A Father's Heart

So, I struggle with the concept of God as Father. You see, the word, Father, or Daddy, or Dad, is so tied up in my relationship with my earthly father. And my relationship with my earthly father is surface level at best, and tense at worst.

There are rather deep wounds, and the distance between us seems to have grown over the last years as I've moved away from the church he pastors, the church I grew up in, and settled into the church I presently attend.

When I think of a Father I don't think of a person I come running to with every wound. I think of a person that I need to be kind of together to come in front of. I don't think of a person who wants to know the intimate details of my life. I think about a person who wants to know the surface level stuff - the intellectual stuff. I don't think about someone who celebrates with me when I'm excited about something new that I've learned. I think about someone who plays devil's advocate even when he agrees with me, someone who will challenge every statement that comes out of my mouth, someone who is always pushing me to think harder, more deeply.

(just reading that last sentence makes me laugh. no wonder I've had trouble with the experiential aspects of faith!)

But, over the last while God has been subtly beginning to reveal His Father's heart to me. Never directly - I don't know that I've been ready to receive it, but always in ways that show me what His love is like.

There was the time I had my arm around a hurting friend, praying for her, and I was suddenly completely overwhelmed with a sense of God's love for her. The depth and intensity of it astonished me as I realized that this was his fathering heart for this hurting woman.

And then there was an experience this week. A group of us were praying together, ranging over a variety of issues, when another young woman began to share. The wounds in her life from her father are deep, and my own heart resonated and understood many parts of what she shared. As we began to pray over her and minister to her, I kept asking God what He would say to her. I paced a bit around the room, needing to move, wrestling to determine if what I was hearing was really the voice of God. And finally, I began to speak. God was telling her that He was not like her earthly father. That He wanted her to run to Him, to be held by Him. That He didn't want to create a spirit that says I must be independent, but rather a spirit that fosters this woman running into His arms with each and every need, each and every moment of joy, with every breath turning to Him. That He wanted to celebrate her because she was His beloved child.

Those words have stuck with me this week. I don't know if they resonated deeply with her or not, but they've bounced around my heart. Slowly, and ever so gently, through the words He's asked me to speak to others, God is revealing His heart for me.

A few weeks ago, as I was laying on the floor at the conference I attended, sobbing, and being prayed for, one of the things I remember Kari saying was that she felt like God was going to heal some more of my Father wounds. A few weeks prior to that, she sent me a note telling me that she was praying a Jason Upton song over me that day. I've written about that song, about the ongoing theme of our interconnectedness in Christ over the last while. I've listened to the song over and over, and every time it impacts me with the truth that I am not alone. What never caught me until tonight, as I began to write this post, is that the song is actually a lullaby that Upton wrote for his daughter, that developed into a love song from God to his children. Part of my father wound seems to have been a driving independence. But that independence was lonely. God is speaking to me through Upton's words... look at the first couple lines of the song:

Don't be afraid baby, don't you cry
Daddy's here it will be all right
You're not alone, you're not alone....

I love the subtle ways that God is working! Thank you, Abba, for continuing to reveal your heart for me.

To Do List

I have often admitted here that I am one of those people who really likes lists. I am not particularly driven by them. In fact, if something spontaneous comes up, I happily chuck the list in favor of the more interesting spontaneity. But lists are helpful in organizing my thoughts, and today, on my day off, I need to make a list of the things I'm hoping to accomplish today and tomorrow. I derive an odd sense of satisfaction from checking things off a list, therefore, I list everything, no matter how mundane, that must be accomplished in a particular day.

• Write a blog or journal entry that does not entail discussing how busy I am, or what I have planned for the next few days - preferably one that talks about some of the spiritual stuff I've been thinking about this week.
• Job interview - 1pm. Make sure I've read the website for the office I'm interviewing at.
• Shower.
• Laundry.
• Change the sheets on my bed.
• Wash the dirty sheets.
• Spend at least thirty minutes outside in the sun. Remember to wear sunscreen this time in order to avoid the thirty minute burn that has made it difficult to sleep on my shoulders all week.
• Clean my desk so there is room for scrapbooking or cardmaking projects.
• Do something creative.
• Watch a movie or read a novel - something that is not work related and will let me escape my brain and simply relax for a while.
• Read some more of the Mike Pilavachi book that I'm enjoying so much.
• Do some writing on some of the scriptural insights I've been discovering lately.
• Email some more resumes out.

Full Day

I'm up earlier than I'd like. You see, I have to leave for work in less than half an hour. I have to make myself look far more professional for work than normal today, because I am leaving directly from work for a job interview at the regional office of a bank - an administrative assistant position.

Then, transit home from the job interview, eat quickly and head out to house church.

Work tomorrow - 11-7. So I'll either be back to "real" blogging (and I have some good stuff to say about church Sunday night) tomorrow night or Thursday (which is my only day off this week.)

Joining Lives

I am thinking this morning about the joining of lives. About how true the statement made by sixteenth century poet and minister John Donne is. Donne wrote while struggling to recover from a long and debilitating illness which he had originally thought was the Black Plague. Each day he would lie in his bed and listen to the tolling of the church bells nearby, signaling the death of yet another person from plague. His words are potent, the entire Meditation XVII worth reading for it's power and strength (you can find the whole thing here), but I will quote for you just a tiny portion, the most famous portion:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

My life is inherently tied to the lives of those around me. I am only beginning to realize the depth of what this means. I am only beginning to understand how to walk out life as an individual, but as an individual who is tied to others with varying degrees of closeness and strength. On November 1st, 2005, God healed me from depression that had plagued me for over five years. On that same day, as one of the things that led up to the prayer time where I later realized I was healed, I began to have flashes of a vision. The same thing over and over again. Two small feet, looking like they had been slashed with a razor blade. (the word razor was very strongly associated in my head with what I was seeing.) The wounds weren't bleeding, they were more like scratches, or healing wounds, but they were fairly fresh and raw. Later, I discovered that God was using that moment of healing to tie my life to another person. The feet were those of a friend who struggles with self-mutilation, and on the day that I was so oddly "seeing" feet all day, she was using a razor blade on her own feet and ankles, expressing the pain in her life in the manor that I had been viewing all day long.

I am only now, six months later, beginning to fully understand that moment. God asked me to serve a couple of very broken women within days of healing part of my own brokenness. And I poured myself into that service with abandon. I had little wisdom to offer, little experience of deeper spiritual things, but I understood what it was to be broken and to desire wholeness. Fast forward six months. There have been ups and downs. This week was particularly down. I had seen little progress in the lives of one of the women in particular. In fact, it seemed she was further away from emotional and spiritual health rather than closer to it. I am involved in another situation that has also drained a great deal of my emotional and spiritual energy. This week I screamed at God because I know deep within me that He has not released me from the ties that bind me to these situations. That He is still calling me to be present in these situations, to continue to offer myself. I had lost all perspective. I was carrying to some extent the burden on my own, rather than allowing Christ to carry it, and simply being obedient to His calling.

I am regaining perspective today. I woke and read this post at Kirk's blog. He describes a vision of a wounded Jesus. The way He describes the wounds of Christ was an accurate description of the wounds I saw on those feet all those months ago. Not just the feet of my friend, but the wounded feet of a Savior who bears all of our wounds...

I was already thinking about the joining of lives because I am going to a wedding this afternoon to watch two very dear friends make the deepest joining of their lives possible. I am so excited for these people that God has already brought together, to watch them stand before their family and friends and God and commit themselves to each other for the rest of their breathing moments.

I am thinking about a situation I heard about this week where it was discovered that a little girl was being sexually abused. I am thinking about how, when the situation was shared with a group of us, our cries to Jesus on behalf of this child and her family were passionate - we knew inherently the evil, that it diminished us, though we would have never known to use those words, and we fought against it on behalf of this child and her family.

I come back, as I draw this post to a close to another portion of Donne's meditation. He is again talking about death, but I find his thoughts so applicable to a life of faith...

...all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another...

May all the situations of our lives, the wounds and brokenness, the joyous moments such as weddings, and the realization of our ties to those around us serve to begin the translation process. May we be translated in small portions each day into a "better language". May the events of our lives be translators employed by the hands of God, and in that moment of final translation may His hand truly bind up all our scattered pages.

You HAVE to see this!

No, really. You have to go to this site. I mean, it's the Bible, only in Lego. Slightly wild and crazy at times, and you have to wonder who has this kind of time on their hands, but so funny!