Seen
Here, in the midst of all that continues to feel hard, I’ve held fast to my newfound daily practice of walking. When possible, I start my day with a long morning walk, aiming for a good step count tracked by the little red heart button on my iPhone. Before securing my earbuds and swiping through Spotify, I slowly rehearse these great big beautiful words from Psalm 90.
Satisfy me in the morning with your steadfast love that I may rejoice and be glad all my days.
Along with my daily step count, my book count has multiplied in 2020. My latest read is by the brilliant Erik Larson entitled, “The Splendid and the Vile,” which has led me down a deep hole of all things Winston Churchill. Good Lord, this man can write. Don’t even get me started on Larson’s “The Devil in the White City” and “Dead Wake” because we’re talking about Churchill now. I am undone by this snapshot of Churchill and his breathtaking response to crisis.
Like most of us, this pandemic has made me seek God’s face more and deepened my dependence on His word and His transformative presence. Like Churchill, I’m learning to never let a good crisis go to waste.
Oftentimes, my daily walks become warfare prayer walks. Texts from loved ones asking for prayer for their children, health issues, and dire job situations have flooded my space these past few months. Hard things. Friends experiencing very real weariness, sadness, fear and doubt. I never imagined myself a giant in the world of prayer, having grown up in a church filled with five-star-general level prayer warriors, and I always landed on the harp side of the harp & bowl equation, but my newfound Churchill courage has led me to throw caution to the wind and step all the way into the world of big, audacious, and outrageous prayers.
As I respond to each text with “I’m praying” and my go-to brown praying hands emoji, I am very careful to do so. I pray until I feel the burden lift. My prayers often lead me down Holy Spirit’s trail of deeper and wider prayer. My response implies, “I see you, I hear you, you matter” and greater still, “He sees you, He hears you, you matter.”
Jesus sees you. He hears you. You matter to Him. This longing of the human heart is not a new social dilemma, sorry Netflix, it’s ageless.
In John chapter 4, Jesus has a remarkable encounter with a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. For so many years I held a very specific view of this woman. I used to think of her like a character in a country music video. The one where she’s at a bar late at night with smoky eyeliner, a tight t-shirt and second hand jeans, played by Carrie Underwood, and she catches the eye of an innocent cowboy wearing a pearly snapped western shirt and crisp dark wrangler jeans. His guilty conscious flashes to the scene playing out at home with his sweet, well dressed wife, also played by Carrie Underwood, and his adorable small children around the kitchen table, but as the song goes on, he can’t resist the bad, smoky-eyed Carrie, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Don’t even ask how I’m describing a country music video with such vivid detail when I don’t even listen to country music.
Back to the woman at Jacob’s well. I want to give her a hug, but she ends up getting the best ever gift. Just wait. She’s drawing water at noon. Imagine the Covid-style SignUpGenius for your local pool where the best spots are grabbed by the moms in the iron blue lululemon high-rise leggings and the worst time slots are leftover for the second and third tier moms. This is the time slot for the Samaritan woman. The upstanding women, the Proverbs 31-ers, drew water in the cool of the day, and she was pushed to the outcast time slot.
Jesus saw her. In all her hopeless mess. She carried all her weariness, sadness and sin-sickness along with her water jar. She had exactly zero chance of cleaning up her story before encountering Him. Her plot line had moved past the point of damage control. But he heard her. She mattered to him. So much so that he took his time, eyeball to eyeball, and offered her springs of living water. By the end of their encounter, it is said,
“Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many more became believers. They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.” (John 4:39-42)
Because of her testimony, many believed in Him. And then many more became believers. Have we heard this story so many times that it ceases to amaze us?
In this glorious intersection where His human thirst met her spiritual thirst, He is wholly willing to step into the mess of her life. In the heat of the day. In the forgotten SignUpGenius time slot. God is not afraid of getting messy in your world of hurt. He blew right past her cleaned-up Instagram-curated version of her situation to the painful truth, relieving her of the burden of the mess. Swallowing up her loneliness with every word.
He saw her, He heard her, she mattered.
His first Genesis interaction with man was kneeling down, dirt in his fingernails, mud in the crevices of his hand, fashioning us out of clay. He could have created us from any substance, and he chose dirt. The King of the Universe walked away from our creation day with dirt on his hands and dust on his mouth from breathing life into us.
He’s in the dirty business of rescuing and repairing his beloved, mud-crusted sheep. He steps into the playing field with us, rather than observing from a safe distance, speaking directly to our deepest heartache. This man really is the Savior of the world.
We are all living in a world of hurt. Heartache finds us through the sinbrokenness of this journey. Weariness, sadness, fear and doubt are the offspring of this heartache. 2020 has served up it’s fair share. It’s noon. It’s noon and I’m not wasting any more days. I’m here. I’m here for all of it. Pressing in. Pointing upward to a good and gracious God. Pushing my Churchill cigar to the side of my mouth, whispering, “Come and see.”