Spiritual Warfare- Part 5

A few months ago at work, I was unexpectedly overcome after spotting a newswire story that the actor Dick Van Patten had died. I don’t just mean a sentimental twinge – I lost my composure in the newsroom, which is one of those open and collaborative spaces that management consultants rave about and workers often don’t. So I had to duck into a bathroom stall for several minutes until I could dry my eyes and get it together. It was disconcerting, to feel so stung by the loss of a man I’d never met and hadn’t even seen on TV for close to 30 years. But Van Patten and the whole fictional Bradford clan of “Eight Is Enough” were part of my childhood after my own father was gone, and are part of a larger dysfunction I hadn’t addressed as an adult.

I had no friends as a small child. My mother, adrift after a divorce that wasn’t amicable, changed jobs and towns frequently. So I was one of the first kids dropped off at day care in the morning, bused to school and back, and usually the last picked up to go home after dark. For the evening hours, while my mother divided her attention between my toddler brother and scraping dinner from a can, I was relegated to prime time TV. And I had crowdsourced my parenting, without realizing it, to several fictional TV dads. The first was probably Bradford, since the divorce came early in that series run. Others followed, as I discovered Howard Cunningham, Mike Brady, John Walton, and later Tony Micelli or Heathcliff Huxtable (by then my mother had remarried, but the pattern was ingrained). I absorbed every helpful talk those men gave their fictional kids in Brooklyn, Sacramento, or wherever, because I was convinced they were the same lessons other boys and girls on my block were getting from real human fathers, and I didn’t want to fall behind on growing up.

In the “Wild at Heart” series at men’s ministry we discussed “The Wound” men carry that affects their personalities and relationships with God; in most instances for me, this was the absence of an earthly father. It still manifests unexpectedly, like the Van Patten obituary incident, and we need a strategy to deal with our wound. In the message we studied the Good Samaritan, of Luke 10:25-37, as a model in coping with wounds. I’m used to thinking of that parable in terms of godly compassion, but it never occurred to me the robbery victim might be modeling something as well.  Sometimes you have to take yourself out of the game, or battle, and go on a disabled player list a while. Own that you are wounded, and allow yourself a chance to heal. It’s also important to make that only temporary, and to resolve to return to the fight.

In my prayer life I’ve become a warrior against loneliness. God often births ministry out of our own pain, and I try to spot isolation of others in the church and the world. I say “warrior” because I’m convinced chronic loneliness is an enemy, even a handicap, that causes people to be underdeveloped and dissociative and ineffective at coping with others’ needs. So I do what I can, just to try and get back in that battle. The end note of the message resonated for me, where after our wounds are tended we must get up and go and, maybe more importantly, to tell others we’re on our way back. Good rallying cry.

I doubt I’ve been derailed for the last time. There are other land mines that we stumble upon here and there, or leftover shrapnel from our wound that aches when we bend a certain way. After all, there are still a few more TV dads out there (really, I don’t know what children of divorce do today without so many nuclear families on TV – they must go deep into basic cable networks for their therapy). But I resolve to heal, and make that determination to cope and to minister with God’s help. We’ll see how it goes – after all, this isn’t over.

I’m on my way back, people.

Written by: Chad Halcom

Edited by: De Ann Sturdivant