There were times in my life, I did not sense or feel God's presence and I mistook these times for His absence.
As a troubled youth, I often visited my great-grandma's farm in the wide-open fields, wooded forests, and rolling hills of PA. My only reprieve from the years of abuse I endured as a child was this place known as the ‘farm’.
Unbeknownst at the time, the memories instilled in me from roaming those lands were residues of my heavenly Father’s tender shepherding love. In the dark seasons, I suffered, I carried the quiet, confident trust of a deep faith Father deposited in me from times visiting the 160-acre homestead. He placed images and sensations of safety, peace, contentment as reminders of his care. It was my Father who provided sanctity in my mind, body, and Spirit as I reviewed, replayed, and reflected upon those images and the sensations as an adult.
In hindsight, I am now confident God never left me alone in my pained childhood and he never left me alone in my adult struggles, even though I often felt isolated and alone.
I am affirmed and sure he never relinquished his desired and personal love for me, even when I rejected Him.
I am now secure that Father's love is always with me, even in dark seasons. I am assured that He provides grace in pain and sorrow, even when I fail to recognize Him.
My story, your story, and the story God is writing for all humanity are incorporated into God's larger narrative. The word of God tells of a Lord whose revealing and redemptive purposes are found in a spirit-being who created each human from desired love - to love and be loved.
We were created with a God-dimension inside to belong intimately in the bonded connectedness in Him. Each human was perfectly and uniquely designed to be completed in the all-inclusiveness of this radical infinite and perpetual life fostering love - where nothing else compares.
We often try to replace this dimension with other things than Father’s love.
Due to an inordinate focus on the pain, and anger, bringing this way of thinking into my adult years, I often missed the light and love my Father was expressing.
I missed the ray of hope and the compassion He was shining through the cracks of brokenness.
Without a doubt, it is evident to me that over the years, He provided glimpses and emblems of his care and love that I failed to recognize.
God expressed his love to me from other persons, in Nature, in the raising of my children, and in the world around me, even when I failed to recognize him. He announced his passion from the images, sensations of my great-grandmother's simple, uncluttered faith in the solitude of a comforting solace.
It is easy to sense his expression of love in good times. It is easy when we feel blessed to know we are loved.
Maybe our need is to realize that even when we find ourselves in dark places Father's love immerses and envelopes each one in an endless, expansive, never-ending, and sustaining life that embalms our hurts and wounds.
It is in the unknown and in the complicated troubles of our day, God remains expressive of his most remarkable character to all mankind. God is the faithful one, All the time!
These remnants of safety peace and contentment I knew as a child were the gift of God’s expressions of love that He embedded and hid in my heart.
It is in the suffering we experienced in the past, those sorrows we know now, and the difficulties we will participate in the future that is drawing us ever nearer to Father's sheltering heart of expressed and manifested love.
The fact is we often miss the Father's expression in the darker seasons of pain and suffering.
As believers, regardless of circumstances, in spite of emotions and in seasons we don’t sense His presence, let us all become more convinced and confident that God is the Faithful one - always expressing a merciful and radical transformative love!