I used to have a difficult relationship with my old man.
Living on a different continent was enough distance and allowed me to chart the course I wanted.
Or so I thought.
I carried the bitterness and anger wherever I went. It started bubbling in ways that were not pretty around the global financial crisis. Maybe the financial pressure was leading me to crack.
My brother-in-law gave me the book Prodigal God by Tim Keller in about 2008 or 2009. It was about a story Jesus told about the Prodigal Son. The character leaves for a distant land, turning his back on family, and life goes off the rails.
With nowhere else to go, he decides to head back home, where he expects to work his way back and make things right. His father has a plan of his own, and that is to welcome him back into the family lavishly.
Reading the book made me reflect on being a dad but more on the son I was to my dad.
I saw Tim at a conference and got to meet his team. I told them how much I loved the book. They hooked me up with more copies, study guides, and the DVD.
I formed a group with a couple of dads, and we went through it together and loved it.
The extra copies filled a significant portion of my bookshelf.
It didn’t resolve the seething anger that was always bubbling underneath the surface of my life. I would blow at the most minor things, especially when things didn’t go my way.
At a church service, God revealed that my unwillingness to forgive was eating me alive, and I needed to do something.
This was my first round of therapy. I entered with the specific intent of forgiving my father.
It was months and months of brutal work that brought up my inability to be vulnerable or even cry.
This went on for six months, and my parents were coming to visit us in Chicago for a couple of weeks in the summer. With the therapist, I practiced bringing the issues up with my dad and telling him I forgave him.
It got close to the date, and I talked to the therapist about how I couldn’t do it. All the options and solutions the therapist brought up seemed impossible.
I wanted to forgive him. I didn’t want to forgive him.
When he arrived, every conversation I had with my dad about the small stuff, I tried to shift to the immense subject I had been working on. It was always in the back of my mind, but I couldn’t make the pivot. There never seemed to be an opening.
My dad reads a lot of books and has motored through the ones he brought on the trip. He asked if I had any books he could read. We went down to the basement and took a look through my bookshelf.
He noticed that all the copies of Prodigal God took up shelf space and asked why I had so many. I told him about the small group I led.
I told him the book was about the essential element of Christianity: the gospel and the good news of the Heavenly Fathers acceptance of us all.
He was deciding between a couple of books, so I said, “You should read this one.” So we headed back upstairs with the book.
We went to the gym every morning. It had an indoor walking track, and then he would swim some laps while I lifted weights.
A couple of days later, we got to the gym and walked around the track, and he asked me, “What’s a small group?”
He wasn’t a churchgoer or familiar with church culture, so I explained it. Saying it is like a book club, but we pray and share what’s going on in our lives and what we got out of the section of the book we were reading.
Then he asked, “What did you get out of this book?”
I answered, “It made me realize I wanted a better relationship with you.”
He responded excitedly, “Shit, mate, I was thinking the same thing!”
While walking, I shifted the conversation and brought up the things in my upbringing that had made our relationship hard. “Getting sent to boarding school, the beatings, especially when I get suspended from boarding school, and being unable to come home on school holidays and get sent off to work on farms.”
He stopped walking and started balling his eyes out. He is a big guy and kept shrugging his shoulders as he wept, saying repeatedly, “I’m so sorry.”
We hugged right there in the gym, and I said, “It was really hard, but I have forgiven you.”
We stood hugging and crying on the walking track for what seemed like an eternity.
In no condition to work out, we decided to head home.
My wife and mum were there and surprised that we were home so early and, seeing the condition of our faces, wanted to know what happened.
We sat down, cried some more, and talked about how we had a beautiful moment at the gym and reconciled our relationship.
The next day I headed off to Camp Paradise with my oldest daughter. She was 8 and the first time going to the Camp. It is a nine hour drive away in the upper peninsular of Michigan. It is just father-daughter, and there is no running water, electricity, or cell phone service.
The trip is five days long. The first and last days are travel days, giving you three solid days of solitude and one-on-one time with your kid.
I spent the entire time crying.
When we were inside, I sat at the back and wore sunglasses so people couldn’t tell the condition of my eyes.
I had spent so long being mad at my dad, and now I couldn’t hold it against him anymore. I had gotten past the anger and tapped into sorrow which seemed bottomless.
There was so much loss. Including loss of identity. The drive to try and prove him wrong, that I could make it on my and show him that he was wrong about me.
On the last day, I was alone on the deck overlooking the river. I tried to engage in the study and the materials they prepared, but it all sucked. There were questions on how to rate yourself from 0 to 10 on a bunch of different things.
I was self-critical and could only rate myself as a failure in every measure.
I decided not to engage the material and headed to the outhouse on the other side of Camp. There was nothing else to do.
It was there in a composting outhouse that God spoke to me. Saying, “It’s not up to you to make things right in your life. It’s my job. Take my hand and follow me. I am going to finish what I started in you.”
I was surrounded by the incredible beauty of an endless forest and a huge river. Why could he have spoken to me there?
The weight was lifted, and my demeanor changed. The sorrow immediately changed to joy and gratitude.
If fact, my whole life changed.
I no longer needed to work or earn my way back to the love and acceptance I yearned for. It was given to me. I had it already.
I experienced grace and understood the gospel.
I am grateful for the book by Tim Keller to present the gospel in a way that was accessible. And for all his other writings that have helped me understand the Savior more deeply.
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