Patricia–

Here are some truths I’ve learned. Maybe they will help you as they have helped me.

If you grow up (as I did) saturated in the world’s system of education (which is surprisingly full of humanistic psychology), you are taught that you are inherently good. Insecurities, heartaches and so on can be traced to the bad influences ON you, FROM others, which are not your fault. You are breastfed self-pity and blame (and these come quite naturally anyway). This road inevitably leads to a great big bulls-eye of blame on the forehead of your parents. We are awash in this thinking and have a hard time extracting ourselves from it.

But the bible teaches that we are inherently bad, that we are sinners and would be sinners regardless of how good a job our parents did and that we are under a CURSE. For myself and others who had divorce in their upbringing, the divorce was part of the curse, but the divorce didn’t cause the curse. My parent’s inadequacies, sins, etc didn’t cause the curse–it was already there. Those things were a result of the curse. And I was also under the curse, not a victim of bad parenting. The results were very tangible in my heart–pain, loneliness, anger. All those emotions I felt are part of the curse.

When Jesus redeems us, he is liberating a captive; not an innocent captive of others but one who is also captive to his own sin, a captive of Satan, a captive of the curse. That is where you delight in your past. You realize you aren’t someone uniquely to be pitied because of offenses against you. You are a dirty rotten sinner just like those who have sinned against you. You praise God that He is lifting the curse from your life, redeeming not only you but also your children. He is stopping the flow and curse of sin down through the generations with you and beginning a Godly line with you. That gives one reason to rejoice.

When children are sinned against, God mightily takes note, as Jesus said with millstones and such. He will be a father to the fatherless. He sees the injustice to children and will render to each man according to his deeds. In other words, the sins against children are real; the pain they feel is real and needs real healing.

As I think Nancy wrote about, this process has come best in my life by plugging away at life, not stopping to lament, but persisting in prayer to ask God for healing. God brings events, people, all sorts of things to bind up our wounds and heal them, and it’s a slow process. But 20 plus years down the road I can say that Jesus is such a healer and has done much more than I had ever hoped.

Hope that helps.

I wonder if father hunger is more damaging precisely because it’s so closely tied to our understanding of the gospel. Fathers model Christ (accurately or inaccurately) to their children (both directly and through the way they treat their wives) much more powerfully than mothers do. Mother hunger seems to have to do with our understanding of how to do; father hunger seems to have to do with our understanding of how to be.

Could you expand on the notion of an “unhealthy desire to please”? What does that look like? What’s the demarcation between healthy and unhealthy there? Thanks.

This post hits home with me quite deeply. I won’t bemoan my history as I’m desperately seeking to respond to the Lord and not be entangled by the ignorance, pride–hence folly of my past relating to men. I’m quite ashamed of my behavior….however, I relish in the fact that my sin proves the Gospel. And I truly rejoice in Christ’ supremacy over all my failures. This is my only joy as I look at my past. I’m very thankful for your insights Mrs. Nancy as I’ve been following your insights (as well as the other ladies here) since September 2007 or so, I think. I’m grateful for you and all the writers here. I want to share one remedy that is working for me, as a classic textbook case of father hungar. In addition the Lord’s grace, I’ve found Godly mentorship. I’m grateful that the Lord has placed a strong godly woman (and her family) in my life to model for me how to love a man and respond to him in a godly way. She’s showing me how to love a family unit. She’s everything I hope to be should marriage be in the will of God for me. I’ve known her for about six months too, as around the time I found out about you, she came into my life. She’s 47 I’m 35 and she’s been such a model.

I relate to the part about “pressing on” that’s where my focus is and part of my pressing on is milking this season to be a fly on the wall with this family as well as trying to communicate the lessons I’m learning in an edifying way to anyone who has ears to hear. I’ve started a blog called in a few words. I’d really like the feedback of this board relative to my content. Ms. Nancy if you have time, I’d be honored if you’d share your opinion of my site after a quick browse. Every post is 500 words or less (see the 66 words post for why). I don’t expect anyone to read the entire blog but just a solid browse and if any topic moves you just let me know what you think and how I could improve. I’m concerned wanting the personal examples I share to be helpful not just venting. You may email me your response or comment at the blog.

http://fewwordsfromtish.blogspot.com/

Be thankful. God is sovereign, and he did not mess up when he put you in the family you were born to. Moreover, God knows our weaknesses–he knows if you have a mom who did not model godly womanhood or a dad who was absent. God is good (always!) to his children! This means that through Jesus Christ, God can use hard circumstances for our good! Moreover, consider Paul’s NT instructors to parents, husbands/wives–many of those first hearers/readers *needed* those commands because they were new believers, coming from outside the covenant people of God.

Also, it helps me to remember that God will equip me to do his will and obey. As a young wife, I can often be tempted to compare myself with the excellent women around me–this one has a very clean house, this one is so organized, this one dresses so nicely on a budget, etc! It is good to know that God created me as an individual, with my gifts and interests, and that he doesn’t require me to be like every woman at church. It is good to remember that God has plan for my life, and that my purpose is to obey his Word, help my husband, and seek Christ in all of life.

It can also mean acknowledging the issue of brokenness and bitterness towards one’s earthly father, and how it has caused deleterious effects in our other relationships, including our relationship with God Himself, which should bring us to repentance and acknowledgment of our sin. The next step should be renouncing our sinful way of relating to God and others improperly, and seeking Biblical counsel in our relationship with God as our Father, and with others, so we can be restored and entered into the inheritance that God intended for us all along.

Re-reading what I have written, I sound kind of cerebral, and it was not a cerebral issue for me, but an emotionally loaded one. I was a Christian for over 20 years before I was able to call God, “Father.”

After dealing with the “father hunger” issue, I got on the Christian path in a life giving sort of way for the first time.