Tag: fathers

Posted in encouragement, Uncategorized

Fathers and their effect

Posted on by elizabethprata

By Elizabeth Prata

My father died in 2014. He was 81. He had never said “I love you” to his daughter.

Now he never will.

It’s a truth that doesn’t get any easier the older one gets. It’s actually harder to get used to the longer one drifts in time away from his death date, not easier.

He was a hard working man. He was a gifted raconteur. He was a wealthy man. He was a lot of things. But a father? Not so much. His ignoring of his kids as they grew, his intermittent but frequent abandonment of them as adults, his final, legal disownment of them as he aged all were stunning betrayals in the lives of three children, with untold consequences.

Every daughter can tell a different story about her father. Some stories are good, some are bad. Some are neutral. Some are bitter and some are sweet. Fathers, dear reader, have an effect.

There is a short film called The Father Effect. It is good.

The producer of this movie lost his own father to suicide when he was a boy. As he stated in the movie’s Mission page, the resulting film is his attempt

to educate, equip, & encourage men to be the dads God created them to be

Many of the people with whom I am connected through media and in real life have great parents who they honor and feel blessed to have grown up under. Others have disappointing stories they share, either freely or privately. Whatever the case with you, you know fathers have an effect on you for life. I worry for the fatherless who don’t have the solace of Jesus. For those among you who have had a less than blessed childhood, but are now safely home under Jesus’ wings, you know you have a REAL father. Jesus will love you forever, never abandon you, and is in fact, perfect. What a blessing this is. He is not only as Prophet, Priest, and King, but friend, brother, and Father.

The Father Effect movie also has an EncouragingDads project.

The Encouraging Dads Project was an idea that came out of John’s experience in making The Father Effect Movie.  As John talked to dads from all walks of life, he heard heartbreaking stories about how dads feel beat up, discouraged, and frustrated with their lives as dads. John was moved to do something to help encourage and inspire dads and The Encouraging Dads Project was born.

Take some time to encourage your Dad. Encourage a dad. Encourage a man who was a dad to you. Encouragement is free, and only takes a few moments. Send a letter, make a phone call, send a text, make a date to take him out for coffee. Tell him how special he is to you.

Dads, do the same for your daughters. If some time has gone by since you talked to her, take a moment to let her know how much she means to you, how proud of her you are, that you love her. My dad in all probability never confessed and repented and probably died outside of Christ. It was a sudden hit in a car crash. Boom. Gone.

He and I will not meet again, and I’m sorrowful for that. Eternity will go on and I will be loved perfectly by many fathers, and THE Father. I will forget the former troubling things, including Dad. He will remember everything, forever. If there is sorrow over your relationship with your dad, if you are on opposite sides of the salvation fence, let that fact weigh on you, and as the men in The Father Effect say, forgive.


Caption: “Our purpose in making this film is to create an awareness in fathers about the significant impact their words and actions have on their children and to help them become better fathers.”

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. (Matthew 19:29).

Posted in dad, Father, unbelief

Does Fatherlessness Influence Unbelief?

Posted on by elizabethprata

By Elizabeth Prata

I have sympathy for all those daughters and wives and women and sons who did not have a father. Either because their dad died early, or abandoned them, or divorce, or abuse. In a One Minute Apologist session, the impact of an absent father is discussed.

In addition to earthly issues, fatherlessness has serious spiritual implications for the child and adult. I distinctly remember the transition from the acceptance-as-normal of a two-parent home these days you have to further define, as women and man, married, mom and dad of opposite genders, to a home that ‘didn’t need’ a father. Where divorce was accepted as a something as simple as checking off items in a grocery list, and how women can ‘do anything’ including work AND raise the kids by herself. Fathers became bumbling fools on television and unnecessary in the public domain.

All this of course is untrue. As Perry L. Glanzer has stated in his essay , Fatherlessness, Whether Chosen or Not, Is Still a Tragedy: 

Throughout the ages, it was always understood that fatherlessness is a tragedy and deprivation, even when others needed to step in to take these roles through tragedy or the sinful choices of parents. Indeed, it is a tragedy that needs special attention. Orphans (James 1:27) and the fatherless (Ex. 20:22; Dt. 24:17, 19-21; Dt. 26:12-13; Job 31 17, 21) receive special notice and protection throughout Scripture. One characteristic of God is that God, as the Psalmist declares, “is a Father to the fatherless” (Ps. 68:5; see also Ps. 10:14, 18; 146:9; Hosea 14:3). Churches, as God’s representative on earth, should be a strong support to fatherless children and single parents. 

It is a praise to the Holy Spirit when He saves a daughter or a son out of unbelief even though the earthly model for the Father was absent in their lives!

If you are in Christ, rest in the eternal fact that a loving Father has always loved you, even before you knew Him, and who will never abandon you again. Ever.

Further Resources

Essay- What does it mean that God is father to the fatherless?

Sermon- Providing Shade for our Children, part 1

Posted in comforter, encouragment, God, orphans, spirit

We are not orphans

Posted on by elizabethprata

By Elizabeth Prata

I was thinking of how wonderful God is. The Trinity, Three-In-One, Father, Son, Spirit are intimately involved in our lives. The Father’s Providence, bringing all things to pass at the good will and pleasure of Himself. The Spirit, dwelling inside us as a deposit of the guarantee to come. The Son, Priest, interceding for us on our behalf in heaven. Each Person of the Godhead intimately knowledgeable of each one of us and loving us and leading us and providing for us. It is amazing.

The Bible’s treasures are limitless. Each time we open it to read more of what God will reveal to us about Himself is a journey into love, wonder, and awe.

“I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” (John 14:18).

The word orphan here means fatherless, bereft, desolate. In the context of the entire passage, Jesus is comforting the disciples, because He is going to leave them. They are lost, confused, heartbroken. They don’t quite understand but they sense something bad is about to happen and they are upset. Jesus is reassuring them. He is explaining that He is going to prepare a place for them and will return. He says He will not leave them as orphans, He will come to them.

Alexander McLaren’s commentary is excellent in explaining this beautiful moment. Imagine, the God of the Universe, softly and reassuringly comforting His little children. That was how Jesus began the conversation in chapter 13:33- “Little children.” He IS our Father, and He will not leave us Fatherless as orphans. See McLaren on the unification of the Christ and the Spirit. One says He is leaving, but One is actually present.

Then, note, further, that this coming of our Lord is identified with that of His divine Spirit. He has been speaking of sending that ‘other Comforter,’ but though He be Another, He is yet so indissolubly united with Him who sends as that the coming of the Spirit is the coming of Jesus. He is no gift wafted to us as from the other side of a gulf, but by reason of the unity of the Godhead and the divinity of the sent Spirit, Jesus Christ and the Spirit whom He sends are inseparable though separate, and so indissolubly united that where the Spirit is, there is Christ, and where Christ is, there is the Spirit. These are amongst the deep things which the disciples were ‘not able to carry’ at that stage of their development, and which waited for a further explanation. Enough for them and enough for us, to know that we have Christ in the Spirit and the Spirit in Christ; and to remember ‘that if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His.’

Photo by david Griffiths on Unsplash

“Christ is the only Remedy for the orphanhood of the world” ~McLaren

What a mystery the Trinity is! How tremendous His care of us in sending the Spirit! I can hardly contain myself. McLaren again-

Then, note, further, that this present Christ is the only Remedy for the orphanhood of the world. The words had a tender and pathetic reference to that little, bewildered group of followers, deprived of their Guide, their Teacher, and their Companion. He who had been as eyes to their weak vision, and Counsellor and Inspirer and everything for three blessed years, was going away to leave them unsheltered to the storm, and we can understand how forlorn and terrified they were, when they looked forward to fronting the things that must come to them, without His presence. Therefore He cheers them with the assurance that they will not be left without Him, but that, present still, just because He is absent, He will be all that He ever had been to them.

Wonder of wonders! He is good. He is so good!

Photo by Katherine Chase on Unsplash

And the promise was fulfilled. How did that dis-spirited group of cowardly men ever pluck up courage to hold together at all after the Crucifixion? Why was it that they did not follow the example of John’s disciples, and dissolve and disappear; and say, ‘The game is up. It is no use holding together any longer’? The process of separation began on the very day of the Crucifixion. Only one thing could have stopped it, and that is the Resurrection and the presence with His Church of the risen Christ in His power and in all the fullness of His gifts. If it had not been that He came to them, they would have disappeared, and Christianity would have been one more of the abortive sects forgotten in Judaism. But, as it is, the whole of the New Testament after Pentecost is aflame with the consciousness of a present Christ, working amongst His people. And although it be true that, in one aspect, we are absent from the Lord when we are present with the body, in another aspect, and an infinitely higher one, it is true that the strength of the Christian life of Apostles and martyrs was this, the assurance that Christ Himself-no mere rhetorical metaphor for His influence or His example, or His memory lingering in their imaginations, but the veritable Christ Himself-was present with them, to strengthen and to bless.

Please know, no matter what you are going through, no matter how trying the hardship, no matter how difficult the circumstances, your Comforter is here. He has not left us as orphans.

Posted in encouragement, Uncategorized

Fathers and their effect

Posted on by elizabethprata

My father died in 2014. He was 81. He had never said “I love you” to his daughter.

Now he never will.

It’s a truth that doesn’t get any easier the older one gets. It’s actually harder to get used to the longer one drifts in time away from his death date, not easier.

He was a hard working man. He was a gifted raconteur. He was a wealthy man. He was a lot of things. But a father? Not so much. His ignoring of his kids as they grew, his intermittent but frequent abandonment of them as adults, his final, legal disownment of them as he aged all were stunning betrayals in the lives of three children, with untold consequences.

Every daughter can tell a different story about her father. Some stories are good, some are bad. Some are neutral. Some are bitter and some are sweet. Fathers, dear reader, have an effect.

There is a short film called The Father Effect. It is good.

The producer of this movie lost his own father to suicide when he was a boy. As he stated in the movie’s Mission page, the resulting film is his attempt

to educate, equip, & encourage men to be the dads God created them to be

Many of the people with whom I am connected through media and in real life have great parents who they honor and feel blessed to have grown up under. Others have disappointing stories they share, either freely or privately. Whatever the case with you, you know fathers have an effect on you for life. I worry for the fatherless who don’t have the solace of Jesus. For those among you who have had a less than blessed childhood, but are now safely home under Jesus’ wings, you know you have a REAL father. Jesus will love you forever, never abandon you, and is in fact, perfect. What a blessing this is. He is not only as Prophet, Priest, and King, but friend, brother, and Father.

The Father Effect movie also has an EncouragingDads project.

The Encouraging Dads Project was an idea that came out of John’s experience in making The Father Effect Movie.  As John talked to dads from all walks of life, he heard heartbreaking stories about how dads feel beat up, discouraged, and frustrated with their lives as dads. John was moved to do something to help encourage and inspire dads and The Encouraging Dads Project was born.

Take some time to encourage your Dad. Encourage a dad. Encourage a man who was a dad to you. Encouragement is free, and only takes a few moments. Send a letter, make a phone call, send a text, make a date to take him out for coffee. Tell him how special he is to you.

Dads, do the same for your daughters. If some time has gone by since you talked to her, take a moment to let her know how much she means to you, how proud of her you are, that you love her. My dad in all probability never confessed and repented and probably died outside of Christ. It was a sudden hit in a car crash. Boom. Gone.

He and I will not meet again, and I’m sorrowful for that. Eternity will go on and I will be loved perfectly by many fathers, and THE Father. I will forget the former troubling things, including Dad. He will remember everything, forever. If there is sorrow over your relationship with your dad, if you are on opposite sides of the salvation fence, let that fact weigh on you, and as the men in The Father Effect say, forgive.


Caption: “Our purpose in making this film is to create an awareness in fathers about the significant impact their words and actions have on their children and to help them become better fathers.”

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. (Matthew 19:29).