Our Father is relentless.
As I found myself getting ready to go in for another day folding clothes and organizing underwear at my remarkably ordinary retail job, I caught myself feeling incredibly heavy. I was worn out. I was sick of being bored. I was sick of feeling a strong sense of “not-enough-ness” as I waited for life to get exciting again.
A lot of my friends were off doing amazing things this summer. Maybe you can relate
They were off to the ends of the world being missionaries, teachers, and explorers. It was starting to feel like everyone else in my life got to profoundly encounter Christ this summer. Meanwhile, I felt like Rapunzel singing “when will my life begin?” Where’s the Father in that?
The Father is in the Present
That’s when the Holy Spirit stepped in and called me on my crap. I was sitting on my back deck with a cup of coffee spending some time with Scripture when I was just overwhelmed with the sense that the Lord was with me. I wasn’t doing anything special. He just reached out to where I was sitting, waiting for Him. I realized that I had been waiting for the next, more exciting season of my life to encounter the Lord, but there He was. The Father isn’t waiting to meet you in some imagined future. He is in the present.
The Father is precisely where you are right now, and He doesn’t need a stage, an event, or an amazing job to tell you so.
So often we can be tempted to wait for the future or wish away the present moment, but that’s where the Father is. He is with us here and now, loving us, drawing us into Himself. The future isn’t a guarantee; He can only draw us into what He has for us next if we allow Him to be with us in the present.
The Father’s Love Pursues Us
One of the harshest truths for me to swallow is that the Father doesn’t actually need anything from me. I’m tempted to continually try to earn His love when all He is asking is to just be with me. He simply wants our hearts. The Father’s pursuit of my heart isn’t waiting for me to be doing something impressive. It isn’t waiting for me to be in just the right place, doing just the right thing, at just the right time. The heart of the relentless Father is His constant, profound desire to abide with us wherever He has placed us.
The reality for most of us is that we are not usually doing anything particularly extraordinary. And that’s ok. It’s ok because the Father looks on us with love, wherever we are, and calls us His own regardless of how worthy we feel. We cannot earn the Father’s love by anything we do. And yet He loves us relentlessly.
Letting in the Father’s Love
In the ordinariness of our lives, it can be hard to let the Father love us where we are. Ultimately though, the hard work is up to Him. All we have to do is give Him room to meet us. Try letting your phone charge away from your bed and make the first and last thing you do every day be a brief prayer. Or set the alarm on your phone for the same time every day. When it goes off, spend five minutes in silence, asking Him to speak to you. It may be uncomfy at first, but the Father speaks in the quiet. Another simple way to be with the Father is to read the gospel reading for the day every morning. Ask the Holy Spirit for help encountering the Father in His Word.
When we give the Father space to love us in our pain, our mess, or our ordinariness, we will start to see Him draw near. We don’t have to wait. Take a moment, pause. Invite the relentless Father to dwell with you. He delights in that invitation.
