Father fiction finished

I finished Father Fiction, by Don Miller on the weekend, and have been wondering what and how to write about it since. I enjoyed it. I laughed and cried and learnt a thing or two. It’s quite simple in some ways, and I realised as I read on that it really is geared to teenagers/young adults, whereas I would perhaps have liked something that delved into a bit more complexity. Also, while it’s a Christian book, and I appreciated the section on how God “fathers” us and other particularly Christian insights, it’s also something I think could work for someone who is not a Christian and Miller seems to have taken a more open approach here. I discovered that Challies actually reviewed the earlier version, To Own and Dragon, so I won't repeat that, and his criticism was that it was not so rooted in Scripture (but Don Miller’s audience is usually something other than the usual evangelical one), and that is true and more of this might have been good, but I think it’s an easily accessible book.

One staggering thing I learnt from the book is that 85% of people in prison grew up without fathers. 85% of them! It’s interesting to explore why that is. The book has within it some very practical chapters on making decisions, work ethic, integrity, education, dating ... things that kids are in danger of not being guided through well without fathers. These chapters made me more aware of the fact that as we develop we don’t just know things, and that you can take for granted, or rather just not notice, the way you learn basic life functions (thankfully I think I gleaned a few of these somewhere along the way – and I’ve stayed out of prison!).

There are a few things underlying concepts scattered through the book that resonated with me. Like this one:

Walking through the park one night I realised I was operating out of feeling of inferiority. Deep inside, I believed life was for other people—that joy was for others, and responsibility was for others, and so on and so on. In life there were people who were meant to live and people who were accidentally born, elected to plod the globe as the despised.

That might sound all a bit woeful. But I understand something of what he means. I’ve realised that I feel like some things are reserved for other people. Perhaps that feeling comes to anyone who has grown up with any kind of “difference”. I think this is as much a function of my father dying as my mother’s outlook as well. She was often talking like she wasn’t much good at anything (which is not true in any case), and saying families wouldn’t want to come over to our house because it was boring for the husband and for boys ... and I absorbed something of an idea that our family wasn’t very interesting and maybe didn’t have a whole lot to contribute to the world.

But the way Don Miller overcame all of this is admirable, and he later writes a chapter on Self-Pity – How to annoy people and be downwardly mobile, because he’s not into just feeling sorry for yourself and it’s oh so true that self-pity is very unattractive. The purpose is rather to acknowledge and work through your luggage, towards better things. To that end his concluding chapter is called Empathy - Wounded Healers. I liked this:

Even though I’ve highlighted the battles of the fatherless, I don’t want you to believe that because you grew up fatherless you are alone in a world of well-adjusted people; nothing like this is true. If you sit down with your friends to scratch the skin, you’ll find they have the same blood as you, the same decaying bone, the same issues, the girl issues, the athlete issues, the spoiled-brat issues, there’s a whole catalog of issues available to us.

The book ends with an encouragement to use your own wounds to reach out to others, which is a good one.

It’s not hard to find a kid whose father has left these days, and I feel like I am now more aware of potential issues, and if I knew one who I thought might benefit, I’d consider giving them this book. There's also something to be learned from John MacMurray, the man who came along and mentored Don Miller, who features extensively in the book and actually co-authored the earlier version. You can't not appreciate this fellow and his approach to helping others.