"The Lord appeared to us in the past, saying: "I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have drawn you with loving kindness."
It's amazing to me how sometimes God uses so many different ways to share a message with me that I didn't even know that I was in need of until He begins to minister to those soft places of my heart and peels back another layer of the past that blocks me from serving Him with my whole heart. Sometimes we tend to bury things so deep in the recesses of our heart that we even forget that the scars and pains are still there ready to resurface and be dealt with on God's timing in our life.
This weekend I heard time and time again about the Father's love. I thought I was pretty well versed in that and I truly know without a doubt that I have a Heavenly Daddy who loves with a love that I can only begin to understand and share with others. His word is a wonderful love letter to me and to you. Sometimes when I sit down to read, there are moments that I feel like I've crawled up into my Daddy's lap as He reads to me. There is such comfort that. I never knew what that felt like in my relationship with my earthly father but I've seen many wonderful men, wonderful father's, take the time to scoop their little one up on their knee or nuzzled closely reading a story and sharing a tale. I often have envied that type of relationship, although I was blessed to have a mother who tried her best to fulfill that role for me.
For me an earthly father was never to be. I've never had a relationship with him and that had always left a void in my life. I must confess that I am grateful that my father chose not to be a part of my life and bring with him all the demons that he still battles today. There are sometimes blessings in the absence of those things that we think we need. My story is not unlike many that I talk to today whose father was not part of their life, but unique just the same. My mom was a young mother, just barely 17 years old when she had me. She wasn't ready to be a mom, but she did all she knew to do to try and be what I needed her to be. But my father was already a new daddy married to another woman but still playing the field. Not too long after my birth, he again became a father to a third child and eventually a fourth. Four children, four mothers and not able to be a father to any of them.
This bothered me for many years, knowing that my father couldn't be a dad to me and that I had three other siblings that I knew he had a relationship with but was causing chaos and destruction in all of their lives. As a young girl I thought I was missing out, but what I've learned over time is that I was being protected and guarded by my Heavenly Father. From before I was formed in a young mother's womb, my Heavenly Daddy was already planning my future and putting a hedge of protection around me. Oh my life wasn't easy and the enemy would have loved to have seen me buckle under the hardships that I had to go through but my Daddy He was holding me on his lap reading the story that was to be my life and saying "I have loved you with an everlasting love".
Some of you reading this today have had broken relationships or no relationships at all with your earthly fathers. Some of you still hold onto the pains of the void left by a man that was suppose to be there for you, loving you and supporting you. We can't undo the past and we can't make someone fulfill a role they don't know how to fill. The good news is that we all have a Heavenly father who loves us, cheers for us,cries with us and has never forsaken us. We never have to question who we are or where we belong because we are children of the King of Kings and there is nothing that will ever come between our daddy and us.
Are you holding onto pains of the void left by your father? Are you still angry for all the ways you felt he let you down? Are you willing to reach out your hand today and take the hand of your Heavenly Daddy and say, "read me a story about how you love me, how you know every detail about me, how you have my name written on the palm of your hand and have every hair on my head numbered." With that kind of a Daddy... we never need feel abandoned again.
Blessings,
Heather
