The melody of hope has been humming in my ears over the last month. Often honestly, it not very sonorous.  It usually begins it’s loudest buzzing in the midst of greatest crisis.  An this month, has been full of crisis, broken and healing relationships, loss and restoration. The hum of hope keeps me going, making me turn my head to see why it is annoying me with it’s persistent buzzing, pressing me to hold on.

One of the most hopeful discoveries of the month was hearing over and over in so many spaces and so many way’s…God see’s.  And the reality is that I live and love my friends in a place that I don’t often want to see, the reality that I love and serve a God who see’s is changing my days.  I have always been a fan of Emmanuel, God with us.  But often in the last few years that has not felt so real to me anymore.  Because, God being with me/us, means, at least to me, that I am supposed to see God at work now, in the moment, feel something beyond myself, present, real, present. But mostly, I have felt absence and can only make sense of where God might have been looking back months and years later.  But to think of Hagar and her prayer/conversation with God, her desperate feeling of abandonment, in the midst of being lost and outcast, she prays “you are the God who see’s.”

And that “seeing” has been enough this month when I have no answers and my problem solving skills are meaningless.  The “seeing” is what helps me hear the hum of hope teasing my weary soul with it’s blasted off tune notes.

The beauty of the five senses, sometimes they don’t all work at the same time, sometimes they work together and sometimes, just one is enough.  Knowing that all this is “seen”by God.   The good, the great, the deeply painful and the extremely ugly parts, all seen, nothing hidden, seen, somehow holds me up.

At the end of a month like this, I don’t feel anything.  I am too tired, too compassion fatigued to breath, let alone have a feeling that makes any sense at all.  But the “Seeing” the “being seen” has sustained, helped me hold to hope, hold to belief, that the God who “see’s” will move, will act, with “be” with in the “seeing.” 

My hope is in the God who see’s.  Who reveals his back to us, who wrestles and leaves us with a limp, who can not always be felt.

What God saw this month, much of it might break God’s heart, it breaks mine and yet some it probably had tears of joy flowing down a glorious face, as 12 women celebrated three years of freedom at Sari Bari and the 2^nd Sari Bari unit celebrated three years since opening and making space for more than 40 women within it’s doors, I think these things made God laugh and dance an unruly gig!

The God who see’s, see’s it all.

Thankful to be seen.