No Matter What

                                                                                                                           

I think, as we age, we think more on how it will end for us and who we will leave behind. Last night, as I lay sleepless once again, I wondered what my death, or what comes next, would be like. It may sound dramatic, but I have had a lot of unexplained health issues of late and it seems, to me, only natural that I would analyze it. That is what I have been trained to do. Seems to me, especially these days, that I analyze and troubleshoot my health more than the doctors who are paid to figure it out… by I digress again.

Last night, I wondered if I would get to meet God or Christ when I pass on. It isn’t the first time that I wondered just how close I would be to Him. Then I wonder how I will be, what I will say, if I could worship Him in song, without the angel’s covering their ears in pain, or show Him my deep love and gratitude for Him in some way. If I would feel so unworthy that I would blow my chance to know Him and spend time with Him. Would I be able to ask Him for one favor or would He just know?

In my sessions with the students at Adult & Teen Challenge, I, too, am being transformed. It is bound to happen when I listen to their life stories and I see the parallels. I often use my own examples in helping them along the way. It causes me to reflect on my own life and things that could have been different. Perhaps that is part of why I am drawn to the broken. I feel their pain.

In my soul searching I have realized that I have never known what it feels like to have normal loving parents. My mother had a nervous breakdown at an early age and my father gained custody of us five girls. We lived in a farmhouse with 14 of us kids and two absent parents, one being my step-mother. They liked to drink so they were gone for much of my upbringing. My sister rescued me when I was about 9 years old but that didn’t end well either. I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere by that point.

I have always had that feeling. The father was never present until I begun to develop. I wish he had never come for me… but then where would I go? There was no place safe. Looking back, I can liken my upbringing in that home to a pack of dogs. Maybe just because I was an outsider and served no purpose at that age. I was just there. I strayed to where I wanted during the day and came back to the den at night. I was fed and had a place to sleep.

Do you know what is amazing about that though? At five years old, with no church or prior knowledge of Him, I laid at the end of our huge yard in the grass at dark and talked to Him in the stars. I just knew. I feel like whatever I said must have touched His heart because I know that He has chased me through life and been there for me, no matter what.

Oh now, don’t feel too sorry for me because what the world meant for bad, God used for His glory. My brokenness and pain help me understand the actions and reactions of those that I serve. I have had a great ending to my last days, thanks to my wonderful husband and our purpose driven life with God.

But something bothers me… I can’t imagine what it must feel like to be held by a parent with a sincere pure love and not feel threatened and unsafe. I can’t imagine growing up in a house where I was encouraged, praised, nurtured and cared for as if I were the priority. I cringe when I think of the father even coming near me, let alone holding me out of anything more than a perversion that ruled his life. Or my real mother, who I never got to know until I was grown, being there to protect me and share my trials with, who will tell me that it will be okay. Or my step mother not looking at me like I was just another mouth to feed and not welcome there.

I reflect on that lately and wonder how having a Godly kind of love from my parents might have changed my choices and my parenting skills. I loved my children and took the responsibility very seriously. Too seriously. I fought to give them what I thought that they needed in life. I was an over-achiever in work. I made sure they had a decent home, food, clothes... necessities and luxuries that I never had, no matter what. I protected them against all the things in this world that I thought would hurt them. I was possibly over-protective. And yet, looking back, I couldn’t possibly recognize all of the evils for what they were until it was too late.

But for as much as I did for them, I didn’t do enough with them. I spent so much time working on succeeding in the responsibility part that I failed at the praise and nurturing part of things. I could have spent a lot more time with them, their homework, their feelings, their failures, fun activities and building them up to be strong and confident. It isn’t always what we do as parents, it is often what we fail to do.

I know that I can’t undo the past, but what I am getting at is this… things would be different, had I known what it was like to have safe, loving parents. I would have learned by example what needed to be done. If I had been praised, I would realize the importance of praise. If I had structure, I would have learned from it. If I had God, I would have known by His teachings, what love is supposed to look like.

But that was a major detour from what I was getting at… all this to say, that when I pass on, I pray that I can see Him. I can’t change what has happened or who we are, except by prayer. But I can ask for something that my heart wants to know. My one request would be, “Can you please hold me like a loving father and tell me that it will be okay?”  I want to know what it feels like to have someone love me like a parent, who would do no harm to me, who would just want to comfort me and let me know that I am loved with a pure unconditional love that surpasses all that I was, failed to be and am.

I know how it feels for me to be the parent who loves, but not how it feels to receive that kind of love from my own parents. That orphan feeling created a void in me that took years to figure out, eradicate and refill with God’s promises. It took me a long time to be able to relate to God’s love for me except in relation to my love for my kids, which was imperfect. It took even longer to truly understand how deeply He loves and pursued me, even in my sin. And longer still to believe that I was loved unconditionally, no matter what, and no longer an orphan.

Now… for those of you that have children… I beg you to consider the way that you parent. Don’t let your lack of knowledge or experience be the reason that you fail to do what is crucial for them to survive in this dark world. There is a wonderful program that you can sometimes get for free through your county called “Active Parenting Now” by Dr Popkin. But more importantly, there is God, who is the Father of all and has the most perfect love for us no matter what.

Prov. 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.”