Were You Loved Enough?

My personal testimony is based on gratitude and thankfulness because it is the most beautiful way to truly see Jesus Christ in your life.  I am thankful for so very many things - including times of hurt, because after all, it is in those times and following when you realize the presence of a mighty Savior who led you through it. 

I am most thankful for the unconditional love of a Risen Savior.  There is a line in the movie Divine Secrets of the Yaya Sisterhood that is in the forefront of my mind at all times about the way I want to live my life.  In the movie, the daughter, played by Sandra Bullock, asks of her dad, played by James Garner, “Daddy, were you loved enough?” and his response is, “How much is enough?” 

There will be a day, which I hope is not any time in the near future, when I will attend the funeral of a man I really do not know.  I don’t know his favorite color.  I don’t know his favorite food.  For that matter, I don’t know his favorite anything and the most heartbreaking of all – I don’t know what he loves and if he truly loves me.  This man is my father, a man that has been so hurt by loss and circumstance that it seems his heart is eaten alive with anger and with bitterness.  We have not seen each other much during my life or even talked on the phone much because I decided that I would try to distance myself as a means of self-protection from constant hurt from cruel words and rejection.  However, I did share with him in a short phone conversation several years ago, that to me it felt like his heart was like a closed fist and encouraged him to open it because a closed heart cannot receive or give love.  His response was “I know” … but nothing ever changed. 

There is nothing I have ever wanted more than to be the apple of my father’s eye, and to be his princess and a daddy’s girl.  From the ages of 6 to 12, not a year went by when I would blow out the candles on my birthday cakes, that I did not wish for this to happen; it never did.

And so I wonder -  how many years do I have left to get to know a man who is now in his seventies?  How will I feel and what will I say at his funeral?  I have no doubt that God, in His master design plan will orchestrate a sweet reunion before the end of his life so that my father’s closed fisted heart will open up and bloom like a flower to know that Jesus Loves Him Enough and so do I.  Maybe then will he know that I only wanted the same unconditional love from him. 

One of my friends, Debbie Pankey, attends a church in our area and shared with me recently that a little girl in kindergarten was baptized and before baptizing her, the  pastor read something she had jotted down on a note card.  It read “I am a princess, not because my dad is a prince, but because my Father is a King.” 

I am thankful that my Heavenly father is a King and I’m His Princess -  and that my answer to the question were you loved enough would be MORE than enough.