The Wilful Sunflower

Two days ago, blogs4God directed me to Ken Pierpont's article, Help Or Harm, on the power of the tongue to bless or curse.

After reading the article, I fired off an email to Ken:

Just an observation - you wrote, towards the end, about a little boy who overhears his father talking about him, and you said that father was blessing his son.

Frankly, it doesn't make a difference how many time the father says good things about his son to others, if he never says it to the boy himself. This little one was blessed because he happened to overhear the praise. But it would still have brought yearning: "If he's pleased with me, why can't he tell me that himself? How is it that he tells the whole world, but not me? I wish I could hear him say that to me..."

I cannot ever remember my dad saying one word of praise or one compliment to my brother or I. It was always about what we could do better and weren't doing well enough. "Performance" seemed to be the key word.

My brother obtained excellent results for a major school exam when he was 17, and I thought surely my hard-to-please dad must be overjoyed this time. He could not possibly find anything to fault. But Dad never showed any signs of pleasure - not even a "Well done" or "Congratulations" passed his lips. Yet my uncle (Dad's brother) assured me that Dad HAD been pleased and proud of my brother's achievement. So Dad must have spoken to my uncle, yet nothing was ever said to my brother.

And so his words counted for nothing because they weren't heard by the one person who most needed to hear them.

At this point I had to stop, because I very nearly wrote something very bitter. I honestly hadn't realised how bitter I still felt about Dad's silent, critical attitude towards us. How much I've resented the resulting insecurity that has been caused by a lack of fatherly affirmation.

So I had to stop, and tell God that I forgive Dad for hurting us...

One more small step to wholeness and healing.