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The Real Father’s Day Nobody Would Put on a Card

The Real Father’s Day Nobody Would Put on a Card

Last updated on: June 21, 2026 at 3:14 pm by Adrian Warnock

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The Real Father’s Day Nobody Would Put on a Card 2026-06-21T15:14:20+01:00 Adrian Warnock

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Axe throwing

This Father’s Day, I know it will be a difficult day for some of you. Perhaps your father has died, and you are left without him.

Perhaps you had a father who wasn’t really involved in your life and left when you were a child. Maybe you never even knew your father. Or perhaps you are a father, but your relationships with your children are difficult or non-existent today. Forgiveness is needed in every single family or else it will fracture. Maybe you’re not able to see any of them for whatever reason. Difficult marriages and divorce can make a day like today hard to cope with.

Like other days of celebration promoted by our commercialised culture, Father’s Day on your own is brutal. And my heart goes out to you.

Even if, like me, you are spending time with family, often it’s not as easy as other people imagine. Sometimes when we think about days like Father’s Day, we imagine that everybody else is having the perfect Father’s Day. That’s just not true.

Social media is a curated and distorted version of the harsh realities of most of our lives. As a funny example, the picture of me having thrown two axes close to the bullseye might make you think I am a manly man who is skilled at this frustrating game. The truth? These were the only two random successes of an hour of missing the board.

Let me share about how even today didn’t quite work out how we had planned. I’ll tell you what I learnt about real masculinity as a result.

On the way to church, before our Father’s Day lunch, we were driving on the highway at 70 miles per hour. Yes, inside our legal speed limit in the UK, which is faster than the US but not unlimited, unlike some German autobahn! A small deer ran out in front of the car. There was no way I could do anything except hit it.

The thud told us that something was not right. I immediately looked in the rear-view mirror, but there was no sign of any animal on the road. We pulled over into a parking area and discovered that the deer had not only damaged our grille but was trapped in it, with blood dripping onto the ground.

Not exactly the perfect Father’s Day that anyone would put on a greetings card.

I must confess that I did try to use Father’s Day as my excuse for not doing what was necessary and pulling the deer out of the grille. My son, who was with me, I will admit, has clearly taken after his father, because he didn’t want to do it either. I won’t mention which of my sons this was.

Both my son and I realized in that moment that we weren’t quite the real men we thought we were. After all, if you’re the kind of man who watches Bear Grylls and imagines yourself as a survival expert, or even just as a strong, reliable man, it ought to be an easy thing to reach into a grille and yank a dead deer out. It did look as though it was going to take some force. My excuse was my lack of strength due to disability. My son had no such excuse.

There was, however, a happy ending to this story. We drove into two different truck stops on the highway looking for a “real man” who could help. We came up short, perhaps because the truckers were not working today and spending time with their kids.

As we were driving away from the second parking area, wondering what on earth to do because neither of us had the courage to do the necessary, a man driving a maintenance van drew our attention to the front of my car. Through my open window, I said that yes, we were aware of the problem and asked if he could help.

This Good Samaritan, however, was travelling with his son in the van. He explained that he often dealt with vermin control and, without any hesitation, grabbed hold of the animal, yanked it free, and removed it from the grille, to the admiration not only of his son, but of mine and me as well.

So whether you think of yourself as a real man, or whether you think of yourself as something of a beta man like me, it doesn’t really matter.

Society may honour the kind of masculinity that will rip a dead deer out of a stranger’s front grille, but manhood is much more than that.

Jesus was a carpenter, yes. He was undoubtedly strong, and perhaps he would have pulled the deer out without any difficulty. Sometimes our image of Jesus is that He is only strong and stereotypically masculine. The kind of man you’d want on your side in a fight or to defend you from a burglar. And He is that kind of man.

But He is also the gentle and kind man who reached out to those who were less fortunate, to foreigners and Samaritans. He Himself knew what it was like to be an asylum seeker. He cared for people from all kinds of backgrounds: tax collectors, prostitutes, and the Samaritan woman.

There’s something else we often forget about Jesus. He knew grief. It’s hard to imagine that, given that His mother and brothers are mentioned repeatedly in the Gospels, Joseph was still alive and simply never mentioned. At some point before His public ministry, Jesus almost certainly experienced the death of His earthly father.

He also experienced the death of His friend Lazarus. Even though He knew He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead, standing near the tomb with the grieving family, Jesus did something that many so-called real men would refuse to do. He cried from the depths of His heart. I’m pretty sure that, just as we often think of other people’s death at a funeral, Jesus was looking down through eternity moved with compassion towards your pain and mine.

If Jesus is the perfect man, embodying both the strength of a carpenter and the tender kindness of a friend who would does cry. He should be our model for manhood. Not merely a man who is strong enough to pull a deer from a grille, but one who is also compassionate enough to enter into the pain of others.

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About Adrian Warnock

Adrian Warnock

Medical doctor · Published author · Patheos writer since 2003

I have always lived within sixty miles of London, UK where I studied, worked and worshipped for thirty years. I began writing for this Patheos blog in April 2003, making it one of the longest-running individual columns on the Christian Internet. My writing here, on Substack, and in my books is influenced by my medical training, eight years of working as a psychiatrist in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), eighteen years working in medical research in the pharmaceutical industry, twenty-five years of serving as a pastoral leader in a growing multicultural church, and a difficult decade of lived experience with chronic illness, including blood cancer, and the unexpected losses, including early retirement, that resulted.

Together, these all shape a biopsychosocial-spiritual approach which I first wrote about on Patheos in 2013. This model offers us hope, compassion, and healing in all life’s challenges. This holistic approach is based on the idea that all truth is God’s truth.

At times, since my illness, my faith has been faint. I wondered if this was the end of my story. I was not strong enough to live for Jesus the way I wanted to. I could not change myself. And then hope reminded me: The resurrection of Jesus changes everything. Just not all at once. Healing takes time. Compassion and patience sustain us over a lifetime of change. I aim to approach suffering with hope and compassion, and address tough questions including:

What does Jesus’ resurrection mean for you?

Raised With Christ: How the Resurrection Changes Everything (Crossway, 2010; 2nd edition, Amazon, 2025)
Why is change so difficult? What causes the resistance?

The Traitor Within: Understanding and Healing Our Deceitful Hearts (Amazon, 2026)
Why is change so slow? How does grace lead us over a lifetime?

Amazing Grace: How Faith Grows in the Human Heart (Amazon, 2026)
How do you become a Christian? Can you know if you really are one?

Hope Reborn: How to Become a Christian and Live for Jesus Co-authored with Tope Koleoso (Christian Focus, 2014)

Qualifications

I qualified with an MB BS from the University of London (equivalent to an MD in the United States), hold postgraduate qualifications in psychiatry (MRCPsych) and pharmaceutical medicine (MFFM, DipPharmMed), and took theological training courses run by Newfrontiers.

Connect With me

Substack: adrianwarnock.substack.com (the best way to ask questions)
Twitter/X: @adrianwarnock
Facebook: Adrian Warnock
Email: [email protected] (I may not be able to respond to every message)

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