Lots of things make me cry. Mainly I cry when I'm frustrated; when I'm mad I just get volatile and demeaning and say extremely mean and cutting things. I do the same thing when I'm sad. I'm really good at insulting people in these times. I mean, better than normal. If there was a competition, I'd probably win. That makes me sound arrogant. I am arrogant. Wow.
That was totally not the point of this post.
I was just going to say that while I definitely shed more than a few tears on average, very few things can make me cry on the spot, you know? Like, there's gotta be a buildup. I have to be good and frustrated and at the end of my rope and just....wah! It's not like you can just walk up to me and be like "Alysa, a baby hippo just drowned" or "Alysa, somewhere, today a praying mantis will eat her mate" because that stuff just doesn't work on me. I'm just...stone faced. Solid. Stoic. Can't touch me.
But when I call my dad and express to him how frustrated I am with school, and how discouraged and defeated I am with life, and how I feel like God picks and chooses which prayers He wants to answer on whims and is yanking me around by a collar that's choking me. And when I tell him how angry I am with God, and how I don't feel loved, seen or heard by God, and I don't really want to pray anymore because I feel abandoned and ignored and I don't see God ANYwhere...
...and he tells me how he would do anything for me, and how it hurts him to be helpless to do anything about my situation, and his voice starts to break when he tells me that I mean more to him than his own life, and he reminds me that he can he can sacrifice and do his best to provide for me, but God can sustain and give abundantly beyond anything I could ask for, and that at his best, he can only love me incompletely, but God can love me fully...
In that instant, I see God very clearly. And I realize that my whole life, I've been held. And that sometimes love is running through our lives in streams and rivers and rushing tides that are wider, stronger and deeper than we could ever hope to understand.
And I start to cry
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ReplyDeleteThat is really cool! I think that our Fathers show us so much about God and his love for us! And I would argue that it is often through the relational lens of the relationship with our earthly fathers that we see our Heavenly Father. like if you have a dad who loves on you then you will understand God's love. if you father is angry all the time you will see God as an angry, wrathful God it's really awesome.
ReplyDeleteJ.I Packer once said "If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father."
i hear that!!! praise God. hes so wonderful to give us good people w good words when we really need it.
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