Happy Father's Day
During these past few months of tragedy, division, and broken hearts and spirits, I’ve found clarity and guidance through spending time with my Heavenly Father. I’m constantly in awe when He reveals new corners of His heart to me, continuously showing what true Love and Goodness looks like. It can be difficult to open your heart to an invisible, heavenly being, but I largely thank my earthly Dad for laying a foundation for me to do so. So for this blog post, I’d like to dedicate it to my Dad, Aubyn Brown.
A significant part, and perhaps the most significant part, of any parent’s role is to represent what their children’s relationship with God can look like. This is why it’s such a tragedy when parents aren’t present in their children’s lives. I’ll attach the link below, but statistics show the heart-breaking results of fatherless homes. While no one is doomed to live according to a statistic, it’s undeniable that our fathers leave a huge mark on our lives, whether it’s good or bad is up to them. My Dad chose and still chooses to leave a good one.
http://fathers.com/statistics-and-research/the-extent-of-fatherlessness/
If you’ve met my Dad, you know it’s not long before he starts making you laugh, and I have many cherished memories of our laughs and jokes. My favorite memories though are, oddly enough, our debates. I distinctly remember being at the Chick-Fil-A in Hoover off Highway 31 debating gun control for hours when I couldn’t have been more than 13 years old. While my views have since changed, Dad never told me my opinions were invalid because I was a child and he never dismissed my arguments just because I was young. He never said, “you’ll change your mind when you’re older,” and through that, I learned that my voiced thoughts were important to him.
When I was in high school, I sometimes (and by sometimes, I mean often) argued with my parents about some of their rules. I fundamentally didn’t agree that I should have my friends chosen for me at 15, 16, 17 years old. While at times these conversations were heated, they were mostly my Dad listening and validating good points I’d made, and then countering with his own. We had productive conversations, and through them, I learned that what I believed in was important to him.
As a young adult, I dated a guy that wasn’t great for me, and that relationship caused a huge rift in my family for a host of reasons. I’d compromised a lot of my morals too, and didn’t even care too much about that at the time. But Dad listened when I expressed my frustrations with our family, and he often understood where I was coming from. He listened with grace about my perspective, even though it didn’t always align with what he and Mom taught me growing up. And then he would be honest about how he worried for me and wanted better, how he disagreed with the choices I was making, but he never treated me as less-than. Through that period, I learned that how I lived my life was important to him.
A few years later I’d chosen to redirect how I was living, and a huge part of that was seeking an intimate relationship with God again. I began to learn God’s true heart and He broke down the lies I’d picked up over the years. He forgave and forgave again. He reminded me of His values and principles, and I began to follow them out of healthy obedience rather than toxic obligation for the first time in my life. Something that also impacted me during this time was listening to pastors and leaders call God other names such as Abba or Papa, and I liked that idea of having a name for God that was specific and personal to me as well. In March of 2019, I began asking God to give me another name to call him. I’d been attending Oak City Church in downtown Birmingham for almost a year by this point and this church is located in a building that used to be a bank. I’d heard my parents suggest that it was possibly the same building my Dad worked in decades ago, but it wasn’t until July 28, 2019 that we confirmed it. I was going to a church and experiencing God in this amazing, fresh way in the same building that my Dad worked at decades before. And even more importantly, I heard God tell me to call him Dad on that day too.
God purposely waited to give me a name to call Him, one that was indicative of the kind of relationship we had, until I understood that He intentionally assigned my earthly Dad to be my Dad. God needed me to understand that while I thought He was teaching me His true heart, what He was actually doing was reminding me of it. What I came to realize was that I already knew His heart because I’d seen countless examples of it in my earthly Dad my entire life.
