How Close Is God In Your Moment Of Stress?

feels like something I might or could ask when I’m finished flogging myself
for something that I’ve missed or over a mistake I’ve made or even a sin that
I’ve committed — and even the worst of my mind-lashing doesn’t purge that
ickiness and ache out of me.

How near is He to me in this moment? 

crops up, perhaps, even just a day after I’ve received all the applause
from the ones to whom I’ve wanted to give praise and I wake up feeling bone dry
from it all, drunk on what was never meant to be my drink.

How near is He
to me in this moment? 

is the life-line of the image bearer, the one made in God’s
likeness.

And it is the rarely-asked question of the one who has not
accepted the grace of these God-imposed pauses.

It is in these harder,
hidden places that we can see Him reaching.
His reach happens in minutes,
over laundry and dishes and across the car console as we make our hand into an
olive branch to our spouse, when no is looking. His reach is a set of eyes
during our 3am feeding hour and our 4am cleaning-up-vomit and changing sheets
for the third time that night.

His reach is not a result of stingy eyes
and a scrutinizing glance (as we so often might receive it to be), it’s a
mercy-look and a kind whisper that we don’t always hear when we’re scolding
ourselves.

And His reach moves the heart in hiding to want to look back
and, soon, to lock eyes. When we feel His kind “I see you”, a thousand human
hands applauding us feels like a loud distraction from that which has truly
enraptured us.

This “hidden version” of you doesn’t need more discipline
to look longer at God — the hidden you needs to see the layered fire in His eyes
for you, when you’re crazy-weak, and you won’t want to look away.

We
don’t need another media fast or a longer Lent or more mustered will-power to
say no to all the bad things (though, these, in and of themselves can be
important steps to take in the right time). We need a long, permissible (though
unconventional) look at Beauty and we need the open ears of a child to hear what
He has to say back to us, about us.

Days filled with intermittent looks
at Him who is looking gently and knowingly back at us, and then the hidden and
misunderstood pockets of our life become spaces of receiving and becoming
beauty.

Three o’clock in the afternoon looks different when I’m not
grittingly forcing myself to look at a God who I believe is mostly frustrated
with me. Three o’clock in the afternoon looks different, even when I’m tripping
over legos and receiving texts from a misunderstanding acquaintance — if I get
five minutes of quiet where I can be reminded of how much He enjoys me, even the
weak me.

Three o’clock in the afternoon then moves from being the
resented, hidden hour of the day, to the one where I am privately re-upping for
another few hours of internally radical living under the expansive Truth of how
He sees me.

When I see the truth of how He sees me — when I don’t just
read but I experience the gentle Father of His Word, alluring and inviting me
(even in the midst of my mess and confusion) — being hidden from the applause of
the crowd or the accolades of friends or being thwarted in the promotion I
craved, pales in contrast.

When I see Him, seeing me with kind eyes, I
begin to crave the hiddenness that offers me those eyes.

My heart starts
to move and to grow when I remember again that I’m seen by Him.

[written
by Sara Hagerty]