Distorted Images of God, Part Three

“You’re worried about pleasing the wrong Dad.”

Those were the words spoken into my spirit while I was standing alone in my bedroom.

Only seconds earlier I had been in deep thought about how to best honor my late father’s legacy.

I was still processing the loss.

We’d only buried my earthly dad in France days earlier, and I’d just returned home to Switzerland to settle down into the new normal of living in this world without him.

Stopped cold by the admonition to shift my focus from the temporal to the eternal, I froze in my tracks.

It was stated in a gentle, not a condemning way. But, my reaction was instantaneous and telling.

I felt guilty.

From a years-long habit of disconnecting myself from painful emotions, I locked all of my feelings about my dad’s passing into an invisible vault, going numb emotionally.

I never thought about God as my dad. As a distant, authoritative, judgmental superpower - absolutely.

When I prayed, I am certain that I even said the words, “Heavenly Father”, but God did not hold a place in my heart as an “Abba”, or as a “Daddy”.

Nor could I remotely conceive of Him in that way.

That was because I was genuinely afraid of God. I had a distorted image of him.

I did not have a fear of the Lord. I was fearful of Him.

There is a difference.

Sometime later, as I laid in my bed at night, God spoke gently into my ear, “You’re afraid of me”.

I turned my face and threw the covers over my head as if that would keep the Almighty’s voice out of my consciousness.

I heard nothing else that evening.

As we drove home from church days later, I heard, “I love you. I love you. I love you.” over and over in my mind.

We had been listening to worship music in the car, so I started to sing much louder to drown out what I hoped to be my own thoughts.

“Don’t sing over me!” He pleaded. But I ignored what I was hearing in my spirit until I didn’t hear anything anymore.

Days later I heard, “Jesus is trying to sweep you off of your feet, but you’re wearing anti-gravity boots”.

Humorous to say the least, but poignant.

Can you imagine the greatest love of all time, love personified, reaching out to someone in desperate need and being unilaterally rejected?

That’s exactly what I had been doing.

There had been other voices too. Much more familiar ones.

Condemning. Judgmental. Critical.

“That’s not me,” God repeatedly reassured me.

I knelt beside my bed in a prayer space I’d created to try to connect with God. I really didn’t want to push Him away but I felt no genuine heart connection to Him.

In truth, I was also mad at Jesus for delivering a message through a friend that cut me to the core. It was a message I desperately needed to hear, but it hurt and I didn’t want to talk to Him.

I figured I’d try to talk to the Father instead.

Even though they are one, it made sense to me at the time.

But still, it was uncomfortable.

I didn’t know how to connect to God as my Dad so I just knelt there in awkward, painful silence.

At that moment I resolved to do one thing in my heart.

I would call God, “Abba” (meaning Daddy) just like Jesus did.

Even though I didn’t relate to God in that way, I felt it was an important step to begin to break through the barriers that were separating me from connecting with Him heart to heart.

“Uhhh. Hi, Abba?”

Day after day, that was pretty much the extent of our conversation.

Sometime later I was on the phone with a brother in Christ.

I cannot recall what we were discussing at the time, but I’ll never forget the odd comment that interrupted our conversation.

“What in the world?!?! Why am I seeing an image of a tricycle?” my brother blurted out.

He was just beginning to experience more spiritual gifts and growing in their operation.

Perplexed and confused, he was genuinely puzzled as to why such a random image would come clearly into his mind.

I was momentarily dazed. Totally caught off guard.

Tentatively, I responded quietly. “I think that was a message meant for me.”

I went on to explain to him the understanding that was unfolding in my heart in real time.

One of my Dad’s favorite stories to share about how much he loved me involved a tricycle. He recalled how he had been watching me play through a window in our home. I was playing in the front yard with other children.

I didn’t have my own tricycle at the time, so I had asked one of the kids who did have one if I could ride theirs.

But they'd said no.

My dad beamed with delight as he recalled the exact moment when he knew I realized I could ask him to buy me my own tricycle.

As I began to run back into the house to ask, Dad was running out to meet me to say, “Yes!” before I could even get the question out.

My dad loved telling me that story, and I loved hearing it.

So, what was the purpose of using the image of a tricycle? What did God want me to know?

My heavenly Abba was reaching out to me, connecting my heart directly to His.

This time through another person (since I had a habit of closing my ears and heart to direct messages from Him).

God wanted me to know that I was His precious daughter and that I was deeply loved and completely accepted by Him, just as I was.

It was only the first of many experiences that God would use to show me what He was really like, and to begin to dismantle the many lies of the enemy about His true nature and character.

HE IS LOVE.

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance...But love will last forever!

1 Corinthians 13:4-8