The Father Wound

What is a Father?  We ask this question, don’t we?

One of the central relationships we deal with in Thrive groups is our relationship with a “Father”.  For many this is a troublesome, even loaded word.  It may include ignorance, rejection, and even abuse.  We suffer the unintended consequences of another person’s brokenness.  We arrive with a story about a relationship with a man who didn’t always know what he was doing. The smoldering sting of our father’s words haunt us in ways we can’t understand.

We simply long to hear the words, “You are worth it,” or “I love you.”

And to make matters worse, many of us are struggling with what it means to be a father.  The story we have about what it means is often something we don’t know how to deal with.  So we passively reject the story we’ve been given by our Father, one that includes rejection itself.  And in it’s absence we try and figure it out on our own, drowning at times under our own fear of failure. We know what the consequences are.  We’ve lived them.

But this rejection of our own story has a way of continuously perpetuating itself.  A father’s inability to understand what to do is often interpreted as something more than it is.  What the child hears is what we heard.  “You are not worth it.”  And as a four year old child, how would we know that our father was scared to death, trembling at the weight of what it means to parent another soul.  How would we know that the silence was a frozen confusion, perpetuating itself into an angry fear.

Little do we know that the loss we feel is the same loss our Father’s felt from their fathers.  The story has a way of repeating itself, over and over and over again. This is the father wound.

What is profound about the narrative in Scripture is that God identifies Himself as Father.  He actively seeks out a relationship, once that calls us to restoration, wholeness and maturity.  And as followers of Jesus, we are first called to restore this relationship, with our Heavenly Father.  This journey is often fraught with fear, and can include a step into and through the pain of this wound.  But it is this first relationship with the Father that validates us, loves us and restores us.

Two thirds of Scripture is God actively seeking out His children.  And the pinnacle of the story is God the Father actively revealing Himself through His Son Jesus, the Imago Dei.  And the more we get to know Jesus, the more we begin to realize that He’s not like what we’re used to.  He’s longs to spend time with us, restore us to wholeness, and see us mature.  His love for us reveals that we are worth it.

So rewriting our story becomes the journey.  Seeing this love in our tribe becomes the chapters.  And embracing His love becomes our salvation.