Father’s Way (Walk In It)
Author: Andrew Comiskey
June 13, 2022
In the face of children
declaring to their parents any number of LGBTQ+ selves, I always listen for the
father’s response. Not much to hear. The man who helped make them is either
absent or mute.
I am convinced: rainbow
confusion can only be clarified by good fathers.
Jesus shows us Father God
who first envisioned us and fights for our best. Human fathers can reflect
something of His divine face. Children cry out for this. We the created need
fathers ‘in the flesh’ who reveal an image greater than our hunger, superior
to our strengths to which our own lives can be united and restored.
Men who incarnate
fatherhood well embody what psychologists call ‘salience’: a fusion of strength
and tenderness. Attuned to sensitive souls, salient fathers meet us in our
divides and confusing needs; in kindness, they coax us out of shame, into
confession of our conflicts. They can help us take next steps in the right
direction.
Good strength commands
respect. Wayward hearts discover in good fathers the security of being second.
Maybe we’ve never had that privilege! At once indulged and alone, we need a
fighting chance to surmount our limited ‘LGBTQ+’ horizon. Good fathers help us
resume the journey to wholeness, a stern and splendid path on which we refuse childish
things and reach for more.
Good fathers are key to
our realizing the virtue of magnanimity—believing in our dormant greatness and
disciplining ourselves to realize it. Let me introduce you to two such fathers,
and a glimpse of their fruitfulness.
Father Paul Check just
celebrated his 25th year as a priest. Marco and I had the privilege
of honoring him along with 500 members of Christ who each count themselves as
having been fathered by this man. I knew many there from the Courage and
Encourage family (Fr. Paul led that apostolate for a decade); marrieds and singles,
aging parents holding fast to a wandering adult child’s best and young parents ensuring
their toddlers don’t wander off, each increasingly clear and chaste and hopeful
through Paul’s fathering. Salient in truth.
Swiss pastor Werner Loertscher
parlayed one Living Waters group in Paris to a national movement. He has
pastorally impacted thousands in France while prophetically incurring the wrath
of the French government. Strange. He doesn’t come out of homosexuality yet has
allowed Jesus to take him down to the end of himself so he can comfort anyone
with the comfort Jesus gives him. He and wife Charlotte have immersed cities throughout
France, French-speaking Switzerland, and French Guiana in ‘living water’ over
the last 26 years.
78 going on 60, Werner
wisely passed his baton to excellent leader Claude Riess. Yet his fathering
lives on in leaders who serve in a culture actively hostile to their
compassion. Werner and his faithful ‘children’ count all resistance, including
death threats, a cross they would die on.
Both Fr. Paul and Pastor
Werner are salient; they father divided children well. When they ask us to
follow them as they follow the Lord (1 Cor. 11:1), we are wise to do so. Grace
to know our trues selves, and to endure hardship, is liberated by good fathers.
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