daddy, do you love me?

Getting to know the real person behind my father.

He’s not a bad person.
He’s not a bad guy.
He’s not a bad father.

It has been a two year process of God bringing me to the next stage in the healing process… learning to see my father as God sees him.

Taking away all that has been done, not excusing it, but letting it define who he is. Separating who he is from his behavior… and learning to see him as a person.

A person who stands before the father, a sinner in need of grace just as much as I am.

We are no different.

At the foot of the cross, there is level ground.

As these things started happening, the process of forgiveness became real. It wasn’t just a process of something I knew I needed to do, I started feeling it and my heart was being changed.

Today was another step. Today when he offered to pay for my eye exam and new glasses because he had “heard” that I lost my glasses and was concerned about me being on the roads, I let him do it.

And I realized that doing so, was allowing him to provide for me and father me in the best way he can.

I can accept that he was not the perfect father. I can accept there were a lot of ways he did not measure up to the role of father.

But today, I got just a glimpse of how he saw things.

And I feel it is a lesson I will take into future relationships with males. Learning how different people they show care. It's a lesson that goes far beyond any understanding of "love languages" but one that takes the things personally ingrained in me that influence how I will also perceive things.

For my father, I realized, from his point of view, he has done everything a good father needed to do: provided for his children. Meeting their material needs. This is what it means. Without getting into more of the nature of our relationship in the past, on the surface, I can say while those physical, material needs were being met, yet the emotional needs a young girl needs from a father were not.

But it doesn’t translate into you were not loved or uncared for, which is a fundamental lie I have lived with most of my life.

It is a lie that is being slowly unraveled over time.

Baring the rest of the details into why I could have come to that conclusion, the way that he simply showed this care was not how I could receive it. But today, knowing this is one of the first gifts in a long time I have allowed them to give me. I saw what it meant to him. To him, this is what it means to be my dad. And I am learning how to accept that gift.

I felt blessed today, I really did. That they wanted to pay for that for me and go out of their way. This doesn’t mean all of the boundaries go out the window. But as the situation is constantly evolving and they are being willing to talk about things instead of brushing everything under the rug, the game has changed a lot. The Father is at work.

I am starting to see him as a human being. Flaws. Strengths. Weaknesses. Yet more I am starting to separating the negative behavior from the goodness that is still there within the person. And am learning more each day of what it means for me to learn to love someone I felt was impossible to love.

He is not bad. No, he was not the perfect father I wished for. But he has not failed. It is not over. He is not a bad person.

He is a man who is broken and needs the Father’s love just as much as he needs my own.

Below is an excerpt from my xanga, written two years ago near Father's Day when this stage in the process began of seeing my father through God’s eyes:

“One of my mentors at The Shelter leads a batterers’ intervention group with another male. I’ve been able to sit in on a few sessions and its been incredibly healing for me. I can relate to the women we serve, but seeing things from the batterers’ perspective is a whole different realm. I’ve realized God’s been changing my heart through these men over the last couple months. I no longer see batterers, I see wounded men with crippling hearts and have developed a heart of compassion for them.

As I was reading this card, I asked myself what was bothering me about the card. Has he been a good father? No. But does that take away from my appreciation for him as a person? Not anymore.

Before he was a father, he was a child of Christ. That is his identity. Wholly and deeply loved by the Christ who came into this world to save each and every one of us. This is the person he is, this is the person God chose to be my father, to teach me more than what it means to be a child, but to teach me how to love not according to what our sins deserve, but to love as Christ does in light of His message of grace. Deep down within this broken man, is a father who loves me. A man who does not desire what his life has become. A person I can forgive and learn to love through his weaknesses, while not excusing them or who they’ve shaped him to be. A man who is not to be seen through his actions, but the condition of his heart. A man who has made mistakes, yet is also a man whom Christ died on the cross for his sins. The gospel of grace is set in a context of God’s battle for hearts, for wounded hearts in wounded men and women, only to be brought to spiritual and emotional wholeness in him.

I walked out of Wal-Mart tonight realizing what a blessing it was that I could buy three Father’s Day cards. God has placed these three very different men in my life to play a significant role that has helped shape me into who I’ve become and what my life is about, the calling and promise He’s placed over my life. He’s continually healing me. Through my interactions with teenage juvenile delinquents at detention centers who are either victims of abuse or abusers, through seeing women transform from victims to survivors of sexual assault or domestic violence at the Shelter, to hearing men for the first time expose their vulnerability and see the full picture of a man, the man that God created, I am realizing it is by no accident that I am my father’s daughter. I am deeply loved, precious and honored in the sight of my Heavenly Father as He’s showing me what it means to love and be loved.”