Can You See Me Now?

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.