I want to see

“I’m so thankful God gave us such a beautiful day for our walk,” Riley says, and it’s like she’s reading my mind as I stare wide-eyed at flame-red leaves set against a cloudless sky, as I watch the sunlight dance, as I listen to my daughter, who once could not speak at all, describe what she feels and what she sees, not just with her eyes, but also with her heart.

Feelings are hard, the speech therapist used to say, gathering up in one hand a stack of pictures of people displaying every possible emotion by way of exaggerated facial expressions.  The therapist used to comfort me this way, or maybe she meant to temper my expectations.  Feelings are hard.  Adjectives are hard.  Sentences are hard.  ‘W’ questions are hard.

Tell me what’s hard, and I’ll tell you about God and how I know the hard things can never overwhelm His love for us.

“Me too,” I say, still listening deep, hearing the praise of God a thousand ways, not only from Riley but from creation itself, the skies declaring God’s glory, every created thing displaying divine qualities that would otherwise remain unseen.

The height of that sky, going on and on forever, I know, from what God has said, that’s a reminder of the greatness of His steadfast love, His hesed, to those who hold Him in awe.  The endless span of the sky, that’s the immeasurable span of His forgiveness, how far He removes my sin from me.  The brightness of the sun, that’s the tiniest hint at His holiness, the radiance of His face, the brilliance of His shining in the hearts and faces of those who love Him, and then these trees, well, they speak paragraphs.

Seeing and hearing God, now that would be hard, except that He threaded Himself through everything He made and gave it visual speech everyone can understand; except He folded Himself into human flesh so we could relate.  It would be a mistake to believe that the knowledge of God has been reserved for a certain few, the ones the world applauds, or the ones from a certain tribe or nation or language or ability.

Riley falls silent, but I can feel her happy beside me, and I give thanks for grace upon grace already given, that even though she can’t always verbalize, she knows how to practice presence.  I glance at her and smile, thinking how easy it is to be with someone who really doesn’t need my words.  Years ago, when we had no words, my kids and I became fluent in each other.  I learned to hear with my mama eyes and my mama heart, and while it’s true that all human beings perceive and communicate using nonverbal communication, it’s also true that in the absence of certain means, our reliance on the others becomes more acute.

There is a speech beyond words, a seeing beyond viewing, a hearing not captured by the ear, a tasting not merely held on human tongues, a knowing that surpasses the mind.  There is a breath deeper than the lungs, a life broader than this one.

Those of us who have become lovers of God need to know that when the faculties of our flesh fail us, our souls still know how to be with Him.  In this relationship, our limitations meet His limitlessness.

I scan the sky, a fathomless blue so deep as to remind me of the ocean, letting its vastness swallow me, and silently, I acknowledge God.

“You’re tired today,” I say aloud to Riley, so she knows I already know what she hasn’t found a way to say to me.  It’s written in her eyes, in the slow spread of her smile.

“Yes, I am tired today,” she says, articulating each word carefully and without hesitation, letting that slow smile deepen as she glances my way before going back to reading the sky herself.

We walk this way for a mile, for two, hearing with our eyes, seeing with our hearts, and I smile, thinking about how Riley still often confuses those words, see and hear, in her speech.  I’ll say I hear a dog nearby, one hidden from our eyes behind walls or a fence, and she’ll say she sees the dog too.  I’ll say I see and she’ll agree, saying she hears, and maybe that’s because the absorption of every kind of sensory information at once, at the same priority, makes sourcing her impressions more confusing than I realize, or maybe she just tangles the words, or maybe, being present to me matters more to her than getting the words just right.  Maybe she knows, deep down, because she hasn’t always had the words, that seeing only amounts to another way to hear and hearing only to another way to see.  Every so often I correct her, saying something like, “You mean you hear the dog,” and she’ll readily agree, saying lightly, “yeah, oh sorry, I hear the dog,” as if she has no idea why I found it important to make such an interjection.

In scripture, “being neither seeing nor hearing” is an ailment of the soul that amounts to not having a relationship with God.  Although the concept has little to do with physical blindness and deafness, scripture uses those very real difficulties to illustrate this spiritual problem in a way that we can understand.  The poetry of the Psalms expresses that those who make idols become like them, having unseeing eyes and unhearing ears.  The prophet Isaiah says that those who see and understand will turn to God and be healed.  During the ministry of Jesus, He restores sight and hearing miraculously to many people and points to this as a sign of the nearness of His Kingdom.

In one such encounter with a couple of blind men, in fact, Jesus asks them, “What do you want me to do for you?” Perhaps, both in witnessing of this exchange and in hearing about it later, this question would have immediately drawn an Israelite mind back across time to King Solomon’s famous dream, when, in like fashion, God asked, “What do you want me to give you?”  Solomon asked for an understanding mind.  The blind men responded, “We want to see,” their response recorded in scripture using a Greek word that literally means to open (let our eyes be opened) and figuratively means to open the mind’s eye or give entrance to the soul.  The men received not only their physical sight, but, even more importantly, they received experiential knowledge of Jesus as the Christ and chose to follow Him.

I want to see.  I form the words silently, as light as a breath on my lips, letting them fly away like a prayer on the breeze that stirs the leaves at our feet, as I do every time I read them in print.  Those words, like Moses’s petition to see the glory of the Lord, feel like they come from my own heart, because what they really mean is, let me know you.  And what really blows me away every time is the lengths to which God has gone to respond yes.

I can feel Riley looking at me now and I glance her way, listening to the rhythm of her steps against the sparkling asphalt street, watching her brassy hair swing around her ears.  Catching my eyes, she grins recklessly wide and laughs out loud, spilling joy.

“I’m so glad God is always with us, Mom,” she says, and I laugh too, because it’s like she knew already what I hadn’t figured out how to say out loud, like she’d been listening with her heart.