Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 304 | What Do You Do When the Dad is Missing?

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Ep. 304 | What Do You Do When the Dad is Missing? · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  You're experiencing healing from your past through embracing your role as a father in your family.
• 0:14
  Hey guys, welcome to the 5-Minute Fatherhood Podcast. So I got a question from my daughter just last week. She was having some time with a really close friend of hers. And her friend has a really kind of a tragic element to their family story. She lost her dad when her friend was pretty young. And she said, so what do you do when an important team member is missing, like the dad?
• 0:41
  And that's a really obviously practical question as well, because for so many people, I think now it's more than 50 percent of people actually live most of their childhood without the constant input of their biological father. So this isn't certainly is no longer the exception to the rule. Yeah.
• 1:02
  And so, yeah, Jeff, I wanted you to tease this out a little bit. The one thing that I wanted to share is just the heart of God as Father for people that are in this situation. One of my favorite passages that really reflects...
• 1:18
  God's heart as a father is in Psalm 65. It says, Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation. God settles the solitary in a home. He leads out the prisoners to prosperity, but the rebellious dwell in a parched land.
• 1:36
  And part of what this is just describing is God as father really has a special relationship with the fatherless. And it's his intention to settle them in a home and to make sure that they have that family experience. And oftentimes, of course, when that's been taken from you in childhood, God will want to give that to you.
• 1:59
  through your families, you begin to establish a family into adulthood. But I think that when you are thinking about your past in this way, it's important to, instead of maybe saying, it doesn't matter, you know, it's just as good to have a childhood without a father.
• 2:14
  Um, that's not helpful to, to sort of, uh, I know that that kind of can ease some of the pain in a short term, but I, I believe it a better way to, to kind of work through that loss is to really acknowledge it as a loss and grieve what was lost and say, man, that really sucks. You know, like I, I,
• 2:35
  that I really suffered through childhood because of this. And I know that it was God's plan or God's design, maybe a better way to say it, God's design for me to have experienced life in an intact home or with my dad. But through whatever circumstances that happened,
• 2:53
  That was not something that I got to experience. So grieving that, I think, so that you don't speak a lie over family. Your ideas of family don't get twisted or changed, but that you say, yeah, that is a real loss. And then I think...
• 3:08
  in your relationship with God as your father, receive the special grace that Psalm 65 is describing. Father of the fathers and protector of the widows is God in his holy habitation. It's God's intention to redeem that experience. And you gotta give God time to do that. But that is his intention. And he is going to be actively working on your behalf to help you have this experience. This is what it says at the next verse. God settles the solitary in a home.
• 3:37
  And for a lot of you guys listening to this, you're experiencing healing from your past through embracing your role as a father in your family. And it's important to connect those two things together. But Jeff, yeah, how have you thought through this one?
• 3:55
  Yeah, I totally agree. I think you have to like not just have a more realistic. How do I say this? Like, it's not just like hunkered down. That's not the answer. But there is a level of when you know that a mission doesn't disappear, then you
• 4:11
  You like an organism, you kind of reframe yourself, not not necessarily saying that, you know, like if you lose your leg, that's not saying, oh, I should have just lost my leg from the beginning. But there is something of adaption that happens that like, you know what I mean? And I think of like all these hard stories of trying to think of the one I read.
• 4:28
  uh, weeks ago when I was doing some research of like a family that like basically got in a plane crash and like the sun and maybe like one person survived and they had to kind of, you know, hike out and they, it was a crazy story of like survival without their normal leadership and parents or whatever, you know? Um, and there's just something about when you still have to survive, when you still have to have a mission, when you're still doing something, there is, there is a grace about which the mission creates a resilience and,
• 4:53
  So, you know, like, or that you just, you still have to move forward. Right. I think sometimes we think of like, there's a weird thing because we don't always believe in the mission of the family that sometimes we believe, well, if that's not there, then I just like, then I don't believe in this or we don't need to do anything. Right. Right. When they're, so there's that. And then also. Family's not for me or something.
• 5:11
  Exactly. That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah. When that's true and then on top of that, then you have the grace of God that meets you in that place, that heals you in that place, that does something really special in that place. And you see all these types of families all over the world, single parents, blended families, you know, horrible, whether it's deaths, whether it's a sibling having to almost raise a kid, you know, like the Lord has...
• 5:34
  transformed and profoundly impacted the world and families and all these different types of people through unique team situations. And so I think it's less about saying, oh, we don't have the ideal family, but thinking about, no, no, but what your job is to be the ideal team with the players you have and the coaches you have. Yeah.
• 5:52
  And God wants to make you the ideal team and with how your team looks right now. And I think that's just there's something about that that brings a resolve that can be really powerful and grace filled when you kind of center it on that.