Shameful

I am so ashamed.

Most days I don't really think about it.  But sometimes (I never know when) I look in the mirror and realize I am supposed to be looking at a father.  On those days, I reflexively put my hands over my face.  I am so ashamed.

Growing up--one day about thirty years ago--I realized that I would never be able to be the person I wanted to be unless I could get married and have a family and be a husband and a father.  So I found a woman who was looking for one man to spend her life with and to raise a family with, and I married her, and we had children.  I began to learn what it means to be a father.

Being a father is so important that many Christian denominations like the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox churches call their Priests father.  They also call the women who have separated themselves to full time Christian service mother.  These words father and mother are symbols lifted high above most of the other words in the human languages because learning to be a father and a mother is probably the most important skill any person on earth can ever learn.

I am so ashamed.

I am so ashamed because I am a Christian.  As a Christian I am supposed to have learned things that other people just don't know.  One of those things has to do with being a father.

To a Christian, being a husband and a father is a way, as the Apostle Paul says in Ephesians 5, to help people understand a "great mystery, namely Christ and the church."  In other words, what we Christians do as husbands and fathers is supposed to be done in a way that helps people understand the great mystery about Christ and the church.

I am so ashamed because I know that the essence of what I am supposed to be demonstrating in my role as father and husband is the demonstration of the true meaning of God's love.

I am so ashamed.

God's love is totally different from people's love.  For example, look at people's love.  People's love, if it exists at all, naturally focuses on those  identified as most like themselves, like their own children.  In this way, people's love is just like the natural affection shown by any species to the offspring within that species.  But Christian fathers are supposed to know and show that God's love is much more than that kind of "natural" love.  God's love is not confined to individuals God recognizes as like Himself, but God's love extends to every person on earth equally.  That is the difference between God's love and people's love. And Christians are supposed to understand God's love because that is the kind of love that was revealed in Jesus Christ and is supposed to be revealed in the lives of the husbands and fathers of those who claim to follow Him.

I am so ashamed.

God's love, the love of the Heavenly Father, is extended to every person, no matter how unlovable or unwanted, no matter how deformed or unclean, no matter how weak or small.  That is the great mystery I, as a Christian father, am supposed to help people understand by the way I carry out my role as father.

So what do I do?  I let myself grow up in a nation and in a time where every day that passes I stand by and do nothing meaningful in my role as father but moan and groan and weep and wring my hands and write endless reams of apparently helpless words as thousands of children created by the Heavenly Father are slaughtered around me.  I know that I create confusion in the minds of young people when I fail to do what a true father is supposed to do.

I am so ashamed.

In fact I am so ashamed that I complain to God the Father about it.  I ask Him why He lets these things continue, why I cannot overcome the things that cause me to be so ashamed; why He will not give me the power, the resources, to actually do the things that can be done that have the power to stop the slaughter of His children around me.  And I get specific in my complaints to God. I ask Him why He allows hundreds of millions of dollars to be poured into the coffers of impotent men by people who claim to serve Him, impotent men like Pat Robertson, and Charles Stanley and Billy Graham and Chuck Colson, and...(with the exception of Father John Earl, who is a father in deed, add the name of every Christian leader you can think of beginning with your local Pastor--who might not call himself father but is supposed to be one just the same--all the way up to the Holy Father in Rome who has, like myself, stood by and impotently watched--watched as the Holy Father in Rome watched during the Second World War--as a holocaust swept millions of little babies into Satan's relentless and ravenous maw).  I complain to God about these things with tears and supplication and all I get in return, all I get as a way to stop the horrible slaughter that is the source of my shame, are these Web sites you are connected to here..

For the web sites and the effects they have created, at least, I am grateful, but I am still so ashamed.