Becoming a father the same week your book on The Father comes out…
God’s timing is so unusual and counter intuitive sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, it’s always perfect, but it can be hard to see that perfection when you’re in the moment and you don’t have the benefit of being outside the timeline and able to see what is coming next. I guess that’s where faith kicks in and our understanding takes a back seat.
I’ve dreamt of being a daddy all my life. Guys really do dream about that stuff you know. I’m aware the stereotype is that it is more of maternal longing, but men and boys do really pray and hope that one day it will be their turn too and they will get to be a daddy.
I’ve wanted to write a book for at least 12 years, maybe longer. I’m not even sure why specifically a book and not, I don’t know, a video teaching series, or a conference or something. Dreaming about writing a book in an era of online content and podcasts seems a little bit like dreaming to release your first album on cassette tape. Aren’t people moving on from that nowadays?
I can feel the magnetic pull of a tangent here and so I will resist and get back on topic, that is a blog for another day!
So, in summary: A lifetime of wanting to be a father. A decade or more of wanting to be an author. And at a conservative estimate, two to three years of writing ‘The Road to the Father’s House’…a book about The Father.
And they both are released within the same two week period of my life.
Perhaps you’ve experienced something like this too? Where you have been wrestling with the timing of God and the movement of things in your life, when you’ve asked God how you are going to navigate it all when you’ve got no idea what the next step should be?
Here are some of my thoughts, when you switch them to be contextually appropriate for you, I wonder if you’ll find some of your thought processes here too:
“Lord I’ve dreamt of these things happening, prayed for them to happen for so long…and now they are…I’m almost at a loss to know what to do next!”
“Lord I need to focus on this one thing, I can’t do both these massive things at the same time!”
“God you’re blessing me too much, I don’t deserve this…”
“God what if both these things coming at the same time means I do neither of them well because I’m too distracted!?”
All of those thoughts, and about six hundred more swirling around in my head.
So what is the point of this blog then? Am I just venting?
I’ll answer that by speaking to the statement in the title: ‘becoming a father the same week my book on The Father came out…’.
As I have spent many hours looking into the face of little Alexander Gabriel Forman’s face, looked deep into those arms just like his mothers, watched him readjust in my arms, crunch up his face like a old man or yawn big and wide like his daddy does, I have realised there is precious little I need from him. I just want him to be content, to be happy, to be full of God. And to sleep well.
My success criteria for my son is that he would see God as He really is and see himself as God see’s him. Which is a theme that runs throughout my book in almost every chapter.
I just want him to be everything The Father made him to be, and to forget about everything else that’s going to come at him. He doesn’t need to impress me or do anything to win my favour. He’s already got it. He’s my boy and he’s perfect already. I just want him to know me and his mom and know that we love him and are always going to be there for him, no matter what.
It’s not much more complicated than that.
Now there are only so many of these kinds of thoughts you can have before you realise your heavenly Father is speaking all this and more over you. These are His fatherly thoughts towards us His children.
That starts to change the narrative in your head. It starts to dissolve the limestone barriers of worry in your thinking, the logical guardrails get upended and removed by the flow of love from God’s heart to ours. Things just start to get a bit easier internally.
And so, the worries about successes, dreams rising or falling, the opinions of others…they don’t necessarily all disappear in an instant, even though I wish they would, but they do start to fall back from centre stage as the Father takes His place under the spotlight.
God’s timing in this specific moment of my life was to bring two things that I have longed for and worked for to fruition at the same moment in my life. I cannot control either of them. I can’t make him be happy and I can’t make the book be successful. My son needs to grow as the Lord has made him to grow, and my book will be used however the Lord wants it to be used, whether that is ten people reading it or tens of hundreds or something else.
Control has to be yielded to God.
The results have to be surrendered to Him.
He knows best. He can be depended on.
God’s perfect timing I believe often allows us to step into times in our lives when our weaknesses cause us to cry out for the strength of His grace to start filling the empty places within. Grace as 2 Corinthians 12: 9 teaches us is also power. It's supernatural power to get things moving that were at a standstill. It’s heavenly empowerment to do things that you could never do under your own steam. It’s gifting and favour where there was just nothing. It’s peace where before there was only anxiety.
So I bless you, dear reader, to know in your heart like I’m trying to know in mine, that:
His timing is perfect
His grace is strong where you feel weak
His love for you is greater and more pure than the love of parents towards their newborn child
He doesn’t need you to do anything to win his favour, you already have it
He really is a good Dad to you
He has put dreams and visions in your heart…and it’s ok if they don’t seem to make sense or seem out of place with where the world or culture is going. That’s OK. He knows more about what is coming than the world does
You can trust him
Bless you richly my friends.
Pursue the real God, be the real you He made you to be.
Grace and Peace,
Alistair