Who Killed My Dad?

By Dorothy Mitchell

My father is not in the best of health right now, but he is getting better. The primary spiritual culprit behind the attacks on his health was found a little while ago.

So it puzzled me that this month in August/Elul I began repeatedly hearing a lyric from the notorious anime Kill la Kill, a show that, in a nutshell, follows a girl on a quest to avenge her father’s murder (and stumbles on a piece of rejected armor): I’ve got to find out who killed my dad; I hear the voice of you in my mind...

As I pondered this all month, I assumed that God was saying I needed to figure out who or what had been plotting against my earthly father, but finally it dawned on me that perhaps I was wrong. He might have been talking about himself. I accepted Jesus and asked God to adopt me into his family a long time ago, so God is also my Father. Jesus knew him as Father and taught us to pray to him as Abba (Daddy) so we could know him as Abba Father.

God wants to be close to us. Sometimes, the enemy of our souls plots against God through us. The easiest way to get to us is not to let any relationship begin in the first place. Sowing doubt and sabotaging trust and relationship in us as early as possible makes sense to the rebellious ones. That’s what would surely hurt him most.

I spent a good deal of my early life acting and feeling loyal but detached from God, as if God were dead, uncaring, unreachable, immovable — the unknowable, ineffable, deist watchmaker god. But who gave me that idea? Who told me he was dead? Who deceived me and killed his image in my mind, and made it so I couldn’t approach him as Father, let alone as Daddy? Sure, the culture put words to the idea, and egged it on, and sure, my own earthly father wasn’t perfect. But it was completely blown out of proportion.

God’s not dead, he’s surely alive! He’s living on the inside, roaring like a lion...!

I also assumed that it was ME who needed to figure this out. But I think I was wrong. I realized that God has his own detectives (I’ve seen him deploy them); I merely needed to give him permission to use them.

Father God, I ask you to find all those culprits, plotters, and schemers who attempted to poison your image and sow discord and distrust into my relationship with you. Release your divine detectives. Track all sabotage back to its source. Account for every blow dealt against me and my earthly father and the fathers before him on earth and between earth and heaven in an attempt to distort relationship between me and my heavenly Father God. I ask you to take the culprits to court and deal with them most harshly. I give you my record of wrongs and ask you to get justice for me. I am sorry for any way in which I agreed with them knowingly or unknowingly. I renounce them completely. You are a good father. You are my good daddy. You are love. I reject all false blueprints or mappings that were superimposed over your image in my heart. Please tear them down and take them away. I want to know you, God, the way Jesus knew you, too.

Life! What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

By Susan Mitchell

A friend of mine who is both a doctor and an engineer once told me, “It’s not a surprise that people are born deceased in utero or with defects. The miracle is that with all the complexity involved in the nine months of gestation that they ever arrive into the world with all their organs and appendages intact and able to kick, breathe, scream, eat, and poop!” 

And it shouldn’t be a surprise that we end up as tweens, teens, adults, and seniors with an ever-growing list of life-altering traumas. 

Even in the womb, some fetuses can absorb the trauma of hearing parents yell and believe they’re unwanted, or suffer from alcohol, drugs, or poor nutrition coming through the umbilical cord and feel the world is an unsafe place. If you resonate with that kind of rejection, abandonment, mistreatment that goes back even longer than you can remember, you might want to learn more from the https://cfreedomlife.com/freedom-quest.html psycho-theological videos on Conception, Intra Utero Development, Birth Part 1, and Birth Part 2. 

In infancy and toddlerhood, there can be all kinds of attachment issues. These may not even be what we consider abuse, that is, Trauma B for BAD things people do, like physical, sexual, or verbal abuse. They could be all the ways we simply didn't get what we should have gotten, that is, Trauma A for the ABSENCE of good things like hugs, affirmations, good nutrition, attention, and so on. Professionals believe Trauma A can be most confusing and damaging for our self-image because it’s harder to realize that the absence of good things is not normal, especially when people dismiss the pain: “Oh, that’s not so bad. Suck it up!"

As tweens and teens, life can feel so emotionally charged that we almost universally make some sort of vow of stoicism, and then as adults we wonder why we don’t feel anything. Then there’s the sense of FOMO fueling a brand of anxiety that is afflicting the current generation as never before, and leading to inwardly self-destructive behaviors or outwardly damaging attacks on their social spheres. 

Then adulthood brings on all sorts of responsibilities in various circles of influence. If we haven’t properly addressed the issues of the first 25 years, we may relive it and inflict it on others, or receive continued traumas that perpetuate the patterns we still see as normal. As adults, we have more power and resources to hurt each other, so betrayals and unfairness may be perpetrated on us if we don’t learn how to dismantle the structures that keep us in stuckness. 

Finally, retired seniors have time to kill, freedom to do whatever! But so often in the transition from the structure of work to the openness of home, our identity, purpose, health, resources, or connections get compromised, and we lose our way and our momentum. 

So, lots of things can go awry in life, and we have experience with tools, processes, and resources that address many of them. You can get unstuck. You can learn new ways of living in freedom. We can help.