God fathered me through Facebook

Okay, so that's a stretch. How about, God gave man wisdom, who eventually created a program called Facebook where i was able to connect with a long lost, very special person from my past.? Through the wonders of technology, i connected to a man, whose father had an impact on me as an adolescent... more than 20 years ago.

I had been thinking of Stacey off and on throughout the years, always wanting to make contact with him. I wanted to thank him for spending time with me; for 'fathering me' when mine was away. Many years ago I sent him a letter to a last known address in another state - not knowing if he ever received it. Than a few months ago as I was searching people on Facebook I decided to put in his son's name - and I found him! I sent him a message, asking for his dad's email address and got it. And after about 25 years of not speaking to him... today we had lunch.

Stacey is his name and when I was somewhere around 11 he came into my life. He lived in the apartment below my mom and I. He would have been barely more than 30 himself. Not too long into our conversation today I asked him why he spent time with me. His answer was both insignificant, and very profound. He didn't think he was doing anything special. He recalls my mom may have asked him to invite me along when he went to do stuff - probably to give her a break. He thought he was just having me tag along; helping my mom out. But he was doing so much more.

He spent time with me. I would spend time with his three kids. That winter he took me with them on their family ski trip to Colorado. He took me a number of times to his family's farm in the summer. The memories just spilled over as we ate at a local restaurant. I can't sit here and rattle off life lessons Stacey taught me, or values he instilled in me. What I can tell you is that at a pivotal time in you youth, Stacey was a father figure for me.

I have been blessed to have other adult men who invested in me growing up. When i was younger I had regular visitation with my father, but it wasn't enough, and then he was stationed out of the country for a number of years and just gone. I was largely on my own to figure out how to be a boy, let alone be a man. And that has 'disaster' written on it from the start. But thank God for men like Mitch, Stacey, Jay T, and others who saw something in me...believed in me.

For those of you reading this, who share a similar story of a single parent home and the loss of an active father in your life... It is my desire that you also can reflect back to other men who spoke into your life during that crucial time of adolescence. Men who, without knowing it, filled some of that father-void your life. Take a moment and just sit in silence. Go back to those days of your youth. Ask God to reveal to you how He has fathered you as a boy. Who did he place in your life? If people come to mind, just bask in those memories. And then find them. Let them know what they meant to you. Thank them for their gift of time, validation, whatever it was for you. It took me about 25 years to find Stacey and it was all worth it.

And the next step for you, the step I've been thinking about doing since i left that restaurant today.... find a young boy to spend time with.

Enter Their World

Some thing I have been reading about in the last month deals with the issue of codependency. Codependency is that inability to remain ourselves around certain people. For the life of me it doesn't make sense. I have been working through the why for the last couple months. I took this question to a coworker of mine to try to get a sense of this phenomenon. Our conversation led to a great discovery.

The common theme of these people shared one component across the board. Absent fathers! Even fathers that may have been in their kids lives, but not taken an active interest in what they like doing. I have been tooting my own horn for years because of how easy it is for me to spend time with my kids. I take them to the store, take them golfing, take them on errands. How much better can a dad get? Well to my surpise, much better than what I am providing now!

What I struggle doing with my kids is entering their world. What do you mean? I am talking about getting to know what they like and liking that also. See, I don't like playing Barbies. Let me be more clear. I hate playing Barbies! I start yawning and within about 10 minutes I have figured out why it is time for dad to get up and go take care of bigger better things.

The discovery is that if the only thing I am asking them to do is enter my world, they will not see their world as being important. Ultimately they will go looking for people they can take care of. Meaning people that need them. In order for me to show my children that I am interested in them, I have to enter their world. Become intersted in the things that interest them.

A Nice Guy

(Ransomed heart Daily Reading)
And then, alas, there is the church. Christianity, as it currently exists, has done some terrible things to men. When all is said and done, I think most men in the church believe that God put them on the earth to be a good boy. The problem with men, we are told, is that they don’t know how to keep their promises, be spiritual leaders, talk to their wives, or raise their children. But, if they will try real hard they can reach the lofty summit of becoming . . . a nice guy. That’s what we hold up as models of Christian maturity: Really Nice Guys. We don’t smoke, drink, or swear; that’s what makes us men. Now let me ask my male readers: In all your boyhood dreams growing up, did you ever dream of becoming a Nice Guy? (Ladies, was the Prince of your dreams dashing . . . or merely nice?) Really now—do I overstate my case? Walk into most churches in America, have a look around, and ask yourself this question: What is a Christian man? Don’t listen to what is said, look at what you find there. There is no doubt about it. You’d have to admit a Christian man is . . . bored. At a recent church retreat I was talking with a guy in his fifties, listening really, about his own journey as a man. “I’ve pretty much tried for the last twenty years to be a good man as the church defines it.” Intrigued, I asked him to say what he thought that was. He paused for a long moment. “Dutiful,” he said. “And separated from his heart.” A perfect description, I thought. Sadly right on the mark. (Wild at Heart , 7)

What Role Are You Playing?

(Ransomed Heart Daily Reading)

We come into the world with a longing to be known and a deep-seated fear that we aren’t what we should be. We are set up for a crisis of identity. And then, says Frederick Buechner, the world goes to work: 

Starting with the rather too pretty young woman and the charming but rather unstable young man, who together know no more about being parents than they do the far side of the moon, the world sets in to making us what the world would like us to be, and because we have to survive after all, we try to make ourselves into something that we hope the world will like better than it apparently did the selves we originally were. That is the story of all our lives, needless to say, and in the process of living out that story, the original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us hardly end up living out of it at all. Instead, we live out all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather. (Telling Secrets) 

Think about the part you find yourself playing, the self you put on like a costume. Who cast you in this role? Most of us are living out a script that someone else has written for us. We’ve not been invited to live from our heart, to be who we truly are, so we put on these false selves hoping to offer something more acceptable to the world, something functional. We learn our roles starting very young and we learn them well. 

(The Sacred Romance , 84–85)