I was standing in line at the store this week when a four-year-old girl reminded me of something I’d quietly forgotten — what first love with the Father actually sounds like. Not rehearsed. Not composed. Just one word: Daddy.

Most of us who have walked with Christ a long time have slowly traded running for working. Nearness for effort. The arms-around-His-leg for arms full of ministry calendars, counseling hours, and Sunday preparation. We haven’t walked away. We just stopped running.

This one is for those of us who want to run again.

Daddy. Just That.

On First Love, Open Arms, and the Long Way Home

By Bruce Mitchell

It was a Tuesday. Maybe a Wednesday. The kind of day you don’t remember until something cracks it open.

I was in line at the store — coffee, eggs, a few things to make chili the way I make it, with cubes of beef instead of ground. The kind of cart that says I’m just here for the basics and I’m trying to get out without spending forty dollars I didn’t plan to spend. You know the cart.

A few people ahead of me, a young dad. Worn jeans. A baseball cap turned the way they wear them now. And down at his hip, holding the corner of his pocket like it was a tether, his daughter — maybe four. Her hair was doing that thing where two pieces refused to stay where her mother had clearly put them that morning.

She wasn’t asking for anything.

She wasn’t pulling.

She was just near him.

And then he looked down. Said something I couldn’t hear. And she lit up — the way only a child can light up — and threw her arms around his leg and said, loud enough for the whole front of the store to hear:

“Daddy.”

Just that.

Not “Daddy, can I…”

Not “Daddy, will you…”

Just Daddy.

And something in me — something old, something I thought I’d long buried under a lot of preaching and a lot of years — turned over.

 

I stood there in line, holding a carton of eggs, suddenly seventeen again on a Burbank lawn. Then the years that don’t quite keep their shape in the memory — Biola, Long Beach, Whittier, Menifee Valley, one address after another in my twenties, young life refusing to settle until it found somewhere worth staying.

Then Port Orchard. Thirty-something on five acres — the barn behind me, two German Shepherds barking at something in the trees, the goats getting into something they shouldn’t, the chickens fussing about whatever chickens fuss about — and my own kids running up from the salmon creek or down out of the cherry trees or crawling out of that old culvert pipe at the bottom of the hill they’d been rolling down all afternoon. Full speed. Full lungs. Full of that one word.

Daddy.

There is no greeting like it.

Adults greet you. Friends greet you. Even people who love you tend to lead with Hey or How was your day or We need to talk about Saturday. But a small child running into your arms doesn’t greet you. A small child arrives at you. Like you are the destination they have been moving toward all morning, even when they were doing other things. Especially then.

My kids are grown now. The running has stopped. The arrival is quieter — a phone call, a text, a hug at the door that lasts the right number of seconds. I’m not complaining. I love who they’ve become. But standing there in that line, watching another father get what only a small child can give, something in my chest knew exactly what was missing — and not only with my children.

With my Father.

 

A Boy, and Five Acres

I came home to the fourth-floor balcony in Renton. Set the eggs down. Made the chili anyway. The valley was gray that morning the way it gets gray here in October — that soft Pacific Northwest light that doesn’t ask anything of you, just sits with you. I sat with it.

And I thought about Port Orchard.

About the years we raised those kids on five acres. The barn. The chicken coop. The salmon creek that ran through the bottom of the property where the boys would come back muddy past their elbows and grinning like they’d discovered a continent. The apple trees in the fall. The cherries the birds always beat us to. The goats who could get out of any pen ever invented and seemed to consider it a personal mission.

And the hill.

That long, grass-and-blackberry hill — and the culvert pipe at the bottom of it that the kids had decided was the greatest amusement-park ride God ever made. They would climb up the hill, crawl into that pipe, roll down the inside of it screaming with laughter, and come out the other end covered in dirt and spinning and shouting at me to watch them do it again.

You couldn’t have paid them to be careful in that pipe.

You couldn’t have explained to them why a grown-up wouldn’t do it.

They just did it. Because they were six and eight, and the pipe was there, and the hill was there, and Dad was watching from the porch.

And I thought about a boy.

A boy in a tie that didn’t quite fit at Calvary Bible Church in Burbank. A boy with a NASB — a Ryrie Study Bible, the one with the sword embossed on the cover, because the Word is the sword of God. I still have that Bible. Fifty years later. Spine barely holding on. A boy who, when the pastor said something true, used to feel his chest get tight in a way he didn’t have words for. A boy who would lie in bed at night and just talk to Jesus the way you’d talk to a friend who’d come over to spend the night.

I have walked with Christ a long time now. JBHS. Biola. Dallas Seminary. Pulpits. Pews. Funerals. Weddings. Hospital rooms. Counseling offices. The Word marked and remarked until my Bible’s spine looks like it lost a small war.

But that boy — that boy who just talked to Jesus — somewhere along the way I started forgetting his face.

When did I stop running?

When did the word Father turn into a doctrine I knew how to teach instead of a Person I knew how to need?

When did intimacy quietly trade itself for industry?

 

I don’t think it was one moment. I don’t think it was sin, even — not the kind we usually mean. It was something subtler. The drift you don’t notice on a Tuesday.

It was the slow promotion of doing for over being with.

It was the season I started preparing more than praying. Studying more than seeking. Talking about Him in the pulpit more than talking to Him on the porch.

It was the year I realized I knew more about the Father than I had let Him be a Father to me lately.

I think most of us who have walked with Him a long time have a version of this story.

We are still close. We are still loyal. We are still here.

But we are not running.

And He notices.

 

What Ephesus Heard

Centuries before that little girl said Daddy in the checkout line, an old apostle in exile got handed a letter to write to a church he loved.

The church at Ephesus.

If you’d visited that church, you’d have admired them. They worked hard. They hated what was evil. They had endured things and not grown bitter. They had tested false teachers and stood their ground. They were, by every measurable metric, a good church.

Jesus said so Himself. He commended them. He named their labor. He saw their endurance. He didn’t miss a single thing about how diligently they served.

But then — and this is the line that should make every long-walker in the faith sit down in his chair —

“But I have this complaint against you. You don’t love me or each other as you did at first.”

(Revelation 2:4, NLT)

Did you catch the but?

Everything else they were doing right. Everything. And still the ache in the voice of Jesus broke through the page: You don’t love me as you did at first.

There is a love that gets you through the early years. The new-believer years. The Bible-falls-open years. The crying-in-the-car-because-He-saved-you years. The years when the music wrecks you and the sermon won’t let you go and you can’t believe He chose you.

That love.

Jesus is asking the Ephesians — and reading over their shoulder, asking us — Where did that love go?

Not Where did your effort go? They had effort.

Not Where did your truth go? They had truth.

But Where did the love go?

 

I think I know.

It didn’t go anywhere dramatic. It didn’t run off with another religion. It didn’t give up and go home.

It just got busy.

It started serving instead of seeking. It started preparing instead of pausing. It started talking about Him more than talking to Him. It started loving His work more than His face.

And the strange thing about that drift is how slowly it happens. You don’t notice it on a Tuesday. You don’t notice it after a Sunday. You notice it twenty years in, when a four-year-old in a checkout line wraps her arms around her dad’s leg and you realize you used to do that. You realize you don’t anymore. You realize you’ve been near Him the whole time without ever once running to Him.

And His voice over Ephesus is His voice over you:

I miss the running.

 

He Misses the Running

This is grace. Read it again. He misses the running.

Not He’s disappointed in your performance.

Not He’s keeping score and you’re behind.

He misses you.

He misses the unfiltered, unscheduled, unproductive joy of being your first love. He misses the way you used to throw yourself into His presence like a child into a father’s arms — no agenda, no request, no fix-this-please. Just Daddy. Just here. Just yours.

The God of the universe — who needs nothing — misses you when you stop running.

Sit with that one for a second.

He bends low for that.

 

Become Like Little Children

Years ago, Jesus’ disciples were arguing about who was the greatest. They argued about that more than once, actually. We laugh, but we do the same thing in subtler clothing — who’s the most theologically sound, who’s the most missional, who’s the most… you know.

Right in the middle of that grown-up religious argument, Jesus did something none of them expected.

He called over a child.

Just a kid. Some kid in the crowd. We don’t know the name. We don’t know the parents. We don’t know if the kid was scared or shy or eager. We just know Jesus picked one. Stood the kid in the middle of grown men who were arguing about hierarchy.

And He said:

“I tell you the truth, unless you turn from your sins and become like little children, you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

(Matthew 18:3, NLT)

Become like little children.

Not become like adults pretending to be children.

Not become like teachers of children.

Become like the children themselves.

Because here is what a child has that we trade away by the time we’re forty:

A child trusts before they understand.

A child runs before they rehearse.

A child says Daddy without first composing a sentence.

A child cries when they’re hurt and laughs when they’re held and asks fifty questions in a row without apologizing for any of them.

A child is unguarded.

And somewhere between our conversion and our credentials, most of us put on a guard we never quite take off again. We become careful with God. Polite with God. Professional with God.

We grow up in the faith.

And we forget that He never asked us to.

 

I don’t think Jesus was telling those disciples to act childish. Childish is throwing a tantrum because you don’t get the dessert. Childish is refusing to grow.

Childlike is something else.

Childlike is keeping, in the deepest place inside you, that one room that has never stopped running into the Father’s arms. Childlike is letting Him be Daddy even when you are forty, sixty, eighty. Childlike is the long-married wife who still tucks her hand into her husband’s at a stoplight. Childlike is the old man who still tears up at the second verse of Holy, Holy, Holy. Childlike is the saint who has been preaching for fifty years and still — still — doesn’t quite know how to say Father without something catching in the throat.

That’s the room Jesus is talking about.

Most of us have built additions on the house of our faith — study, library, sanctuary, office. He doesn’t mind any of those rooms.

He’s just asking if we still go into the small one.

 

Light the Fire

I was eighteen — at Biola — when that album first found me. And one song on it quietly broke something open in me.

It was a Keith Green song. O Lord, You’re Beautiful.

If you grew up in the church when I did, you know it. You can hum it without thinking about it. Some of us learned it in youth group sitting cross-legged on a carpet that smelled like old donuts and felt-board lessons. Some of us learned it later, on a guitar in a college dorm. Some of us discovered it after Keith was already gone, his voice somehow still pastoring people he never met.

I won’t put the lyrics here. They aren’t mine to print. But I can tell you what that song did.

That song was a prayer to see the Father’s face. Not to ask for things. Not to barter. Not to hand Him a list. Just — to see Him. To want His face more than His help. To want His presence more than His provision.

And then, in the same breath, that song asked Him for a strange and dangerous gift. Not the gift of a bigger ministry. Not the gift of better gifts. But the gift of living the Word before shining it. The gift of staying small. The gift of refusing crowns when they were offered.

Read that again, because we don’t pray that prayer much anymore: help me refuse the crown.

I have stood in front of churches and refused that prayer in my heart while my mouth was singing something else. I have wanted recognition with one hand and humility with the other. I have wanted the lamp lit and the praise heard. Most of us have. We don’t say it out loud, but the wanting is there. It’s there for the pastor. It’s there for the worship leader. It’s there for the deacon and the small group host and the Bible study teacher. It’s there for the writer of devotionals at his kitchen table on a gray morning. The crown is a temptation we keep underestimating.

And then that song, in its third movement, asks the most honest thing a tired believer can ask:

Light the fire that once burned bright and clean.

That is not a beginner’s prayer.

That is a prayer for those of us who used to burn bright and clean. Who can remember when the fire didn’t need stoking. Who can remember when we didn’t have to discipline ourselves into devotion because devotion just happened — like a child running across a driveway — like a girl in a checkout line saying Daddy.

Keith knew. He had lived it. He died young, but he died running. And the song he left behind keeps whispering to those of us who have stopped:

Run again. Even now. Especially now.

If you can find that song this week, listen to it slowly. Don’t sing along the first time. Just listen. Let it be a prayer somebody else is praying for you until you’re ready to pray it yourself again.

 

Still a Long Way Off

The Father is watching for that.

There was a man with two sons. You know the story. Most of us have preached or heard it preached more times than we can count, which is dangerous, because over-familiarity is how we miss the deepest miracles.

The younger son took his share. Spent it. Ended up in a pig pen. Came to his senses. Started home with a rehearsed speech about being unworthy.

He never got to finish the speech.

“And while he was still a long way off, his father saw him coming. Filled with love and compassion, he ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him.”

(Luke 15:20, NLT)

Notice three things.

The father saw him while he was still a long way off.

Which means the father had been watching.

Every day, probably. Every dusty afternoon. Every time the road shimmered in the heat. The father had been on the porch — eyes on the road — hoping today might be the day.

That’s God.

That is God.

The Father is not waiting in His office for you to file the right paperwork. He is not weighing your sincerity. He is not asking the angels to verify your motives. He is on the porch. He has been on the porch since the day you stopped running. He has not gone inside.

And the second thing —

The father ran.

In that culture, in that day, men of dignity did not run. To run meant gathering up the long robes around your knees, exposing your legs, sprinting with no decorum at all. It was undignified. It was childlike. It was what kids did.

The father — the father of that prodigal — became a child to get to his child.

He bent low.

He stayed close.

He restored.

He sees. He stays. He restores.

That is who He is. That is who He has always been.

 

Before the Speech Could Land

And the third thing — this is the one that wrecks me — the father didn’t wait for the speech.

The son had a speech ready. I have sinned. I am no longer worthy. Make me a hired servant. You can hear him rehearsing it on the road. Trying to get the words right. Trying to earn back something he knew he had no claim to.

He never got to finish.

The father’s arms were around him before the speech could land.

You can almost feel the breath knocked out of the son. The shock of being kissed before being forgiven. The disorientation of mercy that arrives ahead of confession.

That is the gospel, friends.

Mercy gets there first.

And if you are reading this with a long speech tucked in your back pocket — a list of why you’ve drifted, why you’re unworthy, why you can’t possibly run home now after how long it’s been —

Listen to me.

He does not want the speech.

He wants you.

 

The Kitchen Table

So what do we do, those of us who recognize ourselves in this? Those of us who have been doing the work, keeping the doctrine, walking the long obedience — but somewhere along the way stopped running?

I don’t have a five-step plan. I don’t trust five-step plans for matters of the heart. The Father is not a project to manage.

But I’ll tell you what I did, the day I got home from the store with my eggs and my coffee and my chili meat.

I sat down at the kitchen table. The same table where I’ve prayed through hard seasons and harder phone calls. I opened the Bible with the spine that’s barely holding on. I didn’t read.

I just sat there.

And I said the only word I could find:

Daddy.

Just that.

Not Father in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.

Not Lord God, Sovereign of all.

Just Daddy. The way that little girl said it. The way my own kids used to say it across five acres in Port Orchard. The way the prodigal probably said it through the tears, somewhere underneath the speech that never got finished.

And — I don’t know how else to say this — He met me there.

Not with thunder. Not with a vision. Just with the quiet, undeniable nearness of a Father who never stopped waiting on the porch.

He bent low.

He stayed close.

He didn’t say a word.

He didn’t have to.

 

Pause here.

Don’t rush this part. Don’t read the questions and skim past them so you can get to the prayer and check the box. That’s the very thing this whole piece is asking us to stop doing.

Set the phone down. Close the browser tab if you need to. Sit somewhere with light coming through a window.

And just be near Him for a minute. Just near.

When you’re ready —

Where in your faith have you stopped running?

What rooms of the house have you stopped going into?

Is there a speech in your back pocket — a list of disqualifications — that you’ve been rehearsing instead of just going home?

And if you let yourself say only one word to Him right now — not a paragraph, not a request, just one word — what would it be?

Breathe.

Let that settle.

Now — what stirs in you?

 

A Prayer

Father —

I have walked with You a long time. I know the songs. I know the verses. I know the answers. And somewhere along the way, I stopped running.

Forgive me for the speeches I keep rehearsing instead of just coming home. Forgive me for loving Your work more than Your face. Forgive me for being near You without ever once falling into Your arms.

Light the fire again. The one that once burned bright and clean. Replace the lamp of my first love. Take back the crowns I keep reaching for. Make me small again. Make me a child again. Make me run again.

And when I do — let me find that You have been on the porch all along. Watching the road. Ready to gather up Your robes and run.

Daddy.

Just that.

Amen.

 

He never stopped watching the road. You never have to finish the speech.

Just run.

 

If you’ve read this far, thank you from my heart.

I write every word prayerfully—not to impress, but to reflect Christ’s love and grace—in theology, yes, but especially in relationship. I pray something here has whispered to you:

You are not alone. You are deeply loved.

Grace. Always grace.

With love, prayer, and expectancy,
Bruce Mitchell
A voice of love & grace—always grace
Bruce@allelon.us
allelon.us
@AAllelon on X
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“Most important of all, continue to show deep love for each other, for love conceals a multitude of sins.” —1 Peter 4:8

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