“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Matthew 5:43-45
God provides for us, and one person in His Trinity is the Father. He is the maker of heaven and Earth, and each of us. Our Father: that’s Him. Provider, creator, eternal parent, mentor, friend: that is the Father.
Back here on Earth, I loved my Dad. I really did. I know he loved me, and that he did the best he could in nearly all things. Yet, as a child, I struggled with his affections. I was a boisterous, skinny, uncoordinated and overactive kid, and my Dad didn’t know how to deal with it. He had a great many problems on his mind at the time, in those late 1960s, and dealing with a son to whom he had difficulty relating only made his burden seem heavier. I wanted him as a Dad, but he didn’t seem to want me as his son. Years later, we had a great peer relationship. I respected him more when I understood him more, and I think you could say that he reciprocated that. When he died, it left a giant hole in my heart because it was only then, in my early thirties, that I started to deal with my perceptions of why I thought my dad didn’t really want me for most of my first ten years.
Those misplaced perceptions have clouded my ability to get close to the Father. Sometimes, I think of God the Father as a lot like my earthly father. I wasn’t good enough for the dad I had here, so why would He think I was good enough for Him? He’s perfect and I’m so blatantly not; He’s totally out of my league, and my constant sins must be a huge disappointment to Him. To be fully honest, on my own, I don’t understand much at all about God the Father. Why would the Father want me?
Why? Because He made me to be me, and I’m always more than enough for Him because of His perfect Son. That’s the message Jesus was teaching us. God the Father provides everything to every one of us out of His unending love, even to our so-called enemies, even to us in our insecurities. We are special because He made us and loves us more than we could ever understand here. If we want to know just a little of what that love looks like, we can learn it from His Son, Jesus, who loves us in the same way. It’s a lesson I know Dad learned before he went to be with Jesus in person.
For more reading: 1 John 4:8, Matthew 5:46
Father, I love You.
Practical Proverbs 