New Book Reveals Why Christian Dads Who Would Do Anything for Their Kids Still Feel Distant From Them

When you love your family and still feel far from them

You walk in the door and the house wants something from you. A kid melts down over homework. Your wife starts telling you about her day and you already know what she should do about it. By nine o'clock you're on the couch with your phone, and nobody is asking you for anything.

Then the voice starts. "I'd do anything for these kids. Why can't I just be there?" Or the other one, after you've raised your voice over nothing: "I said sorry last time. I meant it. Here I am again."

If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. You've been running software you never chose.

Somewhere back there, you brought your dad something real. A fear. A hurt from school. What came back was an explanation, a verse, or silence. Nobody said the rule out loud, but you learned it: feelings make you weak. You've been treating your own heart that way ever since.

And the way you treat your own feelings is exactly how you treat your family's.

Why keeping your feelings in check makes you a harder dad to talk to

The belief sounds like strength. A dad has to be the steady one. Somebody in the house has to keep it together, and you're good at it.

There's truth in that. A family needs a man who knows where he's going.

The problem is what that rule does when your son climbs into the car after soccer practice and tells you the other boys left him out. If you've spent years talking yourself out of your own disappointment, the same arguments come out of your mouth for his. Thick skin. Maybe you did something. Here's how to handle it. You fixed it fast enough that neither of you had to feel it.

Your kids don't hear a lesson. They hear that their feelings are a problem to solve. Somewhere around thirteen or fourteen, most kids have worked out where the heart is welcome in their house, and they adjust.

Why discipline, date nights and more Bible reading leave the distance in place

You've probably tried the reasonable things. Morning routines. A men's retreat. Communication skills. App blockers. Reading Scripture every morning and promising your wife, again, that this time is different.

Each one delivers what it promised. You function better for a month or two. Then a bad night lands you back in the same place.

Every one of those fixes works on the outside. A man who gets more disciplined often just gets better at ignoring what he feels. A man who learns listening scripts says the right words to his wife and still wants her feeling gone. Even Scripture can become a way to quiet a feeling without ever hearing it. The rule underneath keeps running, so the gap stays open.

Why I wrote this book

I was willing to move my family across an ocean for missions, and I still couldn't stop getting angry at my kids.

I'd yell over small things. Then I'd get down on their level, ask their forgiveness, and mean every word. Sometimes I was angry again within the hour. That went on for years.

In 2019 we were serving in Norway, and things were coming apart. My wife Natasha was pregnant with our fourth. As we prayed about his name, God led us to Elijah and gave me Malachi 4:5-6, the promise to turn the hearts of fathers toward their children. I loved it for about a minute. Then I realised it was pointed at me.

A year later my eight-year-old daughter didn't want to go anywhere alone with me. Nothing dramatic had happened. She just didn't feel safe.

I prayed. I tried checklists, accountability, fasting, phone blockers. Most men I asked told me to stop being so hard on myself. She turned nine, then ten, eleven, twelve. The anger stayed.

The year she turned thirteen, a friend named Ernie started meeting with me on Zoom every other week. He gave me permission to actually feel what was going on instead of explaining it. When we asked Jesus what was under my anger, the answer was loneliness.

Something changed in how I heard her. I wasn't as quick to correct. When I finally asked about her heart, she told me: "I want to feel like I matter, but instead I feel like nobody sees me."

She had been waiting for me to ask. I couldn't make that space for her until I had made it for myself. At eight she didn't want to be alone in the car with me. At thirteen she told me what was on her heart every week on the drive to youth group.

Why your kids open up once you feel your own hard feelings first

When you give your own feelings room, you stop needing your family's feelings to go away.

Most men assume that feeling something will make it bigger. In practice, a feeling given a minute or two usually gets stronger, then lets go. A refused feeling doesn't leave. It sits underneath and comes out sideways: the snap at dinner, the hour on the phone, the lecture your son didn't need.

So the work starts with you. A dad who has never been allowed to be sad can't sit with his son's sadness. A dad who has practised it for a few weeks starts to notice what's going on when his twelve-year-old snaps at a sibling or goes quiet at the table. You ask what happened at school and he shrugs. You wait. Sometimes he talks that night. Sometimes it's the next day in the car.

Tonight, after something hard happens at home, you do this:

What it looks like

The kids all want something different after dinner, and you feel tension behind your eyes. You send them off and sit down. The word is shame: the feeling that you're not enough for any of them. You sit with it for two minutes, then ask Jesus what he thinks. Ten minutes at first, and many men get it under five after a few weeks. The book calls this a Debrief.

How one dad found the sadness under his anger

Martin had built his life on succeeding at things. When we met at a bookstore in McKinney, he told me he was unfocused, unmotivated, and didn't feel like himself.

The daily practice was slow for him at first. He called it "long and arduous" and felt stuck just trying to find a word. Then an old story surfaced. Years earlier he'd launched a company with friends. While he was on sabbatical, they sold it and forced him out. He got angry and moved on to the next thing. He had never let himself be sad about losing the company and the friends in one move.

When he finally felt that sadness, he was surprised by how much fear and hurt had been locked behind it. "I'm not going to say that I've solved or completely replaced that yet," he told me. "It's a process."

What changed at home was the part he cared about most: "I only knew how to feel my anger and frustration. Now I'm starting to see how those feelings play into our daily decisions, and instead of dismissing them, I use them as a door into better relationship."

Your kid could tell you what's wrong
instead of saying "fine,"
forty days from now

Forty days from now, you could be a dad who catches the snap before it leaves his mouth, hears his wife's worry without fixing it, and repairs it when he misses.