In our training at Encounter Ministries, we are taught that in the study of psychology, each person’s identity comes from their father. When you think about it, it is a tragic thing when one considers how many people grow up in households where there is no father. It is such a common occurrence that nobody really sees the void created in the soul of a child.
My own father was gone by the time I was five years old, and I am continually realizing how difficult life has been as I have attempted to either compensate for or fill the void myself.
But more than the lack of identity discovery and formation, we subconsciously project our relationship with our earthly father onto the Ultimate Father, our Heavenly Father.
I spoke with a man in his seventies who told me that when he tries to talk to God or hear from God all he hears is crickets.
In my prayer ministry I deal with many people who are dealing with relationship issues with their own loved ones. They can’t understand why they are so angry or passive aggressive or bitter or resentful, or whatever the issue is.
God has instilled in us the instinct to trust. For the first six years of our life, from the time we are conceived, born and as we grow, we don’t have the reasoning ability to really reason or question our life experience. We can only trust and believe that the people in our lives who feed us and provide for us, who hold us and tell us that they love us, can only reveal truth to us. We unquestioningly absorb absolutely everything we see, hear and experience from them as the ultimate truth and the best life we can possibly have.
For instance, a little girl learns from her father what to look for in a husband. I can look at my lack of father and see why I did not choose well. My lack of father caused me to look for someone who had a strong personality and provided well for me, but one who was emotionally absent and neglectful, and did not encourage me in my gifts and talents. He was a businessman, and his business was his priority.
I once had a dream. My husband and I were in my car. I pulled up to the curb, got out of the car to go into the shop. When I came out of the shop, my husband, who had been in the passenger seat was now in the driver’s seat with a woman who had entered the passenger door, began kissing my husband so strongly that she had forced him into the driver’s seat. I pulled the passenger door open, grabbed her and pulled her out of the car and proceeded to beat her before I awoke.
I knew instantly that this “woman” was my husband’s work. I also knew that he was helpless to resist her.
However, during the same time, because the marriage was so difficult, I pressed into my relationship with God, my Heavenly Father. He helped me deal with the day-to-day challenges of living with someone whose true love was his business and who rarely showed me love and appreciation as a wife.
Nevertheless, I stayed because divorce simply wasn’t an option. Not in our worldview.
Less than one year before we married, I had been introduced to spiritual warfare and learned that to respond to evil with evil, only multiplies evil. We must respond to evil with blessing.
But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust. ~Matthew 5:44-45
Within the first year of our marriage, he began to rage at me. I had never experienced this. I had usually been compliant but as time went on, I started to act as an adult woman who expected to act somewhat autonomously. He let me know that he didn’t care for this change in my personality.
So, I prayed for my husband. After an argument, I would go, crying, into the bedroom. Lying prostrate, I begin to bless him, and pray that he become the godly man God had created him to be. I called forth the man God intended him to be before he was in his mother’s womb.
Unfortunately, my husband, who had only had his father twice as long as I had mine, didn’t have a good role model either. His father didn’t love his mother the way a husband should. Nor was he a good provider. This would explain why work and money were more important to my husband than I was.
Over time, he improved. After a couple of years of praying for him in this way, he stopped raging. He began to have more peace, and his temper had abated, but he still loved his work and money more than he loved me.
In the end, there was always a part of his heart that he would never let me touch. But of course, if I wanted us to go to counselling together, he would tell me that I should go because he wasn’t the one with problem.
I sought help and healing for my heart. I knew and understood that I didn’t want to live in the prison where my past kept me. I didn’t want to live the way I saw him live, constantly over-reacting to something I would say or do. I knew how difficult his life had been before me and so I understood why he was so angry.
I wanted to be released from the conditioning which caused me to judge people and situations through the dirty window of memories from a long list of wounds and offenses. I knew God’s power to heal. I had seen it. Over the years, I had seen His answers to my prayers not only for my husband, but in so many other ways.
That began what I continue to learn. My identity is in God my Heavenly Father. But not only in Him. I am a co-heir in Christ, baptized in Him as Priest, Prophet and King with the Holy Spirit as my Teacher and Guide. The longer I live in this identity, the stronger and more confident I become.
Eventually, I learned that it didn’t matter what others thought of me. My self-worth wasn’t in the way someone treated me. The way someone spoke to me didn’t do anything to affect my self-esteem. If someone didn’t treat me well, it wasn’t about me. I understood the other person was coming from a place of woundedness.
I can respond calmly because I am not in constant emotional pain from past hurts. My wounds have already been healed. I have learned to see that my worth and identity are not dependent on the opinions of other people. My worth and identity are established by the Almighty God. His is the only opinion that matters.
This became a deep reality for me. It freed me from the fear of man, and I can behave in genuine freedom, which allows me to respond, not react, in a calm manner with a calm voice.
There are those who prefer to live in the prison their past has created for them. They don’t know how to live without the pain that is just below the surface and somehow feel justified by it. All they know is how to respond in pain because they don’t know their true identity.
But we can live without the festering wounds just below the surface. We can live in the peace and freedom of our true identity and be the person God created us to be. The choice is ours.
If therefore the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed. ~John 8:36
