Redeeming Fatherhood

He redeemed us from the empty way of life handed down to us from our forefathers with the precious blood of Christ. 1 Peter 1:18

Meghan and Cody preached about making sense of our past, present and future when it comes to how we handle being family. Today we’ll think about the past.

In our first families, all of us have experienced various degrees of that ‘empty way of life’ that Peter mentioned in the above verse. Father’s Day can really highlight some losses for us. Whether our father was an alcoholic, incarcerated (whether for something he did or didn’t do), or was absent emotionally because his own parents never nurtured that part of his life, there are many, many ways that our dads have not been present to us. And then there’s everything from their silence to their critical attitude to their anger to their active abuse. There are a thousand shades of dysfunction, and the big and the small are encapsulated by that phrase, “empty way of life.”

The double sadness is not just that we experienced that empty way of life, but that it was handed down to us. Literally, it’s our inheritance. It got inside of us. It changed us. It made us fearful or uncertain, angry or critical, withdrawn or invulnerable. Or we just adopted those attitudes and actions uncritically and have started to put them on others.

So as we do deep work this week, take some time with God and answer Meghan and Cody’s question about how we view our past: “What is something as you reflect back on your life that you need to grieve from your first family?”