Here is the second excerpt from John’s book:

Left:

To face death and life alone

Haunted by the face that was once one of our own.

Now, a disembodied cry hangs stranded—

Afloat on the howling wind,

No anchor to plant us amidst our growing strife,

No touch to give us feeling,

No breath to give us life.

Dad and I kept in touch a couple of times a year.  I continued taking my obligatory visits to Austin every summer.  But those visits were awkward.  Like trying to catch up with someone that you never knew in the first place.  My entire world was in Little Rock.  My best friends, my little league baseball team—the Coyotes, my neighborhood pool, and the Putt-Putt golf course where I played video games every Saturday.  How do you possibly share that with someone in a week?

Although I didn’t see him much, I never hated my dad, nor carried any hostility towards him.  It’s not like I was bitter or angry.  I wasn’t.  I always liked being around him.  But seeing him only once a year formed a callousness in me.  His ongoing absence created a practiced indifference.  Dad simply became a nonentity.

At t-ball games I secretly wished that he would show up and be proud.  I wanted him to see me in my blue Coyotes uniform. But he missed my first game—and every game after that.  He missed me riding a bike for the first time when I was five.  He missed me when I split my head open on a brick and needed stitches.  He missed me singing “Do Re Mi” in the school play.  He missed the first bass that I caught in Lake Conway.  He missed the book on planets that I wrote, illustrated and published in the Terry elementary school library.  He missed my childhood altogether.

Although dad may be gone, the ghost of his influence faithfully remains.  Like a graying apparition dancing along the edges of our vision.  An unfocused image blurred by waking eyes that still hold the sleep of dawn.

“Dad is watching us,” we think, “and we must make him proud.”  So we live our lives trying to prove ourselves to him.  We chase after the corporate executive position.  Push ourselves to be a better golfer.  Drive the Jaguar.  Live in the suburban sprawl.  We strain ourselves for the more and the bigger.  We will measure up, even if it kills us.

We still think about dad at major life intersections, or after another accomplishment.  We want his validation in those moments.  We look to him in his presence and his absence wondering what would please him, what would make him proud.

Or we are hell-bent on never making him proud.

No matter who we turn out to be, we swear to be nothing like him.  He is our most-hated and feared enemy.  He is our dark shadow, our doppelganger.  Not only do we reject him fully, we reject whatever vision we think he had for our lives, running at break-neck speed in the opposite direction.  Our vengeance on him festers from our rejection of him and everything he stands for.  So we carpetbomb his memory with hate and indifference, trying to forget him altogether.

Dad is gone.  In our anger, we convince ourselves that we will never live for his ghost.  But without realizing, we allow it to drive us all the same.  The ghost reminds us who not to be, which defines the framework of who we are to be. Our identity is shaped by our defiance.

You can pick up John’s book here.

Fatherless Generation: Redeeming the Story

The earliest memories of my father are the few times he came to visit us during Christmas. About once a year, he would drive up from Austin to Little Rock for the weekend. My brother and I usually stayed with him at the Motel 6. Back then, Motel 6 had the big mechanical beds that, for only a quarter, would shake and make a low humming noise. Sleeping on them was like riding a giant, lumbering submarine.
My father usually smelled like an odd mixture of Old Spice and musky sweat. And for most of my childhood, I just thought that was how a man was supposed to smell. Sometimes he let me “drive” his burgundy Monte Carlo, which consisted of sitting in his lap and playing with the dark hair on his arms.
My brother Bill and I always ended up fighting for his attention. To us, his attention was a prize to be won. To be earned. It was as if we had one weekend to catch up on an entire year of absence. One chance to have him notice us, look at us, be proud of us, and love us. One brief moment to shine for this elusive man we called “Dad.”

I remember the park swings. Swinging beside him, trying to keep up, to go as high as him. I wanted him to be close to him, to make him proud. My brother and I took our Polaroid camera with us to the park to capture these moments. I hoarded these pictures and placed them in a big red album, poring over them for countless hours. These pictures represented seismic moments of acceptance. Moments of joy and belonging. Moments of life as it was supposed to be. Dad was here with us, with me, and everything was all right because of it.

Secretly, I hoped he might stay around this time. Just maybe. If we pleased him enough and were good enough, he just might stay. He might stay home with us, where he belonged. So I continued to live my little fantasy until it was time for his inevitable departure. I remember once grabbing his ankles—hanging on for dear life—as he walked out the front door, dragging me as I pleaded with him to stay. I was fighting for his affection, literally. But it didn’t work. It never worked.

Each time he left, my heart would break and I would die again.

Somewhere along the way, I grew callous. As his visits grew more infrequent, the promise of Dad became remote. He became a face- less voice on the phone. A signature on a birthday card. A fading image on an old, yellow Polaroid.

Eventually I let go of the hope that he would ever stay. It simply hurt too much to hope. So I buried it like some lost and forgotten treasure. I hid away my red picture album under piles of books and shoeboxes full of baseball cards, swearing to never look at it again. As the years passed, I began to accept the reality that he wasn’t coming back. And nothing I could do would ever change that. So I stopped trying, stopped performing, stopped caring altogether.
Rejection is the defining characteristic of the fatherless generation. In the United States alone, just over 33 percent of youth — over 25 million kids — are fatherless and searching for Dad. Searching for his love and acceptance. But Dad is nowhere to be found. He has run off to Vegas with a younger woman. He is lost in an alcoholic fog. He is sitting in a jail cell in Memphis. He is gone.

What’s your story of fatherlessness? Sharing your story is often where the healing begins.

Don Miller Reviews Fatherless Generation from The Mentoring Project on Vimeo.

Pick up the book today!

Willie and Lehzan

I’m incredibly humbled by the number of you who have helped us move into the top 50 in the CHASE Bank grant contest currently running on Facebook. Non-profits in the top 200 get 20k from CHASE, and things could certainly change, but we are placing well going into the last week.

I called Dr. Sowers, our The Mentoring Project’s President and asked what the chances were that we could win the whole thing, giving us 250k (an entire years budget) and he said it wasn’t likely. That said, though, if we moved into the top ten, I think it’s safe to say we’d launch a major campaign to try to move into the top spot. Honestly, it wouldn’t take much. The current leader only has about 12k votes, and nearly 100k people come to this blog alone every month.

At The Mentoring Project, we’d use the money to start mentoring programs at the 600 churches on our current waiting list. That means literally thousands of fatherless boys being provided with a friend who would encourage them through their formative years.

When I was a kid, I was breaking into a few houses, just getting into trouble a bit, and a guy at the church took me under his wing and changed my life. He gave me a little guest article in the youth group newsletter and the job of “writer” took immediately. Those were formative years for me. At The Mentoring Project, that’s precisely what we do. One of our kids, Lehzan hardly talked when we first provided him a mentor, and just this year he and Willie (his mentor) were invited to the White House. You think his life was changed? It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which he won’t succeed. He came home and the whole school shut down to hear his story of meeting the President.

I’ll let you guys take the lead regarding the Facebook contest. I’m humbled enough by your support already. If you think we can do it, I’m willing to close down shop for the next week and just try to lobby for votes. If you’ve not voted yet, you can vote here.

I’d also like to thank the folks at Invisible Children for helping us out. You can’t possibly know how humbled I am by their support. Such a huge organization, and a powerhouse when it comes to stuff like this. We are small fish in a big ocean on this one.

Thanks so much, everybody!

Sincerely,

Don

That said, The Mentoring Project President Dr. John Sowers called me a few days ago to say that Chase was giving away 20k to the top 200 non-profits that get voted on on facebook. John said we really need the money to shoot training videos that will allow the 600 churches on our waiting list to start mentoring programs. What that means is, if we get 20k from chase, thousands of fatherless boys will get role models because we can franchise the mentoring program we are currently running here in Portland. We don’t yet have that money designated in our budget.

So now I am THAT GUY. I’m the guy asking people to vote on twitter and facebook. And to be honest, I don’t even have a facebook account. So I’m DOUBLE that guy. I guess I never put together those little votes with actual social change until it became personal. So please accept that as a confession.

As I write this, we are 30 votes from being in the top 200. The voting ends about ten days from now, so we will need a lot more than 30 votes, but would you mind being one of the people who spends a few seconds and votes for us? It would honestly mean thousands of kids lives are changed through really great relationships.

Thanks so much. You can vote here.

And a very special thank you to CHASE bank. Very cool of them to do this.

More about TMP:

The Mentoring Project – Rewriting the Story from The Mentoring Project on Vimeo.

My friend is very successful, and attributes his success to the consistent reading of the book of Proverbs. He says the wisdom he’s gleaned from the book has helped him decide who to invest with, who to hire, and how to make general decisions. And not unlike Solomon, he is always looking for wisdom.

It happened to be only men on the trip because we were looking for some good guy time. All of the men on the trip had succeeded in business to some degree (I was there because of my charm, I’m supposing) and at the end of our stay we rode horses up to a lookout over the ranch, got off our horses (In case this is sounding like my normal routine, I should clarify I hadn’t ridden a horse in thirty years) and grouped up for a glass of wine (one of the businessmen had operated a winery) and to share what we’d learned from each other and from our time on the ranch. I dismounted Lightning (the guys on the ranch called my horse “Pokey” but he seemed more like a Lightning to me) and joined the guys.

You’d think they would have talked about the stock market (they’d done a bit of that, to be sure) or potential investments, but when my friend asked them what they wanted to share about their lives, about the decisions they’d made, most of the guys talked about their wives. No kidding. Guys who’d flown  in on private Jets and drove nice cars and had given hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to amazing causes, wanted to talk about their wives.

Guys don’t express vulnerability very often, especially with a group that doesn’t know each other well. But to listen to these men talk about their wives was one of the more inspiring moments of the last few years. They talked about their beauty, their humility, and how much they wanted to be better husbands. My friend who owned the ranch talked about a time, many years ago, when he was in a hotel room after a business meeting and had to call his wife to tell her it looked like they were going bankrupt. She told him to read the book of Ecclesiastes, and stop worrying, that their eternal future was fine. He did what she said, and said he slept in peace.

The book of Proverbs weaves business advice and relational advice together like threads of a rope. It’s fitting, then, that our final conversation with each other was about the beauty and brilliance of a woman, because that’s exactly how Proverbs ends. After all that advice about honesty and integrity and not getting into business deals with liars and cheats, Solomon closes with a sighing finale about a great spouse.

As we stood on top of a mountain, after having seen bear and elk and deer and caught fish and ridden horses, the guys wanted to talk about their wives. They were truly successful men.

Do you think of your spouse as your most important business partner?

If you’re dad is around, would you do me a favor? Would you make a really big deal out of him this weekend? Would you take him to a baseball game, shower him with corny (or perhaps thoughtful!) gifts, and tell him how important he is to you? It’ll mean the world. I’m hoping in the next decade Fathers Day becomes a huge deal, a day of celebrating positive masculinity, a day of celebrating the amazing gift that strong men bring to families and communities. We can start by making an enormous deal out of Fathers Day.

On Monday the President will make a few major announcements, including an explanation of a 500-million dollar request he is sending to congress and urging them to fund this summer. I’ll definitely be asking you to light up your congressman’s phone lines when that initiative comes up for a vote. I can’t think of an investment with a greater potential return than to aim dollars at struggling mentoring programs and non-profits that are equipping and resourcing dads to stay involved in the lives of their kids. These funds will pay us back in the reduction of social programs regarding teen dropout rates, drug use, unwanted pregnancy and many more, nearly all of which stem, in part, from problems associated, in part, by the absence of positive male role models. In my work with the Presidential Task Force on Fatherhood and Healthy Families, we’ve discovered we don’t only have a fatherhood crisis in America, we have a masculinity crisis. We’ve simply forgotten how to be men. And we’ve forgotten how much power we have to shape the lives of our own children.

If you’re a dad sticking it out with your family and your kids, THANKS. And if you’re a father struggling through the tension to stay in your children’s lives after a separation, thanks for facing the tension because you love your kids! It will mean the world to them in the long run. Dad’s, in my opinion, you are the most powerful force in the lives of your children. Thank you for not being passive. Thank you for understanding and taking responsibility for your power. Thank you for turning your power into love and commitment.

If you’d like to help in what a team of us in Portland are doing, please donate $10, $25 or $50 a month to The Mentoring Project. Those proceeds go to providing positive male role models to kids growing up in completely fatherless homes. Give to The Mentoring Project as a gift to your father this Fathers Day!

Happy Fathers Day!

My friend Bob Goff started a school in Uganda where he provides an education for children who come from what any American would consider extreme poverty. But you best not call Restore International a charity. Bob won’t have it for a second. Instead of taking funds from wealthy Americans, the kids at Restore are actually growing crops and selling them in order to donate the money to American charities! Why? Because Bob Goff wants to instill dignity and purpose in the lives of his students.

Here’s a guest blog from Justin Zoradi, the Marketing Director for The Mentoring Project, the non-profit I started three years ago. Justin reflects on his interaction with Bob and the unusual emotions involved in accepting money from children a half world away:

Bob Goff, founder of Restore International, called me last week to let us know young men from The Restore Leadership Academy have decided to make a donation to The Mentoring Project to provide mentors for kids in Portland, Oregon.

Apparently, with the help of Restore, a number of these young men have started growing & selling their own crops. After hearing about The Mentoring Project, they wanted to give a small portion of their profits to our work.  

When we heard this news we were shocked, and a little unnerved. What were these young men thinking? Are we seriously going to accept donations from kids in Uganda? Many of these students were former child soldiers, their lives upended by poverty, conflict, and civil unrest, and now they want to give to The Mentoring Project?

It’s easy to be cynical about something like this and assume it’s not in the best interest of The Mentoring Project to accept donations from young people who are, for the most part, in a much harder situation than the fatherless boys in Portland.

But in talking to Bob about it, we realized that accepting the contributions and allowing Ugandan youth the opportunity to give generously is the most empowering thing we can do.

Bob described these students as the future leaders of Uganda and how this donation is a powerful incentive for the development of their country. The gift is a boost for us, but also an act of nation-building for them. 

Due to an eclectic mix of colonialism, foreign investment, and resource allocation, the world of international aid and development is dominated by 1st world countries supporting the livelihoods of 3rd world countries. Rarely, is it the other way around.

Coincidentally, alongside my work with The Mentoring Project, I run an international education organization calledThese Numbers Have Faces. As both organizations solicit support through various means, it’s exciting, and also inspiring, to see ordinary Americans, Canadians, and Europeans feeling empowered and overjoyed to give to our work in America and South Africa. 

We’ve learned that there is something meaningful and deeply enriching in the act of giving itself, regardless of the amount.

Remember the parable Jesus told about the widow who gave her last coin to the poor in Mark 12? In the same vein, let’s not take away the opportunity for the boys from Uganda to be blessed by God and experience the joy of giving.

We wanted the students in Uganda to know how much we appreciate their donations, so we mailed them a few copies of this thank you page showing one of the mentees they are helping us support here in Portland.

Basically, Restore International is turning charity on its head. They are saying that the privilege of financial progress and the joy of financial generosity shouldn’t be reserved exclusively for the global north. And, maybe if we gave the global south more opportunities to experience the joys of giving, they’d be more likely to pull their own countries out of poverty. 

Needless to say, we’re just thrilled to be along for the ride.

- Justin Zoradi, Marketing Director, The Mentoring Project
justin@thementoringproject.org

We are having a big fundraiser this summer involving garage sales. And we are looking for Garage Sale Hosts, which is where you come in.

All you need to do is host a garage sale and donate all or part of the proceeds to The Mentoring Project. In exchange for this, we will change a kids whole freaking life forever.

So in exchange for you selling this leg lamp over here on the left we recruit dudes like this on the right to throw kids in the air until they explode with happiness.

The last thing I want to do is manipulate your emotions. But I just have to reiterate the fact that if you sell your crap, we can provide love for a kid who isn’t as loved as he’s supposed to be.

See this sad kid. He’s shopping at a garage sale. You know why he’s sad? He’s sad because he wanted to buy a dad at the garage sale but they didn’t have one.

So here’s how you can get involved in three easy steps:

1. Decide to host a garage sale. This involves going to the nearest mirror and saying to yourself, I am going to host a garage sale.

2. Stockpile stuff in your garage that you want to sell.

3. Recruit your friends to stockpile their stuff in your garage for the garage sale.

4. Pick a date for your garage sale. Saturdays work best, with a blowout on Sunday afternoon. (The weekend after Fathers Day is the official TMP Garage sale date, but honestly, it doesn’t matter.)

5. Go through your friends stuff to see what you want to keep. Put those things under your bed.

6. Label that stuff with stickers for the big money.

7. Make some huge announcement at your church or in your cooking class.

8. If there are other garage sales on your block, spread rumors that their stuff has lice on it. Or dog pee.

9. Do live demonstrations for the various products. (Study up on the shamwow infomercials.)

10. Count the dough, then write us a check for some or all of it and send it our way.

You say, hey man, you said THREE easy steps, and I say to you, I grew up without a dad and so never learned to count. Why don’t you leave me alone you freaking bully!

And that’s about it.

Oh, also, register your garage sale with my friend Amy. She’s keeping a list of all the garage sales nation wide, so when yours comes up, we can let people know on this blog. Amy is at AmyKluttz@gmail.com

E-mail Amy today, and she will send you a fancy pdf with some helpful hints.

And thanks so much, to you and your friends, for selling your junk so we can throw kids around till they explode with happiness. Maybe little Tobias up there really will find that Father he is looking for at your garage sale. Maybe so, Tobias. Maybe so.

Sincerestly,

Don Miller