Fathers Day Special: Loving My Dad

So tomorrow is Fathers Day and I thought I would share with you my experience in loving my father.

I must admit I am not a big fathers day fan, more so a mothers day fan. Not because I love my father any less but because I know how much my mother values Mothers day and that makes me value it too…my dad even gets excited when it is Mothers day. Probably because if they are together they get to have breakfast in bed…so it is a bonus. Maybe I am not so into fathers day as much because I find my dad to be so hard to please. My dad seems to have everything he needs and if he really wants something he could buy it. So trying to think of a gift or a present for Dad is challenging, even for Christmas it is hard. But whatever we buy dad he loves and he is so good at letting us know he loves it.

Which brings me to my dads Love language , which I have learnt to believe is Acts of Giving . This is something that has taken me a while to learn and I am probably still learning it. A person whose love language is “Gifts” means they show their sign of love through giving gifts, money or anything. I think my dad got this love language from his dad or maybe it was a cultural thing…..THE PROVIDER kind of love. Now if your love language is something else like quality time or acts of service….trying to love or to feel love from someone who has a different love language can be very hard. One of my love languages is “Quality time” which is that I feel loved when someone spends time with me and I show love through “Acts of Service”. So on your birthday you won’t necessarily get a present from me, I am terrible at that, but you would probably get a handmade card or baked cookies and I would spend some quality spend time with you…somehow.

Now back to my Father-Daughter relationship. My dad and I have always loved each other and always will but over the years of growing up I have probably held a lot of resentment and anger towards my dad because I never understood his love language. Something I hope others can learn from. I would get frustrated that he would work so hard and I would get angry that he would put work in front of family, something I vowed never to do or marry into. All those late nights at the office, shorter holidays - all built up in me. For my dad it wasn’t necessarily an issue…(unless my mom made it an issue) because he was loving us in a different way…..providing for our education and for our lives. I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for my Fathers hard work. Yet why did I hold onto the lack of time?

I used to think it was a cultural problem….the fact that I didn’t feel like I had a true relationship with my father, but it wasn’t entirely. It wasn’t good for me to blame it on culture, because it made me upset that I was Shona (in a strange way). I would think that if I wasn’t Shona I would probably have had a better relationship with my dad. In my mind Shona culture didn’t enable a healthy father-daughter relationship. But this isn’t a battle that just Shona daughters experience….but many daughters.

But the problem was not my Father and it was not the Shona culture, it was me. I put so much pressure on my Dad for being the perfect Dad. I had so many unnecessary expectations from him that I found it hard to just love him for who he was. It wasn’t till the day that I got married and I heard my fathers speech that all my frustrations, resentments, and unforgiving nature melted into nothing. It had to also do with a lot of our conversations and discussions prior to the actual wedding ceremony. But I realised that night that I had expected my father to fill a gap that he was not suppose to fill and heal hurts that he was not designed to heal. A gap that only my heavenly Father could fill and a wound that only my heavenly father could heal.

I had heard it many times that we should not hold onto the things of this world but only onto God. But as a daughter I held on so tightly to my dad that I wasted time looking at the areas where he fell short and not the areas where he was my Dad. As the words rolled out of my fathers mouth, that night of our wedding, I just cried. I cried not only because every word he said was everything I wanted to hear my father say or that he called me a miracle child. But because I was so wrong in the battle I was fighting. He was destined to be my dad, to be the man that he is today and has always loved me and my family. I was the one loving him wrong. I loved him through daughter tinted sunglasses and not through Godly filtered sunglasses. I still have my moments where I fall back into my frustrations but my prayer is God helps me love my Father with all his perfections and imperfections and I now just thank God that I even have a father.
I love you Dad :).

Coming up:
This morning Avon and I had a meeting with Rachel and Ryan, one of our close friends at church. We were discussing the whole event of tomorrow….the visit of Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa, to our Church. Yup that is right folks the president himself is coming to God First. What is even more exciting is that Avon and I have been asked to help host him and Zuma’s Crew. This will be a private visit and it falls into our Celebrity series “What would God say to _________” Last week we did Madonna and tomorrow we are talking about ‘What would God say to Jacob Zuma?’ Each series has been pretty interesting and I have learnt a lot from them all. I am so curious to hear what PJ (our Pastor) has prepared for tomorrows preach. Jacob Zuma will be coming with his daughters. My thoughts are that his daughters have struggled with the same struggles I have faced. My dad could be the president of Zimbabwe and I would still have to love my heavenly father for me to love my own dad. Look out for tomorrow’s blog…..encounters with the president.