From The Editor: The Love of a Father

Worry for my child is a different type of anxiety than I’ve felt anywhere else in my life. It is fear mixed with self-loathing, dread, love, and an overall helplessness and impotence that knocks the breath right out of me.

My son recently went through some health issues that caused me to feel all of this and more. Knowing that I can’t protect him from something happening inside his own body makes me want to hold him tightly in my arms and never let him go.

I cycled through all the emotions: feeling like it’s my fault for passing on difficult genetics, thinking that I’m intentionally causing him harm by simply following our regular daily routines, fearing that he’s experiencing more discomfort than he can articulate at age three, and that my ignorance could be causing him physical and emotional harm. And most of all, I just love this little boy more than my heart can handle. It feels like nothing else in the world can ever be as important as his care and protection.

I love my son and will do everything within my power to protect him and provide him with the best current and future life. Yet, God loves even more fully and expansively than we as humans could ever comprehend. And even still, He chose to send His son Jesus to us, knowing full well that he would be scorned and sacrificed.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

How? How could any parent knowingly send their child into danger, let alone in the full knowledge that they would be killed? I can’t even begin to comprehend the pain, the complete agony that He must have felt even from Jesus’ first moments on earth. The dual bittersweetness of watching him grow from infancy into a young man, seeing him transform from being fully God himself to also becoming fully man, God’s most beloved creation.

Even with the foreknowledge that he would ultimately rise again, what heartrending pain must the Father have felt while watching His beautiful, perfect, cherished child be beaten, abused, and crucified by the rest of His unruly and unrighteous children? How horrifyingly traumatic; how utterly devastating.

Hallelujah that Jesus rose and that we have been forgiven for that sin, as well as all the others we have or ever will commit against our Father and His Son. What a miracle that He still even acknowledges us after being complicit in the worst crime and cruelest anguish imaginable. Yet He does. He chooses us again and again. He allows us to crucify Jesus every time we fail, in every instance where we choose separation over unity with God.

I will never knowingly allow my son to be harmed, aside from that which is intended to help him, but thank God that our Father’s heart extends beyond that of an earthly parent’s. Praise God that He can love all of us so deeply, so far beyond our comprehension, that He would submit to the deepest hurt imaginable to bring us back to Him. Every time.