When I first met Kaye* she was in pretty bad shape. She refused to stop cutting herself on her arms and legs. Mainly she would use pins so that the marks weren’t as obvious to her teachers and friends. She told me that she cut in order to relieve the pain of her real life. She was so angry. She was angry at God, and she was angry at people. But mostly, as we talked over the next few months, she was angry at her father.
Like many people, Kaye suffers from a “father wound.” Her father left her family when she was young, took another wife, and never looked back. Kaye couldn’t figure out how to be “daddy’s little girl” again. She could not get him to look at her the way he once did when she was little. She could not get him to notice her at all. Now, it seemed, he was caught up in his new life, caught up in himself. Caught up in his new family. Like so many others, she felt abandoned, hurt, replaced, rejected.
The night she tried to kill herself I was called into the hospital to see her. She couldn’t put words to why she hated herself so much in that moment. She just felt the pain that welled up inside her. I remember meeting her mom for the first time that week, and seeing the tears in her eyes as she talked about her daughter. She didn’t know how to make things right. She was still trying to fit the pieces of her own broken life back together. Kaye’s dad didn’t visit her that week. He never called. He was never heard from. More pain. More anger. The cycle of being fatherless.
Kaye has had her ups and downs throughout the years that followed that night. At times she has been able to see the love of the heavenly Father through Jesus. She has also felt the loving embrace of a church community. She has even sensed what spiritual adoption might look like—the real-time acceptance of a Father who is always present. But she has not been able to fully embrace this reality. She has not allowed herself to be fully embraced by Him. Perhaps it seems too good to be true. Perhaps she feels too vulnerable. Perhaps that Father may end up hurting her like her earthly father did.
I keep a case of pins in my desk drawer that Kaye gave me years ago. She gave them to me on a day of surrender. I keep them to remind me of the pain of the fatherless. I keep them because I know that Kaye’s story is not over yet. The Father’s love is too big and too grand to let her go. His love is relentless. His love is overwhelming. His love is enacted in Psalm 147:3 as the one who “heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds”!
*of course this is not her real name
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