Comfort for Afflicted Children on Father’s Day

My parents recently made the three hour drive to visit with my husband, kids, and me. The day that they were set to go back home, I went to fill up their car with gas. As I backed out of the garage, I heard the sound of scraping metal and the unwelcome clunk of something dislodging. Turns out, I had underestimated just how close the car had been to the side of the garage door. 

Here I was, a mom of teenagers, but I’d unwittingly been a part of a bona fide parent/teenager scenario. I was suddenly sixteen again, getting up the nerve to tell my parents I had knocked the side mirror off their car.

The mirror mishap pointed me to a fact I often forget. It reminded me that no matter how old I am or whether I’m a parent myself, I will always be my parents’ child.

Unanchored Origins

For some people, being the child of their parents is a fact of life that scarcely begets a second thought. It’s the most basic of assumptions, as natural as the pull of gravity. Their identify as the child of their parents served to anchor them as children, and now, it’s an avenue by which they can practice reciprocating love.

For others like myself, being the son or daughter of our parents is not a grounding concept. Some have had a largely absent parent or death took away a parent prematurely. Some are adopted, and their tie to biological parents has only ever been a date and a place on a piece of paper. Still, some have parents who were physically present but emotionally absent or neglectful. For us, the gaps that only a father or a mother could have filled remain, and they leave our hearts adrift even as adults.

Parenthood has a way of bringing this emptiness to the forefront. In my earliest days of motherhood, each time my children skinned their knees and ran to me for a hug, I remembered how I craved this comfort that my own parents couldn’t give. Each time my children cried, I felt a familiar reflex to turn tail and run—an inherited relic of my parents’ response to my emotions. To me, the endeavor to live out the godly call of parenting children in the Lord felt like trying to recreate a specific painting that I had only ever heard of, one I had no memory of and have never seen. These are my hollow places, and they speak just one of the many different stories of how unanchored origins affect us.

The empty spaces can feel especially prominent on a day like Father’s Day. It’s a day where I’m grateful to celebrate my husband’s heart as a father and to thank all the fathers in my life (including my own) for who they are to me. But the day carries with it a quiet affliction, a sort of grief from what my relationship with my parents never was and never could be.

The Abundant Comfort of Sharing in Jesus’s Afflictions

For whatever the reasons it may pain you to be the child of your parents, there is comfort available for you too. God speaks no condemnation for our experience of affliction. He doesn’t dismiss suffering of any kind. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 1:3–5 (NIV) that God is “the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles. . . . For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.”

I used to read verse 5 as a sort of promise that the moresuffering we endure, the more comfort we will receive from Christ. The bigger the hole, the greater the amount of water it can possibly hold.

While this is still true, there is another layer of richness to the biblical picture of abundant comfort. Paul helps us see it more fully in his letter to the Philippians.

Philippians 3 is Paul’s declaration that knowing Christ is his greatest treasure and desire. Knowing Christ is not collecting knowledge about Jesus but is knowing “the power of his resurrection, the fellowship of his sufferings, and conforming to his death” (v. 10). This knowing is less about imitating Jesus—doing what he did—and more about feeling what he felt, especially what he felt walking through his sufferings and even to his death.

After all, Jesus was the afflicted Savior. His sufferings were central to his time on earth. He rescued us when he was not rescued. He gave to us what he was not given. What comfort did he receive from his loved ones? Who remained with him in his hour of need? He is well acquainted with being abandoned, of pouring himself out when no one poured into him.

To be sure, Jesus’s suffering was pure in that he never sinned during any of it. We cannot say the same. Tangled into our suffering is always our own sin, the sins of others, and the consequences of living in a fallen world.

But regardless, Paul is saying that when our sufferings brush the fringe of our Lord’s sufferings, we participate in his sufferings. We identifywith Jesus. We know him in a way that, apart from these sufferings, we never could. That is our abounding comfort—to commune with Jesus, to sit with him in our suffering, sharing in his suffering, as we tell him, “Lord, I think I know just a glimpse of what it was like for you. So I feel like I know youmore. Thank you, because your suffering was for me.”

The Grounding Identity of Being a Child of Our Father

Friends, will it be enough comfort for you to know Jesus more deeply than you ever could without these wounds?

If it’s not enough for you, that’s okay.

That’s okay, because there is more to be had. The Lord doesn’t look at your aching heart and scorn you for wanting more or for wanting relief.

Instead, he gives you more. Much, much more. God himself steps in to be your more. He calls himself your Father. His profound, parental love is this: He bought you and brought you to himself to be his adopted child. That means he accepted you with all of your hollows and voids and intends to fill them all up himself.

This is not a Father who ever wants us to grow up and become independent of him, for us to become adults who solve our own problems and don’t cause him any headaches. This is a Father who delights for us to audaciously walk into his house, shamelessly bum off his resources, eat his food, and live there, with him—for all the days of our lives.

May we draw such deep comfort, such deep rest from this truth, and may we be forever grounded to be called the children of this Father. Askyour heavenly Father to be your comfort, to be your strength, and see how he answers you.

---