He Is Not Wincing

There is a way of walking past a mirror that people who are at peace with themselves have never had to learn.

You know it. It is a slight speeding up and a slight turning of the head, done so smoothly that it does not look like anything from outside. You are not avoiding the mirror, exactly. You are just always slightly on your way somewhere when you pass it.

And you have done that for so many years that it has stopped being a decision. It is just how that hallway is walked.

I am not going to ask you to stop. Not yet. And I am not going to tell you to look in it and find something you like, because that is what everybody says and it does not work, and the reason it does not work is that it asks the person who is at war to negotiate the ceasefire on their own.

What I want to do is much smaller. I want to tell you who else is looking.

She named Him for the way He saw her

There is a woman in Genesis who is in a genuinely terrible position: pregnant, alone, running away from a household where she has been badly treated, sitting by a spring in the desert.

And God meets her there. And what she does next is astonishing, because she becomes the only person in the whole Bible to give God a name.

And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me: for she said, Have I also here looked after him that seeth me? (Genesis 16:13, King James Version)

Thou God seest me.

Out of everything she could have named Him for, she names Him for how He looked at her. Not for rescuing her, which He does not exactly do. Not for changing her circumstances, which stay hard. She names Him for the quality of His attention.

She was in the worst condition of her life and she was looked at in a way that made her want to name the One doing the looking.

You are being looked at right now, and there has never once been a flinch in it. Genesis 16:13 has a woman in the worst state of her life name God for the way He saw her, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a thing a person can feel rather than merely agree with.

What you are expecting from a look

Here is why this matters more than a compliment would.

You have been looked at a great deal. Some of it was kind and most of it was neutral and a certain amount of it was not, and somewhere in all of that you built a model of what happens when somebody's eyes land on you. There is a fractional pause. A recalculation. Something is being decided. Genesis 16:13 is the one place in the whole book where somebody names God for how He looked at them, and the Holy Spirit is the reason that name stuck.

And now, when you think about God looking at you, that model comes with it. Of course it does. It is the only model you have. So this is not information you are short of. You know the doctrine. What you are short of is a different experience of being looked at, and that is not something a paragraph can hand you. What I can do is tell you plainly that the pause you brace for is not there. Not softened. Not present. He is not doing the thing you are braced for.

You are not being assessed, and the recalculation you flinch at has never once happened in heaven. The written word says thou God seest me, spoken as a comfort rather than as a warning, and the Spirit of God is the one who changes what being looked at feels like.

What I am not asking

Let me be plain about the things this site will never do, because you have been handed all of them before. I am not going to give you a number, a target, a plan or a program, today or ever. There is no before and after here and there never will be. I am not going to tell you what to eat or not eat, or how to move, or what to aim at. And I am not going to praise a body, yours or anybody's, in either direction.

I am also not going to ask you to feel differently by the end of this page. Feelings do not take instructions and asking for them is just one more thing to fail at. Genesis 16:13 has God arrive with no conditions attached at all, and the Holy Spirit has never once handed somebody relief and an invoice in the same breath.

The whole assignment today is to hear one sentence said over you by somebody other than yourself.

You are not being given another thing to do, and nothing here has ever once required you to change first. Genesis 16:13 has God meet a woman where she was and not where she was heading, and the Holy Spirit is the one who arrives without a set of conditions attached.