How God Restored the Relationship With My Dad

When I was five my mother found me playing with a few sheets of paper. They were part of a love letter beautifully penned in my father’s slanted writing, but addressed to another woman.

After this, dad packed up his things and moved across town.

Mom cried all the time, while my father picked us up on weekends, and the rest of the world went on with their lives.  Within a year, we moved in with the man who would become my stepfather and my biological dad moved even further away; shipped across the Pacific by the military.  My new normal became six weeks every summer and weekly obligatory phone calls.

How’s the weather?

Nice.

School?

Fine.

Talk to you next week.

Most weeks he called.   At least he sent child support. Sometimes it was even on time.  That’s really all my dad was: a part-time, long-distance, mildly concerned, duty bound parent.  He wasn’t abusive like my whiskey loving and sharp-tongued stepfather.

He just wasn’t there.

That is, until the year my mom couldn’t handle me anymore. You can’t blame her. By sixteen, I was wild-smoking Newports, drinking forties, rolling j’s, dropping acid, and running away. I wandered home as the street lights winked out and snuck boys into my bedroom. She tried everything, my poor desperate mother: threatening, pleading, reasoning, guilting, and punishing. She even tried hiring a nanny.

It was too little too late.

In the end, there was nothing else to do. She flew me across that ocean special delivery, for my dad to deal with.  A man who didn’t even know me was now being charged with repairing me.

It won’t surprise you to know that it didn’t work.

At first, I strove to please him, to become the ideal colonel’s daughter. We made over my appearance. I lost the fire-engine red locks in exchange for a sedate brown; traded in my baggy jeans for flowing skirts;  and took to wearing lip-gloss.  I even toed the line for the rules he set in place.  No drinking. No drugs. No boys. Get good grades. None of it was ever enough. No matter how I strove, I could not remake myself into the kind of daughter that would make him proud. Too loud.  Too strange.  Ungraceful.  Awkward.  Emotional.

Out of the blue one afternoon, my father leaned into to my room and announced, “You’re moving back to your mother’s tomorrow.”

I returned to my mom’s home with a fatherless soul. For a year, I had truly attempted for my dad what I had never managed to do for my poor mother – to be what he wanted – and still, he could not love me.

Within days of my return, I approached my step-father, and thanked him. “You’re tough, but at least I know what you want from me. I’ll keep the house clean and follow the rules.”

But the domestic tranquility born of my conversion was short lived.

A few months later, shortly before my 18th birthday, my mother found out about my step-father’s other women. He moved in with a lover and again my mother cried. I lost two fathers in less than a year. Maybe they had never been enough, one an ocean apart, the other, much more enamored by whiskey and women than step-parenting, but as far as fathers went, they were all I had known.

By the time I reached adulthood I knew the truth about fathers; it was etched on my soul.  You cannot please them. You will never be enough for them. You cannot make them stay.

And that is where the Lord met me.

He stepped into my life when I was 23 and asked me to call him Father.

Father?

The word itself was heavy with impossible expectations and defeat.

And I fell right back into that same old heart trap: strife.  Serve in every ministry.  Go to church each Sunday.  Toe the line and maybe you can earn your Father’s love. Be a good, good girl and He may approve of you.

And I failed.

And I failed.

And I failed.

After years of laboring, I confided to my best friend that I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop in my relationship with my Heavenly Father. Sooner or later, it seemed, He would get sick of my crap and give up on me.

As much as God should have abandoned me to myself, He never did. Time after time, my own rebellion and failures were met with grace and an outpouring of love from my Heavenly Father. Bit by bit, I began to understand just how wide and how deep and how high was God’s love for me. The Lord etched his own image over my definition of the word Father.

It took years, but eventually I learned to call him Daddy.

Daddy.

I had a dad.

I had experienced a stepfather. They were not enough. God himself, almighty creator, Holy of Holies, chose to be, not distant and disapproving, but my Daddy.

As my relationship with God grew I mustered up the courage to make a whopper of a prayer request. I’d curl up on the couch, and spill my heart, “Please, Daddy, heal my relationship with my dad.”

He answered.

I began calling my dad for no real reason at all. The one thing my dad and I both loved was classic rock. I’d listen to the oldies station and call my dad with his favorites – Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker or James Taylor – playing in the background just so I could say, “This song reminded me of you.”

Then one day they announced a contest to win tickets to the sold-out America show, two seats, front and center. “Call now to qualify!” I called. I was caller seven.

I qualified.

The second I hung up, I dialed dad and explained the situation. “If I win,” I half-jested, “Will you fly out and be my concert date? Promise?” He laughed as he agreed.

I had not seen my father in seven years. It had been more than a decade since he sent me back to my mother’s in defeat. This contest, as I saw it, was my way in with him.  I began to pray fervently, “Daddy, I want to win those tickets. I want a real relationship with my dad.”

I wasn’t even surprised when I received the phone call a few weeks later from the station, “Congratulations, you won front row seats to the America concert next month!”

When I called dad to tell him to book his airline ticket, he was astonished. “I never really thought you’d win,” he confessed even as he agreed to fly out.

“Oh, I suspected I might! I prayed.”

That concert was just the first gift in God’s restoration plan. Since then, dad has visited many times, become a grandpa to my children, and even given his life to Christ.

Nowadays, my dad and I are very close and he is a changed man. Warm. Loving. Interested. And I am quick to remind him that he is my remembrance stone, because God did not have to restore our relationship.

If the Lord had only stepped in and become my Father it would have been enough but He went above and beyond. After becoming my Daddy, he gave me back my dad.

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. Ephesians 3:20-21 (NIV)

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