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Are Is God’s affection toward you a reality in your life? If so, consider yourself blessed. This assurance has been absent in my life since the night I became a believer in 1974 at the age of nineteen. Unfortunately since then, intimacy with God has been made up of short glimpses, not long, lingering gazes into the Father’s eyes.
An impenetrable curtain of fear hid God’s face from me. Similar to the same veil that hid God’s presence from an unholy people in ancient Jerusalem, a veil of unbelief hid God from me.
Made from embroidered linen, the veil in the Jewish temple was four inches thick. It hung at the height of sixty feet in the Temple, covering the access to the Holy of Holies. It took three hundred priests to hang it and it was beyond human ability to tear. No one but the High Priest could enter past it, and he, only once per year. The terrifying presence of God dwelt behind it.
During His last moments on the cross, Jesus cried out, “It is finished!” and when He breathed his last, the veil split open, top to bottom, revealing the Holy of Holies, the place where God dwelled. Like a courtroom judge who slams a gavel, the renting of fabric served as the Father’s declaration, “Separation is finished!”
Some of us come into the Kingdom broken, injured from hurtful upbringings. Our parents, in their own brokenness, unknowingly distort Father God’s true heart toward us. Like my sister Beth, once told me, “Some are given a Rolls Royce and some are given a jalopy to drive through life.” I was given the latter. My Beverly Hillbillies jalopy leaked oil, sputtered and coughed, and rattled its way down the human highway. Yet I wouldn’t trade it for a lean, mean luxury machine. That old “car” drove me to Christ! It was my upbringing in the Conkle family that gave me a hunger to be fathered. What the enemy meant for evil, God meant for good.
Brokenness provides an invitation to the grace of God. Such glimpses of grace throughout my life have paved a way of understanding into God’s love I couldn’t have seen otherwise. My walk with God has been made up with momentary glimpses of the Father’s love. Such glimpses would lift that veil of unbelief that shrouded His face. I believed a lot of lies about God.
I grew up in the chaotic sixties. The devastation of alcoholism, rage and neglect brought similar disorder to my home, defining it as what we now call a “dysfunctional family.” Authentic love was doled out sparingly, if at all. Affection, affirmation, the calling out of children, may have been experienced in other homes, but were absent in mine.
We three Conkle children faired better unseen, hidden away in our bedrooms, or out of ear-shot in our expansive Arizona back yard. When Dad came home (usually well after the dinner hour) his words never beckoned us for sloppy wet kisses. Instead, his command “Hit the cave!” meant we were to go to our rooms immediately. Children and double martinis never mixed well.
Dad’s rants had damaging effects on all of us kids. My ten year old brother, Steve, was told he was stupid. It was jokingly conveyed to four year old Beth, she needed a nose job. And I was only eight years old when my father told me I was fat.
When I look back on the photo documentation during those years, I realize I was not fat at all. Sandwiched between two scrawny siblings, I appeared larger than them. I was a healthy weight for my age and height. But parents write on their children and what was written on my heart had become indelible. Later in my teens, a twisted relationship with food brought years of yo-yo dieting and a poor self image in which I struggle with to this day.
My parents (both deceased) did not do anything horrendous. In a 1960’s American world, they parented with what they knew. Coming from similar upbringings, their love-tanks were bone-dry. When it came to us, there wasn’t much to give. Our practical day-to-day needs were met more than sufficiently. We were well-dressed, our home immaculately clean, and my very weight-conscious and thin mother possessed amazing culinary arts with delicious well-planned meals. I was taken to activities like Girl Scouts, ice skating and summer camp. Anyone inspecting our family from the outside might have mistakenly thought Ward and June Cleaver were at the helm. Not true. Something was very wrong. A gaping emotional chasm in their marriage brought all five family members dangerously close to disaster. Year after year, the breach widened with my father’s serial infidelity until eventually our family of five dissolved in the summer of 1968 when my father left permanently. A nasty divorce followed, defining our broken family. Mom, my sister and me, moved to California while my troubled fourteen year old brother Steve and my father, stayed in Phoenix, Arizona.
My sister and I, now California latch-key kids, escaped the tension in our previous home and things begin to get better as Mom made an effort to connect with the both of us. While struggling to regain her identity, she found her divorcee life-style appealing at first. Though an assortment of men flowed in and out of her life, her emptiness deepened.
Having just left a life of love beads, long sun-bleached hair and Hang Ten shirts, I embraced early adulthood, ready to get a college degree. After losing thirty five pounds in my first Weight Watchers experience, I abandoned my hippie look, cut my hair, bought some new stylish clothes, packed up my car and drove eight hours from Fountain Valley, California to Phoenix. Dad offered me a job and a full ride to Arizona State University. Excited about moving away from home for the first time, I landed in the Valley of the Sun where I enrolled Arizona State University as a business student.
After I settled into my off-campus apartment, an old elementary school friend and I got together for a night of bar-hopping. After a night of dancing and drinking, amazingly our conversation steered to the topic of prophetic end-times. Michelle insisted that Jesus was coming back soon and if I was interested I should read a fantastic book called The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey. As crazy as this sounds, while buying my textbooks the next morning in the student store, I encountered a display of this very book. I purchased it and voraciously read most of it that night.
Convinced I was not a Christian and my future afterlife would be spent in hell, I anxiously perused the yellow pages trying to find a church that would tell me what I had to do to be saved. I wasn’t really interested in a relationship with Jesus, but rather a fire insurance policy. Discovering a rule-keeping religion seemed the way to go. As long as I kept my end of the contract, God would surely keep His. Sort of like my childhood. Just be good and Dad won’t yell too much, or worst yet--hit. In fact, hiding in religion was like hiding with my books in my room whenever my father came home. It felt safe and familiar.
That weekend I received my “get out hell free card” in a little church in Tempe, Arizona. Father God graciously met me in this fragile place where the light of His Son remained hidden by my own faulty belief system. The college pastor from that church either didn’t convey the message that I was welcomed into God’s arms or I just didn’t get it. Instead, I walked away with a verbal list of instructions. If I had any bad habits like smoking and drinking, I needed to stop. Church attendance, a must. Oh…and premarital sex…that was a definite no-no. After awhile I tired of the rules. I backslid back to the bars. A failed romance convinced me to drop out of school and return to California. But I didn’t drift away from Christianity for long. Soon I found myself smack right in the middle of The Jesus Movement, a phenomenal revival that began on the west coast of the United States.
God was on the move with young people all across the country. While I had been in Arizona, my mother had become a Christian while my sister had given her heart to Christ a year before while at a high school after school Bible study. Both were on fire for God! They took me to their church, the very first Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Sherman Oaks, California. The place dripped with the Spirit of God. Keith Green led worship. Very soon we ended up in Orange County and begin a four year love relationship with Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa.
Pastor Chuck Smith’s expository teaching deepened our growth in the scriptures. I was blessed to hear inspiring believers like Corrie ten Boom and Brother Andrew. Something shifted in me. I wanted authentic faith, not rules. My quest led me to YWAM (Youth With A Mission) but despite the rich teaching, eight months on the mission field failed to alter untwist performance-based Christianity.
From my involvement with Bible studies, rigid church attendance, tithing and all the stuff from my human-doing list, the “religious activities” muffled the cry in my heart which wanted to know God as my Father. My so-called righteous pursuits didn’t satisfy a deep longing for intimacy with God.
That’s what lies do to you. You are convinced God is like your own dad. In spite of what you read in God’s Word, how He loves and forgives you, God still has the same personality and problems as your dad. As disappointing as it was, I accepted this as the best I would get this side of heaven.
Yet one evening, He broke through the darkness. It was a night I would never forget. |
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By Karon Ruiz
glimpse verb \ˈglim(p)s\ : to look at or see (something or someone) for a very short time |
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From left to right: the Conkle children circa 1962, myself, Steve and Beth. |
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Site last updated 10.31.23
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