For most of my life I dreaded Father's Day. It was easy to ignore as a child but social media made this day impossible to ignore for at least a few years. I grew up with a mother who played both roles of mother and father. My mom was a young mother and had me only twelve days after her sixteenth birthday. She was urged to give me up and heck, one doctor even tried to get her to sell me but she raised me herself and gave me the best life she could. As a child it's easy to fantasize about someone who is not there to destroy that fantasy with his reality. It's easy in the darkness to imagine everything a young girl believes a father should be and yearn for those sweet moments that I would watch on television or see between my friends and their fathers. I heard lots of stories growing up about this man and none were positive but I just knew that my entire family was wrong. My little girl heart wanted it to be untrue so badly. A little girl's heart is a funny thing in the way it can heal the brokenness with a little imagination.
As a teenager the brokenness became harder to heal and took more than imagination so as most fatherless teenage girls do I tried to get attention elsewhere which we all know leads to a path of more feelings of abandonment, rejection, and hurt. At seventeen years old I made the decision to contact my biological father. I can tell you there was nothing scarier than having that conversation with my mother who had sacrificed everything for me. Once again I am sure my mother put aside her own feelings and helped me locate his address. I wrote him a letter. It was not an angry letter, I did not demand answers or try to make him feel bad. I just knew that I had felt bad about this situation for far too long and I needed to try to heal myself. I told him about me and I offered forgiveness with no expectations.
One night after I got home from work I walked in my home to find my mom on the phone. She told me someone wanted to talk to me and handed me the phone. I heard a voice I had both never heard before and heard a thousand times in my own head. We talked for a while and he told me everything I had waited so long to hear. He told me that he had thought about me every day and that he had so much to tell me but wanted to do it in person. We planned our next conversation and I hung up the phone over the moon. That feeling didn't last very long. A week went by. Then two weeks. And those feelings of abandonment, rejection, and hurt crept back in. I reached out, for the last time. I called. He answered. And I'll never forget this conversation. I wasn't angry. I didn't cry. Calmly I told him, "Every question I had you answered by not calling me back." I won't go into the details about the conversation that followed out of respect and because as crazy as it sounds I do feel very protective over this conversation because it changed me and healed me. I was able to see with clear eyes who he was and I was able to truly forgive him.
That was the last time I spoke to my biological father. I think a lot of people would be angry but I am so thankful. I got my answers. If I never would have reached out to him I would have spent my adult years wishing he was a part of them. I wouldn't have been able to enjoy my uncle walking me down the aisle because I would be too sad that my fantasy dad wasn't there. Instead I was able to truly be in the moment with a man I would lose just one year later. And finally, I am so thankful that God protected my heart for seventeen years. It didn't feel like protection at the time but I see it that way now. I am able to see just how much God protected me from feelings of disappointment until I was ready and able to handle the disappointment.
This day is no longer hard for me. I have the very best husband who is such a great father to our little ones. I celebrate this day now instead of hiding from it. And now that I have a little girl who has her daddy wrapped around her finger this day has such an even bigger importance to me. I love seeing the posts on Facebook that many of my friends share praising their fathers and I especially love the photos that accompany the posts. I think about the pictures my friends will post today of themselves as little girls with their father, pictures on their wedding day with their fathers or pictures of themselves today with their fathers and I think back on my own pictures. I won't ever have a picture like that and maybe you won't either. But I do know that if we were able to capture our Heavenly Father in a picture we would be able to look back on photos of ourselves as a little girl, or pictures on our wedding day, and we'd be able to see God standing there beaming with pride the way only a Father could.
Dear Father God,
Today I pray for all of those who struggle on this day. Lord I pray for the hearts who yearn for a relationship with their earthly fathers. Father, remind us that we are not fatherless on this Father's Day. I am so thankful, Lord, that we do not have to earn your love and that you give it away freely. Father, I am so thankful that your love is unconditional. Lord, I pray for those fathers who stayed away. I pray for restoration if it is your will, God. Lord I pray for the men who step up to be fathers to children who are not their own. I pray for all the fathers in our lives, Lord, that they live a life that exalts you and makes you proud. Lord, heal broken hearts on this day. Thank you for loving us.
Psalms 68:5 "A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling." NIV
Job 29:12 "Because I rescued the poor who cried for help, and the fatherless who had none to assist them." NIV
Psalms 10:14 "But you, God, see the trouble of the afflicted; you consider their grief and take it in hand. The victims commit themselves to you; you are the helper of the fatherless." NIV
Zechariah 7:10 "Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other." NIV
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