As I approached the stop light to turn left, I heard the still small voice of God, catching me off guard, "I am not your father."
"What?' I thought. "God I know you are not my father."
"I don't give and take away. I don't make you scared all the time. I am not your father. I am your Heavenly Father. Cynthia, I Love you."
That was about it. But it was enough to make me want to pull over to think about it. Seldom does God make profound direct statements to me. Ususally, he reveals something of our relationship through reading the Word. But every now and then there is this...I almost felt like he Yelled it at me in a loving way. Like someone shaking you out of a hysteria. A "Snap out of it' kind of thing.
I was riding down the road blaming God for not providing, and putting me in my precarious position with time and money, and talking myself into a fit about it. So He just said: "Don't you dare compare me to your father."
Unlike a lot of people this Father's day morning, who will extol their dads, I can't. I loved him, but he was not the best father in the world. In fact, he lacked a lot in the fathering department. I have always known the difference between a loving heavenly father and a not so loving earthly father. I had issues as a child in honoring my father, because I was told in Sunday School that honoring your father meant to obey him. I could see obeying God, but my father told me to do bad things. I had to disobey him - often - to do what my mother and Heavenly Father would have me do. I was always praying God, I forgive my father for that, but please help me to not hate him for it. I worried a lot about the verse that says to honor your parents so you might live a long life. At the time, I thought it meant I was doomed to die young. LOL
I knew my Father was nothing like God, and I knew that when God called himself Father, the person I knew from a toddler as my Heavenly Father was very different from my dad. In the beginning, as a tiny little girl, no one held a candle to my Daddy. I chased him around the yard, and wanted to do everything he did. When he came home from work I ran to the car to meet him. He didn't mind my being right under his feet while he worked. And he didn't ever spank me. Never!!!!! Only Mama, spanked me. Daddy taught me how to do things. He gave me tools and gently took my hands to help me use them. He helped me hang by my ankles upside down on the a-frame of the swing set. Then he would dare me to pull myself up, when he let go. I thought he was so great to show me things.
But...
This was the beginning of my love my daddy/hate my daddy confusion. I loved that image of my dad helping me do something challenging and wanting me to be strong. I had to get a little older to understand that my father was hanging me up to watch me suffer, to writhe there trying to pull myself up from that awkward upside down position while he WATCHED. It was when I saw the look on my mother's face when she discovered him doing it, that I began to not want him to hang me up there anymore. Daddy let you hang there past your ability to. Each time he let me hang longer, he began to taunt me, and laugh. At first if you said I can't hang on any more, he would help me up. And the last time I let him do it, he was mean. Get yourself up, he said or fall on your head. You see, it was impossible to pull myself up from the way I was hanging. He was giving me false hope. And Daddy knew it. If Mama had not intervened that last time, (he had let me hang there until it couldn't hang on anymore,) he was going to let me fall.
My daddy tickled you til it hurt, and when you begged him to stop, it was like you begged him to not stop. When it hurt is when he did it more. We would beg Mama to come and intervene. Sometimes I don't think she understood that we really needed her to. But I could see in his eyes that he knew she wouldn't. We learned that if we were playing in the floor, and daddy entered the room, we got up and found something else to do. It was later we discovered that if she intervened, that he became a monster.
From the time I was "born again," (when I was baptised and my father found out I was "saved,") Daddy turned his back on me. Never again did he treat me the same. Once when I didn't do what ever bad thing it was he was telling me to do, he opened the window, and hung the brand new doll, he had just given me, upside down out the window. He threatened to drop her on her head. The image was not lost on me, and he knew it. I resolved to turn my back on him, no matter what he did to the doll. He said he better never catch me with my hands on that doll ever again. It was no longer mine. So be it, I thought. I think I asked him to please not be mean, and Please give her back, but I was not going to do the bad thing. He said if I didn't obey, she was going in the trash. Daddy bought the doll to manipulate me. Later, I found two more of my dolls hanging upside down, soaking wet after a morning rain, on the clothesline. I never knew if I had just left them outside and mother found them and hung them to dry, or if daddy took them outside and did it deliberately, because I was too scared to ask.
Purhaps I should say that I don't remember what he asked me to do that was bad specifically at specific times. My mind has blocked some of that stuff, thankfully. But, usually it was something to hurt my Mom. Like: he would have something she was searching for, and he was getting a morbid amount of fun from not telling her he had it hidden. Then He would want me to throw it away or something, like take it to the trash out at the road without her seeing me. Bizarr, mean kind of bad. Not sexual bad.
I have spent a lot of years overcoming the trauma having a father like that has caused. As years went by, Daddy only got worse. The episodes of him being a bad father were more frequent, and lasted longer each time. From an hour or two to a couple of days of fearing him at first. Then, from a couple of days to a week or two. Sometimes it would be months before something would happen again, but then it became months before it would stop. Mom tried to get us help, but in those days there wasn't much help. About the only option was for social services to take us away. I never understood why they would take us away from her. She was so loving, that she could even still love him, and taught us to do the same, and to keep praying for him. She never stopped loving him, but the years changed her, and her attitude toward men.
At the time of this incident when the Lord said: "I am not your father," I'd had a lot of years to understand the dynamics of staying with someone who abuses you. I had forgiven my father, -and my mother for staying. I had gotten past some of my own issues with my husband, which naturally infected my marriage from not setting my own boundaries -because I didn't have a proper model for doing that. Yes, I was sure that my Dad was nothing like my Heavenly Father. I even knew for sure that My Heavenly Father was nothing like my Dad. But I had never thought how I might be saying, "God, why are you letting this happen in my life?" as if God would treat me like my Father had.
Suddenly, all those images of how my earthly father had set us up into situations where he would taunt us, cause us to be afraid of our situation, leave us hanging with no help, and in fact hurt us every chance he could... I realized I was seeing myself in life, as if God would treat me the same. If I felt desparately in need, I would say, "God why aren't you helping me here?"
God had heard enough of my crying to Him, from the stand point of Him being like my earthly Father. When I realized it, all I could say was, "but it feels like you are leaving me in the same kind of binds that he would. What am I supposed to think?" I remembered something else I had learned earlier: "What you feel and what is real...are two different things."
The Lord said, "You stopped asking your Father for good things because he didn't give them." "Don't see me like him. Don't stop asking me to help you up. If I am putting you in a place to teach you, I won't leave you hanging, and if it is impossible for you, I will do it for you. I will never ask you to do something mean. I will not take back what I give you without giving you something better. I Will Not Hurt YOU. I AM NOT YOUR FATHER."
I still have to remind myself all the time, to think about how I am praying. How do I talk to God. Do I see Him as a Loving Giving Heavenly Father, or am I praying to him as if he were my own father, expecting him not to help me, expecting him to take the good out of life, to treat me in a way I don't understand? Am I living out of the memories, or am I talking to God, while seeing Him for who He really is?
The scripture says we remedy that kind of patterns in our thinking by the renewing of our minds. It means to turn our thinking around, and say for instance: "Lord, today I see myself in a mess. Help me to see You helping me get out of my mess." Every time life gets stressfull, I fall back in to "with daddy there's no way out" mode. I really wish God would put his foot down more often, and yell at me: "I am Not Your Father."
So today, I celebrate Father's day, knowing I can be released from the emotional bondage any time I need that release. I can forgive my Father, and focus on the good things about him. I can look to the Heavenly Father for a Father to be thankful for. I can try to help break the image my children have of when we failed as parents to focus on the Heavenly Father or provide them a more loving reflection of Him. I can stop and ask my self, am I being respectful of who God really is when I pray, or have I put him in my little "picture of God" box again - the one that limits my clear view of just how big and good He is?
Comparing God to how my father would do things, or how my children's father would do things, is a disservice to God, to myself and to my children and grandchildren. I need always to work on comparing God to His Word, on seeing Him as the Real Heavenly Father.
..."be renewed in the spirit of your mind..."
Ephesians 4:23
Be not conformed to this world, but be...transformed by the renewing of your mind....Prove what is the good, ...acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2
Lord, I need to be reminded often that you are not my earthly father. I would like to find myself remembering it before life gets to the place where I feel I am hanging on and about to fall. I really wish I would remember it before I let the world, circumstances, and life talk me into letting them hang me on the A-frame, lead me to believe I have to keep trying to do the impossible; before I am exhausted from trying just to realize, they have all left me, hoping for rescue. Before all that, Lord, remind me, that You don't do things that way. Help me to seek You first in all things. AMEN
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