Forgiveness and Understanding: A Reflection on My Relationship with Dad

I miss my dad, who died nine years ago today. That sentence alone is evidence of God’s grace working in my life. What follows is a window into a journey marked by forgiveness, gospel conviction, and the long-suffering work of grace in my own heart. Over time, God has shown me that it is far easier to condemn our parents' failures than to honestly confront the brokenness within ourselves. This brief reflection is an invitation to examine our own hearts in the light of God’s mercy.
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The Letter
I don’t think I will ever know my dad’s final words to me because they remain sealed somewhere inside an envelope in Indonesia. While we were living outside Jakarta nearly a decade ago, I received a notification that a letter from my dad had arrived at the post office. Along with the notice came an invoice for seventy dollars to retrieve it from the Indonesian postal service.

I refused to pay the ransom. At the time, I justified the decision on principle, convincing myself I did not want to support extortion. But beneath that conviction was something more personal and painful: I did not believe my dad’s letter was worth seventy dollars. Now, I would pay far more to read it. In fact, when I returned to Indonesia, I asked people if they knew someone who could help me find the letter. So far, no one has.

Grace has a way of exposing what bitterness conceals. What I once dismissed, I now treasure. What I once hardened myself against, I now grieve. And somewhere in that journey, the gospel has been teaching me that reconciliation rarely begins by seeing another person’s sin more clearly, but by finally seeing our own in the light of Jesus' finished work and our union with Him.

Captain America
When we were kids, my dad loved entertaining my friends and me by calling into sports talk radio shows. Whenever he dialed in, the moment would revolve around the call. We were expected to wait in anticipation for him to break through to the hosts. And every single time, he opened with the same line: “Hello out there, America, this is your captain speaking.” He rarely added anything meaningful to the sports conversation, but he was unforgettable. 

Dad loved being the center of attention, and his personality could fill a room. He delighted in making strangers laugh. He was deeply relational. When he was at his best, he moved toward lonely people with tenderness and compassion, including widows he visited, homeless people he helped, and strangers he made feel seen. When he had money, he was remarkably generous. When he was intentional, Dad tried to make memories, from taking me to a Michael Jackson concert in elementary school, the SEC Basketball tournament in middle school, and to Tennessee football games growing up.

Deep within my dad, there was something genuinely beautiful: joy, mercy, generosity, warmth, and adventure.
 
But Captain America had a dark shadow side, too. The wounds of my dad’s childhood never truly healed, and his alcoholism magnified every fracture. Too often, his life reflected addiction and instability more than faith. He could become volatile without warning, reactive and cutting, using words like weapons. It often felt as though he could switch personalities in an instant. His instability eventually shattered our family, leading to my parents’ divorce when I was twelve. His inconsistency made leadership and work difficult, eventually forcing him to sell the family business. His lack of self-control left a trail of financial debt, broken trust, and deteriorating mental and physical health.

I was the youngest of three children, and for reasons I still do not fully comprehend, something in my personality often seemed to awaken his darkest side. Our relationship became deeply strained and painfully complicated. I wish I had taken more time to understand when I was growing up, to not be so reactive myself. But I did not know grace then as I do now, at least enough to extend patience and perspective in relation to him. 

For most of my life, I only saw my father through the lens of his failures, shortcomings, struggles, and limitations. But the gospel has a way of dismantling self-righteousness. Grace forces us to abandon simple categories of victims and villains. Over time, I have come to realize my father was neither a monster nor a saint, but a wounded man bearing both the beauty and brokenness of God’s image in a fallen world. And if I am honest, so am I.

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Mingled Reality
In August of 1985, my dad survived a major plane crash: Delta Flight 191 in Dallas. He was one of only twenty-five people who survived. 

I still remember watching coverage of the crash on CNN and later seeing camera crews at our home interviewing him. Physically, my dad recovered remarkably well. Emotionally, I do not think he ever truly recovered from the trauma.

The crash exposed two very different realities in my father’s life.

On one hand, my dad publicly spoke about his faith in Jesus, his love for his family, and his gratitude for being alive (See the article above). Those moments were sincere. He genuinely saw his survival as a gift of divine mercy and wanted people to know it.

On the other hand, the tragedy also uncovered a hidden life that no interview or newspaper article mentioned, specifically deceit toward my mother, a devastating gambling addiction, illicit relationships, and years of secrecy. The crash illuminated these realities in my dad's life.

For many years, I only knew how to interpret my father through his darkness and my own pain. Looking back now, I think my dad embodied Paul’s tension in Romans 7:18-25 more than I realized at the time. There was both genuine beauty and deep brokenness in him, often existing side by side in confusing ways. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, there were parts of my father that reflected tenderness, generosity, and mercy, while other parts were hidden, destructive, and deeply painful.

The gospel changes how we see and understand people, and for my dad, I no longer exclusively focus on Hyde.

The gospel does not minimize sin, excuse addiction, or ignore the devastation people cause. Rather, the gospel exposes sin honestly while also refusing to reduce a person entirely to their worst moments. Over time, the grace of God has helped me see not only the darkness in my father, but also the image of God still present within him. And strangely, as I have grown in understanding my own need for God’s mercy, I have found myself able to honor what was good in him and lament what was broken.

Last Words are not Final Words
When we moved to Indonesia, my dad’s final spoken words to me were heartbreaking. As we tried to coordinate a time for him to say goodbye to our family, he said, “I do not want to see you, son. You will only continue to disappoint me.” 

Looking back, I do not believe those words reflected the deepest reality of my father’s heart. I think he was wounded, reactive, and trying to use words to regain control of a moment he did not know how to handle. But understanding that now does not erase what those words felt like then. At the time, they landed like a hammer on my soul.

I remember asking him to repeat himself because I could hardly believe what I had heard. He repeated the words. And after a long silence, I simply responded, “Dad, I love you,” before hanging up the phone.

We never spoke again as my dad died while we were living in Indonesia.

At his graveside service, I lingered long after everyone else had left, searching for some sense of closure. As I threw dirt onto his coffin, the Spirit of God began convicting me about my sin. For years, I had clearly seen the brokenness in him while remaining far less aware of the pride, anger, self-righteousness, and hardness living inside of me. From that moment, the gospel began liberating my soul.

The strange and painful reality is that the tension of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde runs through my life too. The conflict between sin and sanctification is not unique to my father; it is part of the human condition outside of Eden. I am not ultimately broken because I am the son of John Moore, but because I am a son of Adam. But the gospel speaks a greater word.

Through Jesus Christ, I have been adopted into a new family and given a new identity. My deepest identity is no longer rooted in the wounds of my earthly father, but in the love of my heavenly Father. Part of me still wonders about the missing letter from Indonesia, imagining it could somehow provide the closure I once longed for. But the older I become, the more I realize redemption rarely comes through finding the perfect final words from another person.

True healing comes from hearing and believing the final Word God has spoken over us in Jesus. From our union with Christ, believers hear God’s acceptance: “You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

Because of Jesus, the truest thing about me is not my pain, loss, disappointment, or sense of rejection from my relationship with my dad. The truest thing about me is that I am loved by the Father through the Son, sealed by the Spirit forever. And because this is true, I can genuinely say, "Dad, I miss you."