Daddy's standard.

::  by Rachel McGowan [gallery link="file" columns="5"]

The reason I have such high expectations in my future husband is because of the way my daddy loves me.

I am my father’s first born, his only daughter, a full-blooded daddy’s girl, and the second most important woman in his life. When I was little, he used to call me “pumpkin”, and I loved it. It still slips out from time to time.

Days after I was born, he wrote a song for me on the guitar. It’s a sweet little melody that rocks my soul to sleep and fills me in the best ways.

From the start, my daddy has loved me well. He tells me I am beautiful at every opportunity. He always answers my questions, and he laughs at my jokes. He calls me to say hello and remembers the details of my life when I tell him. He fights for me against all odds; he would take any bullet for me, just to know I was safe and happy.

He supports everything I do. When I went off to college in another state, he helped me get there, so that I could have the opportunity of a lifetime. When I worked in a restaurant, he frequently asked me about work, so that I could feel purpose behind what I was doing. When I wanted voice lessons, he paid for them in an instant, so that I could grow my passion for music.

But the most important thing my daddy has every done for me is pray for me.

In the song I mentioned he wrote, my daddy asks God to keep me safe, to watch over my life. My daddy submitted me to the Lord before I was even cognitive enough to know it. And as I grew, he discovered my heart, and showed me where it aligned with God’s promises. He showered me with prayer, in any situation. He led the family in a way that put God first, above everything. He so passionately delighted in praising God, that it compelled me to know Jesus deeper. He pursued my heart over the first 24 years of my life in subtle and consistent ways that I am only now beginning to realize. And he never stopped getting to know me. He still takes my heart’s corners and points me back to God’s promises.

I wish I had known that if a boy couldn’t hold a candle to my daddy’s love for me, then he wasn’t worth a second of my time.

As I look back now, I can see ways in which I am sure I broke my daddy’s heart. I spent time with boys just because they were cute, boys who did not understand guarding my heart or preserving my purity. Of course he knew better than I did, but I did not listen to him. So he graciously and gently allowed me to expand the spectrum of my experiences, and allowed life to teach me lessons that only life can. He was there for me when my heart was broken; he stood up for me at all cost.

I have met the man I want to spend the rest of my days with, and I am not surprised that he reminds me of my daddy.

He is kind to all, giving to all, and loving to all. He supports whatever I do and he cherishes me as incredibly important in his life. He values my purity, and is a consistent source of grace, joy, and love. Our relationship is so sacred, so patient, and so focused on God’s promises.

But the most important thing this man does for me is pray for me.

He wraps up our evenings or our conversations in a prayer. He loves Jesus so furiously and passionately, that I am compelled to know Jesus deeper. His love for God inspires me. His showers of prayer strengthen me, and point me back to the meaning of it all.

My standards for a man were set long before I knew it. They were set before I even knew I wanted to get married. Before I knew what I would need in a relationship, before my heart would be broken by boys who were undeserving of my attention, before I undoubtedly recognized my own inner beauty, my daddy instilled those truths within me. My daddy planted deep-rooted seeds in my heart that harvested good fruit in my life. With constant, “I’m proud of you, exactly how you are.” moments, my heart knew what kind of ground to stand firm upon.

I know my worth because my daddy never let me believe I was anything less than wonderfully made; cherished; lovely; enough.

A girl is worth a daddy who resembles the steady love of Jesus, and she is worth a husband who reminds her of that love.

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Rachel is a writer, reader, laughter, dreamer, shower-singer and car-dancer who lives in Dallas, TX and works with hundreds of college students who are figuring out life. She is passionate about women’s issues, the struggles of faith, and is seeking ways to give a voice to the untold stories that have the potential to change lives. She believes in the healing powers of authenticity, acoustic music, and whole bean coffee.

She blogs at www.sincerelyrachelchristine.com and you can keep up with her here:

Twitter:: @_rachchristine Facebook:: www.facebook.com/whistlingrachel

4 guests, all girls.

From the very moment air first filled their lungs and released vulnerably, admittedly I knew fully well the expression 'in over my head'.  I held each of them with measured caution as if they could break too easily, but with an intrinsic familiarity I stood awed and somehow presently aware they were of me.  Bone of my bone.  Tethered by blood and strands that make us who we are. The joke common, ‘When will you have another?’  The boy.  That was their question.  We were done.  Complete.  And we had our fill.  Three little princesses distinct and beautiful.  The want of a boy shallow compared to another child.  If we ever had decided on another child, God would again have had opportunity.  Whatever granted would have been fully embraced, the responsibility fully accepted.  Still, it felt a bit peculiar to have all three children be daughters.

As a father to daughters, I pray often, as often as I think to.  There are so many questions, countless unknowns and variety of ways in which we do not connect.  I try as best as I can to empathize with them in tears that seem insignificant to me.  I don’t always get it.  They don’t always get me.  But we are here together figuring out life, piecing together the day now and ahead and loving each other deeper with each step.  Clothes don’t necessarily need to match, sometimes a fight is in order to right a wrong and feelings do get shrugged off as mushy when the air hangs too heavy.  You’d swear I’m raising boys, but I’m not.  I’m grooming little girls to hold strong the name that will forever be within them.  Not my name for the sake of my pride or my legacy, but theirs.  Ethos.  The essence of who we are now in this moment, who I am in their little opening lives, that is what I passionately desire to hold strongly within them.  Forever, they will bear the scar of death.  Once a wound open, now evidence of pain soothed and wounds healed by life.  A loss unbearable in my thinking.  The nights come when tears do fall pouring from their hearts wishing for life different, their mother’s death to be reversed somehow.  They do feel lost and unsure at times.  I can tell it in their eyes.  Gazing off only half alert, they step back into memory or sideways to fantasy.  But in this moment, they are found by me found by grace.  They are mine.  My responsibility to teach, show, lead and guide them to Him.  Them being mine does not leave me as sole voice in their lives.  There are others, women in particular, whose perspective and insight I value and admire.  And so, I want my girls to hear from them of struggles, insecurities and strengths from the hearts of women conspiring against issues weighing many down.

This week I will feature four such posts.  All will be guest posts written by women as a sort of open letter to young girls growing and struggling to find path in today’s culture.    Four friends sharing from their lives.  I am ever so thankful.

And with each post, I will add a bit of information about each.  I’d encourage you to read each day and then visit the guest poster’s website for more amazing perspective.

As a preview, three websites are listed below.  The fourth guest is a surprise:) felicitywhite.com || meshalimitchellphoto.com
 || sincerelyrachelchristine.com

what makes love live.

“Well, do you love her?”   Quiet. Blank stare. Long.

His look part anger, part remembering, part brokenness.  I had no wise words to offer greater than the realization settling back into his world.  Something blocked it all, what he once loved so much in his own way, her.  Little things had been building.  Arguments kept, offenses recorded in their minds, every identified wrong used as weapons to cut.  They were both injured and now insecure, quick to cut and easily run.  What brought them back each time?  Love and all that had been invested.  Life together.  Imperfect indeed and sometimes twisted, but not easily dying either.  And there he sat in love.

This could be anyone’s story.  It is one, but also the story of many.

Relationships crumble when scores are kept left to be settled one day, lurking in every wrong and hurt and offense.  What once was so beautiful and full and giving, now a pit sinking and a hole keeping.  Two people convinced things have irreparably changed live in a dead love.

Deepening relationships meaningful and lasting are complicated always.  Two individuals whose lives are colliding and merging in hopes of achieving the greatest sense of belonging and being hinges on giving.  Giving stands in direct contrast to getting.  One cannot get love no matter how persistent the attempt and/or pursuit.  You can’t make someone love you lastingly.  They choose.  You choose.  That’s how love works.  Just because you buy her flowers today does not mean she’ll love you tomorrow, or even later that evening.  She will undoubtedly enjoy the flowers, attention, effort and maybe even creative detail, but that’s like, not love.  Too many of us buy flowers but do not give love.  There’s a bit of truth and good perception to the argument that Valentine’s day is merely a consumer driven industry, a golden opportunity for businesses to capitalize on people trying to buy love, but only the smallest bit of truth and good perception.  The ones holding tight fisted and defiantly to this argument defending their lack of romantic effort on this day to a somehow believed track record of loving their wives in the everyday typically seems to boil down to tightening a screw here and there, taking out the trash most nights, keeping a good roof overhead and so on.

Love is about more than doing.  It is giving in every chance and never noticing who gave last.  Love is blind in this regard.  It has to be.  The moment you start keeping notice and record of who gave last, your hand empties held out waiting to receive.  Love withers.  Wilting in the waiting.

Some of the best advice I ever did receive in regard to relationships succeeding, Be quick to forgive, and forget.  Hurts are sticky and offenses are clingy.  Allow them room in your heart and love will be strangled to a death.  Forgiveness is what makes love live.

Forgiveness is typically defined as the process of concluding resentment, indignation or anger as a result of a perceived offense, difference or mistake, or ceasing to demand punishment or restitution.

Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.  Love doesn't strut, doesn't have a swelled head, doesn't force itself on others, isn't always "me first," doesn't fly off the handle, doesn't keep score of the sins of others, doesn't revel when others grovel, takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, puts up with anything, trusts God always, always looks for the best, never looks back, but keeps going to the end.  Love never dies.  (1 Corinthians 13:4-8, The Message)

one word. what is it?

[gallery link="file" columns="5"] One word, singular and bare, complete and roaming still, shadow cast deeply, widely into future sleeping.  A word, one, that stands tall and soars at its mention and holds hope, fear and all forgetting.  Cutting honest through cluttered thoughts and old vocabulary not aging well.

Manna ...what is it?

If you had one word ...only one, to speak defining love to her, to him, to them all over again, what would it be?  No explanations, just one word to say it all.  What is it?  No ornate words fluffing flat folded hearts, but one cutting straight to her heart releasing love new, holding strongly and true.

Where is it?

Is it gone, lost in shuffle, let go of during the thinness of life together, bruised in traded blows?  Or forgotten?  Or mistaken for smiles only?

Love is work always of the most beautiful and worthwhile kind.  Like a garden springing abundant, teeming life and fragrance captivating, love is made strong in the dirt where eyes can see no beauty.  It never just happens.  Love is made.

Be it a name or a place, a memory, quality or symbol catching, there is one word that finds them all.  One word synonymous with love that is more precise, calls it common and undoes those four letters, l-o-v-e, as generic, misstated and overused.

Find that word.  Work for its discovery, not for a day or a moment manufactured romantically, but a connection far deeper than the life we see and know.

One word precise and exact for love. What is it?

Your word.  One. What. is. it?

love in words.

hearts collidebruise | bend | break | bellow to be free to know at the edge holding hands finger in knuckle lost in grasp feet planted dirty want. to give. scenes and history blurred into one beautiful mystery escaping love is a weight heavy for one held easy by two a euphoric finding grandest completion mess of years compounding erased with glances belonging held by stronger than wanting desire longing to be found to be loosed to be free

“Take away love, and our earth is a tomb.” Robert Browning

the discipline of love.

“Love is friendship set on fire.”Jeremy Taylor

“Does everyone leave?”

My daughter, aged young, eyes wide observing, told me stories about friends’ families broken or breaking.  There was a curiosity in her asking.  A wondering of love building expectations to be held in her heart for now and ahead.  My hands clinched the steering wheel a bit stronger, and I sat a little stiffer in hearing her say of her friend believing her mom would probably return in a couple days.

“She said probably in a couple days her mom will be back.” “Do you think so, Dad?” “Does everyone leave?”

Our hearts diseased with self, infected with independence roam to be satisfied.  The satisfaction, we call love, our hearts happy and served and content in the shallow.  The deep undisturbed.  Years together do not equal love.  Close but not connected, no matter how long, is like neighbors under one roof with the option of moving never officially dismissed.  Love is not found in a bar or a car.  I heard that somewhere when I was young, and it’s actually great advice.  A precise uncovering of love truer than we are led to know.  We find love not where we look, but in the exact spot we allow ourselves to be found.  To be found can be quite troubling when we are too busy searching and grabbing and keeping for ourselves happiness.  So we synonymously connect sex to love and cheapen the chance, run eventually and our hearts shut a bit tighter.  Our hearts are not conditioned to love, but we want it.  Happy.  Everyone wants happy and that proves problematic.  The divide ever widening between wanting love and actually getting there.  Instead, love is romanticized and bludgeoned to an unrecoverable end with thoughts of smiles and sex and white picket fences forever.  What few know and fewer find is that work is required.  Love is discovered in death.  It takes a strong discipline to die enough for room to be made in your heart for another and you in theirs.  Both forever and lasting.

That’s the stuff of true romance.  Not trouncing lightly on rose pedals and lying easy under an always clear sky, but cutting through brush losing the path in steps, crossing rushing rivers in storming skies and forging up slippery slopes.  Love is discovery and adventure.  Love is sweat and swearing while you reach to pull out of moments when you only want to slide back into selfish alone.  Sitting at the dinner table colder than happy, ready to run, pushing out your clinched fist to open your hand to hold the hand known by your heart and wearing your symbol given on a much sunnier day, and allowing the moment to pass without words but together, there in the moment that is love, too.  That is right where love deepens and soars both at the same time.  In the discipline, love is truly found. “No, not everyone leaves.  But I want you to know that relationships are tough.  They take work and are not always easy but always worth it.  Always.”

Love is found in the giving not receiving.  It is in the receiving that you hold it as love holds a heart that was once two now lost singularly.

saving a little girl.

[gallery link="file" columns="5"] We are a family of four.  One dad, me.  Three daughters, them.  Four of us together learning life again.  The beauty peeking in every one of their eyeful glances and playful smiles strengthens me and opens my eyes to see.  They are leaning on a man to show them how to be women.  It is more appropriate than I ever imagined.  In many treacherous ways, it is harder to become a woman than it is to be a man.

A study found that on average, women have 13 negative body thoughts per day and that 97 percent of women in the study admitted to having at least one “I hate my body” moment daily. 80% of women who answered a People magazine survey responded that images of women on television and in the movies make them feel insecure. In one study, three out of four women stated that they were overweight although only one out of four actually were. Some of the pictures of the models in magazines do not really exist. The pictures are computer modified compilations of different body parts. One half of 4th grade girls are on a diet. 95% of individuals who diet as opposed to those who follow a healthy food plan will gain their lost weight back in one to five years. 81% of ten year old girls are afraid of being fat. A study found that adolescent girls were more fearful of gaining weight, than getting cancer, nuclear war or losing their parents. When preschoolers were offered dolls identical in every respect except weight, they preferred the thin doll nine out of ten times.

There it is.  That thing robbing happiness and fullness with ease and with little fight.  Everyone just gives in and maybe enables thieving hands to pull long and reshape lasting what little girls see with innocent, bruised eyes.  The sun only shines on thin.  Smiles made to effortlessly open the heart and bear the soul to broad possibility wear loosely intent on bowing always to generated images of people that never existed.  It is oppressive, servitude hanging the price of freedom in happiness on a sliding scale forever sloped unreachable.  It is tainting the divine.  Every eye, ear and nose, a content stroke of the creator’s hand.  Beauty skin deep, surface holding, mutes love true and absolute, actual gorgeousness of individual.  Shapes and sizes, height and weight, blemish, curves and lines, all beholding and unveiling beauty in individuality.  No two alike.  Neither should they ever be.  Every one holding beauty deep and divine.

The disease feeding on socially acceptable, preying on innocent while little hearts still warm in the nest.  Wings forming strong maimed as they stretch to embrace life before flight.  Cut all the same length.  The world is flat again.

As a single father of three little girls quickly approaching double-digit age, this breaks my heart and overwhelms and intimidates me.  Tears welled up as images of my little girls innocent and free moved through my thoughts.  I can only run in panicked circles warding off these thieves.  But that will buy little time.  The windows will break, glass will shatter and they will come in uninvited and despised.  They are coming.  I am waiting.  Images manufactured precisely.  Idols all empty little hearts aspire to please.  Models that don’t exist.  Women that don’t fit.  Empty little hearts always wanting to be filled hungry just to be held as they are, where they are, how they are.

My little women, do they feel the weight?  More frightening even, do they identify the wrong as right?  Are their little knees still scuffed with dirt and sweat fading too fast giving way to a thieving normalcy, a must achievable mold they must fit into?

Someone needs to yell something different, look into their eyes beholding and everyday grab that disease thieving by the throat, crush it underfoot and open the door to beauty actual.  Let the lies swarm and pick and invade.  I am the destroyer of deceitful beauty, treading heavy footed on every lie making room for itself in their filling little hearts.

Reading through this information my heart caught flame with fear and resolve.  Acceptable images of how women are said to be but were never intended to be or should be influencing all watching, capturing the attention of those needing to be caught.  It is not right.

How do you undo an empire but by one brick at a time?

I have three.  They will be loosed with the continual help of the one divine.