“That’s My Daughter” – Knowing Our Identity Lies In Love

“That’s My Daughter” – Knowing Our Identity Lies In Love

It takes a lot to offend me, but it doesn’t take a lot to make me defensive of the ones I love.

A week ago, I felt defensive of one of these loved ones. I even had a dream where I called out the person doing the offending.

But when I awoke and replayed through the dream, and all the different ways I had forced that person to apologize, a still, small voice spoke to my heart: “That’s my daughter.”

If I am defensive of my loved ones, how much more defensive is the One who created them? Furthermore, God also created the ones doing the offending, so if I am calling them out in a harsh way, I am also offending God.

Ouch.

I can no longer take pride in my fierce “loyalty,” for I have seen that this loyalty does not exude the Fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

If anything, that loyalty makes the matter worse.

Now, I do believe there is a time for justice, and I would never sit back and let someone hurt my children just because the person inflicting pain is also a child of God.

I am talking about the surface issues that arise because of pride masked as insecurities: the same pride that would have exacerbated those insecurities if I had jumped in to defend my loved one.

Instead, what if I lived out Scripture and turned the other cheek by praying for the person doing the offending? If they are hurting someone else, they must also be in pain. If they are hurting someone else, they must not know that their identity lies in perfect love, found through the only One who is perfect.

Humans can never fulfill the longings of our heart because that longing is meant to drive us to Jesus. He placed that hunger inside of us, so we can never be wholly filled with anything but Him. Therefore, when we look for a substitute in our fellow man, we become frustrated when they fail us and then use that frustration like a weapon.

But if we are finding our identity in Jesus, it frees us to walk in the authority of His perfect love, and we can then love others perfectly—even when the world says they’re doing us “wrong.”

This revelation is a new one for me, but it is transforming my life. I can no longer have a knee-jerk reaction of judgement when I see women and men as God’s daughters and sons.

Instead, I should do for them what I do for my own daughters, and that is to call forth their gifts, their value, through His perfect love. I witnessed this when my eldest daughter and I walked up to a coffee shop while my middle daughter practiced for her dance recital.

My daughter sat at a table to do her art homework while I put in my order. I turned around to check on her and saw a woman leaning over the table to look at my daughter’s drawings. As an artist and art teacher, she was blown away by my daughter’s work.

I sat back down and listened as this artist continued calling forth my daughter’s value. My daughter beamed beneath such praise, and it was as if I could see those words watering the creative seeds inside my daughter’s heart, and now they were beginning to unfurl and bloom.  

This picture has remained with me because it is what I want to do. But I believe it is what we are all called to do.

Just as my capacity for love has grown with each daughter I’ve had, God’s love never reaches its limit. There is always enough to go around.

Because we are daughters and sons, we do not have to act like orphans. We do not have to participate in a dog-eat-dog world where we are constantly trying to knock someone down so we can get to the top.

We can do the opposite: encouraging other people’s gifts, encourage their value, so they glimpse perfect love through us and want to know how they can get closer to it.

We were placed on this earth to love, not to spend our days making a name for ourselves or being offended or defending.

Let’s call forth love, my friends. How can we begin?

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