I’m not sure exactly when or how it started.
My family are huge Tampa Bay Rays fans (somewhat challenging this season if you pay any attention to baseball). Anyway … We’ve been taking the kids to the games for years. A portion of the highway to the stadium is a toll road.
Over the years, toll takers have come and gone. Others have become recognizable faces, but we’re never quite sure who we’re going to get when we pull up to the booth.
For years, my husband and son have made trying to figure it out a game. As they approach the booth, they each guess a male and female name. Although the people are often familiar, my boys always have to look at the name tag when they get to the booth to confirm if one of them guessed correctly.
What happens if they get it right? Bragging rights. That’s about it. I didn’t say the game made sense. It’s just become one of those quirky things that your family does that no one else would really understand.
Recently, their game has made me think about what a personal God is. He always knows our name. He never has to guess. Our Creator sees it all. Every part of us. Every thought, every hurt, every unspoken desire.
He knows us more intimately than we know ourselves. Those painful places we don’t want anyone else to see? Those hopes, fears, and doubts we don’t dare utter? He wants to meet us there.
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So many times when we are going through a difficult stretch, we can feel forgotten. Prayers we’ve prayed for years go unanswered. We walk endlessly through painful circumstances that seem to have no end.
Maybe we feel like everyone else is doing something amazing and important and our “feeble” contributions seem to fade into the woodwork. So we struggle with feeling insignificant and unimportant. We long to do more, be more.
What can we do when we can’t feel God’s presence? When we’re wandering in the wilderness and He seems distant? How do we remember that we’re not forgotten?
Remember to allow others into your struggle.
Sounds simple and obvious. However, if you’re like me, you too often decide to carry your struggles alone. When we’re feeling depressed or forgotten, it can sometimes be difficult to even take them to God. We want to, but we’re emotionally spent. Or, maybe the cloud of our pain and circumstances envelops us and we can’t recognize His presence or His voice.
This spring, I was going through some difficult stuff, not just physically, but emotionally, for a variety of reasons, not just my health. I asked for prayer in my Bible study. The next week, one of the ladies said she’d been reading her Bible and praying for me one morning and felt like the Holy Spirit distinctly told her, “It’s going to be okay.”
Five little words. Nothing specific. He didn’t say when. Or exactly what “okay” meant. That didn’t matter. It brought me to tears because I knew He saw me. I was not forgotten. He wasn’t removed from my difficulties.
We have to be careful about listening to others “impressions.” However, I knew this woman seeks God regularly. Her message was one that had a personal significance to me (beyond the obvious) that she couldn’t have known.
I don’t know why God works the way He does. But more and more lately, I’ve experienced the voice of God and the sweetness of His assurances through others He’s put in my life to support and pray for me. It’s made me more likely to reach out during those times I feel invisible to God.
Remember that the wilderness is often where He meets us.
In Genesis 16, God saw a woman named Hagar in the midst of her pain and despair. God had promised Abraham a child who He would make into a great nation. When years passed and his wife Sarai was old and still not pregnant, she suggested Abraham have a child with her maidservant, Hagar.
When Hagar became pregnant, she suddenly felt superior to Sarai—perhaps more favored by God—and routinely disrespected her. In pain and retaliation, Sarai mistreated Hagar so badly that she finally ran away.
As she wandered in the wilderness, Hagar most likely felt alone, fearful, and hopeless. She finally spotted a place of physical refreshment. That is where God met her: “The angel of the Lord found Hagar beside a spring of water in the wilderness …” (Gen. 16:7).
It’s in the “wilderness” of our circumstances, either ones beyond our control or those partly or entirely of our own making, that we most readily believe that God has forgotten us. He must have turned away for a moment and lost us in the crowd. Maybe we feel we don’t deserve for Him to see or help us.
In truth, the wilderness is often when God wants to reveal Himself to us most sweetly. I love what Hosai 2:14 says: “Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.” (NIV)
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Remember His sacrifice.
Feeling forgotten? Remember the cross. The God of the universe (Let that sink in for a moment. Seriously.) gave His only Son to die for you and me. We’ve heard that truth so often that it can lose its power and impact in our hearts and minds. The horror of His death is beyond our comprehension.
And it was His choice. He didn’t have to die. He could have left us in our sin and desperation.
Instead, He allowed Himself to be taunted, beaten, whipped, rejected and humiliated.
For you.
For me.
I love the simple beauty of what Saint Augustine said: “God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.”
Like Hagar in the wilderness, God sees you, friend.
You are not forgotten.
See, I have written your name on the palms of my hands. Isaiah 49:16
© Melinda Means. Contains excerpts from Invisible Wounds: Hope While You’re Hurting. 
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