With a father who was 53 when I was born, I know for certain that I was unplanned. My parents were weary from struggling to raise my four older siblings. After I came along, my dad started drinking to excess, which led to their separation. Dad died when I was six, and I blamed myself. As a teenager, I pushed Mom over the edge. She didn’t know how to handle me. She had never planned for a problem child.

Not only was I unplanned, I turned out to be a disappointment to my mother. Mom died before I was 28. I lived in another state by then, but I hurried home when I got the call. I was there for her final 12 hours in this world. I am not sure if she knew I was there. I am not sure she would have cared. After Mom’s funeral my brother told me that Mom had written down some thoughts about each of her children. He refused to show it to me. It would be painful, he said. That confirmed her disappointment in me.

As sad as that sounds, my regret is not that she was disappointed in me, rather my regret is that I gave her bountiful reason to be disappointed.

I have a parent, though, whom I can never disappoint. My Heavenly Father knows my ending from my beginning. Before He spun the world like a top, He knew every sin I would ever commit. He knew every time I would go astray. He knew before I took my first breath when and where I would breathe my last. God cannot be disappointed in me because He knew exactly what I was when He invited me to follow Him.

That ledger that God keeps, with my name on the top, with two or three good things in the right column and thousands of bad things in the left column… It lists every sin I ever committed and ever will commit. Lately, though, that list has disappeared. It’s gone. No one can find it. The ink faded away. The paper burned up. In its place, God wrote my name in the Lamb’s Book of Life.

A few years ago, I surrendered to Jesus as my Lord. I committed to live like Him. I can never make up for disappointing Mom, but I have a proud Father that I can never disappoint.  He killed the “fatted calf” when I came home. I tell Him I’m sorry when I sin. He says, “That’s covered by the blood of the Lamb – and has been before the foundation of the world.”

Fear Not for God knows all and loves us anyway. We will never disappoint Him.