13 Years Without a Father’s Day

~See Southeast Outlook Newspaper covering this story here!~

Father’s Day.

For some, it is a day of gratitude, appreciation, and an extra hint of love for a father or father figure that has been in their life. For others, it is a day of pain, longing, anger, or resentment.

June 19, 2006, was my first Father’s day without a dad. Of course, I was seven years old. The pain that was to come hadn’t quite hit me yet, and during the next few years, I would celebrate my mom on Father’s day. She did everything for me.

In high school, I started mourning the passing of my father. The pain was real, and I needed him more than ever. High school was also the time when I found out that my father had actually died from a mixed drug intoxication of heroin and fentanyl — rather than simply an “overburdened liver” from drinking alcohol every day.

My father loved drugs more than me. 

He would have rather done drugs than raise his children. 

He didn’t love me. 

These were the thoughts that I was dealing with in high school. Every father’s day, these were the feelings that I felt as my mom and older sister celebrated his life, and adored him on social media. I hated him for leaving me, leaving us.

As a man, having a father was so crucial to my development. I blamed him for everything that was wrong with me. He was the reason that I wasn’t athletic, he was the reason that I had poor social skills, why I was awkward, and why I was poor. If he had only stayed, I would turn out like all the other guys that I know. If only he stayed, I wouldn’t have to witness my mom’s abuse by other men. Growing up, there were never father figures in my home. There were “men” in my life, however, the ones that lived with us had been nothing short of boys; boys, who controlled my mother, brought darkness into my family, bad influences, physical and emotional pain, fraudful acts of tenderness and hate.

For a while, this hatred in my heart for every kind of man brewed during every Father’s day. The other fathers that my friends had in school didn’t even have the decency to inform their child that bullying was not okay and that not everybody was rich. There was no hope, and I hated father’s day.

In eighth grade, soon after I got baptized, I started going to the youth ministry. The students all had their respective “small group” youth leader according to their year in school and gender. For about 15 minutes every Sunday morning, I got to spend time with this small group leader and a couple other guys that were in my grade.

No, this post is not about how going to youth ministry every Sunday morning to talk about scripture changed my life.

What changed my life, was the first time a man had taken me out to a birthday dinner. Not out of any obligation. No man in my family up to that point had ever considered taking the effort and time to let me know that I mattered. The most I got from the men in my blood family were obligatory birthday Sundays at grandmas, and of course the annual Christmas parties. What changed my life, was when the same man took me to get new shoes for the new school year with a blank check. What changed my life, was the same man who was absolutely joyful to give me $600+ a year so that I could go to an annual trip to Florida with my youth ministry, where the focus was on Jesus for an entire week. Those simple acts meant more to me than the accumulated 5 weeks that I spent in high school going to Florida to hear back to back sermons. For years to come, I will remember only a few sermons, but for a lifetime will remember these acts of love from a father of two beautiful daughters; who knew my situation, never pushed Jesus on me, never preached more than I wanted to hear, and didn’t ask uncomfortable questions about my past — he simply loved me for who I was, and showed me tangible love.

My exposure to genuine love didn’t stop at him.

It’s the love from a middle school youth pastor that talked to me on the phone as I am walking home from school when I wanted nothing more than to run away from home. It’s the love of a middle school pastor who talked to me about maturity and growing up, who was also stern and talked to me about sex, women, and men. Many boys dread “the talk,” but I inside I was begging for someone to step up and see that I didn’t have a father to tell me about these things.

My senior year of high school, my family was homeless again. This was nothing new, and I was used to instability. However, this time it was different. The only place that we could live was a 45-minute drive from my high school. This meant that I had to quit swimming, quit my job, stop going to church, and that school was going to get very difficult for me. This meant 5am morning drives, drugs, smoke, an arguing family member, a dog I was allergic to, and a decaying trailer home.

During the same time, my church hired a new high school pastor (the third one since I had been there). I remember walking into his warm home a couple hours before the ball dropped for new years eve, with nobody home and meeting the not yet painted nursery that would be my room for the next year. I lie on the ground, with no bed yet, and cried. He and his wife had been in my hometown for less than a month, who had a wild young son and a daughter on the way. They were not in town, they barely knew me, yet trusted me. They gave me shelter and met my every basic human necessity, and all the love I could ask for. Nobody expected them to do that, they were not boastful about it, and treated me like a son for longer than they had anticipated; and they did it with joy. I lived with a pastor, who never pushed the gospel on me, who poured into me, listened, and simply loved me for who I was, and showed me tangible love.

There have been several dads that come from the same place, that have prayed for my family, kept up with me, and genuinely cared. But through all the sermons, all the prayer,  the conviction in the past decade, nothing compares to the love of Jesus that these men displayed. When I remember what God has done for me, and why my life is changed, why I am free from darkness — I remember the love of these men. Men, who had their own families, their own jobs, time commitments, bills, decided I was important enough. That I was worth it. That I was loved.

Today, fathers from Southeast Christian Church are still loving me. and have loved me in the past. Fathers who are battling cancer, are still giving me a place to stay when I come home from school. Fathers who contribute to every mission trip that I go on. Fathers who have helped my family move into a new home. Fathers who agree to have my high school graduation party at their house.

This is what I remember for Father’s Day: that we love because Jesus had first loved us, and that God was pursuing me through the hearts of fathers in my church. He wanted to let me know that I was loved, that I mattered, and that he had a plan for me. He was letting me know that no matter what darkness I had been through, and no matter what darkness that I will go through, that he will always be there. He is more faithful than any father on earth ever will be, he is life-giving, and he is love.

It is no coincidence that the most impactful men in my life are coming from my home church, Southeast Christian Church Indiana. The power of tangible, powerful love goes farther than any of us can ever anticipate. God is able to love and change the heart of someone over the years, and one person, just one, may contribute to the realization for any person how much Jesus loves them.

The statistics for fatherless homes are saddening. Here are just a few.

63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes. 


90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes. 


85% of all children who show behavior disorders come from fatherless homes. 


80% of rapists with anger problems come from fatherless homes. 


71% of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes.

The love displayed by these godly men in my life showed me the love of Jesus. This love of Jesus changed the way I treated people, changed the way I saw the world and changed my heart entirely. Not only did I defy these statistics, but I am pursuing to fight against them.

Jesus has given me a heart of deep inquiry, an inquiry to know the pain my father experienced as a child that led him to drink, which led to a weak liver that prevented him from fighting his overdose. The inquiry of behavior, science, and the human body. This love has led me to an undergraduate career that explores neuroscience in the class and in a lab that uses dMRI, tractography and anatomical structures leading to precise medical diagnosis and contributions to behavior literature. This love is calling me to a career as a physician who wants to save as many fathers as possible both in the civilian and military populations — because children deserve their fathers, and they need to know that they are loved. But even more so, a career that is able to show tangible love through the wisdom of medicine, and to show the love of Jesus as it has been shown to me.

I forgive my father for his decisions. He came from a fatherless home, and he could not control the darkness, pain, poverty, and fatherlessness in his own childhood. I love him, and I thank him for the unconditional love that he showed me while he was here on Earth. It is his life, and his passing, that has made me into the man that I am today, that allowed me to meet Jesus, and to discover the man that created my father’s heart.

Thank you daddy, thank you to the godly men in my life, thank you Jesus for life, and Happy Father’s Day to all you dads who love children, even those who are not yours. Know it means the world to us.

Ricardo E Stuck Jr.

“Father of the fatherless and protector of the widows is God in his holy habitation…” Psalm 68