I see you
From upstairs, I hear Riley saying her goodbyes to the members of her online class one by one, and every time the sentence full, as if acknowledgement simply must not be halfway done. In our home, where Autism rises like a wall, interrupting and limiting relationships, we exchange words as valuable currency; we fight for them; we build bridges with them. Riley tries and tries and tries; she tries harder than most of us.
For years, acknowledging people by name has been Riley’s unique way to share God’s grace. Though in her lifetime Riley has often either been overlooked and ignored or mocked, she passes ‘I see you, you matter‘ to absolutely everyone she can. Even though she has always fumbled with the keys to connection, she has also always innately understood how desperately we all need acknowledgement. So in elementary school, during Riley’s stint on the safety patrol, she scanned her yearbooks for hours every day and then baffled other kids, greeting them by name when she opened and closed car doors in the carpool lane. I watched them tilt their heads, watched them thinking, “Who’s this weird girl and how does she know me?” I watched their mothers and fathers smile, driving away. As a teen, Riley played church hostess, welcoming families to church services at the front door, acknowledging every single person down to the youngest child, even returning families who had been away for years. I watched them walk down the hall smiling, feeling a little less uncomfortable about coming back.
This has been God’s grace to Riley, that through her He has long repeated a truth delivered in ancient times by the prophet Isaiah, “Do not fear…I have called you by name.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” one of Riley’s classmates drawls, “your camera froze. I can’t quite see you.”
Hearing this, I suddenly realize that what God does through Riley involves so much more than the words. I think of Peter and John on the way to prayer, stopping in front of an invisible man, or at least a man who would have believed himself so, a man both lame and begging. Before they healed him, they urged, Look at us! It’s an odd thing to say to a man used to feeling unknown and unwanted, used to hundreds of others who ignore him and walk on, but then maybe we can’t quite get close to the truth about how visible and valuable we really are without seeing it reflected back to us. If anyone felt often overlooked and ignored, it was that man.
It’s these kids in Riley’s class.
Maybe people who feel invisible need to look at someone seeing them, to look at God seeing them through the eyes of His people, to begin to discover their own substance.
“Oh!” Riley pauses, and silence stretches a beat, and in that space I think of the change in me when I’m in hidden mourning and a friend leaves a jar of flowers at my door. The flowers say I see you; I know, in a voice at once coming right from God through my friend. Something about seeing that I’m seen begins to heal my view and help me know it.
“There you are,” Riley’s friend says, his voice slow, rumbling over gravel. “I can see you now. Go ahead.”
“Okay, goodbye, Ethan! I’ll see you tomorrow!”
“She’s such a sweet person,” Kevin says, smiling with me as we eavesdrop from our office upstairs, because we both know that whatever makes Riley this way can only be a gift from God.
The care with which Riley remembers names, this way she understands and acknowledges the value of every soul, has long reminded me of the genealogies of the Bible, of those lists, which, as Max Lucado said, feel like a protracted pause during which God opens His cosmic wallet to brag over all the pictures of His kids. When I try to read those, my eyes eventually glaze over. There are so many names. God’s love has so much more capacity than mine. Riley’s love has so much more capacity than mine.
Dallas Willard wrote that when scripture says, “God is love,” it tells us something about love rather than something about God. In other words, we must never use our own broken definitions of love to try to understand God; we must let our experiences and knowledge of God define our understanding of love. The fact that all those names feel gratuitous to me only demonstrates the smallness of my perspective.
In the histories of the Bible, when people come to understand something about the nature of God, they call him by a new name like Jehovah Rapha, the God Who Heals; Jehovah Jireh, God Will Provide; and El Shaddai, God Almighty. As I listen to Riley calling her friends by name, I’m reminded of another–El Roi, the name an abused slave named Hagar used after she had an encounter with God in the desert. “You are the God Who Sees Me (you are El Roi),” she told Him, and then expounded, “I have now seen the God who sees me.”
I imagine that lame beggar felt something similar the day Peter and John healed him by the power of the Name Jesus. I have now seen that God sees me.
In cheerful chimes, Riley continues, not leaving anyone out, and I chuckle, especially when she throws in, “Bye everybody!” like a pile of confetti at the end.
To my mind, college has never sounded better.
