To my surprise I was one of only nine men among one hundred women. I had just arrived and registered to attend my first writer’s conference. My uneasiness showed up the next day as I attended my first small group teaching on writing personal stories.

I made a comment to the teacher about all the women. Her response was, “Just get to know them.  They are only writers.” With that verbal spanking I walked out to the parking lot and saw one of my fellow group members getting into her car to drive down the hill to the dining room for lunch.

I walked over to her and asked her if I could ride down the hill with her. She said, “Okay” and I got in.

As she slowly drove down the narrow road she said to me, “I noticed you yesterday when you registered, and the Lord told me you had a word for me.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I simply said I would pray. Later that night I found a quiet place to be alone and I began to pray for her. I knew some things about her because of her sharing in our morning class together: She was in her fifties, had been raised in an alcoholic family, had become an alcoholic, was now a recovered alcoholic, and was born again.

I began to pray. I prayed the same prayer over and over again. “Lord, what do you want to say to her?” I was concerned that my background in social work would keep me from hearing the Lord. My tendency would be to counsel her out of my intellect and not hear the Lord and what He would like to say.

Finally, I ‘sensed’ the Lord saying to me: “Say this to her: ‘Daughter of the Lord! Daughter of the Lord! Daughter of the Lord!’” Could that really be the Lord? Would a phrase like that, seemingly out of the blue, make any sense to anyone? I had nothing else so I went to bed.

The next day after lunch, the conference was over and I looked around for my writer friend. I found her packing her things into the trunk of her car. I went up to her and said “You said to me yesterday that the Lord had a word for you.”

“Yes!” she replied.

“I prayed last night and the Lord told me to say this to you. “Daughter of the Lord!” As I said those words she began to cry. (I knew I had to say those same words two more times.) I continued, “Daughter of the Lord! Daughter of the Lord!” She was crying even more by now.

I asked her what “Daughter of the Lord!” meant to her. This was what she said:

“Last night I stayed up and talked with the other writers in my room. I told them about my life and how when I was a little girl I would ask my Dad if I was his daughter and he would say, “Go ask you mother.” I would ask my mother and she would say, “Go ask your father.” It was always an issue.

When I was twenty-one my father died and he left a will. In his will it said that I was not his daughter.”

Quietly, I asked her, “So what does, ‘Daughter of the Lord!’ mean to you today?”

She replied through her tears, “Finally, a father has claimed me as his own.”