Baby love

After much waiting and many unexpected twists and turns, God has faithfully given me what He promised...a healthy wife and baby! Moving from a natural homebirth to a c-section at the hopsital was in fact the will of God for more reasons than I know of and after all is said and done, when I gaze into Makayla Nicole's blue eyes, I could care less how she got here but am grateful to Jesus that He has blessed me with her.

I had expected this great thrill and rush of emotion and revelation from God of His love for me as His child when I first held her since I had heard of others' testimonies of something similar, but it has not turned out that way for me. My immediate reaction was to begin attempting to produce this emotional high myself. What came of it at the end of my first day of fatherhood was the beginnings of idolizing my daughter and a heart that felt hard. God quickly showed this to me and graciously granted me repentance and began to reveal to me the worthlessness of my own ability to love and the great love that He is able to pour forth through me when I receive His love for me. The greatest thing that humans can do apart from God's grace to love is obsess over someone.

God has been showing me that the answer to this is to receive His love. More specifically the love of my heavenly Father. Over the past four and a half years of being a Christian, I have come to experience much of the salvific love in Christ, the guiding, counseling love of the Holy Spirit, but, as I have come to realize in trying to love my daughter, I have not experienced much love from my heavenly Father. I mean, this is one of the chief reasons God saved me was to know the Father's love! It's what we are ALL made for! Cleansed by giving our life to Christ as we are moved to love by His love for us in the cross and resurrection, we are to come clean before the Father in an intimate child-parent relationship. And it is here that I am finding that as I receive God's Father-love for me, I am able, by His grace, to experience this love for Makayla. Everytime I look at my daughter and long to love her, God reminds me that this is how He always loves me. With joy, excitement, and sacrificial love.

This love is for everyone, so ask and you will receive. Even when Makayla throws up on me or poops on my hand, I experience a joy that I can't explain...because the truth is, I just don't care, my love for her grows daily as I receive the Father's gaze upon my life. The fruit of His love for us will be a longing to love Him with 100% of our affections with no division of its focus. This is what Christ meant when He gave us the greatest commandment to "love the Lord your God with ALL your heart, ALL your mind, ALL your soul, and ALL your strength." And thus, the second greatest commandment will follow as God gives us love for our neighbor...whoever is near us. May we give up loving in our own strength which isn't love at all, but instead, come to Father who is love itself that we may know why we were made and share it with others.

"Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God...So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him...We love because he first loved us."
1John 4:7,16,19