I Had a Good Father and I Am Still Hungry for Something

A man told me he feels like a fraud in every conversation about this subject, and he is not wrong to feel out of place, and he is wrong about the fraud.

His father was good. He said it without hesitating. Present, kind, said it out loud regularly, came to things, is still alive, still says it.

And there is something in him that is hungry anyway, and he has never once been able to say that to anybody, because every version of the sentence sounds like an insult to a man who did nothing wrong.

He said: what am I supposed to say. That my father who loves me is not enough? Who says that?

I want to be careful here for two reasons. The first is that most people reading this site did not have what he had, and he knows that, and it makes him quieter still. The second is that there is a version of this article that turns a good man into a disappointment, and I am not going to write it.

There is a sentence in Jeremiah with one word in it that solves this, and the word is not about quality.

The word is a category, not a grade

Here is the verse.

The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. (Jeremiah 31:3, King James Version)

An everlasting love. Not a better love. Not a larger one. Everlasting, which is a statement about duration and therefore about a category rather than about a grade.

No human father, however good, has ever been able to offer that. Not because of a defect. Because he is a man, and men start and stop, and everything a man gives has a beginning in time and will have an end in it.

Which is the answer to the fraud feeling. The hunger is not a complaint about his father's performance. It is a hunger for something in a category his father was never in a position to supply, and no amount of goodness on his father's part would have changed that.

Nobody failed. Something was simply not available at that address.

You are hungry for a category rather than for a better version of what you had. Jeremiah 31:3 says everlasting, which is a word about duration and not about quality. It is the same Spirit, Ephesians 1:14 called the earnest of our inheritance, who is named as the down payment on something that does not end.

The psalm describes a hunger nobody caused

David uses an image for this that has no complaint in it anywhere.

As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. (Psalm 42:1)

As the hart panteth. A deer looking for water is not making a case against anybody. It is not aggrieved. Nobody withheld the stream.

It is describing a built in requirement meeting an absence, and the psalm treats that as ordinary rather than as evidence of a wrong.

And Solomon says where the requirement came from, in a line that is one of the strangest in the Old Testament:

he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

The word translated world there carries the sense of eternity or of the long stretch of time. Solomon is saying God installed something in people that is aimed at what is beyond them, and that this is why nothing inside the frame ever quite settles it.

You are carrying a requirement that was installed rather than caused by anybody. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says he hath set the world in their heart. It is the Spirit of God, Romans 8:23 called the firstfruits under which we groan waiting, who is named as present in exactly that kind of ache.

The hunger is the right instrument

There is a line where Jesus takes hunger and thirst and does not treat them as problems to be removed.

And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst. (John 6:35)

Notice what He does not do. He does not tell the crowd to want less. He does not suggest their hunger is a fault of appetite. He identifies Himself as the thing that answers it.

And the invitation in Isaiah opens the same way, aimed at people by their thirst rather than by their worthiness:

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters. (Isaiah 55:1)

Every one that thirsteth. The thirst is the qualification. It is the thing that gets a person addressed in that sentence at all.

So the hunger a man is ashamed of is the exact instrument that both of those invitations are aimed at, and being ashamed of it is like being ashamed of having a hand out.

You are qualified by the hunger rather than disqualified by it. Isaiah 55:1 addresses every one that thirsteth as the invitation itself, and it is His Spirit, Revelation 22:17 where the Spirit and the bride say come, who is named as one of the two voices doing the inviting.

What this does and does not say about a good man

I want to end this part carefully, because the wrong version of it does damage.

Nothing here says your father should have been more. He was in a category. He filled it, apparently well, which is more than most people get and he deserves to be told so.

And Scripture is glad about good fathers. It uses them as the picture: like as a father pitieth his children. The whole image only works because good fathers exist and people recognize what one is.

What Scripture does with a good father is use him as a signpost, and a signpost is not a disappointment for not being the destination. Nobody stands at a road sign complaining that it is not a city.

You have been given a signpost, and a signpost is not a failed destination. Psalm 103:13 uses a good father as the picture for God rather than as a rival to Him. It is the Holy Spirit, Romans 8:16 bearing witness with our spirit that we are children, who does the telling that the signpost points toward.