Sample Stories for Fathers

I sat for hours in a dimly lit cell that night remembering my days as a migrant farm worker in the small Midwestern town where I’d come to live. Those days were often spent working long hours. But they were good days. Now suddenly my life had dramatically changed.
During the last 10 years of my life I had become affiliated with the local “Mexican Mafia”. This gang was the scourge of the city and I was its most prolific drug dealer. If there had been a serious crime committed, I was the prime suspect.
I lived in the fast lane. I had it all—new cars, new trucks, new house, and pockets full of money. I kept reminding myself of that as I sat in the county jail. Just twenty-four hours earlier, I had it all. Now it was all gone. Nothing.
I had been caught selling drugs, framed by my best friend and partner in crime, Lonnie. For years we terrorized the community, pushing drugs and committing burglaries, but now he turned me in to the police in an attempt to protect himself from being arrested. Because of him I was going to federal prison for six years. I made a vow that I wouldn’t rest until he paid for his betrayal. My hatred for him grew so intense that all I could think about was cutting him to pieces.
A year of pain and hurt passed slowly in my prison cell, one day at at time. Things grew worse. My oldest son despised me. My wife was under incredible pressure as she tried to provide for our four children by herself. All I could do was sit in prison and hate my life and Lonnie more and more each day.
Deperately searching for answers, I went to a prison church service. I was consumed with fear and felt so helpless as I sat in that service. As I listened to this simple preacher-boy who spoke of peace, forgiveness and a new start, my heart welled up within me. In front of the other three hundred inmates in attendance that day, I suddenly stood up. In a loud voice I asked the preacher, “Can you show me how to receive Jesus into my life?”
The preacher opened his Bible and read Romans 10:9: “That if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved.” Jesus stood in that prison service with His arms opened wide. He was willing to take me in, regardless of my past, regardless of the fact that I was in prison.
I was forever changed. That night Jesus Christ became the center of my life. All the pain, all the fear, all the hate was gone. God made me a new creature in Christ. Though each day, for the next five years, I woke up to see bars and guards surrounding me, I was no longer a prisoner. I was free in Christ. I believed what God said in Acts 16:31: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your house.”
The day I walked out of prison, I went home and never looked back. God fulfilled His promise to me by restoring my family.
God put it in my heart to find the pastor who had reached out to me in my youth, over thirty years ago. I found his name in the yellow pages. Just two weeks after being in this pastor’s church, God spoke to him about me. The pastor told me that God wanted me to start a ministry in the same town where I lived before I went to prison. I couldn’t believe it. I was already making plans to sell everything I had and get as far away from this place as I could. In this small community, I had been nothing but a disgrace and an embarrassment to my family.
God began to encourage me through His word. With the love and support from a local church, I obeyed God and begin to spread the good new of Jesus in the very town where I had been arrested.
After about three years, God told me to carry my ministry over to another nearby city. He told me, “I have gone ahead of you and prepared the way for you. I will place people along the path that will help you.” Little did I know that God would bring along an old companion of mine. God had a reunion planned for two former friends.
He was the last person I ever expected to see. I had just finished preaching a Sunday morning sermon when he stepped through the back doorway of our small mission church. I walked toward the man and stood face to face with Lonnie, the very person who had helped send me to prison. I was overcome with the realization that God’s love and forgiveness were bigger than both of us. As I looked into Lonnie’s eyes, my years of hatred for him melted away. With my arms opened wide, we embraced and I forgave Lonnie as God had forgiven me.
He told me of his journey over the last seven years. He, too, was sent to prison not long after I was sentenced. And he, too, met his Savior behind the bars that held him.
In a moment God brought us back together and now He has sent us out together. As a team, Lonnie and I serve our Lord, delivering the message of God’s forgiveness and salvation to one of our city’s worst areas for drugs and violence.
We love to tell anyone who will listen about this God Who stands with His arms opened wide.

On my daughter Kristen’s tenth birthday, the unimaginable happened. We were celebrating a normal birthday party. What could go wrong at a child’s birthday party, right?
Some relatives had helped decorate. As a part of the decorations, they’d hung balloons all around the front porch. They were hung on nails that had been driven securely into the wood to hang potted plants. One of the balloons was the thick latex type, with a heavy-duty rubber band attached—the kind that you bounce back and forth off your knuckles while holding the rubber band.
As the scenario unfolded, my son, James, wanted a balloon—not just any balloon, but “that balloon”. It was within his reach, so he grabbed it and did what any eight-year-old would do. He started pulling. But the rubber band was attached to the nail and wouldn’t come down. The more James pulled, the tighter the rubber band stretched. Then, in a microsecond, the nail, not the balloon, was dislodged. The force of the stretched rubber band bulleted the nail directly into James’ chest, embedding it there. You can imagine our shock as James came stumbling into the living room, stunned, with a three-inch nail driven into his chest!
It was not a pretty sight. The nail had projected through his bone and was driven so deep that we thought he might die. We were scared to move him because we didn’t know if the nail had hit an artery or a lung or what. Someone called 911. Soon an ambulance and fire truck filled our front lawn. Lights were flashing everywhere. Cars were slowing down on the street to inquire. Kristen’s birthday cake and presents lay untouched as the paramedics worked intensely. The girls were crying. The paramedics secured James so he could not move, slid him into the ambulance, and whisked him away as my father-in-law and I followed. They would not allow me to ride in the ambulance with my own son. James watched in terror, screaming for me to come, but all I could do was watch.
You see, my son is totally deaf. What must have gone through his mind during that ambulance ride? Why has Daddy left me? Why won’t he come?
At the hospital, the x-rays revealed that the nail had barely missed an artery and was resting on his lung. Mercifully, it had not punctured it. The ER doctor’s words went like this: “It is evident that Someone upstairs is watching over your son, because if that nail had lodged a half-inch in either direction, he would be dead. Or the nail could have hit his eye or gone into his head.” Then the doctor told me, “We could put him under anesthesia and do surgery to remove the nail, but for someone as young as James, that might cause further complications. We need to get the nail out now.” Then he looked at me and said, “It’s going to be painful. But it’s for the best.”
James was given pain medication, but it had little effect and he was screaming. The doctor instructed me to hold my son down while he attempted to remove the nail. Soon we realized that this was going to be a much more difficult task than we had first thought.
Each time the doctor merely touched the nail, the pain would send James jerking and screaming. The doctor took a pair of pliers and started pulling the nail, but it wouldn’t budge. It was driven in his chest like a nail hammered into a piece of lumber. Because of his deafness, James couldn’t talk, but the whole time his eyes were locked onto mine. They pierced through me and said it all: “Daddy, do something. Don’t let the doctor hurt me. Please, Daddy, please.” I too was in tears and, in a moment of weakness, I let go.
The doctor sternly confronted me and said I had to be strong and hold him down. “It is for James’ own good,” he reminded me again. Despite knowing what was best, holding my son down was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I also knew that I had within me the authority to stop the whole procedure and request surgery. My instincts as a father, however, told me that this was the best thing to do in the long run. So, I took a deep breath and, once again, wrapped my arms around James and held him down—this time more tightly than before. The whole time his eyes never stopped speaking to me: “Dad, how could you betray me, you of all people? I trusted you. You know how this is hurting me. Daddy, I’m in pain. Do something!”
Yet, all I could do was hold him down. This time, the doctor literally straddled James and pulled with his arms using his legs for more power. That’s how deeply lodged the nail was. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the nail popped out. James and I sat there, in a pile of sweat, exhausted and emotionally spent. The pain subsided. The distress was over. James looked at me, as if to say “Daddy, why did you let them do that to me?” All I could do was hold him in my arms and love him. He couldn’t understand why I had done what I did, and words wouldn’t matter. “When he gets older and more mature,” I thought, “then he will understand.”
Only another parent can know the torment I was going through. And yet as I think of how much I love my son and was hurting for him--I am reminded and greatly moved by God’s love for us. So profound is His love that He gave His only Son, so we could have eternal life.

 

“ Daddy, when you do something bad and ask God to forgive you, do you still go to hell?
As we sat in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart Supercenter that Sunday afternoon, Whitney’s face exhibited the pained evidence of torment, so I asked, “Did you ask God to forgive you for something?” She replied,
" Yes.” Well,” I offered, “do you still feel like you’re in hell?” “Yes,” was again her answer.
Earlier in the day, reprisal of a behavior that my then ten-year-old daughter had begun to display more frequently had broken through. For unknown reasons at the time, Whitney would dig her heels in when she was upset and absolutely refuse to relent. Words like “I hate you!” “You don’t love me!” and “You never do anything for me!” were becoming commonplace when my historically sweet, loving, polite child began to back herself into an emotional corner. Making the unpleasant interactions even less understandable was the open, loving, and communicative relationship Whitney and I had enjoyed in the past.
Assorted friends and relatives had attempted to appease me by writing the outbursts off as “just a phase” or a “stage” she was going through, but I truly believed I knew my daughter better than that. I also sensed that, just as confident as I was about Whitney’s experiencing some sort of internal agony, I was very sure that, in her own time, she would find the motivation to talk about her troubles. I couldn’t force the issue and expect her to freely open up about it.
Sundays were typically tough for us anyway because that meant that it would be time, in a few short hours, to return Whitney to her Mom’s home. Her Mom and I had been divorced for several years, and while school was in session, 6:30 P.M. Sunday evening was the standard departure time, the ending to our weekend together. Yes, Sundays were always difficult but this particular Sunday felt profoundly tense.
Whitney had wanted me to pick up one of her friends and bring her over to play. For a reason which presently escapes me, I found it necessary to say “no.” The verbal onslaught began. As I bit my own lip to avoid retaliation or another ineffective punitive response, Whitney decided to take the barrage up a notch, threatening to refuse to leave the house to accompany me on a shopping journey that we’d been planning for a while.
“You go. I’m staying here.” “I’m not going anywhere with you!” "You don’t love me!” Her obvious pain was shooting right through me.
Before long, I had convinced Whit that not only was she not old enough to stay home by herself, but the possibility of losing more of her freedom and privileges was about to become a reality.
She departed in a huff, wearing a scowl for about the first forty-five minutes of the shopping trip, not uttering a word. I made unreciprocated small talk in intervals, for no other reason than to make Whitney aware that I would be ready when she was.
When we pulled into the Wal-Mart parking lot, I said, “Whit, you’re not going to run me off. I’m your Dad. I will always be your Dad. I will always love you.”
That’s when she swallowed her pride and made her inquiry about God and His forgiveness.
“Honey, maybe the reason that you still feel the way you do about it is because sometimes God needs our help. Sometimes we have to forgive ourselves before we can feel better about something we’ve done. I can only tell you that sharing things I have felt guilty about with someone I trust has helped me to get past many of the regrets that haunted me. It allowed me to forgive myself and accept the fact that I’m not perfect.”
Whitney broke down, cried long and hard, and through her tears, entrusted me with the knowledge of a deed so big and ugly to her that it had affected her relationships for several months.
Naturally, the act Whitney confessed to me--and over which she had bludgeoned herself, for what, I am certain felt like an eternity to her--was a minor transgression, except for the toll it took upon her.
Just as powerful was the immediate benefit of sharing her trouble. As evidenced by her ability to talk openly about real life issues since that day, Whitney experienced a release from the burden of carried guilt. She understands that many times in life we are only as sick as our secrets.
The relief that my daughter received was evident then and remains so, even to this day. She is now fourteen-and-a-half (don’t forget the “half!”) and, to my knowledge Whitney has never had that attitude of unforgiveness toward herself again. She has learned that it is easier for God to do His job when we do ours.

 

It was a carefully planned speech, made secretly on an old reel-to-reel tape player. On it he was spewing tales of bitterness, anger, and disgust. The shame of being abused by his father, the anger of being ignored by his family, and the lost hope for things to ever get better, all recorded in graphic detail with nothing held back. Along with those details came the description of the measured madness he would carry out on himself. A madness that by the time the tape was discovered, would be far too late to stop. He was saying a final goodbye, but there was nothing “good” in any of it.
He placed the tape on his pillow in his room, grabbed his backpack, and left the house that had caused him so much pain. Inside his backpack was some stuff to get high and a freshly sharpened hunting knife that, ironically, had been given to him by his father. In the woods nearby was a huge boulder in the middle of a small clearing, one of his favorite places to go. It was here he came to think, to cry, and to hide; today it would be the place he came to die.
He figured that his party buddies would find him first, but that thought brought neither comfort nor sadness to him. He was already too high to feel the results of his actions or to fear the outcome.
For years he’d groaned with the despair of feeling dead on the inside, praying that the misery would stop. He pulled the sharp, shiny blade from its sheath and put its coldness to his wrist. Soon, his pain would end and the bitter taste of hopelessness with it. Even now, the thought of being just a distant echo in someone’s memory shrouded his heart in a resignation cry, “No one will care!”
As the blade began to press against his skin, suddenly there was a sound that seemed to come from all around him. One single word was spoken that shook him to instant soberness: the word, don’t. Only once was the word spoken, yet it so unnerved the young man that he couldn’t finish his task. He had gone into the woods by himself, yet he was not alone.
He slid the knife back into its sheath, placed it inside his backpack, and returned home. He took the tape and destroyed it before it and his former intentions could be discovered. He had not come to know God and yet he had heard the Father’s voice and was heading in the right direction.
Some thirty-odd years ago, I was that young man. What I found in that hopeless, dark, and lonely place that day was hope; when the Father said “don’t,” I instantly knew that God was proclaiming the value He placed on my life. He pierced my personal darkness with the intense truth of my worth. Oh, I still struggled with it for a few years afterwards and wrestled mightily until He finally pinned my heart. However, the spark of hope was spoken to me on top of a rock in the woods, finally bursting into flames of renewal when I surrendered all that I was.
Through suicide, I was prepared to deliver myself with what I thought was mercy, but God called out real eternal, redeeming mercy with the simple word, don’t. The impact of that word was changing me, even the debris field that He was determined to clean up. It was a reminder that enough blood had been spilt, His Son’s. What had already come from the Lord’s veins changed all of eternity. And with that He also changed the direction of my life forever.
The Father speaks hope in all He does. Hope infuses us with the strength to stand in difficult times; it fills us with grace to allow His will to change us.
Hope gives us the ability to believe even though no evidence exists, that we can see. God’s hope doesn’t change the circumstances; it changes us in the midst of those times that try us.
On top of a rock, alone in the woods, desperate for hope, the Father of all creation spoke hope into my life, and I haven’t been the same since.