hope

Why We Long for God to See Us

by Tammy

Thanks today for the Blog Guest Post on Pearl Girls!

Why We Long for God to See Us

FEBRUARY 4, 2014 BY PEARL GIRLS LEAVE A COMMENT

Not long ago, I accompanied a friend to the hospital for surgery. After she was wheeled away, I began talking with one of the nurses. Somehow the conversation came around to the nurse’s brother, who had been killed in an accident three years earlier. Like most untimely losses, the brother’s death had dramatically disrupted this woman’s family. Her mother still struggled with bitterness. Her parents’ marriage had faltered. Her baby son, born two weeks after her brother’s death, would never know his uncle.

Soon my new friend was pouring out her heart to me. And at some point, I shared with her something I had been thinking about a lot.

“Do you understand that God sees you in all this?” I said. “He really sees—”

I hadn’t even finished the sentence before she started to weep. She cried so hard that another nurse walked over to see if she was okay. She was completely undone at the thought that God saw her pain, her fear, her broken heart. She kept saying through deep sobs, “He sees me? He really sees me?”

That was just one simple encounter, one more reminder that the message of the God who sees you is one that needs to be shared again and again—with those who don’t know the Lord and with those who do. There’s a reason we hunger to be recognized, acknowledged, appreciated, and cared for. There’s a reason our hide-and-seek life—yearning to be found by God, yet fearing it at the same time—leaves us feeling so bruised and unsatisfied. It’s because God has intentionally and wonderfully created us to see and be seen, to live in intimate and joyful relationship with Him and with others.

More important, He put that need in us because He wants to meet it. He’s put the longing there to draw us closer to His heart.

We hunger to be seen—because He really does see us.

The challenge is to really believe it . . . to live in the confidence that we are recognized and accepted and included and, most of all, loved.

Can you do that? Can I?

I’ll admit I’ve had my struggles, but I can honestly say I believe it with all my heart. Here’s why:

First, the Bible tells me so, and the Bible has proven a reliable guide in my life. The whole sweep of the Bible can be understood as the story of a God who saw His people, even when they couldn’t see Him. A God who came to earth and paid special attention to the unnoticed—the meek and the mourning, the children everyone turned away, the powerless rather than the ones on top. A God who cared so much about what He saw that He came to earth in human form, turning hide-and-seek into the ultimate show-and-tell.

But I also believe because God has shown me, again and again, in the circumstances of my life. He has shown me through the whisper of His Holy Spirit, through the timing of my experiences, through the love and example of other people and the mysterious provision of what I have needed most.

I’ve seen too much evidence not to believe God sees me. I’ve been loved too much not to make it the story of my life.

I want it to be the story of your life as well. I want it to change everything, including the way you look at God and yourself and other people. I want you to live in confidence that when God looks at you, He sees beauty. He sees value. He sees hope. And even when you’re hiding, even when you’re so beaten down you can’t see anything clearly, He’s still hard at work, crafting a beautiful future of relationship with Him and with others. . . .

That’s . . . my personal witness as someone who at times has felt forgotten, uncared for, unloved, invisible. I truly believe I have a word from God for those lonely, aching times in your life.

The message is this: Regardless of how you may feel, God does see you.

He knows your name, and He loves you—passionately and tenderly.

He sees your needs, and He yearns to fill them.

At any given moment, even when you feel most alone, He is working out a plan for your future. . . .

One way or another, one day soon, you . . . will be able to say, thankfully, “I have seen the God who sees me.”

Regardless of how you may feel, God does see you @tammymaltby @grit_grace

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More about Tammy Maltby:

Tammy is a speaker, author, and media personality with a heart for helping women to live rich, authentic lives. Her multifaceted life can be summed up in one word “encouragement”. Tammy’s graceful and transparent style of communication inspires women to live a more honest and real lifestyle. Her passion for beautiful living and relationship-centered hospitality shines in her recent book, The Christmas Kitchen: A Gathering Place for Making Memories. Tammy is also the author of Confessions of a Good Christian Girl, Lifegiving: Discovering the Secrets to a Beautiful Life, and A Discovery Journal to a Beautiful Life, is coauthor (with Tom Davis) of Confessions of a Good Christian Guy, and has just finished her newest book The God Who Sees You released in April of 2012.

A ten-year cohost of the two time Emmy-winning NRB TV talk show of the year Aspiring Women, Tammy is spearheading a movement encouraging women to “Start Simply but Simply Start!” Tammy is inspiring women to use food and faith as a tool to create community and connection. It’s not just about how to cook, more importantly it’s about why we cook!

Tammy is the married, mother of four grown children, two of whom are adopted internationally. She is a doting grandmother to four grandsons and makes her home in Colorado.

Learn more about Tammy and The God Who Sees You at tammymaltby.com.

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Dancing Beyond the Fire

by Tammy

in The God Who Sees You

When I look back over my own life, I’m astounded by the way God has used my gifts, my talents, my decisions, my life circumstances, even my mistakes to put me exactly where He wanted. . . . Your story will be different from mine—constructed by God from the raw materials of your own life and your response to God’s calling.

But you can be confident that when God looks at you,

He sees you dancing beyond your circumstances, whatever they are—

-living the life He has already prepared for you.

He will put you where you need to be … if you pay attention and obey His call.

But what if you don’t obey? What if you rebel or lose your nerve or just don’t understand what He’s trying to do?

I know there have been times in my life when I have done all three. And while I don’t understand all the ways God works, I have come to believe these things with all my heart:

Nothing can happen to us that the Father is not aware of.

Nothing can happen to us that He can’t use to further His kingdom.

We can pull away from God. We can try to hide from Him. We can even make choices that separate us from Him forever.

But none of this stops God from looking at us through the eyes of love. And none of it will delay the coming of His kingdom.

I believe that God has a plan for your life, a specific place for you in His future. But I also believe that the specific unfolding of God’s plan is fluid and subject to change. God, like a master Artist, adjusts His plan as we make our choices in life. When we smudge the painting, He works our smudge into the master design, using even our sins and our mistakes for His purposes.

If you keep your focus on God, He will put you exactly where you need to be. But even if you lose focus, if you’re disobedient and lose your way, you can turn back to Him and still trust Him to use all your pain and mistakes to put you where you need to be.

God is infinitely creative, infinitely willing to go to whatever lengths to help you dance beyond your circumstances into His future.

And He does it because of the way He sees you. Because … you’re worth it.

This to me is the heart of the gospel, the heart of what God sees in you. When the God of the universe looks at you, He sees someone who is infinitely worth all His love and time and trouble. Someone who is:

• worth trying again and again to reach.

• worth teaching, even when you’re stubborn or rebellious or don’t get it.

• worth disciplining, even when you resist.

• worth waiting faithfully for—as the Father waited for the prodigal son.

• worth seeking out—as the shepherd searched for his lost sheep.

• worth the trouble of redeeming.

• worth forgiving, again and again.

• worth dying for.

Because He really does see you—your past, your present, your possibilities. He is painfully aware of your sins and your failures but also rejoices over your hidden good deeds and your best intents. He cherishes your true self—the spark of divine in you—and delights in your human particularity. He sees you accurately, from the inside out. And you are enough for Him, just as you are.

If you have trouble believing that, look at the facts:

As the Father, He made you and adopted you into his family.

As the Son, He thought you were worth dying for.

As the Spirit, He chooses to lives within you.

As the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, He sees for you a role in His ever-unfolding story.

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Releasing the life we planned to embrace the life that is waiting for us.

by Tammy

in Lifegiving Devotionals, The God Who Sees You

The Truth of Restoration

We all want our hearts to be healed.

But once you’ve been traumatized you just can’t bear the thought that it could happen again. Everything in you tells you to hunker down, to cut your losses, to settle for a little bit of happiness. That’s when you need to act counter-intuitively, pick up your life again and move on down the road.

You need to choose the work of restoration.

There are times when I’d rather do almost anything other than the hard work of restoration and recovery. And what is that work? It’s the equivalent of ordering timber and bricks and starting to build the walls of hope again in our lives.

It means being willing to release the life we planned to embrace the life that is waiting for us.

Here are just a few things it has entailed in my life:

The work of hope—which means being willing to say you need restoration and actually asking for the help you need.
The work of waiting on the Lord—quieting down my life so I can hear…trusting his timing…staying in curiosity and out of judgment as to what God is doing.
The work of honesty and transparency. In the aftermath of trauma, that could mean shouting at God and telling him how you feel. It can mean refusing to put on a happy face and insisting that everything is all right. There are certainly times when you need to control your feelings for the sake of others. But your restoration absolutely depends on finding a place to confess your honest thoughts and feelings—at very least, in prayer, in a journal, or with a few friends who are close to you.
The work of “controlling the wild horses.” I love the way my friend Emily describes this. She’s referring to that tendency we all have, but trauma victims have more than most, to let our “vain imaginations” run away with us. If we give in just a little to fear, panic and worry, those emotions can quickly take control of our lives. So while we need to be honest with our feelings, we also need to be alert to the ways our thoughts can run away with us and learn to short-circuit the runaway thoughts. In the process, as the apostle Paul describes, we move toward being ‘transformed by the renewing of our minds.’
The work of obedience instead of instinct. Our instincts can serve us well in the early moments of trauma. A “fight or flight” response could actually save our lives in an accident. But as we move from survival toward restoration, our instincts can being to get in the way of what God wants to do with our lives. Your instinct may be to pull away and withdraw when you need to press in to relationships…or to hang on too tightly when you need to let people make their own mistakes. I tend to rush in to ‘fix’ things instead of waiting on God’s timing. But I’m learning obedience sometimes has to trump instinct in this too. We have to act on the light we’re given, do what we know to do. And all this takes both courage and discipline.
The work of forgiveness. Bill Ritter sums this up beautifully: “Sooner or later, you will have to forgive what you can’t understand. For you may never figure it out. Or even if you do, the conclusions you reach in your head may not necessarily heal what you feel in your heart. The only way out of your pain may be to start splashing forgiveness in every direction…forgiving the one who [caused the trauma]…forgiving yourself for anything you did or didn’t do, just before it happened…forgiving God for allowing it, or not stopping it…and even forgiving circumstances for being so damn hard and weighted against you.” [1]
The work of gratitude. This is simply looking for signs of God’s presence in our lives and resolving, by choosing to “give thanks in all things.”
The work of modeling faith and integrity. This does not mean faking a faith, covering up our doubts, or sacrificing our integrity to our witness. In fact, it means the exact opposite. As God walks us toward restoration, it’s good to realize that others—our children especially—are watching the way we walk, and how we live into our own restoration can have a powerful impact on their relationship to God. The more honestly and trustingly we can walk, the more integrity we manage, the more we confess our mistakes but accept forgiveness…the more others will be blessed and helped.

I cannot tell you how the work of restoration will look in your life. Or how God will grow you though your times of sorrow or loss. But I know He will…He will grow you into healing…He will grow you into wholeness…and He will use your hard work of recovery to bring forth his (amazing mighI say) grace.

[1] Bill Ritter, Take the Dimness of My Soul Away: Healing After a Loved One’s Suicide (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2004), 49.

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Why We Long for God to See Us

by Tammy

in The God Who Sees You

Not long ago, I accompanied a friend to the hospital for surgery.

After she was wheeled away, I began talking with one of the nurses. Somehow the conversation came around to the nurse’s brother, who had been killed in an accident three years earlier. Like most untimely losses, the brother’s death had dramatically disrupted this woman’s family. Her mother still struggled with bitterness. Her parents’ marriage had faltered. Her baby son, born two weeks after her brother’s death, would never know his uncle.

Soon my new friend was pouring out her heart to me. And at some point I shared with her something I had been thinking about a lot.

“Do you understand that God sees you in all this?” I said. “He really sees—”

I hadn’t even finished the sentence before she started to weep. She cried so hard that another nurse walked over to see if she was okay. She was completely undone at the thought that God saw her pain, her fear, her broken heart. She kept saying through deep sobs, “He sees me? He really sees my reality?”

That was just one simple encounter, one more reminder that the message of the God who sees you is one that needs to be shared again and again—with those who don’t know the Lord and with those who do. There’s a reason we hunger to be recognized, acknowledged, appreciated, and cared for. There’s a reason our hide-and-seek life—yearning to be found by God, yet fearing it at the same time—leaves us feeling so bruised and unsatisfied. It’s because God has intentionally and wonderfully created us to see and be seen, to live in intimate and joyful relationship with Him and with others.

More important, He put that need in us because He wants to meet it. He’s put the longing there to draw us closer to His heart.

We hunger to be seen—because He really does see us.

The challenge is to really believe it … to live in the confidence that we are recognized and accepted and included and, most of all, loved.

Can you do that? Can I?

I’ll admit I’ve had my struggles, but I can honestly say I believe it with all my heart. Here’s why.

First, the Bible tells me so, and the Bible has proven a reliable guide in my life. The whole sweep of the Bible can be understood as the story of a God who saw His people, even when they couldn’t see Him. A God who came to earth and paid special attention to the unnoticed—the meek and the mourning, the children everyone turned away, the powerless rather than the ones on top. A God who cared so much about what He saw that He came to earth in human form, turning hide-and-seek into the ultimate show-and-tell.

But I also believe because God has shown me, again and again, in the circumstances of my life. He has shown me through the whisper of His Holy Spirit, through the timing of my experiences, through the love and example of other people and the mysterious provision of what I have needed most.

I’ve seen too much evidence not to believe God sees me. I’ve been loved too much not to make it the story of my life.

I want it to be the story of your life as well. I want it to change everything, including the way you look at God and yourself and other people. I want you to live in confidence that when God looks at you, He sees beauty. He sees value. He sees hope. And even when you’re hiding, even when you’re so beaten down you can’t see anything clearly, He’s still hard at work, crafting a beautiful future of relationship with Him and with others. . . .

That’s . . . my personal witness as someone who at times has felt forgotten, uncared for, unloved, invisible. I truly believe I have a word from God for those lonely, aching times in your life.

The message is this: Regardless of how you may feel, God does see you.

He knows your name, and He loves you—passionately and tenderly.

He sees your needs, and He yearns to fill them.

At any given moment, even when you feel most alone, He is working all things together for your good.

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A Christmas Epiphany

by Tammy

in Lifegiving Devotionals, The God Who Sees You, Weblogs

Has anything like this ever happened to you?

You might not have seen a light or experienced a vision. But maybe you’ve had one of those moments when everything seems to come clear and you suddenly understand something in a whole new way. When you find yourself newly and intensely aware of God’s presence. When you are granted the gift of peering past the veil and you just know you’ve encountered the God who sees you. Something clicks in your mind and soul and spirit, and you suddenly think, Yes!

It’s called an epiphany moment. And if it has ever happened to you, you know what a true miracle it can be.

Showimage.ashx

It happened to me about this time last year, while I was sitting in the car with my daughter Mackenzie.

Car on snowy road

Actually, the whole thing started several hours earlier, when I realized with a start that it was December 22 and I hadn’t even begun to prepare for Christmas.

This was not normal for me. I love Christmas, and I usually start my preparations early. But this year Christmas had sort of been pushed aside by a family wedding. And I suddenly realized I had only forty-eight hours to make Christmas happen—shopping, wrapping, cooking, everything. I was feeling like a failure before I even started.

That’s when Mackenzie called. “Mom, I’ve got to go to Target this morning. Do you have time to go with me?”

Yes! I thought. Perfect timing. I could take care of my to-do list and have some much-needed time with my firstborn. My efficient, get-it-done mode kicked in as I grabbed a large coffee, picked up my shopping list, and headed for Target with Mackenzie.

Would you believe I got all the shopping done in less than an hour? (That’s one upside of a limited budget.) I stuffed all my packages in the car, and we started for home, my mind already racing ahead to what I needed to do next.

But then, as we drove, I fell into a conversation with Mackenzie.

Car on snowy road

She shared with me some ideas she’d been writing about in her blog—thoughts about her experience of being an adult child from a divorced family, about taking responsibility for her life, and about the meaning of Christmas. Her insights were profound, thoughtful, seasoned with both pain and maturity. And by the time we pulled up in my driveway, time had stilled. All my concerns about shopping and cooking and making Christmas happen had faded.

“Mom,” Mackenzie said to me there in the car, “Christ came when we didn’t acknowledge Him, when we weren’t grateful, when we were blind to our need and determined to have our own way. He came when we didn’t think we needed Him. And Mom, I am learning that He still comes, no matter what. He comes to free us from the failure of our lives, from the broken promises that seem to define us. He says, ‘I saw you in your need. And I still see you. I am restoring all you thought was lost, all you have grieved and left behind. For with Me, all things are new.’”

I am fully convinced I experienced a miracle that morning through the life of my young adult daughter. With her words, with who she is, Mackenzie unwrapped my Christmas gift from the God who sees me. She helped me shift my perspective from anxiety over what needed to happen to peace over what God has done in all our lives.

“Well, we can take the tree down now, because Christmas has already happened,” I told Jerry when I walked into the house that day. Jerry smiled when I explained what had happened in the car. “Christmas is more than what hangs on that tree,” he said. “He hung on the tree. He is the gift.”

Cross

Jesus gave and still gives us the miracle of a perspective change. Right in the middle of the messiness of life, He still comes. He still reveals Himself to our longing eyes.

Adapted from The God Who Sees You, by Tammy Maltby (with Anne Christian Buchanan) David C. Cook publishers.

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