To Be Seen
I began seeing ‘them’ in September. Let me assure you before you keep reading that this story is not going in the direction of The Sixth Sense—not quite. It was a sequence of numbers that kept reappearing when I was not looking for it: 444. I have at least fifteen screenshots of the times I casually picked up my phone and the time was 4:44. Drew and I experienced several instances of getting in his car only to find the number 4:44 flashing on the display board as soon as he turned the key. Sometimes, I’d notice those three numbers on the car clock during an important “conversation” with Drew at a stoplight (read: gentle argument related to my skills as a highly engaged passenger-seat driver). Each time, 4:44 was always the correct time, but still—what are the odds?
As the months progressed, 444’s recurring appearances became a bewildering sort of joke between me, Drew, and God. As much as I pondered what it could mean, I could not fathom why this set of numbers kept coming to me. As an Enneagram 4, I naturally wondered if seeing the number 4 in a sequence of 3 was a massive, heaven-sent affirmation of my identity but very maturely decided that this conclusion would be giving my ego far too much bandwidth. I pored through the Bible like a detective, examining each book that had either 44 chapters with more than 4 verses or books in which chapter 4 had 44 verses. The references I found were obscure and didn’t seem to fit my life, though the most encouraging passage was Isaiah 44:4 and the surrounding verses.
Eventually, I began to notice that 4:44 seemed to come in times when I needed comfort, whether while glancing at the time on our kitchen clock or picking up my phone to distract me from the moment’s sorrow, only to find 4:44 greeting me on my lock screen. I began to accept that I might never be given an acceptable answer to “Why this 444 business, God?” and tried to go on with my life, receiving each 444 as they came like little elbow nudges from God throughout September, October, November, and December.
Then, in mid-January, life got the better of me and I found myself anxious and alone at the Kalispell airport, trying to catch a flight home from saying goodbye to my grandmother in her final days in order to arrive in time for a dear friend’s wedding the next day. As the inclement weather grew worse, my mid-afternoon flight’s boarding time grew later and later. I looked down in frustration as my phone alerted me to the newest delayed boarding time—which was, of course, 4:44. I smiled in spite of everything, and sent a screenshot of my boarding pass to Drew.
Since January, as I have grieved the loss of my Grammy while also embracing the many gifts she left behind, 444 has persisted. My relationship with it has changed from amusement and curiosity to a rather blasé acknowledgement akin to “Whelp. There it is again.” But always, an almost imperceptible sense of “This might mean something. I want to wait and see,” has remained as an undercurrent within me, deep and steady.
And so it was that on March 3rd, as Drew and I were driving home from Eastern Washington, I took out my phone, opened Spotify to a random playlist called “Christian Folk,” and found a song called “444” at the top of the list, complete with song art featuring a giant 444 across a backdrop of clouds and sky. I almost choked, then held my phone up to show Drew, who was driving and nearly swerved into the other lane. After a few moments of shared stunned silence, he asked quietly,
“Do you want to listen to it?”
“No.” I said.
What if the song was awful? What if it meant nothing? What if months of waiting to figure out what 444 means ended in disappointment?
“I want to Google what 444 means first.”
It is odd that asking Google’s AI to summarize what the masses have declared 444 to mean had not occurred to me until that moment, but I maintain a healthy suspicion of robots. I knew it was unlikely that a search engine would be able to give a satisfactory enough answer to such a deep and obscure question of my soul, but I decided to give it a try.
Nearly every result came up with a combination of these words:
“444 is widely considered an angel number symbolizing protection, guidance, and stability from spiritual guardians. It is often interpreted as a sign that you are on the right path, encouraged to trust yourself, and supported during times of transition or difficulty.”
“Well then,” I thought. “I have only been thinking and writing about angels consistently for maybe my whole life and even more so recently, but let’s not get too worked up about that. 444 could still mean less than I want it to mean.”
I don’t know what I think about angel numbers, but I do know what I think about the song lyrics we heard next. As we listened to the opening verses of “444,” I was filled with inexpressible awe as the singer described nearly word for word what my experience of 444 has been the past few months:
Do you ever tired looking after me?
Do your angels get bored watching while I sleep?
Do they tell you about my self-destructive streaks?
Are you for, for, for me?
Did you send me a sign when I was lost?
Saw that symbol three times, now I can’t write it off
There’s no way to deny your fragrance from above
You are for, for, for me.
Maybe this is why my thoughts, dreams, and poems have been filled with angels lately. Perhaps there is a reason 444 began appearing 4 months before my Grammy died. When the time for knowing came, I knew that months of seeing 444 had prepared me for this moment on an ordinary Tuesday in March—finally ready to receive the surprising gift of it.
As I write now, I wrestle with the question, “What is the story here?” Is this simply the story of a bizarre coincidence, or is something deeper and infinitely more loving at work? After we listened to the song and sat in thick silence for a bit, I asked Drew,
“What do you make of this? How do you hold this, or categorize it?”
“Well,” he said slowly, “Either it’s a crazy coincidence, or it is something mysterious yet true that God did.”
I concur. What story is this? I believe it is a story that says, Though the future feels fraught and unsure and all we are becoming is yet to be seen, even so, to be seen changes everything. Here’s what such a piercing reminder of my seen-ness has done for me: It has asked me to live seen.
As I so often do, I think of Hagar’s story—the Egyptian slave, outcast, and runaway who met God in the middle of a desert and named God “The God Who Sees Me” after a profound encounter with God’s kindness. We celebrate that Hagar was the first person in the Bible to name God, but we forget that in naming God, she also named herself: "The One Who Is Seen".
This tells me that what we name ourselves in response to God’s gaze matters greatly.
Up until recently, I have been living as though God was vaguely aware of and interested in my daily life, but if I really wanted to get God’s attention, I’d have to figuratively jump up and down and wave my arms. The name I’d given myself was “Sometimes Seen, Often Left to Her Own Devices, Loved from A Distance.” I am a bit embarrassed to admit this given how often I write about the intimate nearness of God, but there it is, the truth that has been tapping me on the shoulder for months now, finally unveiled:
I have an anxious style of relating to God, and I need to be healed.
If you can relate, then perhaps the first step towards healing from an anxious relationship with God is to put the full weight of ourselves upon the bedrock truth that the not-indifferent gaze of God is upon us, has always been upon us, and will never not look at us with eyes of love. Sometimes, God’s eyes are filled with tears. But we are never not seen, and to live as though we are unseen is to live in direct opposition to what Love asks of us, which is quite simply that we give of our whole selves, naked and unashamed, in agreement with God that we are seen and we are loved and that all of this—even the unbearable present and inscrutable future—is going somewhere. Pain and sorrow, war and terror, do not have the last word, for it is Love alone that remains. This begs for a new name.
I am the one who is seen by Love, and so are you.
Knowing we are seen asks us to live with an increased awareness of our belovedness, along with our responsibility to those we come across to remind them of their seen-ness, their belovedness, too.
To paraphrase Romans 8:31, What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is ‘for, for, for’ us, who can be against us?
In case you half-skimmed all of this, here’s the gold:
As children of God, we are seen. We are loved. God is for, for, for us.
May this poem by John O’Donohue serve as a benediction over you today and always.
The Eyes of Jesus
I imagine the eyes of Jesus were harvest brown,
the light of their gazing suffused with the seasons:
the shadow of winter
the mind of spring
the blues of summer
and amber of harvest.
A gaze that is perfect sister
to the kindness that dwells in his beautiful hands.
The eyes of Jesus gaze on us,
stirring in the heart’s clay the confidence of seasons
that never lose their way to harvest.
This gaze knows the signature of our heartbeat,
the first glimmer from the dawn that dreamed our minds,
the crevices where thoughts grow
long before the longing in the bone sends them to the mind’s eye,
the artistry of the emptiness that knows to slow the hunger
of outside things until they weave into the twilight side of the heart.
A gaze full of all that is still future
looking out for us to glimpse the jewelled light of winter stone.
quickening the eyes that look at us to see through
to where words are blind to say that we would love.
Forever falling softly on our faces,
his gaze piles the soul with light,
laying down luminous layer beneath our brief and brittle days
until the appointed harvest comes assured and harvest left
to unravel the last black knot
and we are back home in the house we never left.
Going Deeper: Listen to “444” by eightFour and Calah Mikal