I do have a good father.
He has been one who has loved and been committed to me. His expressions of fatherly love have made my personal acceptance of God as my heavenly father easy and natural.
When my father proposed to my mother, he did so with one condition, that she allow him to adopt her two year old daughter (me) as his own. I actually think that it was always in the plan of my heavenly father, that my dad be … my dad, and that I be his daughter.
“See how very much our Father loves us,
for he calls us his children,
and that is what we are”
1 John 3:1a
Love is a choice. It was the choice of my father to love me, it has been my choice to love him. Blood relation does not change that reality, because love is always a choice, or it is not love, but obligation.
I think all of us reach point in our lives when we realize that loving others, loving our children, loving our parents, is a choice that is in our hands.
I remember reaching the developmental stage when I became aware of the faults and mistakes that my parents have made. The things said that stung. The time not given. The things that were important to me that were critiqued and rejected. But I also realized that they were, they are human (I might have come to that realization around the time that I became a parent). They have not done it all right. They did not always comfort me as I desired or needed, they did not always do things with me when I so wanted them to, they did not always say (or not say) what I needed. But, I know that when I look at the big picture (from our beginning to today) they chose to love me.
For many, Father’s Day is a tough day. We may have very valid reasons for feeling unloved, abused or unchosen, and for those who must keep apart from the earthly man who is your father. What I am saying does not apply to you, for your story is one of self preservation.
But, for most of us, it is a matter of choice, our choice, to love the men in our lives who have chosen to love us … imperfectly, humanly.
Happy Father’s Day, to my dad, who I choose to love.
“Yet to all who did receive him,
to those who believed in his name,
he gave the right to become children of God
children born not of natural descent,
nor of human decision or a husband’s will,
but born of God.
John 1:12-13
itsawonderfilledlife 