God is not your dad.
Photo by Katie Moum on Unsplash
Sometimes, I am drawn to something and think that maybe it means I should pay attention. Lately, I keep being drawn to the title of a Substack essay by Kathleen Kilcup, “God is Not Your Dad.” My own solid feeling that God loves me no matter what stems, in part, to having been blessed with a father who modeled that love. I wonder if I’m drawn to the statement “God is not your dad” because I and others who read this will benefit from thinking about it. I meet many people, who, when I ask them to imagine what God would say to them, tell me they imagine God saying, “Why aren’t you doing more?” in some area or another—”Why aren’t you going to church more?” “reading the Bible more?” “praying more?” It makes me so sad to think they see God as scolding them for not measuring up instead of hearing his voice of unconditional love and feeling his loving presence.
We often use the word “Father” in our prayers and discussions of God. It’s no wonder our images of God and his attributes is heavily influenced by our earthly fathers. Perhaps you struggle with feeling judged and found wanting by God the Father because you experienced those feelings of not meeting your father’s expectations. God might seem distant because your dad was. Even more critically, you may have mixed feelings or anger towards God because your father abused you. Even though we often use the word “Father,” our image of God can include both our mother and father, or other caretakers or sources of authority.
It helps me to remind myself that the use of “Father” for God, or any other word, is a metaphor. We use metaphors all the time to give us images that are familiar to help us understand mysteries. The Bible has many examples, including many for Jesus: Jesus as a shepherd, a farmer, a mother hen, and many others. His audience could relate to those images. Maybe now we could use images like a business person, an IT expert, or an HR director. (“Like an IT expert, God understands many things that seem like magic to us.” “God invests in you as a smart business person invests in her employees with training and advice.” “You can confess to God as you would a trusted HR director.”)
Similar to my not seeing ultraviolet light or hearing infrasound, my limited human mind cannot understand much of what God is. I cannot even conceive what our resurrected selves will be able to see, hear, and understand!
And here’s where faith comes in. I like the word “trust.” We have to try not to use faith or trust as a shortcut. It’s easy to call everything that seems illogical to us a mystery and use that shortcut to end all contemplation of the topic or event. We want to meditate on God’s words and think deeply about how to model God’s love in all we say and do. There is no denying, though, that there are things in this world that truly are a mystery, and we take a leap of faith to trust God and leave the outcome to him.
Going back to “God is not your dad,” the article I linked to above is an excellent one to read. The author wrote that she confessed to a trusted spiritual companion “the resentment and cowardice and lust and insecurity that had become more internally vocal.” After listening sympathetically and promising to pray for her, her spiritual companion, knowing the underlying sentiments the author was revealing, said, “You know, God isn’t your father. He isn’t your dad.”
Does that statement jar you a little bit? Does it make you think? We use the image of father or dad because much of the ideal father’s attributes give us some understanding of God’s attributes: unconditional love, protection, strength, comfort, boundless knowledge, and more. But our human fathers are not God. Imagining our human parents may trigger the emotions the author writes of, including resentment, fear, feeling unloved, lust, anger, feeling you’ll never be good enough, and so on. I think that this limitation of our human mind, bringing our human responses and emotions into our relationship with God, is part of what the verse means that says, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” (I Corinthians 13:12, King James Version)
I pray you, I, we, all of us, come closer and closer to God, experiencing “the peace that passes understanding” (Philippians 4:7) as we lean into God's love, as we grow in our trust even while not understanding why things happen or people fail. God loves you.