I’ve never seen colors stack outside their order in the visible spectrum. Maybe that’s scientifically impossible, but it looked that way with green wedged in between lavender and orange, pink touching blue touching yellow. In any case, I missed it with this photo which I snapped too late into a mesmerizing sunset.
I took this a few evenings ago at the end of a day when I fought fear the hardest. This sunset pressed pause on my panic and brought to my mind the fact that so many beautiful things, not just the horrible things, are out of our control. I often look at unpredictability as having an infinite capacity for evil, but goodness can just as equally fill the future.
As I drove after sunset and began once more to pray for those fighting for their lives against COVID-19, a sentence dropped into my consciousness: “God sees.”
God sees.
That is at once comforting and confusing. Comforting because of all I believe about the heart of God; confusing because seeing is…not really the action I was hoping to be reminded of.
“God fixes,” “God fights,” or “God wins” would have been a little more heartening than just “God sees.” I mean, I can see, too.
Thankfully the sight of God goes far beyond our physical sight.
In Genesis 16:13, a runaway Egyptian slave (Hagar) gave the Lord the name “the God who sees me.” Impregnated by her owner and abused by his wife, she ran to the desert to get away from everything and was met by a God who made her promises about her unborn son. No one saw her but God. And His sight changed her life.
In Genesis 22, her master Abraham had another son, and God asked for him as a sacrifice. When God spared the son from death on a mountaintop, Abraham named the site of deliverance “on the mount of the Lord it will be provided.” The root of the word “provide” is “to see.” God will see to it. God saw to Abraham, and it saved his son’s life.
When God sees, it is an act of provision. God sees the people for whom we pray. God provides for them. The toughest part to swallow is that we can’t predict when that provision comes, nor what it looks like. As I choke on these facts, I recall that names, in Jewish as well as many other cultures, denote character. Hagar and Abraham named God after the ways He met them, ways that reflect who He is.
And in what ways has He already met you? What names can you give Him? By what names can you address Him as you pray amidst COVID-19? His character is as unchanging as the fact of every sunset, every sunrise. Whether we can see them or not, we can count on their coming. Pray to the One who sees. Pray to the One who provides, who will see to it.