Is God invading your privacy right now?

Imagine yourself at the grocery store. Probably not hard to do, because if you're like me, you're there several times a week (because no matter how we plan our meals for the week, we always forget a few ingredients).

You’re standing in the cereal aisle, mind wandering, perhaps mumbling to yourself about whether the store-brand oats are really that different from the name brand, when suddenly you feel it. That prickle on the back of your neck. You glance up, and sure enough, someone is looking at you. They look away quickly. You look away quickly. And for the next several minutes, you walk a little straighter, push your cart a little more purposefully, and pretend you weren’t just having an internal monologue about oatmeal.

Being watched changes us.

There’s a reason songs like Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” or The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” feel unsettling rather than romantic, despite the latter being played at countless weddings by couples who clearly never listened to the lyrics.

We instinctively understand that a human gaze, fixed on us in secret, is rarely benign. It might be curious, judgmental, predatory, or envious, but it is rarely pure. We have been watched by enough people in our lives to know that the watching itself can wound.

And then Jesus says something startling: ”And your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:4).

He sees. In secret. The Greek word here is blepōn, a present active participle. It’s not that God occasionally glances our direction when something interesting happens.

He is, right now, in this moment, seeing. The watching is continuous.

For some of us, this is the most comforting truth in the world. For others, it is the most terrifying. And if we’re honest, most of us are both at different hours of the same day.

 

The Gaze We Fear

Why does the idea of being seen by God make us squirm? After all, we believe He is good. We believe He is love. We sing about it. We put it on bumper stickers. And yet, when we slow down enough to consider that He is watching us right now, watching us as we scroll through our phones late at night, watching us as we say that thing about our coworker, watching us as we sit in church thinking about a million other things we need to get done, something in us recoils.

Adam and Eve hid in the garden for a reason. ”I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself” (Genesis 3:10).

Notice that Adam did not say he hid because he had sinned. He said he hid because he was naked.

The sin had produced a new kind of self-awareness, a sudden, painful consciousness of being exposed. The shame was not primarily about what he had done. It was about what he was, now visible in a way he could not bear.

This is the wound that every human being carries since that day in the garden.

We long to be known, and we fear being known. 

C.S. Lewis once observed that the deepest desire of the human heart is something no earthly experience can satisfy, and I would add this: the deepest fear of the human heart is that if we were fully known, we would not be fully loved. That somewhere beneath all the careful curation of our public selves, beneath the highlight reels and the rehearsed answers to “How are you?”, there is a person who, once seen, would be rejected.

So we hide.

We hide behind humor, behind productivity, behind religion sometimes, behind a thousand small performances.

And we know God sees us, but we’d rather He see the polished version. The version we’ve put together for company.

 

The Gaze That Heals

Here is where everything turns.

There is a moment in the Gospel of Mark that I think contains one of the most beautiful Greek participles in all of Scripture. A rich young man comes running to Jesus, asking what he must do to inherit eternal life. He recites his observance of the commandments. He’s been faithful. He’s been good. And then comes the line: ”Jesus, looking at him, loved him” (Mark 10:21).

The Greek is emblepsas autō ēgapēsen auton. The word emblepsas means more than a casual glance. It means to look into someone, to fix one’s gaze upon them, to behold them. And the verb tense suggests that the loving flowed from the seeing. Jesus saw him, really saw him, and in that seeing, loved him.

This is the gaze of God. Not the cold, clinical examination of a judge cataloguing offenses. Not the leering, intrusive watching of a stalker. Not even the well-meaning but suffocating attention of a parent who wants to fix you. It is the gaze of a lover who looks upon the beloved and is undone by what He sees.

St. Augustine, who knew something about hiding from God, wrote in his Confessions of the moment he could no longer escape: ”You were within me, and I was outside myself” (Augustine, Confessions X.27). He had been searching everywhere for the One who was, all along, looking at him from the inside out.

The Hebrew Scriptures give us perhaps the most tender naming of God in all of Scripture, spoken by Hagar, an Egyptian slave, pregnant and abandoned in the wilderness. She encounters the angel of the Lord, and she gives God a name: ”So she named the Lord who spoke to her, ‘You are El-roi’; for she said, ‘Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?’” (Genesis 16:13).

El-roi. The God who sees me.

Notice who gives God this name. Not Abraham. Not Moses. Not a priest or a prophet. A pregnant slave woman with no status, no power, and seemingly no future, sitting by a spring in the desert.

She had been used, blamed, and cast out. And the first thing she discovers about God is that He saw her. Not as a category. Not as a problem. Her.

This is what we fear and what we long for in the same breath. To be seen as we are, by Someone who, in seeing us, will not turn away.

 

The Difference Between Watching and Beholding

There is a difference, I think, between being watched and being beheld. Watching is observation. Beholding is contemplation. Watching catalogues. Beholding cherishes.

When Jesus says ”your Father who sees in secret” (Matthew 6:6), He is not describing a celestial surveillance system. The word He uses for “see,” blepōn, in the context He places it, is the seeing of a Father who is paying attention to His child. The context of the entire passage is about almsgiving and prayer done not for public recognition but in the hidden place where only love is the audience.

And here is the staggering thing: Jesus assumes that being seen by the Father, alone, in secret, is enough. He assumes this is what we want. He assumes that if we understood the nature of the Gaze, we would prefer that hidden, intimate seeing to all the applause of the world.

Do we?

I suspect most of us would say yes in theory and live as if we said no. We perform for crowds, real and imagined. We measure our worth by the number of people who notice us. We post and we wait. We speak and we wait. We accomplish and we wait. And the Father, all the while, has been gazing at us with a love so consuming that the saints have wept for centuries trying to describe it.

 

When You Cannot Bear to Be Seen

Of course, there are seasons when the thought of being seen by God brings only pain. Perhaps you have done something you cannot forgive yourself for. Perhaps something was done to you that left you feeling tainted, marked, untouchable. Perhaps you have simply lived long enough to know your own capacity for self-deception, and the idea that anyone, even God, has been watching the whole show is unbearable.

To this, the Cross is the only sufficient answer.

”But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Notice the order. Not “while we were sinners but on the verge of getting our act together.” Not “while we were sinners but secretly meaning well.” While we were sinners. He saw us in our worst moment, and He did not look away. He stepped into the frame. He took the gaze of the Father, the holy seeing that we feared most, and He absorbed it on our behalf. ”My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34).

He was unseen so that we might be seen and welcomed.

The eyes that see you in secret are the eyes of the One who was forsaken so that you would never have to be.

 

Living Under the Gaze

So how do we live under such a gaze? How do we move from the fear of being seen to the freedom of it?

First, practice being seen on purpose. Take five minutes a day, ideally in a quiet place, and simply sit in the awareness that you are being looked at by Love. Do not perform. Do not list your sins or your accomplishments. Just be there. St. John Vianney once described an old farmer who would sit in church for hours, and when asked what he did, he replied, “I look at Him, and He looks at me.” Begin there.

Second, when shame arises (and it will), let it be the doorbell that announces the Lord’s arrival rather than the alarm that sends you running. Shame whispers, He sees this part of you and will reject you. The Cross answers, He has already seen it and chose you anyway. Bring the shameful thing into the gaze rather than fleeing from it.

Third, look at others the way you are being looked at. The reason we fear being seen is partly because we have so often used our own seeing as a weapon. We have judged. We have categorized. We have dismissed. The cure for fearing the gaze of God is to begin extending the gaze of God. Behold the cashier. Behold your spouse. Behold the difficult coworker. Look at them not to evaluate but to love.

Fourth, do your secret things on purpose. Pray where no one will see. Give where no one will know. Serve where no credit can be received. Not as a spiritual performance, but as a way of training your soul to find its sufficiency in the One Audience that matters.

The truth is, you are being watched right now. Not by a stranger in a window. Not by a cold and distant deity. You are being beheld by the One who knit you together in your mother’s womb, who knows the number of hairs on your head, who has engraved you on the palms of His hands. He sees you. All of you. The parts you love and the parts you hide. The parts you can name and the parts you cannot.

And in His seeing, He loves.

So, yes, God invades our privacy. And He invades it in love, in a way that speaks to the deepest, most hidden, and profound wounds that we are too afraid to heal the world. And he takes those wounds upon Himself. 

That is not creepy. That is the Gospel.