This is a blog about reconciliation.
This is about a daughter who had an earthly father who didn’t love her in the way she needed to be loved.
Yes its about me!
I harbored hatred and hurt in my heart towards my father.
The animosity could be felt in all interactions.
Slowly the Lord entered and captured the broken spaces. He replaced the pain with understanding. He mended the broken places, and everything my earthly father didn’t give me, the Lord did.
As time went on I found that my heart had been softened towards him, I was walking in the process of forgiveness, but not quite trusting the Lord with my pain.
It was almost as if I thought letting the Lord have it would mean that my feelings of hurt would not be validated.
That is not true, in fact the Lord desires to have all of our pain to take us through healing by way of mourning – but that’s a blog for another day.
So, here’s when that change started happening.
After a painful encounter with the Lord, He told me the places I am going, I cannot afford to harbor any hatred in my heart.
He told me that before he was my father, before he was my enemy, he was the Lords child.
And my job was to love him the way the Lord loves me.
I mean come on Lord! After everything this human has put me through you want me to love him?
Irrigaurdless of my feeling towards the matter I adheared it to the Lord and just gave my YES.
A few weeks pass by and I see my father.
Get this my friends: I was able to hug and genuinely ask how he was. I prayed for him and everything
From that moment I chose to love and honor my father.
There still was no relationship but there was a new respect for my father.
Now when you find new freedom in the Lord, it seems, that very quickly, its tested.
One night my father was being a bit much, things were said, other things were done, and I was finding that everything that I had just walked through was going out the window.
Have you ever been so mad that you don’t have any words to say?
It literally took all of my being to not lash out and bring myself to pray.
I could only muster out 2 phrases.
1. Lord you have to fix it.
2. Lord you have to change it.
After praying for what seemed like 1 hour I fell asleep.
The next morning my father calls me!!!!!!!
Oh I’m ready to lay him out
So our conversations usually have a pattern:
He will speak and get all of his thoughts out, then I will speak and get my thoughts out, he will not like my response and angry words will escape his mouth, then I will hang up.
I mentally prepared for this to be case with this phone call.
I told him to proceed with his thoughts.
I put the phone down and began to clean.
Then.. ..
The Lord ask me where my heart was.
Quickly I realized I was not listening to my father I was just waiting for my turn to condemn him.
The Lord said Maggie you have 2 choices you can choose to condemn him or choose to love him.
I picked up the phone I sat down and placed it on my lap. I felt a layer of my heart come off, and I began to listen to my father.
What I heard was a person who was hurt. I heard a person longing for validation.
After he finished I prayed with him before I responded.
I told him how much I cared for his heart, how much i loved him, and I gave him my honest opinion about things but made sure it came from a place of love.
We got off the phone and I felt like I was walking on cloud 9.
The next day he called my mom and apologized for everything he did the night before and he went as far as to ask for forgiveness.
I never understood why God wouldn’t just do things, wouldnt it be so much simpler if the Lord would snap his fingers and make everything perfect!
Instead he gave me the choice to walk in love. He gave me the opportunity to walk through what I’ve been praying for, hand in hand with the creator of the universe.
Now my father and I are working on our new relationship. We have a lot of ground to cover but small beginnings bloom into fields of friendship.
The miracle could be that I have a relationship with a person that at one point t in time I couldn’t say his name without getting ill.
But!
I understand now that the true miracle was allowing the Lord to transform my heart while walking through true forgiveness.
Thanks for reading!!!
