Daddy's Little Girl

Recently, our church attendees have been invited to share their “elevator pitch” – a few-minute version of their testimony. On April 14, I had the privilege of sharing mine, and I want to share it with YOU!

You can access an audio recording of my testimony HERE. But if reading is more your style, I’ve included the text of what I spoke below. May these words reveal Truth about who God the Father is, and may that revelation forever change your understanding of who you are in Him.

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I have a necklace I often wear that says “Daddy’s Little Girl.” I love being able to tell people when they ask that it’s actually about my Heavenly Father.

I started out this life with an earthly father who didn’t want me. But God did. So He gave my Mom and me neighbors who literally loved us into the Kingdom!

At age 4, I gave my heart to Jesus at Vacation Bible School and quickly came to love the Bible. Yet despite this growing relationship, there was a built-in angst inside of me throughout my childhood, a persistent nagging that I needed to earn my Father’s love.

When I hit my teenage years, I looked for that love in all the wrong places and found myself pregnant at age 16. But my Heavenly Father didn’t reject me. He said, “you’re still my little girl.” And He gave me the strength to make an adoption plan for my son because I wanted him to have a Mom AND a Dad.

You would think God’s grace to me in this situation would have broken my striving, but instead, I was even more determined to prove myself after such a big fall. God even gave me a Dad with skin on when my Mom married when I was 17, but by then the pattern of performing was established. Lauren Daigle’s song, “You Say,” captures the struggle I felt. It says

     I keep fighting voices in my mind that say I’m not enough
     Every single lie that tells me I will never measure up

But in His great kindness, my Heavenly Father didn’t leave me there. When I was in graduate school, He allowed me to enter a season of insomnia, like a two-year season because that’s just how stubborn I am, that’s how long it took for me to relinquish the fight, fall to my knees in surrender, and admit there is NOTHING I can do on my own to earn His love.

A peace and a rest settled over me, marking the beginning of a lifetime of discovering more and more how much He loves me, of freeing me to love others.

It was in that season of on-my-knees surrender that He called me. God called ME – striving, insignificant, fatherless me – out of a career in academia and into the ministry, to help others find freedom through the truth of Who He is and who we are in Him.

I don’t have to be perfect to walk in His calling, but every day I have to choose to die to the temptation to perform. When I find myself falling into a pattern of striving, it’s because I’m listening to the wrong voice, and the quickest way to calm the angst rising in my spirit is to pause and remember, as Lauren’s song continues, that

     The only thing that matters now is everything You think of me
     In You I find my worth, in You I find my identity.

Who is my Heavenly Father?

He is the one who defines me. He is the Daddy Who loves me and claims me as His own. I am His.