How to Get God's Attention When You Need Him

That childhood pain of feeling overlooked, misunderstood, or not-good-enough never went away. You mask it well behind a smile, hard work, selflessly devoting yourself to your people. But you feel that opened-up ache when you’re not invited, praised for what you can produce, unintentionally dismissed.

It feels like confirmation. You’re visible but not truly seen.

No wonder you try so hard to prove your worth. You’re trying to believe it yourself.

And all your striving efforts come out sideways because you can’t outwork, outperform, out-perfect that nagging, self-critical voice.

Maybe that’s why you’ve got a default answer when it comes to your Christian life: yes. Yes to the Bible study. Yes to leading a second small group. Yes to serving in the nursery, packing food, helping with special events. For sure yes to the women’s retreat. Angel tree kids. Prayer nights. Jesus prom.

You feel guilty even thinking about turning down an opportunity to be Jesus’s hands and feet. Because that’s what gets God’s attention, right?!

Are you tired?

Tired of the perpetual busy? Tired of the push-hard pace? Tired of doing all the things to get God to pay attention to you but still feeling unseen?

Oh, friend, your heart is tender. I see it. God does too.

Here’s what He’s got to say about you:

[I] know everything there is to know about [you]. [I] perceive every movement of [your] heart and soul, and [I] understand [your] every thought before it enters [your] mind. [I] am intimately aware of [you]. [I] read [your] heart like an open book and [I] know all the words [you’re] about to speak before [you] even start a sentence. [I] know every step [you] will take before [your] journey even begins.
Psalm 139:1-4 TPT

Read: I see you. All of you. Nothing of you is hidden, and I don’t hide Myself from you.

The God Who Sees

God goes by many different names, and each shows us a sliver of Who He is. Learning His names is like eating an artichoke. Every peeled-back layer brings us closer to His heart.

Maybe you know Him best as Provider, Father, or Friend.

But maybe how you most need to know Him today is as El Roi: “the God who sees.”

The God who sees you when you’re so busy serving Him you’ve forgotten He’s in the room.

The God who sees you when you try to outdo yourself because you feel you have to.

The God who sees your shame and loves you till His heart hurts.

The name El Roi appears only once in the Bible—in the story of a woman named Hagar whose pain of being overlooked climaxed in an actual life-threatening situation of thirst and desert. It was in this desperate place that God acknowledged her pain and offered a promise.

As we read in Genesis 16:13,

Then she called the name of the LORD who spoke to her, You-Are- the-God-Who-Sees; for she said, “Have I also here seen Him who sees me?”
NKJ

Although every name is a glimpse into what makes up the essence of God, He is every name at the same time. God is not just El Roi to Hagar in this one moment. He is El Roi. Always. And to everyone.

He sees you.

He’s obsessed with you, and there is nothing in all the great but broken world you could ever do to change His mind.

You don’t have to prove yourself to Him.

Be any more or any less.

He’s not impressed with your yes or let down by your no.

Reality is “we’re all sin-infected, sin-contaminated. Our best efforts are grease-stained rags” (Isaiah 64, The Message).

We don’t earn God’s attention. We can’t. But He gives it anyways.

Because He sees His Son Jesus when His eyes rest on you.

Jennie Allen says it this way:

There is no remedy for your striving apart from finding your identity in Christ. He is your enough, and the degree to which you believe that is the degree to which you will stop striving, stop performing, stop trying to prove yourself.
Find Your People, p. 137

Her words echo a refrain from an UpperRoom worship set on YouTube I keep playing:

I’ll never have to fight for Your attention / Because Your eyes are always upon me.

You never ask that I earn Your affection / Because I could never earn something that’s free.

The song reminds me that I already have God’s full attention. He’s delighted when I bring simply myself, nestle in, and turn my ear towards His heart, quietly content and lavished loved.

There’s delicious freedom here. From all the things we do that get us nowhere. The significance-searching questions that adorn our lives. The yeses that have been more about us than what God’s done for us.

A Stop-Striving Exercise

What is the conversation, situation, absence, or other memory that triggers your work-hard-to-please-God reflex? Take out a journal, your notes app, your kid’s leftover notebook—and give yourself a few minutes to write your answer.

Next, answer this question. What does El Roi—the God who sees—see in you? Remember that you’re His precious child, covered in the blazing righteousness of Jesus. Now, begin to write what He sees.

Finally, imagine yourself without the weight of ill-fitting expectations. Ginormously loved without having to do a single thing. How does it feel? Who would you tell?

Truth is that you have God’s undivided attention whether you feel like you’re desperate for it or not. And so do the people around you. The ones across the street. In the other pew. Behind the check-out counter and at the park and in the car line.

And when you begin to believe it, you begin to also live it. Because being seen by El Roi heals the deepest places that have scarred or still ache. Answers our longings and search for worth. Replaces self-criticizing with grace-filled knowing we’re okay because we’re His.

God doesn’t just sort of like you. Give you a knowing nod and shoulder squeeze. He is wholly delighted in you. Extravagantly moved by you. No matter what you do or don’t do.

Let’s pray.

Jesus, You are our permission to stop trying to be good enough to please you. All our efforts to reach You fall short. But You stoop down. Bend Your gaze. Love us anyways. May we rest in the gift of your endless attention that invites us to look more like You. May we generously share about what You’ve generously given.

Just a friend over here in your corner,

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