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If you have strained or broken relationships with parents (even deceased ones), how can you forgive them for their sinful failings and defects? How can you learn to view them through gracious lenses?<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not a trained counselor, but I had a strained relationship with my dad (who died in 1984), and over the last few years I have walked a slow journey toward understanding, mercy, and forgiveness. So let me try to answer these two questions by sharing some parts of my story. My story is unique, as is everyone\u2019s. But perhaps, as you consider the path God has led me down, your own next steps will become clearer.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s start with the question of forgiveness. It\u2019s easier to forgive when we can see some of the benefits a bad experience brought. Since my father did not abuse me or harm me in the ways we sometimes read about in newspapers \u2014 others have it tougher \u2014 I eventually realized that my father\u2019s defects actually made my life easier in three ways: easier to feel successful, easier to do what I wanted, and easier, through God\u2019s grace, to profess Christ.<\/p>\n
It was easier to feel successful because, as I grew up, my mother constantly disparaged my father, essentially labeling him a lazy loser. That wasn\u2019t fair: he worked consistently for forty years, didn\u2019t get drunk, and didn\u2019t beat her \u2014 but he was also an underachieving Harvard graduate. She didn\u2019t respect him because he didn\u2019t get the respect she thought he deserved.<\/p>\n
The other day, half a century after seeing it in a theater, I streamed Love Story<\/em>, set at Harvard. A successful student-athlete there has an ultra-strained relationship with his father, an old-money, elite lawyer who competed in the 1928 Olympics. The son, who calls his dad \u201cSir,\u201d has a high bar to leap and feels he can never meet Sir\u2019s expectations. I, on the other hand, could feel successful by leaping over a low bar. That\u2019s not bad.<\/p>\n My dad was not absent, but he was distant. I suffered in some ways as a result, but I also gained independence by not caring much what my father thought. I left Judaism at age fourteen without worrying about his disapproval. Later I could tell him about my coming to faith in Christ and my upcoming marriage to a shicksa<\/em>, a non-Jew, without concern about his disapproval.<\/p>\n I believe I\u2019d have had the guts and good sense to marry Susan regardless, but a few Jews with good paternal relationships become petrified at that point. More are lassoed by Jesus but keep tugging on the rope \u2014 or they at least keep their changed thinking secret to avoid upsetting parents. That\u2019s not sensible, since Yeshua proclaimed his Jewishness as he said he\u2019s the Christ. Either way, I never had that problem.<\/p>\n Forgiveness in Christianity, of course, means more than relenting in resenting: it involves sacrifice. God forgives us because of Christ\u2019s supreme expression of love. The famous line in Love Story<\/em> is \u201clove means never having to say you\u2019re sorry,\u201d but I truly love my father only by sacrificing my pride and being sorry for never thanking him for all he did for me.<\/p>\n His gift started with giving me life, of course, and continued to his material provision for me. I was able to graduate from an expensive college with almost no debt. My father had no car until he was thirty, but I grew up with driving privileges and did not have to pay for them. He grew up poor during the Depression, but he made sure his family had a home. We never went hungry.<\/p>\n The intangibles, though, are now more tangible to me. My research into his experiences leaves me 80 percent sure that he faced abundant anti-Semitism as a teenager. He never told me about that. I\u2019m 90 percent sure that immediately after World War II he saw concentration camps while working as a translator and expediter for survivors and refugees. He never talked about that.<\/p>\n What if, as I was growing up, my father had embedded in me the gruesome detail he almost certainly saw while sweeping up the ruins of the Third Reich? What if he had told me how some of my great-grandparents probably received bullets in the head from Nazi soldiers and collaborators?<\/p>\nUnseen Sacrifices<\/h4>\n
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