Birth Fathers Who Leave: Part 4 of 5

Interview with Lorilyn Roberts: Part 4 of 5

Question: You mentioned that all your fiction books have elements of yourself in them, stories you couldn’t tell directly, so you turned them into fiction. What is the story you have carried the longest that finally found its way onto a page? And was it a relief or a risk when it did?

Answer: I think the trilogy I am working on now is probably the hardest because I see so much of myself in Chumana. Unlike the two protagonists in the Seventh Dimension Series, whose issues also involve a missing father, Chumana’s issues are deeper and harder to figure out. She meets her father without realizing it is him at first, and their relationship develops quickly. Her father seems loving in many ways, and she inherited his incredible intelligence. However, he is involved with the U.S. government in their UFO program, or UAPs, as they are commonly referred to now, and that creates danger for her.

Chumana is chosen as an ambassador, a go-between, partly because of her mother’s bloodline and partly because of her high I.Q from her father. Her family bloodline on her mother’s side also has a history of UFO abductions.

So, what does this have to do with me? It’s complicated. I create stories with themes drawn from my own life, focusing on relationships. In book one, Frequency, Chumana meets her birth father, and they develop a good relationship. But will it continue?

Suppose what she later learns conflicts with her father? Suppose there is no common ground between them once they get to know each other? Suppose their relationship turns out to be toxic?

Was it a mistake for her to even get involved with her father, trust him in her newfound role as U.S. ambassador, and create a meaningful relationship with the Extraterrestrials? And suppose they aren’t what they seem? Suppose they are using her?

To discover the truth, she is mysteriously taken from a UFO to a parallel universe before the beginning of time, and what she learns soon turns out not to be what it seems. God assigns her the role of the “keeper of knowledge” from the Eighth Dimension.

I know this sounds far-fetched, but that’s why I love Christian fantasy. I create a story and ask, “Can God redeem this? Is everything always redeemable? And if I knew the end of the story, would I do it again?”

That is a huge theme in Counterfeit: wanting to know the end of the story before the end, but in God’s eyes, the process is more important than the outcome because God already knows the outcome. We must submit to the process and allow God to mold us for His glory, even with fear and trembling. If it were too easy, we wouldn’t learn anything. If it were too hard, we would fail. God knows what we can handle, and He is with us all the time, helping us.

Another thing I have learned is this: God is never in a hurry, and He’s never late. He doesn’t take shortcuts. Oftentimes, He takes the long way, the scenic route, the back roads. But He is always there, always with us. He never leaves us or abandons us.

So where am I going with this? I saw my birth father for the first time at my half-sister’s wedding, but I didn’t introduce myself. I watched him—the birth father who left me when I was two years old. He basically abandoned my mother and me on the streets of Tampa, Florida.

My half-sister never knew she had a sister until she found the adoption papers in a drawer one day in her early 20s. My birth father never told her. In fact, if you read his Wikipedia page, you will see that I am not mentioned. No record shows that he ever married my mother.

One day, my mother called me and said, “Do you have a minute?” You know, one of those phone calls. And then she said, “Bruce’s wife, Nancy, called and said her daughter, Nancy Lee, wants to meet you.”

And that’s how it all began. I have never written about any of this in any detail. I don’t know that I ever will. So, I write about it in stories—stories about absent fathers, famous fathers who have made an impact on the world, yet, according to their bios, there is no record that you even exist. You remember the special moments you shared, yet the ending isn’t what you hoped it would be.

So, was it a mistake to open that door? Maybe when I write book three in the trilogy, I will have the resolution. Or maybe not a resolution, but at least I will know that I used the talent my birth father gave me to write every story God wanted me to write, and maybe that is the answer to the question. No, it didn’t end the way I wanted. But maybe that was never God’s intent.

God wanted me to write for His glory, and I needed the pain of the relationship to bring out the emotion in me and confront what had haunted me all my life: “Am I okay, God? Am I okay?”

I have concluded that the answer to that doesn’t depend on me. It depends on God and God’s purpose for my life. I am okay because God is okay. In fact, I am more than okay. I am good because God is good. All of our value is in Him, as our heavenly Father. He makes up for what our earthly fathers lack.

I write because God used my birth father’s genes to enable me to write, and God gave me that desire, a talent that became evident in strange ways growing up; i.e., like my fifth-grade teacher who accused me of plagiarizing in front of the class because what I wrote was so well-written.

Or those tests a psychologist gave me when I was even younger, because I had so many issues—I failed first grade because I couldn’t read. When my mother didn’t hear back from the principal about the test results, she finally called to inquire. The only answer they gave her was, “We don’t know what her problem is or how to fix her. All we could tell from the tests is she has creative talent, but we don’t know what that is.”

I’m still on the journey. I can also say that if I had not met my birth father, I would not be the writer I am today. He encouraged me to keep at it; he believed in me, and I believed he cared.

My adoptive father raised me, adopting me when I was ten. And he was a good father to me, very flawed, but a good father. I look forward to seeing him in heaven.

Anyway, I don’t know what to do with all of this, except to say that many young adults have issues with divorce, broken families, and absent birth fathers who leave and never return, but I can say that God, as our heavenly Father, our eternal Father, will never leave us. He performed amazing miracles when I was young, showing how much He loved me.

God, as our heavenly Father, loves us, and His love for us is greater than human love because it is perfect. So, in my books, while I show the struggle my characters have with missing birth fathers, God’s love shines through all of the adversity, and the reader comes to see that God’s presence is real and He will never forsake us. Even if husbands leave us (I know about that, too) or birth fathers abandon us, God never will.

That really is the message of this trilogy. Even today, a huge battle is being fought for souls, and the evil one is relentless, but in the end, God wins. God wants us to be part of His family, and that family will be forever. So, whatever we can do here to share God’s love with a world that is literally falling apart, we must do. God will help us if we are willing to listen to Him.

To read part 1 of 5 in the series, “Hardest Book to Write and Why,” click here.

To read part 2 of 5 in the series, “Hope and Joy in Adoption Trials,” click here.

To read part 3 of 5 in the series, “Most Rewarding (and Surprising) Moment as an Author.

To read more non-fiction anthologies by Lorilyn, click here for God’s Good Works: Stories to Treasure and Tales to Ponder.