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Growing up without my father on Father’s Day, I would often make out my card to my mother. I would tell of all the ways she provided for me and protected me and how grateful I was. As I’ve grown older I realized that my mother could not take the place of my father. Her role was to model things about God that were different from how my father could. Of course, ideally, the two of them would be Christians working together to create a beautiful bountiful bungalow for me to thrive in.
Like mothers, fathers are a shadow. They are to point us to our heavenly Father. The problem with shadows is that they can bring joy or fear. Delight or distress. How we feel about shadows depends upon our interaction with them.
Have you ever made shadow puppets at night? Merging hands and twisting fingers together, to mimic one of God’s creatures of nature, projecting it onto the bedroom wall by using the visible light. We laugh in amazement at what hands can create. Hands transform into a flying bird with flapping wings, crab claws walking sideways or an elephant with tusks and a trunk. Young eyes widen in amazement until the shadow changes form.
Have you experienced seeing a “monster” projected on that same bedroom wall? Waking up in the middle of the night to find a dark shadowy figure is in your room. Your hands are under the blanket so you know it is not a puppet show. Fear rises up inside your heart making you wish it were only a dream. It is not until you turn on the light that you realize it was just a few coats hanging near the closet, or the comforter you balled up and plopped on top of your dresser - and forgot about - several hours earlier. Sometimes shadows leave us jovial and other times jittery. This is especially true when dealing with human shadows.
A personal story of learning to trust our heavenly Father when you feel your earthly father has let you down.
Often for those who did not grow up with their father, when we think of “father” the idea is riddled with so much pain and truancy that we cannot formulate a healthy picture in our brain of what it means to have God as our Father. This may be because our natural father projects an image of God that has been distorted, scary, or aloof. We ask ourselves if we want to face these scary shadows. Sometimes, rather than moving toward the light, we bury our head in our blanket out of fear. In truth, our mind must flip the concept on its head. Our concept of fatherhood should be the other way around.
When we think of “father” we should immediately think of God. For he is the epitome of fatherhood, the Father of fathers. Yet, as with everything that is to be a pointer to the original, Satan’s goal is to distort the shadow so that it only exudes pain, leaving fatherless children writhing in order to draw our attention away from the light and onto the dark silhouette. This blinds us from seeing our human fathers as a temporary figure whose job is to point to the prototype. Thankfully our imperfect father is not the only one who can point us to God.
"If Father’s Day is typically filled with pain and fear because of a distorted shadow, remember you can acknowledge the gift your father has given you in the divine shadow and know that you have another Father you can behold today"
We have a perfect brother who also points us to the perfect Father. Jesus says if you have seen him you have seen the Father. For he is the image of the invisible God. Jesus teaches the disciples (and us believers) in the Sermon on the Mount that God is our Father. In Matthew 7 he tells them the reason they should ask, seek, and knock is because God gives good gifts to his children. He says, “If you then, who are evil (speaking of human fathers), know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him. (Matthew 7:11)”
Jesus argues from the lesser to the greater here. Earthly fathers are an imperfect picture of provision but God the Father is a perfect picture of provision that is always good. Even if our earthly father doesn’t give good gifts, it does not change what our heavenly Father will do. And let me share this, even if your earthly father has never made provision for you, he has helped give you life, and that is a good gift. If we cannot praise our earthly fathers for anything on Father’s Day, we can at least praise them for giving us life. You are here in part because of your earthly father. Even with the gift of life our earthly fathers helped give, the reality is we can expect more from our heavenly Father than our sinful earthly one.
Our heavenly Father does not only give natural life, but spiritual life. As Christians, God has made us his children. He sent his only begotten Son Jesus into this world as our unblemished lamb. He laid his life down on the cross to take away any punishment we deserved for our sin by bearing the wrath himself. Jesus took his hands and stretched them out in this dark world, allowing them to be pierced for our ultimate joy. Not only his pierced hands and feet, but also his death are signs of him being a shadow we could behold to point us to God. He resurrected from the grave and is now at the right hand of the Father interceding for us.
Jesus is our brother that brings us to God. He not only brings us to God in order to justify us through faith, he makes us one with himself and through that faith adopts us into God’s holy family. We are God’s children now! God is our Father. And God shows no partiality. He loves us the same way he loves Christ.
So if Father’s Day is typically filled with pain and fear because of a distorted shadow, remember you can acknowledge the gift your father has given you in the divine shadow and know that you have another Father you can behold today. Turn on the light, open his scriptures, which say he is a “Father to the fatherless,” (Psalm 68:5) and get to know his beautiful transcendence and his fatherly love.
Our brother Jesus says, ask, seek, and knock. He is waiting to provide you with good gifts, the first being more of his fatherly affection. So rather than give your mother a Father’s Day card, you can send one to your father if he is around, thanking him for life. Whether or not you can get a card to your dad, you can look up and give your heavenly Father praise today for the good Father he has always been and will always be.
Finding My Father by Blair Linne is available for preorder. The book releases October 1, 2021 and shares Blair Linne's personal story of learning to trust our heavenly Father in the face of earthly fatherlessness.
Blair Linne is a Christian spoken word artist, actress, and Bible teacher. Blair is recognized as one of the originators of the Christian spoken word genre. At 13, she was one of the youngest contributors to the Anansi Writers Workshop at L.A.’s prestigious art forum, The World Stage. Since then, she has toured globally, proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ through spoken word. Blair has written poetry for Sprite, Neutrogena, NBC, and the Gospel Coalition. She has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, on ABC’s Nightline, popular Christian radio show Revive Our Hearts, and several Christian Hip Hop albums. Blair’s debut album, When Light Meets Water, delivers her God-glorifying, Christ-centered, gospel-saturated poetry against a backdrop of Neo-Soul influenced sounds, underground hip-hop and live instrumentation. She has appeared in numerous theater productions, commercials and television shows including Days of Our Lives, Alias, Malcolm in the Middle, Boston Public, The Parkers and American Dreams, as well as her own Saturday morning show, SK8 (Skate) on NBC. Blair lives in Philadelphia with her husband Shai Linne and their three children Sage, Maya, and Ezra; she serves in discipling women at Risen Christ Fellowship, where her husband is one of the founding pastors.
