Good Faith Dispatch

Dispatch № 007 · Jun 21, 2026

Like Father

On Father's Day weekend — what our best earthly fathers borrow from the Father who never fails.

Tomorrow, somewhere between the burnt pancakes and the necktie nobody asked for, a lot of men are going to be told they are good fathers. Some of them will believe it. Most of them won't. The honest ones know the ledger better than anyone — the missed game, the lost temper, the night they came home tired and gave their children the leftovers of a man instead of the man himself.

Father's Day is a strange holiday for that reason. It is the one Sunday a year when the church and the Hallmark aisle agree to be sentimental about a role that is, in practice, mostly hidden. Mothers get poems. Fathers get power tools. And the men in the pews shift in their seats, half-grateful, half-uncomfortable, because the word father lands on a different bruise for every one of them.

Some had a father who showed up. Some had one who didn't. Some are the father who didn't, and they're trying, late, to become the one who does. And all of them — all of us — are sitting under a passage of Scripture that calls God by the same name we either revere or resent.

"For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name."

— Ephesians 3:14–15

Paul's line is easy to skim and hard to absorb. He doesn't say God is like a father. He says fatherhood itself — every family, every household, every dad who ever taught a kid to ride a bike or buried one too young — takes its name from Him. The earthly thing is the echo. The Heavenly Father is the original.

Which means the best fathers among us are not inventing something. They are imitating Someone.

Think about what Jesus revealed when He taught us to pray. He didn't open with Sovereign, or Judge, or King of the Universe — all of which would have been true. He opened with Our Father. The most radical word in the Lord's Prayer is the first one. Our. Not my — ours. A Father shared. A Father near. A Father you can talk to before breakfast.

And then watch what Jesus says this Father does.

He knows what you need before you ask (Matthew 6:8). He gives good gifts to His children (Matthew 7:11). He runs down the road to meet the son who blew it all (Luke 15:20). He disciplines the ones He loves, not to crush them but to grow them (Hebrews 12:6). He counts the hairs on your head (Luke 12:7) — a detail so absurdly intimate it can only be true of a Father, never a mere God.

That is the template. Not the dad in the beer commercial. Not the dad in the self-help book. That one.

So what do the best earthly fathers actually do? They borrow.

They borrow presence from a Father who promised never to leave. The single most underrated act of fatherhood is just being there — at the dinner table, in the carpool line, on the edge of the bed at 2 a.m. when the nightmare won't quit. Kids do not need a father who is impressive. They need one who is available. God models this in the most extravagant way imaginable: He took on flesh so He could be in the room.

They borrow patience from a Father who is slow to anger. Children — and let's be honest, grown ones too — test the limits of love daily. The Father in the parable of the prodigal son did not lecture, did not demand a repayment plan, did not say I told you so. He ran. He embraced. He threw a party. Earthly fathers who reflect Him are the ones who learn to hold the line and hold the child at the same time.

They borrow discipline from a Father who corrects because He loves. Discipline in our culture has been confused with cruelty, and so half of us have abandoned it and the other half have weaponized it. Hebrews says God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in His holiness (Hebrews 12:10). That is the standard. Not anger management practiced on a child. Not contempt dressed up as toughness. Correction that shapes, never shatters.

They borrow delight from a Father who took pleasure in His Son before that Son had done a single public thing. "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" — spoken at Jesus' baptism, before the miracles, before the cross, before any of the resume. The Father loved the Son for being the Son. The greatest gift a dad can give a child is the same: a love that comes before achievement and stays after failure.

And they borrow forgiveness from a Father whose mercies are new every morning. No earthly father gets this all right. The good ones know it, and they say so. I was wrong. I'm sorry. Will you forgive me? — three sentences most of our own fathers never learned to say, and three sentences that can break a generational chain in a single afternoon.

Here is the harder word, though, and the one Father's Day sermons often skip:

For some of you, father is not a warm word. It is a wound. The man who should have shown up didn't. The man who did show up shouldn't have. The grief is real, and no amount of greeting-card theology is going to paper over it.

To you, Scripture is even more tender than you've been told. The Psalmist — who knew something about a broken family — wrote, "A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling" (Psalm 68:5). God does not stand at a distance from the wound your father left. He moves into it. He claims the empty chair at the head of the table. He calls Himself by the very name that hurts you, because He intends to redeem it.

If your earthly father failed you, you have not been disqualified from sonship or daughtership. You have been adopted by the Father who never will.

And here is the word for those of us trying, often clumsily, to be fathers ourselves:

We will not get this right by trying harder. We will get it right — to whatever degree we get it right at all — by spending time near the One whose name we borrowed. You cannot pass on a love you have not received. You cannot give a peace you have not known. The best fathers I have ever met are not the most disciplined or the most accomplished. They are the most fathered. They sit under their Heavenly Father long enough that something of Him rubs off, and then they carry that home to a kitchen full of kids who needed exactly that and didn't know how to ask.

So tomorrow, when the cards come out and the grills fire up, do the small radical thing the day was made for. Thank the men who showed you something true about the Father. Forgive, if you can, the ones who didn't. And if you are one — pick up the phone, drive over, write the letter, get on the floor and play the game one more time. Be present. Be patient. Discipline gently. Delight loudly. Forgive quickly.

Borrow shamelessly from the only Father who has ever done it perfectly. He has more than enough to share. He always has.

Happy Father's Day.

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