I call him Papa. I know the word sounds foolish coming from the lips of a 25-year-old woman, but wait until you hear it spoken by a man in his mid-40s. It takes you a second before you realize we’re referring to God.
No, it’s not childish ignorance, not a sign of stunted relational development. It’s a deliberate choice made by adults who have been re-introduced to our Heavenly Father - and we’ve found that he means what he says. “What we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands . . .” The God of the universe. Otherwise known as Papa.
Offended? I was. My dad was a legalistic man who believed that love was control. I learned to view God that way. But then I met two Colorado ranchers who were raised by an alcoholic father. I met a man whose dad was vulgar toward everyone, especially women. I met a woman whose father had never believed in her or encouraged her to grow. All of them still called God “Papa.”
I remember the first time I heard it, from the lips of a pastor whose own dad had never attended his church due to doctrinal disagreements. The pastor said it so plainly in the middle of a conversation. “Papa.” Based on the context, he could only have been talking about God - but he said it so matter-of-factly, without bothering to explain it. Like I would innately understand. I realize now that I was designed to.
The entire body of Kremmling Community Church, it seemed, knew God as Papa. It seemed out of place for someone to call him “God” - like sawdust on the tongue. I was dumbfounded. It was one thing to hear middle-aged adults use such an infantile word. I almost felt embarrassed for them. But then to learn what their own experience had been with that word, with that broken human being they had called Papa from childhood - so much pain and confusion in each story - how on earth would they now assign that name to God? Why would they not delineate as much as possible between God and their earthly Papa who was nothing like him?
I can see Krik’s face now, contemplative, as he sits on the piano bench. “I feel like Papa is inviting me into a season of rest,” he says. Simple, solemn. Just like any other sentence. He doesn’t stumble on the word. He doesn’t smile sheepishly as he says it. He doesn’t wade through traumatic flashbacks. It’s like this Papa he speaks of is sitting right there in the living room with us, and it would be ridiculous to call him anything else.
“Abba.” The word I’d always seen suddenly jumped off the page one day. “For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons and daughters by which we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’” I knew this was the Hebrew word for Papa, or better yet, Daddy. I’d even heard a few men call him that, too. It made my skin crawl.
But I knew these men and women weren’t contriving anything. There was no piety, no posturing. This was simply a reality that couldn’t be stolen from them. For they had been fathered by God.
Adoption is actually a spirit, I realized. And it produces the gut-bursting cry of a vulnerable child. The greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
It flowed through them like a river. The moment I met Robbie and Kelsey, I felt I was meeting the father and mother I’d always wanted. They invited me and the other Bible school students to lie down on the chairs and soak in Holy Spirit’s presence. Then they prayed over us - but not from a distance. They touched me. They looked into my eyes and laid their hands on my shoulders, my arms, my head. Kelsey’s hand brushed aside my hair as she whispered a heavenly tongue, whispered God’s promises for the future. I still feel the syllables sparking along my spine. My eyes stung hot. Robbie locked with them and smiled, “Welcome home.”
I didn’t know how much I’d wanted this. I felt the pull in my innermost being - Abba? Father? Who are you?!
I washed up on the shore of that tiny ranching town, battered and bruised, frantically clinging to a thread of hope that this was real. I’d been hunting real my whole life. The Spirit of adoption had to permeate my thick skin slowly. He used many hands. Hands wiping my tears away, anointing my forehead, pressing my palm, braiding my hair, cradling my head. Arms holding me safe for a long time - longer than I felt I deserved. Eyes seeing me, seeing past my fear and sabotage. Ears listening, even when my words were weak and awkward. Voices asking me questions no one had ever asked. Speaking life into things I thought were dead. Calling me a daughter, a sister. My callouses melted. These hands surrounded me, and I felt the touch of Papa.
I had nothing to offer, but he found me. I experienced Yahweh as my father, my mother, my brother. These people protected me, fixed my car, took me shopping, played broomball with me, stayed up late to talk, visited me at work. I was adopted into a family. And in four months, Papa healed years of brokenness. His Spirit burrowed its way into places that had been governed by fear. His perfect, tangible love drove it out.
I was surprised on the day that the exclamation marks erupted from my belly. Abba! Father! I suddenly found it natural to cry out to my Papa. I found myself lost outside of his presence. I had forgotten how to not abide in the vine. The life I now lived, I lived inside of him.
Why had I had such a visceral reaction to this word? In truth, adoption was the place of deepest vulnerability. I had figured out how to claim the position of daughter through my words, my actions - everything external - but had no clue what the experiential reality was like. I’d had no reference; in fact, I’d only had a pain model.
But isn’t the place of deepest vulnerability also the greatest horizon of redemption? What an abyss for Yahweh to fill, and what glory when he proves to be more than sufficient. For he is not only wide enough and long enough, but he’s high enough and deep enough. The gaping caverns of our suffering are the very prize he’s after.
I remain convinced that his chosen way of driving out the spirit of slavery is through family. Perfect love drives out fear. It’s a scientific law. Our rawest wounds and our true resurrection transpire within the space of family, because we were made from and for family. I was cut from the cloth of Yahweh, a family within himself in three persons. He expanded into a fractal physical form when he made my flesh as a dwelling place for his spirit of adoption. My enemy came against that spirit before anything else, trying to rob me of my very design. He started speaking lies even through the walls of my mother’s womb. That’s why surrendering to the spirit of adoption, to Papa, is the most vulnerable thing I can do - and the greatest gift I can give Jesus. The very reward of his suffering.
God as my father, as my mother, as my brother was never supposed to be something I understood intellectually. It surpasses knowledge. It is practical, not positional. It looks like something. It looks like real human beings surrendering corporately to the spirit of adoption and allowing him to transform their “church community" into a family. A family that derives its name from the Father himself. First receiving his love and all the workings of his tender undoings, they then look to each other and reckon with the repercussions of this boundless love jointly. They dive headfirst into the messiness of life on life. Covenant. A white-knuckled promise to one another - “I will not leave you -” digs trenches for the river to flow through. The dams are broken and the flood lets loose. And in that torrent, souls are washed white for their wedding day.
So bring the shattered. Bring the flowers with bruised petals. Watch him fiercely mend the unmendable with the healing touch of his physical temple.
Exodus 34:29