It’s been a long week, I’m ready to be home, and my hands smell like people.

I’m writing this between airports, coming home from yet another work trip. And at the end of each day while we’re traveling, my hands always smell like people.

It’s become my phrase on our many work trips—it struck me on the first trip and has stuck with me over the past few months of regular travel. It just comes with the territory when you work for a uniform company and help people try on clothes all day.

Being there with the employees changes everything about our business. We can hear their complaints, see how the clothes fit, and help them figure out exactly what they need to wear depending on their specific role.

It’s close, it’s personal, and it’s totally different than an email or even a phone call.

It’s made me wonder what Jesus’ hands smelled like.

On any given day, I guess it could have been sawdust, dirt and spit, fish and bread, lake water, grimy kids, dirty feet, even death.

Which puts a quick stop to my pity party about having my hands smell like worn clothes.

I have a lot to learn about the kind of love that makes you not care what your hands smell like.

He must have loved the blind man He healed, the dead girl He raised, the 5,000 people He fed, the disciples He served so much that the smell of His hands didn’t even cross His mind.

“He gets us. He’s been there—the tiredness, the loneliness, the sin being dangled in front of us that looks so tempting.”

I really should be in awe more often that Jesus became a man. It has become so commonplace to me.

God wrote this story—prologue to epilogue. I’m sure He could have picked another way to save the world.

But He chose this way, the human way. He chose the world of siblings and road trips, sleepless nights and desert heat, bad government and unfaithful friends.

Just so that when it was time for Him to plead our case, He would know exactly what we’re going through.

He gets us. He’s been there—the tiredness, the loneliness, the sin being dangled in front of us that looks so tempting.

He took a huge pay cut. Volunteered for a massive demotion. God had given Him authority over everything, and He willingly tabled it for a few years.

Hebrews 2 says that everything in the universe is subjected to Him. And even though we don’t get to see the full reality of His rule yet, it also says that we do get to see Him.

Thank goodness, we do see Him.

He became human so we could see Him.

His humanity made Him visible, relatable, accessible.

Recently, I just cannot seem to escape that word see.

A few weeks ago, the Lord was teaching me about looking back and seeing Him, and now He’s showing me that it’s possible to see Him in the today.

It’s easy for me to be jealous of the disciples. All they had to do was wake up to see Him. They just took a hike one day and “lifting up their eyes, they saw nothing except Jesus Himself alone” (Matthew 17:8). They happened upon His glory daily.

For me, it takes a different set of eyes. The stubborn ones in my heart that have to be trained to see Him in His Word and in the subtle ways He appears in everyday life.

The eyes that have to be humbled to the point of desperation to say what Job said: “I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.” (Job 42:5)

The eyes that have to be reminded to “taste and see that the Lord is good.” (Psalm 34:8)

The eyes that have to be forcibly fixed on Him second by second because all they want to do is lust after affirmation and competence and security. (Hebrews. 12:2)

“Pay attention. Look at the Man—the God-man—who made Himself visible and vulnerable so that I could relate to Him.”

No matter how many times His Word tells me where to look, my eyes still need help doing their job.

Pilate says the most ironic thing near the end of Jesus’ life. He too directs people to look at Jesus, but when he presents the God of the universe to the people who are about to kill Him—so that He could turn right around and offer them salvation—he picks some interesting words.

He says, “Behold, the Man!”

How appropriate. Not only for the Jews back then, but for my heart now.

Pay attention. Look at the Man—the God-man—who made Himself visible and vulnerable so that I could relate to Him.

The One who decided to sweat, to sleep, to cry, to bleed so that He could be accessible to me.

Although we don’t see all things subjected to Him yet, praise the Lord that we do see Him.

I’ve been on a good many work trips now, enough that my hands smelling like people is becoming more normal. I’m trying to think of it less as a “I need to shower let me go to the hotel and go to bed” thing and more as a “it’s an honor to be close enough to the people I serve that they rub off on me” thing.

Maybe my hands can help my eyes out a little bit—a reminder to look a little harder for the One whose hands smell like my sin every single day.

So in the daily moments of training my forgetful eyes to look for Him in songs and words and thoughts and events, may we look to Him and be radiant. (Psalm. 34:5)

Behold the Man, indeed.