Attaching to God
We sat in my study for our spiritual direction appointment—our chairs facing toward each other. She wasn’t meeting my gaze but was in thought and looking off into the distance. She had opened our time sharing with me about her deeply wounded and aching heart. Living in a fallen world with fallen people can leave us feeling barren and marginalized. After pursuing her with curiosity for a while, I asked, “How are you experiencing God in this season?” After pondering for a bit, she shared that she’s sensing a very tender nearness from God. As she shared how his nearness is manifesting she paused, then offered, but I don’t feel like it’s okay to share all of my feelings with him—like the anger I sometimes feel toward him.” I asked her why she doesn't feel the freedom to share her anger with him. After a pause she replied, “I guess I wonder who am I to talk to God like that?”
We sat in silence for a short time before I asked, “What if God’s deep desire is to attach to you? How would that re-shape your perspective on bringing your anger to him?” She rested in my question. Her eyes became glossy, “I think he’d want me to share all my heart with him. He’d feel so safe that I would want to invite him into these parts of my heart. I’ve never known that kind of safety.”
I shared with her that before God was a sovereign Creator, he was a Father loving his Son in the sweet fellowship of their Spirit. God has not always been a sovereign Creator, but he has always been a Father pouring his affections into his Son for his Son’s sake. And the Father and the Son desired to share their love with others. Through the Son, we are grafted into this shared life of love. Our problem is that we come into the family as adopted children whose vision of our Father is shaped by our formative experiences in a fallen world. These default visions affect our capacity to attach to him, how we relate with him and others as well as our transformation into the loving image of his Son.
In Renovated Jim Wilder writes, “The only kind of love that helps the brain learn better character is attachment love. The brain functions that determine our character are most profoundly shaped by who we love. Changing character, as far as the brain is concerned, means attaching in new and better ways. If the quality of our human attachments creates human character, is it possible that when God speaks of love, “attachment” is what God means?...Salvation through a new, loving attachment to God that changes our identities would be a very relational way to understand our salvation: We would be both saved and transformed through attachment love from, to, and with God.”
When we adopted our daughters, they had lived many years in another culture with another unconventional family in which they’d lost their birth mom at tender young ages. When I became their mom, I soon realized they had overlaid the faces of their previous moms atop of my face. It is a gritty road we walk as I seek to peel away the layers that hide my face from them. I think one of the greatest costs to these “masks” is they block our attachment to one another. These ideas have prevented (and still do) them from believing that I am for them rather than against them. How I ache to close this chasm of detachment so they would freely come to me and share their lives and heart with me. And when there are moments they seem to see me more clearly and invite me to move closer to them—these moments have carried me through the years. I can only imagine how the Affectionate Father exults in these moments with his children, how they carry him through the years of waiting for us to invite him into the raw, authentic stories of our hearts. Our invitations to him to attach to us must cause his heart to burst open.
I have tasted an inkling of God’s ache to attach to his adopted children. And I have been the child who entered into my relationship with him unknowingly overlaying a multitude of false masks over His face. These “default visions” of God have kept me behind walls of self-protection at times, wondering where in the world He’s gone, withholding my affections, and assuming he is not for me but against me or indifferent to me. It is a gritty road the good and beautiful Father walks as he seeks to peel away the layers that hide his face from us.
As I brought the session with my spiritual directee to a close, I asked her what was bubbling to the surface for her after all that we had talked about. Again she paused, then with a deep exhale her shoulders rested, “I feel lighter. I feel the freedom to share all of my heart with God and desire to do that.”
How would seeing God as a loving Father who longs to attach to you before acknowledging that he’s a Good and Beautiful Sovereign Creator affect the way you relate with him?