Daddy

Ok, so I know I wrote my Armchair QB on the sermon notes, but there was another sermon in that gathering that spoke even louder to me, and continues to resonate with me as the week passes.

The worship leader, Chris, nearly apologized for the many familiar songs that the band was playing because their rehearsal had gotten snowed out.  In introducing the next set, he explained it was an older song, but he just had to play it because his daughter requested is and how could he not give her this simple thing.

Did you hear the sermon? 

It still takes me to this quiet moment.  If an earthly dad will play his daughter a song (or give her something good to eat and not a stone...), how much more might God want to give to his children?  Do we dare ask?  Or do we hold back?

Too often I pray to a nebulous, impersonal god.  It's not that I don't know God, but I allow stuff to get in the way.  I get all tangled up in the expectations I have for myself, the disappointments and guilt that come from that, and I project those feelings on to the way God must view me.  I get tripped up by the world's interpretation of me and my needs and of God himself. 

I forget that Jesus taught us to call him Daddy.

I admit, I do not have a great relationship with my earthly father.  Perhaps it will be this way until Jesus helps us mend things.  Sometimes I wonder if it doesn't play a part in me being uncertain of God as my Father, but as I watch my son with his daughter, my friends with their children, I recapture a sense of Daddy.  When this worship leader said he could not refuse his daughter, I began to cry, because I know God wants me to seek him like that, but I haven't been lately. 

I had enough of being sad and powerless and afraid, so I started to distance and make decisions and calculate and plan.  Notice how I went from feeling to action?  What might happen if your daughter brought to you her sadness, her fear, her sense of the world spinning out of control?  Would you tell her to fix it herself?  Of course not!  Yet, that is exactly the response I seem to expect from my Daddy.

Jesus told us that God's creation is cared for by him, that there is a rhythm to the creation-a shalom, that God knows what we need, that we can trust him to care for us in the same way the birds do.  Such simple, peaceful thoughts in such a confusing, complex time.  It is hard to hear them.  Even harder to trust them.

Just for today, I will remember to call you Daddy...