But Now I See

I had heard rumors about You,
but now my eyes have seen You.
Therefore I take back my words
and repent in dust and ashes.
Job 42:5-6 HCSB

Job is describing perfectly what I experienced, and will continue to experience as my relationship with God deepens. Seeing God changes everything! Without personally interacting with the living God, it’s all just rumor and speculation. If there’s no true relationship, then I’m just a groupie or an obsessed fan, clinging to the fantasy I’ve created because I know that true intimacy is impossible. No, my God is real and present and speaking and interacting—and my life turns on every Word He speaks and every glimpse of His Heart that I perceive.

Each time I see Him, a greater sense of the eternal is planted in my heart. And I so desperately need that! The vastness of God allows me to slip my “mortal coil” and go beyond what I see and into what HE sees. And I’ve just discovered how much I needed to know how He sees me.

When you love someone, what they think about you is extremely important. Imagine, you’re standing in front of the absolute love of your life, the person that makes waking up in the morning awesome even if you only slept 2 hours. They look deeply into your eyes and gently say, “You are a disappointment in every possible way. I have to bite the inside of my lip to keep from nodding off when you speak, and the only word that consistently comes to mind when I see you is ‘mediocre.’” Would you shrug that off, or would your whole world come crashing down?

I’ve been convinced for a long time that because Christ died for me while I was still a sinner, that His view of me was stuck in wretch mode. If God sees everything, and He does, then how could He possibly see me in any positive way? That is the insidious pride of self-hatred. Insidious because it keeps us from the very thing we so desperately need: to see ourselves as our one true LOVE sees us.

And the reason I needed to see ME as HE sees me is so that I could see HIM. When I glimpsed how God sees me, I saw His great Heart. I saw a deep well of mercy and forgiveness, enormous tenderness and inexplicable delight, and a love that I have no words to describe. It was just me and Him. This wasn’t some vicarious buzz from a holy relic, or a framed, autographed glossy to prove I’m connected to Him. No, I experienced the Father-Heart of God in reality, and I am forever changed.

I don’t know much about anything, including my own life, but I know this: my big life changes follow a change in vision. The sight of my nephew splayed in a NICU incubator dragged my heart out of hellish depression and into the light of Love—love at first sight. Only 4 years later, my surrender to Christ as Savior AND Lord led to my first glimpse of the Almighty – the bottom of His Foot – and I was born again from above. And now this.

We need to see ourselves as God sees us, because that breaks down walls and takes us straight to Him. I’ve just experienced this, and all I did was repent, surrender, and say yes to God. It was His joy to show me everything I needed to see.

After the death of Abraham, God blessed his son Isaac,
and Isaac dwelt at Beer-lahai-roi
[A well to the Living One Who sees me].
Gen. 25:11 AMP

Read Part 1: I Once Was Blind