What We Can’t See

You all know how much I love walking outside, but I also spend about 30 minutes every day walking on the treadmill in our garage to get in a little more cardio.

The truth is, walking with Gunner and Marley through the woods is wonderful for my soul, but not necessarily for my heart rate. There is WAY too much sniffing going on to keep up a decent pace! So, when I’m on the treadmill, I usually listen to podcasts.

Recently, I listened to a ​two-part interview from Focus on the Family​ with a former atheist who had worked as a homicide detective. It was fascinating, and I’ll link the episodes below if you’d like to listen. But as I walked and listened to him talk about his years investigating homicides, a memory came rushing back that I hadn’t thought about in quite a while.

There’s an interesting fact about me that I’ve never shared with you before and don’t share often. I realize this is going to sound like I’m joking. I’m not. More than 35 years ago, I unknowingly hired a serial killer. Yep. You read that correctly.

Right out of college, I took a job with a local textile company working in Human Resources, which is what we called Personnel back then. I was only about 21 years old and had a lot of different responsibilities, including taking applications and interviewing prospective employees.

One day, a young man about my age named ​Lesley Warren​ came in looking for work. He was clean-cut and had recently been in the military. His application was short, but didn’t reveal any problems. I remember that he was nervous and didn’t say much, but that wasn’t particularly unusual for someone sitting through a job interview.

There was one thing about him that I remembered later, though. He wouldn’t make eye contact with me. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. People get nervous during interviews. It was a basic labor position that we called a ‘utility worker.’ We needed employees, and after he met with our plant manager, we hired him.

He worked for us for probably close to a year. And nothing happened. He came to work. He did his job. He was quiet. Eventually, he left the company, and life moved on.

Then, a year or so later, I was getting dressed for work one morning with the local news playing on the TV in the background when I suddenly heard a familiar name. Lesley Warren.

I turned toward the television, and there he was. The man I had interviewed and helped hire was being charged with a gruesome murder and was suspected of others. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

Not long afterward, two detectives walked into my office asking for Lesley’s employment file. I pulled the records for them, and they asked me questions about what he had been like when he worked for us. I told them the truth. He had been quiet. He did his work. There had been nothing during his employment that made me imagine he was capable of what the media was describing. Then I said something that I still remember all these years later.

I told the detectives that if my car had broken down while Lesley worked for us and he had offered me a ride home, I probably would have gotten into the car with him without thinking twice. One of the detectives shook his head. He told me that would have been a very poor decision.

That conversation stayed with me for a long time. In fact, for months afterward, I questioned myself.

Until then, I had always thought I was a pretty good judge of character. I felt like I could usually tell when someone was being dishonest or when something just wasn’t quite right. Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.

How could I have sat across a desk from someone, interviewed him, shook hands with him, worked in the same building with him for months—and had absolutely no idea?

For a while, that realization shook my confidence in my ability to read people. But with the benefit of nearly 40 years of life between that young 21-year-old woman and the woman I am today, I see it differently.

We were never meant to know everything about another person’s heart. We can’t.

We see expressions. We hear words. We observe behavior. We notice whether someone looks us in the eye. And sometimes our instincts are worth paying attention to. God gave us wisdom and discernment for a reason. But none of those things give us the ability to see another human being completely.

There’s a verse in 1 Samuel that says, “People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” — 1 Samuel 16:7

I’ve heard that verse countless times, usually in a positive context—a reminder not to judge someone’s worth by what we see on the outside. But there’s another side to it that I hadn’t considered when I was so young. Only God truly knows what is inside another person’s heart. That’s humbling.

We can know someone for years and discover there are things we never knew. We can trust someone who disappoints us. We can believe someone who isn’t telling us the truth. We can completely misread a situation. And when that happens, sometimes the person we stop trusting is ourselves.

How did I not see it? How did I believe that? Why didn’t I know? Maybe you’ve asked yourself those questions before. I certainly have.

But perhaps we’re asking ourselves to do something no human being is capable of doing. We’re asking ourselves to see what only God can see.

That doesn’t mean we ignore warning signs. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use wisdom, ask questions, set boundaries, or listen when something genuinely doesn’t feel right. But it does mean that our inability to see everything doesn’t make us foolish. It makes us human.

Looking back, I can still picture that young man sitting across the desk from younger me. And yes, I remember the lack of eye contact. But I also know now that I could interview a hundred nervous young people tomorrow who wouldn’t look me in the eye, and 99—or hopefully all 100—would simply be nervous young people trying to get a job.

I couldn’t have known what I didn’t know. That’s something it took me a while to accept.

These days, I still try to use good judgment. I pay attention to my instincts. Age and experience have probably made me a little wiser and certainly more cautious than I was in my twenties. But I don’t expect myself to see into people’s hearts anymore.

That job belongs to God. And strangely enough, I find a lot of comfort in that. Because the same God who sees the things hidden from me also sees the things hidden in me.

He knows when I’m afraid, even when I look confident. He knows when I’m hurting, even when I say I’m fine. He knows my intentions when someone else misunderstands them. He sees every part of me that no one else can see, and loves me completely anyway.

Maybe that’s the beautiful flip side of a lesson I learned in such an unsettling way all those years ago. We can’t truly see into another person’s heart. But we are completely seen by the One who can.

Note: For those interested, the Discovery Channel did an episode on ​Lesley Warren​ in their ​Handsome Devils series, episode #6​ , available on Amazon Prime. There is also a book about him called ​The Baby Face Killer​ (2002). My understanding is that he confessed to 8 murders and has been convicted of 4 of them.

• Focus on the Family: Part #1
• Focus on the Family: Part #2

Sept 6, 2026 Morning Brew