Forty Thousand Faces and Not One of Them Mine

She got home at twenty past seven and realized she had not been spoken to by name since half past eight that morning.

Not ignored. Nothing happened. She had gone through the station twice, walked the length of the concourse, been in a lift with nine people, bought a coffee, sat in an open plan office of a hundred and forty, and driven home through a city of six hundred thousand.

Somebody said thanks when she held a door. Somebody said sorry when they knocked her bag. The coffee had a name on it and it was spelt wrong.

And standing in her own hallway with her coat on, what she felt was not lonely exactly. It was thinner than lonely. It was the sense of having moved through an entire day at the speed of everybody else and left no mark on any of it, as though she had been slightly out of phase with the city all day.

She has had a version of this for months. It is worse in crowds. That is the part she cannot explain to anybody, that a full lift is emptier than an empty one.

That is your hallway. That is your day. And I want to speak to that, because there is a woman in Genesis who was as unregarded as anybody in that book and she is the one who gets to name God.

The name she gave Him

Hagar is a servant, pregnant, running from a household where she has no standing, and she is found by a well in a desert. And at the end of it she does something nobody else in Genesis does.

And she called the name of the Lord that spake unto her, Thou God seest me: for she said, Have I also here looked after him that seeth me?Genesis 16:13

Thou God seest me.

She names Him. In the whole of the Old Testament, this is the one place where a person gives God a name, and it is not a prophet or a patriarch. It is a foreign servant girl with no rights, in a desert, whom nobody in that story was looking for.

And the name she chooses is not about His power or His holiness. It is about His eyesight. Out of everything she now knew about Him, the thing she named Him for was that He had looked at her.

You are seen by the God who was named for seeing. Not overlooked in a crowd of six hundred thousand. The written word gives the naming to the least regarded person in the chapter, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a woman standing in her own hallway with her coat on.

Now let me say something about the city, because months of this can make it into something malicious.

Nobody withheld anything from you today. A hundred and forty people in an open plan office are all in the middle of their own days, and the man who spelt your name wrong was working at speed, and none of it was aimed. A city is not cold. It is just large, and largeness looks like coldness from inside it.

You are not being refused by anybody. The written word never makes another person's attention the proof of your worth. The Holy Spirit is not in competition with a lift full of strangers.

And now the thing that is actually wearing you down, which is not the day.

It is the suspicion that being unnoticed by everybody might be evidence about you rather than about the size of the place.

You are not less real for being unremarked. Thou God seest me, said by a woman with no status at all, in a desert, about herself. The Holy Spirit has been looking at you since half past eight this morning, through the station and the lift and the office and the drive home.