It Stops With Us

My father grew up in a house where his own father threw him through a window.

That was my grandfather. And he came by the cruelty honest.

His own father was a violent drunk, and the man before that one was too. The way the story comes down to me, my great-grandmother finally left after he put his hands on her one too many times. She married a gentle man and stayed with him the rest of her life. But the poison was already in the blood.

My grandfather got between his father and his mother one night, fists flying to protect her. The way it’s told around our table, a man lost an eye before it was over.

Then my grandfather ran. Joined the Navy. Picked up the same bottle his daddy left him. He met my grandmother in New York and started a family on the move, hauling them clear across the country until they ran out of road in California.

And he raised my dad the only way anyone had ever shown him. With his fists. With a cruelty he called discipline.

My dad had every excuse to pick up the bottle next. It was right there. Poured and waiting. His inheritance.

He put on a uniform instead.

He became an Army Ranger. He ran toward something hard on purpose instead of toward the fight he was guaranteed to lose at home. I came along right at the hinge of it, right as he raised his hand and swore in.

So I grew up an Army kid. Washington, where my brother was born. Germany. Hawaii. Florida for a season. A new school every time we turned around, and my mother holding all of us together with both hands while my father did the one thing his own father never did for him.

He stayed.

He went to work. He shipped overseas. He was gone for years at a stretch, and I learned young the particular ache of watching a man you love walk up the steps of an airplane. He mailed home VHS tapes so his sons would not forget his face. He wrote letters. He left and came back and left again.

By the time I knew my grandfather, he was not the man who threw my father through that window. Late in his life something turned. Some say he got saved. Some say the drink finally poisoned him sober. We never settled which. He was gentler with me than he had ever been with my dad. The strain between the two of them never fully cleared. But the thaw started with him.

My father came home from the Army and pinned on a different badge. Police officer. Crime scenes and car wrecks. The worst night a stranger’s family would ever have, over and over, then the drive home to be a dad with whatever was left in the tank.

Was he perfect? No.

He lost his temper. He did things he would take back. I know, because I have done the same, and I have no clean curb to preach this from. I am in the line too.

Here is the part I am ashamed of.

When I was young and on fire and certain of everything, I judged him. I decided he wasn’t spiritual enough. Not saved enough. Not serious about God the way my loud, holy friends and I were serious.

I graded my own father against those men.

Let me tell you where those men are now. Gone. Out of the faith, some of them frauds the whole time. The loudest spiritual voices I knew at twenty are not in the building anymore.

And my father is still here. Up before the sun, still taking care of my mother, still completely unimpressed with himself. The man I once decided wasn’t spiritual enough has shown me more about laying a life down than every man I was grading him against.

We love to explain ourselves with the blood. We’ve got addiction in the family. We’ve got a temper in the family. As if naming the curse gave us a pass to keep carrying it.

The sin in a man’s house reaches for the third generation and the fourth. That is real. I have felt it reach for me. But a curse only runs until one man plants his feet and says it goes no further.

My father planted his feet. The chain that beat his grandfather, and beat his father, and put him through a window, did not reach me whole. He took the worst of it on his own back so there would be less of it on mine.

“And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers.” (Malachi 4:6)

That is the whole job of a man. Turning the heart back.

My wife Christie wrote about me this morning. About how my son Dylan watched me get up broke and bone-tired, go to work, then sit in church with nothing left in me, and how he is quietly doing the same thing now himself. Father to son to son. Blake is next in line. The heart turning down the generations.

This is me turning the other way. Up the line. To you, Dad.

You were never a perfect father. You were a faithful one. It only took me this long to learn the difference.

The chain broke on your back. I felt it stop.

Happy Father’s Day. Peace to you, from the son who finally sees it.

Adam