Unseen Sara Hagerty Quotes

The craving to be seen is universal: we were made to be known. But there is only one who can know us. He is the one who created us to live with moments and hours that no one else can understand

Hiddenness is God’s way of helping us with this holy detachment, slowly releasing our clutch on “the things of earth,” which we were never intended to grip.

Jesus is big in my small, unseen moments. Glorious monotony. He came for these very days.

Thomas Merton says it this way: “If we are to love sincerely and with simplicity, we must first of all overcome the fear of not being loved.”12

He redefines my circumstances even without changing them.

She’s tapping into the deepest cry of the human heart, the heart that can preach a sermon on God’s love one moment and flog itself in private over a single mistake the next. We all struggle to believe His delight. Might this be one of the greatest barriers to our communion with God—believing that the one who made us barely likes us, the one we assume finds us barely tolerable?

How would parents respond to children who gladly cleaned the house and mowed the lawn but refused to spend time talking with and enjoying them, the very ones who have loved and cared for them their whole lives? We know this isn’t the way things should operate in a healthy family, and yet we often and subconsciously relate to God in this way. We give Him what we perceive to be our obedience yet internally resist a deeper surrender.

Great kingdom impact comes not just from actions that make a dramatic and observable impact but from all the accumulated moments we spend looking at God, bringing Him glory in private, and letting Him shape our insides.

We forget that it’s in the interruptions, the waiting seasons, the disappointments that we grow best. It is in those times when we are “sidetracked” by a disheartening job, an unshared bed, or a leader who doesn’t acknowledge our gifting that God whispers, This is where you become great—on the inside.

In his book Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “The richness of the Word of God ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart.

Too often we settle for lesser things. It seems easier to get a like online than it does to get quiet before God, to seek His face and listen for His whispers.

On the glorious splendor of your majesty, and on your wondrous works, I will meditate. They shall speak of the might of your awesome deeds, and I will declare your greatness” (Ps. 145:5–6 ESV).

Left to ourselves, we will pray to some god who speaks what we like hearing, or to the part of God we manage to understand.

God has created each of us for greatness. Not the greatness of a stage or a title or a degree, though He may use those things in our lives. He may even let the applause of others encourage us and help us grow. But the sweetest greatness starts with being rooted, being made and nurtured in secret, being seen by God alone.

We become great when we genuinely, happily serve in unacknowledged ways and places because that is where we find the sustaining face of God, especially when no one else sees us or applauds. Hearts that grow in God, that reach for Him and receive His reaching back, become profoundly great. Unshakable, even.

God champions us like no human can, but we don’t often see that unless we have nowhere to look but Him.

coat, my tired extra mile? “Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake,” says Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. “Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matt. 5:11–12). We read these words and yet too often still experience surprise when our best efforts at Christian living result in something other than Christian applauding. Do the works of God and people will see and they will celebrate, we think. We forget that the map for following God was given to us by a man who was routinely persecuted by the religious leaders of His day, who was abandoned by virtually all of His followers at the end of His life and then brutally murdered.

We all struggle to believe His delight. Might this be one of the greatest barriers to our communion with God—believing that the one who made us barely likes us, the one we assume finds us barely tolerable?

So much of the distance between God and us could be spanned if we’d let His Word inform us about who He is and who we are in Him. When we see God more clearly, we see ourselves more clearly.