My Dad - Part 1

This weekend, Rooftop continues our series on The Apostles' Creed. We are teaching through the creed as a means of covering the important foundational components of the Christian faith, and this week I am speaking on "God the Father Almighty". This will be interesting because I am living what I am teaching, and I am going to share the unabridged version here for the record and a more fuller understanding of my own search for my Father.

None of us first learns what "Father" is supposed to mean from a textbook nor from any other objective source. Rather from our earliest memories, we learned about "Father" from our own experiences with or without a father or father figure. So here you have a biblical truth "God as Father" and yet all of us come to this idea with our own misconceptions and presuppositions...all dependent on the nature of our relationship with our own fathers. This ranges from great to horrible and touches every possible reality in between as well.

For me personally, I have been on a father journey since my own dad died on December 1st, 1993. In the middle of the night, I received a call from my mom that my dad had died. He had been battling a rare heart disease he had contracted a couple years earlier. I was in the Marines at the time and would be promoted from Private First Class to Lance Corporal the following morning. I received my promotion and then got a plane ticket home from my duty station in Pensacola.

The almost 16 years since has been some kind of journey for me chasing the ghost of my father. You see, my father was a good man and he was a simple man. He did not want much from this life: God, his family, his workshops, his church, his hobbies; and that is what he had. I am his only son, and I am about as different from my dad as someone can be. As good a man as my dad was, willing to serve and help anyone who needed it, I had little to no relationship with my dad because he did not know how to relate to me beyond doing things for me which was his language of love.

This blog is difficult because my relationship with my dad was so erratic. I want to and need to honor him, and yet I also want to be honest about my journey, and as my father, he played a big role therein.

My dad had a very rough childhood. He was a very small boy who did not get his growth spurt until he was 20 years old...growing one foot in one year. He also suffered from a variation of dyslexia. And this was before there was good training in schools to deal with it appropriately. He never talked about it, but I can imagine being the smallest boy in 8th grade (being one of the smallest boys in 8th grade myself) and also having reading problems for no apparent reason and probably being called "stupid" by his classmates. Consequently, my father had to repeat both the 3rd and the 8th grades in order to graduate. From what I understand, 8th grade gym was the worst and oh...8th grade boys can be so brutal when they want to.

Ironically, my dad lost his dad when he was 25. Grandpa Zilkie had a massive heart attack while getting his hair cut at the barber shop in 1967. From what I was told, he, like my father, was not much of a communicator either, and so my dad very much was a product of his environment.

I share this because it is important to know the path my dad came from. And yet, that knowledge did little to help me in my adolescence when I found myself in the same or similar position as my father had found himself 32 years earlier. More on that later...

My dad coached my first soccer teams. He always drove me around on my paper route on Sunday mornings when the papers were too heavy to put on my bike. He spanked my butt for lying to him when I was in 3rd grade and was right in doing it. He did a lot of things for me and tried in many areas to support me. And yet though he was physically present in my life, he never talked with me about life...ever. And so I was a lonely, depressed, and confused young man who was destined to face the dangers of adolescence on my own, going without what I needed most...a loving father's wisdom, support, and help.

To this day, I love my dad, naming our oldest child after him, David Lawrence Zilkie II. And yet, I get so frustrated when I see the missed opportunities in his life and the consequences I and our family endured as a result. Beyond the age of 10, the only kind of communication I remember having with my dad was arguing and fighting. Constantly arguing about nothing, and boy, I could get him riled up some of the time. I also lost respect for my father and in some ways grew to be ashamed of him. This is a terrible thing and would break my heart if my children ever felt this way about me. I wonder how he felt? He never let us know...

(Part 2 tomorrow)