The Super
Bowl was on last night, along with the famous commercials that keep everyone
talking for days about which ones were the funniest, the silliest, and the most
memorable. One of the ads that caught my attention was the Nationwide ad
featuring Mindy Kaling, who decided that she was, in fact, invisible and
proceeded to do, well, whatever an invisible Mindy thought she could get away
with . . . including sneaking a selfie with Matt Damon. Didn’t work so well.
I thought
about it later and realized that I remember a time I felt invisible. We moved
back to Orlando when I was halfway through the tenth grade and I went from a
high school in College Park, Georgia, where I knew literally every person in my
class, to a school that was so huge, I got lost every day the first week.
Each
morning I would board a bus for school, and then I would arrive to a teeming
mass of almost three thousand students swarming through the halls and sidewalks
of a huge campus. I recognized a few faces from elementary school, having lived
in the same neighborhood years before, but only one friend made a connection
with me. The rest would swim around me between classes as if I weren’t there .
. . or invisible.
Until I made
it into the choral ensemble that summer. I had played the piano for years, so I
auditioned to accompany the select choral group for the school, and I was
chosen along with another girl to play for the group. We would spend six weeks
in summer school practicing music and preparing for a busy year of performances
and competitions. And those six weeks would change my life.
I had
friends now. I had an identity. When school started back my junior year, I had
a family scattered throughout the population of the school and I felt
connected, united, to the other members of my group. Beyond the select
ensemble, I was also closely connected to the members of the chorus so that
gave me an even broader “family” unit throughout the school population. I was
no longer invisible.
Mindy
Kaling and the Nationwide folks make invisibility look fun . . . but it’s not.
It’s terribly lonely. A lot of kids feel invisible at school; young people, you need to
look around and see the other people around you more. Patients often feel invisible in the
hospital; we need to visit folks who are sick more often. Family members feel
invisible at home; we need to stop to look and listen to each each other more. Whenever someone
is feeling invisible, something is terribly wrong; something is broken. It
needs repair.
One of the
worst places for people to feel invisible is in the church. Yet, that is where
we hear the complaint so often: “I went to church, but it felt like nobody even saw me.”
So let’s get
busy fixing that one. Look at the people you see at church. Look them in the eye. Say “Hi, there!”
and put some feeling into it. Stop and shake a hand. See them. Make sure they feel visible.
Maybe they’ll
come back.
1 comment:
I look at that old photo and am thankful I saw all of you in living color…and heard the beautiful music all of you made, together. And how proud I was to sit beside you on that piano stool and turn pages for my big sister. You were the most popular girl I knew! Love you for being the best big sister a little sister could ask for and for being visible in my world.
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