Desperate to be Seen

    She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me, ” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.”- Genesis 16:13
    It's all we want, isn't it? To be seen. Desperate to be seen. 
    Not just to watch or glimpse, but to see. 
    To see, to know, to understand. 

    Do You see, God? Do you see how many women are pushed to the side, how many races are ignores based on a beautiful skin color, how many mentally challenged are trodden over because "intelligence matters?"
    Do You see, God, how Christians are the ones who champion the mighty and dismiss the lowly for attractions and sufferings and pasts and anything-to-do-with-sex? 
    Do You see how the meek have been mocked off the Earth?

    But why not delve into specifics.
    Do You see the refugee, clutching her children in the dark as she prays for food that won't come in time?
    Do You see the privileged college student as he wraps a noose around his neck?
    Do You see the child slave as countless men rape her over and over again?!
    Do You see those who don't care, those who will never want to understand or even try to know those who are as human as they? 
    Do You see me - me who judges others, me who quivered in the corner while they raged on, me who hopes and dreams and cries and - and hates?

    Oh, God, do You just watch?

    How empty it must be to watch and never know.

    You're not that God. You're the God Who Is Good, Who dares to swoop into our lives, the God Who "makes the glass break," to quote Jessie J (yes, I'm mixing Jessie J and theology and I like it that way). 
    Hagar, abused and fleeing, in the desert, saw You and christened You the God Who Sees. 
    The God.
    Who.
    Sees.
    You know us. You know the pain, yes You do (I'll whisper now:
    Does it make You want to blind Yourself?).
    And the victories, the smashing of prisons and the resurrections - those You delight in seeing. You clap your hands and cheer and thrust Your scarred fist in the air (if heaven has air?) every time good wins out. 

    Sometimes it doesn't feel like enough, to have one God, Whom I can't see, see me. It sounds cheap to the abused, to the suicidal, to the outcast.
    But He does. And there's a flimsy vapor of hope that yearns ever-so-quickly for His seeing to be enough despite my rage.

    I don't understand pain, or why God lets such horrors happen. I wish I did.
    I just hope His seeing is somehow, like Hagar experienced, what we need to go on.

Love,
Kelley