What my Father’s like

I’ve had the privilege of being in a mentorship program since the start of the year about spiritual growth and becoming who God made you to be. In this, all of the ladies who signed up have access to resources through our mentor, one of them being a Discord chat that currently has around 270+ ladies in it. Let me tell you, it has been such a blessing learning from these ladies as well as our mentor, Tori. She has provided us with a curriculum and assignments that have us on a similar track in the process so that we can lean on each other. Speaking into these ladies’ lives and gleaning from their experiences has been invaluable, and something was brought up recently in one of the chats that spoke to and inspired me. It’s one that’s very close to my heart because it’s shifted my worldview in the last few years, and that is forgiveness. 

As Christians, and in some secular settings, we’re taught about forgiveness regularly. We’re reminded that God forgave us and we should forgive others from the forgiveness we were given through our faith in Christ. But acting it out is easier said than done, especially when someone harms you in a deep way. It’s a natural reaction to want to protect ourselves from people that hurt us, make us feel bad, or even call us out on the things we’ve done wrong. Then there’s the battle of forgiving ourselves for what we’ve failed at or fallen short of. Forgiveness is a process that has a different pace for everyone, and there are also those who never get to a place of forgiveness for themselves or others. And this burdens my heart, especially because everyone is in need of forgiveness in some area. I know I’ve sinned against people in ways that are hard to excuse, but more importantly, I’ve sinned against God in an even worse manner. Yet, He still forgives me and is proud to call me His daughter. 

I think one of the most profound and life altering moments of forgiveness started with my deepest hurt, my parents’ divorce. That’s hard for families of any age, and I had just turned 9 years old. As a kid, I didn’t really understand what my parents going through a divorce meant other than they didn’t love each other anymore, they weren’t going to live together again, and that they were really, really sad. There were things I later learned contributing to the decision that was made that wounded me personally, but also made me feel wounded on behalf of everyone else involved. I unknowingly mourned a lot as a 9-year-old, but God also graciously sheltered me from so much in the process. He provided for me and the rest of my family in a perfectly individualized way. And even though we looked like we were good on both parent’s sides, it all still felt so awkward and new, and not right when those sides came together. Looking back, I know part of it was underlying unforgiveness– for things I knew about, but didn’t want to bring up for fear that I would bring about more pain, and for those things that still lurked below the surface. Mostly, I felt hurt by my dad. Father-wounds are, unfortunately, pretty common. That being said, and this is something I want to emphasize especially with this whole thing being about forgiveness, my dad doesn’t deserve to be demonized or villainized. He is no more and no less a sinner than everyone else on this planet. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, amen, thank you Romans 3:23. The enemy used him in my life as a distraction, making my dad the subject of my pain, trust issues, need for male validation, and bitterness. 

For many years, on and off, I didn’t communicate with my dad. It seemed to be a cycle of sweeping things under the rug because we missed each other and had a desire to be in each other’s lives, and then going right back into resentment and unresolved misunderstanding, which led to cutting communication. But the thing that caused the most recent, and if I may be so bold to say in the name of Jesus Christ, LAST disconnection hit closer to home than it had before. We had just gone through him battling stage 4 cancer, and beating it!! Hallelujah! I was in college, and he had recently moved to a town about 15 min away. We saw each other all the time, and were the closest we had been in a decade, but I let the past pain affect my future relationship with him. I was still living as the 9-year-old caught in the crossfire while pretending those wounds had stayed behind. Long story short, I had hurt him by treating him as the guy who hurt me, rather than my dad, whom I should have been honoring and loving. The Bible doesn’t say “honor your father and mother if you think that they’re perfect and have done everything right by you in life.” The only parent that’s lived up to that is God, our Heavenly Father. I think one of the most important things I learned after getting married was that my parents are just people, and honoring them doesn’t mean putting them on a pedestal and having expectations for them that are impossible for any human to meet. Honoring my parents means forgiving them for their faults, being grateful for the things they’ve done right, having grace for them when they mess up, and recognizing the authority and responsibility for you they’ve been given by God. It means respecting the position He has put them in, to lead and love you as best they know how, whether you agree with their methods or not. 

When you learn to look at the person you believe to be your enemy as another soul that Jesus died for, not out of obligation, not out of spite for you, not because He cares about them more than you, but because He truly loves all of us the same, it changes how you treat them, how you treat yourself, how you treat those that you love, and hopefully, how you’ll treat the next person that hurts you. People are going to disappoint us. It’s a guarantee in life. There’s only one Jesus. Only one perfect human. God made flesh. 

Just shy of two years since my dad and I had cut communication, my therapist told me to write a letter to him that I could send if I wanted, but it was really just an exercise for myself to be allowed to feel those feelings and express them in a safe place. When I started writing, the Lord put this new kind compassion for him on my heart. Instead of going straight into accusations, I wanted to ask him questions and genuinely understand his perspective, where he had come from, and the trauma he had been through that educated his behavior. I had been made aware of the grace God had given me, and I wanted to extend that grace to my dad. It was one of the first points in my life I remember not acting out of my flesh, but with the desire of the Holy Spirit. This only came after God allowed me to truly understand for the first time all that He had forgiven me for, and made me recognize that there is no sin greater or lesser than the next, we all need His forgiveness just as desperately as the person who wronged us. 

It’s only by God’s grace and mercy that He showed me what I knew about forgiveness was wrong. That I could have a healthy relationship with my dad where we both were protected. That boundaries aren’t bad and unmet expectations aren’t the end of the world or a good enough reason to cut someone off. Our brains are wired to remember things that hurt us as bad/evil/dangerous as a survival mechanism, it’s natural to want to avoid the source of our pain and suffering. But God calls us above that. He tells us that He fights for us, He’s protecting us, defending us, and gives us discernment when we ask. The walls I had up with my dad could come down because I was surrendering everything from our past and our future relationship to my Father. 

What I had been taught was that forgiving means forgetting in the way that whatever happened is totally removed from your mind. Like it never happened. This was what was brought up in my mentorship group: the struggle to forgive and forget. Who can be expected to forget the deep pain they’ve been caused?  I don’t think God has asked us to ignore reality, but He does want us to heal from it and not be weighed down or a slave to its memory. In Hebrews 8:12 God says, “And I will forgive their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins.” That doesn’t mean He forgets that we’ve sinned or that we’ve been sinned against. There are other points in scripture like 2 Corinthians 5:10, Matthew 12:36, etc. where God’s judgment for our sins is acknowledged. We will all have to answer for our sins once we get to Heaven, but even in that, He sees us through the lens of Christ, being justified and righteous. We will not be condemned for our sins because of our faith in Christ and repentance to receive the forgiveness He made available to us on the cross. His judgment of us will be loving and redemptive. When He says He “will never again remember [our] sins” it means when He looks at us, He doesn’t see the stains of our sins because Jesus’s blood has washed us white as snow. God doesn’t use our sins against us or hold them over our heads. Grudges against those whom God loves have no place in the Kingdom of Heaven. Our relationship with God has been mended, healed, and made whole. He knows we’re sinful, that’s why He sent Jesus to die, to pay the cost of them on our behalf. But when we put our faith in Him, believing that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior, and that He raised from the dead, “He has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west.” (Psalm 103:12 NLT). God doesn’t build up walls between us because we hurt him by sinning, rather He tore the veil because He loves us and offers us this kind of pure forgiveness where we are not called or known to Him by our sins. We are known to Him as His children that were made right with Him by His Son whose blood was shed. It’s laying down our pride and ego, looking to how God is gracious enough to put away from His mind the evil we’ve done against Him, and seeing that He wants you to share with others the freedom that comes from removing the shame and condemnation that sin gets us. I had to learn to call my dad by who God refers to him as, His son and my earthly father, who Christ has made him, not by his sins, no matter the severity of the consequences in my life. I don’t think it’s about forgetting in the sense that it’s vanished from our knowledge, and it’s not as if the effects of what they’ve done disappears. There are consequences for everything we do. I believe forgiveness is a lot about treating them the way we know God does, loving them all the way through it. Use the way God has loved and forgiven us as a guide for how He expects us to return the favor to our fellow humans. We can trust that God loves us all the way through it, too. He is at work in all our lives to encourage us in moving toward the perfect peace that’s a result of forgiveness. So don’t “forgive and forget” in a dishonest way, but we should forgive and forget by how we don’t keep record of how people have wronged us. God doesn’t keep a record of our wrongs, rather He has our names recorded in the Lambs Book of Life. Forgive in a way that causes a release of offense and a clinging to the Lord, because He is bigger than sin. He defeated it.

My dad and I are in a great, healthy place today. We talk every week, and the only expectation I have is for myself: that I love him the way God loves him, as best God has equipped me. I’ll reiterate that forgiveness happens at different paces for everyone, and although it’s not a “one size fits all” process, it is a command given by God. It is so weighty a subject to Him that in Matthew 6:14-15 Jesus says, “If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.” And just like the process, not all outcomes will look the same, either. God has given us self-control, not control of others. The focus should be on obedience to the Lord, honoring Him by doing His will, humbling yourself to know that no one is without need of forgiveness.

love & be loved,

Ashlyn