Not Forsaken

by Louie Giglio

  189 times in the four gospels alone, jesus referred to god as a father.

  Scripture tells that when Jesus comes up out of the water, the heavens open, the Holy Spirit descends like a dove and alights on Jesus, and a Voice from heaven gives a startling and altogether wonderful announcement. Do you know what it was?

  The announcement was big news to all those gathered by the Jordan that day. Many of the folks who were gathered around John the Baptist must have already known this thirty-year-old man, Jesus of Nazareth. He was Joseph’s kid, the carpenter’s son. Jesus had grown up in a little village not far away. They must have remembered Him playing as a boy, running down the side streets. They’d seen Him in the synagogue and marketplace, fully grown. And now, after Jesus is baptized by John, God the Father goes on record, speaking in an audible voice at the baptism service. And what exactly did God say?

  Hey everyone, sorry I’m late but I was at the AARP Convention. Did the kid do okay?

  Or, Hey boy, You better get in that river and get dunked like I told You to.

  Or, Can’t you just feel a sense of peace and tranquility in the universe today?

  Nope.

  The Father calls out: THIS IS MY SON, WHOM I LOVE! WITH HIM I AM WELL PLEASED!

  It’s like He is saying I’m God, and that’s My kid! I love Him a lot. With Him I am well pleased. How crazy is that? If God’s going to call down from heaven, surely He’s going to give a full sermon. Surely, He’ll dazzle us with His theological omniscience.

  Nope.

  Just simple fatherly delight.

  We just need to soak in that concept. We need to stay there, to bask in it, to enjoy it. See, by the Jordan River that day, God the Father showed that His relationship with Jesus wasn’t a contract. It wasn’t the signing of a theological treatise. It wasn’t a list of principles to agree with, or a bunch of rules to follow. It was a connection. A family connection. A real, heart-to-heart life connection where the Creator of the universe acknowledged His Son. Yes, God is all knowing and all powerful and all wise, and He’s holy and just and perfect, and there is a just wrath awaiting those who reject His truth and grace. But here’s what Jesus reveals most about Him—God is a loving Father. We see it clearly as God the Father pulled back the curtain and showed us this amazing relationship with the Son whom He dearly loves. And God extends a similar kind of relationship to us. A relationship where He is our Father, and we are His sons and daughters. God loves us, and God is even proud to call us His own. Let that fact sink in a bit.

  Huge, Enormous, Jolting Image

  That’s the big hope of this book—that when I say God, you will think Father . That’s the image that will come to mind. Yes, I want you to think holy. And mighty. And glorious. But, all in the context of Father.

  I know this father concept can send us spinning in any number of ways. For some it’s an immediate hurdle, a barrier one hundred feet high. When you hear that God is a Father you may instantly say, No thank you. I don’t want any of that. If God is like my father then I’m out right here.

  Wait. I plead with you to stay with me as we slowly take a look at this idea and spend some time gently peeling back the layers of our hearts in several of the next chapters. We all have earthly fathers, and some of those fathers were good, and some of them were not so good. Our mental image of what a father is like is mostly learned from our earthly fathers. I know this, and I get this, and I want to be sensitive to you and what you’ve been through and are going through with your dad. I don’t want to minimize in any way what’s happening right now when I say “father.”

  Please know if that word pushes on a nerve, or exposes a hurt, I’m not doing that without a lot of grace and care. I want to give you room to cry, to be mad, to set the book down and think for a while—to wonder and ponder and journal and take your time processing what God is saying to you. Yet, I also want to resolutely and lovingly and biblically point you to this amazing truth: that the knowledge of our identity as sons and daughters of God unlocks prison doors, heals wounds, and propels us into greater purpose in our lives.

  When we know that God is our perfect Father, and we live out of the revolutionizing identity this new awareness gives us, we can come alive in this truth. Old things pass away—disappointments, guilt, sorrows, and struggles. Habits change for the better. Our relationship with God is transformed. Our worship is revived. We see changes in the things we long for and hope for, and how we see other people is affected.

  Broken Relationships

  I know that it might be a stretch for you right now to think of God as your Father, or to envision that He loves you and is delighted to call you His son or daughter.

  Right now, I’m thinking about a friend whose dad left for another life when she was seven. Her father said it was about finding himself , and that he and her mom were moving in different directions. Her dad ended up in a new city, a new job, and ultimately with a new family. First it was a new girlfriend, but eventually he found another woman who became his new wife. Everything was beginning again for him, while his daughter was left behind to figure out what happened and to pick up the pieces of her heart.

  Her dad had sat her down as a little girl of seven and told her he was moving out. Moving on. And then he emphasized, It’s not about you, it’s about me. You realize this is not about you sweetheart, this is about Dad!

  Yet, as he spoke, her little mind inverted his words from this is not about you, to this is all about me.

  She told me that at first the lines of communication between them were steady, but in time the calls got less and less frequent and then became mostly texts. Eventually, there was mostly silence. Not malicious silence. Just the deafening quiet that underscored the emerging reality that she wasn’t that important to her dad after all. For her dad the silence was always explained as being busy . But to her the silence was translated unseen, unwanted—that she wasn’t a priority anymore . It made her wonder if he ever did love her—if she ever had a place in his heart.

  In time, she built up walls to hide the pain and protect her heart. She tried to stuff the anger and ended up trusting no one. She became lost in so many protective emotional layers she didn’t even know who she was. At the time she was telling me all this she was confiding to our team that she was struggling with an eating disorder and was in and out of unhealthy relationships with guys. She was dying on the inside.

  that’s the big hope of this book—that when i say god, you will think father .

  For her, the instinctive heart cry of every child, Daddy, watch me , had crashed and burned. She had the kind of dad who didn’t see her and appreciate her and want her. Her primal need for her dad’s arms to be strong and his heart to be good was left unfilled, and her heart was withering away in the face of his failure. As time went on she wasn’t sure if her dad’s arms were strong or not, but more and more it didn’t seem like his heart was good. Either he was defective, or she was. Or both.

  I’m also thinking about an achieving leader who came to me for advice recently. He was thinking he’d stuffed the long-standing resentment he held toward his father for the way he was treated all his life far away in the Never Never Land of forgetfulness. Yet now he was confiding in me as a successful businessman leading a great family and living miles away from his dad, both emotionally and literally, that the fire of bitterness was consuming his thoughts and polluting his relationships. Though he’d tried his best to erase the past and walk away he couldn’t break free from the way his dad had made him feel about himself.

  Still another friend was robbed of his dad in death at an early age. As we were talking about a father’s approval, he just stared into space with no real concept of what we were discussing. When we talked about living with a father’s blessing over our lives, this friend just stared into the distance. He can only wonder what it must be like to grow up under the shadow of that kind of love and approval from a father that is his own flesh and blood.

  And as I write I am thinking abou
t you, and of the father relationships that could have been better, or even existent, in your life. I can understand if the feelings running through your heart right now as we talk about God being a Father are not positive, but painful. Not hopeful, but hurtful. Not redemptive, but more like a wrecking ball crashing into things you just might prefer to leave walled up in the past. If that’s you, I believe God may have placed this book in your hands to reverse the curse of “what has been” and transform everything about you.

  Tribute to an Imperfect Dad

  Not all the thoughts that are rushing through people’s minds as we say the word father are painful.

  For example, my wife, Shelley, has journeyed all her days with a strong, loving, supporting dad who has championed her, prayed for her, and modeled strength, integrity, and consistency for her. And, it’s not just Shelley who’s received the benefit of his goodness. Her dad has been a great father to both of us.

  Yet, the more stories I hear the more I realize fathers like this are less and less common in today’s generation.

  I was blessed to have an amazing earthly father who I can be proud of. You met him in the story I told earlier about our conversation by the kitchen stove. Like all our dads he wasn’t perfect, but he tried to be the best dad he could be.

  He’s passed away now. His name was also Louie Giglio. (Actually, my grandfather had the same name, too, so I’m Louie Giglio III.) My dad was a graphic designer and he had a brilliant mind.

  Back in 1964, my dad designed the Chick-fil-A logo, and it’s been printed on every one of their cups, wrappers, napkins, and signs since then. My sister (who was his favorite between the two of us) saw an early draft while accompanying my dad to his office on a Saturday. At the time, he was working freelance for a man who ran an advertising firm in Atlanta, and Chick-fil-A was one of his clients. That particular Saturday, Dad was tweaking their “Chicken C.” Gina, seven years old at the time, told my dad she thought it was “so cute.”

  How cool is that?!

  A few years ago, the CEO of Chick-fil-A told me that they’d hired multiple ad agencies since then, most all of which wanted to update the Chick-fil-A image. But that one little logo has endured through the decades with only slight modifications. My dad’s little $75 creation has stood the test of time. When I look at that logo, I think: Wow, my dad did that.

  But I’m not surprised. My dad was a genius.

  He was an original.

  He was a true artist.

  He was a lover of music and could build a killer stereo system from scratch.

  He was a captivating storyteller.

  He was a golf fanatic. He loved the legends like Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer, and Jack Nicklaus, but he was an enormous fan of the little South African, Gary Player. Many afternoons as I was growing up, we would head to a nearby putting green or driving range to hit some golf balls after he got off work. When going to a real putting green wasn’t an option, we would hold fierce putting competitions on the carpeted floors of our apartment, using furniture legs or glasses from the kitchen for the holes.

  Dad was an Auburn grad, earning his Art Degree in the football National Championship year, 1957. He taught me how to root for the Tigers and say, “War Eagle.” And in the old days when games were mostly on the radio, we’d sit together with my sister, and when Auburn would score to win the game we’d run on the furniture , from chair to sofa to coffee table and yell as loud as we could!

  He worked hard to provide for us.

  Dad drank a little and sometimes a lot.

  He definitely was not a planner.

  He was a non-conformist.

  He had the most expansive vocabulary. He could turn a phrase in a clever way. For example, he would tell us before we went to sleep, “Don’t bite the bed bugs,” instead of “Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”

  He’d give you the shirt off his back if you needed it.

  He treated everyone the same, no matter who they were or where they were from.

  Dad served in the Korean War as a mapmaker.

  His first real job out of Auburn was in Atlanta (that’s where I came along), and that’s where he’s buried.

  And what about my dad’s dad—Louie Giglio I? I don’t have a clue what he was like. My granddad died suddenly before my dad was thirty, and though I’m a namesake of my grandfather, I have no memory of him. Dad rarely mentioned him, if at all.

  My dad was an only child, and due to the instability between his mom and dad, and mostly likely the lifestyle that caused my grandfather Louie to die young, my dad was shuffled between family members when he was little. He learned fast how to fend for himself and build up walls. He attended all three high schools in his town in a four-year stretch.

  In the last chapter of his life, after being ravaged by a rare viral infection in his brain resulting in him being disabled mentally and physically, Dad confided in me, words that echo in my mind to this day:

  No one ever loved me.

  No one wanted me.

  And I know God doesn’t love me, either.

  That’s where we were towards the end of his life. This brilliant man, and good father, telling me that he believed no one ever wanted him.

  I was stunned, tears welling up in my eyes. Slowly, it began dawning on me that my dad was a person, too. My father wasn’t only a dad; he was also a son—a broken son. Here we sat all these years later and whatever it was that went down between my father and his father sixty years before was still the dominant story in the room.

  I wondered, if my dad hadn’t become disabled and experienced such traumatic changes in his brain, if I would ever have known the pain he’d been carrying all those years? Would I have ever understood how the lack of a father’s blessing had crashed into his life and, in turn, into mine?

  Given all that, it’s incredible the way he loved and cared for my sister and me. In spite of his shattered sense of self he was a pretty darn good dad. And I miss him.

  But my “father-story” doesn’t end with “Big Lou.” I also have a heavenly Father in my life.

  The Only Perfect Father

  As proud I am of my earthly dad, I’m infinitely more amazed by my heavenly Father. I can hardly conceive of the reality that, through Christ, I’ve been graced to become a son of the heavenly Father. I am a child of Almighty God. When I see a sunrise, or the Alps, or see images of a galaxy that’s 13.4 billion light years away, I think: Wow, my heavenly Father did that. And He knows my name. I belong to Him. He might not have designed the “chicken–headed” Chick-fil-A logo, but my heavenly Father actually created the chicken and everything else in Creation!

  The same can be true of you. This relationship becomes yours when you trust in God through Jesus Christ. God brings your heart to life, and you are born anew as a son or daughter of a perfect heavenly Father. This spiritual birth not only brings us to life on the inside, it places us in a new family with a new Father. When Jesus was on the cross, He used a specific word that I hope sticks in our souls. When crying out to God, Jesus called Him, Abba.

  Abba is Aramaic, the common language of Jesus’ day. It was the word little kids used when addressing their earthly dads. Abba isn’t perfectly translated into English as Daddy or Papa , but it’s close to that: a word that’s tender, affectionate, easy for a child to say. The word connotes confidence in a father. It’s not a formal title. It’s a familiar title. It’s what a child says when he knows he’s close to his father, and that his father is close to him.

  In Romans 8:15, the Bible says we, as believers, can use this same title when addressing God: Abba . That means God isn’t some kind of nebulous force impossible to know or understand. He’s not your great cosmic butler in the sky. He doesn’t live in a stained-glass cathedral; He isn’t keeping score on you, and He’s not merely your buddy. God is not a bully or a grandpa or the face you look at in the mirror.

  God is a Father. And through Christ, God can be your Abba Father.

  That’s the image of God Jesus taught u
s about and the image I’m inviting you to see and know deep within your soul and keep there for always. It’s an image that’s truth, and it’s an image that shapes everything. This is what I hope becomes the most important thing about you—that you would know without a doubt that God is your Father and that you are a beloved child of God.

  And if that image is hard or painful for you, or maybe if you’re simply wondering more what this God-as-a-Father business is all about, you’ll soon see that you’ve been given a surprise gift.

  But it’s nothing like you ever expected.

  Chapter 4

  Reflection versus Perfection

  One of the things Shelley and I were looking forward to most when moving from the suburbs to the city was the panoramic view of the downtown skyline we would enjoy from the rooftop of our new townhouse. Granted, you had to take the utility stairs and be a bit of a risk-taker to get to the roof, but that didn’t dampen my enthusiasm in the slightest. We had a stunning city view! That was until the vacant lot next door became home to a condo building that ended up being eleven feet taller than our rooftop. Just enough to completely obstruct our skyline vista.

  In the same way, your earthly dad may be responsible for erecting an image of Father that is impeding your view. Discovering that God wants to be known as a perfect Father is only half of the journey. Each of us has a picture of what a father is like that’s primarily based on our relationship with our earthly dads. Although God is loving and inviting and trustworthy and dependable, it’s as if something—or someone—constructed a barrier that makes it difficult to take in this amazing aspect of God’s character. Our view is being blocked by a flawed understanding of what a father is.