My younger sister often tells me that I have ADHD, and while I typically deny the accusation, or rather diagnosis, or simply laugh it off and correctly state that I have never been diagnosed with the disorder, I can’t deny the fact that I have so many involuntary behaviors that are characteristic of the condition that any professional worth his or her salt would probably diagnose me with ADHD on my first visit. I bring up my sister’s unprofessional, though likely accurate, diagnosis of me because, while I try my best to pay attention, I sometimes get lost in thought during church and pay less attention to the sermon than what it deserves. Getting easily distracted is a problem that plagues me in most other aspects in life as well, which is why I generally have no less than twenty active projects at a time, and why I am continually starting new ones. I really do try to pay attention to the task at hand and not get distracted by another project, something I have to do later, or a shiny bobble in the distance, but unless what I am doing requires all of my attention, my concentration is split and my thoughts bounce back and forth inside my cranium like a ping pong ball on a hotly contested match, and as a result, I get more than a little squirrelly. Last Sunday was one of those times.

About midway through the sermon last Sunday, I noticed the little boy in the pew in front of me had rather hairy arms for someone of his age, and that set off a chain reaction of thoughts inside my mind. People often tell me that I say random things, but if they were somehow able to see the chain of thoughts from the originally topic or statement to what I said, it would make perfect sense. The problem is, the chain of thoughts takes precious little time, and in the space of a breath, I can derail the conversation from backyard barbecues to Wild Bill Hickok, and since no one can see inside my head and follow what I consider to be a logical procession of thoughts they view my comment to be completely random and irrelevant to the conversation at hand.

Anyhow, when I saw the boy with the hairy arms it reminded me of my childhood, which is something I often actively try not to think of, and I thought about how my arms were hairy when I was young and how it was simultaneously a source of pride and a source of shame; pride because it made me feel I was growing into a man, and shame because my father would ridicule me for having hair. You see, my father did not have any hair on his arms or legs, for reasons unknown to me, and he would often say that I could not be his son because I was hairy, by his standards at least, and he was not. My father also said often that I was a child of the devil because I had red hair, and that I was not and could not possibly be his child.

The thought that I could be anyone’s child other than my father’s is laughable though because we share so many phenotypic traits that, despite the differences in the color and abundance of our hair, I was more or less the spitting image of my father, for better or worse. The other reason I could only be my father’s is that not only would my mother never have cheated, but my father never gave her the chance and there is no doubt in my mind that he would have killed her if she had. Have I mentioned that my father was not a good man? Well, if not here it is. My father was far and away from being a good man, a good father, or even a good human.

Growing up, I wanted nothing more desperately than I wanted my father to be proud of me, and it wasn’t until I was an adult and my father was dead that I fully realized that he would never be proud of me and that there was noting I could have ever done to make him so. When it came to my father, I was always walking a narrow and dangerous trail with the unscalable precipice of pleasing my father on one side and the dangerous chasm of angering my father on the other. While it was all but impossible to please my father, it took no effort at all to anger him and the simplest misstep or perceived slight would send him into a fit of rage that he took out not only on the object of his anger but anyone and anything in the general area. I can’t count the times my father would fly off the handle and break nearly everything in the house, just to place the blame and everyone but himself.

When my father was angry with me he was not only abusive physically but he also told me that I was not loved by God and that it was therefore not likely that I would be saved. Since I was taught to respect my father, both my father and as a spiritual leader, I more often than not believed him. It is partially because of my father that I have been obsessed with religion my entire life, and also partially because of my father that I lost faith in God for a few years. There have been times in my life when I was absolutely sure that God is real, and there have been times in my life when I was absolutely sure that God was nothing more than a myth, but there has never been a time in my life when I could not care either way. Growing up, I read and re-read the Bible, trying to decide if my father was, in fact, correct or if I had a chance at salvation.

In addition to being an abusive and controlling person, my father was also an ordained minister and was extremely legalistic and made it clear that, according to his doctrine, no one could be saved unless he or she followed a certain prescribed set of rules, yet he claimed that we were saved by grace alone. Apparently my father failed to understand that works is the antonym of grace and if we can only be saved by doing good works than we have earned our salvation. As a child though, I did not have nearly the theological understanding or real world understanding that I do now, and whenever I did not understand something or if something did not make sense I took it to be a failing on my part. I was always afraid to ask my father questions because at best I would get a lecture I did not understand filled with words I did not know whose premise could be summed up by saying I was a sinner destined for hell, and at worst I would get smacked, or worse.

When a person grows up with an abusive father it is extremely difficult to view God as a loving father, and the problem is compounded farther when raised in a legalistic religion such as I was that teaches that the smallest infraction of God’s law will anger him and cause him to send you to hell in a handbasket where there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and apparently basket weaving, I guess. I never really understood the handbasket thing. One of the many things I would have gotten in a lot of trouble for asking about.

There are so many religions, including that of my father, whose doctrines teach that God is love and that we are saved by grace alone through faith alone, and yet what they teach and preach every weak contradicts that in a dramatic way. If it is grace plus anything else than it is not really grace and we are earning our salvation, and the Bible is extremely clear on the fact that we cannot ear our salvation. There are numerous verses on the subject, but one of my favorites is Ephesians 2:8-9 (NIV), “ For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.”

In a lot of churches, and even in a lot of churches that I have attended, there are a lot of people who have taken it upon themselves to be the rule police and take it to be their God given duty to ensure that everyone is following all of the rules, every single minuscule one, even though they themselves are undoubtedly not following all of the rules, not even the large or significant ones. Since Church is meant to represent God on earth, it is only natural to assume that what the church wants of us is what God wants of us, and as a natural result, we grow to think that God is just some absent, angry father that only comes home long enough to catch us breaking the rules and severely punish us for it. In other words, a lot of religions would have us believe that God is a cosmic fun hater who revels in punishing flawed humans for not following rules that are almost impossible to keep. No wonder so many people simply give up on religion, and God with it, and try to live their best life with little or no thought of the afterlife.

About halfway through my childhood I realized that I could either do what I wanted, have fun, and get beat for it, or else have absolutely no fun, do what I was told, and Get beat anyway. I figured that if I was going to get into trouble either way I might as well have some fun. I remember as a child reading the scripture where Jesus says that even the evil know how to give their children good gifts. Jesus said, “Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:13). I remember thinking when I read that passage that my father must somehow be beyond evil because he would have totally given me a serpent when I asked for a fish or a scorpion in place of an egg, or more accurately, slapped me, told me to stop being so greedy and self-centered and to stop serving the devil. Apparently it is a sin, according to my father, to expect a parent to fulfill even the most basic of societal expectations toward ones own children.

Even those of us who had the absolute worst fathers knows at least one person who had a kind, loving and generous father, and deep down we know that is what a father is meant to be. A good father will not chastise his child for falling down when learning to walk but instead will praise him or her for trying and encourage them to get up and try again, and though it may be difficult to believe, God is the very best father.

My father would not have done anything to make my life better, and even actively went out of his way to make it worse, and it took me a long time to realize that my father was not a good representation of what a father was supposed to be, and certainly not a good representation of our Heavenly Father, but Jesus died for me, not because I deserved it somehow but precisely because I didn’t. It was not and is not my love toward God that saves me but his love toward me.

“You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners Christ died for us,” (Romans 5:6-8 NIV).

God is not happy with us when we mess up, just like a good parent is not happy when his or her child makes a poor life choice, but he doesn’t stop loving us and wants us to try to do better. Instead of chastising us for failure, God praises us for trying and urges us to get up, brush off the dust, and try again. God is not an angry and abusive father, is not some cosmic fun hater, and he is not just an angry judge waiting for us to mess up, but our loving creator who knows the most intimate details of our lives and wants us all to succeed, and more importantly, he wants us to know how much he loves us and to love him in return. God loves you more than you can imagine and more than you will ever know in this life.