Daughter of St. John wrote a post back in May that I just stumbled across. She uses some images in the post that I can’t get out of my mind.
I just listened to a talk by Scott Hahn a few weeks ago, called Fatherhood at It’s Best (can’t find it online to link to it, and, I’d like to note, I know that apostrophe is wrong, but it’s typed that way on every single CD in the rack – and I just know that the grammar freak in me will not be appeased by calling the company, because those CDs will stay in the rack). Hahn discusses in this talk how it is very unique that Christians view God as Father. He recounts a heated discussion he had with a Muslim friend, in which his friend finally stopped him and said something to the effect of, “Would you stop calling God ‘father’ already? We are not children of God!” Both he and Padre got me thinking about how, most appropriately “Abba” is translated closer to “Daddy” than “Father.”
So I have this image of us, God’s children. We are stumbling along, doing the best we can, winning some and losing some, praying and sinning and being, overall, human. In fact, the exact image is of my 17-month-old daughter, who’s not so steady on her feet yet, and who falls more frequently when she’s tired. She will just walk up to me, sometimes, and especially when things are going rough, and lay her head in my lap.
Do we do that to God? Do we stop in our stumbling, in our struggling, in our searching, to put our head in his lap, to trust him to pick us up and get us through?
