Parenting

I watched a one woman show yesterday entitled "One Drop of Love".  The mixed-race creator and performer, Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, allows us to travel with her through her family history.  It's a beautiful story of reconciliation.

The show opens with a telling of how she met her husband, Diego.  She marries Diego in Jamaica, the birthplace of her father, but guess what?  Her dad does not come to her wedding.  After confronting her dad, she learns that he was not upset that she was marrying a European as she had assumed, but rather he did not want to return to Jamaica because of the poverty he experienced growing up.

Now, before confronting her dad about the wedding, her grandmother encourages her to ask her dad about his own father.  When she does, she learns that her grandfather was an alcoholic who would beat her grandmother.  Grandma leaves grandpa, and her dad is left to fill his own father-less void.  She learns that her dad does see his father every once a while, as he drives a bus in a nearby part of town, but that's the extent of their relationship - bus conversations and a little exchange of money.

Fanshen remarks, "Parents are only able to pour out the measure of love given to them plus just a little bit more."

Aha!

I am not a parent.  Ok, I am not a parent to a human child - after all Pepper is my baby - but I can imagine that when a child is born, an involved parent determines to shelter that child with an insurmountable amount of love, protection, and provision.  But somewhere along the line, every parent falls short, and not necessarily for lack of trying.  Each parent is only able to model the love that he received himself.

That's why we need the Father's love!

Yes, revelation and reception of God's love will enable any parent to fill up her love void and equip her to pour out more to her own children, and at the same time allow her children to be filled up in the areas that she's lacking.  Yes!

The ultimate, perfect, all-consuming love from Daddy God hits the spot!

Piece of advice from Mama Lise -
Before confronting your parents with "you should have done this and been there and said that", examine your heart voids and invite the Father to fill those places.  Then seek reconciliation - not humiliation - with your parents.  Embrace them as the human beings with hearts in need of as much as healing as yours, and invite them to enter God's love chamber.