When You Feel Invisible and Nobody Seems to Notice

You know the feeling. You post something and it gets three likes, one of them from your aunt. You mention at dinner that you had a hard week and the conversation just moves on. You do the thing at work that keeps everything running and nobody says a word, but the day you're out sick, three people notice the printer is jammed. You start to wonder if you'd be missed. Not in a dramatic way. Just quietly.

I'm not going to tell you that feeling is silly. It isn't. Being unseen is one of the loneliest things a person can carry, partly because it's so hard to say out loud. "Nobody notices me" sounds needy when you say it, so most of us don't. We just carry it around and smile.

There's a baby in the book of Exodus that I think about when I feel that way. His mother had him at the worst possible time. Pharaoh had ordered that every Hebrew boy be thrown into the Nile. She hid him for three months, and when she couldn't hide him anymore, she made a basket out of papyrus, sealed it with tar and pitch, put her son inside, and set it in the reeds at the edge of the river.

Think about how small that is. One basket among the reeds along an entire river. A baby who can't even lift his own head. His big sister stood at a distance to see what would happen, which tells you nobody knew what would happen. He was, by every measure, invisible. A few pounds of hope floating in a place where no one was looking.

Except someone was. Pharaoh's daughter came down to bathe. She saw the basket. She sent her servant to get it. She opened it, and the baby was crying, and the story says she had compassion on him. The daughter of the very man who wanted him dead looked at him and her heart went out.

And then the part that gets me every time. The sister steps out of the reeds and offers to find a Hebrew woman to nurse the child. Pharaoh's daughter says yes. So the baby's own mother gets to hold him again, raise him, and be paid to do it. That baby grew up to be Moses, who led his whole people out of slavery. But that morning, he was just a child in a basket that nobody was supposed to find.

Here's what I want you to hear. God did not lose track of one basket in the reeds, and he is not going to lose track of you. The fact that the people around you haven't noticed doesn't mean nobody has. Being unnoticed by people is not the same as being unseen by God. He knows about the hard week you didn't finish telling anyone about. He knows the work nobody thanked you for. He knew where that basket was, and he knows where you are.

You might be in the reeds right now, waiting for someone to come down to the river. I don't know who that will be or when. But I know the one arranging it has never once looked away from you.