How Much More

I Don’t Deserve God’s Love and Other Lies Like It

“…the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’”

~ Romans 8:15b ~

I felt like I failed as a father. I know he didn’t mean it, but when my son said it, I crumbled.

We’d been dealing with an issue for about two hours that night. This doesn’t happen hardly at all anymore, but for a time, a couple of times a week, my youngest would spiral into a web of survival and self-preservation, transforming those he loves into a threat.

Adoption is a humbling process. Regardless of parenting practice or how often you display your love in both word and deed, there’s a wall that, at times, feels impenetrable.

Most of us don’t remember our first breath or our first touch or our first tears. And yet, so much of our identity is formed in this first few moments after we emerge from the womb. My youngest was taken by nurses from his biological mother’s womb and put straight into a tube to counteract the fluid in his lungs. Sure, that’s somewhat primitive in the Western world, but he was born into something more akin to poverty. His extreme athleticism today would suggest his lungs were unharmed, but it’s the wounds to the heart and the soul that concern me most.

After a day or two in the tube, he was first held by his foster mom. His biological mom had returned home without her newborn son, just as her father had instructed her to do. Somehow, in the mystery of memories undetectable by the conscious mind, my son was first imprinted by loss. Not love.

The loss of the heartbeat he heard for nine moths just above his head. The loss of the flesh from whence he came and to which he longs to return. The loss of living with a biological mother he dreams about to this day that never was fully realized.

Loss haunts all of us. Overlooking our age or maturity, our theology or preparedness. Over the last seven months, my family has lost five people close to us. An aunt, two grandparents, a step-mother, and a thirty-nine-year-old best friend. The last four spaced out perfectly so we could say, “This year we’ve lost someone we’ve loved every single month.”

This month my wife was unceremoniously fired from her job at our home church. A loss that feels like the fifth death in as many months.

I’m still recovering from the loss of my best friend. Not even two days ago, my wife and I were driving toward a stop sign discussing how we were going to lead our family through another round of church hurt, when out of nowhere, tears welled up and like a reflex I whispered, “I miss Justin.”

Yes, healing takes time. Sure, grief is a process. Without question, we’ve made progress as a family and as individuals. And yet there’s something about loss that lodges in our flesh, melding with our melanin, surfacing with rapidity and without warning because it simply isn’t far beneath the skin. Surfacing with such a force that it can send you spiraling into survival and self-preservation for hours on end.

I don’t remember what sparked the loss in my son’s heart that night, but I remember how it ended. He moved in and out of shouting fits, covering his head, saying he’s sorry, and crying through deep repentance. He has such an amazing heart. He loves so fiercely, in fact, that at times I’ve said, “This kid is either gonna to save the entire world or burn it to the ground. Nothing in between.”

Towards the end, out of nowhere, from the pain of loss deep within his soul, he asked about his birth mom. I love these moments. These windows of grace where the Spirit within him grants him enough courage to peer through the lattice of the past where nothing but mystery and “what could’ve been” cloud his vision and prod his pain.

“Did you meet her?” he sniffled.

“Yeah.” I nodded. “We actually got to sit with her and talk for a couple of hours at the court house on the day we adopted you.”

He quickly looked away, down, to the left, anywhere but in my face. Eyes do that, at times. They reveal the agitation within simply by where they focus or their inability to do so. To ease his loss, I placed my hand on his leg.

“Hey,” I said, “do you want to see the picture?”

He’d seen it before, but for whatever reason, he couldn’t remember. So, this time, for whatever reason, was like a first time.

We pulled open my computer, sifted through several files, and then it filled the screen. He was transfixed. Her vibrant yellow shirt decorated with an artistic depiction of a woman’s face affixed with glasses and red lipstick. Her purse draped over her shoulder with arms stiff to her side as she stood between two strangers who promised to take care of her baby boy. She courageously holds a subtle smile that masks the pain of another loss in a life littered with many more.

He started crying without warning. Burying his head in my lap. I could feel the pain coursing through his little body. And then relief set in. Or was it exhaustion? His body went limp. His tears dried up. And he just lay there. Staring blankly as I stroked his cheek.

No words.

They usually don’t help much in these moments anyway.

No fighting.

That storm had passed.

Just presence. Just connection. Just a dad holding his baby boy after a long night of struggle.

After several minutes, he sat up, eyes droopy, clearly ready for slumber to prepare him for a new day. Yet all of a sudden, his tears erupted once more.

“I don’t,” he sobbed, “I just,” he shrieked, “I just don’t deserve to be your son!” he wailed.

I was crushed.

By the weight of each word.

Wounded.

By the precious heart of my tender son.

As a father, I felt like a failure.

“Hey,” I lowered myself to his eye-level, “Hey, I don’t ever want to hear you say that again.” It came out a bit too harsh, so I softened the next bit, “No, what I mean is, I love you. You’re my son. That will never change. No matter what you do or where you go, you are my son. Period. And I love you. More than anything in this entire world.”

We hugged. A long time. So long he started to snore a little. I picked him up, laid him in his bed, and as his head pressed the pillow, a subtle smile rested on his sweet little face.

As I was leaving the room, a thought hit me with uncharacteristic force. Or maybe it was just the Spirit.

“When we say the same thing to God, I wonder how it makes him feel?”

Almost every Sunday, at least in the Protestant churches, at least in the majority of evangelical services I sit in, this same sentiment will surface. The words may vary a bit, but the message is generally the same. Sometimes it’s through the words of a worship leader trying to bridge one song to the next or through the words of the communion meditation trying to explain the magnitude of the moment or sometimes in a random prayer meant to encourage those with closed eyes of how much God loves them: “God, I know how terrible we are, how we’re covered with so much disgust and sin, but thank you so much for your love, even though we don’t deserve it.”

It’s strange to me that somewhere in the alchemy of our loss we’ve distorted love to such an extent that we believe if we tell God how much we suck and that we don’t deserve his love then our relationship will improve. That then, maybe, he’ll love us even more.

As a father, I don’t cherish words of my children that assail their value or worth. I don’t love them more when they speak down about themselves or when they say something akin to “I don’t deserve your love.” As a father, it pains me. Hurts me. Tempts me to believe not that our love is strong but that I’ve failed them as a father. For the greatest gift a parent can give their children is the ability to see themselves the way I see them. All their gifts, all their value, all their worth distorted by sin and shrouded by satanic lies that tell them “You’re not enough.”

As a father, success is measured not by my children’s ability to speak down or hurt themselves, but by their ability to embrace love, mine and others, unconditionally. At this point, I think it makes some sense to bring up God, remember he’s a good, good Father, and end with a simple, “how much more.”

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