God Sees the Pain No One Else Can See | Morning Prayer transcript

Before we pray, let's first take a moment to listen to God's word. And then we'll pray together. Some pain is hard to talk about. It usually doesn't make it into a social media post or onto a prayer request card at church. This is the pain that hides behind your smile. The pain you've learned to tuck away because explaining it feels exhausting. Or because you tried once and didn't get the support you needed. Maybe you've carried it for so long that you no longer expect anyone to notice.

I want you to know today that even where people cannot see, God does. The Bible gives us a woman whose story captures this. Her name was Hagar and we find her story in the book of Genesis. Hagar was Sarai's servant and after a painful chain of events involving Abram, she found herself pregnant, mistreated, and running for her life into the [music] desert. There was no one to explain her situation to. No one who understood the full weight of what she carried.

She was alone, running from the only home she had known, toward a wilderness with no clear end. Genesis 16 verses 7 to 8 tells us what happened next. It says, "The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert. It was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. And he said, 'Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?' 'I'm running away from my mistress Sarai,' she answered. The Lord went looking for her in the desert. >> [music] >> In the exact place she assumed no one would ever come.

God called her by name. He asked her questions he already knew the answers to because he wanted her to speak her pain out loud >> [music] >> to someone who actually cared what she said. Notice too that God met her before she had resolved anything. She had no plan, no destination, and no solution in hand. After this encounter, Hagar responds with words that have resonated through scripture for generations. Genesis 16:13 says, She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her.

You are the God who sees me. For she said, I have now seen the one who sees me. She gave God a name that day. A name born out of her own desert. Her own encounter. Her own pain. She called him the God who sees. If you read further, you will find that the well where this happened was named Beer-lahai-roi. The well of the living one who sees me. That place became a marker. A reminder to anyone who passed by afterward that God notices the ones the world tends to overlook.

This is not a truth reserved for one woman in one moment thousands of years ago. It is who God has always been. This was not a one-time encounter for Hagar. Years later, in Genesis chapter 21, she found herself in the wilderness again. And this time it looked even more hopeless. She had run out of water. And believing her son Ishmael was about to die, she placed him under a bush and walked a distance away, unable to watch him suffer.

Genesis 21 verse 17 tells us, "God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, 'What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid. God has heard the boy crying as he lies there.'" God saw her again. He heard the boy's cry even when Hagar had already given up hope. His eyes remain on us through every wilderness season, including the ones that repeat, including the ones we assumed we had already survived.

The psalmist understood this same truth from a different angle. In Psalm 56 verse 8, David writes, "Record my misery. List my tears on your scroll. Are they not in your record?" David wanted his pain recorded, remembered, accounted for. He wanted to know his tears were not falling into nothing, that someone was keeping count of what he carried in private. Scripture answers this longing again and again with a yes. Every tear is known.

Every sleepless night is noticed. Every silent ache is recorded by a God who forgets nothing. We see this same truth in the life of a woman in the New Testament. Mark 5 verses 25 to 28 tells us about a woman who had suffered from bleeding for 12 years. She had spent everything she had on doctors, and instead of improving, she grew worse. On the day she encountered Jesus, a large crowd pressed in around him, and she was one face among many, easy to overlook in a crowd that size.

Yet Mark 5: 30 tells us, "At once, Jesus realized that power had gone out from him." He turned around in the crowd and asked, "Who touched my clothes?" His disciples were confused, since everyone in that crowd was touching him. But Jesus was asking about the one whose faith had reached out in desperation, the one whose 12 years of pain no one else in that crowd could see. That is who God is. In a crowd of people, he turns toward the one quietly falling apart.

In a desert no one else walked into, he finds the one who is running. Whatever you carry today that feels too complicated to explain, too old to still matter, or too private to say out loud, God already sees it in full. You do not need the right words or the right audience for him to notice you. He already knows what you carry in the exact detail no one else has been given. Let's take a moment to pray together. Heavenly Father, I come to you as the God who sees me completely, the one whose eyes are never distracted by everything else happening around me.

You already know every part of my story I have never said out loud. And you do not need my pain explained in perfect sentences to understand it. I worship you, Lord. Thank you for the moments when you have already met me. Thank you for being there on the nights I cried alone and still felt something change because you were with me. Thank you for meeting me even before I had a plan, an explanation, or a solution to give you.

I am grateful that your care for me has never depended on how well I could express my pain. I also thank you for sending Jesus who did not keep away from human suffering, but chose to share in it completely. He carried grief that few people around him understood. Because of this, he is not a god who watches my pain from far away. He is close enough to understand exactly what I am going through and close enough to help.

Lord, right now, there is something in my life that no one else really understands. And I bring it to you just as it is. You already know what it is, so I will not try to cover it up. Please meet me right there. Let me sense your closeness where I have felt most alone. And let that be enough for today, even if nothing changes yet. I ask for comfort >> [music] >> that reaches past the version of me that smiling has protected for far too long.

I have learned to seem okay. But let me set that aside here with you. I let go of the need to pretend I am well in front of you because you already know the truth. And I do not have to keep up the act with the one who sees me fully. I am not invisible. Even if there have been situations that have led me to believe that I am unnoticed, unheard, or unimportant, that does not have the last say as to how you see me. You have addressed me by name in all the seasons, and you are still addressing me today.

I decide to accept that truth today. Father, I think now of others carrying what the people around them cannot see. Someone hearing this today is smiling through a diagnosis, a strained marriage, a private shame, or a grief they have never spoken aloud to another person. Someone is serving faithfully at church on the very weeks they feel furthest from you. And someone older, whose pain has been dismissed for years as part of aging, >> [music] >> has quietly stopped expecting anyone to ask how they really are.

I intercede for each of them now. Let them sense, even in the middle of a crowded room, that they have not gone unnoticed by you. Give them courage to keep speaking to you honestly, even from whatever wilderness they are currently standing in. Today, I let go of the burden I have been holding onto. I am no longer trying to handle it by myself, or deciding who should know about it. I give it completely to you because you have shown that you can carry what I cannot and I trust you more than I trust myself.

If you want to bring someone into my life to help me with this, please give me the wisdom to see them and the courage to accept their help. I do not want to mistake being alone for being strong. So, please show me the safe places you have already given me even if I have missed them before. Father, please heal the quiet places that remain sensitive and unspoken. Restore what others have overlooked and renew my strength where I feel exhausted and unsupported.

Grant me restful sleep, calm my thoughts, and bring joy to the areas where pain has lingered. I speak peace over my mind in place of the anxious replay it has grown used to. I speak strength over my body wherever this pain has settled physically. I speak hope over my future wherever discouragement has tried to write the ending before you have. I believe you are already working in what still feels unresolved and I choose to trust your timing over my own impatience.

I do not need every detail explained right now. What has felt delayed to me has never once been forgotten by you. And knowing that you see exactly where I am is enough to help me take the next step and the one after that and everyone that follows until this season gives way to something new. I ask you, Lord, to go ahead of me throughout this day. If I need it, grant me one sincere conversation, one moment of relief when I've been holding my breath for too long, and the mercy to be kind to myself in those instances where I have been harsh.

May this day contain, even if it is only in a small way, proof that you have been giving attention to me all the while. Thank you, Father, for having listened to this prayer just as it is. Thank you for being near to me in all the parts of my story which I have never told anyone else. I'm sure that you are keeping record of every tear, precisely as your word promises, and that nothing of it has been wasted or missed.

Let your peace come upon my heart and my mind at this moment. And may I leave here firmly believing without any doubt that I am completely seen. In Jesus' name, amen. [music] I hope this devotion reminds you that even in your most hidden pain, you are never invisible to God. If you have any special prayer requests, we would be honored to pray for you. Feel free to share them in the comments. And if Grace Oasis Ministry has blessed your life, please consider joining our Patreon or supporting us through Buy Me a Coffee.

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