Part Three

I was recently sitting in the church seats awaiting the start of the service, when I looked at the top of the program that was handed to me as I walked into the building. On the top of the program it stays: Anger.  I was shocked. I knew that this service was meant for me in such a time as this.
Without knowing it, I realized that this service would speak to the core of my un-forgiveness for my father. Without realizing it, this service would dig into the anger that I’ve carried throughout my life for my father. All I knew was I needed to hear this and I needed to take it seriously.   
As I listened to the sermon, I scratched notes fervently on the program, allowing my heart to soak up the wise words of the pastor. I knew that I’d look back at the notes and the scriptures and I would be putting meat to the skeleton of my un-forgiveness and bitterness.
Throughout the sermon, the pastor highlighted Ephesians 4:26-27 where it says, “…Do not let the sun go down when you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.”
Here’s the truth, often when we are hurting due to the words or the actions we tend to burry that pain into our hearts and we carry it. When the Apostle Paul wrote the words “…Do not let the sun go down when you are still angry…..” it seems that Paul is encouraging us to deal with the pain that has rested in our hearts. Do not carry this anger around from the different seasons of our lives.
Hearing these words, I realized that I’ve been carrying bitterness for my father from season to season: from my childhood to my adolescence to my adulthood. I’ve been carrying this bitterness around too long! I need to let it go!
Now, that’s easier said than done. I’ve told myself for years that I needed to forgive my father, yet I still hold bitterness so close. The question is: How do I deal with it once and for all?
Listening to the sermon, the pastor described three steps that helps lead to healing and forgiveness.

1. Identify a painful season of life: When it comes to the painful past that I carry from my father, there are many incidents that I can pull from. I can look at his lack of presence in my childhood. I could look at the moments that I felt insignificant, insecure and inferior throughout my adolescence, or I could try to look at the difficult relationship that we maintain into my adulthood. In part one; I identify my biggest areas of my brokenness and my father’s role in those insecurities. Obviously, those are the areas that I have identified.
        
   As I identified the painful seasons in my life, I am able to think through the moments and I am able to see my father’s actions within those moments. I am able to see every step from a clearer view, seeing the good choices that were made and the bad choices that were made. I am also able to indentify my father’s intentions in that moment. I’m able to see his point of reference and how he provided for his children and raised us the best he could.
    
   
2. What did someone take from you: Without realizing it, my father has taken a lot from me. Whether it’s my security within a loving family, or my significance within the family structure, which has translated to my significance outside of the family into the cultural structure. It feels as if I have an abundance of sour or bitter feelings and memories for my father, which seems to outweigh the positive memories of my father.
    
   The truth is, even though it seems that my father took a lot from me, the reality is he added more to my life than he took. He was always there to provide for me and to guide me. The issue was, the enemy of God convinced me that my father wouldn’t understand me. I was convinced that my father wouldn’t support my dreams; therefore I choose not to share this side of myself with my family.  
    
   
3. Forgive:
    

At the end of the service, the pastor asked the congregation to prayerfully consider these steps throughout the next week. Along with considering these steps, we were also given a small sealed cup of juice and a small cracker to take home. At the appropriate moment, once the above steps are complete, we are asked to take communion.
We are asked to observe communion not only as a remembrance of Christ forgiving us, but in remembrance of us forgiving those that offended us. For me, that is my father. After church Jessica and I returned to her mother’s house where we discussed the sermon and the idea of forgiveness.  She spoke about the pain that she continued to carry and I spoke earnestly about my desire to forgive my father.
After speaking earnestly about our bitterness and our need to forgive, we opened our sealed communion cups. Holding each other’s hands, we approached the Lord in prayer. I prayed specifically for Jessica and she prayed specifically for me.

We took communion together.

I can finally say that I’ve forgiven my father for the pain that I’ve carried over the last three decades. I will no longer blame him for my jagged edges; I will thank him for his provision.  I will no longer allow the enemy to control my emotions toward my father; instead I will choose to forgive. I will choose to gift forgiveness to my father.
I am going to trust that God will heal my heart and allow me to rebuild a relationship with my father that have never had before. I am going to trust God throughout this process so that create a better future for my fiancée and my future children.
I will trust in God as Christ forgives me and I will pray that my father also seek forgiveness from a Holy and perfect God.

“Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” –Ephesians 4:31-32.

Part two
While I am working on the condition of forgiveness on my heart, one of the questions that I was faced to ask myself was: Why has God placed this burden on my heart?
The obvious observer would easily be able to answer this: We are called to forgive those that have hurt us in the same way that we ask God to forgive us. Yet, I think there’s a deeper, more personal reason to God placing forgiveness on my heart.
The truth is I am growing in my faith, which means that I need to grow as a man. I can no longer hold on to the pain of my adolescence. The thick burden of guilt on my spirit cannot remain, it needs to be lifted from my shoulders, especially since I am getting married and I am about to start my own family.
Since I am beginning my own family, I know that I cannot carry the burdens of un-forgiveness of my childhood into my adulthood, if I do, then I will be inevitably infecting my new marriage and my future family with the same insecurities that have plagued me all of these years.

Working through the Past
          Since it is imperative that I begin to heal these years old hurts, I need to go back to the  three sources of my pain that I wrote about in part one and I need to begin to see God’s view of my insecurities. That means I need to allow my identity to transform me by the words of Christ in relation to the insecurities that I labeled.

1. Feeling of Insignificance: While I grew up feeling insignificant to the world around me, the truth is, I am not insignificant to God. How do I know this? First off, God created me. He molded me in my mother’s womb. God gave me breath to breathe and a heartbeat. Then when I was lost in my sin, God sent Jesus into my life to free me from my sin. To further my understanding, I have learned that God continues to provide everything that I need to succeed in this life that has been given me. In my weakest times, God has shown me just how important I am to Him. It is because of that, I will learn that I am also given a significant value to the people around me. At the end of the day, my significance belongs to God.
    
   As I here thinking through my feeling of insignificance, I must always think of my father. I begin to ponder the possibility that my father also carries feelings of insignificance. Could it be possible that my father grew up in an environment where he also felt un-important and insignificant? Has that pain been compounded in his heart, creating bitterness and anger that he has been carrying throughout his adulthood? Are him and I living in a cycle of insignificance that can only be broken through the blood of Christ and the forgiveness that He offers?  

                                How can I help my father find his significance in Christ?

1. Feeling of Insecurity: Often when someone feels insignificant, they develop a series of insecurities. Yet, when my significance is found in the Christ alone, I am more secure than ever. I am secure in who I am because I am often reminded that God developed my heart, my personality and my intelligence. There is nothing that God doesn’t know about me, yet God still loves me enough to die for me to be free from sin. Therefore, I can be secure that I am a person who has a purpose. I am a person that God has a plan for; therefore, I can be secure in the calling that God has put on my heart.     
    
   Continuing to think through these steps, I once again am forced to consider my father’s feelings of security within himself. From the little that I know of my father’s upbringing and his adult years, it is easy to see that there is a lot that plagues him. I can only imagine that there is a lot insecurities that weighs on the heart of my father, whether it is feeling secure in himself as a husband, a father, a provider and a friend. I am left to understand that my father is human, which means that he feels the same feelings that I feel. Truthfully, his feelings may be more increased and more dangerous due to the fact that they’ve plagued him for so long.
    
   How can I help him find his security in Christ?
      
   
2. Feeling of inferiority: Ever since I was young I felt inferior to the friends and the family around me. Due to this, I applied less effort into my hobby and interests. I never took the time to build a community of friends that I can be real with. I grew up feeling that everyone was better than me and that I couldn’t compete. The truth is; we are all in the same boat. We are all on even ground. Through my relationship with Christ I realized that I am not inferior to anyone. I also discovered that I don’t need to prove myself to those that I felt inferior to; in fact, I can take comfort in the fact that we all are in need of a savior. We all need grace and mercy from Christ. There is no need for me to feel inferior because all people are created equal by the hand of God. To be honest, I am confident in who God created me to be. I can now stand strong in the identity that Christ has given me, even though it seems so different to those around me. I don’t need to compare myself to anyone else. I only need to compare myself to the person that I used to be before I met Christ and was drastically changed.
    
   Lastly, I think through the areas where my father may feel inferior. A burden that, I can only imagine, my father has been carrying for most of his life. This burden could have started with living in a single parent home, where my father was usually the only male in the home. Or it could have festered over the years of broken relationships and drug and alcohol issues. Lastly, all of these together could have contributed to the feelings that my father has been carrying for decades, the same insecurities that I now carry in regards to my father.
    
   How can I help my father realize that, in Christ, he is not inferior to anybody?
   

Through a few late nights of thinking through these issues, I realize that I am not alone in these feelings. None of us are alone! I honestly believe that many of those who maybe reading these words may also suffer from these insecurities. Too often they feel insignificant, they may feel insecure, or they may feel inferior. The truth is God never desired us to feel these insecurities. It is because of these insecurities, we never truly encounter God’s purpose for our life. I know that’s what I was feeling throughout my childhood and my teenage years. I believed that I had no purpose in life. I believed that I was a mistake or that my family’s lives would have been better if I were not involved.
That was not God’s truth…….

Reader’s Response
If you are reading these words and you have ever felt any of these insecurities, just know that you are not alone. You may be trying to let go of things from your past that is keeping you from fully knowing your identity in Christ, but that doesn’t mean that you are facing your obstacles alone.
Everything that we are facing can be common for many others. That means that we are part of a community. Even though the enemy tries to convince us that we walk these difficult paths alone, we are actually part of an in-depth community where we can work through our insecurities and our broken pasts together. So, while the enemy believes that he is isolating us, he is actually building a community that God can use overtake the enemy’s attempts to destroy the body of Christ.
At the end of the day we have the opportunity to hand our pain and our insecurities to our Heavenly Father. As I am going through a time of healing from my past, I am able to feel the freedom that God has delivered through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Part one:

Can we be honest, forgiveness is one of the most difficult things that we are asked to do. Whether we are asked to forgive a family member who has hurt us, or we are asked to forgive a friend or former friend due to an offense that was caused.
If we were truly being honest with ourselves, we would never forgive the person that hurt or offended us. We would ignore the problem. We would never truthfully discuss the offense; it would only be buried in an internal graveyard where we keep all of our personal demons and skeletons at bay.
  I can say that this is all too real for me. In recent months God has placed one person on my heart: my father. Let’s face the facts, my father and I have not always had the best relationship over the years. From missing large chunks of my childhood to not being able to relate to me throughout my teen years extending to my adult life, my father and I just never truly connected.
Due to these major events, I have developed animosity and anger towards my father, which has been burning in my chest for many years. Just when I thought these issues were healed wounds and I had moved on, I have had to come to the agreement that the wound is still agape and yet to be healed.
The time for healing is now….
In order to fully heal these wounds and forgive my father, I need to hand the pain that I’ve carried for so long over to my God. Through that, healing will be evident.

Consider the source
Here’s what I’ve realized, you can’t heal from your past until you take the time to truly understand your pain. I’m not talking about just being able to discuss your shortcomings, but digging deep into the wound, discovering the root of the issue of the shortcoming.
This is what I’ve had to do. For every issue that I carry, for every layer of unforgiving thick skin, I need to be able to identify the source in order to allow healing to occur. As I searched my heart, I found three major topics that I discovered that require work in order to fully forgive my father and heal my heart.

1. Feeling of Insignificance: Everybody wants to be important to the people around them. I know that it’s true for me. The truth is, through the majority of my childhood and into my adolescence, I never actually felt important to many people.  To most that doesn’t seem to matter as long as you feel significant to your family and loved ones, yet the unfortunate truth is that I never felt significant when it came to my family. And for some reason it showed the most with my father. When it came to my mother I knew that I was important to her, regardless of the upbringing that she provided me and my older siblings with, which involved constantly moving, living in sketching living environments and dealing with a lack of food and other resources. Yet, for some reason when I search for my insignificance, the only face I can picture is my father’s. I moved in with my father right before my tenth birthday. My father always worked hard and provided for his children, yet he never took the time to make me feel significant to his family. On the contrary, it seems that he often worked hard to make me feel insignificant and unimportant. Often my father used words against me that cut deep, which in the developmental stage where I was so influential, those words cut even deeper. Many of them I can still feel today.      
    
   
2. Feeling of insecurity: A family unit was created to make the smaller and younger members of the family feel secure and safe, a place where they can develop and grow into outstanding and responsible adults. On the outside, living with my father, I had all of those things. Yet, inside my heart I felt insecure and outcast. Often this comes with growing up, but most adolescence grow out of the feeling of being an outcast. For some reason, I never felt secure.  Within the confines of my father’s house, I only felt more insecure of who I am and what my purpose was. I searched for a secure home. I searched for a secure place to grow and develop. Yet, for some reason, I never felt comfortable talking to my father. I was never secure enough to be myself. I often hid who I actually was in order to protect myself. Due to me hiding my thoughts and feelings with my family, I developed thick walls of protection around my heart.  This sense of insecurity still lingers in my heart.  
    
    
   
3. Feeling of inferiority: As one grows and becomes secure in themselves, they learn more about their purpose in life. Due to them finding their purpose, they work hard and they develop a sense of self value. When a fully-developed person measures up to the world around them, they see themselves as equal to the rest. An under-developed person often finds themselves feeling inferior to the friends, family and acquaintances around them. Unfortunately, this is where I often find myself.  Due to the fact that I grew up feeling insecure and insignificant, my self-value has diminished to close to nothing. When I’m around my peers at a job or peers who are a little further along in their life, I feel inferior, less than. I discovered that through my childhood and adolescence compliments were scarce, or absent entirely. Yet, my friends were able to receive a multitude of compliments from the members of my father’s house. I felt less than.    

   As the reader may be able to see, my father’s words impacted me deeper than I understood in my younger years. As a teen I knew that I didn’t like the way I was treated by my father, but I never knew that I would carry those words with me for nearly fifteen years. Those words would form my opinion of myself, which in turn would affect my adult life.

My Christian Call
At the age of nineteen I gave my life to Christ. I accepted that through the blood of Jesus, I was given a new life. Over the last eleven years, I have grown into a better man. I have been given the opportunity to share my faith with friends, family members, and even strangers. I have walked away from my relationship with God and I found my way back to Jesus.
Over the years God has challenged me to step out in faith in many ways; yet, forgiving my father has been the most challenging. First of all, God spoke to my heart about this situation years ago. To be honest, I thought I had dealt with the bitterness that I carried. I thought I had forgiven my father. I guess I was wrong.
 Here I am again, the Holy Spirit urging me to forgive my father for his shortcomings and mistakes. This time I will do it properly and fully. I will pray for my father daily, asking God to transform my heart, to see my father as a man who works hard to provide for his children, a man who needs Jesus just as much as I do.