The Refugee Whose File Was Already Open

In 2019, a Syrian family arrived at a resettlement office in Louisville, Kentucky, exhausted from eighteen months of waiting. The father, Marwan Haddad, carried a folder of documents he assumed no one had read. But when caseworker Ellen Briggs greeted them, she spoke his daughter's name — Yasmin — and mentioned that the girl loved drawing birds. Marwan froze. He had never spoken to this woman. He had never emailed her. How could she know?

Ellen explained that she had studied every page of their file for weeks. She had read the interview transcripts, the teacher's notes from the camp school, the small details buried in paragraphs no one expected anyone to read. She had already arranged art supplies for Yasmin's room in their new apartment. "I wanted you to know," Ellen said quietly, "that someone was paying attention to your life before you ever walked through that door."

Marwan wept. Not from sadness, but from the shock of being truly known.

This is what Nathanael experienced beneath that fig tree. He came to Jesus full of skepticism — "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" — but Jesus dismantled his doubt with a single sentence: "I saw you while you were still under the fig tree." Before the introduction, before the invitation, before Nathanael even considered following, the Lord already knew him. The Almighty does not discover us when we finally show up. He has been reading every page of our story all along.