The Father Effect by John Finch

Author:John Finch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: FaithWords
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

If I had to guess, most children of the fatherless fall squarely into the second camp.

I certainly did.

Just Like Dad

Somewhere along the way—maybe it was from TV or the example set by my friends’ fathers—I thought that obtaining love from your father meant you had to earn it. I didn’t have a word for it back then, but I now know that this is called “performance-based love.” Whether a father actually loves his child based on their performance isn’t the point. If the child feels that he or she must act right to be acceptable to Dad, then that relationship is tainted with performance-based love.

And that kind of relationship translates all too easily to a child’s relationship with God.

For years, I saw God as a dictator focused solely on discipline and punishment for my inevitable mistakes, like not telling my mom about finding my dad’s gun. I felt that I could never measure up to God’s perfect standards. I thought that no matter what I did, it would never be good enough for God to love me.

If I experienced major issues or decided life wasn’t going the way I wanted it to, I believed it was because I wasn’t close enough to God. I thought that I should be reading my Bible more, or praying more. I saw God as a sort of bank teller. Whatever I put in was what I’d eventually receive, maybe with a few dollars of interest.

Even when I felt somewhat closer to God, or when life seemed to be going well for a time, I’d cautiously wait for the other shoe to drop. In the back of my mind during those good times, I’d hesitantly think, Well, something bad’s going to happen sooner or later. Guess I just need to enjoy this until reality busts down my front door again.

At other times, I just felt that God had been removed from my life. He existed, but I wasn’t sure He really cared about what I was doing—unless I was doing something wrong. Plus, I laid the blame for my father’s death squarely on God’s shoulders. If God really loved me, He wouldn’t have let my father take his own life. He would have used His powers to prevent that from happening so I wouldn’t get hurt.

For what it’s worth, that’s not God. That’s a broken, fatherless boy’s poor theology in the midst of intense personal pain.

Unfortunately, much of what I’d gathered from my father’s friends and the churches I attended while growing up didn’t help sway my distorted view of God. He was all about what I wasn’t supposed to do. Even as an adult, guilt would cause me to believe that God was already disappointed with me, which would then lead me to believe that I might as well keep sinning. He couldn’t become more disappointed, right?

I used this terrible theology as my own free pass. I would do wrong to convince myself of my guilt, and in my guilt I would continue to do wrong.

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