Rick Johnson - A Dads Guide to Raising a Son of Character

The Redemption of a Man

God does work in mysterious ways.

I was raised in an alcoholic home. I can distinctly remember lying in bed at night as a little boy, my little brothers and sisters huddled around me in fear, my pillow tightly pulled over my ears, desperately crying to God to make the fighting, screaming, and hitting in the next room stop. I prayed fervently, with all my heart and soul. But God didnt answer those prayersthen.

I grew up to be an abuser of drugs, alcohol, and any other substance that would deaden the pain I felt in my soul but didnt acknowledge. I slept with a multitude of women, never realizing that what I was really looking for was love, not sex.

I met my wife and married her when I was twenty-five. She unwittingly followed my masculine leadership into depths of degradation and despair. Finally, with the birth of my son when I was thirty, I recognized my foolishness and stopped taking drugsthe first step on the road to recovery. Years of counseling followed as I attempted to lead a normal life and be a good husband and father despite my lack of a positive role model growing up. By then I had substituted work and achievement (societys legal narcotics) for the numbing effect of drugs.

At forty, I had what the world said should have made me happy and satisfied. I owned a relatively successful business. I was married to a beautiful wife with two great kids, owned a nice house and new cars, and had money to burn. We werent rich, but compared to most people we were living a pretty good life. I was what the world considers a success.

Yet I was miserable. The more I accomplished, the less gratifying my success was. I stubbornly adopted a me against the world attitude; I was going to win no matter the cost. I believed that I controlled my destiny and that all I needed to do was work harder and smarter to achieve my dreams and goals.

How could I have everything the world offers and still be so dissatisfied?

I finally decided to take inventory of my life and see if I could fix whatever was wrong with me. After all, thats how I had taken care of every other dilemma I had faced before. Since I had no men in my life whom I respected at the time, I decided to look at the lives of admirable men throughout history to determine what they had that I didnt.

As I researched the lives of brilliant men such as Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, John Adams (and nearly all the other founding fathers of our country), Abraham Lincoln, and many others throughout the ages, the one common thread I discovered among them was that they were all Christians. I was shocked. I had grown up in a family that considered religion in general to be a crutch for weak people and Christians in particular to be a bunch of hypocrites.

In reaction to that revelation, I set out to prove to myself that Christianity was a false concept. I believed that the Bible was written by uneducated, superstitious savages and that the basis for believing in a mythical Jesus was one of unenlightened ignorance. I was a scoffer of the highest magnitude. In fact, I despised people who could so easily be led around like docile cows with rings in their noses.

After a year of research and study, I finally had to admit that I could not disprove Christianity. As illogical as I believed the concept to be, something about it spoke to me deep in my gut. In time I became convinced that Jesus Christ not only existed but was actually the Son of God who had come to earth as a man to die for our sins and rise again in order to provide eternal life for all who chose to believe and accept his gift.

So I believed. I took the gift. The decision was not one based on emotion or one that someone talked me into but one based on logic and my own research.

I soon realized that God had blessed me with a number of personal gifts or traits that I had been using only for self-gratification and that I needed to start using to serve him. I spent the next year trying different types of serviceeverything from ushering at church to picketing abortion clinicshoping to figure out how God wanted me to serve him.

I was particularly concerned about the culture around me. How could our culture be so far off base from all the truths that I had recently learned to be self-evident? Our country seemed to be decaying at an accelerated pace. But I didnt know how one man could possibly make a difference in this troubled world. The task seemed overwhelming. At the same time, I was also deeply concerned about the kind of father I was. I kept searching for answers: How can a man become a good father when he has been raised without one or with a very poor role model? No one seemed to have the answers to the questions that plagued my soul.

I started a ministry called Better Dads with a mission to inspire and equip men to be more involved in the lives of their children. Shortly thereafter, a counselor with one of the school districts approached me and said, We have a lot of single mothers raising sons in our district, and they have questions about boys. Could you put a program together for them? That program immediately became popular, and I began giving presentations to groups of women across the Northwest.