What If You’re shaped more by absence than presence?

Honestly, I just really deeply love the women who sit across from hurting people with open hands and honest hearts, the ones who refuse to rush past pain and instead make space for Jesus to meet us right there. That’s Willow Weston, author of Collide: Running Into Healing When Life Hands You Hurt. Willow tells stories the way I love best: with beauty and truth braided together, with laughter and tears never far apart. She’s the kind of woman who uses china on Wednesdays, throws unforgettable parties, and still shows up raw and real about insecurity, old wounds, and the long work of healing. She collided with Jesus in her own brokenness years ago and has spent the last couple decades inviting thousands of women to do the same. Storyteller, coffee-shop confidant, and author, Willow doesn’t offer tidy answers—she offers presence. And I’m so grateful she’s here, sharing from the tender, holy ground where Jesus meets our pain and makes all things new. It’s a joy to welcome Willow to the farm’s front porch…

Guest post by Willow Weston

I have an old Polaroid of little kid me holding a picture of my dad. The photo I’m holding is worn from use, and I carried it everywhere, right alongside Cookie Monster and my blankie. I had heard that I had a dad and would meet him one day. This was him—he looked black-and-white, with stringy hair and a scraggly beard. Until he came for me, I clung to an image of him.

When I was eight years old, Mom took me to the Greyhound station, plopped me on the bus, said, “It’s time to go visit your dad,” and waved goodbye. A few hours later, I stepped off the bus, and there he was—a practical stranger greeting me with cheer, humor, and a groovy little arm dance.

Our visits were awkward.

We didn’t have the father-daughter connection, and we were helplessly unsure how to get it. He had no idea how to be a dad, and I had no idea how to be a daughter. We were teaching each other, and our lessons were difficult.

My dad told fabulous stories and silly jokes. I found him clever, hilarious, and interesting. I got to buy fancy outfits, and he would take me to posh places and order exorbitant amounts of food and use really big words and ask, “Do you know what that means?”

“Have you seen pachyderms?”

“What’s a pack E derm, Dad?”

“Elephants, girl. Elephants.”

And then, as though the big words didn’t make me feel dumb enough, he’d throw out a small one.

“Boon. Know what a boon is?”

“Noooo, Dad,” I’d say, rolling my eyes.

“A boon is a gift. From the powers that be, kid.”

“Do you know what braggadocio means, Dot?”

“No, Dad.”

“It means boastful, arrogant.”

“Funny. Aren’t you being braggadocio right now, Dad?” 

I never knew what those words meant. What I did know was that I wanted this dad to love me, to want me, to stay with me.

I have spent years trying to put words to how I have been shaped by daily life without a dad, trying to understand the power of this absence. Maybe you have come up speechless about an abyss in your life too. The only way to articulate what my dad and I missed out on is that it looks like chapters and chapters and chapters we cannot get back, and their pages are blank. The story that could have been, that was supposed to be, was not.

Those of us who have experienced the blank pages left by neglect, death, separation, estrangement, infertility, debilitation, or crushed dreams share this ache.

“Absence makes the heart long prodigiously.”

Absence makes the heart long prodigiously.

Do you know what that means?

Prodigious means remarkably vast in size, extent, power.

You and I, we have a remarkably enormous longing that threatens to overpower us. We might not even know that we live out of it, trying to satiate the haunting emptiness.

In Mark 5, a woman wounded by the blank pages of her life collides with Jesus in one of the most beautiful, life-changing moments I have ever seen. Bleeding for twelve years, she was outcast and soul weary, having spent everything to get better only to grow worse—with every reason to believe God wouldn’t show up. She had probably told herself what I told myself every day in my blankie-draggin’, Cookie Monster–totin’, where’s-my-dad era: He probably won’t come.

That way, we don’t get disappointed.

We are hope temperers. This is how we self-protect. 

This woman did what we’re often too afraid to do. She fought the crowd to get what she wanted. She came up behind Jesus and reached for healing. In the middle of a crowd, He stopped for her. And then we witness one of the most healing moments one can ever experience.

Jesus called her “Daughter.”

There is not a more personal name a father can use than one that says, “You are mine. And I am yours.” The psalmist says God “determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name” (Psalm 147:4, NIV).

Our Father might call the stars by name, but He calls you “Daughter.”

One Sunday, I sat in church as the voices sang,

You’re a good, good Father
It’s who You are . . .
And I am loved by You
It’s who I am

The more they sang it, the more I wept. Forty-something, and I’m still the girl carting around this hope that maybe, just maybe, I will be worthy of showing up for. And maybe you are carting this hope around too. 

Lord, teach me how to be a daughter. Help me believe I am loved by You . . . That it’s who I am. Because it’s who You are.

Right there in like row twelve, I ached. I just don’t know how to do this.

I dug down deep, and in what can be a vulnerable move for all of us, I reached for Jesus like I saw the hemorrhaging woman do. Lord, teach me how to be a daughter. Help me believe I am loved by You . . . That it’s who I am. Because it’s who You are.

Absence makes the heart go prowling round, doin’ everything it can to fill itself. But the Father’s presence fills you so full that you need not long prodigiously because you know who you are. You’re His kid.

So if you’re like me and you don’t know how to do this, start by telling Him. Do the soul work of allowing your entire being to be loved by your Dad—your heavenly, perfect, present, good Father.

I don’t know what gaping hole absence has left in your life or what blank pages you wish were filled.

But I do know that you and I have a Father who lets us interrupt Him at any hour, pull on the hem of His robe, and heal in His presence.

Whether it’s the three-thousandth time or the very first, He invites us closer, and the first thing He whispers is, “You are mine.”

{Our humble thanks to Tyndale for their partnership in today’s devotional}