Proxy Work

Today on 12 Lunches  we have a guest post from Chuck.

Looking back on my teenage years in the LDS  Church, I’m very grateful for the abundant, diverse examples of stable fatherhood that life in our wards provided. My early childhood is best described as unstable. I was the oldest of five children, …and the only boy. I loved my father very much and most of my childhood memories with him are happy ones; he enjoyed spending time with me and we had a lot of fun together. But Dad was also a binge drinker and abusive and angry when drunk. My mother left him for good when I was six, divorced him when I was eight and found the LDS Church the summer I turned nine. We joined six weeks later. As a lone-parent, five-child family on welfare, we were hardly the ideal Mormon family.

When I turned twelve my mother remarried in the temple and we moved across town into my stepfather’s house. I was fiercely loyal to my father and resented my stepfather as an intruder, though we were in his home.   At fourteen or fifteen, I began to be  able to acknowledge my father’s shortcomings and my stepdad’s strengths, but only to myself —  my teenage pride wouldn’t let me climb down from the high horse whose saddle I fit so comfortably.

At this tender time, I started looking for role models in other fathers and found them in abundance. Chief among them was Alan Fletcher, a combination of my father’s warmth and my stepfather’s stability. He and his wife had seven kids, including three girls whose ages bracketed mine. They were a great family — always a good feeling in the home, despite the usual sibling jousts and carryings-on. His wife was one of my seminary teachers. I looked up to them and had a huge crush on one of their daughters.

One day, when they had moved across town and I was visiting their ward, I arrived early for church and a member of the high council did a double-take when he saw me in the hallway. He asked if I was a Fletcher. I told him I wasn’t. He replied that I looked like one and I was hugely flattered by his mistake. I saw Brother Fletcher after church and told him what the other brother had said. He put his arm around me and, in his warm and casual way, said “Well, that would certainly be no shame to me, Chuck. Next time someone asks you if you’re my son, just tell ’em you are!” I won’t be able to do justice to the effect that had on my sense of self-worth, but it cemented my belief that those whose opinion mattered would judge me by my own behaviour and not by my family of origin.

Over the years, I’ve compared notes with others from similarly unorthodox family backgrounds. Some find the contrast between the church’s high ideals and their own family experience to be deeply discouraging. Others, like me, find it aspirational. A pivotal difference seems to be how we were treated by others at key inflection points in our lives. As a forty-year-old father myself now, I’m able to remember my own father more charitably and my stepfather more fairly. But I also appreciate, that much more, the way men like Alan Fletcher make welcome in the Church those who might otherwise feel themselves outsiders. I have known no greater example than this simple and consistent kindness, extended in a season of need.