One Powerful Key to Healing Your Heart

Photo by Jakob Owens

“Sally,” a friend of mine, grew up in a household that didn’t know how to express love very well. She remembers hearing “I love you” from her parents only a handful of times. 

Specifically, she felt unloved because of her father’s absence. Though he was present physically, he always seemed to be focused on something or someone else. When she rode in the car with him, he rarely spoke a word to her and seemed preoccupied, but at social events, his personality changed. He was the life of the party, talking to every adult he could find.

Her young heart couldn’t help but internalize his lack of attention toward her.  

Why Is the Father’s Role So Important?

Our image of Father God deep in our hearts is formed by our childhood experiences with our earthly parents—our fathers in particular. If our earthly fathers were absent, distant, or harsh, we likely have come to believe the Lord is absent, distant, and harsh.

The father’s absence plays a profound role in how we think and live. In an article for Focus on the Family, Danny Huerta and Carol Cuppy write: 

If you have experienced your father’s absence—whether emotionally or physically—you undoubtedly feel angry and hurt. Perhaps you feel as if you’ve been abandoned, or that you need to seek affirmation in different places. You may also feel fear: fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of hurting your children in the same way your father hurt you.

Sally’s experiences as a child resulted in an unmet need for love in her life. Though she technically believed in Jesus and was saved, she didn’t know the Lord. She didn’t see Him as her Friend, Provider, and Healer. Instead, she saw Him the way she saw her father—someone who was not going to tell her the three words she desperately needed: “I love you.” She didn’t believe she could go to God and hear those words.

After graduating from high school, she began looking for the love she hadn’t been able to find at home. She met someone she liked, married him, and had children with him, but their marriage didn’t work out.

“I remember feeling as though my whole existence was to serve my husband and family,” she told me. “I felt lost, depressed, and invisible.”

She ended up going through a painful divorce, and for a season, she lived as a single mom with a broken heart. For years after the divorce, she didn’t feel cared for or loved, not even when she married a second time.

The Key That Changed Her Story 

What began to change Sally’s story? What will begin to change your story?

Sally’s whole life shifted as she started to know the love her heavenly Father had for her. That was the key and exactly what she needed—to know His love. She began to believe how blessed and loved she really was.

“It was during the darkest time of my life,” she said, “that I began to rely on the Lord. He became my strength and provided what I needed at every turn. Life wasn’t easy. I struggled to put food on the table and keep my home, but with the help of my parents, family, and friends, I began to thrive. It was during those years that I began to understand how much my parents did love me. Although they weren’t outwardly affectionate, they loved me with financial gifts, they fixed my car, they helped pay for my children to go to a private school. My relationship with my father grew very sweet during those years.”

As she discovered her heavenly Father’s love for her, she began to understand that she had been loved her entire life—even by her earthly father, who didn’t know how to express that love. She didn’t recognize his love until she recognized the Lord’s love.

How Does God Really See You?

Sally, like many people in tough circumstances, believed that somehow God was responsible for her heartache. She felt ashamed and embarrassed after the divorce and blamed God.

When we find ourselves going through devastation, heartache, and financial insecurity, many of us wonder why God allows it. But here’s what Sally has realized: the Lord blessed her in the years following her divorce, and He used the tragedy in her life to teach her about His love. Now she’s happily married, involved in ministry, and enjoying life the way God means for it to be enjoyed.

“Most of my healing came from knowing how God really sees me,” she said. “Nothing is ever wasted with the Lord. He uses failures and every struggle to build character. As Christians, the way to maintain your emotional health is to remind yourself how God sees you. And the Lord is crazy about you.”

His Heart, Your Life

Do you feel like the Lord loves you so much that His love surpasses the level of “normal” and enters the level of “crazy,” like Sally said?

What keeps you from believing His love for you? What hinders your ability to see yourself the way He sees you? Ask Him to reveal His love to you—and keep asking. Understanding His heart for you will change your life.

Your heavenly Father loves you more than you realize! For more on this topic, check out Becoming the One by Salomé Roat. The book is also available in Spanish.