3-29-22
(1 minute, 55 seconds)

I wasn’t a sickly youngster, but I remember times when I was sick as a little girl. Specifically, the yucky kind of sick that involved throwing up. I remember a tender gesture from my mom. She would sit with me, gently rubbing my back and holding my long hair back. She didn’t actually fix anything, but her awareness and presence were what I most needed.

After I grew up and became a wife and mommy, I wasn’t a sickly woman but I did have occasional episodes of that yuckiest kind of sickness and other physical pains, illnesses, and owies. And even though my mom and I were not especially close, something deep inside me still wanted her to know, just to know when I wasn’t well.

One of the most precious truths about our Heavenly Father that He frequently cloaks my soul in is this:
When I am unwell, when I am overlooked or misunderstood, when tender places within me are alerted and troubled, God sees and He knows.

I recall feeling near the point of buckling under the pressure and stress of one of our many impending moves. Everything we had was boxed and ready to load on a moving truck when we had an unexpected change of plans including house guests with only hours of notice.
Something in my soul cried for someone to see and know the impossibly hard, devastatingly upending, out-of-gas place I was in.

That particular day consisted of an important doctor appointment for continued blood work for a worrisome situation and another doctor appointment where I endured one of those uncomfortable woman’s tests. Following these appointments, I dragged myself into Trader Joe’s to buy food for guests after purchasing a new pyrex dish at Target to cook the food in, because all I had was packed in a buried, near impossible-to-find state. Though of course now I clearly see that calling a pizza delivery service would have been a brilliant move, my body and mind at that point were slogging through quicksand and it never occurred to me.

Hurrying home, I scurried like a crazy woman to throw dinner in the oven, re-create a walking maze through a sea of boxes in our living room, and set the table with disposable plates and napkins. Suddenly mid-zoom, I halted and stood still. Like a gentle breeze that gives you pause as it kisses your bare arms in spring, I remember this comforting assurance softly blowing over my about-to-move-for-the-millionth-time overwhelmed heart:

God saw. God was with me and He knew.

The Bible says there was a man who had been an invalid for 38 years. This man suffered with a crippling disability for nearly four decades which left him isolated, defeated, and vulnerable.
John 5:6 is one of my favorite soul-cloaking passages that wraps me tenderly in the arms of Jesus. It says that “Jesus saw him lying there and knew.”
To be noticed and fully understood in our affliction, seen and known by Jesus, is life to our withered beings.
Psalm 31:7 also speaks of the comforting truth that faithful God SEES our affliction and He KNOWS the distress of our souls.

Whatever you are walking or crawling through, where ever you have come from, God sees, dear one. Even if no one else knows, He does.