8. He's a Good, Good Father....

How the fierce intimacy of parenthood began to stress my theological framework to its limits.

It is late and I am cradling my firstborn child in my arms. In order to get her to sleep, most nights she would require us to rock her continuously until her eyes finally closed. As she lay there in my arms, the intensity of my love for her was overwhelming. I cared about this little girl with an intensity I had never experienced before. I was deeply invested in the flourishing of her life and the thought of, I would do anything to protect her and ensure she did not get harmed, crossed my mind.

I remember that moment so vividly because even as I type these words, I tear up. That thought still brings me an immense amount of pain today. Because even though my love for her is pure and untainted, it simultaneously highlights the insufficiencies of my own father’s love, and even more than that, God as a father over me.

The thought that crashed into my mind was a logic loop I could not solve, How could I love my little girl and be willing to do anything to protect her, and God love me with that same fatherly love yet allow the terrible things to happen to me that I would never allow to happen to my daughter if I had the power to stop them?

That episode of deep pain began showing up more and more frequently in me. While things kept getting better for me in many ways, a high paying job with a meaningful mission, a new house to be proud of in the country club, and our first daughter, my deep seated trauma began to surface in ways I did not see coming. My daughter’s birth caused me to confront the realities of my lack of fatherly love in a visceral way that I had been able to suppress throughout most of my adult life.

A Lowering of The Wall

By the end of my senior year I had realized that I wanted to pursue a PhD in theology. Nothing mattered as much as knowing the truth of the Gospel and telling others about it, so it made perfect sense that I would pursue a religious career instead of a secular one.

However, my wife needed to finish her master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy, so we decided that we would stay in Stillwater until she finished her schooling before we would move to Louisville, Kentucky for me to complete my master’s degree at Southern Seminary, the flagship Baptist college. In the meantime, I would start my master’s online while she was finishing her degree, so I enrolled in my first class, early church history.

I was excited about starting school, and at the time, I was the store manager at a local mattress store. I loved that job because in between customers, the environment allowed me to do my classwork during work. I was really excited to begin this class because this timeframe from the Apostles to the Reformation was something I knew almost nothing about, which ironically made up the majority of Christian history.

What I began to realize from this class was how much the early church struggled to make sense of Jesus. There was not a fully formed consensus on who he was, how he related to God, and even how the church should be structured.

Logically, you would think that this would have destabilized me based on my need for certainty. But what it did was actually allow me to feel better about uncertainty and the messiness of life. It was still the same basic software, but it was allowing for God to be trusted to straighten out the mess of life and people to get us to the perfect code. The implicit thought I had was if God could work through the mess of these early church fathers, he could handle the messiness of life.

A New Mission

While in the middle of my semester of online seminary, I got an offer to come and work for a Christian Real Estate Company that had built a property in Stillwater. The owner of the company called me on the phone of the mattress store to offer me a job. He started out by pitching the role and asked me if I had any interest. I told him I appreciated the offer but I enjoyed my current job, was in seminary, and planned to move in a couple of years.

He did not take no for an answer and proceeded to tell me about the Christian mission of the company and the pay. He told me that they had the goal of eventually giving away 90% of their profits to spreading the message of Christianity and only keeping 10% of the profits to pay for operations. He also said that he would give a significant amount of money to my home church each year as well. I jokingly told him he should have led with that and I would consider his offer. I joined the company a week later.

By the end of my first and only seminary class, my thoughts on the rigidity of theology had begun to soften. It is not that I did not think a literalist interpretation was necessary any longer, it is just that I had moved the goalposts. In many ways, thanks to my emotionally healthy wife, I started to see the unhealthiness of how an incredibly tall brick theological wall was isolating and too heavy.

I thought I could remove the top few layers of the wall. The bottom layers, the orthodox beliefs of the scripture, still felt essential because they ultimately kept the uncertainty of life and the fear of death at bay. But with this new found revelation and this new job, I thought maybe this career could be how I make an impact in the world for Jesus. So I poured my heart and soul into growing this company.

Little did I realize that while this was definitely an improved, updated software to my previous extremely rigid literalist framework, it still contained the same core root issues that would ultimately lead to a later collapse.

A Last Visit

While I was learning how to be a protective father to my daughter, my own father was still pretty absent in my life. While he had quit doing meth, he had become a full on alcoholic that was drunk most days. He had only visited me one time since I moved to Stillwater, which was for my daughter’s first birthday.

I had heard from my mom that he had an incident of blacking out while driving and had lost his license. From my background in nutrition, I knew about the symptoms of liver failure, and the last time I had seen my father he had been showing most of the signs. Therefore, after I heard about this incident, I decided that I needed to see him again because I did not know how much time he had left.

I called him and asked him if I could come and pick him up so he could stay the night with us. He agreed to it and we set a date.

When I showed up to pick him up, he had clearly been drinking and I could smell the alcohol on his breath. However, he was very pleasant, kind, and playful, the fun cool dad that I always loved. His visit to our house was mostly uneventful. He stayed the night and we went out for lunch the following day before I drove him back home.

Our conversations were mostly shallow and I could tell his mental state was declining rapidly. When I got to his house, I hugged him a powerful long hug. No one hugged me as powerfully as he did and I loved it.

I drove home from dropping him off reflecting on how bad he looked and how sad I felt about his lack of care for himself. When I got home to decompress with Mary, I told her with tears in my eyes, I think that will most likely be the last time I see my father alive.

I hated that I was right.


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