Hidden in Christ

In 1975, Dr. Edward Tronick conducted the first ever “Still Face Experiment”. The experiment tested what happens to a baby when its caregiver goes from being engaged and connected to non-responsive and disconnected. The experiment starts with mom and baby playing – the mom is very responsive, she looks where the baby points, they are talking and having fun. The baby is calm and happy because she knows mom is present and responding to her.

They are working to coordinate their emotions and their intentions, and that’s what the baby is used to!

Then the mom disconnects and looks at the baby with a blank face. It only takes a few moments for the baby to sense something is up. She tries to get her attention by smiling and pointing again since that worked before. The baby tries everything she can think of to get the mom back. She reaches and squeals.

When her attempts don’t work, her calm and happy demeanor quickly begins to unravel. She then begins to look away and grasp. It only takes a few minutes before she increasingly feels the stress of the disconnection and begins to melt down.

Our video stops here, and the mother re-engages with the baby, and we watch the baby calm back down and return to happy self knowing her mom is connected again.

Here’s the interesting thing: if the experiment were to continue, what you’d see is eventually the pain of the mom’s disconnection would become so unbearable, the baby would move into despair and become completely hopeless. Psychologist Jason Goldman wrote:

After three minutes of “interaction” with a non-responsive expressionless mother, [the baby] rapidly sobers and grows wary. [She] makes repeated attempts to get the interaction into its usual reciprocal pattern. When these attempts fail, the infant withdraws [and] orients [her] face and body away from [her] mother with a withdrawn, hopeless facial expression.

(Jason Goldman, Thoughtful Animal)

This research confirms what we know experientially: we need loving eyes to see us, connect to our hearts, and respond to what’s going on with us. We are, in the words of Curt Thompson, “Looking for eyes that are looking for us.” We are looking for eyes that truly see us, remain soft toward us, and don’t look away.

So when I say we have a deep need in us to be “seen”, I don’t just mean physically seen, though that’s important too. The mother with the still face was technically looking directly at her baby; rather, I mean we need to have our hearts paid attention to, engaged with in real time, and met with love and compassion. In many ways, love is measured by someone’s heartfelt responsiveness to what’s going on with us.

When we don’t feel seen, something deep inside of us panics. When we experience disconnection or feel unseen, it doesn’t take long for our hearts to slip into despair. Just like the infant in the Still Face Experiment, our internal sense of calm and happiness quickly unravels when we feel disconnected from love.

Why do I bring this up? Because in order to step into the Lord’s invitation for us in our unseen places, we have to start by acknowledging:

1. Our need to be seen and connected at a heart level is woven into us as humans, and it is not a bad thing.

2. The emotional turmoil that follows feeling unseen, forgotten, or alone not only makes sense, but is the natural response to disconnection.

The hidden and unseen places of our lives are the most painful and daunting to us, and we, understandably, do our best to avoid them. For some of us, our hearts have felt overlooked for so long, we, like the hopeless infant, have turned away and embraced despair at the thought of ever feeling truly seen or connected to love again.

It can be easier to stay busy, binge Netflix, or buy something new than it is to face the pain of feeling overlooked and alone. But even our best efforts cannot entirely snuff out the hidden feeling that creeps in beneath loads of laundry, in the community group we don’t feel we entirely fit in, when another year goes by without one date, when our name is not on the invite list, when our good works go unnoticed, when someone chooses their phone over connecting to us...I think if we’re all honest, there are a myriad of ways this feeling of being unseen eats away at our hope, joy, and peace.

I’ll go ahead and give you the punch line of this teaching on the front end, and it’s very much a good news/bad news situation.

Good news is: There’s a warm face that’s never once looked away from us. There’s someone who is always intimately connected to our hearts and our stories, and there are steady, soft eyes that see us in the way we most deeply need and desire to be seen. We do have someone’s undivided attention who will never leave us nor forsake us. And when we understand how deeply seen and known and beloved we are by God, we are entirely transformed!

Bad news is: The path to knowing, trusting, and resting under God’s soul-level, loving gaze is laden with grief and requires unlearning our responses to failed human gazes. It means giving up old comforts that cannot satisfy the deepest longing of our hearts. The journey to coming alive to the knowledge that God sees us winds through the valley of the shadow of death.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Today, we are taking the hand of an older sister in the faith, Hannah, and following her lead on this well-worn path through death and grief to resurrection. The end goal is to live in the full assurance of just how deeply known we are and to flourish under the loving gaze of a God who sees into the depths of our hearts.

Cathy Loerzel from the Allender Center lays out this helpful path in what she calls the “U-Diagram of healing.” It shows us the road we must walk to heal from the pain of the unseen places in our stories.

The path is not an easy one to walk – we must go down and lament with Hannah before we can join her in the joyful worship, praising the God who never forgot her. But today, we do not walk alone. We walk together, following Hannah’s lead, and ultimately following Christ from the death of Good Friday to the despair of Holy Saturday and ultimately, to the rejoicing of Easter Sunday.

So, let’s jump into our text for today, 1 Samuel 1:1.

“Penninah had children…Hannah had none”

1 There was a certain man …whose name was Elkanah … 2 He had two wives; one was called Hannah and the other Peninnah. Peninnah had children, but Hannah had none.

Right off the bat, the author of 1 Samuel names Hannah’s pain. She was childless, and we later learn she really longed to have a child. She also lived in a patriarchal culture that valued the ability to have kids, especially sons, more than just about anything else… Can you imagine the sting of being the barren wife?

To add insult to injury, her husband’s other wife had several daughters and sons – and it served as a constant reminder to Hannah of what she did not have. I imagine every time she looked upon Penninah’s swollen belly and remembered her own empty womb, Hannah’s heart sank deeper and all the more close to despair.

And this dragged on “year after year.” Hannah’s heart was constantly bombarded with the pain of not having the family she most desired. Her sorrow and longing were seemingly always before her.

We all are familiar with Hannah’s pain in some way – we intuitively recognize the sting of it from our own stories. Naming our places of sadness and longing hurts, and staring down the barrel of our pain feels like death, but this is where our journey begins.

For many of us, I think there is a visceral sense of Hannah’s pain because you too feel unseen in it. You might feel unseen in your own childlessness at yet another friend’s baby shower. You feel the pain of longing for a group of close friends with whom you can share your life and heart. Maybe you’re grappling with the painful aftershocks of abuse or chronic illness in your story and feel like no one sees all the sorrow you carry. Maybe you feel pain because your marriage is falling apart. Or maybe you, like me, long to be married one day but feel as though you’re still hidden in singleness.

Just naming the unseen pain of my own longing leaves an ache in my chest, and quite honestly, I wish one of you on the front row had a big chocolate chip cookie I could sink my teeth into to make it go away. I do not like this pain, and I’d venture to guess, neither do you. But we’re being invited to face it.

Naming our pain is the first stop on this journey. Next, we must face the God who sees our pain. Let’s keep reading:

“The Lord closed her womb”

3 Year after year this man went up from his town to worship and sacrifice to the Lord Almighty at Shiloh…Whenever the day came for Elkanah to sacrifice, he would give portions of the meat to his wife Peninnah and to all her sons and daughters. 5 But to Hannah he gave a double portion because he loved her, and the Lord had closed her womb.

I told you it would get worse before it gets better…bear with me. “The Lord had closed her womb.”

It seems the Lord was either 1) refusing to open her womb and take away her pain or 2) intentionally inflicting the pain on her by actively closing her womb. He wasn’t a passive bystander to Hannah’s story – this is the story He hand-picked for her.

On the surface, that feels pretty at odds with the character of a God who sees us. It’s hard to compute how a loving God, after seeing just how much our hearts ache with longing, would respond by intensifying our pain. Is this true of His character?

Well, to get the full picture we have to look at the whole story of Scripture. There’s a clue for us in Hosea 6. Let’s look together:

Hosea 6:1-3

“Come, let us return to the LORD.

He has torn us to pieces

But he will heal us;

He has injured us

But he will bind up our wounds.

After two days he will revive us;

On the third day he will restore us,

That we may live in his presence…

As surely as the sun rises,

He will appear;

He will come to us like the winter rains,

Like the spring rains that water the earth.”

So yes, it would seem He is the one who tears and injures us, but that’s not the whole picture. In fact, His wounding actions are far outweighed by His healing ones. The Lord is a faithful Father who only wounds if it’s what’s needed to bring about real healing and who only withholds so we may leave our empty wells and return to Him.

Yes, He tears and wounds, but He is quicker to heal, to bind up, to revive, to restore, to appear, and to come and satisfy our hearts.

The pain we feel in the unseen places of our lives is only part of the story. Perhaps it’s a grace-filled wound of a Father whose loving eyes are searching for ours and who wants to satisfy our deepest craving for unity, stability, and wholeness with Himself. One of my favorite songs has a lyric from the heart of a Father that says:

“I hate to make you bleed, unless it leads you limping homeward. So come back to my house, and I’ll give what they can’t offer, it’s just blood on my couch, we’ll clean it up together.”

(Just and Just As, Penny and Sparrow)

Could it be that our hearts are looking to be satisfied by things that cannot offer us what we most desperately need? Could it be the slice of pain we experience when we feel unseen is a faithful wound from our Father, beckoning our prodigal hearts home?

With these questions in mind, let’s go deeper into our story. Pick up with me in verse 6:

“Her rival taunted her”

6 Because the Lord had closed Hannah’s womb, her rival kept provoking her in order to irritate her. 7 This went on year after year. Whenever Hannah went up to the house of the Lord, her rival provoked her till she wept and would not eat…

We find ourselves at the final stop on our journey down to the deepest part of Hannah’s grief. Not only did she experience the pain of longing and have to face the God who closed her womb, but then she had to endure her rival, who provoked her for years. She was constantly having salt rubbed into an already raw and open wound.

Like Hannah, we too have an enemy of our souls who leverages our pain to provoke us and drive us to despair.

When I feel unseen, the rival of my soul provokes me by trying to get me to listen to one of three voices: toxic shame, resentment, or despair.

• Toxic shame tells me a story about myself: people don’t want me around because I’m too much, not enough, too hard to love, or not worthy of love.

• Resentment tells me the person/people I feel unseen by are judgemental, emotionally immature, selfish, excluding me, or not intentional, and they are to blame for my pain.

• Despair tells me God has forgotten me, I am alone, I will not have any more hope or joy or peace…I have been abandoned, God’s face is still toward me, and He does not hear my cries of pain, so I should just shut my heart down and turn away from Him.

Oh how wicked and cruel our enemy is! He begins to infuse lies in our hearts when we are in our most desperate need for truth.

As an aside: Not if but when the lies of the enemy are beckoning you to spiral in shame or grow bitter in resentment or give over to despair, cry out to the Lord for help and for rescue, reach out to a woman in this room and ask her to remind you of the truer story. Sometimes we need friends to speak the Gospel over us and remind us of what’s true.

But the abuse of our enemy is not the final stop on this journey, nor does it get the final word. Oh how easily we might miss the truer, better ending to the story if we stopped here! The next step of the journey may feel especially daunting after this one, but let’s take Hannah’s hand and take a step forward into grief.

“In her deep anguish Hannah prayed to the Lord, weeping bitterly.”

10 In her deep anguish Hannah prayed to the Lord, weeping bitterly. 11 And she made a vow, saying, “Lord Almighty, if you will only look on your servant’s misery and remember me, and not forget your servant but give her a son, then I will give him to the Lord for all the days of his life, and no razor will ever be used on his head.”

12 As she kept on praying to the Lord, Eli observed her mouth. 13 Hannah was praying in her heart, and her lips were moving but her voice was not heard. Eli thought she was drunk 14 and said to her, “How long are you going to stay drunk? Put away your wine.”

15 “Not so, my lord,” Hannah replied, “I am a woman who is deeply troubled. I have not been drinking wine or beer; I was pouring out my soul to the Lord. 16 Do not take your servant for a wicked woman; I have been praying here out of my great anguish and grief.”

There is so much to be said about Hannah’s lament here, but I want to point out these three things:

1. The proper way to deal with all the anguish Hannah had stored up in her heart was to pour it out at God’s feet – and she did not hold back.

• Friends, I hope you know the Father can hold your grief. He can handle you beating on His chest. His face is not still toward you when you cry out in pain in His arms. He is the best place to bring your hurts. Pick a Psalm of lament and let it guide you as you pour out your soul to the Lord.

2. Hannah did not diminish or rush past her grief.

• Hannah did not filter her lament. In fact, she grieved to such a degree Eli accused her of drunkenness. She let it all out, no holds barred.

• It’s important not to push past the death of grief to try and get to resurrection – sit in the Holy Saturday uncertainty of “My savior is dead” and feel the despair and anguish that comes with it.

• You will move through in due time, but it’s important not to bypass what happens in the deepest places of your grief, which leads me to my third point:

3. Hannah’s lament was a place of transformation.

• Hannah moves from the painful cry of “I want a son” to “Lord, look at me, see my pain, remember me, and do not forget me.”

• When she gave over to grief, she realized the deeper longing beneath her longing for a son was to be seen and remembered by the Lord. Every time Penninah became pregnant, Hannah felt as though the Lord had forgotten her yet again.

• Childlessness felt like God’s still face – and in her grief, Hannah realized that, more than she wanted a son, what she really needed was to be seen and remembered by the Lord.

More than Hannah longed for a son, she longed for the Lord to remember her when it seems as though He has passed over her time and time again…

Grief is a messy and disorienting place, and sitting in it for longer than a few moments feels like death, BUT it is also a purifying place, where we can realize the deeper and truer longings of our souls. And we can hold fast to the promise: our Father’s face toward us is not still, especially in our grief. Let’s pick up in verse 19.

“The Lord remembered her.”

19 Early the next morning they arose and worshiped before the Lord and

then went back to their home at Ramah. Elkanah made love to his wife Hannah, and the Lord remembered her. 20 So in the course of time Hannah became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She named him Samuel, saying, “Because I asked the Lord for him.”

Hannah’s plea was for the Lord to look on her misery and remember her, and He does. The Lord responded to Hannah’s cries, and he answered the deepest longing of her heart: he remembered her.

I want to take a second here to say this: beneath all your pain and grief, there is a God who knows you, and has known you since you were in your mother’s womb. He lovingly knit you together, and He knows you intimately.

He was there when you scraped your knee as a kid, and He is with you now when you feel like another day goes by without someone asking, “How are you, really?” He catches every tear that falls from your eye, and He hasn’t missed a single one.

With childlike faith, Hannah reached for God and asked Him to show her He remembers her. God did not tire of her childlike reach for Him. He did not push her away with a “You should know this by now.” No, what does He do? Like a good parent, He hears her cries and He responds. He remembered her, just like she asked.

Just as the Lord responds to Hannah, so also will He respond to you. As Hosea says, “His coming is as sure as the dawn” – He always comforts His children. It may not feel true in the throes of your grief, but friends, His faithfulness is sure and it is bigger than the doubts we feel in the midst of our pain.

This kind of steady, sure, responsive love changes us, and we see this in Hannah’s story. What does this love lead her to do? Let’s keep reading.

“She took the boy with her and offered him to the house of the Lord”

24 After he was weaned, she took the boy with her, young as he was…and brought him to the house of the Lord at Shiloh… they brought the boy to Eli, 26 and she said to him, “Pardon me, my lord. As surely as you live, I am the woman who stood here beside you praying to the Lord. 27 I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of him. 28 So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he will be given over to the Lord.” And he worshiped the Lord there.

She gives Samuel back to the Lord. How does Hannah go from being grieved and anguished over this thing she did not have, to giving it back to God shortly after she receives it?

The only explanation is that she encountered the loving eyes of the God who sees her and she was completely and utterly satisfied. She realized the thing she longed for paled in comparison to the deeper, truer longing of her heart: to be remembered and to know the Lord responds to her.

Deep down, Hannah had experienced the faithful, loving character of this God, and she laid down the thing she most wanted back at His feet. Hannah encountered the Living God and was entirely changed!

What if, like Hannah, we allowed the pain of being unseen to send us searching for the loving, responsive eyes of our God? What if the grief of our proverbially empty wombs led us to the feet of the God Who Sees?

Friends, I hope we can recognize our heart’s deepest need is not to be seen by our spouse, our community group, the women in this room, or to hold in our hands the thing we most desire in this world; rather, our greatest need is to be intimately connected to our loving Father.

And while we are not promised the fulfillment of every earthly desire, we are promised that He will satisfy the deepest longings of our hearts with Himself. Now we can only know this satisfaction in part, but then, when we meet Him face-to-face in glory, we will know it in full!

When we find His loving eyes and taste what it means to see Him and be seen by Him, our hearts can return to joy and praise. This is where Hannah’s story ends:

“Hannah rejoices”

I want to read Hannah's prayer and invite us to rejoice in the God who reverses what the enemy intends to harm and turns it to good, who wounds us and is even quicker to heal us, and who sees us and responds to us when we feel most unseen.

May we profoundly encounter this God who sees us in our grief, anguish, and longing and who satisfies us with the thing we most long for: Himself.

1 Then Hannah prayed and said:

“My heart rejoices in the Lord;

in the Lord my horn is lifted high.

My mouth boasts over my enemies,

for I delight in your deliverance.

2 “There is no one holy like the Lord;

there is no one besides you;

there is no Rock like our God.

3 “Do not keep talking so proudly

or let your mouth speak such arrogance,

for the Lord is a God who knows,

and by him deeds are weighed.

4 “The bows of the warriors are broken,

but those who stumbled are armed with strength.

5 Those who were full hire themselves out for food,

but those who were hungry are hungry no more.

She who was barren has borne seven children,

but she who has had many sons pines away.

6 “The Lord brings death and makes alive;

he brings down to the grave and raises up.

7 The Lord sends poverty and wealth;

he humbles and he exalts.

8 He raises the poor from the dust

and lifts the needy from the ash heap;

he seats them with princes

and has them inherit a throne of honor.

“For the foundations of the earth are the Lord’s;

on them he has set the world.

9 He will guard the feet of his faithful servants,

but the wicked will be silenced in the place of darkness.

“It is not by strength that one prevails;

10 those who oppose the Lord will be broken.

The Most High will thunder from heaven;

the Lord will judge the ends of the earth.

“He will give strength to his king

and exalt the horn of his anointed.”

What’s even more amazing is that just a handful of generations later, there is another Jewish girl who finds out she is having a son whom she will also give up. She echoes Hannah’s prayer in her own famous song in Luke 1.

But if we look past the songs of these two mothers, both Hannah and Mary, we find God the Father, who was also preparing to give up His beloved son. This son goes on to live 30 years of his life in obscurity, hidden from view, and unseen by history books.

Jesus goes on to be abandoned by those closest to him, betrayed, pushed out to the lonely places, filled with longing, tempted, beaten, slandered, and abused… He endured it all because of His great love for us.

And His scars remind us He came near to us and He suffered in every way we have. He tenderly responds to our pain from His lived experience. His eyes fill with tears when we tell him of our unseen pain because He knows it all too well.

Jesus even knows the anguish of experiencing the still face of a father. In Jesus’s moment of greatest need on the cross, His Father turned His face away. If you’ve experienced the still face of a parent, Jesus weeps with you.

But hear the better news: on the cross, Jesus endured the still face of God the Father so we don’t ever have to. We serve a God who knows what it is to be unseen, to be hidden from view, to be cut off from love in suffering, and rather than leaving us disconnected from love like we deserve, He invites us back into loving union.

He freely offers our hearts His unflinching, unswerving, unconditionally loving gaze. Friends, the invitation in your unseen moments is to find the eyes of the God Who Sees You.