Daisy-Petal Hope

“He loves me, he loves me not.” I plucked the white daisy petals, deciding the outcome of my childhood crush.

Years later during a Sunday church service, daisies on my dress stirred those memories as I waited for my pastor-husband Mike to call me to the platform. He had asked me to share the long journey of praying for my father to come to Christ. First we watched the Billy Graham video “Hope for America—a Message of the Cross.”

As I waited for my cue, the white-and-yellow daisies on a background of black seemed to blossom on my dress. The Lord put in my heart an image of plucking flower petals and suggested the daisies that represented a young girl’s hope—hope for love—still covey a message of hope…hope found in the kind of love that goes to the cross.

As a young girl, I longed for love—especially from a father.

Starting in childhood we form beliefs about love. Beliefs about God often shape what we think about love. In The Knowledge of the Holy, A.W. Tozer writes, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”

There may be unbelief in God’s existence. We may believe there is a God but form wrong thoughts about him.

• God is a cosmic cop watching our every move, ready to bust us for every wrong turn and slap us with justice.
• God is a disciplinary father-figure punishing us for poor choices with stern consequences.
• God is like our earthly father who abandoned us physically or emotionally—perhaps both. We cannot count on him.

As a child I wasn’t sure what I thought about God, but as a teen I came to believe in God, who sent his Son Jesus to pay the penalty for my sins.

Every other weekend I saw my father, a self-proclaimed atheist. He often said, “People think there is a God, but there isn’t.” At sixteen, when I came to Christ, I started praying for my father to believe in God and accept Christ as Lord.

Sixteen years later when I was thirty-two, my father accepted Christ. He finally realized there was a God—a God who loved him and wanted him.

God is not the earthly pictures we paint. There is a God. He loves us. He is love. Love originated with him and from him. His love is not conditional on anything we do or don’t do. And his love is not based on some whimsical hope of the last flower petal landing on “he loves me.” It’s the hope of true love found in the cross.

Plucking petals from a flower, we can never say about God, “He loves me not.” It is always, “He loves me, he loves me. Jesus loves me, God, you love me, you love me, you love me, you love me!”

 

© 2014 by Karen Friday