Daddy's Little Girl

From the moment that he had cradled her in his arms at the hospital and crooned the words softly, she had always been “Daddy’s Little Girl.”  He was the one who bought her the frilly little dress to bring her home in.  He was the one who taped the pink bow to her tiny bald head.  He was the one who later curled the beautiful dark hair that grew there.  Even as she grew into a young woman with the fire and beauty of an untamed horse, she was still “Daddy’s Little Girl.”   When her heart was broken, as it frequently was, a good cry on Daddy’s shoulder and a late-night talk could put it back together again.

But that was back then.  She was no little girl anymore, though her clients sometimes called her that.  And, her heart was not broken - it was dead: stone-hard, tomb-cold, unmoving-dead.  Years and worlds had come and gone since she was Daddy’s Little Girl.  It seemed to have been a life-time ago,  even though she had only missed three semesters of school.  But each night was an eternity - an eternity of living death. She had turned her back on Daddy’s world and the world she was born to share with him.  They truly lived in two separate worlds now, though she knew how it must break his heart.  Daddy was a church-man, she was a street-girl.  Daddy walked in the light, she worked the nights.  Daddy talked about heaven, she lived in hell.  Daddy always had hoped… but she was hopeless.  

So they were worlds apart - two worlds separated by an unbridged, empty chasm of her own guilt and shame and hiding.  Separation from her Dad was the last thing she had wanted.  In fact the night she fell into this world, her first thoughts were to call home to Daddy and to confess it all and cry and ask him for forgiveness, and hope he could make it all right.  But her guilt and shame drove her deeper into her world, and she was afraid to shatter her father’s world by reentry.  So, she lost herself in the world of the neon sun.  There was no exit , no return to the light.

She was chained to a needle and a need.  She was a prisoner of the darkness, and it was within her.  She had lived in the darkness so long that she no longer feared the darkness of death.  She had been falling to the bottom so long, she no longer feared the bottomless pit.  In fact, it now looked like an escape hatch rather than an eternal prison.  She planned her escape.  One more job would buy enough stuff to pump the liquid death into her veins. 

She hit the street with a strange sense of hope that night.  It was the first time she had any stir of that other-world emotion since falling here.   As she watched the man  walk down the sidewalk toward her the hope grew.  He didn’t look like he fit in this part of town.  That no longer surprised her, most of her clients didn’t fit here.  They lived in a different world, at least at first.  They only visited this side of town, little realizing that the road home always grew longer.   Everything about this guy was from the other side - the cut of his suit, the way that he walked, even the fact that he held his head and shoulders up.  One final move betrayed him as an alien - he stepped into the light and looked directly into her face. With that look her nightmare came true - her greatest fear and wildest hope.  “Daddy?”  She cried.  She was looking into the eyes of her father.  She tried to clear her head and reason with herself that this was just that dream again.  But it was no dream.  She was standing face to face with her Daddy.  His face was creased with wrinkles of care and his cheeks were wet with tears, but it was him.

“Daddy.  What are you doing here?”

“I came to get my little girl.”

“But Daddy, you don’t know what I’ve done…”

“I do.”

“But, you don’t know what it would do to your life.  Your church, your…”

“I do, and I’ve already left that behind to find you.  I have nothing left to lose, but you.”

“But Daddy…”

“No honey.  There are no “buts’.  And, the only ‘if’ is ‘if you will.’  Will you?”

“I can’t…”

“Remember what I told you as a little girl?  With God there are no ‘can’ts’?”

“Will you?”

“…I will.”

“Let’s go home.”
               
Jesus said,  "For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost"  (Luke 19:10). He came.  He  sought.  He paid the price for your sin by His death on the cross.  Will you accept His forgiveness as a gift of love that you can not earn, but only accept?