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radioIn his usual honest way, Ian Pilkington shares from his own experience both as a son and a Dad.
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'Love others as you love yourself' Jesus says. So how do we love ourselves as fathers, when we've so de-valued the role from our own experience? Without affirmation for a huge part of our lives, we lose our heart and our courage, and struggle against the odds to carry out the incredibly tough job of just being a father.
Fortunately, God rescued me before I could completely wreck my life with drugs and other things, and soon after gave me a wonderful wife and mother to our children. For the last twenty years he has been reversing the trend, redeeming the broken image of fathering. I could not have sustained a relationship, let alone maintained any semblance of fatherhood, without him doing that.
The brokenness that my children have experienced out of my own fathering has been tempered with God's healing. In some places it's been great, in others there are painful issues still to work through. It's ongoing, and at present it's tough as we all take a journey through their teenage years - that's where it went really bad with my step-dad and I, and that's where I find it toughest to be a good dad. It's not rocket science when you think about it.
Presently, I have one 18 year old son facing the reality that dad is not the person he placed on his boyhood pedestal. I need to trust Father God that by letting my son walk this through and giving him the truth where I can, he'll find his eternal Father, and our relationship will find a better, healthier foundation for the future. He is a great young man with an awesome destiny.
God is our perfect heavenly Father, ideally we all draw our affirmation from Him, and as fathers ourselves we give that love out to our own children. That's the hope offered by the Christian faith, but in our rational society we want it to work out like a plus b equals c. I wish it were that straightforward to walk. We need humility, to let love embrace our wounds and not push it away. We need to forgive our own fathers and receive the loving help of mature folk around us to take this journey.
I wish the answers came easily, with a prayer, and I could write out a formula for others to follow, but it doesn't seem to work that way.
I have no idea how God manages, as our loving Father, to contain his pain and anguish in the face of our rebellion, rejection and religiosity, all of which keep us away from his love. Maybe he doesn't, and his pain is etched into the face of Jesus on the cross.
If we're honest, we all know it's true that we need fathers and mothers. But after at least three or four generations of fatherlessness, following two world wars and the disastrous social experiments of the 20th century, we need a miracle to restore what can no longer be imparted by earthly fathers who themselves have not been built up by good fathering. We need to see what Malachi 4 verses 5 and 6 really looks like. Thankfully, I believe we're going to, and it will make the pain worthwhile.
It would be great to hear back from some of you in response to this
article - leave a comment, share your own journey, drop in some
wisdom. 
Ian Pilkington lives in Plymouth with his lovely wife Karen and their six children Joe, Ben, Jon, Pete, Isaac and Mary. He is the MD of 
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Thanks for your article. I grew up with my father but our relationship was broken and I see that played out with my own son. Sometimes I've sobbed after I've shouted at him or disciplined him realising, too late, that the way I went about it was identical to my dad to me. When I dreamt of being a father I wanted to be like God, but I find myself all too like my own dad. It's definitely the toughest role/job I've ever taken on and now as my son enters his pre-teens/puberty it looks set to get exponentially tougher. I think fathers and father hood needs to be something high on a prayer list somewhere because it often seems a struggle.
Hey there
I resonate with your struggles over discipline with your son. Is he your only child?
One thing I found was to NOT try to be NOT like my dad - it's like telling a kid in a toyshop not to play with a certain toy, you just know it's going to happen.
Make Jesus your focus, try to be like Him. You'll fail a lot (if you're like me and the rest of the planet) but you'll succeed a lot too.
As far as those adolescent years ahead... just put on your seat belt and try to enjoy the ride. Hormonal changes do play a MASSIVE part in our teenage children's moods and behaviour. At times you may wonder where on earth this child came from, he's certainly not the toddler you played with and loved so simply. And as for the lack of respect that you'll sometimes get from him, (and other times wrongly perceive from him, watch out for that trap) - be reassured, that really is common, it really does happen to just about all of us and it really will be a process that you'll all come out the other side of. I've done it two and a half times now (we're in the middle of number three) - they're all different, but they're all grace-growing experiences. I reckon I've become more like Jesus through the cross of having teenage boys than at any other time in my life!
Don't beat yourself up over your mistakes - your heart's for your son, even when you don't think it is, and Jesus will bring you both through in this imperfect world.
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