That was the only real piece of life advice John’s father ever gave him.
Two words, repeated often enough that they became his dad’s catchphrase. Two words coming from a man John would later describe as a “functional alcoholic,” a blue‑collar truck driver on the north side of Chicago who went to work every day, came home, complained, drank, and checked out.
As a teenager, John dismissed him as a “drunken fool.” He looked at other dads—engaged, present, taking their kids places, teaching them things—and wondered why all he got was, “Don’t panic.”
It felt like an insult. Like nothing.
Years later, raising a non‑verbal son with severe autism, riding in ambulances, dealing with seizures, watching his first marriage come apart, and then walking his own road into faith, John realized those two words were anything but nothing.
They were a seed.
They were also, though his father likely never saw it this way, a profoundly spiritual discipline.
Don’t Panic: The Gift from a Flawed Father
John describes his childhood as a Saturday Night Live sketch—“the Bears,” the accents, the food, the holidays. Stereotypical Chicago Catholic blue‑collar life. His mother held the family together. His dad drank.
There were nights of shouting. Times he feared it would turn physical. Episodes where, as a child, he stepped in simply because he was afraid one of his parents was going to kill the other.
There were also moments of crisis handled with grit and composure.
One night his father began bleeding uncontrollably from the nose—a symptom of a series of brain hemorrhages. Waste baskets filled with bloody tissues. His consciousness fading. His mother bundled them into the car for a late‑night drive to the hospital where his doctor practiced, speeding through empty city streets.
John remembers his mother’s voice:
“Keep him awake. Keep talking to him. Don’t let him fall asleep.”
No screaming. No hysteria. Just determined calm.
Only later would a therapist explain that children raised in alcoholic homes, where trauma is a daily occurrence, often develop an unusual capacity to handle major crises. The house may be on fire emotionally, but you learn to function inside the blaze.
“You can handle really serious hard situations like nothing,” John was told. “The little things might get to you—but the big stuff, you’ve got that.”
“Don’t panic” can be a way of minimizing, avoiding, pretending everything is fine. But it can also be something else: a hard‑won wisdom about how to walk through the valley without losing your mind.
For John, it became that.
He found himself repeating it—not as a shrug, but as a way to steady himself—when his own son’s disability began to manifest, when seizures came, when paramedics and ER visits and new diagnoses and financial stress piled up.
He started to see what his father, for all his failures, had given him:
A way to keep his head when everything else was falling apart.
Faith Like My Father
John’s memoir is called Faith Like My Father. At first glance, that title might surprise you. What “faith” did a functional alcoholic father really have to pass on?
Quite a bit, as it turns out—though not in the form many of us expect.
He didn’t disciple his son with Bible studies around the fire. He didn’t pray with him. He didn’t even go to church. In John’s words, he “did the best he could,” but largely checked out.
Yet John also learned:
- Hard work: his dad went to work every day, even with hangovers and health issues.
- Family commitment: for all the dysfunction, his parents stayed married, showed up for each other, and for him.
- Perspective in crisis: “Don’t panic” might have been slurred over a drink, but in practice, both parents embodied it when stakes were highest.
He learned at least as much from what his dad did wrong—what not to do—as from what he did right. As a young boy, he consciously decided:
“When I’m a father, I’m going to be present. I’m going to put down the glass, be intentional, spend time. I’m not going to give up on life the way I see my dad giving up.”
That is, in a real sense, faith like his father—refined, corrected, and transformed.
We rarely inherit faith in a neat package. Most of us receive it as a messy bundle of wounds and gifts mingled together. Part of our spiritual adulthood is learning to:
- Name the damage honestly,
- See the good that’s there,
- And then, in the light of God’s grace, decide what to carry forward and what to lay down.
I resonate with that. My own story includes an alcoholic mother, divorce, an international abduction, time in Sweden, and living in a tent as a high‑school senior in Alaska. Chaos was normal. Survival was a daily assignment.
Like John, there are things I wish had been different. There are things I learned never to repeat. There are also qualities—resilience, adaptability, a deep sense of dependence on God—that I would not trade, because they were forged precisely in that furnace.
In both cases, we are doing a kind of spiritual genetics: learning to “eat strong meat,” as Paul puts it, and “by reason of use have [our] senses exercised to discern both good and evil.” We go back to that forbidden tree in Eden, this time with the Holy Spirit, and finally learn to discern rather than merely react.
When Community Fails—and When It Shows Up
John’s “don’t panic” formation wasn’t just personal. It was social. It’s one thing to be calm in crisis when you’re embedded in a strong community. It’s another to find yourself with no one who truly understands.
In the worst season of his life—job loss, near‑foreclosure, marriage on the brink, a five‑year‑old autistic son, and no clear way forward—John went looking for community.
He thought he’d found it in a Unitarian men’s group at the church his family attended at the time. The night he decided to lay it all on the table, he expected wisdom from older men, many twenty years his senior.
Instead, he got silence. Then a vague assurance: “That’s really tough… but what you need to hear is that it’s going to be okay.”
As he says now, from the vantage point of faith, he knows in the deepest sense that “it’s going to be okay.” But in that moment, in the middle of crisis, what he needed was something else:
- Someone to sit with him in the pain,
- Someone to ask questions,
- Someone to say, “Can I walk alongside you? Coffee? A meal? A real conversation?”
He discovered, the hard way, that he had no real community. He had acquaintances, not brothers.
A few weeks later, almost out of desperation, he walked into a men’s Bible study at an evangelical church. His stereotypes were ready: they’ll hit me over the head with Bibles; it’ll be weird.
Instead, the men listened. They asked. They didn’t center the night on his story, but they made space for it.
And at the end, when they closed in prayer, one man—Matt—prayed for John by name.
He hadn’t yet come to Christ. But he knew enough to feel the weight of that. The difference between “It’ll be okay” and “Father, here is John; here is what he’s carrying; meet him in this.”
That experience of being seen, named, and prayed for was as important in forming his “don’t panic” faith as anything his parents had done.
When I talk on this show about “building vibrant communities,” that’s what I have in mind. Communities where:
- People are more than warm bodies in chairs,
- Prayer is not a formality but an act of bearing one another’s burdens,
- And men, in particular, are invited out of isolation into honest brotherhood.
John would later take the tools he learned in those men’s groups and translate them into support circles for fathers of children with disabilities. “If you have no one to talk to,” he says, “you can talk to me.”
One calm soul in a storm can change the weather for someone else.
Headship, Servant Leadership, and the Special‑Needs Home
If you listened to the episode, you heard another thread in John’s story: marriage.
He contrasts his parents’ troubled but enduring marriage with his own first marriage, where he gradually lost any sense of agency. His ex‑wife, a very capable and dedicated mom, naturally took charge of therapy calendars, doctor visits, educational decisions. Her mother weighed in heavily. John, by his own description, was reduced to “just tell me where to drive him next.”
He wasn’t drinking. He wasn’t cheating. He was simply… unnecessary.
Eventually, out of the blue, he heard: “I don’t love you anymore. I want a divorce.”
He came to faith in Christ in the midst of that unraveling, and over time, God led him into a new marriage—with a believing wife who loves him, loves his son, and shares his calling.
In that context, John talks unapologetically about being “the head of the household”—a phrase that sets off alarm bells for many. Rightly so, if headship is imagined as control, domination, or unaccountable authority.
But John doesn’t mean that. When pressed, he frames it in the language of Ephesians 5:
“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”
That is not a call to be the boss. It is a call to be the chief cross‑bearer.
In practice, in their home, it looks like:
- Praying together at meals and over decisions,
- Seeking God’s will together,
- Respecting each other’s strengths,
- And John understanding that any “final decision” he makes must be for her and their son’s good, not his ego.
In the high‑stress environment of special‑needs parenting, with endless decisions about therapies, schools, finances, and the future, that kind of servant leadership matters.
It’s another way of saying “don’t panic” in marital form: we will not be driven by fear, control, or resentment. We will be guided by Christ’s self‑giving love.
For those who recoil at the language of headship, I’d put it this way:
If “head” doesn’t look like Jesus with a towel around his waist washing feet, it’s the wrong head.
Learning to See the Image of God in Our Parents—and Ourselves
The title of this show, Created in the Image of God, is not a sentimental slogan. It is a demanding lens.
It asks us to look at:
- A functional alcoholic father…
- A driven, overburdened mother driving through the night to the hospital…
- A young dad sitting in two very different parking lots, discovering who is and isn’t really “there” for him…
- A divorced man figuring out how to co‑parent a severely disabled son…
- A remarried husband trying to live out Ephesians 5 in the trenches of IEPs and seizures…
…and say: the image of God is somewhere in there.
Sometimes it shines bright. Sometimes it’s deeply obscured. But it’s there.
Our task is not to romanticize or excuse sin. John is brutally honest about the damage his father’s alcoholism did. I am candid about the chaos of my own upbringing. There is such a thing as hardness of heart. There are marriages that fail. There is real collateral damage.
But if we stop there, we miss what God is doing.
In John’s case, God took:
- A two‑word mantra from a broken man,
- A mother’s composure under pressure,
- A lonely season of having no community,
- A painful divorce,
- The daily challenges of raising a non‑verbal autistic son,
and wove them into:
- A memoir, Faith Like My Father, that is already helping other parents of disability,
- A speaking ministry to dads who would otherwise check out,
- Support groups where men hear, maybe for the first time, “You’re not alone,”
- And a calm, grounded presence for his son—a father who stays, listens, and doesn’t panic.
That’s what redemption looks like on an ordinary Tuesday.
You and I are invited into the same process. To look at our own parents—where they failed and where they shone—and ask:
- What did they give me that I need to keep?
- What did they model that I must lay down?
- Where can I, by God’s grace, become the parent, spouse, or friend I wished I had?
You are created in the image of God.
And God loves His creation.
Even when that image seems cracked, He is in the business of restoring it—often through people like John, who learned not to panic, and then turned around to steady others.
Sneak Peek: Next Week on Created in the Image of God
On next week’s episode, I’ll be joined by Steve Rotermund, a ministry veteran whose life was marked early by abandonment and trauma—his mother left when he was four—and who later burned out in performance‑driven religion.
Today, he’s back “in the saddle” of ministry in a very different way, having developed a Christ‑centered 12‑step recovery program focused on identity in Jesus rather than mere behavior management. His passion is to help people get unstuck—from unhealthy habits, performative religion, anger, depression, codependency, and more—by inviting them into authentic community.
We’ll talk about:
- The difference between performative and transformative spirituality,
- Why “those people” (addicts and alcoholics) are often mirrors of our own struggles,
- And how the love of Jesus meets us in the patterns we feel powerless to change.
Join us next Sunday at 8 PM Central for Created in the Image of God with Steve, as we explore what real recovery looks like when it’s grounded in who God says we are.
