Father's House Blog

I’ve been thinking a lot about Steve Jobs.

It’s been hard not to after his death on October 5th.

I can’t really think of any inventor who has been more successful and influential in my lifetime than him. Among many other things, he was co-founder and CEO of Apple Mac and co-founder and CEO of Pixar Animation Studios (and don’t forget he was executive producer of Toy Story).
 
Very likely he will be most remembered for the arrival of iMac, iTunes, iPods, iPhones, and iPads. As one who uses this technology a great deal, I have often said this: ‘I know that Jesus is the best thing that can happen to a person but an iPad is a pretty close second’! An overstatement I know (because iPads don’t save souls, only data, and iPhones don’t connect us with the divine, but with each other) but one I still share regularly with friends and acquaintances alike.

While most of the focus has been on Jobs’s achievements I have found myself drawn more and more to Jobs as a man more than Jobs as an inventor.

It’s a well known fact that Jobs was the son of an unmarried couple of young academics, that they decided to give him up for adoption, and that this initial adoption was unsuccessful. It had been arranged before he was born. The adopting parents had wanted a girl, so when Steve came along they backed out. Steve was then adopted by Paul and Clara. For the rest of his life, Steve was to regard them as his real parents and was close to them – especially to his father, who showed him how to dismantle things and put them back together in his mechanics shop.

Paul and Clara never hid the fact that they’d adopted Steve; they were very open about it. That is not to say that it always sat easily with him. When he was six or seven years of age, he was sitting on the grass outside his house speaking to the daughter of his next door neighbour. She asked him a telling question. ‘So does this mean that your real parents didn’t want you?’ Jobs was later to record, ‘lightning bolts went off in my head. I remember running into the house, crying’.

When Steve later grew up into adulthood he was to have a very ambivalent and inconsistent attitude towards his abandonment by his biological parents. On the one hand he would often deny that this separation had had any effect on him. At other times he would talk about it repeatedly. Greg Calhoun, who became close to Jobs, said that ‘Steve talked a lot about his being abandoned and the pain it caused’, adding, ‘it made him independent’. One of the signs that Steve really was deeply affected and wounded by this abandonment was the fact that he fathered and then abandoned a child of his own, at exactly the same age as his biological father had abandoned him. Steve didn’t realize this coincidence until later; the abandoned had become an ‘abandoner’.

Why am I emphasizing this part of Jobs’s narrative?

It’s because I believe there are big lessons to be learned.

From my own experience of being abandoned and adopted, I know that the wound of separation leads to a legacy of pain and problems. Chrisannan Brenning, the mother of the child Steve fathered, said that being put up for adoption left him ‘full of broken glass’. It also led to some classic signs and symptoms of what I call ‘the orphan heart condition’. I have already mentioned abandonment and independence, two of the 21 signs and symptoms I describe in my book I Am Your Father. But there were others too. For example, it’s no secret that Steve was sometimes a very controlling boss and that he was prone to bouts of rage.

Ann Bowers was one of the few people who knew how to handle these. She joined Apple in 1980 and often had to clear up the emotional mess after Steve’s tantrums. She would go into his office, close the door and tell him not to treat others in this way. Steve would relent and repent and then go back to his controlling behavior a week or two later and the whole cycle would begin again.

Steve became close to Ann and her husband John because he respected their older, wiser calming influence on his life. He would often get on his motorbike and ride round to their house unannounced and stay to dinner talking to them. The significance of this was not lost on Ann Bowers. She was to record, ‘he needed a grown-up, a father figure, which Bob became, and I became like a mother figure’.

There’s so much more I could say but I want to finish by asking an important question – important for this present, orphan generation of ours – and that’s this:

Is it possible for orphans to grow up and become men and women who achieve great things without it being at the expense of their health and their relationships?

Let me put it another way:

Is it possible for wounded orphans to become healthy achievers?  

I believe it is.

People who carry deep wounds from their fathers don’t have to become driven, independent, controlling, angry people who end up creating a culture of fear and wounding others as they themselves have been wounded.

It is completely possible for leaders of organizations – whether churches or businesses – to have their hearts healed and their leadership style transformed.

At Father’s House Trust we have today completed one of our five day healing schools for leaders. We have seen leaders with tragic and poignant back stories come to a place of freedom and release in the love of the perfect Father.

So I don’t believe for a moment that apple macs need to come out of orphan hearts.

I believe – no, I am convinced – that the great ideas, inventions and even stories of the future can come out of hearts made whole by Abba Father’s love.

Speaking as an orphan who was adopted, I can truly testify to the fact that an encounter with Jesus Christ really does heal and transform our hearts because Jesus introduces us to the Dad we’ve all been waiting for.

I’m not sure if Steve ever had the opportunity of such an encounter.

But you and I can.

So let’s make sure that we achieve what we are called to achieve.

But let’s do so because we are already valued not because we want to be valued – valued and loved by Abba, Father.

Let’s do so in a way that enhances as opposed to wrecks our relationships.

Let the world be filled with healthy, loving and God-glorifying achievers!