For our home churching today we got on a discussion of faith and how people regard their prayers being answered. How we regard our blessings is dependent on the type of person you perceive your Heavenly Father to be. We often perceive our Father in Heaven through the lens of the dominant male father figure we have in our life – if our earthly father was a violent, pernicious, and malevolent person, your view of Father in Heaven is often the same. If you had a kind, loving, and forgiving earthly father, so is your Father in Heaven, in your view.
This tends to be a constant sticking point in conversations about our Father in Heaven. We hear conversations, discussions, talks, and lessons on who our He is. We read He is one way or another. We read and learn of His destruction of sinners and His punishment of the unfaithful, but then we read He is a loving compassionate person. For people with a type of earthly father that closely matches one or the other binary version of Heavenly Father, we can’t understand the other perspective, and our struggles in the gospel are aligned with those.
The metaphor I came up with is actually really relevant right now – do you see Father in Heaven as a firefighter or as a police officer? Right now there are societal and personal views of what these people mean in our society. If you happen to know the true nature of both types of first responder, then this metaphor may seem stilted. It is not, and I’ll get to why.
The thing is, both save lives, both risk their own lives for the sake of others, both are willing to give their lives for a stranger – something close to how Heavenly Father gave His only begotten Son to save us.
Societally, firefighters are seen as heroes and are almost always welcomed and regarded warmly. Why is this? Because we are having an emergency in our lives and we are asking for help. With firemen, they come when your world is in chaos because of a fire or medical emergency, and all of your precious things are in danger. They show up, put out the fire or save people, then leave people grateful for their willingness to risk their life to the best of their ability to protect you and your things.
Again, societally, police are seen as destroyers. When police are called for an emergency, we’ll say a domestic violence call, they are all also coming when your world is in chaos and at a low point. They enter into a world where their life is in danger, but their tools are to remove the violent person. Now they are destroyers because they are taking the breadwinner out of the house. They are saving people, but often not in the way the person wants to be saved – stop the problem and go away, just like fireman.
Many of us want the firefighter response from Heavenly Father when we pray. We want our prayers answered and want the blessings the way we expect the blessings to go – save things and go away. Often times we get the police answer to prayers – the blessings were not how we wanted them to be, and didn’t resolve in warm and fuzzy feelings. Heavenly Father is now the destroyer.
The thing is, just like police and firefighters, Heavenly Father is both destroyer and savior.
Firefighters have to be destructive too. They have to tear down and smash in order to put out the fire, but it isn’t as obvious when it is surrounded by the rubble of the rest of the destruction. Law enforcement is coming to save the family from violence and harm, but their way of saving leaves something that looks destroyed because now someone is missing from the family. The thing is, both types of first responders have to destroy something in order for healing and saving to happen.
The problem is we are stuck with the idea that Father in Heaven is one way or the other. Our expectations are jaded by our experience with an earthly father, or father figure. If your earthly father experience was good, then your view of Heavenly Father as a firefighter is foremost. When you expect the blessings to be the way you want (the firefighter way), and have the Heavenly Father as police result, this becomes very confusing. If your earthly father experience is bad, then your view of Heavenly Father as police is foremost. When blessings come the way you hoped they would come, because you expected to be let down, you become distrustful of the result and doubt what it is real.
Both lead to doubt, distrust, and a loss of faith. The problem isn’t in the nature of Heavenly Father, the problem is in our expectations of who Heavenly Father is. Heavenly Father is both the destroyer and the savior, which means we need to pray and ask for help as He sees fit, not as we expect. If we entreat Him and ask for help or blessings, the only expectation that we should have is that He will act as He sees best for us. We may not immediately see it, but it is always that way – if you stay faithful.
I learned in my Conversion 3.0 that Heavenly Father isn’t the man my father was to me, he is the man I am trying to be to my children, but perfectly. I trust in my Father in Heaven to know me perfectly, so I do as the scriptures advise us: submit to His will in all things. It is scary and hard, especially when it comes to flushing my expectations from the process, but every time I have done so – every time – the results were far better than what I could have expected or even hoped for.
