Seen At My Lowest

It was a Wednesday afternoon in a supermarket parking lot, in the rain, and it lasted about ninety seconds.

He had been holding it together for eleven months. Properly, by any standard. Getting up, going in, doing the shopping, answering his sister's messages within a day so she would not worry.

And then something small went wrong with the car and it was not even a real problem, and he sat down on the wet ground beside the open door and he could not stop.

And a man he knew tapped on the roof.

Not a friend. Somebody from work, two floors up, a man he has said four sentences to in six years. He was decent about it. He crouched down, he did not say very much, he asked if he could call anybody and he was told no, and he stayed for about ten minutes and then he went.

It has been four months.

He can be in a room with that man. That is not the problem. He can nod in a corridor and both of them are fine.

The problem is that he cannot look at his own face while shaving. Something happens at the mirror and he looks at his jaw instead.

If somebody saw you at your worst, you know exactly what I mean.

The oldest name anybody gave God

Let me be plain about what this page will not do. I am not going to tell you that God arranged for that man to be in the parking lot. I do not know. Nobody does, and a sentence like that is a great deal easier to write than it is to carry, and you have had eleven months of carrying.

Here is something that can be said, and it is older than almost anything else in Scripture.

A woman ran into a desert. She was pregnant, she was somebody else's property, she had been badly used by two people who should have known better, and she was found by a well by an angel, in the worst hour of her life, at the lowest point of a life that had a great many low points.

And afterward she did something nobody in the Bible had done before her.

And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me: for she said, Have I not also here looked after him that seeth me?Genesis 16:13

She named Him. Not a prophet, not a patriarch. A used woman in a desert, and the name she gave Him is the God who sees me, and Scripture keeps it.

Notice what she does with having been seen. She does not experience it as exposure. She experiences it as company, and she names Him for it, and the name is the oldest name given to God by any person in the book.

You were seen in that parking lot by God before that man ever tapped the roof, and the seeing was company rather than exposure. That is not my comfort. It is written in Genesis 16:13, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a man's ears into the place where he actually lives.

So four months at the mirror have not been shame you deserved. You have been fully seen the whole time and you were not once diminished by it, and that was true before the rain. The word settled that before your grandfather was born, and the same Spirit who inspired it is at that mirror while you read this.

What you think he saw and what he actually saw

Here is worth being exact about, because you have been running a version of that ninety seconds for four months and the version has drifted.

You think he saw a man collapse. What he saw was a man who had been holding a great deal for eleven months on his own, sitting down.

I say that with some confidence and here is the evidence: he crouched. A man who has seen something contemptible does not crouch. He gets lower, so as not to stand over somebody, which is what people do instinctively in the presence of a thing they respect.

He asked if he could call anybody. He stayed ten minutes. He has said nothing since, to you or to anybody, which is a decision that man has been making every day for four months.

Nothing about that is a man who saw something disgraceful.

The judgment in that parking lot was not his. It is one you have supplied, at the mirror, every morning, for four months, and it does not match a single fact in the account.

You have permission to look at your own face, and the permission does not require the ninety seconds to be undone. Genesis 16 has a woman naming God for seeing her at her lowest; His Spirit is the one who makes a man able to be known and remain whole in the knowing.

One plain word, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If the weight has gone as far as thinking about not being here at all, please tell somebody living today. In the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour. And if there is nobody, ring anyway; that is what it is for and it is not a small thing to use it.