Poor Daddy. He just couldn’t shake it. Shame weighed him down like a dead body strapped to his back. No matter how many times I told him that God loved and accepted him just the way he was, he couldn’t believe it. That kind of grace was unfathomable, unthinkable, unbelievable... especially for a man like him.
I grew up in a home that was filled with angry outbursts, violent arguments, alcohol-induced mayhem. My dad was an emotionally active volcano with occasional periods of dormancy. My mom was a bitter and wounded woman who sometimes had stretches of sweet normalcy. I was just scarred and scared.
But God. Don’t you just love those two words? When I was fourteen years old, a woman in my neighborhood took me by the hand and heart and lead me to Jesus. Three years later, my mom made a decision to follow Christ as well.
But what about my dad? He had many vices. Alcohol, pornography, gambling, and illicit relationships with other women—all common knowledge in the small town where we lived. The drinking and physical violence stopped after my mom became a Christian. And even though he agreed to go to church with us, dad was convinced he could never become a Christian.
“I’ve done too many bad things,” he explained. “God could never forgive a man like me. I could never be good enough.”
And even though we assured him that God could and would forgive him—that Jesus came because none of us could ever be good enough, dad couldn’t understand that kind of grace.
I love these words of Jesus,
My Father is always working; and so am I. — John 5:17
Our limited vision doesn’t allow us to see God’s strategic maneuvering, but we must believe that He is working still. And even though it may appear that everything is falling apart, it could be that the pieces are actually falling into place. That’s where the story picks up several years later.
Six years after I came to Christ, my dad was facing a lawsuit and ruin in our small town. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, he climbed in his car and drove from North Carolina to Pennsylvania to try and find my mom who was attending a business meeting. It was then that God dipped His pen in the inkwell of grace and continued writing one of His best stories ever.
Unable to find my mom, he stopped by a random church. “Is the preacher here?” he pled. “I need someone to pray for me!”
“I’m sorry,” the receptionist replied. “He’s not in at the moment. But I know a pastor who is out in the woods doing some construction on his new church building.” The receptionist grabbed a scrap piece of paper and drew a simple map. “Why don’t you drive on over and find him? I bet he can help.”
Dad jumped back in his car and followed the hand-drawn directions to a construction site out in the country. There he found a man with a hammer in his hand and Jesus in his heart. “Can you pray for me,” Dad begged.
“Let’s sit down on this log,” the paster began. “Now, tell me what’s going on.”
For several hours, Dad sat with this stranger and confessed all he had ever done. When he finished his long litany of offenses, the pastor placed his strong arm around my dad’s shaking shoulders. “Now, Allan,” he began, “let me tell you what I’ve done. You see, I was a man much like you.”
The pastor pulled back the curtain on his own dark past and followed with the subsequent unfolding of forgiveness, redemption, and healing from Jesus.
That day, my dad and a pastor whom I’ll never know knelt in the woods of Pennsylvania and prayed. My dad walked into those woods believing he was beyond redemption and walked out knowing he was forgiven.
What turned him around? My father had met a man just like him. His gaping wounds met the balm of grace through a man who was willing to reveal the most despicable parts of his own story, and how God forgave him and set him free.
When Dad came home, he explained it this way: “That man told me his story. He had done everything I had done. And I knew that if God could forgive him and he could be a pastor, then he could forgive me too.”
I’ve often wondered what would have happened if that pastor had read a bible verse, said a prayer, and sent him on his way? The verse would have been true. The prayer would have been powerful. But it was the pastor’s story that helped my father believe the grace of God could be true for him too. His story that made all the difference.
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