The Pain of A Broken Father/Son Relationship

Without getting into too many details I have to say that Father's Day really has me down this year. Especially after watching MAN OF STEEL yesterday, which was heavily focused on the father/son relationship. I honestly don't know why things are so bad. I know I haven't been perfect, but I honestly feel like I have done all I could reasonably do to make the relationship good. The limits of my ability to heal are represented by the other relationships in my life. I cannot give to my father to the detriment of, say, my relationship with my wife, which I believe strongly has to take precedence. Not that my father wants that necessarily, though sometimes it certainly feels like he does.

Yes, I feel like I've done what I can. But that doesn't make it hurt any less. I love my father, still, though I doubt he believes that. Much of what is good in me is the result of his activity in my life, though mostly when I was younger. The truth is he's had little influence over the last decade or so, and that is by design. It just hasn't been a good adult relationship.

I have other family members where the reverse was true. Things were rough when I was younger but now they are extraordinarily positive. And I am a weak man, I cannot maintain relationships that are not positive. I'm too moody, and I get to depressed. I don't hate people who can't form these kinds of bonds with me, but if I can I avoid them. If I don't I am no good to anyone else and I have too many people who rely on me to work any other way. Maybe that is selfish, but I never claimed to be anything other than a sinner.

But, again, this all hurts. It hurts to have no kind words from a person you love. It hurts when you have no words at all to give back, because the words you use seem to come out wrong, or are taken wrong, or whatever. Maybe some relationships are like butterfly wings: once damaged, they never get off the ground. However, I won't sacrifice my own self-fulfillment at the altar of a dead relationship. God is a God of the living, not the dead (John 8). I feel like if I just continually expose myself to a relationship that is broken, for whatever reason: my fault, their fault, both, whatever; if it does not good, if healing is not possible except at the sacrifice of other roles I know God calls me to first, then I am doing nothing but engaging my own masochistic tendencies. It sure feels like my old self-mutilations problems when I do that. If my heart convicts me, as 1 John says, then God convicts me. Whether other people think it is the right thing to do, I know when I'm giving into destructive patterns.

So I accept this as the limit of my power, I cannot fix this problem. I will reach out and hope for creative interaction, but if destruction rears its ugly head, I am running the other way. I have been down that road too many times. The door is open, the limits and boundaries are set, I will live with my father within them or not at all. To do otherwise is a kind of personal apostasy. An idolization of an ideal that simply does not exist. If silence is the end game in this world, I will put everything in Christ's hands, confident that in Him all things truly are reconciled to each other and to God. That is the only honest thing I can do.