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Over the last few months, I have been sharing some questions I have been living with for a while. I have written about the strange blindness that can come with familiarity, about the assumptions that quietly become certainty, and about Jesus stopping when everything in me expects Him to keep moving. I have wondered what happens when we become so good at guarding our attention that we fail to remain attentive, and what it might mean to become interruptible. All those questions keep circling one small prayer: Lord, let me see.
At first, I thought I understood what I was asking. I wanted to see people more clearly. I wanted to notice what I too easily passed by, to question the assumptions that can quietly take the place of attention, and to return to familiar stories of Scripture with enough humility to believe there might still be more to see. But the prayer kept changing as I lived with it—or, more accurately, it kept changing me.
Eventually, I found myself asking whether I was seeing Christ as He actually is, or whether familiarity had made Him smaller and more manageable in my imagination. I began wondering whether what I knew could be true and still incomplete. I started paying attention to interruptions, to people at the edges of stories, to questions Jesus asks when surely He already knows the answer, and to moments when He stops when every ordinary measure of urgency says He should keep moving.
And then the prayer turned again. I began to understand that learning to see as Christ sees may not begin with looking outward at all. Before I can learn to notice what He notices, I need to understand what it means to stand before Him and discover that I have already been seen—fully, attentively, lovingly.
There is something I haven’t told you.
These questions did not begin with these articles. I have been living with them much longer and more quietly. I carried them into familiar passages of Scripture and found myself lingering there: beside a spring in the wilderness, beneath a fig tree, inside a busy home, within a pressing crowd, under the branches of a sycamore tree, across a hillside, and along a road where someone had been left behind. I began writing down what I was noticing, and somewhere along the way, the questions became pages. The pages became chapters. Eventually, I realized I was writing a book.
Lord, Let Me See: A Walk with the God Who Sees Us grew from that prayer and from my own desire to linger longer with the Christ I thought I knew so well. It is about seeing, certainly, but not quite in the way I first imagined. It is about the ways familiarity can narrow our vision, the assumptions we carry into stories we think we already know, and the people Christ notices when others see only a crowd, a category, an inconvenience, or an interruption.
But underneath all of that is the discovery that surprised me most: before Christ asks me to see, He sees me. That realization changed the way I understood the prayer. Learning to see is not simply a matter of becoming a better observer. It begins by returning again and again to the inexhaustible Christ with enough humility to recognize that no matter how long I have known Him, there is always more of Him to know.
The stories have not changed, but I have. And that may be one of the gifts of returning to familiar places in Scripture. We do not return because the truth has changed. We return because the One who is Truth is still forming us. We come back to look again, to wonder again, and to notice what familiarity may have allowed us to pass by.
I am almost ready to place these pages into the hands of others, which feels both wonderful and a little astonishing after carrying them quietly for so long. But I have realized something as I have shared these reflections here: in a way, I have already begun sharing the book. I just hadn’t told you that was what we were doing.
So, this is less an announcement and more of an invitation to keep looking with me. If these reflections have made you want to linger a little longer, you can learn more about Lord, Let Me See: A Walk with the God Who Sees Us on the website, Cabinet of Stories.
Lord, let me see.
There is still so much to behold.