Live To Forgive

I pretty much lost all respect for him at that point when he calls me and asked me for money.

I'm like, you spent all your money on gambling and drinking and now you're calling me in college and saying, can I borrow money? Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson. And I'm Dave Wilson and you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. So today we've got Jason Romano with us, one of our great friends. Welcome to Family Life Today, Jason. Glad to have you back. Thanks for having me back, guys. And Jason leads a really incredible ministry called Sports Spectrum, where they interview athletes about their faith. And, you know, formerly he was with ESPN for 17 years, a job we all wish we had.

I wish I had. Do we? Oh, yeah.

What a great— Every guy wishes for that? I mean, it's just something you turn on every day at 7 a.m. and turn it off at midnight. Oh, that's terrible. So anyway, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

But no, really, what he's doing now is phenomenal. But you, Jason, have an incredible story with your dad that when I read your book about, well, you're going to tell us today about that. But, man, your relationship with your dad was similar to mine, wasn't it? I had a father growing up who wasn't around. Physically or emotionally? Emotionally.

Yeah. So physically, my parents—my story with my dad goes all the way back to four or five years old, my parents divorced. My mom and dad divorced, and I think I was five years old. And so I have no real memory of them being together. That reason—I've talked to my mom about this many times—for the divorce was because of what was the beginning stages of the alcoholism that my father struggled with.

The addiction to alcohol grew and grew and grew and got worse and worse and worse. And so as we were younger, I tell people, you know, like a typical divorced family—I hate to say that, but unfortunately that's what it was for us. I have two brothers, so it was three boys. And us three boys saw my dad on the weekends. My dad had, you know, what's it called, the legal rights to hang out with us on the weekends. And then during the week, we lived with my mom. So we would spend time with my dad, but my dad, when they got divorced, my dad lived and moved back in with my grandparents. My nana and my pa. And nana and pa were the ones that, in essence, we gravitated towards on those weekends, even though we were, quote unquote, with my dad. And my dad would go to the bars, he would go drinking. Sometimes he would be there for us when we were kids, especially when we were doing sports.

That was the connection. But usually it involved the bottle or some kind of drinking. And my grandparents were the ones, while my mom was working as a single mom, three jobs as a nurse, they were the ones. And my grandparents, who kind of did stuff with us, took us to the toy store, took us to the mall, took us to Pizza Hut, whatever it was as kids, took us to our games to play sports. While my dad was sometimes around, quite often he was drinking. Now, when we were seven, eight years old, I also remember my dad taking us to the bars with him. And he would give us a quarter, buy us a soda, say, go play pinball and go play some video games. A seven-year-old thinks that's a great night.

I don't know any better. But my dad's at the bar getting wasted and, you know, at seven or eight, not a big deal. But as I got older, I saw the dysfunction and I saw what was happening and it really tore us apart. Well, if you had to describe him as a little boy, like under 12, what would you have described him as? I would describe him as a very loud, in some cases, angry person who loves sports. That's the best way I could have described him. And then you got older and you became resentful.

Very much so. In fact, the 12-year-old Jason, I didn't feel, I never felt love for my father. I'm sure he loved me. And of course, I, you know, under the current here, loved him too because he's your dad. But I never felt that love. The love, the only way I really ever felt love for my father, even growing up through high school and to college, was when we would have a connection through sports and when he was sober.

Unfortunately, because of the drinking, he wasn't sober that often. And as I got older and I started experiencing things as a teenager and seeing him in states that you shouldn't have to see your dad in, usually drunk, I became very resentful, very angry. I didn't know how to process it. I didn't have anybody in my life to kind of walk me through it other than my mom. I want to be careful here because my mom saved us. I tell people, you know, when we were easily headed down a track like my father, my mom kept us back on the on the narrow, the straight and narrow and allowed us to have experiences like normal kids, even though our relationship with my dad was anything but normal. For the most part, other than that, I kind of had just a normal childhood. Thankfully, you know, just going to school, playing sports, hanging out with my friends. And it sounds like you lost respect for him. Very much so, especially as I got older and I got into college and even more out of college.

I'll tell you a time when I definitely realized I lost respect for him when I was in college, 19 years old, and I went away. It was a community college, but it was about three hours away. And I lived in an off campus apartment, growing up quickly, just trying to live on my own. And I got a call at like midnight from my father.

I'm like, what's going on here? And I knew my dad wasn't in a good place anyways. You know, at that point, he had already missed my high school graduation because he was in a rehab center.

So I knew he wasn't doing well. And I answer the phone and my dad is on the other end calling up, telling me that he had no money and was asking me for money. Now, I'm in college. Anybody listening who's ever went to college knows that we are the poorest people on Earth. We have no money. But it was so bad that my dad got so desperate. And I think he was hoping that I would have some kind of empathy or sympathy for him, feel sorry for him. I'm sorry, dad, that you're in this spot, that you lost all your money. Sure, I'll send you the five dollars that I have, which is pretty much what it was. But I pretty much lost all respect for him at that point when he calls me and asked me for money.

I'm like, are you serious? Like, you drank yourself out of this. You spent all your money and he gambled a lot, too. So you spent all your money on gambling and drinking. And now you're calling me in college and saying, can I borrow money? What are you doing?

What are you doing? And so there's obviously an anger there. Very much so. And you even said your brothers wanted to kill him. Oh, yeah. There was a time. This is a couple of years after this. In fact, one of the chapters in Live to Forgive is the time my brothers wanted to kill my dad. Like, we didn't know how else to title that chapter other than what it was. And this was a story that they told.

I wasn't even around for this, but I wanted as people read the book to see that it wasn't just me that was affected by what my dad had done. My two brothers went through this, too. Are they older or younger? They're younger. So I'm the oldest. I'm the oldest. My middle brother, Chris, who is the one that led me to Christ, is two years younger. My youngest brother is four years younger than me. So we're all pretty close in age. And today we're all still best friends.

And that's great. But it's weird because my dad's parents, my grandparents, my Nana and Pa, were amazing people. Like, they were the stability when my mom was working that we needed. And they were also the grandparents who gave us anything we wanted, which is great. You always want those grandparents in your life. We definitely took advantage of them in a bad way, I would say, by saying, OK, Nana, I need 10 bucks to go to the whatever.

And here it is. Those two were allowing my brothers to live in the upstairs apartment at their house at this time. One day my dad comes home and my dad was it was up and down with him.

I mean, when he had his bad moments, it was really bad. And my dad shows up drunk and my grandparents were it was their only son, too. So this was really hard for them to walk through with a son who is, in essence, produced three grandchildren for them that they love dearly, but couldn't get his own life together.

And one day he comes home and he's just drunk as a skunk. And my brothers saw that my dad was yelling and screaming at our grandparents. And my one brother, Damian, and him got in a verbal exchange, but also a physical exchange. And at this point, none of you are believers or followers of Christ.

None of us are, no. So we have no faith, no understanding of who Jesus is. And even after that, which we can talk about, I still had a lot of issues with my father. But at that moment, my brother saw what had happened to my dad.

And he said, listen, you've got to call the cops on this guy because I'm going to kill him if he doesn't get out in my face right now. It was that much anger that had spilled up in my brother's life. And when they told that story for the book, I remember talking to them and saying, I don't think I knew all about this. I remember them telling me there was a time when we almost killed dad or felt like we wanted to kill him.

But I had not experienced that. But I'm glad they told me because I went through my own stuff with them, but they went through it, too. So this wasn't just a Jason story. This was all three of my dad's son's story that we all went through.

And it was bad. And so a few years later, you surrender your life to Jesus. And it all goes away, right? Everything's wonderful.

Isn't that how it's supposed to work, Dave? Yeah. So really talk about that because some people may think that's true, but you still had a struggle and you had to go on a journey. Tell us what happened.

Very much so. I mean, I'm so grateful that that day took place that I began that journey with Jesus. You know, my brother Chris, who I just mentioned, led me to the Lord Mother's Day 2001.

It's 20 years now. I'll never forget it. But I had to understand who Jesus was for me. It was my relationship. But there were many moments, even after that, where I didn't understand truly what forgiveness was about and understanding how to process what was going on with my father. And even after I became a Christian, my dad still continued his battle and his struggle with alcohol for the next 15 years. Had you shared your faith with him?

Yes. I wouldn't say multiple times, but a few times. I mean, all three of his boys now are Christians. You know, a little bit of a spoiler alert. My dad's not walking with the Lord still to this day. So that is a tension in our home a little bit.

And I'll get to how he's doing in a second. But he, at that point, you know, I'm walking and trying to learn who Jesus is, trying to understand salvation and the cross and forgiveness. But I was kind of like that character in the I Can Only Imagine movie. If you've seen that movie with Bart Millard.

Right. And Bart has to struggle with his dad and then his dad gets cancer and Bart is able to share faith with him. But there's a moment in the movie where Bart looks at his dad and he says, can God ever forgive me? His father says to Bart and Bart looks at him and says, God can forgive you, dad, but I can't.

And I was like, oh, my gosh, that was my life for the next 15 years. And it wasn't intentional. It wasn't like I was saying, I'm not going to forgive you. It was just understanding what Ephesians 4, 31 and 32 is about. And if you read the words of Paul, he says, let all bitterness and anger and wrath and slander and clamor be put away from you along with all malice. Verse 32, be kind to one another, forgive as God and Christ have forgiven you.

That part, the let all bitterness and wrath and anger, like that didn't happen. And it took me a very, very long time to understand because what would happen is my dad and I, we lived two hours apart. You know, my dad, unfortunately, had a DWI in 2006. He lost his license, so he wasn't able to drive. So we very rarely saw each other a couple of times a year, even in the midst of his drinking.

But we would talk. So his outlet was to pick up the phone and call. You know, my dad has never had a smartphone.

He doesn't have never been on the Internet to this day, has no email. It's good old fashioned 1993 relationship where he picks up the phone and calls you. That was good, but it wasn't good because that was where he would go to, especially when he drank. He would pick up that phone and he would call. Here's how I knew I hadn't forgiven my father. When he would call and he was sober, everything was fine.

We can talk, we can have most of our conversations revolved around sports, but we could talk. But when he called and he was drunk, I turned into a different person. I turned into, in essence, him. I wasn't drunk, but I was angry. I was bitter. I was lashing out saying things back to him that you wouldn't want to wish anybody would say to anyone.

Now, he would say some things to me, too. And I can claim that I'm the victim here and say that no father should ever say those things to their son. They shouldn't say these words.

They shouldn't use these words. But I wasn't being Jesus here. I was being Jason, and Jason was angry, and Jason was responding, and I was so upset with what he was saying that I wanted to inflict that pain back onto him.

I wanted him to feel what I was feeling. That's not the example of Jesus, and it took me a long time to forgive him. Well, what happened?

I mean, there's a journey. I've been on that journey, so I know it can take a long time, but what changed? What changed was this powerful word that we all need more of, I think, in our lives, empathy. See, I never saw my dad and thought about what he was going through. I only thought about what he did or how he acted and how it affected me, how it affected my wife, my daughter, my brothers, my mom, extended family. I mean, my dad ruined a lot of relationships because of his drinking, and so I always thought about the effect that it had on other people.

I never thought about how it affected him. He must not have enjoyed the life that he was living. Seriously. And I always thought, man, this guy's probably just this bad dude who would say these things, and I just wish he would stop drinking. And for many years, that was my prayer. My prayer was simply, even after I became a Christian, it wasn't that he would come to Jesus.

This is just honesty here. It was that he would stop drinking. But it came to a boiling point in 2013 where my dad hit his lowest point. So at this point, my dad is not only drinking heavily still, and he's in his early 60s here, he's also struggling with depression. And so when you combine the alcohol and the depression, that's a recipe for disaster.

It was bad. And so my dad hit his lowest point in 2013. He tried to end his life. Woke up one day, just didn't want to live.

And he had hinted at that in the past on different phone calls. But I had heard that since he was 40 years old on phone calls, that maybe I'll just end my life. Maybe I'm just not worth living for. And there were moments, I hate to admit this, but it's the truth in where I was in my walk, where I thought it would be better maybe if he wasn't here. I hate saying that, but it's true, because I didn't, again, have that empathy for my dad.

I just thought, well, this is easy if it just would all go away. And so my dad thought that way, too. And he tried to end his life. He took a bunch of pills. Thankfully, I think really quickly after he took those pills, he recognized that this wasn't a good situation. He called 911. They came, they took him to the hospital, and they saved him, in essence. And he's alive, and he's still alive today, thankfully. But it was at that moment when I got the call from the nurse. And here's where I know where my mindset was with my father at that point, seven, eight years ago now. The nurse calls me and says, Jason, your father's here at the hospital.

Took some pills last night, but we have him, and he's okay, and he's going to survive. We didn't know if you wanted to come visit him or if you wanted to come up and see him or whatever. And I said, no, I'm good.

Thank you, though, for calling me and letting me know that. And I hang up the phone, and I was numb. I didn't even have any feeling. There was no sadness. There was no empathy. There was definitely no jumping in the car and going to visit him.

None of that. And I think about where I was in my relationship with him at that point. If that's anybody else in my family, I'm jumping in the car right away to go be with them. But I was so bitter, and the relationship at that point—again, I'm a Christian at this point, too— but the relationship with my dad at that point was really just a thought of, maybe this is just what needs to happen.

It just needs to go away. But I spent the next week really diving deep into prayer, talking to my pastor, my small group, and sharing. I've always shared about my dad and just said, can you pray for him? He's still struggling with his alcohol. Well, at this point, I'm saying, can you pray for him? But he's now in a really, really bad spot.

He tried to end his life. My pastor and I had a conversation one day, and he goes, you know you need to think about forgiving him. And I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm fine. I forgave him years ago. And I had thought I had forgiven him for many years. But every single time he would call and he would be drunk and I would lash back out, I realized I hadn't forgiven him. I was still bitter.

The bitterness was there. Allowing him back into my life, I thought, was forgiveness. But that's not what it is, because forgiveness is not about the other person. In fact, it's never about the other person. The forgiveness is about ourselves.

And the chains that we carry when we hold on to that bitterness and that unforgiveness. And so a week later, my dad actually from the hospital calls me and he's lifeless. The voice I hear on the other end is just a man who has no intention to want to live anymore. And, you know, he spent four months in that hospital in the psych ward just trying to get better and treated for the depression.

Not just the alcoholism, of course. But when I heard my dad's voice that day, maybe it was because of what my pastor said. Maybe it was just because I finally had empathy for my father for the first time in my life. That was the moment where I told him verbally that I forgave him. I said, listen, Dad, I know what you're going through. I'm so sorry. I said, I just want you to know I forgive you and don't worry about anything else right now.

Just get better. And what was his response? You know, my dad was was not feeling great at that time, so there wasn't really a response. It was most like it wasn't even thank you. It was like, yeah, whatever. But it wasn't about my father at that point. It was that for that moment.

It's what I needed. Now, it also was what my dad needed. But I had to make a decision that if my dad never could get sober, I still had to choose to forgive him because it wasn't about him. And I'm happy to report that day when he went into the hospital, that's the last day to this day that he's had a drink. He's been able to stay sober now for seven, almost eight years.

And that's a miracle in its own right. And that's an answer to prayer, because that's where my dad was. And that's what I prayed for, was for him to get sober.

Now we're hoping someday that, you know, he begins a walk with the Lord and that still hasn't happened yet. But our relationship now is it's better, but it's not great, but it's not horrible anymore. And there's no bitterness, you know, and there's still things that my dad does where I just like, oh, my gosh, please stop. But I've forgiven him, you know, and, you know, reconciliation for us took place. But I tell people, forgiveness is always required because Jesus tells us to. Just read Matthew 18. Just read various other passages in the Bible. But where forgiveness is always required, reconciliation sometimes can't always take place.

Sometimes the damage is just not repairable. But again, remembering that the forgiveness is not about anything that other person does, it's for yourself. Yeah, I remember when I was toward the end of my journey of forgiving my dad, I read this quote by Lewis Smeeds.

And Lewis is one of the guys that's, in my opinion, authority, so much written about forgiveness. But, you know, Lewis says, when you forgive someone, you set a prisoner free only to discover you're the prisoner. I mean, I literally dropped the book. I mean, it hit me. The second I read it, I'm like, oh, my goodness, I'm the prisoner. I thought I was locking him up and that's what he gets and that's what he deserves for, you know, all these years of alcohol and, you know, abandoning your son, blah, blah, blah. And when I read that, I was, it hit me. It's like God was saying, you're the prisoner and you're never going to be free. You've got the key.

You've got to, you've got to unlock that and forgive your dad. And again, it didn't happen that day, but when I did, and I can sit here now in my 60s and I used to say it to the men in my church, I became a man at age 35. Because that's when I was free to become who God wanted Dave Wilson to be. I was, I was not able to be the husband she needed, the dad, my kid. And I'm not saying I'm a perfect man, but it was like, man, it was that big holding onto that bitterness.

And I know there's listeners right now. It's like, I can't forgive. I know what you can't and neither can I and Jason couldn't either, but God can through you.

And I really think it's supernatural. It's a supernatural thing, a divine power of God, especially when the wound is that deep and hurtful to be able to let that go. And you look at the example of Jesus, right? I mean, he was beaten, mocked, spit on, you know, made fun of everything you could imagine a person goes through. And yet he's standing there or up there on the cross and the people who put him up there are mocking him and making fun of him.

And he looks down, he says, Father, forgive them for they don't know what they're doing. I will say as a wife, it was probably the most marked difference in Dave that I've ever seen because he became free. I think you had an anger issue kind of simmering below the surface all the time. Just like Jason was saying.

Yeah. And that you really were released from that. And here's the thing that's so critical to understand.

And if you're a dad or you're a mom, please hear this. If you don't deal with this, you will continue it. It will go into your legacy.

You pass it on. The sins of the father visit through the generations. And I didn't know it then that my decision to forgive my dad would affect my sons.

Yeah. You know, they didn't really even know they were so young at the time. And again, I'm not saying they don't have bitterness and those kind of issues, but man, it changed the legacy because they have a dad now who's free. And again, not perfect freedom, but because, you know, we get triggered at times, but it's like, no, I no longer have this desire to punish him. And that's what Smeads defines forgiveness. You give up your right to punish.

That's right. You know, God was punished for us and forgave us and we can do the same thing. So I would say to anyone listening, today's your day. And absolutely choose forgiveness, but it doesn't mean we're perfect either.

I still struggle with not anger, I would say, but lashing out sometimes, you know, my daughter or my wife or, you know, a few people. But I will say that having chosen forgiveness, especially walking through writing a book about forgiveness, has helped me understand that that's available to us every single day. Like that's what we do every single day when we wake up to Jesus and we say, God, like forgive us of our sins.

Right. We're asking for forgiveness every day. But then it's our responsibility then to be Christ-like and that to exude that onto everybody else. And if we don't, we're basically putting a hand to God's face and saying, I got this.

Yeah. And that's when we get in trouble. And we don't have this.

We don't have it. So I'd say pick up Jason's book today, Live to Forgive. I love the subtitle, Moving Forward When Those We Love Hurt Us. You want to move forward? It starts right here. Dave, will you pray just for people that are struggling with that, that are struggling with forgiving people?

I'd love to do that. Let's pray. Father, you know better than any of us the pain of what it took to offer your son as the payment for our sin and to forgive us. We didn't deserve it.

We didn't even ask you for it. But you unconditionally loved us and you love us still and you made a way for us to be completely forgiven and free and through the blood of our Savior Jesus. And even through his resurrection, we have not only forgiveness to ourselves, but we actually have the power of God residing in us to empower us to forgive others that don't deserve it. So Lord, just as you have forgiven us, give us the power to forgive others and set them free, but in the process set ourselves free. And Lord, I know we cannot do it without you and we need you desperately to help us.

So we ask right now and we commit. We will do and we will be what you call us to be through your son Jesus. And we thank you for his forgiveness. We pray in his name. Amen.

Amen. I have to think that many of us, as we've listened today to Dave and Ann Wilson talking with Jason Romano about his relationship with his father. We've thought about people in our own lives, maybe parents, maybe siblings, other family members who have wounded us. And the question is, have we been able to move to forgiveness? Jason has written about his relationship with his dad in a book called Live to Forgive, Moving Forward When Those We Love Hurt Us.

It's a book we've got in our Family Life Today Resource Center and it's a book I think many of us would benefit from reading. The Bible makes it clear that a failure to forgive says something about our own relationship with Jesus. If we are forgiven people, we forgive others. You can get a copy of Jason's book, Live to Forgive, when you order it online at familylifetoday.com or call to order at 1-800-358-6329.

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