CASSELBERRY, Fla. (WordNews.org) Jan. 25, 2012– For Patrick Morley, men’s ministry is personal.
He sees the benefits of older men coming along younger men and helping them find their way as husbands and fathers.
And knows firsthand what happens when that type of mentoring doesn’t take place.
“My story is really my dad’s story, too,” says Morley, CEO of the Man in the Mirror ministry and a best-selling author.
“My Dad was abandoned by his father in 1926 when my dad was two years of age,” Morley tells WordNews.org. “So my dad grew up in a home with a single mom. She did a great job but he never felt the scratch of his father’s whiskers. He never heard his father’s voice reading a bedtime story, threw a ball in the backyard, had a daddy to tussle his hair. All those things.”
Morley’s father, “a good, sweet guy” knew he wanted to be different.
“When he became a man, he decided he wanted to be a cycle-breaker,” says Morley, the oldest of four boys.
“My mom and dad realized they needed some help so they joined a church. But our church did not have a vision, they did not have men in the church who saw this young father with his wife and these four little boys and knowingly look at each other and do what had to be done and grab my father and disciple him to be a godly man, husband and father. That didn’t happen,” Morley says.
Instead, a familiar pattern took hold.
“Our church had a vision to do the work. So they put my dad to work.” And work he did, feeling that doing the work made him a good Christian.
“By the time my dad was 40 years of age, he was the top layman in the church,” Morley recalls. “But he got burned out. We left the church.”
Morley was a sophomore in high school at the time; his youngest brother was in third grade.
“We left the church and the wheels really came off the wagon,” Morley says. “Within a couple of years I quit high school. My next oldest brother, he followed in my footstep. He eventually died of a heroin overdose. I have another brother who became an alcoholic and drug addict. I have another brother who struggled with employment his whole life and all kinds of other issues. My dad just never saw it coming.”

Come back tomorrow to hear how Patrick Morley’s experience was different than his dad’s