If He Really Sees All Of It

The article she read was about wanting to be noticed, and it was kind, and it did not help at all.

It was a good article. It said the right things. It said that wanting somebody to see is ordinary and in everybody and does not make you a fraud, and she read all of it and agreed with all of it and closed the tab and felt exactly the same.

Because that is not the thing.

Wanting to be noticed is the surface. It is the part she could say out loud to a friend on a walk and they would both laugh. It is embarrassing in the way ordinary human things are embarrassing.

What is underneath that is not that.

She is not going to write it down here and nobody is going to ask her to. She knows what is in there. There is a thing she thought about a person she loves, once, that she has never told anybody. There is a satisfaction she felt about somebody else's bad news that lasted about four seconds and that she has carried for eleven years. There is a whole floor below that which she does not go down to.

So when she hears that God sees everything, the fear is not about being caught wanting attention. It is about the floor below.

If you know what she means, come and sit down. Nobody in here is going to ask you to describe it.

The verse is honest about the heart and does not flinch

Here is a sentence that does not comfort anybody at first reading, and I want to take it at full strength before doing anything else with it.

I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.Jeremiah 17:10

I search the heart. He does. That is not softened here.

And the verse before it, which people quote and then move quickly past, says the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, and asks who can know it.

Now watch. That question is not rhetorical despair. It is a setup. Who can know it? And the very next sentence is God saying: I do. I search it.

Which means the passage is not a threat. It is an answer to a question about who could possibly see the bottom of a human being, and the answer is the only one who could and He is not upset about it.

And here is the thing she has never noticed in eleven years. He said He searches it, and He said so out loud, in advance, in a book He gave to people He was keeping. A God intending to be shocked does not announce the search beforehand.

You are searched by Somebody who already knew what was down there, and He knew before you did. Jeremiah 17:10 is where that sits, answering the question the previous verse asks, and the same Spirit who put those two verses in that order is the one who lets a frightened woman read the second one without covering her face.

What He did after He searched

Now the part that does the actual work, and it is not in Jeremiah, it is in what God has done with people He had already searched.

He searched Jacob and then wrestled him and then blessed him. He searched David all the way to the bottom of the worst thing David did and then stayed, and left the psalms David wrote afterward in the book for everybody to read forever. He searched Peter before the fire and knew exactly what Peter would do at it, and told him so, and then made him breakfast on a beach and gave him the church.

Not one of those men was met after cleaning up. Every one of them was met while the thing was still in them and still known.

And that is the answer to the floor below. The question is not whether He sees it. He does, He said so, and there is no version of this where she gets to hold anything back.

The question is what He is like when He is down there, and the evidence on that runs to sixty-six books.

You have been fully searched already, and it is already done, and He has not left. He promised it, in the sentence about a love that nothing in all creation can separate anybody from (Romans 8:39), and His Spirit is not a visitor who would leave if the house turned out to be worse than advertised.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one.

And a specific word for a woman carrying something she has never said. If what is on that floor is heavy enough that it is affecting how you sleep or how you are with people, that is worth saying to a real person: a counselor, a pastor you trust, your doctor. That is not a failure of anything on this page. Privacy here is about audience and never about concealment, and telling somebody safe is always allowed.

You are permitted to say it to a person as well as to God, and it was always allowed. It is written into James 5:16, where confession to one another is named as the ordinary thing rather than the exceptional one, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to carry it alone.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.