Profound Love #9

. . . that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom, and revelation in the knowledge of Him, (Ephesians 1:17).
 
It’s God that I came to know first. I think I needed a Daddy more than I needed a King. I’d never had one. Much later I needed a King, but not at the beginning. I needed to know His love. As a pre-teen I used to climb out the dormer windows in my bedroom and sit on the roof in the middle of the night. My parents had gone to bed, my sisters were asleep, all of them on the ground floor, me in the attic, and the night was as quiet as a tomb. I needed to sit on the rough tiles of the roof where I could breathe.
 
I would look up in the sky, see all those stars, and marvel because something inside of me knew that whoever made all the shining lights of heaven, also made me and my world and loved me enough to put them in my sky.  My heart sang to that someone, songs I made up on my roof. I needed that connection, no matter what, because down below, operating through those sleeping bodies, evil did it’s best to squash me. Thank God for my roof. Even when it was covered with snow, I crept outside, all bundled up, and sang to the heavens.

​

​I wouldn’t know how to say whether I came to the Father of Glory, or if He came to me, but my aunt invited me to a prayer meeting.  Northern California doesn’t normally need much air conditioning; this night it did. The prayer group took their chairs out to the parking lot hoping to catch a breeze. It was there that the Knowledge of Him presented itself. I saw Jesus, right there in the middle of that circle of chairs, He presented Himself. He held out His arms and said, “Come to Me.”
 
I couldn’t do it. I knew He was presenting Himself as my spiritual husband, but I could not run into His arms. My relationship with my earthly husband was so dismal that jumping into another man’s arms, whether that man’s arms were those of the Son of the Father of Glory or not, I had to decline. Instead I turned toward the Father. My heavenly Father invited me to sit on His lap and tell Him the stories of my life. My heavenly father helped me solve my problems. For instance, I suddenly knew I must go to my pastor and tell him about my stepfather raping me. I thought His advice backfired because my pastor simply called my parents and told them everything I had to say. But after all the screaming and shouting ended, I saw that the raping also ended.  I needed a daddy to help me solve my problems. Then it came time to “marry” Jesus.