Crystal Renaud Day, MAPC
From as young as the age of 8, I can remember being on a search for love. That may sound kind of odd because why would an 8-year-old be searching for love? But, for me, I was searching for the love of a father.
I grew up the youngest in my family. And while I grew up with both of my parents in the home, my dad travelled for business full-time. And when he was home, he still wasn’t there. He would be preoccupied with things that kept him emotionally unavailable and disconnected. So for most of my childhood, I didn’t have a relationship with him and without a relationship, I didn’t feel loved by him.
So my search for a father’s love began.
My search led me down some difficult paths beginning with an unhealthy relationship with food. I would binge, hide food, and eat when I wasn’t hungry. All as a way to avoid feelings and to feel better.
But at the age of 10, I was exposed to pornography and that event would radically change my life. It seemed food was no match for a sexual awakening. For 8 years I struggled with an addiction to pornography and inappropriate sexual behavior. I settled for a counterfeit of true love, intimacy, and affection.
Women are designed by God to need the love a father.
In my own life, pornography and the behaviors pornography led me to filled a longing I had for love, affection and acceptance that I wasn’t receiving at home.
Women often see their heavenly Father in same way they see their earthly father.
If a woman has a dad who is emotionally unavailable, abusive, unreliable, or just simply absent all together, then she will see God in a similar light.
A dad is supposed to personify the relationship our Heavenly Father has with His children. But here’s the truth about all of our dads, regardless of where we come from … they are all imperfect. No dad here on earth can truly fulfill the love of God in a daughter’s heart.
The only man on earth who has ever been perfect is Jesus himself. So who better than to receive the love of a Father than through him?
I want to share with you the story of a woman from scripture who knows better than most what it is like to search for the love of a Father:
21 Jesus got into the boat again and went back to the other side of the lake, where a large crowd gathered around him on the shore. 22 Then a leader of the local synagogue arrived. When he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet, 23 pleading fervently with him. “My little daughter is dying,” he said. “Please come and lay your hands on her; heal her so she can live.”
24 Jesus went with him, and all the people followed, crowding around him. 25 A woman in the crowd had suffered for twelve years with constant bleeding. 26 She had suffered a great deal from many doctors, and over the years she had spent everything she had to pay them, but she had gotten no better. In fact, she had gotten worse. 27 She had heard about Jesus, so she came up behind him through the crowd and touched his robe. 28 For she thought to herself, “If I can just touch his robe, I will be healed.” 29 Immediately the bleeding stopped, and she could feel in her body that she had been healed of her terrible condition.
30 Jesus realized at once that healing power had gone out from him, so he turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my robe?”
31 His disciples said to him, “Look at this crowd pressing around you. How can you ask, ‘Who touched me?’”
32 But he kept on looking around to see who had done it. 33 Then the frightened woman, trembling at the realization of what had happened to her, came and fell to her knees in front of him and told him what she had done. 34 And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you Whole. Go in peace. Your suffering is over.” Mark 5:21-34
How do you think it felt to be this woman?
We may not be able to identify with her physical ailment, but certainly we can identify with her emotional pain. Her embarrassment. Her desire for healing. Her need for acceptance and love.
But what was it really like for her?
Leviticus 15:25-26 tells us,
“If a woman has a flow of blood for many days, at a different time than when it happens each month, or if the blood flows longer at that time, all the days the blood flows she will be unclean. She will be unclean. It will be as if it were the time when she is unclean each month. She will be unclean. Any bed she lies on while her blood is flowing will be like the bed during the time she is unclean and whatever she sits on will be unclean.”
In just two verses, this woman was identified by just one word SIX times: UNCLEAN.
For 12 years this woman lived with a physical ailment that transcended a physical problem and became an all-encompassing burden that affected every aspect of her life. Since she was considered culturally unclean, she would not have been allowed in public, and would have been treated as an outcast. Even by her own family. It is likely she had stopped leaving the house all together.
It may have been 12 years since she felt love and acceptance from anyone at all.
But on the day Jesus was there, she didn’t allow her infliction to keep her from getting to Him. She didn’t allow her infliction to keep her from dropping to her hands and knees to crawl through a crowd of people shunning her. She didn’t allow her infliction to keep her from the LOVE she knew she could receive from Jesus.
And how did He respond?
He doesn’t call her unclean, unwanted or unloved: he calls her by ONE WORD: His DAUGHTER — and not only was her body healed, so were the longings of her heart to be loved. And that same love and healing is available to us today.
1 Peter 2:9 says, You are a chosen people. You are royal priests, a holy nation, God’s very own possession. As a result, you can show others the goodness of God, for he called you out of the darkness into his wonderful light.
Do you want to know what the good news is about that? And I want this to be your take away from today:
No matter what lies in your past – no matter the struggle, the insecurity, the lack of love you feel – God sees you as his own and calls you His daughter. And nothing and no one can take that away from you. All you have to do is reach out your hand to receive it.