Spiritual Survival Guide
5: Complicated Stuff
In a way, what each one of us needs to do is to pick his fruit. The fruits of success inevitably grow tasteless and don’t satisfy. The fruits of the streets grow bitter and go rotten. But the fruits of the Spirit just keep growing sweeter and feed others. You’re a man: this is a decision you need to make for your own life. Do you want to be an empty suit, a street hustler, or God’s man? Choose your fruit, and what kind of man you want to be, and plant yourself there. The father-problem. Let’s be honest and just deal with this issue head-on. We have a serious “father problem” on our hands. It probably afflicts 99% of the guys who are locked up, and lots of guys who aren’t. Sometimes the problem is “the father I never knew.” Lots of us never had any meaningful relationship with our biological fathers. They were missing in action. For the rest of us, our problem was “the dysfunctional father I did know”— who was unreliable, untrustworthy, disengaged, drunk, or violent. Either way—whether our fathers were absent or dysfunctional—we were wounded as boys. This isn’t just some psycho-babble. This is the honest- to-God truth. As boys, we didn’t get the fatherly love and support we needed. We didn’t get the practical wisdom we needed. We didn’t have a father around to model healthy, godly living for us. Over the years, lots of us responded to that wound by going into denial mode: “He didn’t care about me. I don’t care about him.” But we did care, of course. We were hurt, ashamed, or filled with rage. But since we were taught to be “strong,” we covered up our feelings. We were told that we had to be “the man of the house,” but nobody ever showed us what that was supposed to look like. Truth was, we were simply too young too take on such a huge responsibility. We still needed fathering ourselves. And so, instinctively, some of us found ourselves drawn to the gang to find acceptance and support, to try to grab some of what we were missing from our real fathers.
Let’s be clear on this: we are not saying that our fathers are to blame for the situation we find ourselves in. That would be a lie and a cop-out. But at the same time, we do need to face up to the ugly truth that, for many of us, those childhood wounds inflicted by our absent or dysfunctional fathers are real and deep and have never properly healed. We’re not going to get better until we wise up and realize this fundamental fact. Unless we men see the truth of what we’re doing to each other and deal with it (in- cluding finding a way to forgive it), we’re just going to keep on repeating the same ugly cycle with our own kids. That brings us to the question of how well we’re doing as fathers. One guy recently told us, “Anybody can be a dad, but only one man can be a kid’s biological father.” He was feeling cut off from one of his daughters but still proudly holding on to the fact that he was her biological father. We understand his point, but we think that’s exactly backward thinking! Let’s face it: most any guy can get a woman pregnant. It’s not all that difficult. But we think it takes a real man to be that child’s dad—to be that provid- ing, nurturing influence day in and day out. You may be thinking, “Yes! That’s exactly what I want to do. I want to begin to break the cycle and begin to be a better dad now!” You may long to be like the father in the book of Proverbs who says things like, “My child, if you accept my words …” or “My child, do not forget my teach- ing …” or “My child, be attentive to my wisdom …” (check out the first eight chapters of the book of Proverbs, right in the middle of the Bible). But here’s the thing: the voice of the wise father in the book of Proverbs also said, “When I was a son with my father, tender, and my mother’s favorite, he taught me and said to me, ‘Let your heart hold fast to my words; keep my commandments, and live.” The problem is, few of us had that same experience. We didn’t grow up with a wise father. We certainly weren’t treated tenderly by him. We weren’t taught his wisdom or how to live by his commandments. For us, the chain of wisdom was a broken one.
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