My father in heaven with Our Father in Heaven

“Our Father in heaven”.

What an amazing blend of sovereignty (Heaven is God’s place of unrivalled rule and reign and righteousness), and intimacy (that our God is that close to us!).

My father has been dead almost a decade, and it wasn’t an amazing relationship – indeed it was primarily an absent relationship -, though we loved each other deeply by the end.

But his own father – my grandfather – was no saint – a hard drinking, womanising Belfast shipyard worker.

I wonder how Dad experienced that? Dad was a mummy’s boy, – my grandmother’s “wee Raymond”, the youngest of a whole older brood some of whom survived him and some of whom died in childbirth.

I am fairly sure his father never told him that he loved him. That would not be an Ulster thing to do.

Yet love him he must have. Indeed my dad’s father dropped dead helping he and my mother move house as newly weds. He was holding one end of the couch. And then he wasn’t.

My mum tripped over his body as she came rushing out of the apartment elevator having been alerted by shouts. As an aside, my mum never knew her dad either. Mum – conceived out of wedlock – was fostered out the day she was born and her dad had fled her mother for another woman within the year.

Dad’s dad had died as an unbeliever, never knowing or longing for the Heavenly Father.

In a slightly bitter twist my own father also died the day that Jill and I moved house. Yet by that stage my dad was trusting his Heavenly Father.

I still remember the phone call I received from the aged care facility, after I’d sat up most of the night with him, placing a dampened cotton tip on his dry lips from time to time. I left late.

The next morning I was rushing to get a key handed in – our keys from our family home of 17 years – before hopefully heading off to the hospital again for a last goodbye.

Too late.

“Mr Raymond has died in the night,” said the lovely, kind Nigerian voice on the other end of the phone.

And that was it. Gone. But finally with a Father who loved him and expressed that most fully in the death of his own Son.

Which is a reminder that dad too needed the sovereign rule and intimate relationship of God, and indeed longed for it. And maybe the mistakes he made in his life were partly driven by that search.

So despite the gap between us, we both long for and need the same thing – the love of the Father.

Which should just soften us all a little bit as we either rejoice in, or perhaps lament, our fathers today. Our Heavenly Father knows our needs, cares for us, and should I drop dead moving house for my son (hope these things don’t come in threes!) he will welcome me with open arms.