So the title of this post should be pretty self-explanatory. Its about God as our father…our daddy. This was a pretty intense week for most of us here. Ive been so blessed with my dad. I will bet you money that my dad is better than yours. I mean, he is by no means perfect…he is only human after all! But as far as Dads go, he is pretty darn close. As a result, seeing God as a loving father wasn’t exactly difficult for me. However, there was one part of the unit that really did strike a chord with me, forgiveness. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard plenty of sermons on forgiveness, so I was pretty ready to sit back and hear the same things I’d always heard.
Because the whole series was on God as our father, Doug (our speaker), started off this whole forgiveness spiel talking about how we need to each forgive our earthly fathers for where they have failed us. Either by things they did, or things they failed to do. We sat in the classroom, each of us in our own little space we had claimed, and joined together in prayer. Doug prayed over us, and we all forgave our dads. For some, it wasn’t easy. There were a lot of tears shed and we were only about 20 minutes into class. Then we had to forgive our moms, this of course brought on a whole fresh round of crying. Then Doug did something unexpected. He made all the girls get up and stand in a circle, standing in the center he began to walk around making eye contact with each of us. He apologized to us on behalf of men, for making us believe that our value was only in our image, for believing that we would never measure up, etc. This was touching, and everyone was sniffling, but he took it one step further. He asked us to think of the guys who had communicated those things to us, they may have said it out loud, they may have communicated it through actions, and everyone paused for a second, “You all have them in your head. The ones who made you feel less than the treasure that you are. I want you to forgive them. At that point, there was not a single dry eye in the circle. We were all crying and thinking about the person(s) who hurt us. And each of us forgave them. Then Doug did something amazing. He told each of us to hold out our hands, because God had a gift for us. He told us that God was restoring our purity to us, whether we needed it or not, we had it. If the water works weren’t going before they were on full blast now. As I write that, I realize it sounds a little hokey, but in the moment, it was exactly what we needed. After that, Mr. Doug prayed for each of us individually and it was pretty cool. We then sat back down and he prayed with everyone to “forgive” God. We cant really forgive God, because that implies he did something wrong, but what we did is we took every question, every “why didn’t you?” “where were you when” “Why?” “How?” and “When?” and we laid it at the foot of the cross saying, “Lord, I don’t understand these things, and I don’t like them. But I trust your plan, and that you know what is best.”
Walking through forgiveness with Mr. Easterday was an amazing experience. And I learned some things that were new. I learned first and foremost that forgiveness isn’t just a one time choice boom it’s over and done with. Forgiveness is an attitude. I also learned some things about myself. I have people to forgive. I didn’t know that. But sitting there listening to Doug pray, and asking the Lord to reveal anyone in my life that I needed to forgive, I suddenly found there was a whole list of people that I had been hurt by. By training myself to be the “water off a duck’s back” type of person, I didn’t allow myself to stay mad or hurt long enough to deal with it. I didn’t realize how many hurts I had held back and allowed to kind of fester in the background. I had to deal with a lot of those that day, and they weren’t always easy, and even now I'm still asking the Lord for help! But, I cannot even begin to describe how much better I felt after we were done that day. I went into that class not feeling like anything was wrong, and leaving feeling lighter and more full than I have in a long time.
Ali
Wow, how powerful.
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