Restoring Relationships with Your Parents, Part 2

Here are some suggestions for how to go about either reestablishing relationships with your parents or making them better.

First, write two letters home. Do not write, “Dear Mom and Dad.” If you write that, who answers the letter? Mom. Dads are illiterate when it comes to answering letters. In many cases, the father thinks that any communication is between mom and the kids. He doesn’t think he ever gets a letter, even if it is addressed to both Mom and Dad. So, write a letter to your father and a separate one to your mother. Make them very clearly separate. Put on the outside “Dad Only,” “Mom Only.” (Yes, I am suggesting sending actual letters in the mail. It will mean more than an email.)

When you write to your father, include at least five things.[1] I recommend covering one element per paragraph as follows:

1. Tell your father how much you respect him. If you do not respect him, do not write the letter until you do respect him. You must not be hypocritical. But not respecting your father is not one of your options. How can you do it?

First, confess this disrespect for your father to God. Your father is to be honored because he is your father. God has commanded you to honor him. It is not optional. If you do not honor him, then you have sinned. The same is true with your mother. Sin is forgivable, and repentance is required.

Now with freedom and sincerity, write to your father how much you respect him. If he is not respectable, make sure you are not being dishonest. It would be a lie if you said, “I respect you for divorcing Mom, for being a drunk, for…” No. Don’t respect him for anything other than being your father. “I respect you as my father.”

2. Tell him how much you love him. If you do not love him, that has to be corrected first. You might object that you would have loved him if he had loved you first, but he didn’t. I’m sure that is true, and he should have loved you first. As a father, he should have loved you so that your natural response would have been a loving one. But we cannot go back to childhood and start over. Even if we could, that does not guarantee that your father would do it any different the second time. We address the problem from where we are, not from where we should be.

One of the reasons your father didn’t love you may be because he had never been loved. You are turning that around.

If you had to answer for your father, would he say that his father loved him? I have asked many college students this over the years. The answer I usually get is, “No, his dad didn’t love him. He’s told me all the fights they had.”

Next, would he say that his wife loves him? No, mom doesn’t love him. Would he say that his children love him? No, he doesn’t think his kids love him. Would he say that God loves him? He doesn’t know God; he’s not a Christian.

Do you meant to tell me that your father doesn’t think God loves him, his father loved him, his wife loves him, or his children love him? And you wonder why he drinks too much! He sees that everyone who should be close to him does not love him.

“His perception is wrong. We do love him, and God loves him.”

That’s not what I asked. Does he think that you all love him? No.[2]

So here we have a person who couldn’t love you first because he has never been loved. He doesn’t know how to love.

I used to ask this question when speaking to a crowd: “How many of you know that your parents love you?” Ninety-five percent would raise their hand.

Then I would ask, “How many of you think they expressed it to you adequately?” Only half of those hands would stay up.

“Of those who think it was expressed adequately, how many could have used more love?” Everybody’s hands stayed up. Nobody gets enough love at home, even when love is there.

You are now an adult, and as a Christian you have unlimited access to love and forgiveness—a love that your family does not have if they are not Christians. If you are waiting for them to love you first, you’ve got it all backwards. You are now the source of love for your family. You are the vehicle to love your parents. Straighten out your unlove for them with God. As a Christian, confess this lack of love to Him. Is it sin? Yes, it is sin. It is disobedience to the command of God. We have been commanded to love our neighbors, love the brothers, and love our enemies. Your father fits into one of those categories. Confess this lack of love and forsake it. After you have confessed and have been forgiven, choose to love your father.[3] This love requires expression, so tell him in this paragraph.

3. Tell your father how grateful you are to him. You may be grateful for a lot of things. Enumerate them. Or you might have to go back to preschool days to think of something. Think of it and thank him. Go back to some nostalgia; tell him how much you appreciated sitting on his lap when you were three, or the fishing trip you had that one time. If you are not grateful, then as with respect and love, it is your problem, not his. The procedure is the same. Confess your unthankfulness to God. When you are forgiven, express your thankfulness to your father.

After I had been teaching this for years, I wrote a letter to my mother. (My father had already passed away.) Most of it was just news, but I put one last sentence in of gratefulness and praise to her, and she called on the telephone to talk to me about it. Nobody gets enough! Start expressing respect, love, and thankfulness.

These elements are necessary and required. The next two are suggestions for further ways to convey respect.

4. Ask your father for his autobiography. He probably won’t write one, but he will be glad that you want to know about him. If you live near your parents, you can ask your dad for this in person. One young woman told me she couldn’t write home because her parents lived in the same town. I told her to just ask him. So she asked her father for his autobiography, and this man who is normally extremely quiet talked for four hours. She asked, and he was so glad to be asked.

5. Ask your father for advice, in general and on specific matters. This is part of honor. Has he given you advice before, and you didn’t like it? Unsolicited advice is generally much rougher than requested advice. It is rougher on you because you didn’t want it, and it is given rougher because you didn’t want it. But when you request advice, the person is usually much more considerate, much more thoughtful, and the advice will be better.

Ask for counsel, and be open to it. You might be really surprised at the advice you get. There are very few parents who are not concerned about the direction their children go and what they do. When you ask, you might find that they were just waiting to be asked, and they will be considerate.

If you are still single, this is especially true regarding anyone you are dating. Ask your father what he thinks of this guy/girl. You may hear things you don’t want to hear. When you do, you had better listen. Even if your father is not a Christian, he’s been around a while. His answers may be sheer prejudice, but likely they are not. He knows you, and he knows people, so pay attention. If he dislikes the person you are going with, go slow. Even if this man or woman is absolutely right for you and you both know it, it is not right until your parents also know it. It is wise to go slow even if you are right and they are wrong.

Some parents will say it doesn’t make any difference to them what you do, and you should just do what you want. Don’t believe them! They think that is the proper thing to say because you are an adult. Ask them, “If you were going to give me advice, what would you want me to do?” If they still don’t give you advice, but you know your parents well enough to figure out what they think, pay attention to that, even if they are not willing to tell you outright.

Your father may not answer the letter you have written him, but he will almost certainly read it more than once, and he will not throw it away. If you have Christian siblings, tell them what you are doing and encourage them to do the same thing.

Next, write the same kind of letter to your mother, but with one change. The first paragraph should express your love to her, and the second para­graph should communicate your respect. Both sexes of the human race need love and re­spect from both sexes. But of the two, women need love more than they need respect, and men need respect more than they need love. Tell your mother how much you love her; then tell her how much you respect her. The rest of the letter can follow the same pattern as the letter to your father.

(To be continued on May 25. Don't want to wait? Get Restoring Relationships with Your Parents at ccmbooks.org/bookstore.)

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[1] If you have previously been rebellious towards your parents, there is one more element you should add at the beginning of your letters. First, you must confess to God your rebellion to your father or mother, and now also confess it to your earthly father in this letter, with no excuses or accusations.

[2] Of course, sometimes the people I speak with acknowledge that they don’t love their father and that their mother hates him.

[3] The confession must be done first—you cannot obey on top of accumulated disobedience. Once you are clean, you can choose to obey this command, with God’s help.