They Do Not Look At Me Anymore

It happened again on Tuesday.

A woman asked you a question without looking up. Somebody stepped round you as though you were a trolley. A man said thanks in the direction of the wall.

None of it was cruel. That is the thing that makes it hard to talk about, because there is nothing to complain about, no incident, nothing anybody would recognize if you described it.

It is just that since you started this work, a certain percentage of people have stopped focusing their eyes on you.

You are still fully there, and a person failing to look at you has never once made you less present in the room.

And I want to be honest about the mechanism before I say anything else, because pretending it is imaginary would be an insult.

It is real, it is well documented, and it is not about you. People sort each other into figure and background at enormous speed, and a person in working clothes doing a service task gets sorted into background by a certain kind of person, automatically, without malice and without awareness.

That is a fact about the sorting system. It is not a fact about you.

But knowing that does not fix the feeling, because the feeling does not live in the part of a person that knows things.

One of them turned back

There is a moment where ten men are healed and one comes back, and the detail that matters for you is who he was.

And fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks: and he was a Samaritan. (Luke 17:16, King James Version)

And he was a Samaritan.

The one who turned round was the one from the group that everybody else in that society looked past. The outsider was the one who saw properly and came back.

You are in an account where the person nobody looked at was the one doing the seeing, and being in the background of a room has never once meant a person's eyes had stopped working. Luke 17:16 says and he was a Samaritan, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that clause at the end of the sentence rather than at the beginning.

And notice what Jesus does with him. He asks where the other nine are.

The question is not aimed at the man who came back. It is aimed at the room. He notices the absence of the nine out loud, in public, on behalf of the one who returned.

You have somebody who notices out loud when other people do not, and going unthanked has never once gone unnoticed by the one who was watching the whole room. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a room where nine people walked on, and it is written in Luke 17 that the question was asked plainly about them.

What the looking was actually doing for you

Now let me get at something underneath, and it is not a criticism.

Before this job there was a steady supply of small acknowledgments. Eye contact, name used, being included in the joke. Hundreds of tiny confirmations every week that a person is a person in the room.

Nobody notices them, because they are always there, the way nobody notices air.

And they have been withdrawn, mostly, by about half the people you encounter, and the withdrawal was invisible because each piece of it is too small to name.

You are missing something real that was taken in pieces too small to point at, and a loss with no single moment in it has never once been less than a loss. The written word notices the nine who did not come back, and the Spirit of God is the one who names an absence that nobody else in the room mentioned.

And here is the thing that helps, and it is not a reframe, it is an actual change.

Some people do look. Not most. Some. There is a woman who says your name every week. There is a man who asks about your mother. There is somebody who always says thank you to your face.

You have been counting the nine. There is a tenth, and the tenth is real, and the account in Luke is built entirely around that ratio being normal.

You have been keeping a record of the nine, and the one who turned back has never once counted for less because the others walked on. The Holy Spirit is the one who points at the one, and it is written in Luke 17:16 that the account is about the one who came back and not about the nine who did not.

Take it, and be seen once on purpose

So the assignment, and the second half of it is going to do more than you expect.

Take the shift, and tell one person plainly what you are doing and why. Luke 17:16 puts the one who turned back at the center of the account, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present while a woman says out loud what she does.

And say it to one of the tenths. Not to somebody who looks through you. To the woman who says your name.

Say what you do, and why, and say it as a whole person having a conversation rather than as somebody in an apron answering a question.

You are able to have one full conversation this week, and being properly seen once has never once been undone by a hundred people who did not look. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in an ordinary exchange, and the written word has a whole passage turn on one person stopping.

And there is a second half to this that costs nothing and changes a week. Look at them.

The person you hand something to. The one at the till. The other woman clearing the other end of the hall. Look at their faces and use their names.

Not to teach anybody a lesson. Because a room where one person is looking is a different room, and you can be that person from where you are standing.

You are able to be the one who looks, and a person who does the seeing has never once needed permission from the room to start. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that possible in an ordinary hall, and it is written in Luke 17:16 that the one who saw properly was the one everybody else had overlooked.