| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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A Father's Absence
00:05:32
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| We don't recognize what a man looks like today. | |
| Therefore, we don't respect what man is today. | |
| In the 80s, you realized what leadership was all about, and it was defined when you looked at leadership. | |
| You knew that President Reagan was a leader because he spoke like a leader, and he carried himself like a leader. | |
| In the household, you knew who your father was because their father spoke like a father. | |
| He carried himself like a father. | |
| But the moment a father became absent from the home, we lost who a father was. | |
| Therefore, we don't recognize what a father looks like because a father has been gone for so long that therefore we don't even know what it sounds like, what it looks like, what he smells like. | |
| Therefore, when we try to be fathers today, we can't even recognize what a father looks like because the father has been gone too long. | |
| Now, let me flip the script for a minute. | |
| Now, we don't know what a leader is because a leader has been absent for so long that we don't recognize how he looks like, what he sounds like, how he signs executive orders like. | |
| So, therefore, we come against anything that looks like a man, smells like a man, walks like a man. | |
| Oh, I can preach right now. | |
| But as man, we've become absent from our home. | |
| So, how can a man regain his position when he's been gone for so long? | |
| How does a man, there you go, Neil, that's a question? | |
| Well, when I was five years of age, my mother called my brother, my sister, myself into her bedroom. | |
| And that was not unusual. | |
| My father was an executive for General Electric, and he traveled a lot. | |
| And so, it wasn't unusual to get on the phone, but this time it was weird. | |
| It was different. | |
| There was a look of pity and sadness on my mom that I really couldn't grasp at the time. | |
| And my brother, who's older, took the phone and immediately burst into uncontrollable tears. | |
| I couldn't describe it then. | |
| I understand what happened now. | |
| I saw my brother swallow a bitter root that he's yet to extract. | |
| My sister was next. | |
| Beautiful girl. | |
| Oh, my gosh. | |
| My sister, beautiful. | |
| But when she took the phone, she didn't cry. | |
| It was like a fog enveloped her that lasted for decades. | |
| And she tried to sedate that pain her whole life. | |
| I was next. | |
| I'm five years of age. | |
| I take the phone. | |
| On the other end of the phone is my father's deep baritone voice, and he says, Gary, I'm not going to be living at home any longer. | |
| Your mother and I are getting a divorce. | |
| I love you, little buddy. | |
| Click. | |
| Now, I didn't know at five years of age, you don't know what the word divorce means. | |
| You don't understand what that is all about. | |
| And so when I heard that, I'm like, what just happened here? | |
| And I couldn't understand what was happening. | |
| I didn't understand when my mom married a former friend of my father. | |
| You know, when you're five, you don't understand that. | |
| And I didn't understand it when my mom called me in and said, we're not going to call you Gary any longer, which is my father's name. | |
| We're going to call you Neil, your middle name, and you're going to assume my husband's name. | |
| So that morning, I awakened Gary Kennedy. | |
| That night I went to bed, Neil Robertson. | |
| And somewhere in the daylight hours, someone stole my identity. | |
| And the problem with that is if you don't know who you are, you'll never know why you are. | |
| Inherit to identity is your purpose. | |
| So my whole childhood, all my teenage years, I'm grasping. | |
| I'm trying to play catch up. | |
| It's like the world was on a time zone I wasn't on, and I'm just trying to figure this out. | |
| No one there. | |
| My father wasn't there to tell me about our heritage. | |
| He wasn't there to prophesy my future. | |
| My father's voice exited with him, and I wouldn't know him until I became an adult. | |
| One night I was working in a coal mine, believe it or not, in Oklahoma. | |
| I look like a coal miner, right? | |
| I was working in a coal mine from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., seven nights a week by myself. | |
| They hired me to pump water out of the mind all night long. | |
| And so I learned very early that freedom costs a lot of money. | |
| So I had moved out when I was 17, and I'm working and trying to just make, I didn't have anything else to do, so 84 hours a week at work, you know, helped me eat. | |
| So one night in the coal mine, I heard the Spirit of God. | |
| I remember looking up at the stars and saying, God, do you even know who I am? | |
| Do you even care? | |
| And Philip, you know the voice of God. | |
| I heard the voice of God. | |
| And the voice of God said to me, I know you. | |
| And I've given you the Spirit of a Son. | |
| And you can call me Abba. | |
| You can call me Daddy. | |
| And it was at that moment, intentional direction began to happen in my life. | |
| An identity of who I am. | |
| A self-assurance. | |
| It's not personal confidence. | |