The Window Before the Doors Open

The train slows and the train windows slide past like a row of dark mirrors, and her hand goes up before the doors open. Collar. Hair. The face she puts on for being seen, arranged in a second and a half in the glass, with forty people on the platform doing their own version of the same thing and nobody watching anybody.

She has done this since she was nine. She could tell you the birthday party where she learned it, and the sentence somebody said, and she is not going to, because the sentence is not the point. The point is what it installed. From that afternoon on she has known, the way you know your own name, that what she is, is something to be looked at. Not something that looks. Something that is looked at. And everything since has been arranged around that: what she wears, how she stands, what she checks in every shop window and lift door and spoon, without once deciding to.

The doors open. She gets on. She sits by the window and does not look at the reflection now, because the checking is done for this stretch, and she has the strange, tired thought she has had a thousand times and never said out loud: I do not think I have ever once walked into a room without first making sure I was worth walking into it.

You know that hand going up. Man or woman, it does not matter, and it does not matter what your history is, because I am not going to guess at it and I am not going to say a word about what you wear or how you carry yourself. Somebody, early, before you had any say, taught you what you were for. They handed you a valuation and you were too young to refuse it. And now you check the window before the doors open, every morning of your life, and some part of you believes that if you ever stopped checking there would be nothing there.

Whose eyes were on you first

Here is the thing I want to put beside the train window, and I want to say it plainly. Somebody's eyes were on you long before that birthday party. Before you had a face to arrange. Before you had a surface at all.

Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.Psalm 139:16

Read what those eyes were doing. Not appraising. Not deciding what you were for. Making. God looked at you when you were unformed, when there was nothing to look at in the sense you learned at nine, and what His look did was write your days in a book. The first gaze that ever rested on you was the gaze of a maker on a thing He was making on purpose.

So hear this, and hear it as already true, not as a hope: you were seen by God before you were ever looked at by anyone, and His seeing is the one that set what you are. That is not my sentiment. It is Psalm 139, and it is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line from a psalm and makes it a floor under a person on a platform. You were not a surface to Him. You were a person He was fashioning, and He said so before your first day.

What a valuation is, and who gets to set one

The thing you were handed at nine was a valuation. It told you what you were worth and what for. And here is the trouble with a valuation: it can only be set by whoever owns the thing. A stranger at a party did not own you. Nobody who has looked at you since owned you either. Their looks were real, and they left a real mark, and I am not making light of the mark. But they had no authority to set the value of what they were looking at, because it was never theirs.

Listen to the One who does have the authority. Isaiah records God saying: I have called you by name, you are mine (Isaiah 43:1). And a few lines later: you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you (Isaiah 43:4). Precious in His eyes. There it is again. His eyes, and His Spirit still saying it. The valuation that stands is the one set by the eyes that made you, and it was set before anybody else looked at you at all.

You are His, and the worth of what you are was fixed by Him and not by a look, and that is finished, and no later look has been able to revise it. Isaiah wrote it down as the word of the Lord, and it is His Spirit who says you are mine to a person who has only ever heard you are for looking at. Notice that I have not asked you to feel more valuable. I have told you who set the value. Those are different things, and only one of them is yours to hold.

Made on purpose

Now the word I actually want you to carry to the mirror. Paul writes that we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10). Workmanship. The word underneath it is the one we get poem from. A made thing. A thing somebody composed on purpose, with intent, for a reason that was in the maker's mind before the first line.

A poem is not something you look at. A poem is something that does something. It was written to be walked in, Paul says, and the walking was prepared beforehand. So the question your whole life has been quietly answering, what am I for, has an answer, and the answer is not to be looked at. You are made on purpose, for a purpose that God prepared before you had a face, and you are in Christ, and that is what you are for. That is Ephesians, and it is written, and His Spirit is the one who makes a made thing know it was made. Nobody at a party knew what you were for. The One who wrote you did.