The Through Line of a Father Figure

There’s that moment in everyone’s life where it becomes necessary to admit something you never wanted to: You are more like your parents than you realized. Sometimes it’s your father, other times it’s your mother, often it is a sprinkling of both. Maybe it’s something you said, perhaps an act you did — more than likely a spouse pointed it out. It’s no mystery, for humanity is well aware of this. We have our cultural sayings about the apple’s distance from the tree and the uphill battle against genes. And yet, somehow, we are mystified when looking in the mirror and taking account of self.

In Judaism there’s a saying: “The deeds of the fathers are a sign for the sons.” We are to take heed of the patriarch’s actions and remember them in our own lives as they are patterns we will see play out. On a macro level, we see this in Abraham’s time in Egypt during a famine hinting toward Joseph’s (and eventually all of Israel’s) time there during another famine. Others have suggested Jacob’s time with Laban is setting up for Moses’ struggle with Pharaoh. Of course, Jacob’s famous wrestling match with God typifies the relationship Israel will have with God throughout the rest of the Old Testament.

What intrigues me more than the macro is the micro. On a smaller scale, it seems these notable characters miss the signs in their fathers’ lives and continue the same patterns. Abraham lies about his wife being his sister in a selfish display of self-preservation. Isaac then follows suit, repeating the same behavior with his own wife. As Isaac is fooled by his own son, so Jacob’s children fool him with the disappearance of Joseph.

But it isn’t just the patriarchs where this saying is valuable. This could be the entire story of the kings of Israel. Father-son relationships are integral to scripture. In the patriarchal society of the Bible, they’re paramount. As the kings of Israel and Judah show us, it is extremely difficult and rare to break out of the legacy passed down to you. With leader after leader, the reader sees the reality we know so well experientially. And yet, scripture still professes the wisdom to break this chain. The book of Proverbs is typically seen as one-off sayings yanked and put in quotations for an Instagram post, but it is clearly an admonition and encouragement from a father to a son on the importance of heeding the voice of wisdom.

Today, the bar seems low for fathers. This is demonstrated by how easily fathers get praised for what others might describe as simple and expected parenting, while mothers are highly critiqued and criticized. To make things more complicated, it is difficult to find male leaders who represent fatherhood and manliness well in a Christ-shaped way, with the numerous online avenues leading young men into what has been determined “toxic masculinity.” The myriad voices of social media, podcasters, and artists fill the fatherhood vacuum for a swath of those bearing the absence of one. At times it leads to undesirable results.

But in the swirling world of online voices, one arose that produced hope in me. In the chaos which we call our everyday, an artist named Jon Bellion released my favorite album from 2025, Father Figure.

You’ve heard Jon Bellion and didn’t even know it — he’s behind the scenes on some of today’s popular music. His writing credits span from Miley Cyrus to Jungkook. He’s written for Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Halsey, Katy Perry, Jason Derulo. “The Monster” by Eminem ft. Rhianna contained a chorus co-written by him, and he also co-wrote “Memories” by Maroon 5. Between all those songs, Bellion has been crafting his own low-key discography. After a six-year hiatus, getting married, having three children, and attaining the rights to his music, Bellion is back and better than ever with a third album that features themes focused on fatherhood, being a husband, the traps of modern life and celebrity — all the while littering the tracklist with teases of God’s presence.

The album is prophetic. I imagine Bellion in the studio dressed in a garment of camel’s hair with a leather belt wrapped around his waist. Jars of dead locusts and wild honey next to the recording equipment for snack breaks as he sonically prepares the way for the listener’s soul. By prophetic I do mean the words sting. There are aggressive parts of the titular track that aim directly at fathers who’ve willingly abandoned their post. He uses the vehicle, no pun intended, of a “big Ferrari,” which symbolically stands in for any other pursuit we’ve placed on the altar of fatherhood. A modern golden calf, or coffin as he calls it, that demons applaud as Bellion screams in the song. “You look so sick inside your big Ferrari” and “Left your kids outside so you could hit the party” are like bullets for any of us fathers who’ve sought selfish desires over putting our children first. These jabs are undercut by the hook, which rallies, “Lord, Lord. Father figure, known to protect, I do that sh*t however” and “I am no saint, I am no saint it’s true.” The song contains this tension that reverberates through every father. It’s the divided self Paul describes, the unbalanced affections the church fathers discuss poignantly. The conflict between the flesh and the Spirit, the will of man and the will of God.

As a father myself with two kiddos and awaiting an adoption placement, I often find myself pitted against my own self-important desires and the desires of my children. There are novels I want to write, articles to draft, and books on my to-be-read shelf. Video games I bought last year that I haven’t touched. A garage left unorganized. Overtime available at work, money on the table for the taking. Stocks to be invested in. A wife to cherish and take out on the town. And yet there’s a child wanting to play Legos. A child who needs love and attention, not just my verbal affirmation while I look at my phone screen.

All this tension fits neatly into Bellion’s “big Ferrari,” whatever your specific Ferrari may be. We all feel the desire to matter,  captured perfectly by this line, “Gave up your children just to be somebody.” This innate human desire to grasp, forgetting we’ve already been grasped.

Besides the title track there are songs like “GET IT RIGHT,” which acknowledges and exemplifies a real marriage, the ups and downs and the push and pull of romance in the midst of inevitable failure to meet each other’s needs around the clock. The paradox of marriage where “getting it right” is actually admitting you’re getting it wrong. “RICH AND BROKE” flips the script on wealth and what it means to be rich, as Bellion’s scale reveals his wife and children outweigh the modern idea of success (i.e., the “goose down bed,” “big big house,” “whip outside on 10,” and the “big chain round my neck that I worked for my whole life”). One of my favorites (and perhaps the song with the sharpest bite for me) was “DON’T SHOOT.”

Here Bellion writes about protecting his son and the creativity flowing through him. Letting his boy “stay in the clouds” and threatening anyone who would dare aim to shoot him down. This song was a two-edged sword that pierced my heart. My son had recently begun kindergarten and was suddenly changing before my eyes, saying new foreign things like “six, seven” and seemingly no longer thinking of his father as the coolest person he knew since his discovery of other five-year-olds who like to slide on the ground and put holes in their pants (which their parents just paid for). Not to mention a flip switched where I began to wonder if he came from his mother and I or was a robot programmed to speak of only Minecraft and the different evolutionary stages of Pokémon that didn’t exist back when I was wheeling and dealing the cards. I was a total jerk to my son. For the first half of his kindergarten year, I was taking aim and shooting him down from the clouds. I shed tears as I listened to this song on the night the album released. One of those dark nights of the soul, in bed as everyone slept and my folly was revealed to me in the shadows of our bedroom.

The most beautiful aspect of this album is that, while every song has a powerful convicting nature to it, there’s another edge to the sword. There’s a blessing, a word of grace and hope for fathers who’ve gone off track. While “DON’T SHOOT” had me slain in bed, hiding under my fig leaf covers, it also yanked them off and directed me. It impassioned me. Not with guilt and “do better” mentality but with a genuine, contrite heart. I’m not sure if it’s the melodies, the incredible production, or the passion in the lyrics, but it’s surely intentional. On a recent podcast, Bellion laid it all out:

If I could soothe the guy who has lost sight of the fact that fathers are important and your role in your children’s life is more important in the lineage of your family from a thousand years back to a thousand years in the future — your job as a father will do more than anything you can do in the physical world … my son is me. And his son will be him, and we will live forever through each other … I hope for forty-seven minutes or however long my album is, you can be reminded you’ve never lost the path far enough that you can’t return to your kids.

The sonic vibrations of this album breed life and foster resurrection in the dry bones of fatherhood. Lyrically it wounds you and simultaneously salves the sting it wrought, readying you for the new mercies of the sun rising on another day of fatherhood. And the shadow over the whole album is the true Father Figure. It’s hinted at in the multilayered title track. Near the end of the song, the original chorus “I am no saint, I am no saint it’s true, but I’ll be okay if I’m half the man as you, these boys will make it through, I’ll follow after you” unexpectedly pivots and changes to “these boys won’t make it through.” It’s Bellion’s condemnation of the lack of leaders in this arena of life, the shortage of waypoints and guides for fatherhood. With the inevitable bad examples perpetuated in culture, our genealogy and self will not lead us nor our kids through. It ends in a somber tone, leaving the listener at the top of the album wondering What father figure will we follow then? Where will we find a guide for the journey ahead of us? In another interview, Bellion lays out our path forward as fathers:

“When I look at my son … there’s for sure a through line here between my dad’s dad’s dad’s dad’s dad dad dad … times a bajillion all the way to God that we’re all experiencing the through line. When I look at my son I’m experiencing the through line of fathers all the way back to Abba Daddy, abba Father.”

In Bellion’s Father Figure, we are offered an encouragement to not collapse under the weight of a paternal through line we cannot carry. Instead, we are given a chance to wrestle with our imperfect and messy fatherhoods of past, present, and future; to see not only a call to fatherhood but a grace extended, intertwined in this through line of failure, regret, and lack.

Gregory of Nyssa, a church father himself, once wrote about the peculiar glimpse of God granted to a biblical father figure. Moses is tasked with what appears to be an impossible mission: shepherding and fathering the children of Israel. He begs the Lord to show him his ways. Moses is about as lost as Bellion at the end of his song, lost in the wilderness wondering if they’ll make it through. In an inexplicable scene, the old man was shown the back of God. Gregory supposes “that he who desires to behold God sees the object of his longing in always following him.” Perhaps this answers Bellion’s hanging question of what father figure to follow after. This is how we, and the kids, will make it through. We follow the through line back to the very beginning.

The Kingdom of God is notorious for its backwards ways. The humble are exalted, the last shall be first, the blind are the ones who see, the deaf who hear. And the through line is forwardly traversed by sprinting backwards after the Father. Legacy’s demands are rejected and, at the same time, mysteriously fulfilled when our through lines are seen clearly — not hindered by the messiness of our family lineage and inward focus but traced along the ups and downs, zigs and zags, all the way to their original source. It is there we weary fathers find rest and gladly gaze upon the figure who overshadows the through line we find ourselves inescapably threaded into.