Life for most men boys is an exasperating search for the absent father who has not yet offered protection, provision, nurturing, modeling, or, especially, acceptance. Many men they have given up the search and they act out the wound on who they love the most. Every man is longing for attention, affection and approval from a loving safe father. All the men that you see struggling with marriage, jobs, kids and anger are suffering from Father Hunger.
They go through their adolescent rituals day after day for a lifetime, waiting for a father to validate them and treat them as good enough to be considered a man.
They call attention to their pain, getting into trouble, getting hurt, doing things that are bad for them, as if they are calling for a father to come take them in hand and straighten them out or at least tell them how a grown man would handle the pain.
They compete with other boys who don’t get close enough to let them see their shame over not feeling like men, over not having been anointed, and so they don’t know that the other boys feel the same way.
In a scant 200 years–in some families in a scant two generations–we’ve gone from a toxic overdose of fathering to a fatal deficiency. It’s not that we have too much mother but too little father.
But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. 1 Corinthians 15:10
Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship
“Ask this question: how have you learned the Father? Search your heart until you know that you know that you know how you have learned Him. Then, lay down all who you have learned him to be and ask the Him to come to you as His son, and reveal Himself as He truly is.
Father, I have learned you wrong. It would have been better to not know you than to have learned you wrong. I want to relearn you. Who are you? What is your heart? What is your way? What is your way with me? What is the love language you have between us? Father, daddy, this is all frontier. But I choose this day to give more of me to more of you. I choose to stay and stay and stay again until I have received your heart for your wandering son.” – Morgan Snyder
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