Fathers, Faith, And Sacrifice: The Burden Of Love

It’s Father’s Day soon!

It’s Father’s Day this weekend. ‘Dad’s Day! Fathers, faith, sacrifice and the burden of it all. A couple of weeks ago, we raised mothers up to pipes and drums. Well, maybe it was just me. Moms don’t care, normally, for bagpipes. Now, we have God, dads, and love’s burden. Yes, love-when done well, can be burdensome.

A father has the ability to be the model of real love. There is no harder job, no job more non-prestigious, more costly, more painful, more of a living example of sacrificial love then a dad. If we do it right, we die about fifteen years in front of our wives from shear wear and tear. Fifteen years-if they are close in age to their spouse. Which makes it weird if he’s seventy-two and she’s twenty-three, the math rules don’t work with that situation but work with me here. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/insideourgooeyminds/2025/02/blessings-in-challenging-lives/ So, how does it relate to God and dads?

Men, specifically dads, in general and specifically the last few decades, have not come through well. I am including all dads in this list because every one of us has failed at some point-many times. We all have, at times, crapped our pants. And it seems the father, in that coupled parent relationship, is the one who ‘quits.’ We, the rest of us who somehow got off the beach, need to be reminded we are also responsible for our brothers who struggle. We live in a community, and that community is constantly under attack by the Evil One.

When we fail….

When a man quits his family, the damage is monumental. Don’t get me wrong, like I said, men will-daily, fail. The question is, does he get back up again? https://www.patheos.com/blogs/insideourgooeyminds/2025/01/is-god-in-my-struggle/ . But most importantly, do we, as men believe God-our Father, actually lives in us the moment we dare to believe He is who He has said He is? This is the key to everything-that belief.

Do we, as men and fathers, come along side, grab each other’s arm, and affirm them gently as men can do to each other “Come on! I got you. We got to move our asses!” A father has a big trashcan lid size target on his chest. Evil locks in and throws the Holy Mother of the Madagascarian Spears at him. Evil does everything to bring him down, and if Evil gets that man to quit the struggle, it will cripple the family. Most of the time, Evil just needs to put doubt in the man’s mind and stand back. The family can still ‘function’ because the wife, born to hump baskets of rocks over the Alps while carrying their child, will take over-alone. But why the hell should she?

Every day…..

A friend of mine, John Lynch, a pastor and public speaker on Grace said it beautifully-

‘Every day; every single day, there is opposition to your very person existing on this planet.
You can sometimes feel it. Something’s off. Again. You can feel lacking. Like what you bring is not enough. You can feel like you don’t fit in. And there are all manner of lingering, unsolved, unresolved experiences of failure and regret from just existing amongst others on this broken ball…. He (Jesus) is actively caring for you in the potential distortion and deceit of every moment you walk into. He is never disgusted with your inability. https://mailchi.mp/johnlynchspeaks/five-truths?e=f2cee58318

You are viewed by God as courageous.

You are viewed by God as courageous for bravely facing life with your particular limitations, doubts, and fears.

Listen dads-you, me, your son, will all fail—daily. It’s because we are wearing those big-ass targets on our chests. Satan plays to our weaknesses-pride, fear of failure, vanity-all of them. We are being targeted to take three below the waterline. Evil thinks he can do that, and frankly, he is successful-a lot. Advisor https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/divorce/divorce-statistics/

…what is our recourse?

But what is our recourse? We can divorce, find someone else, grow distant, drink or gamble our problems away. People will say-both men and women, ‘hey, Williams-I have the right to be happy.’ Here is my non-clinical answer. “No, WE don’t.” We have an obligation we volunteered for ever since we promised at our wedding to ‘…for better or worse.’ Do you know how much ‘worse’ is? No, you don’t! You won’t for a while. None of us do. Not until we actually experience it. We were young and hormonal when we made that promise. If we wrote our own vows, we would promise ‘I will dry your tears with our hair’ or something similar. ‘Happiness, true happiness we seek doesn’t truly happen outside of a relationship with Jesus. Doing life outside of Him-it’s liked capped teeth. The teeth are real, they’re just not, well, real.

You will fail.

Badly.

Repeatedly.

Depressingly.

What can we do?

C.S. Lewis said Surely, what a man does when he is in an uncomfortable situation is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.

Think about that for a moment

Think about that for a moment. You’re not tested when you’re lying on the beach with a Mai-Tai, your diamond shoes fit, and you wake up to your wife curled up on her side of the bed, staring at you with a smile and when you ask why she is staring with a smile she says ‘I could not believe I could have such a great lover.’ Yeah, I know! She is actually talking about you!

You actually might have some elements or combinations of those great moments in between your rounds of beach volleyball in your mind. Then comes your mother’s cancer, flat tire on the freeway, water leak in the attic, no money for kids’ college, your wife reminding you again to make an appointment with the urologist to fix your erectile disfunction issue. What did we say-vanity, pride, fear of failure?

And Evil smiles.

You can buck up, strap it down, and move on. Maybe you can stuff your feelings and continue like nothing happened. Most men do.

Or—

In the quiet confines of your car/truck, on your way to work, walking around the block, sitting by the pool or on your ice chest lunch box as you lay asphalt on a different section of the city’s streets in the depth of summer, you can start talking to your greatest Hero.

Abba-Dad

Abba—Dad.

Be prepared to start crying as you sip on your coffee you traditionally make to take with you to work. I don’t cry, Mark.

You will.

When I did it, tears ran down my face-neck, shirt. I loved it! You start to feel an emotion as you half-assed start your conversation using all those ‘holy phrases.’ “Oh, thouest, most infinite Lord of the Earth and moon….’ Or some crap like that. Hey, just talk to Him!

“Dad, I don’t even know how to spell your name. I want to leave my wife, my family. I don’t want to deal with our kid’s autism; or that X-ray of whatever that is on my wife’s brain. I want that chick in the Xerox room who said I am hot like a tuna sandwich….”

Frankly, you are. You stayed in shape and you make your side of the bed and put the toilet seat down. That’s attractive to wives. But this is hard, Mark.

Hell yes it’s hard! Some groups of men have a higher failure rate than others. Across all economic lines, cultures. But when you look at single family homes, almost seventy percent are fatherless, not motherless. You don’t know it yet, but you have 48 years and six months more to go before your ass is found in a nice house and the police having to break in because the neighbors were complaining of a ‘smell.’ You made it to Heaven, but it’s going to take a while.

Your life is a street fight….

Your life is a street fight sometimes, and you don’t even know it. Every man, whether he is sitting on his lunch Igloo under the shade of a Chilian Mesquite tree or wearing a tailored Ralph Lauren suit is in the same fight. When things seem calm, they could be, given to you by the God of the Universe because you needed a breather.

Tomorrow, it starts up again. You promised, in front of a boat load of witnesses, or just between the two of you, you’re going to dry her tears with your hair when you were young. No, you’re not. The words are great. But when she is throwing up on your shoes from her alcohol history or the chemo from the cancer she got, you’re looking at her as if she’s a complete stranger. Then, the unspeakable happens, you wish her long struggle would just end. You actually wish her to have her life-end. Yeah, you will.

We, as men, loose our bravado when we face the dark part of our brain. If we tell someone, we imagine we will lose our status in their eyes and guess what, sometimes you will. Then, you remember you were having that conversation with God in your car or your walk and you find yourself imagining Him again with you and imagine you’re at your favorite restaurant-talking at the bar.

And the old man….

And the old man, with the silvery grey hair pulled back in a ponytail, turning the scotch glass with a gnarled hand and a lemon rind in it, looks over at you. He whispers—”Do you trust me?”

So, on Father’s Day, I try with this ramble to identify and remind you-me-my brothers, what we are fighting, but also who we have living IN us-

On this day, you—fathers, I remind you you stand between Evil’s army and your family. Metaphorically, you have a bad knee, a sharp stick, a dull knife, and two rounds for a gun you don’t think you own, to defend them with. That’s it—that’s your only earthy defense. Dawn will bring a wave of badness. You just know it. There is an assumption you will get gobbled up and your family will have to deal with the limp of no father, eventually passed down to the sons and the daughters to continue the brokenness.

The wife will remarry a guy named Redondo who is a second-string pro-soccer player from Uruguay. She’s ‘happy’ in a way like taking ibuprofen instead of acetaminophen, for the rest of her life or until the soccer player runs off with a waitress from Tulsa. Your wife just longs for love and a partner. You’re tired and beat up and want to quit. You think it’s you who has to do it all and you are never-ever good enough in your own eyes let alone hers. You want to run away with the Peruvian chick with the clubbed foot. It’s sexy. But—you can’t get that guy turning the whiskey glass out of your mind—

–that guy at the end of the bar sitting next to you in your mind.

“Do you trust me?’

“Do you trust me?” as you notice he sips a really bad ‘War’ scotch. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20John%204%3A7&version=NIV

You lower your head, almost to the bar, and begin to draw tears. You’re exhausted. Your performance isn’t working.

It is so hard. “I need to do better,” you mumble with snot coming out of your nose.

The old man smiles. “No, you don’t.”

“But, I have screwed up.”

“Yep, and you’ll do it again too. You just need to believe it’s all done. You won. I’m in you. And you, my adopted son, are in Me. There is nothing more you need to do except enjoy this, right now. The day of badness, it will happen, but I am with you-in you. The Plan is perfect.

There’s got to be something I need to do and the answer is yes, there is.