Copyright by Shea Oakley
\nAll rights reserved<\/p>\n
There is much talk today about father\u2019s and their impact on the lives of sons and daughters. Some of us were fortunate enough to have had wonderful men as dads; men who, by and large, were healthily loving towards us and present for us during the times it counted most. But, in this day and age, the sad fact of the matter is that fewer and fewer of us can testify to having such a father. For many of us our childhood and early adult memories are stained by dads who either physically or emotionally abandoned us or, worse, were present but abusive.<\/p>\n
Today an entire therapeutic culture has grown up around helping people cope with the results of bad parenting. Some of these psychological support systems are good but some are not, because the flip side of the coin is that many individuals have built their entire lives on bitterness and un-forgiveness towards fathers who were themselves abused and perhaps did the best they could under their own circumstances. Any therapeutic system that perpetuates blame does neither the victim nor the victimizer any good.<\/p>\n
The purpose of this piece, however, is not primarily to examine how to deal psychologically with the pain and sense of loss involved with having a bad father. Instead I\u2019d like to use this widely experienced reality to point out another reason for those who have written off Christianity to give it another look.<\/p>\n
The Bible speaks to those who have been abandoned and abused by the men who helped bring them into the world when it tells us that God \u201cis a Father to the fatherless\u201d. No other global belief-system calls God \u201cFather\u201d, but the Judeo-Christian faith. The Deity revealed in scripture is one who clearly longs to be a father to those he created in his image. In fact the New Testament tells us that for those who receive God through his son the right is given to call their new Lord \u201cAbba\u201d, a Hebrew word used by Jewish children that roughly translates as \u201cDaddy\u201d.<\/p>\n
One of the attributes of true deity, even from a purely logical perspective, is perfection. What that means for the sons and daughters of God is that their perhaps deeply flawed earthly fathers have been replaced by a perfect Father. It is on this basis that real healing can begin from the wounds so many of us received as children, healing that the best secular psychology cannot work within us. When a bad dad gets replaced by an \u201cAbba\u201d the love we so needed, and did not have, becomes available to us right now.<\/p>\n
So if you live with the insecurity, pain and relational devastation that is the terrible legacy of abandonment or abuse by one of those \u201cbad dads\u201d here is one more reason to consider the Christian faith. What you may need is to be re-parented by the best parent that ever was, is, or will be and that parent is the Father of Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Copyright by Shea Oakley All rights reserved There is much talk today about father\u2019s and their impact on the lives of sons and daughters. Some of us were fortunate enough to have had wonderful men as dads; men who, by and large, were healthily loving towards us and present for us during the times it… <\/p>\n