In Memoriam: Dr. Barry E. Horner

Last week I travelled to Montana to speak at my father's memorial service. Below is what I shared.

Memorial Service for Dr. Barry Horner

Some kids grow up in the shadow of their parent’s work as a famous actress, or politician;  I grew up in the shadow of my father’s work as a preacher and author. Most children’s first words are “mama” or “dada”; familial legend has it that mine was “Bible” - shouted as I bounced on my mother’s lap as we sat in the front row of a church, listening to my Daddy preach. Other children learn to read from books like Dick and Jane or Dr. Seuss. I learned to read from the first chapter of Genesis - sounding out “G-o-d God” as I sat on my Dad’s knee reading from Genesis 1:1. I used to joke that my parents must have thought they were raising the most Holy Spirit-filled baby since John the Baptist. 

When I was little, I remember playing “Wedding” with my sister and my cousin Ian in the backyard of our house, using the portable pulpit someone had made for my Dad. Ian was the groom, of course, but I made my sister be the bride; I wanted to be the preacher, just like my Daddy. 

I inherited my Dad’s love of books and ideas - and the determination to share them with everyone. As I grew older, I absorbed Dad’s ability to craft sentences and paragraphs into arguments, whether written or spoken, as if by osmosis. My freshman year of high school, my English teacher was startled at the depth of a literary criticism essay I’d written. I had effortlessly incorporated source quotations into my writing *and* footnoted them all accurately.  “Where did I learn to write like a college professor?! “ she asked. The answer was easy - I learned from my Dad. 

I don’t remember how old I was when things began to shift - when I stopped wanting to be a preacher like him, or even a Christian like him.  I just know that I did, and rather definitively. Because there were other things about God thatI needed to learn  - not because he was a preacher, but because he was my father. If God describes Himself as our father, and God is love, as the apostle John tells us in 1 John, just what was this love like that God has for us, as a father?

As gifted as my father was at teaching others about what the Bible says God is like, as committed as he was to that work, he wasn’t as good as teaching my sister and me. For my Dad, love was conditioned on my performance, and conformity into his image of what I should be as his daughter.  That meant dressing modestly, playing the piano (hymns and classical music, nothing secular), and doing well in school. It meant not talking to anyone about how difficult things were at home - about living on food stamps, about my mom’s mental health struggles, about how hard it was for me to take care of my mother and my sister by myself when he would leave for a conference for days at a time. I meant not being listened to about my hurts, my doubts, or my dreams. 

That experience of love formed a chasm in my soul, not just between me and my father, but between me and God, for quite some time. By the time I was a senior in high school I’d decided that there really was no God at all. Sometime that year my Dad told me that instead of going on to university in Australia with my friends, I would be going back to America and attending John MacArthur’s college,The Master’s College. I readily complied. California was about as far away from Australia and my father as I could get. I thought I’d stick it out for a semester and then transfer to a secular college like UCLA. I’d make my way into the world, and far away from everything I’d grown up hearing about the Bible and God.

But then, God did what God does. He showed me that He was real, and saved me my freshman year.  I knew that God was real, and the Bible was true, that Jesus was alive and my sins were forgiven. Because of that, I could go out and be all the things that the Bible said a godly woman should be. And that would earn my Dad’s approval. Or at least his interest. 

I graduated from college around the same time my Dad finished his D.Min. I got married and became a mother (the one thing I remember my Dad saying I’d be really good at), around the time he founded Bunyan ministries and began traveling around the country leading seminars on it. I became an aspiring writer, a fledgling public speaker and Bible teacher as my Dad’s ministry interests shifted to the future of Israel, and he wrote the book that he considered his magnum opus. I got my first outreach from a publisher about writing a book of my own,  right around the time John MacArthur gave my Dad’s book a glowing endorsement from the floor of Shepherds conference.  Whenever we talked on the phone, my Dad was always excited to talk to me about the good things happening in his life and ministry- the books he was selling, the seminars he leading, things like that. He wasn’t so interested in hearing about  me, or about my family- not the things that were good, or the things that were hard. 

The invisible burden of my father’s emotional and circumstantial absence pressed down on me for decades, until a few years ago, when other heartbreaking circumstances grew so heavy that I began collapsing under their weight. Much like the protagonist in Pilgrim’s Progress, I set out on a desperate spiritual pilgrimage to understand what had happened to me, and what I should do. 

What I learned is this:

At the very core of our being, as humans made in God’s image, is our capacity to be shaped by love, because love is the essence of God’s being. Our entrance into the world is the beginning of a lifelong pilgrimage - a quest to discover what the love of God is all about.

At first, the questions are both simple and profound:

Who am I?

What am I?

Am I seen?

Am I safe? 

When we’re very young, we experience the answers to those questions long before we develop the capacity to translate our experiences with words. The more we experience those answers positively - with nourishment, warmth, protection - and strong arms, kind looks and giant smiles - the more we grow.

And as we grow, our questions grow too.

Am I wanted?

Am I chosen?

Am I valuable?

Am I important?

Am I interesting?

The question we’re asking underneath all these questions as babies, as children, as teenagers, as adults is, “Am I loved?”   And in God, the answers to all of those questions, and especially that question,  are always, always “Yes. And the family is the central place where we’re meant to learn that.  The  more our experience of love is shaped like God’s love, the more we’re shaped to receive everything else He wants us to know about Himself, about ourselves, and about the world He’s made.  When we experience things that are not like God’s love - when we’re neglected, ignored, made to feel small, or insignificant or unimportant, when we’re abused,

 the more that warps our understanding about Him, ourselves, and the world. 

It leaves a hole that we struggle to fill, in all kinds of inadequate, and sometimes even harmful ways. 

As I did the work to lay down and leave behind some of the things my experience with my Dad had mistaught me about what it is to be loved, I started to become curious about what my Dad’s own experience might have been. I found a few clues in the life of John Bunyan, and in Pilgrim’s Progress. 

John Bunyan, as you should all know by now, or are you even my Dad’s friend, was a tinker and lay preacher - who wrote Pilgrim’s Progress as he was imprisoned for preaching, leaving his second wife and their four young children to subsist on the charity of friends. In the story Bunyan writes, Christian leaves his wife and sons behind to go on a quest to be relieved of the burden of his guilt. But when he does lose his burden, he doesn’t go back to get them, to tell them what’s happened,  and to take them with them.  He goes on his journey without them.

And then there’s the story of my Dad’s own father, who died years before I was born. My Dad didn’t do what other Dads might have done in that situation - lament that I would never know him, tell me heartwarming stories about him and how he would have loved us, his grandchildren. My Dad told us next to nothing about his father, except that he also was a lay preacher, a very strict Methodist who ruled his house with a very strong hand. 

And it made me curious.

What if the reason my father poured himself far more into his ministry into helping others know God, than he did into us, was because he himself was carrying the residual wounds of not having been poured into himself? What if, with all of the understanding he was given about the Scriptures, he’d never come to understand fully what the Scriptures say about how God knew and fully loved him, personally? What if the core motivation of his refusal to consider and take responsibility for the impact of his choices on us, his family, wasn’t pride, but fear? Fear of his heavenly father’s disapproval or anger or rejection? Fear of ours? Fear of mine?

My Dad had surely preached a hundred sermons on 1 John 1 - that there is no fear in love, because fear involves punishment, that God is faithful and righteous to forgive our sin, because the punishment for our sin has already been paid. But I wonder if deep down, he struggled to believe it, perhaps because in his own younger life he hadn’t fully experienced it.

It was in asking these questions, just in the last couple of months, and considering the answers, that I’ve finally been able to be free of the grief that came from being Barry Horner’s daughter, alongside the many gifts.  

This might be a surprising, or uncomfortable, thing to hear. So why do I choose to say it? 

Why speak about my father’s faults, and place them alongside the fruit - the fruit that I fully acknowledge was real, that is manifested in your presence here today as we gather together to remember his life, and honor the One who gave him to us?

Because I believe that’s what the Bible teaches us to do.

Think about Moses.

In Exodus 6, before Moses starts writing the story of how God used him to lead the Israelites out of the bondage and into the Promised Land, Moses writes a brief story about his own family. including his father, Amram. Who is, technically, something like a cousin, given that, as Moses writes, Moses and his brother Aaron were the result of marriage between his father, and his father’s father’s sister - his  aunt.  Several books later, Moses will write down the laws which forbid such a marriage. 

Every time the story of the Israelites exodus is read to Moses’ descendants, it will include the reminder about his father’s sin. (And also his own). 

Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Moses doesn’t  write over the darkness of his origin story in the story of God’s redemption plan - he writes it into it.  God does the same with Abraham’s story, Jacob’s story, David’s story. The entire story of Jesus’ earthly lineage is the story of men who God depicts as faithful, fruitful followers of God, *and* in different ways and different degrees, who fail at being fathers, or husbands - sometimes both.

It’s no wonder that when God sends his Son Jesus into the world, he just bypasses the usual process of fatherhood altogether.

Jesus did not only live a perfect life as a human being - as a boy, who grew into a man.  Jesus also experienced  a life of perfect fatherly love, in God Himself. And it was out of that love that he was able to give his whole life - his healing, his hope, his power, his death for our sins, his resurrected life for the certainty of our resurrected life - for us.

This is the life that Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress was yearning for. This is the life my Dad preached about. This is the life - and the love - that Jesus offers.

When we are reconciled to God by repentance and faith in Jesus, God’s Son, we are not just released from the burden of our sin that separates us from God; we are subsumed into His perfect Fatherly love as well.  Being filled with that love is what frees us to love others in the same way. To be honest not only about the ways we ourselves have not been loved, but about the ways we have not loved as God does - as fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and to be forgiven, and be reconciled, not just to God, but also to one another.

It was in asking these questions about my father’s life, and following where God lead me to look for answers, that God has helped me, even now, to lay down the burdens of being my father’s daughter.

The only sorrow I’m left with is that I didn’t get the opportunity to tell him about it. But I trust that now he knows. 

And for that, I give all the glory, and all the honor, to my Heavenly Father.