(About a 4 min read…)
I was 10. This was the era of Transformers, GI Joe, Jace & the Wheeled Warriors and Rubix… amongst many other toys from the eighties….
I was really into the Wheeled Warriors and all I wanted for Christmas was the Wheeled Warriors Battle Base… I’d dreamt of it all year…
As the year progressed, my anticipation grew to the point that I just couldn’t stand it anymore… I would talk to my mom about it every 35 seconds…
My father grew irritable and would yell “shut the hell up, Mike… I’m trying to watch the show!”… it put a chink in my heart… I feared him…
The months went on and my luster for the battle base became a secret to me… I stopped speaking about it… but I couldn’t stop thinking about it…
And then the day came… that blessed Christmas morning… I woke up early with anticipation… ran downstairs and started looking at all of the name tags to see if there was anything “Battle Base - Sized” with my name on it…
There is was… the most beautiful sight a 10 year old could have… a perfectly even cube… “that had to be it” I thought.
My siblings and parents came down and we began to open our gifts… a rubix cube… a storm shadow character… a peppermint stick… a basketball… and then the time came…
I opened the gift slowly… I wanted to savor every minute partly in fear of disappointment and partly in excitement…
“YES!!” I exclaimed… it was EXACTLY what I wanted… I felt so special… I felt validated… I thought “my parents know what I wanted… they care about me…”
The day progressed and I was playing with my new treasures in the corner of the living room… my Father (a morbidly obese man of about 6’5” and 400lbs) walked over to the corner where I was playing… he said “Mike.. . I said shut up!!” He scanned my area… walked over to my new Battle Base and with all the force he could muster… kicked it against the wall… shattering it into pieces… he then proceeded to violently stomp on the remains…
I fell into tears… I couldn’t understand why he did that… of all the things he gave me… why that?!… what hurt the most was his following statement… “if you would have shut up… this wouldn’t have happened…”
For decades I struggled with moments like these… it took nearly 30 years for me to come to realize that God doesn’t treat us like that… God is not a narcissist… He’s not Bi-Polar… He’s not Passive - Aggressive…
We live in a broken generation… a staggeringly numerous amount of men and boys don’t know what a father looks like… many have had it even worse than me…
If you are one of those men that don’t know what a good Father is… do what I did… say this prayer… or something like it in your own words…
“Hey God… I know I’m missing something… it’s vital… I can’t clearly describe it because I’m hurt… but I know I need you… I want to see you as my Father… I want to know your love for me… I want to know I’m valuable… and that you’ll never let me down… please show me how much you love me?’”
Thanks for reading this all the way through… I hope that a small glimpse into my life blesses you and challenges you to reach farther and higher than before.
Michael
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