I Am Not Invisible

I went on a women's retreat with my church last weekend.  I was looking forward to spending time with some of my best friends, having a weekend away, imposing rest and relaxation on myself.  I was also in a state of anticipation for the message our speaker, Connally Gilliam, was going to bring.  Connally's written a book, Revelations of a Single Woman: Loving the Life I Didn't Expect (which was a great book about the single life - living it or relating to it), and since I too am living a "life I didn't expect," I had a feeling God was going to give her something to say to me.  And He did.

The opening session on Friday night focused on the fact that we are seen by God.  He never leaves us alone and we are never invisible to Him.  I don't know how many times over the past several years I have felt alone.  Intellectually, I knew I was never alone.  God has promised to never leave me or forsake me.  I have a family who loves me.  But I still felt completely and utterly alone.  And like T.S. Eliot says in a poem Connally shared:

What is hell? Hell is oneself.

Hell is alone, the other figures in it

Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from

And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

What bleak words!  Yet as I heard them I realized that that is exactly how I would sum up the experience of my life over the course of six years or so.  To realize that I would use these horrible words to describe my own life brought me grief, but that grief was countered by the feeling that I was finally exhaling a breath I didn’t know I had been holding.  My past hurts, and no matter how hard I try to see the good in things and look on the bright side, there is still pain that won’t be explained away or justified by some good that results from it.  This was my frame of mind going into the next section of our Friday night session.

The next part of our session was a time of prayer, worship, and reflection on some Scriptures that Connally read to us.  A fitting Scripture for a retreat about “being known,” Psalm 139 was one of the first passages Connally read.  I know this psalm; I memorized it growing up.  But one verse jumped out at me that night: “In your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them” (vs. 16).  Here is how my thoughts progressed from that point:

God had all my days written down, planned out, from before creation.  He knew about those years of loneliness; in fact, He planned them for me!  Why, God, why?  Was all that suffering really necessary?  Even now I feel the effects of it.  (Cue tears.)  I want to be made whole, for the good promised me in Rom. 8:28 to come to pass, and yet I still feel broken.  Enough already!  Aren’t you listening to me, God?  I love you and I want to trust you, but this is so hard!  Please give me more faith.  Help my unbelief. 

At this point I realized I was missing the other verses Connally was reading, so I turned off my inner monologue and tuned in again to what she was reading.  This is what I heard: “I have heard your prayer; I have seen your tears. Behold, I will heal you.”  Seriously.  That’s what she read.  (I found out later that it’s 2 Kings 20:5.)  God’s message could not have been clearer had the woman next to me turned to me and spoken it.  God heard my prayer!  He sees my tears!  And He is going to heal me! 

Honestly, I should not have been as shocked as I was, but I have never received such a blatant word from God before.  It’s taken me a whole week just to formulate my thoughts for this post: I am not alone.  I am heard by God.  I am seen by God.  He understands my emotions and does not chastise me for them.  My pain is not trifling to Him.  Best of all, He is going to heal me.  He told me so Himself: “I have heard your prayer; I have seen your tears.  Behold, I will heal you.”   

Stay tuned; this story is To Be Continued…