Unseen: The Gift of Being Hidden in a World That Loves to Be Noticed

by Sara Hagerty

Just as little children need to be seen, need to see their reflection in the eyes of a loving parent, I needed to see God seeing me as I spent hours in the stillness of that store. I needed to see the twinkle in His eyes when He looked at me.

I needed to know what He thought of me in my unproductivity, when I was doing nothing to advance His kingdom, just paying my bills, buying groceries, and making the bed. If God had tender thoughts toward me in my mundane moments, then those were moments in which I wanted to encounter Him. I wanted to believe that the same God who was pleased with me when I shared the gospel still smiled when I took out the trash or took a nap. If I could meet God’s eyes in all those ordinary times—if I could just see the spark, there—then my assumptions about what matters most to God would have to change.

He does this all so that we might see another side of Him, this God who looks deeply and knowingly into us when no one else is looking or noticing, and come alive under that eye.

In the words of Paul, these hidden times allure us to “think about the things of heaven, not the things of earth” (Col. 3:2).

Often the obvious accomplishments of our days get most of our attention. Noticing the roots, much less tending to them, seems secondary when there are branches to climb and fruit to pick. We live for what is right in front of us, while God is ever so gently calling us toward the unseen.

But God was ever so gently inviting me back to the soil. To hide in Him rather than perform for Him, to shift my attention from branches to roots, from my visible work for God to my unseen life in God.

The craving to be seen is universal: we were made to be known. But there is only one who can know us. He is the one who created us to live with moments and hours that no one else can understand.

He takes us out of an up-front role so we can discover the beauty of falling in love with Him when no one else is looking on or applauding. We sit behind a desk, toiling at a job no one appreciates. We push a stroller, change diapers, and rock crying babies to sleep. We work behind the scenes, clipboard in hand, serving the person on stage. We attend a church whose mission isn’t the perfect fit with who we are and how we’re gifted, and we serve, quietly and unacknowledged, in the background.

We spend the majority of our lives hidden from others. Our secret thoughts, our sleep, our parenting and driving and grocery shopping. God designed us to hide in Him, not perform for Him.

God doesn’t banish us to this hidden place. He invites us. And finding God in the secret can teach a heart to sing.

The kind of unhinged love that lays everything at His feet whether or not anyone else ever sees, approves, or applauds.

When no one else applauds you, when life is hard and makes no sense or simply feels like drudgery in the still quiet, will you hide yourself in Me? Will you waste your love on Me, here?

The problem is not that we long for significance but that we are shifty or misguided in where we look for it. When we crave most the eyes of others—their opinions and accolades—we break our gaze with the only eyes that will ever truly see us. We forget the beauty of the Creator-eyes turned toward us, the ones that saw the inception of our lives and loved what He saw.

And even after we find our way into God’s arms, parts of us are still broken, still in need of the tender hand of a Father gently putting us back together. Whether twenty-three, forty-eight, or seventy-one, there are always newly vulnerable parts of ourselves that need the reassurance of this wild love of God.

For true faith, it is either God or total collapse. And not since Adam stood up on the earth has God failed a single man or woman who trusted him.”

But the sweetest greatness starts with being rooted, being made and nurtured in secret, being seen by God alone.

We forget that it’s in the interruptions, the waiting seasons, the disappointments that we grow best.

“God could, had he pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape him. Of his great humility he chose to be incarnate in a man of delicate sensibilities who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane . . . He has faced all that the weakest of us face, has shared not only the strength of our nature but every weakness of it except sin. If he had been incarnate in a man of immense natural courage, that would have been for many of us almost the same as his not being incarnate at all.”

The God whose Spirit enables the breath inside my chest endured a far worse rejection than I ever will.

He is the one whose callused, earth-stained fingers gently hold the tender parts of my heart, the raw and bleeding parts of me. He is the one who loves for me to be exposed before Him, leaning in.

But it’s all subtly destructive when I scan these images and fail to turn my eyes back to God. They too often become a checklist of all the ways I am less than: less than organized, less than responsible, less than spiritual, less than athletic, less than beautiful. We become what we behold.

Beauty is in the lines of His face, the humanity He wore for you and for me. But we tend to be a people of quick glances—even with God. Life at warp speed allows for little beholding. We are increasingly accustomed to three-minute waits and one-click purchases. And in our approach to God, we follow the same pattern. We want the soundbites. Or we wait in expectation for barked, impersonal orders. Or we expect to barrel through life and then sit down for thirty minutes and somehow find focus, though our hearts were racing for the other twenty-three and a half hours of our day. We want to gaze on God’s beauty, we want to look into Jesus’ face, but speed and beauty rarely coexist.

“In prayer we intend to leave the world of anxieties and enter a world of wonder. We decide to leave an ego-centered world and enter a God-centered world. We will to leave a world of problems and enter a world of mystery. But it is not easy. We are used to anxieties, egos and problems; we are not used to wonder, God and mystery.”

Lovers will always outwork workers.