John Shore Christian Blog and Commentary

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Happy Father's Day! (Or Not!)

I'm not anti-Father's Day, or anything like that. And (what with having been born of one and all), I'm hardly anti-fathers.  My own father isn't a bad guy. Never meant anyone harm. Good provider. Didn't get high. Wasn't physically abusive. Didn't sleep around.

Not a bad dad, Chad!

Had problems, yes. Had problems enough, in fact, to help drive my sister from our home when she was fifteen years old, and me soon after my seventeenth birthday. Over the next twenty-five years of my life, I saw my father maybe three times.

Then I suddenly became a Christian, and found myself feeling a lot more loving and emotionally generous toward everyone -- including my dad. So I started writing him once a week.

And voila -- a year later, he was inviting my wife and me out to his home on the east coast. So we went, and had a perfectly lovely time visiting with him and his wife.

God heals all!

Father's Day does not, however, evoke in me warm and fuzzy feelings. It's just too late for that. I can't conjure up memories of my dad that I don't have -- and, sadly, the memories I do have (and I've got a freakishly good memory) don't exactly scream Happy Days.

If Father's Day makes you feel all warm and fuzzy towards your father, fantastic! Congratulations! A close relationship with one's parents is surely one of God's greatest blessings. You scored, for sure.

If Father's Day doesn't make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, though, please don't ever forget that you are hardly alone in that.

I have a friend whose father's idea of playing baseball with him was to sit in his car smoking and reading the paper while his son -- my friend -- threw a baseball into a mitt he had propped up against a backstop.

I have a friend whose father regularly punished him by locking him in a dark closet for six, eight hours at a time.

I have a friend whose father, when she was a young girl, and while she watched, purposefully broke the backs of some abandoned kittens she'd rescued and was raising.

Okay? And these are the things I can print.

We all know what kinds of nightmares fathers and stepfathers can wreak upon the lives of those they choose to victimize.

Point is: If you're someone for whom Father's Day brings more pain than pleasure, take comfort in the fact that that's true for a lot of other people, too -- and, frankly, for a lot of people who won't, or for whatever reason can't, admit it to themselves.

And that you had a bad or less-than-ideal dad is okay, too. In the end, in fact, it means nothing whatsoever. Because each of us, no matter what sort of earthly family we were born into, is ultimately, unconditionally, and bounteously loved by the first, last, and greatest father of all.