What If God Has Been Caring for You in Ways You Never Noticed?

Hosea 11, baby books, Minecraft, and the care we so easily overlook.

By Pastor John Erickson

If you've ever raised a small child, you know how much goes on behind the scenes.

You feed them. You clean up after them. You keep them from making questionable decisions involving electrical outlets, traffic, or the mysterious substance they just discovered under the couch. And how much of that do they fully appreciate? Approximately none of it.

It isn't because they're evil little people. They're kids. They don't yet have the perspective to see everything you're doing.

We have baby books for each of our four kids, with photos from their first year. Looking through them does something to me. Even when parenting is difficult, those pictures pull me back to the tenderness of caring for that little person.

Hosea 11 invites us to wonder whether our relationship with God sometimes looks similar.

A different picture of God's love

Earlier in Hosea, God uses the picture of marriage to describe his covenant relationship with Israel. In chapter 11, the imagery changes. God begins speaking like a parent remembering a child.

"When Israel was a child, I loved him," Hosea 11:1 says, recalling God's rescue of Israel from Egypt. Then we see a heartbreaking contrast. The more God called his people, the more they turned away.

The people are not accidentally lost. They have repeatedly walked away from the God who delivered them.

But listen to how God describes his care. He taught them to walk. He took them by the arms. He healed them, although they didn't recognize that he was the one helping. He led them with cords of human kindness and bonds of love. The language is tender, intimate, almost startling when you remember how much rebellion fills this book.

This is not a detached deity watching the world from a distance. This is the God who stoops down to care for people who often fail to notice.

The things we forget to see

Our kids wanted to play Minecraft together. We had one copy, which meant only one could play at a time. After months of asking, we bought two more.

Literally a day later came the question: could we get this other game?

Did you not remember what we just gave you?

Now, I love being a dad. They're kids. I was a kid, too, and I'm not sure gratitude was my outstanding childhood quality. The story makes me recognize something about myself with God.

I pray for something, receive an answer, say thanks-and immediately move to the next request.

I wonder how often I ask God where He is while overlooking the ways He has already been working.

We tend to notice his presence when something dramatic happens: a prayer answered in an unmistakable way, an unexpected provision, a breakthrough we've been waiting for. Those are good gifts. But Hosea reminds us that God's care is not limited to spectacular moments.

There is also the ordinary, often unrecognized care: an encouraging conversation when we were discouraged, a friendship that kept us from isolating, wisdom that came just in time, a lesson we didn't recognize until months later.

We ought to be careful not to claim we can identify God's secret purpose behind every event. Hosea isn't asking us to pretend we understand everything. He is asking us to remember the character of the One whose care Israel so easily missed.

One of the more painful lines in this chapter is that God healed them, but they did not realize it. Their lack of awareness didn't mean God's kindness wasn't real.

A parent who refuses to stop loving

Hosea 11 doesn't ignore consequences. Israel's betrayal matters. What the people do to themselves and others matters. God's love is not indifference.

Yet in verse 8 God speaks with extraordinary anguish: "How can I give you up, Ephraim?" The imagery portrays compassion rising even in the face of judgment.

This is one of the reasons I love spending time in the difficult parts of the Old Testament. We sometimes imagine that the God of the Old Testament is angry and the God of the New Testament is loving, as though someone switched personalities halfway through the story.

Hosea makes that caricature hard to maintain.

The God speaking here has every reason to confront Israel's destructive behavior. Yet his words reveal deep compassion. He is determined not simply to discard his people.

Notice something else. God does not sound indifferent to the pain of broken relationship. His response is personal. God is not an emotionless machine dispensing penalties after someone breaks the rules. In Hosea's poetic picture, divine love is passionate, costly, and persistent.

The God who comes toward us

Hosea 11:9 grounds that mercy in God's identity. He is God and not a human being. He does not merely mirror the ways we respond when we have been hurt.

When someone lets us down, our natural impulse can be to keep score, withdraw affection, or make sure they feel the damage they caused. We say we forgive, but we want them to feel at least a little miserable first.

God's compassion challenges that reflex. His holiness is not the opposite of love. Here, his holiness is part of why his response is unlike ours.

Christians see the fullest expression of God's willingness to come toward us in Jesus. God does not remain far away, waiting for humanity to figure out how to climb back to him. He enters our world and gives himself for us.

That's not permission to shrug at sin. It is an invitation to trust the heart of the One calling us home.

Perhaps you've been treating God as distant because you cannot make sense of what you are going through. You can bring those questions to him. But you can also ask, "What have I forgotten? Where have I already experienced his care?"

You may find that the God you're looking for has been nearer than you realized-teaching, leading, calling, and loving, even when you didn't see his hand.