The Book:
The Revelation:
Within the first few chapters of the book I realized I'm fatherless in a very Earthly way. I didn't think about it before now. I have a father but he was absent in childhood and in my more recent years he's really distant, more so a shadow father then a father (just so everyone is aware that is a reference to my fav show Grey's Anatomy you know like Shadow Shepherd as in the not as good as Dr. Shepherd Seattle Grace neurosurgeon... yep same thing). A shadow father isn't like a real dad he doesn't take you fishing or on father-daughter dates and he doesn't remind you that you mean the world to him or tell you that you're pretty and make you feel like you're the most important person in the world sometimes; he speaks to you while walking away, forgets important events and shows up late on your birthday if he shows up at all. When you have a shadow father you occasionally can forget how important you really are. I know I do. I don't blame my shadow father for my pain, I feel like I can't because he's a victim too, and his father wasn't even a shadow in his life. I suppose when you don't have a dad you don't really have the opportunity to learn how to be a dad. Whether or not he's at fault is not the issue at hand... it's the fact that having a shadow father has really broken me. I mean honestly to me I don't really have parents in the first place not in the traditional sense anyway. However my mom and I have come to some kind of understanding about the past and so we're moving forward but it can never be a traditional mother daughter relationship but it is a relationship, but my dad and I don't move in any direction. As a result in my personal life I don't move in any direction. I sit and wait for some kind of affirmation that may never come. I’m seeking some assurance that I might never get.
The BIGGER revelation:
I have reluctance to being in all relationships as well as an intense fear of intimacy. I'm aware I've been painfully aware for a long time but I never could figure out why. I now think it's because I have a shadow father as well as a "doesn't exist as far as I know" father. At several points in my life I've tired to deal with this and thought I succeed it but I only half succeed because I've only dealt with parts of the issue and thought that was good enough. It's not, that is a false assumption on my part on anyone's part really about any issue, if you don't deal with every part of an issue you can't be whole until you allow the entire wound to heal. It was a lot easier to cope with not having my mom around, because I had my Grandma. So I don't feel like I missed out on anything. She's one of the best things to ever happen to me. She was my mom so I don't have that void in my heart. I'm not missing the influence of a mother in my life. I always had one and I have like 70% of a second one and we're working on the rest, all I had to deal with was my hurt from my mom's absence. Hurt and a hole are on different ends of the spectrum. But I do have a huge hole in my heart because I don't know what it's like to have a good dad. Sometimes that affects my relationship with God. That's what I'm sitting before Him with. Sometimes I'm guilty of projecting my lack of expectation of my Earthly father onto my Heavenly Father. It actually happens more often then I would like to admit. Furthermore I'm also guilty of projecting my lack of trust in and my lowered expectations of my shadow father and my "doesn't exist as far as I know" father on every male I encounter. I've built this wall around my heart to keep people out. The problem is that I forgot it was there because it's a recessed wall but now I see that the wall has prevented me for getting closer to God. I've never noticed my distance from intimacy (with people in general not just males) I've also never noticed that sometimes when I fail to trust the LORD its because the image of God the Father sometimes resembles a shadow father in my head. EPIC FAIL on the part of my logic. I've realized that's part of what's going on in my heart right now. God's pointing to the recessed wall that's guarding my heart and saying, "I want in there, that spot right there, I want to tear that wall down and fill that hole that's the part of you that I need to fill to make you whole."
I think sometimes we, as people, are so broken that we don't even notice that we're broken but God knows and it's his desire to heal that brokenness and make us whole and he pursues us so he can heal us and occasionally we become aware of our brokenness while reading Donald Miller in a coffee shop.
