During the summer, one of the things I love to do is take time to read. Perhaps it started with a hunger to know more through reading. In the summers following the fourth grade to early junior high, I joined a program at the public library to read a book each week.
As I read, I wanted to read more. By the time I entered junior high, one particular author spurred my interest above all others. His books were short in comparison to many others. Maybe that was the attraction. There were no pictures, or comic heroes. However, the depth of his writing captures my imagination even to this day.
George MacDonald (1824-1905), Scottish novelist, pastor, and author of children’s stories and mysteries, was admired by many of his peers, like C.S. Lewis, Mark Twain, J.R.R. Tolkien, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Walt Whitman. Today, many American libraries ban MacDonald’s work due to its faith messages, but honest literature assessors rank his works high among the classics of juvenile literature.
In 1850, he was made pastor at Arundel, West Sussex, England. MacDonald resigned, however, after three years of not living up to the congregational authorities’ expectations for more dogmatic sermons; he also was accused of heresy. Rejecting his Calvinist upbringing, he came to believe everyone was capable of redemption.
MacDonald married Louisa Powell in 1851 and they had six sons and five daughters together. His large family provided a wonderful laboratory for writing to the heart of children about things that matter in life and faith. Of course, his marriage of 50 years also gave him powerful insights that helped him create depth of personality in his writing.
Most of his work is out of print today. However, used books abound, especially those edited by Michael Phillips and published by Bethany House.
In one of his essays, there appears a special note about the Heavenly Father’s love for people and a Father’s love. Excerpts appear appropriate for Father’s Day:
“Abba, Father!
‘— the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.’ – Romans 8:15.
“The hardest, gladdest thing in the world is, to cry ‘Father!’ from a full heart . . .
“The refusal to look up to God as our Father is the one central wrong in the whole human affair; the inability, the one central misery: whatever serves to clear any difficulty from the way of the recognition of the Father, will more or less undermine every difficulty in life …
“God can no more than an earthly parent be content to have only children: he must have sons and daughters – children of his soul, of his spirit, of his love – not merely in the sense that he loves them, or even that they love him, but in the sense that they love like him, love as he loves …
“In my own childhood and boyhood, my father was the refuge from all the ills of life, even sharp pain itself. Therefore I say to son or daughter who has no pleasure in the name Father, ‘You must interpret the word by all that you have missed in life. Every time a man might have been to you a refuge from the wind, a covert from the tempest, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, that was a time when a father might have been a father indeed …
“All that human tenderness can give or desire in the nearness and readiness of love, all and infinitely more must be true of the perfect Father – of the maker of fatherhood, the Father of all the fathers of the earth, specially the Father of those who have specially shown a father-heart …
“Never could we have known the heart of the Father, never felt it possible to love him as sons, but for him who cast himself into the gulf that yawned between us. In and through him, we were foreordained to the sonship: sonship, even had we never sinned, never could we reach without him …
“The world exists for our education; . . . the whole creation works for the development of the children of God into the sons of God. When at last the children have arisen and gone to their Father; when they are clothed in the best robe, with a ring on their hands and shoes on their feet, shining out at length in their natural, their predestined sonship; then shall the mountains and the hills break forth before them into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Then shall the wolf dwell with the lamb, and the leopard lie down with the kid and the calf, and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.”
(“Abba, Father!” published by Longmans, Green & Co, London, 1886, revised somewhat into modern English by Jim Mellis, 2014.)
Praise the Lord for earthly fathers who compassionately, lovingly pointed us to our Heavenly Father.