Living a life outside of my passport country and culture, I am daily faced with an aching desire to be known: my name, my character, my history, my dreams, and my heart. I do not realize the scope of my grief of not being known until I am given glimmers of being known. My response to the local postmaster remembering my face and our conversation from a week ago reveals the depth of my heartache. I long to be known. Paul makes reference to this when he includes in his list of hardships in 2 Corinthians 6:9, “known and yet regarded as unknown.”  

While we are regarded as unknown, we are sustained by the faith in the Father who knows us. We are comforted in our sorrow because our heavenly Father who knit us together in our mothers’ wombs, from whom we cannot hide, knows us and loves us. We can endure the pain and disorientation of being unknown because we are rooted and established in his love. 

Furthermore, as we increasingly know God’s heart and purposes, we take on the hope of Jesus. Jesus’ prayer to his Father at the end of his life was, “I have made you known to them and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them,” (John 17:26). Our vision is that the love of God would be in the people around us. We are able to endure the pain of being unknown so that his name might be known among the nations. 

As my family moved into an unreached city, my prayer was to be known for the right reasons. In studying Adoniram Judson, I had learned about people walking for days so that they could know the people of Jesus. If I was known for anything, I wanted to be known as a woman who taught them the love of God.

As we look around our cities, we can be struck with the amount of people who have not yet known the love of the Father and who do not know that they are indeed known. May God sustain us in being unknown so that those around us would know and be known by Him.