A new book and movie showcases the irreplaceable effect a father has on his children, told from the perspective of a Texas man well-acquainted with the intense pain of being fatherless.
John Finch, 49, was raised in a Dallas suburb with two older brothers, and lost his father to suicide when he was just 11. He spent his youth and young adulthood looking for fatherly affirmation through several worldly avenues, creating a false persona to try to heal the wound.
This father-wound, he would come to call it, would govern his life for close to 30 years. Craving the blessing he never got from his dad, he pursued lucrative careers and making money, and had become a social alcoholic. All of it left him empty.
Yet on Feb. 20, 2009, Finch had what is sometimes referred to as a “come-to-Jesus” experience when he surrendered everything to God.
“I had just been struggling,” Finch said of that moment in a phone interview with The Christian Post about his book The Father Effect: Hope and Healing From a Dad’s Absence, which he co-authored with Blake Atwood.
“My life had just really imploded. I say that God took to me to a place of brokenness. He took me to my knees.”
What began that February day was a journey of delving into the pain of losing his father and learning to forgive. Through an intense process of counseling that he says was the hardest three months of his life, he encountered the Father’s love, and out of that encounter and that revelation of who he is as a son of God, he embarked upon an…
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