God Sees Your Pain — Your Breakthrough Is Closer Than You Think

• It’s in the quiet hours, isn’t it? When the house is still and the world sleeps and the only sound is the beating of your own heart and the weight you carry feels so terribly completely yours alone. You look around and it seems everyone else is moving forward, smiling, living while you are here in this unseen place, bearing a burden that no one else can fully understand.
• And the most painful part, the deepest ache, isn’t always the struggle itself. It’s the feeling that you are enduring it, invisible. That your tears fall unnoticed. Your fears are yours to whisper into a pillow. Your courage is mustered in a silent solitary room. You wonder, “Does anyone see? Does anyone know the cost of the smile you put on? The strength it takes just to make it through one more hour.
• But I’m here to tell you tonight with every certainty in my soul that you are seen. Not just observed, not just noted, you are beheld. Every sigh that escapes your lips is heard in heaven. Every midnight prayer, every anguished, how long, Lord? Every moment you feel too weary to even form the words, it is all gathered. There is a divine compassion that is intimately acquainted with your particular pain.
• You are not a number, not a face in a crowd to him. You are his child and a father always sees his child. When Hagar was alone in the desert, desperate and convinced she and her son would perish, she gave a name to God. She called him Elra, the God who sees. You are the God who sees me, she said.
• And that revelation that she was not invisible in her desolation was what saved her life. That same God is here tonight. He is Elroy for you. He sees the exact contours of your heartache, the specific nature of your financial worry, the private depth of your loneliness, the hidden source of your shame. He sees it all. And this seeing is not a passive distant observation.
• It is the first and most profound form of help. Because to be seen is to be known and to be known by love itself is to begin the journey out of isolation. Think of it when you are hurting. What is the first thing you long for? Isn’t it for someone to truly see you, to understand, to nod and say, “I’m here. I get it.
• ” That acknowledgement alone can lift a piece of the weight. How much more then when the one who sees you is the creator of your very soul, the one who knit you together. His seeing is active, engaged, full of purpose. He sees not only where you are, but where you are going. He sees the path ahead even when you can only see the wall in front of you.