Happy Father’s Day

It’s a weird holiday.

Not because fathers shouldn’t be celebrated.

The role of fathers is so deep and wide and complex and yet so simple.

Be like the Father. The ultimate model of love and faithfulness, tenderness and strength, justice and mercy. Sorrow and joy. Sacrifice and selflessness.

I could say the same for mothers. But it’s not their day today.

And maybe that’s the weird part. That we have only two days a year to celebrate two of the hardest, most rewarding, most messy roles we might ever fill in this life.

I understand the history of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. A day to memorialize the blood, sweat, tears, and love of the first people in our lives as we enter the world. The first ones to impact and influence us for good or ill, better or worse.

John Adams, in a letter to his wife as he struggled on the front lines to build a new nation while Abigail kept the home fires burning, stated,

It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue.

Their son, John Quincy Adams took their lessons to heart and not only became a great president and abolitionist, but he passed the legacy on to his own son with these words,

I advise you, my son, in whatever you read, and most of all in reading the Bible, to remember that it is for the purpose of making you wiser and more virtuous. I have myself, for many years, made it a practice to read through the Bible once every year.

Ephesians 6:2 tells children to:

“Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise“

What does it mean though? What does one do when one’s father (or mother) are absent? Abusive? Neglectful? How does one honor a parent who abused their position and brought shame to it? What if the relationship is strained and suddenly, those sappy, sentimental cards you see in the store every year are a knife to the heart, because none of them give the message you want to say and many of them remind you of the fact that you are grieving a picture of a life you wanted and never had?

What if that realization comes later in life as you are raising your own children and feeling the deep, heavy burden, the weight of the gift and burden you must carry for each one of the precious souls God gifted to you to tend and nurture?

What if the wounds run so deep that your heart aches every Mother’s and Father’s Day because you had a dream – an idealistic picture – of carrying on a legacy down through the generations and that legacy must now start with you?

We don’t have the whole story.

Some of our fathers have suffered deeply in silence, from the wounds of their own pasts, the pain of it exploding in rage and fear when it got too big to crush down into the darkest parts of themselves. Some of them absent themselves emotionally, because they don’t know how to feel without it being a weapon or a weakness.

Some of our mothers have been dismissed, disregarded, and alone in the cares and toils of life, being told to look and act a certain way because, “That’s the way it’s done.” They soldier on, depressed and afraid, repeating the same patterns over and over — they don’t know where to make changes because they don’t know where they went wrong to begin with.

It’s easy to sit in the judgment seat and deliver your verdict when you are a victim of someone else’s missteps and mistakes.

It’s a lot harder to walk in their shoes and understand that those missteps and mistakes often come from a place of deep-seated pain and regret.

Maybe they don’t want to deal with that pain and regret because to touch it, to delve into its darkness, to confront it, hurts too much. Maybe continuing forward without looking back is the only way they can believe that the iceberg hasn’t hit and the ship isn’t sinking.

I’m grateful for my father. I’m thankful for my mother. And the holidays to honor them are for me, a bittersweet time where I struggle with what to say and which message to send that fits into our personal story.

I’ve healed from the wounds of the past, and the scars are a reminder of God’s grace and forgiveness, an acceptance of a divergence from the life I wanted to the life I’ve been gifted. It’s a bittersweet pill to swallow and one that still returns to choke me with sorrowful tears while simultaneously bringing on tremulous smiles of the happier memories.

That’s life though. The bitter and the sweet. The lessons we learn from those who come before are not always the feel good, right way to live lessons, but the what not to dos and the how can I improve on this? They teach us truths, the good, the bad, and the messy of life and they make us appreciate all the more, how difficult and heavy are burdens we try to carry alone.

It’s actually kind of amazing when you think about how resilient human beings are.

We can take a whole lot of damage before the you-know-what hits the fan. It’s why dysfunctional relationships can limp along for years, decades even, before someone finally realizes that it’s not normal and something needs to change. Some people never reach that point and go to their graves holding onto the reality they created for themselves, never knowing that they’ve lost some of the most precious parts of life along the way.

Humans are also really good at putting rose-colored glasses on, especially when it comes to the ones we love. Love is blind they say.

It actually says, “Love keeps no record of wrongs.”

The whole passage in 1 Corinthians 13 is such a beautiful message, but one thing it never says is, “Love is blind.”

True love sees all. The beautiful pieces and the deep, dark ones. True love does not condone evil. It does not make excuses or downplay wrongs. True love is humble and seeks forgiveness. True love sees the deep, dark places and knows that those deep, dark places need the exposure of the pure light of Christ to heal and come to life again.

True love does not keep records of wrongs to bludgeon over the head of the one who wronged you. True love seeks the best in others and as far as it depends on you, works to see the best in others come to fruition.

In the end, it’s up to the loved one to make that leap into the light of True Love and see redemption, restoration, healing, forgiveness, and a new beginning. Whether it’s you or the one who wounded you.

We cannot change the past. We must walk into the future, grieving what was lost, hoping for what is to come, and trusting in the Father of us all to walk the journey with us.