Father’s Day 2025

2025-06-15T09:02:09Z

Intro

I just wanted to capture some thoughts on Father’s Day and how becoming a dad and raising two beautiful kids has affected my view on, or matured my view of, my relationship with God and how He sees me. Because, biblically speaking, the father metaphor is very common and prominent for Yahweh. He’s many things to His chosen people. But the theology of adoption makes the father model and metaphor a really good one. And being a dad, I feel like I’ve learned a lot.

The Childlike Position Before God

This is pretty related to the last post of mine A New Perspective on Being God's Child where the crux of that post is that, as smart as we might think we are as educated theologians, in the eyes of God we’re still just children. And I mean that we should think that our understanding of our complex topics, is still the level of a child in relation to God. And so in that same vein I’m asking

Warning

“In what other ways am I like a child to God?”

So again today, I’m making sure to process some of these thoughts.

Babies and Who Am I? #

I remember both of my kids as babies would get overtired, and they’d be so tired that they couldn’t fall asleep. And I would look at them and go - “this doesn’t make sense. Your body knows you need sleep, you know you need sleep, but what does it mean to be too tired? You can’t fall asleep. And you just yell and scream at me.” But that baby doesn’t know that I’m their dad, they don’t know anything. They’re just overtired, and they’re yelling and screaming. It’s just my job to protect them in that moment, comfort them, whatever. And I thought, “man, this just has to be how God sees me sometimes.” Even though I’ve been walking with the Lord for decades there’s got to be times when I’m just throwing a tantrum.

And that's how God sees me

as a creature he loves, who’s just too tired to take a nap. And it’s a humbling thing to think that that’s really sometimes how God sees me.

Unconditional Love & Disobedience

As my kids have gotten older, I think that I’ve picked up on other truths of the Lord - mainly how he can love me even when I sin… Even when my daughters disobey, it doesn’t change my love for them. I just had an experience today with my daughter who climbed up too high on a swing set on a trapeze bar and couldn’t get herself down. And although it got tense and there was some shouting to handle, I eventually walked her through a few things:

I told her not to get up there, and she disobeyed.
By disobeying, she put herself into a dangerous and scary situation.
I would help her in her scary situation, but my help might not look like how she wants it to look
The help I can provide is to not remove her from the situation, i.e. to pick her up and just save her, but I could help her climb down and give her instruction.
Finally, she needs to choose to trust me, even though she’ll still be scared, and she needs to choose to trust me, even when I’m not standing where she wants me to stand, or putting my hand where she wants me to put my hand, so that she feels safe.

Guidance Over Rescue & The Need for Trust

I need her to know that she is safe, and to trust that I tell her she is safe, even when she doesn’t see it or feel it. And that is what God requests and demands of me, is to trust him more than I might be fearful of my future, financially, or of relational security, or whatever.

Acting in Obedience Despite Fear #

That trust doesn’t necessarily take away the fear, but it does mean that you behave obediently and act in accordance with the reality, not with the fear. The reality is that Yahweh loves and protects me, just as I love and protect my daughter, even when she was scared on the trapeze bar.

End

So Father’s Day is, for me, a good time to just reflect on what that means to be a dad. I’m not going to celebrate and do anything crazy. My family isn’t going to, because I don’t want us to. But this is a nice reminder, perhaps I should do this more purposefully, more often, is reflect on how God teaches me about his love for me through giving me a deep love for my children.

Posts tagged: fathers-day