When we recite the Lord’s Prayer, as millions of people worldwide do regularly, we begin with the word, “Our.” However, in the Greek in which the New Testament was written, the first word of the prayer is “Father.” It is the first word, and the most important. If we cannot say, “Father,” and mean it, we will not benefit from the rest of the prayer as we should.

Until “Father” becomes a word we love and speak with joy, praying the Lord’s prayer will prove difficult. The Scottish novelist, poet, and preacher George Macdonald once said, “The hardest, gladdest thing in the world is, to cry ‘Father!’ from a full heart.” Those who can make this hard, glad cry can pray the Lord’s Prayer to great advantage.

But why should calling God “Father” from a full heart be hard to do? For clearly, it is. It does not come naturally to people and, for many, it doesn’t come at all.

One does not need to look far to find an answer to why calling God “Father” is difficult. An after-school program director recently told me that three out of four of his students do not have a father living in the home. Some students do not even know who their father is. When a father is absent during a person’s formative years, one of the chief helps in relating to God is missing.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of children living only with their mothers has doubled in the last fifty years. These children are more likely to live in poverty, to go to prison, to experience unwanted pregnancy, and to abuse drugs and alcohol. The loss of dads in the home has been disastrous.

The absence of dads has also had a deleterious effect on faith. It is not, I think, coincidental that America is experiencing a crisis of faith at the same time it is experiencing a crisis of fatherhood. As recently as the 1990s, 90 percent of all Americans identified as Christian. There has been a startling drop in that number, but among those raised in the dad-less years the decrease has been greatest. When fathers fell away from the family, children fell away from the faith.

Yet many people who have trouble crying “‘Father’ from a full heart have not fallen away from the faith. They are genuine Christians who find it either difficult or unhelpful to think of God as their heavenly Father. The problem for these sincere believers is often not that dad was absent but that dad was present in ways that caused them to distrust fathers.

As a pastor, I have met many such people. Their dads were not absent but distant, uninvolved, and disinterested. If, as is certainly true, children learn what fatherhood is all about from their dads, these people learned that fathers are distant, uninvolved, and disinterested. Such an upbringing makes faith in God as Father much more difficult.

Other people had a dad that was too involved. He was demanding, critical, and impossible to please. These people struggle to believe that God can ever be happy with them. They do not relate to God; they perform for him. And they feel their performance never measures up.

Still others were raised by manipulative, deceitful, and abusive fathers. I know a gracious Christian woman whose mother abandoned her to her father’s sexual abuse for years. She learned that a father is an unstoppable force that hurts and uses people at will.

It is not just bad dads who make it difficult for people to call God “Father.” Inconsistent dads do too, and we who are dads are all inconsistent to one degree or another. Sometimes we are involved and sometimes we are not. The “fun dad” is sometimes unreasonably angry. The wise dad occasionally does something stupid.

On Father’s Day, we don’t celebrate perfect dads, but good dads who try to be better dads. Although the reflection they offer of the heavenly Father is inevitably distorted, they give us glimpses of what he is like. Such dads are worth celebrating. They are more important than we know.