Growing Up Without A Father, God Still Restored Jamie MacDonald

Growing up without a present father really put a lot of confusion around my relationship with my Heavenly Father. I didn’t have a father’s love in my life growing up.
I was born at the peak of my dad’s boxing career in Nashville, and it was a crazy time for our family. My dad wasn’t around a lot, and my mom was playing the role of a single mom, and I think she was about 18 or 19 years old. And so, finances were a big issue for us. And my dad had some addiction issues, and so really it was just an unstable environment to be a kid.
And so my parents divorced when I was around seven years old and really never saw my dad again. He started coming around a little bit here and there, but he had mental illness from the boxing that just kind of kept increasing.
And so my mom ended up remarrying somebody who loved her but hated kids. And so it was just another round of a really rough home life where there was no singing aloud in the house. And so I would do music in school and then I would be punished for it at home. And so it just kind of created this confusion around using my gift. And so over time I just got really angry about that and started doing self-harm and just finding ways to express all this anger that I was feeling and this frustration and not feeling loved as a kid.
And so I started failing a lot of my classes and really just feeling alone in the world. And I got invited to church camp. And it was around the age of 12 that I just really felt the love of God for the first time and felt loved in general.
My counselors brought me in and just said, “Jamie, we love you. And God loves you. And God has a plan for your life.”
And I just never felt that warmth before, and I never felt understood as a kid or even seen. And so that really, really marked me. And it’s just like, I belong here. This feels like a family to me.
And so upon leaving camp, which was only a week long, it was like that was amazing, but going right back to the same situation, my home situation and everything. It just wasn’t long before I began to spiral and hang with the wrong crowd around the peer pressure age. So I started experimenting with drugs and alcohol as another form of escape. And basically it led to me dropping out of high school.
I was in and out of group homes a lot as a teen, and I honestly was happy to be out of the house, and I was finding a lot more love and support outside of my home, even within drug houses and gangs and just different groups of people that honestly became a family to me and treated me in a way that felt like safe for me at the time.
I always remembered what I learned at church camp and what God spoke to me there like when I would get… Sometimes I’d be at a party and I just, after smoking a lot of weed and drinking, and I just get in this haze and I would just think of those songs from camp and I would hear the Holy Spirit just speak to me like, “This isn’t what your life’s supposed to be.” And looking around at the people, “I have a plan for your life and it’s not this.” And, “You’re going to get out of here.”
I would hear stuff like that. And people would tap me like, “Hey, are you good?” Because I would zone out for so long. But the Lord was just calling me out. So I started really listening to that voice and I started getting into my Bible. I was living with my boyfriend at the time. And we were selling drugs together, and I would just sneak away and read my Bible in the mornings. And slowly but surely, I just started falling in love with God and I was so convinced that God was watching me and he was saving me.
Growing up without a present father really put a lot of confusion around my relationship with my Heavenly Father. And so, for years it’s like people are singing about the father’s love and I’m in church and I’m even in writing rooms trying to… I want to write about the Father’s love. And I’m just like, I don’t really get that yet. And it’s because I didn’t have a father’s love in my life growing up.
And so I would say for years I had this feeling that I wasn’t good enough for my earthly father, and maybe if I was, he would want to be with me and he would want to see me. And so I think that translated a lot into my walk with God where I’m just not sure if I’m measuring up. And my whole life says I’m not, so by the time I became a Christian, I still carried a lot of that. Like it’s never enough. It’s never going to be good enough.
Even now, every night when I get ready to go to bed, I’m putting on scripture affirmations and ways to keep my mind on the truth. Because it has been easy for the devil to pull me back, in my identity. And it’s just it’s easy to forget who I am now in Christ because I’ve spent so many seeing myself in a different light. And so it’s taken so many years to rework that in my heart. And a big part of that was reuniting with my dad and facing a lot of those wounds that I didn’t even know were still there.
In reuniting with him in Georgia, I actually got to sing for him for the first time. And something about hearing your dad tell you you sound good is so much more powerful than anyone else that could tell you that.
So when my dad said that, he didn’t even make a big deal about it. He’s just like, “Sounds pretty good.”
And it landed in a way that compliment never has for me. And so I wonder if that’s the beginning of me receiving affirmation and even being celebrated, if that needed to land there first before I could receive it from anyone else.
For anyone that feels like it’s too late for them or that they’re in a situation that’s so hopeless that they might as well just give up, I just want to remind you that God cares more than you do about that situation and that he has a plan to redeem and restore because he really is working all things together for good.