I finally called God "Daddy"

Last week, I called God “daddy”.

Photo by lauren lulu taylor on Unsplash

I know it may not sound like earth-shattering, life-altering news to you, but it was one of the most profound moments of my life.

Let me explain why.

So, this year, things have happened to me that have tried the very core of my faith in God.

They are the kind of things that have had me swirling around in a haze of utter disbelief, looking for some sign that I was not going crazy, that the divine was still in my life.

In the midst of it all, I railed, I cried, I withdrew, I prayed, I didn’t pray, I read the word, I didn’t read the word, I went to church, I didn’t go to church…

I vacillated between wanting to be on this earth and wanting to leave it. It is not something I can put in words, but it was not the most pleasant experience of my life. And to be honest, I might just wish it on my worst enemy because look, it brought me to this point I am excited to talk about.

I am beginning to understand that the place of father in the family is one of the most understated and attacked positions in the world. I am beginning to understand that while the enemy did attack women and still does, the more insidious attack is on manhood, priesthood to be precise. 

Growing up, I did not have the best relationship with my father, I still don’t. 

It was one of those relationships that was filled with so much toxicity that I learned to breathe life into different masks to survive. I grew up seeing my mother do that hard work of leading the family to the prayer altar, the work of bringing me and my eight siblings up in the ways of the Lord. 

I also grew up seeing my father absolutely refusing to be a covering to my mother. It was a refusal that bordered on a twisted logic that he was making her suffer by not being the husbandman. I have learned since that when men do not have an understanding of who they are in God and what their position in the family means, they are literally murders of divine destiny. It is akin to a general taking his soldiers to a raging war without a plan and weapons. Only by divine intervention and protection do they survive. You leave your wife and children vulnerable to the attacks of the enemy. 

I have since understood what many men and even some women do not understand. The father is the one who provides the framework of relationship for his children to connect to God as a Father. Time and time again, I have come across wounded people, those who have been wounded by their fathers because the fathers did not understand that they stood in a gap that was so profound, so sacred, generations depended on them. These people like me, have struggled all their lives to connect to God as Father. Don’t get me wrong, they might have a great walk with God and can excel in trusting God for many things but struggle time and time again at with relating to God as their Father. 

This is particularly significant when you consider the truth that Christ came to reveal God to us as a Father who cares for his children. The enemy is aware that when he attacks fatherhood, he attacks the very core of the connection between God and his children. Love is the heartbeat of God’s divine plan to connect with us through Christ and the enemy knows that when he can get children to disconnect from their fathers and vice versa, he tampers with the belief system that God can love and does love us, unconditionally.

For a long time, believing that God loved me was hard. I had a varying degree of thoughts about his love for me: it was obligatory, after all, he created me; it was conditional, if I was good enough, he would bless me, If I wasn’t, he would punish me.

 It was a push and pull relationship where I watched him from a distance, never sure what to expect, always suspicious of so-called “good intentions”.

It was made all the harder by several bouts of sexual abuse that made me conclude that I could not be loved and not worthy of love. When men abuse girls, they leave a strong message behind, one that says, “something is wrong with you and it’s your fault that something so reprobate could happen to you”. It is a message that only accepting the love of God can erase. 

Something insidious has been going on for a while now. While an all-out war was declared between the woman and her seed in the garden of Eden (Genesis 3:15), the enemy also declared an all-out war on men and he has been taking them out from the beginning

I will be talking more about this in the next instalment of this article.