The Missing Piece

It's Father's Day again.

I scroll, and the timeline fills with men holding babies, men walking daughters down aisles, men captioned my first love, my protector, my hero. I've healed. I've grown. I've even built a life I'm proud of. And still, every year, there's a small girl in me who looks at all of it and feels the shape of what was never there.

I haven't had my father in my life, permanently, since I was ten.

Maybe your dad passed away. Maybe, like mine, he was entangled in more relationships than he could honor. Maybe he just never understood the weight of the position he was standing in. The reasons differ. The mark it leaves doesn't.

The Porch

Let me tell you what I remember.

I remember being six on the front porch, tears running down my face, waiting for him to come take me to the carnival. Hours. My mother in the doorway asking why I was still sitting there, why was I crying, what else did I expect. I didn't have an answer. I just kept watching the road.

I remember being ten, when his wife felt so threatened by what he and I had that she invented a story, said I'd done something, said evil things to her daughter that never happened, and just like that, I was never allowed back to his house.

I remember being sixteen, when my mother put me out and told him I was his responsibility now. He didn't have anywhere to put me. He didn't have anything to give me.

In and out. In and out. Close enough to touch. Worlds away.

That kind of rejection doesn't just hurt you. It builds you. It hands you a lens, and you spend years not knowing you've been seeing the whole world through it.

What Fathers Are Supposed to Do

Because here's what fathers are supposed to do. They don't just teach a daughter how to think, they protect her. From the hands. From the boys offering counterfeit hope to a girl who's starving for the real thing. A father guides his daughter into every next season. He's the first voice to tell her she's beautiful, to show her that her brilliance is even better than her appearance, to pick her up when she falls. He is her first hero.

And when the hero is absent, he doesn't leave nothing. He leaves a hazard sign on your chest. The trouble is, everyone else can read it. The predators especially. They can smell an unguarded gate.

God Withheld the Imprint

But we have to move on. Not because the pain wasn't real, but because the purpose is realer. We know the pain by heart. The work now is learning to see what it was for.

Years later I learned things about my father. The scars he carried. His own rejection. The pain that made him who he was. And I understood something I couldn't have understood at six or ten or sixteen:

God gave me his DNA. But his imprint was something I was never meant to carry.

Because his imprint would have changed the trajectory of my whole life.

The wound says you weren't enough to make him stay. But wisdom hears God whisper something else: your value was so high I would not let it be tainted by his pattern. The plan for me required a different blueprint than the one he was handing down. So God withheld the imprint and kept the daughter.

I needed to hear that. Maybe you do too.

The Girl On The Porch

So to the girl reading this, the one watching the world lift up fathers this weekend, scrolling and scrolling with no post of her own to make, the one who feels alone in a season everyone else seems to be celebrating:

Invite God to sit with you in the wound.

Invite Him onto the porch with the six-year-old who kept watching the road. Invite Him into the years you were never protected, into the moment where that boy caused something to break in you that you weren't sure would ever be whole again. Invite Him to reach into the depression, the darkness that descends on days like this one, and lift you up out of it.

Because the missing piece was never about replacing him.

The missing piece is making room for the Father.

The Projection

Here's why this matters more than a hard memory. The way you see your earthly father will project itself, quietly, onto the way you see God.

For me, rejection ran so deep it turned into theology. Will God lead me out and then turn His back? Will God leave me hanging? Will God want the best for everyone else and leave nothing for me? I had two half-sisters who lived with my dad. They got his whole life. And somewhere in me a verdict formed: he must have loved them more. Even though I have his face, his humor, his entire being. And if God calls me His daughter too, is that just a title? Does it really mean anything? Does He want me in a relationship, or just to tell people He's related to me?

I know that's silly to think about God. But that's the way it works when your wounds shape your worldview.

That's the cycle. Rejection, then self-protection. Self-protection, then reaching for people to love you, people who only hurt you more. And because you opened the door, the old verdict gets confirmed all over again: you were never good enough. Around and around, with no exit in sight.

The Pandemic Nobody Counts

Fatherlessness, in the Black community especially, has been a pandemic we have not begun to fully count. COVID took more than 7 million lives. How many more lives were quietly altered because a father denied the position he was given?

We grieve the one. We have to start naming the other.

So if you're the girl on the porch today, I'm not going to tell you to just trust God and move on. I'm going to tell you the porch is where He wants to meet you. Right there. In the waiting, in the watching, in the part you've never said out loud.

Let Him sit down beside you. And let Him be the piece that was missing all along.

A Prayer For Her

A prayer for you:

Father, and I almost can't say the word, because the word is the wound,

You see the girl on the porch. You saw her then. Sit with her now.

I name it: the disappointment, the door that closed, the night that boy broke something in me, the verdict that I was never enough to make him stay. I've carried it so long I called it the truth about myself. I confess I built my whole picture of You out of him.

But You are not him. You did not withhold love. You withheld a pattern that would have undone me. You kept the daughter. You called me by name and meant it.

So I receive it. I am not presumptuous to call You Father. I am not entitled to ask for Your protection, I am Yours. I am seen. I am guarded. I am chosen. I am loved.

I am not the missing piece.

You are.

In Jesus' name, Amen.

"A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling." (Psalm 68:5)

Whoever you are, wherever this finds you, I hope this post gives you a hug and a little hope. He has not forgotten you. He has been a Father to you all along.