow where I walked with my mother was also the location of a forest fire that consumed their house. It was hard to remember so much beauty when I saw so much destruction after. Coming back to the meadow later helped put everything into perspective.

Blackened tree trunks still lined the horizon. Shiny boulders were still exposed. The air still smelled faintly smoky as the wind blew through charcoaled remains. But now ashy stumps were eclipsed by color. Grassroot balls had been safely preserved underground from the brimstone heat, and green pockets filled the landscape again. Arrowleaf balsamroot dotted the slopes with a brilliant explosion of gold. Fluffy white beargrass towered over yellowbells nodding in the breeze. Carpets of purplish fireweed cloaked the ground like a robe of stars. A few birds filled the air with song.

As we think about living after loss, it’s hard to see beyond the pain of the present. That’s why it’s so important to look to Jesus wherever we are. Only He can give us greater joy in a future hope. God has not abandoned us, and He’s promised that one day He will make all things new (Revelation 21:5). 

We may still cry in the rubble, but He will bring the wildflowers again.