"You are the son of a kind, strong, and engaged Father, a Father wise enough to guide you in the Way, generous enough to provide for your journey, offering to walk with you every step. This is perhaps the hardest thing for us to believe - really believe, down deep in our hearts, so that it changes us forever, changes the way we approach each day... I believe this is the core issue of our shared dilemma as men. We just don't believe it. Our core assumptions about the world boil down to this: we are on our own to make life work. We are not watched over. We are not cared for... When we are hit with a problem, we have to figure it out ourselves, or just take the hit. If anything good is going to come our way, we're the ones who are going to have to arrange for it. Many of us have called upon God as Father, but, frankly, he doesn't seem to have heard. We're not sure why. Maybe we didn't do it right. Maybe he's about more important matters. Whatever the reason, our experience of this world has framed our approach to life. We believe we are fatherless."
All of us, no exceptions, relate our earthly father's to God. All of us relate to God and view God in a similar fashion as we see our earthly fathers. It doesn't always stay that way, but our initial thought of God as father, comes from what we experienced with our dads. How has it shaped you and your view of God?
For me, I have gone through times when I've tried to talk to God but feel that He is distant and uninterested in what I have to say. Other times I have felt like God wants nothing to do with me because He's angry over something I did wrong. And I've been through times where I've felt God is distant, and loves everyone else more than me. And I'm finally at a point where I can admit that I've felt all of this from my dad.
Fathers, you are the model your children have of God. How they see and relate to you is how they will see and relate to God. And if no one comes along and shows them differently, it is how they will see God for their lives. I've met a lot of people who can't grasp the idea of God as a loving father because it isn't what they experienced growing up. The words love and father don't go together. And for men, the idea of a father guiding us, and teaching us how to be a man is an even more nonexistent thought.
"The hardest, gladdest thing in the world is to Father! from a full heart... the refusal to look up to God as our father is the one central wrong in the whole human affair; the inability, the one central misery." Let's look at The Patriot again. As Benjamin Martin and his two younger sons are preparing to ambush the British troops taking the oldest son to be executed he asks them, "What did I tell you fella's about shooting?" The both reply, "Aim small, miss small." In shooting, accuracy is a pretty important thing, especially in a fire fight where your life is dependent upon hitting the other person before they can hit you. If you aim big, you can miss big. Pointing you gun in the general direction of your target and pulling the trigger could hit them, but more than likely it's going miss pretty significantly. But if you aim, small, if you aim specifically at the heart, if you don't hit it, you'll hit some other vital organ right around the heart. Aim small, miss small.
Refusing to look up to God as our father is aiming big. It's trying to hit the target by aiming at everything else, or just taking a guess at what you need to hit and firing. But when we do look at God, when we open ourselves to the vulnerability of allowing God to show us what a real father is, we aim small. We might not hit it exactly on the first shot, but we are close, and we are headed in the right direction.
"You have a good Father. He is better than you thought. He cares. He really does. He's kind and generous. He's out for your bet. This is absolutely central to the teaching of Jesus, though I have to admit, it never really struck a chord in me until I began to think through the need for masculine initiation, and came straight up against the question, But who will do the initiating? Most of our fathers are gone, or checked out, or uninitiated men themselves. There are a few men, a very few, who have fathers initiating them in substantive ways. Would that we are were so lucky. And, some guys have found a mentor, but they also are hard to come by. Especially those who understand masculine initiation. So, again, I still find myself wondering, Where can we find a true father to initiate us? Then pow - the lights begin to come on. Maybe this is what Jesus was getting at. That is the way of any real discovery - we find ourselves in need, and then the answer that has actually been before us form some time suddenly matters, suddenly makes sense."
Look through the Bible, and see how many times it refers to God as "your Father" or "our Father" or "the Father". Read and the Gospels and see how many times Jesus says something along the lines of "You have heard... But I say...". Look at the life of Jesus. Jesus came to earth to show us what God is like, teach us about who God is and what God desires of us, and clear the path back to God. In Him we see that God is a loving Father, and we see that so much of what the people thought was skewed from what God originally had in mind.
God wants to initiate us as men. God has been trying to for our entire lives, but somewhere along the way something happened to misdirect us. We came to see God in a way that doesn't line up with who He really is. We've had men who haven't been initiated and don't know how to initiate us, do the best they can, in the best cases, and in the worst, nothing at all, and it has hindered our own journey. But God is working to get us back on the path. He knows that this is what we long for, because that is what He created us to do.
"The deepest search in life, it seemed to me, the thing that in one way or another was central to all living was man's search to find a father, not merely the father of his flesh, not merely the lost father of his youth, but the image of strength and wisdom external to his need and superior to his hunger, to which the belief and power of his own life could be united." And that is what God will fulfill and provide. It is something only He can provide. And once we see Him as the Father that He is, we can be initiated into the men we are created to be.
"Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another."
To God alone be the Glory!
Strength and Honor
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