There’s a scene in the movie The Joy Luck Club that I have always found very moving. Based on a novel by Amy Tan, this film tells the story of four Chinese-born women and their American-born daughters.
One of the daughters, June, has always felt she’s a disappointment to her mother, Suyuan, who suffered greatly as a young woman in China and made many sacrifices to give her daughter every advantage. June feels especially uncomfortable when compared to Waverly, the brilliant, confident, and highly successful daughter of Suyuan’s best friend.
These feelings come to a head one evening at a dinner party where Suyuan serves her famous steamed crab dish. During the dinner, Waverly openly belittles June, and Suyuan fails to come to her daughter’s defense. Later, when June and her mother are cleaning up in the kitchen, June finally blurts out her pain: “I’m just sorry that you got stuck with such a loser, that I’ve always been so disappointing…. My grades, my job. Not getting married. Everything you expected of me.”
“Not expect anything,” her mother answers. “Only hoping best for you. That’s not wrong, to hope.”
Then June’s pain just overflows. “Well, it hurts. Because every time you hoped for something I couldn’t deliver, it hurt. It hurt me, Mommy. And no matter what you hoped for, I’ll never be more than what I am. And you never see that, what I really am.”
Her mother just looks at her for a long minute, then removes a jade pendant from around her neck and hands it to her daughter. “June, since your baby time, I wear this next to my heart. Now you wear next to yours. It will help you know: I see you. I see you.”
Then she goes on to talk about the dinner they just enjoyed: “That bad crab. Only you tried to take it. Everybody else want best quality. You, you thinking different. Waverly took best-quality crab. You took worst. Because you have best-quality heart. You have style no one can teach. Must be born this way.”
She looks deep into her daughter’s eyes and repeats: “I see you.”
And by that point, any mother would be weeping, any daughter moved—because that scene so beautifully depicts the transformative power of being seen. You can see it on June’s face—the powerful internal shift as she begins to see herself and her relationships differently.
There’s something about being seen, really seen, that changes everything, because it changes the way we see ourselves—just as knowing we are seen by God makes all the difference … unless we, like June, get the wrong idea about how our heavenly Parent looks at us.
It’s so easy to do. We get mistaken ideas and feelings about what God expects of us and about the way we measure up to those expectations. And those mistaken ideas and feelings hurt us. We feel forgotten, or worthless, or like failures. We’re sure we don’t measure up, that we’re not enough for God or anyone else. We may know we’re loved and forgiven, but we still feel like a disappointment to God.
That’s why we need the powerful message of how our heavenly Father really sees us. We need to open our eyes and hearts to the person God sees when He looks at us. Because the more we come to see ourselves through God’s eyes, the closer we’ll move toward becoming who we were really meant to be.
Coming soon...to be released April 1 2010! Adapted from The God Who Sees You by Tammy Maltby with Anne Christian Buchanan. Copyright 2012 David C. Cook. Used with permission. Permission required to reproduce. All rights reserved.
Recent Comments