God Is Our Father

Many years ago I had a pastorate in northern Maine where, on rare occasions, the temperature in January and February went as low as forty degrees below zero. If you have lived in those northern climes, you know that the frost gets into the beams of the houses and in the dead of night snaps with a bang and a boom, like a gun going off. It is a ghostly sound of frightening loneliness in the silence of the night. On one of these winter nights my wife was away on a visit, and my little girl was sleeping alone in the room across the hall.

She was awakened in the night by the booming of the frost in the beams of the house and cried from her room, in a frightened voice, to her father across the hall, “Daddy, are you there?” With an assuring voice I said, “Yes, Daddy is right here in his room.” Then, in a few seconds there would be another boom and bang, shattering the silence with the eerie noise, and again would come her frightened, childish voice, “Daddy, are you there?”

And I would reply in a voice as calm and assured as I could across the darkness, “Yes, darling, Daddy is right here near you, keeping watch all the time.” Then there would be a long silence.

Once more there would be a bang and boom. And this time I took the initiative and said, “What is it that you want, dearie?” By this time, thrice assured that her father was there in the darkness, she recovered her calm of soul and piped up in a sweet, tiny voice of reply, “Oh, nothing! It’s just a nice night, isn’t it?”

So, in all life’s fearful, frightening experiences, once we have acquired faith that God our heavenly Father is keeping watch over His own, the unknown and the unexpected event loses its face of terror. Like a little child, we rest in the calmness of knowing that our Father is near. But what if you have no heavenly Father?

Without hope and without God, you are left as a lonely orphan, crying on the doorstep of a vacant world where no one hears, no one cares, and no one answers. Those who come to Christ come to the Father and to the security of divine love. For Jesus said, “For the Father himself loves you.” (John 16:27). Only such a love can give us peace in a terrifying age of frightening threats and darkening fears.

This is why Christ calls, “Come unto me . . . and I will give you rest.”