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I can never escape from your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence! If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the grave, you are there. If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell by the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide me, and your strength will support me. I could ask the darkness to hide me and the light around me to become night— but even in darkness I cannot hide from you. To you the night shines as bright as day. Darkness and light are the same to you. You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed. How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered! I can’t even count them; they outnumber the grains of sand! And when I wake up, you are still with me!
Psa. 139.7-18

I was raised by my mother and a man I call "Dad," but who is not my biologial father. My father was killed in an explosion on an oil rig 40 miles offshore in the Louisiana Gulf of Mexico. Growing up, everyone always told me how much like my father I was, how much I looked like him and acted like him. There was a hole in me all those years, and still is to some degree. I was angry at God for allowing my father to be taken. He'd survived a lot of things, one of which was the Vietnam war. It was not fair, because I had to grow up unsure of who I was. I watched my cousins interact with their fathers, and there was such a natural way between them. They came from that man, his blood was in their veins. Their inheritance was sewn up from the day of their birth, their heritage was not broken or interrupted by death.

Anger surged, like the tide, in me. I was depressed a lot as a youth, and hid it the best I could. Some people knew. I heard stories about my father from his siblings as I got older. Some of the stories sounded like some of my own, with different details, of course. But, some of the stories did not sound at all like me. I was much more cautious of danger (some might disagree) as a boy, not near as bold, and perhaps more foolish in other ways. This made me feel, sometimes, even more alone because in my mind the man who may have really understood my perception was gone forever from the earth. The man who raised me, I thought, would never understand me, never be able to connect to me on that level a boy needs a Dad to connect on. So, in my later years-middle to late teens-I was bent on forgetting all he had taught me and on finding my own way.

I ran away at least three times while I was living at home. Once when I was thirteen-a cousin and I were determined we would not be separated when we found out one or both of us would be moving away. The cops found us before a really strange man did, who had been stalking us that night. When I was a senior in high school, I was convinced my Mom had "turned me over to the devil to be taught a lesson" when I got my ear pierced by a girlfriend. I was gone for over a week that time, staying with a friend from school in their garage. The last time was later that same summer of 1988 when we were living on Fort Ord in Seaside, California. I stayed (illegally) in the army barracks with some guys who were in my Dad's company on the Presidio in Monterey. I worked my job, and snuck in and slept on a bunk no one was using at night. On July fourth I was beaten up pretty badly when I got myself into a scrape with a few sailors, who left me bleeding on the beach. One of my Dad's Russian classmates found me, put me in the back of his truck, took up the hill to the Presidio, and alerted my parents. There was one other time. I left the Army after 7 weeks of basic training. I thought, "I guess I'm not like my father, after all..."

Angry and lonely, in one of the deepest depressions I had ever seen, I was visited by the man I'd called "Dad" most of my life. I could see the surprise on his face when he saw how depleted I looked, how much weight I had lost from drinking a lot of alcohol and not eating enough. After he left, I was so ashamed and began thinking of how a bullet would feel passing through my head. I had brought dishonor to myself and my family. And I just wanted it all to end.

But in the darkness of that deepest pit, I began to hear whispers. "Why won't you..." I found my roommates loaded .38 and began to conjure my courage with a bottle of tequila. I put the gun to my head and began fingering the trigger, and heard it again, "give me a chance..." Then I started thinking about the disciple who betrayed the Lord Jesus, and his end. Fearing that same end I put the gun down and whispered back into the night, "a chance."

And now, twenty some years later, I'm still amazed. All those years, all this time spent feeling utterly alone, wasted. There is someone who still sees my disillusionment, who hears my weeping in the early morning hours, who understands my misconceptions. And He had been there all along. He is right beside me all along. And He is still as close as the whisper of His Name.

I have always thought that who a person is, or who they are, is married to their ancestors, to their past. But this is a lie from the enemy, and there are massive religious systems that believe and teach this ancestor "worship," that is really a kind of slavery to the sins of the fathers. The truth is we are who God made us to be. It's all there inside, every different, individual idea of God. And the people we spend time with shape us and influence us; the good ones pushing us closer to God's idea. The process rarely appears perfect in the midst of it, but it is always perfecting. We are the sum total of our experiences and abilities until we meet the One Whose idea we are.

My truth is, the man I call Dad is the man I am most like, without any biological ties. The time I spent walking and talking with him, learning to work with my hands, learning to care about people, using my abilities to express God's love, all this I learned from him. Some of my mannerisms are his. My verbal expressions, even my thought processes are like his. The irony in this story is this-he was abandoned by his father at a young age, as well, after his mother was killed in a car accident. He spent many days feeling alone and detached from his surroundings and those he knew. God placed me in the care of a man who could more than sympathize with me. Summarily, all those "wasted years" I felt cursed and forsaken by God, I was actually twice blessed... and never alone.

...so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us... Acts 17.27