You may have come across the story of Karl Bushby. You can read about it in lots of different media outlets. In 1998, he undertook a 28 year journey to walk from Chile to Hull. Almost every media outlet cast him as an explorer, an adventurer and some sort of hero.
What is quite interesting, however, is the comments underneath those articles. Very few seem to share the view of the media. The media reports note that when Karl set off, his son was 8 years old and is now 36. His return to Hull gave him the first opportunity to meet his 12 year old grandaughter. His mother was also left behind. The overwhelming noise from the comments is that this was a total deriliction of duty and a complete shirking of responsibility. I am minded to agree.
Two things stand out about the comments. First, there seems to be an increasing recognition that fathers are really quite important. Anybody who has looked at any of the stats will know that the number one predictor of life chances is fatherlessness. It is not insignifcant that many see a man simply abandoning his familial responsibilities and see it as less that laudable.
Second, there was a time when ‘following your dreams’ would have been the order of the day. Never mind the impact, nothing matters more than ‘being true to yourself’. Seemingly, this is the broad line the media have taken. But the response to it has largely been to reject that logic. It appears many people still think responsibility, particularly when it comes to family, is really quite important.
I think this is good from a Christian perspective. It is yet more evidence that things are not always on a completely downward, worsening trajectory. They are not always on an upward ever improving one either. Rather, there are examples of things being better and other things being worse than they have been before. This (as I judge it) is one positive example. Simply going off to ‘find yourself’ or ‘show the strength of the human spirit’ is no longer deemed a credible thing to do when you have responsibilities and duties. Dumping them all for spurious reasons is not largely reckoned to be something we ought to laud, but is rather regrettable, particularly as it pertains to those left behind.
Christians have their own form of this kind of thing. Often less ‘finding yourself’ or ‘following your dreams’ and more usually linked to mission and ministry. That is not to deny the need for some sacrifice for the sake of the gospel, but there are enough stories of people who hate the Lord and his church because their father insisted on following his ministry calling (Christian codified language, typically selectively employed at that, for whatever I would quite like to do) at the expense of taking hold of family responsibilities.
We may Christianise it, but the issue is the same. Sacrificing our family on the altar of a spurious “calling” or a mission we have decided upon, despite the needs of our family and its impact on them, is not very godly. Dare I say, many missionary biographies and some of the calls from the “great pastors” of the past simply feed this tendency. It probably bears recognising – as the Karl Bushby story highlights for us clearly – this is now one of those sins that is not even tolerated among the pagans these days. And rightly so!
If fathers really are important (and the Bible reckons they are), we do our family no good if we simply abandon them. That is true if we divorce our wife and leave home, it is true if we go off on some spurious challenge and it is just as true if we drag our family into mission and ministry that means – though we may be physically present on some level – we have nigh on abandoned them to fulfil our wish-dream. In the end, your primary calling is to your family; dropping that responsibility for whatever reason is neither godly nor right and does not commend the gospel to our unbelieving neighbours either.