WITH EYES TO SEE
WITH EYES TO SEE
Not all clarity comes after the storm hits—some of it shows up inside the collision. I don’t know of a worse storm in life than that which engulfs the death of your child. The cloud of that pain comes darkly and thickly. Yet sometimes “eyes to see” pierce the moments of impact. In the moment you didn’t brace for. The phone call that splits your life into before and after. The words you never imagined would be yours to accept—that your child was in an accident and didn’t survive. The thing that is more than your heart knows how to hold. There are no categories for a moment like that. No immediate meaning. No way to steady yourself before it lands. Everything in you resists it. Everything in you wants to wake up from it. And yet—you are there. Fully inside a reality you didn’t choose.
In Scripture I have read, “He who has eyes to see, let him see.” I used to think this meant understanding more. Now I think it means noticing differently. Having “eyes to see” isn’t about physical sight—it’s about perception.
I have learned having eyes to see doesn’t always mean peaceful reflection. It can mean sudden jarring awareness while something is happening in real time, when everything in you would rather look away, denying a terrible truth. And yet, somehow you can see more than meets your eyes. Not answers. Not resolution. But something unmistakably clear.
I didn’t expect to see God there—in the disruption, in the breaking, in the unanswered moment. Maybe in my brokenness, part of me didn’t want to because I felt betrayed by Him, and it made me angry. This is the kind of storm where life doesn’t give you time to step back and reflect—it pulls you under. But something in me opened, even as everything else shut down.
Somehow, even there one thing became clear. Not everything. Not answers. But a detail. A Presence. A truth that wasn’t as visible before. It’s almost disorienting—to feel the full force of hurting inside the time and space you occupy and at the same time have an awareness of an Unseen Presence. Maybe that’s what it means to have eyes to see—not only after the pain has passed, when faith is easier and makes sense, but right in the middle of it, when we’ve become blind-sided. To be breaking yet noticing. To be responding while recognizing something deeper underneath it.
“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18). The Heavenly Father is close—not distant. Not waiting for the storm to pass. Right there in the unbearable.
Jesus once said, “Though seeing, they do not see…” (Matthew 13:13). Not because there is nothing to see. But because some things are only recognized in a different way, revealing unique perspective. Maybe having eyes to see isn’t about finding clarity in every moment—especially not the ones that shatter us. Maybe it’s about this: that even in the places we would never choose, even in the moments we cannot make sense of, there is a nearness—a Presence, a thread of something real that holds, even when everything else feels like it has come undone.
What I didn’t understand when I was in the storm was that suffering was changing the way I saw life. Though not all at once. It was in the middle of devastation that I learned to notice a depth of God’s nearness. His strength arrived when I had none. His peace appeared without explanation. His comfort was carried through ordinary people, ordinary moments, ordinary mercies to reveal extraordinary perception. Things I once overlooked became impossible to dismiss. And over time, something changed. Not the past. Not the reality of what happened. But my deeper awareness of God being a loving father shielding His daughter in a storm. There is something tender about the way God fathers us in heartbreak. Even while the thunder rolls, He stays. And His rod and His staff—they comfort me.