The Impact of a Fighting Father

“Refrain your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears;
for your work shall be rewarded, says the Lord,
and your children shall return from the enemy’s land.
And there is hope for your future, says the Lord;
your children shall come back to their own country.”
~ Jeremiah 31:16-17

Maybe you’ve come from a broken family, and your hope is to provide, love and shepherd your family in such a way that they never experience your own brokenness, whether that brokenness came from a walk-away parent, an emotionally absent parent or even an abusive parent.

How do you become a father who doesn’t give up when your own father did?

Knowing what it felt like to have a parent walk away would not allow Dave Roland to walk away from his son when he went through addiction.

Dave didn’t want Davy or his daughter, Carley Darby, to experience the lack he experienced: the lack of a father’s love, a father’s attention and a father’s provision. Both his mother and father had walked out of his life when he was three years old, leaving him to grow up with grandparents who, though they loved him dearly, could not heal the brokenness caused by a walk-away parent.

What he did want his children to experience was the God who pulled him out of all that lack, the God who heard his prayer in a dark moment before he met his wife, Diane: “Lord, whatever it takes, don’t let me slip out of your hand.”

One of the first steps Dave Roland took in fighting for his family, before he even had a family, was when he chose to follow Christ and sought out what that meant.

Both Dave and Davy faced two crossroads moments of decision in their lives that affected their futures.

For Dave, the first crossroad was the decision to start tithing when he had nothing but two cantaloupes to give.

“When I had nothing to give, I made a garden,” Dave said. “I had a little place in Jackson County that I was about to lose, and I made a garden in it. Nothing came up but cantaloupes. Everything you see today, that’s where it started.”

He prayed for a wife, then a fulfilling career. Today, he and Diane have been married 43 years and own Roland Digital Media.

When Dave Roland’s son, Davy, was born, his concern was simple and honest: “How can I be a dad?”

“Here comes Davy,” Dave said. “When I saw him for the first time, I said, ‘I could die for that right there.’”

Learning how to be a father and working to provide for his family, Dave faced his own challenges in the business world, selling one business and restarting another. His identity had been so completely tied to the first business that there was a readjustment period before he started a second business.

Dave said, “I read a book one time, The Addiction America Applauds. You know what it was? Work. Success.”

Dave was, in a sense, detoxing, readjusting into a healthier, more balanced identity.

During the transition of disentangling himself from the addiction of his first business, Davy was growing into a teenager, heading into his own identity crisis. The difference between his identity crisis and his dad’s? Davy had a father to fight for him.

In the middle of high school, Davy walked away from his high school baseball team. He started playing league baseball at the Babe Ruth fields by Park View School. When he was 16, that’s where, Davy said, his league baseball coach sold him cocaine.

Davy spent the last two years of high school building a “party guy” identity. The deeper Davy went into drugs, the more frayed his relationship with his parents became. Butting heads became part of everyday living.

Davy will tell you his parents didn’t sit idly by. His dad brought friends, addicts and pastors to talk with him. He didn’t want to hear it.

When words didn’t work, Dave and Diane found Praying God’s Will for My Son by Lee Roberts.

“We wore it out,” Dave said.

Just a week before high school graduation, Davy was expelled. He left home, came back and then, when he wouldn’t abide by house rules, Dave said, “We had to kick him out.”

Davy’s first crossroads decision came when his parents signed him up for Teen Challenge. He stormed out of the house, slamming the garage door so hard, he said, the house shook. He calls that moment “my fork in the road.”

“I felt right there,” Davy said, pointing to his heart. “The Lord said to me, ‘Davy, if you don’t do this, if you don’t go right now, you’ll never go. It will never happen.’ Eventually, I wanted to have a normal life, a wife, this was my chance. I was like, ‘OK. All right. I’m going to go with what that voice said.’”

Davy went to Teen Challenge for 14 months, came home and was clean for 18 months until he relapsed. The relationship with his parents relapsed also, along with his plans for the future. He was flunking out of Savannah College of Art and Design and determined not to return after summer vacation.

He joined his dad for the Hot Rod Power Tour.

“Seven car shows in seven days,” Davy explained.

With his dad and 20 others, plus thousands of hot rods, they traveled to Charlotte, where their bus broke down. The trip was tenuous for both. Both admit to butting heads, with Davy once again hating his father.

Davy said, “The bus breaks down. I’m in the hotel room. He’s down trying to figure out what’s wrong with the bus, and I just felt that voice again say, ‘You need to go with your dad the rest of the way in that little car, just you two.’”

Davy found himself at his second crossroads.

Instead of taking the easy way out and riding with friends, Davy chose to be obedient to God’s prompting.

“I texted him at 10:00 that night: ‘Hey, tomorrow morning, me and you, let’s just go.’”

The next morning, they piled, or maybe squeezed is the more apt word, into the 1966 Austin Mini with its plastic vinyl seats and no air conditioning in a summer heat wave.

Mile after mile, their frustration with each other grew.

“We were all pumped up trying to see these drag races, and we were too late,” Davy said.

Trying to capture fun from the remaining event moments, he decided to get out his skateboard. Davy grabbed hold of the trailers being pulled, then decided to grab hold of the T-handle on the trunk of the Austin Mini.

“We’re pulling out and driving down the access road, and I’m hooting and hollerin’,” Davy said.

“It’s a joint effort,” Dave said.

They were having a great father-son moment when Dave saw rumble strips coming up.

“If I slow down, he’s going beneath this thing,” Dave said.

Dave kept going, and the rumble strips kicked out Davy’s skateboard. Davy held on, dragging until he finally let go, spinning and tumbling to a stop.

“I was a bloody mess,” Davy said. “Blood everywhere, T-shirt shredded, my skin off.”

Then he added, “It shocked me back to life.”

Davy said, “You want to know when I got saved? It was right there. It was the Holy Spirit saying, ‘Davy, text your dad and tell him you want to go,’ and I said yes to the Lord. It wasn’t saying yes to getting in the car with him. It was my yes to Him, the beginning of my life becoming yielded to the Lord, not just being a believer, but becoming a follower, being yielded.”

Davy entered what he calls a season of submission, a season of saying yes to the Lord every day.

In this season, he graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design, married Dianelis, a girl he met in art school that fall, and is now a father to three sons. He is involved in ministry and works with his dad.

Dave’s second crossroads came when he forgave the baseball coach who sold his son cocaine.

“You can have a mighty hard feeling for someone like that,” Dave said.

He saw him one day and shared Davy’s two-minute video testimony.

“We prayed for him, hugged him, told him we loved him, and I forgave him,” Dave said. “I tell people today that if I can’t come in here and forgive you, I can’t go on doing what I’m doing. We probably wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

Next Step for Life probably wouldn’t be here either.

Davy’s addiction broke both Dave and Diane’s hearts for those struggling with addiction, showing them a love that fights for them, not letting go and not giving up.

Dave talked about watching a UFC fight online while wrestling in his big chair with his five grandchildren.

“I’m trying to watch the fight, and I’m in the fight for my life,” he said.

A good, good father fights for his children, even when he isn’t sure how to. When you haven’t had a father teach you how to fight, God steps into the ring with you, training you step by step how to win the battles before you.