Hey Friends,
The book is almost finished! I appreciate your prayers regarding the logistics of pulling everything together in the next few weeks. Here’s a peek at the Introduction:
I wasn’t into zombies or The Walking Dead franchise as much as my kids were, but I have enjoyed other post-apocalyptic expressions like The Terminator, The Hunger Games, and Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction, The Road.[1]
Like many post-apocalyptic stories, The Road presents readers with a barren, God-forsaken, post-apocalyptic world that offers little hope for humanity. One online forum commented on the savagery of McCarthy’s world:
The remnants of the human species are forced into cannibalizing each other merely to survive or scavenging for tins and other dried goods thanks to some kind of unspecified disaster that has overtaken the planet. As a result, the humans in the book are presented as shadows of their former selves, debased and animalistic in the way that they prey on each other and have lost any sense of moral code.[2]
In McCarthy’s tale, only the main characters– a father and the son –carry the seeds of civilization, hope for a better world, and the motivation to thrive. McCarthy communicates this through the concept of “carrying the fire,” which comes up in four scenes in The Road.
The first is when the boy is afraid and his father has to assure him they’ll be okay. The boy asks if it’s “because we’re carrying the fire.” His father nods and says, “Yes. Because we’re carrying the fire.”
The next comes after an encounter with cannibals. The father promises his son that he and the boy will never become like “those people.” He explains that this is because “we’re the good guys” and the ones carrying the fire.
The third is when the boy asks whether they might find another father and son like them. He asks, “And they could be carrying the fire too?” Trying not to extinguish hope, the father agrees that it’s possible but that they can’t be sure.
Finally, at the end of the book–spoiler alert–just before the father dies, he insists his son must continue on:
You have to carry the fire.
I don’t know how to.
Yes you do.
Is it real? The fire?
Yes, it is.
Where is it? I don’t know where it is.
Yes, you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I see it.
Friend, you and I have a fire inside of us. It’s always been there. And like the boy’s experience in the scenes above, it’s shaped by our questions, hopes, fears, and even the apocalyptic hurts we’ve experienced on our journeys to date. And, yes, it’s intimately connected to our fathers—whatever they were or weren’t, their powerful presence or haunting absence. Ultimately, as we’ll explore in this book, it’s also connected to God the Father and Source of All.
Unlike McCarthy’s book, Irreplaceable: Recovering God’s Heart for Dads isn’t a work of fiction; it’s about reality. And rather than being dark and God-forsaken, it’s God-infused and full of light. Like McCarthy’s book, however, it is still very much about “carrying the fire,” primal relationships, and our human journey along “the road.” Moreover, this book is about recognizing and recovering fire from above to make better sense of our journeys and pass on an irreplaceable legacy to our children. And it’s based on two convictions:
- “Fire from above”—the foundational desires, drive, motivation, and all that makes humans thrive—comes ultimately from the heart of God.
- God’s perfect design for human relationships includes an irreplaceable role for dads in carrying that fire and passing it on to their children. As biblical scholar N.T. Wright noted:
“The God of whom the Bible speaks is, after all, the creator of the world. Part of the point of the whole story is that he loves the world and intends to rescue it, that he’s put his plan into operation through a series of concrete events in actual history, and that he intends for this plan to be worked out through the concrete lives and work of his people.”[3]
To be even more specific, God, the creator of and giver of all life, carries out his plans through “the concrete lives and work of his people,” especially fathers. Or to summarize both points above even more simply for the purposes of this book, God is the source of the fire we carry within us and He has a special heart and purpose for dads.
With that in mind, this book is divided into three sections: Part 1, Essential Foundations, Part 2: Culture Shifts and Challenges, and Part 3: Your Irreplaceable Legacy. By way of analogy, you might think of our road trip together in this book like building a house (essential foundations) that will not only withstand hurricane force winds and floods (culture shifts and challenges) but remain a thing of shelter and beauty for the next generation (your irreplaceable legacy). And now, before we jump into these sections, I’d like to illustrate and define two key concepts that are central to this book– the father wound and father-absence, as well as give some context for my own journey with my dad along “the road.”
[1] My second son, Timothy, a history major who later got his masters in theology and literature, defines “post-apocalypticism” as “the popular fascination with the aesthetics of post-apocalyptic landscapes, as well as an obsession with the implications of the end of the world on society and human nature.” Again, The Walking Dead, Terminator, Mad Max, The Hunger Games, Divergent, After Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Cloverfield, Elysium, Oblivion, etc.
[2] https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/explain-what-does-this-quote-means-carrying-fire-424360
[3] N. T. Wright, Simply Christian (New York: HarperOne, 2006), 195.