when being seen makes all the difference in the world

Mom must have cut these banks after that!

​Her name was Mrs. Yuke, the third-grade teacher who beckoned me to the front of the class to push my bangs out of my eyes, securing them with bobby pins she’d brought from home.  “Who fixes your hair anyway?” she asked, shaking her head as she sent me back to my seat. That experience, and perhaps others I’ve forgotten, spewed shame across the landscape of my developing soul, making me dread the prospect of school every day. You can see the sadness in my eyes.

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4th grade

​​But then, along came Mrs. Korevec, my fourth-grade teacher. Perhaps all her students felt the same, but I was convinced I was her favorite. I couldn’t wait to get to school each day because I knew that when I did, her face was going to light up with joy.  
My face tells a story in these pictures, but what made the difference? It clearly wasn’t because I’d improved my hair styling skills, as you can see. Simply put, these teachers treated me differently because they saw me differently. How I felt about myself was a direct reflection of that. This is, in fact, what it means to be human, that we come into the world looking for identity through the eyes of others. How we feel seen, especially in our formative years, will shape our way of being in the world.

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​In my last blog I wrote of what it feels like to be unseen, asserting that God gazes at each of us with joyful wonder. Experiencing God’s pleasure, I claimed, has become the elixir of my life, even when—especially when—it feels as if no one else sees me at all. The problem, of course, is that we struggle to believe that God takes delight in us, that joy is his default response when he looks our way.
Do you feel the happiness in God’s gaze? Do you believe that he experiences joy as he watches you manage your life, even with its flaws and failures? For decades of my faith journey, this was beyond me. I know I am not alone. In the next few blogs, I will share some thoughts on some common obstacles to living within the warmth of God’s smile. 

Today Joe and I are finishing a 3-day fast. Fasting  is one of the toughest spiritual disciplines for me, even though I always experience God’s presence in amazing ways. When I started this fast, I was secretly hoping I could turn it into a long water fast—like 21 or even 40 days! Why? Last night God showed me that he had never called me to this, but that I wanted to do it because I know people who have. This mantra--if they can do it, I should be able to-has always played like a song in the back of my mind.
 
Where did this come from? The answer is complex, but in a nutshell, I was a middle child of five and I decided early on that the way to get to the top of the heap of the humans in our home was by being the best at whatever I did. (Add to that I’m an enneagram three—achiever—by nature and you see the odds were stacked against me).
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I carried this into adulthood and my relationship with God. I was a model of dutiful obedience, working hard to be at the top of the heap. For years I did not feel God rejoicing over me, consumed as I was with getting his attention, with securing his approval.

What ways might your relationship with God be tainted by experiences from your past? From our earliest years, we develop coping mechanisms to handle the neglect, abandonment, rejection or even abuse we suffer from living in a fallen world. If we don’t address them, these patterns will obstruct the brightness of God’s face shining on us like a solar eclipse of the sun. The wonder of our Creator’s delight, the very thing that can make us feel seen and known and loved, will remain hidden behind the strongholds of self-protection that are embedded in our souls.

There can be no better description of how God feels about us than Paul’s treatise in 1 Corinthians 13, a litany of love that is profound and extravagant. God is love, and this means he is not only patient and kind, but bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. What would it take for you to live in the spacious wonder of this?   
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There is a clue in Paul’s coda to his love symphony. He writes that when he was a child, he spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. However, in the process of growing up, he put these childish ways aside. Have you ever processed how your childhood experiences have shaped your relationship with God, creating roadblocks  to one of the most valuable of all spiritual currencies—his joy in who you are? 

This is no small thing. If the lens through which we view God makes us keep our distance or puts us on a treadmill of performance, we will never know or be known by him in the way our souls desperately need.

​Paul ended his treatise on love by explaining that the tradeoff for putting away childish things is a promise, a partial fulfillment of our destiny:
                       For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know                         fully, even as I have been fully known (1 Corinthians 13:12).
What might it take to trade your outdated defenses for true intimacy with Jesus? I've learned that the process feels at times like looking in a dirty mirror, but if we persist, we will glimpse the pleasure of God’s face shining back at us in love. As we cling to the hope of seeing Jesus face to face one day, we press on, knowing that when we do, we will grasp at last how fully God has seen and known and loved us all along.