The Father’s Love
This morning’s Sports section described an altercation between an 18 year old tennis professional and her father during the player’s tour at the Carlsbad Resort in California. The incident was one of several past similar events between fathers and their teen daughters in the world of professional tennis. In this incident, however, the young player was battered, and suffered cuts and bruises. The exact cause of the father’s “acting out” was unclear, but he was arrested for the attack. His daughter had ranked 35th in the world, but recently had dropped to somewhere in the 100s. The daughter declined to press charges, but the father has been restricted from attending future matches by the professional tennis association organizing the event in the interest of protecting the player.
I can imagine the stress and sadness of this young woman. She was battered by her own father during a competition when she most needed his support. She may have already felt the disappointment of losing her ranking by objective performance standards of “winning and losing”. Now she may have felt her father’s love was just as conditional and unpredictable. Who was she if she didn’t win? Was she lovable only if her ranking met expectations?
This young woman’s dilemma of not knowing if we are loved or lovable is something we all share in some degree. Some of us are lucky by disposition or by actual experience of love. We know that inner feeling of calm security that we are cared for, provided for, nurtured, and safe. We have resources then to “face the world”. Others of us grew up in insecurity, without reliable parents, and maybe even parents who verbally and physically attacked us on a regular basis. We felt loved only if we were “good enough”. The result is that consciously or unconsciously we go through the world with a fear of abandonment and a broken spirit. We are unable to trust others to love us.
Christians are broken, sinful people, who also sometimes struggle to “face the world” because they continue to need an inner healing of the places left empty by the sins and omissions of others. The difference is that they have consciously accepted that brokenness, and in faith they placed it before God, their Heavenly Father. They believed in such a Perfect Father because they found Him through God Incarnate, Immanuel, or “God With Us”. They went in faith and trust to a spiritual Father through the introduction of the living God-Man, Jesus, the Christ or “Promised One”.
This process of salvation is difficult for the sophisticated and cynical people of the 21st Century (or of any time) to accept. Many educated and bright people reject the idea because of intellectual pride, and the belief that this way of simple faith is too easy, and too strange. A “sophisticated” God would have done things much differently.
Yet, the journey of the wounded heart captured and restored by God is not a “sophisticated” journey, but a straight-forward experience that is proved by a radically changed attitude and a renewed hope. A life is not merely “touched” by salvation, it is regenerated and renewed to the original glory God intended before sin infected the human race.
So, even as Christians continue to sin, and even as they continue to struggle with some of the “old issues” of their past, they know deep within their hearts that a continuing process of regeneration and renewal is underway, and that daily love is retaking the territory of the heart lost to injury and sorrow. This experience is the power of “Christ living within”.
In my earlier posts, I have written about the experience of God’s grace “within the gap”. The “gap” is that place which is the distance between where we are and where God hopes us to be. Our God, however, is not like the tennis professional’s father. He will not hammer us if our score doesn’t meet his expectations. When a Christian accepts God’s invitation to be renewed through following Jesus Christ, the score is settled: God 1, Sin 0. Now the process of life is one of daily transformation in which we are no longer condemned by God, and we are wise to therefore no longer condemn ourselves. The prize of the Christian life is freedom, and our daily challenge is to live in that freedom in a world characterized by enslavement to sin.
