The Father Heart of God

Floyd McClung, Sally McClung

• Publisher: David C Cook
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9780830784813
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In his work on three continents, Floyd McClung met many people who suffer from emotional scars and fears. Over and over again, the discovery of God as Father—perfectly reliable, unlike any human parent—has brought freedom and healing. A classic introduction to God's love, written for those in need and for those who wish to share that love with others.

1

The Wounded Heart of Man

It was on the fifth floor of the Olfat Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan when I saw him for the first time. He called himself Steve, but I had the feeling that wasn’t his real name. His jeans were old and bleached out, not because he had bought them that way in a trendy European boutique with the ready-made ‘worn look’, but because of constant wear on the ‘hippie-trail’. He had travelled with a friend named Jack overland from Amsterdam on the Magic Bus, a travel service that was cheap, but made no promises of safe arrival.

Steve was evasive and withdrawn, and only dropped in occasionally during the first few weeks after we met. ‘We’ were Sally, my wife, myself, and a few stalwart friends running a free clinic for Western drop-outs drifting across Central Asia in search of adventure, drugs and escape from the Western societies they had come to loathe. Many had been pushed to the fringes of society by rejection and a deep sense of alienation. Nothing in their surroundings provided a sense of identity or belonging. Steve was no exception.

I’ll never forget the time Steve asked me if I wanted to know the happiest day of his life. Little did I realize the shock awaiting me as I expressed my eagerness to know more about this young man who until that time had remained closed, and unwilling to talk about himself or engage in normal conversation. The locked-in pain and hostility seemed to explode in a torrent of anger: ‘I’ll tell you the happiest day of my life,’ said Steve with a strange smile on his face. ‘It was my eleventh birthday and both my parents were killed in a car accident!’

I could hardly believe what I was hearing as Steve rushed on. ‘They told me every day of my life that they hated me and didn’t want me. My father resented me, and my mother continually reminded me that I was an accident. They didn’t plan on me coming along, and didn’t want me either. I’m glad they’re dead!’

We lost track of Steve soon after that. But I have thought about him many times since then.

Steve was one of many young people on the hippie-trail that we befriended in Afghanistan. Many were hurting, alienated, and seeking escape from the reality of broken relationships at home.

What Sally and I discovered there, in the early seventies, was not just a few wounded westerners running away from their problems. We had come across the tip of an iceberg. These ‘world travellers’ were part of a whole society of hurting people. We have invested our lives since that time helping broken, hurting people, and not just young people or runaways in trouble. We have discovered that no level of society is immune to the pain of broken relationships.

At one point in the seventies it was estimated that there were ten million American women dependent on tranquillizers. One psychologist told me that 70% of all violent-impulse crimes are committed by children from divorced homes or single-parent families. The average parent in Europe watches television three-and-a-half hours each day and spends thirty seconds communicating with his children!

No, the wounded young people Sally and I found addicted to heroin and dying in sleazy, flea-ridden ‘hotels’ in Afghanistan were not an exception. They were the product of a generation that had sown a philosophy of privatism, materialism and hedonism. Their parents denied God, moral absolutes, and the importance of the family. As a result, rejection and emotional scars are normal. My daughter was in a class at school with twelve other children and she was the only one from a family where both the mother and father were still living together.

And we cannot ignore the enormous effect that modern society has on our emotions. The dependence on computers and technology, rapid urbanization, crime and violence, and the threat of nuclear holocaust have affected many individuals in a profound way.

As I have already said, Steve’s story is not the exception. If we take time to care, and to listen, people begin to trust us enough to open up and share their hurts and fears.

One upper class young man, who came to us for coun­selling, described how his father had made him look on as he beat his mother and cut her with a knife; another girl described the humiliations and molestations she had expe­rienced at the hands of her father, brothers and grand­father; another young man told us how his parents gave him to his grandparents simply because they did not want him. He was inconvenient. His grandparents in turn sent him to an orphanage at the age of five, where he was beaten every Sunday by the Director if he refused to go to church. Years later he became a Christian through our work in Afghanistan and then returned home to express love and forgiveness to his parents with a gift, but his mother screamed at him and would not let him enter the house. Another handsome young husband wept as he said he could not remember his lawyer father telling him that he loved him even once.

We forget all too quickly that it is the norm in our world today for people to carry emotional wounds. I used to wonder why my wife and I attracted so many needy people—what was wrong with us, I asked myself? But then I came to the conclusion that when we as Christians take time to care, to create an atmosphere of love, acceptance and forgiveness, then people will open up their lives to us.

Once Sally and I sat in a prostitute’s apartment in the Red Light district of Amsterdam. We listened in amazement as Annerie (not her real name) very openly described her relationship with her pimp. She and another prostitute both supported him—he lived half the day with Annerie and the other half with the other prostitute. When Sally asked why she paid this man when she knew he was living with another woman, she said after a few moments of reflection, ‘Even prostitutes need someone to laugh and cry with.’

‘Why?’ I ask myself. Why must a prostitute pay for friendship? What has happened to our world?

I’ll never forget talking to a young girl in Cornwall, who wept and sobbed as she explained how confused she was, because her father had wanted a boy. She was given a boy’s name and had tried to be a boy to please him, yet she never could please him. So she carried emotional wounds with her, all because her father rejected her for being female.

Nor will I forget the girl (raised in a ‘good’ home of well-to-do Christian parents) who wished she was dead because her mother kept comparing her to her dead sister, saying her sister always ‘did it better’ than she did. Finally in desperation she felt the only way she could get her mother to love her and be pleased with her was to be dead, because her mother always talked so lovingly about her dead sister!

Is it any wonder that many people have a distorted view of God? They see him through the grid of their own expe­riences, and when those experiences have been hurtful, it contributes to a wrong impression of God. Many young people react violently when you talk about God as a Father. They are spiritual orphans—hurt, lonely, confused and separated.

Projecting onto God our negative experiences, deeply affects our ability to relate to him in the right way. We don’t want to hear about God or talk about him. Or, if we do want to know him, we cannot approach him with love and trust. The Bible speaks of this as a ‘wounded spirit’ or a ‘broken spirit’. The book of Proverbs says, ‘A glad heart makes a cheerful countenance, but by sorrow of heart the spirit is broken’ (Prov 15:13). ‘A man’s spirit will endure sickness; but a broken spirit who can bear?’ (Prov 18:14).

One example of someone with a broken spirit in the Bible is Michal, the daughter of King Saul. She was raised in an environment that was charged with friction and conflict. Her father was an impatient man, very insecure, and given to fits of anger and jealousy. No doubt she was deeply affected by his uncontrolled anger.

Saul’s jealousy of the future King David led him to devise a plot to kill David. As enticement, he offered one of his daughters to David for killing one hundred Philistines (the enemies of Israel at that time). ‘Surely,’ thought Saul, ‘David will be killed by the Philistines and I can be rid of him for ever!’

Much to Saul’s dismay David succeeded. In fact, he did more than that: he killed two hundred Philistines! Saul gave Michal as the ‘prize’ to David, but David soon fled from another of Saul’s fits of anger and in doing so left Michal behind in the city. Several years later David returned only to find Michal married to another man. David demanded her return, against her will and that of her new husband. In the end Michal is torn from the arms of her weeping husband and forcefully returned to David (2 Sam 3:13–16).

It seems that Michal is moved between the men in her life like a pawn in a chess game. My heart goes out to her. Given the environment in which she was raised it is understandable why Michal reacts to David with such bitterness. Michal’s bitterness towards David finally comes to a head.

As the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal the daughter of Saul looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart … And David returned to bless his household. But Michal the daughter of Saul came out to meet David, and said, ‘How the king of Israel honoured himself today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servants’ maids, as one of the vulgar fellows shamelessly uncovers himself!’

And David said to Michal, ‘It was before the Lord, who chose me above your father, and above all his house, to appoint me as a prince over Israel, the people of the Lord—and I will make merry before the Lord. I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in your eyes; but by the maids of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be held in honour, And Michal the daughter of Saul had no child to the day of her death.

(2 Sam 6:16, 20–23)

Michal was deeply hurt. Difficult as it was for her, and is for those like her, there is only one way out of the prison of hurt: forgiveness. Impossible, you say? No, not impossible. Difficult, yes, but it can be done. Many have done it and now they are free. I know because I have talked and prayed with many who have done so.

There are many modern day versions of Michal, but they don’t have to end up like her, or like Steve who was so consumed with hate that he was glad his parents were dead.

What makes the difference? The father heart of God. Only he can change us and heal us and give us wholeness. But first we need to look specifically at how we are hurt and how those hurts can block the Father’s love and prevent it from healing us.

2

The Father Heart of God

She was a shy teenager, a bit taller than some, perhaps. I was tired and the last thing I wanted to do was talk to a laughing teenage girl. I had just finished teaching a group of South African young people about God’s ‘father heart’, and I desperately wanted to rest. But something ­cautioned me that I should listen carefully to what she had to say.

Her question seemed almost pointless, but then I began to wonder if she wasn’t struggling to tell me something else. Maybe her question was just ...

Table of contents

• Grateful Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. The Wounded Heart of Man
• 2. The Father Heart of God
• 3. The Waiting Father
• 4. The Broken Heart of God
• 5. God Is a Loving Father
• 6. Why God Heals Wounded Hearts
• 7. How God Heals Wounded Hearts
• 8. The Saul Syndrome
• 9. Fathers in the Lord
• 10. Dealing with Disappointment
• Epilogue
• APPENDIX A
• APPENDIX B
• Recommended Reading