God, our great Father
It struck me this morning how many people I know who have either absent or complicated relationships with their fathers. Between the work I do — listening to people unpack stories of harm or neglect — and the observations I make amongst my own friends and acquaintances, I realize these days to celebrate and honor can greet us with waves of fresh grief or anger, or whatever.
There are the fathers who can’t seem to express their love.
The fathers who lash out with raging tempers.
The fathers who leave, sometimes by choice and sometimes by an abbreviated life.
The ones who long for a life different than they were given, taking their disappointment out on those who desperately want to be seen and known.
There are fathers who look away, ambivalent to the hearts of their little ones.
The fathers who lose their minds, slowly chipped away by aging faculties and frailties.
It’s easy to look around on holidays where we are supposed to express gratitude and fondness and sense our lack. How do we think well about the ones who resist loving us, recoil against us, or remind us of what has been lost?
When we speak of mothers and fathers, there are many categories and characteristics we seek to assign. I fear that some of these perspectives have been influenced more by Christian subcultures than by scripture. We talk about how a mother’s care and attentiveness has the power to shape the heart of her child, and a father’s leadership guides his family toward wisdom and responsibility. While there are certainly verses pointing to these themes, as is our common practice, we tend to overemphasize the narrow and miss the wider truth. Perhaps it’s also that, in some ways, we have overemphasized the family itself. Don’t hear me saying you shouldn’t acknowledge Father’s Day to the father in your life. But the family is not what will ultimately save us, or meet the longing of our hearts in their deepest needs.
The love of God surpasses any earthly love we may experience. A love generated from his own fatherhood, moved into action. When we describe the love we experienced from a parent, don’t we typically highlight demonstrations of that love? Demonstrations of selflessness and sacrifice? If we didn’t receive love from our father (or mother), is it not the case that we are speaking of what we did not tangibly receive from them? Attention, affection, action?
God, as Father, has always been looking our way, tenderly drawing near, moving toward us. Love in action. He demonstrated his love in the greatest way possible by sending his own Son to secure our redemption.
God is the great Father, the Father of the fatherless and the fathers.
One of the deepest miseries for a child is to try, and try again, to win the attention, affection, and action of their parent. With God our Father, it is not so. Thank God, it is not so! We do not have to win his love. He gave it freely — before we even thought to want it — and he continues to give it in abundance.
A child may not ever be able to penetrate the heart of his or her father, never able to draw forth love from him. We are not meant to. It is not our job to cultivate or compel a parent’s love toward us. A parent loves because it’s supposed to be in their nature. Because we live in this fallen world, we know (and experience) the ways that same nature has been distorted. Even if you have known the love a kind and attentive father, you have only seen a sliver of the love of God our Father in him.
God the Father has a love expansive enough to reach the aspects of you that most need him — to reach into those spaces where sorrow, confusion, or anger remain.
He has expressed his love in all its fullness on the pages of his Word and in the life of his own Son, Jesus. (John 1, 17, and Colossians 1:15-20)
He sings over you with delight. (Zephaniah 3:17)
He has promised to never leave you or forsake you. (Deuteronomy 31:18)
He desires you completely, and he knows you with complete knowingness. (Psalm 139)
He does not turn away from you, but is always gazing upon you with attentive affection. (Psalm 66, 121)
His mind never changes about you, but is forever for you and with you. (Psalm 136)