Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Always Seeing

Does God really see me? If so, why does it feel like he doesn’t? Is he ignoring me?

I’ll never forget the phone call. My sister and her family were visiting us, and we were on our way to eat lunch. As we drove to the restaurant, I got a phone call from one of my college roommates from back in the day. I normally would have picked up, but because my sister was in town and we were catching up, I decided to let the call go to voice mail. About ten minutes passed. We were all piling out of the car to head into the restaurant when the phone rang again. It was the same friend.

I’ve been in ministry long enough to know that back-to-back phone calls in a short time span are rarely good. I told my family to go in, and I took the phone call.

“Did you hear about Zac?”

No greeting. No pleasantries. Just this question.

Zac, another roommate from college, was one of the funniest people I have ever met. A good comparison is Chandler from Friends. Sarcastic. Witty. Quick with a comeback. Everyone who knew Zac liked him.

When we graduated college, I moved to Dallas and he went back home to Northwest Arkansas. We didn’t remain in close contact through the years. We would send texts back and forth every now and then. We followed each other on social media, and occasionally he’d make fun of me in a comment.

Zac had married a few years ago and then had a son. He and his wife, Kelly, were very open on social media about their journey raising their son, Everett (or Ev), who was diagnosed with achondroplasia shortly after his birth. Most people know it as dwarfism. Because of his son’s condition, Zac had been on my mind a lot and I prayed for him often.

Zac and Kelly were doing an amazing job at not only raising Ev but also helping to educate many people on the facts about dwarfism. They were living out their faith in a way that was honest, real, and transparent. I knew Zac was a believer, and I could tell caring for his son was taking him deeper in his walk with the Lord.

The day I got the phone call was Zac’s forty-first birthday. Evidently, he left his house after having breakfast with Kelly and Ev and hopped on his brand-new motorcycle. As he was pulling out of the neighborhood, the bike got away from him and he ran into oncoming traffic. He died instantly.

Forty-one years old.

On his birthday.

Leaving behind a beautiful wife and three-year-old boy.

I felt numb. When I got off the phone and walked into the restaurant to join my family, my wife and sister immediately knew something was wrong. I told them the news and made it through lunch the best I could.

But I could not stop thinking about Zac. More than that, I could not get Kelly and Everett off my mind. None of it made sense to me.

How could this happen? What was God doing?

Eyes like Roz

One of my girls’ favorite movies when they were little was Monsters, Inc. Well, I’ll be honest, this was one of my favorites. Who couldn’t like the lead characters—er, monsters—James P. Sullivan and Mike Wazowski?

These two monsters were the exact opposite in personality but made a great team. Mike was the more responsible of the two but could be a bit of an airhead. Sulley was the larger-than-life, charismatic scare champion. Mike and Sulley partnered together at Monsters, Inc., to make sure the screams of boys and girls from all over the world kept their city powered.

They were supposed to file paperwork each day with Roz, a miserable and grumpy sluglike figure who had no love for Mike, his forgetfulness, or his schmoozing.

She constantly reminded him, “I’m watching you, Wazowski. Always watching.”

We don’t find out until the end of the movie that Roz actually worked undercover for the Child Detection Agency (CDA) and knew exactly what Mike and Sulley had been up to the entire time—because she was “always watching.”

I thought about Roz when writing this chapter because sometimes I wonder if Roz was better at watching Mike Wazowski than God is at watching us.

That’s how I felt when I heard about Zac, especially when I thought about Kelly and Ev in the days following the accident.

Didn’t God see that Kelly needed Zac? Didn’t he see that Ev needed his dad? Why wasn’t God watching?

Surely, you have felt that way before. Something happened and you felt as though God must be taking a nap or, worse, turning his back on you. Either way, he must not see what’s going on. If he did, whatever was happening wouldn’t be taking place.

It might have been . . .

A relationship that went wrong.

Someone else getting the promotion you deserved.

The story in the news about another innocent person being killed.

The way your kid is struggling.

The prayer you’ve prayed and prayed without an answer.

Zac’s death led me on a journey to see what the Bible had to say about all this. I knew Scripture promised that God was aware of our lives and was present in the midst of difficulty, but I needed more clarity. 

I had attended a four-year Bible school, gotten my master’s at a seminary, and completed my doctoral studies.

I had read all about God’s omniscience—that he knows everything.

I had written papers on his omnipotence—that he can do anything.

In classes, we had debated his immutability—that he never changes 

I knew intellectually what the Bible says about the nature and character of God, but I was having a really hard time believing it after Zac’s death.

Anthropomorphiwhaa?

I have a little joke I sometimes share with people about myself: My family is from Mississippi. I grew up in Louisiana and went to college in Arkansas. That means I am never the smartest person in the room—ever. I certainly felt that way when I was introduced to the term anthropomorphism. I had never heard it before and couldn’t pronounce it. You should have seen how many times I tried spelling it while writing this paragraph.

Let me save you some google time. Anthropomorphism is a big, fancy term that theologians use for ascribing human characteristics to God. In this section, we’re going to explore why it’s so important that . . . 

God sees.

God hears.

God speaks.

Anthropomorphism ascribes to God the same physical functions we humans have so that we can better understand him and how he operates. For example, we might say, 

When God sees, he sees with his eyes.

When God hears, he hears with his ears.

When God speaks, he speaks with his mouth.

God does not physically have these functions of the human body because “God is spirit” (John 4:24). Anthropomorphism simply makes it a bit easier for us to fathom God.

As I dove into Scripture to understand what happened with Zac, it became abundantly obvious that although God may not have physical eyes, he sees farther, clearer, and more than we ever could.

For example, the Bible teaches over and over that God sees what we do. Listen to how the psalmist wrote it:

From heaven the Lord looks down
and sees all mankind;
from his dwelling place he watches
all who live on earth—
he who forms the hearts of all,
who considers everything they do. (Psalm 33:13–15)

Did you notice that all was used three times in this passage? Read it again slowly. God sees everything. He “watches all” our deeds. Like for an all-star catcher in the major leagues, nothing gets past him—nothing. He sees everything we do. 

God is sitting on his throne (more anthropomorphistic language), and from there, His eyes are on us no matter where we go.

The eyes of the Lord are everywhere,
keeping watch on the wicked and the good. (Proverbs 15:3)

In Ezekiel 1:18, God is represented by an item that is “covered with eyes” (nlt). The implication is clear: God is a God who sees.

Jesus also taught that God the Father sees what we are doing. He sees when we pray. He sees when we give. In maybe Jesus’s most famous teaching, the Sermon on the Mount, he shared that God sees even what we do in secret—when we give or pray without anyone else knowing, God knows (Matthew 6:6).