I was reminded tonight that I usually need a "slap in the face" before I realize something as truth. For example, someone said to me tonight that I have an attitude about father's, fatherhood, and anything having to do with father's in my life! This was said to me in a loving but matter of fact way...just like I usually need. I DO have an attitude...an angry, pissed off attitude.
God presents Himself to us as a Father. Well, He should. He created us and watches over us and loves us in a similar way to an earthly Father. Jesus used parables the way publishers use pictures in books and manuals. Pictures quite literally show or explain the truth, the process being presented in a manual. Parables were used as mental pictures. God bringing himself to his people in a way they could relate to and understand. He loved them and wanted to be real to them. Imagine then, if you will, the ones who have had no father. There I am. No earthly father. I have never seen his face...not even a picture. He held me once as a baby but I have never felt his touch to my memory. He is a void. An emptiness...a nothing. He is a fantasy. In my dreams I "see" him but I always wake up right before he would reveal his face. All my life I have wanted with a desperation that I could sometimes feel in my chest to see my father. I still want my father. I still want him to come walking up my driveway...I feel so foolish but it is the truth. I am holding out. I am in a sort of waiting room. I wait for this man that I don't even know to come and make it all better. I have some sort of twisted hope that he will just come back and life will go on. It sounds so ridiculous, I know. I want him, I want him, I want him. I want to be the daughter! I want to belong to a man on this earth the way my Maddie belongs to her daddy. I want to be my dad's little girl. I want someone to look at me that way. I WANT IT!!! I can hear you all saying, "But God...". I know I am all this to God and more. I know what the Bible says...but the my heart doesn't speak Bible sometimes. Father is such a stupid, dirty, ugly word to me! Why me? In a room full of women weeping over things their father's did to them I can still feel lower than them all because I can sit and remember that mine just walked away. He never had a second thought. I was waste to him...a mistake, a burden, TRASH! He discarded me and left me for dead. I wonder if he even knows my name. How can I want him this much and he want me so little? It feels like a scarlet letter. All of you have a father but I am the bastard. I wasn't worth a second look. He might as well have wrapped me up in a trash bag and dumped me in the land fill.
I can tell you that my heart knows God never left me. I can tell you it was my father's choice to abandon me. Somehow the latter has more weight on how much I value myself! What a shame. The scars my father left on me cover me entirely. I know my wounds and my scars make up my story. I know my life has a purpose. I know God allows bad things to happen but He never authors it. (Someone said that to me tonight too...what a pleasant reminder!) Why is it so hard for me to say that God never meant for me to be fatherless. When I think of me it is automatic to think that I am fatherless. I have an easier time believing it was never meant to be...but it was, wasn't it? God intends for everyone to have two parents...hence the reproductive differences of the male and female!! He designed it this way for a purpose. A mother cannot fulfill the role of a father and a father cannot fulfill the role of a mother. We as human beings need both to become well rounded people. What happens when the family is not a complete circle...DAMAGE!! I know the damage exists in two parent families as well. But I can only speak to what I know. Sometimes I feel like a nomad. Where do I belong and from where (or whom) did I come? Man this really sucks!! I will probably never lay eyes on my father in this life or the next. I will never know who he is or what he looks like. That breaks my heart. I feel like everything has been taken from me...my mother and my father. I feel blind sometimes at the hand of these two people. I am a product of sin and I am lost. I am branded the bastard and all that comes with it.
I know I have purpose. I know the wrongs of the past will stay in the past. My children are the first in at least 2 generations to be held by their fathers. They will never be fatherless. That is a victory. I don't know what purpose my being fatherless will serve. I don't know why God can't pick up my father where he stands now and bring him to me. Well I guess I do know why He doesn't do that...my father would most likely walk away again. I just don't understand. I know that if my father were to come back I wouldn't know what to do with him. It wouldn't make all this pain just float away. He would be just as much a stranger to me as he is now. Fatherhood would still be blank to me.
I have left the spot vacant in my life. It doesn't feel right to let another man father me. It would feel like betrayal. I don't want another man there...maybe I don't want anyone there at all. Who knows??!! I know I am afraid of what I would face if I pulled apart the strings of that "area" of my life. It scares me to death. It would be like crossing the desert without a map...a road to certain death!! I don't think I have enough faith to face it all. How can I help other people when I am such a coward??
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