Visiting Invisible People

Recently someone in our church asked if I would visit a friend of theirs in a nursing home.  It was a gentleman who went to another church, but had few friends or family to stop by and see him.  One afternoon, I dropped in.

He was going through a tough and depressing time.  Moving into this facility, he had lost the life to which he was accustomed. He spoke at length about God, and how focusing on particular Bible verses was helping him get through it all.  To say his theology was different from mine would be an understatement.  There was much talk of demons and spirits, leaving me at a loss for words.  I felt awkward and doubted if I could say anything that would help.

Then he quoted the well-known passage in Matthew 25, where Jesus tells us that when we visit the sick, we are really visiting him.  Well, that's more in line with my view of Christianity, so my ears perked up.  Yet nothing prepared me for what he said next.

"You know," he said, "If I were Jesus sitting here in this room, there would be a line of people out the door to see me, but there isn't."

His words hit me hard.  If Christians really believed it was Jesus we encountered when we visited the sick, hungry or imprisoned, we would visit them more often.  No matter what one's spiritual beliefs, if we all really believed that we were encountering the sacred or transcendent when we visiting the invisible people in our society, we would visit much more often.

So why aren't we and why have we made so many people invisible?  If there is an invisible or forgotten person in your life, visit them today.  You will be blessed far more than you can imagine.  It doesn't matter if we don't know what to say when we get there.  Sometimes we just need to listen.

Comments

[Deb Holton-Smith]

Thank you Don for visiting him. I can't imagine how long his days, weeks and months must feel while living in a nursing home. It is so easy to make the elderly invisible, while rushing around each day. I'm guilty for not visiting as often as I should. Like you, I run out of words and feel down with his depression. I feel like a failure, trying to pep him up. Thus it's easier to avoid going, which I find myself doing frequently. But you are right about the "being blessed far more than we can imagine". When our mutual friend starts talking about his journalism days, his time spent w/the many celebrities he wrote about, his life transforms for those few moments....making an old man happy for the time being. Thanks for reminding me that it's not about me being there but rather it's about being there for HIM....Jesus and our lonely elders. Appreciate you stopping!!!!!!

[Eileen Fisher]

When I was in a nursing home for nerve damage to my foot my roommate was a 90-year old woman who LOVED being there because there was a lot of activity going on with nurses, doctors, aides, physical therapists, etc. She was only in there temporarily but she did not want to go home, she told me. Home was the lonely place where she only saw her family for a limited amount of time at night after they got back from work. Here in the nursing home "she" reached out and made people laugh. We will all be invisible at one time or another in our lives but from experience, I think that it makes a difference how you view things. Sometimes we forget that Jesus said if you give someone a cup of cold water in my name, you gave it to me. Such a small act but it is exactly those small, quiet things we neglect doing because we think we should be out doing greater things. Maybe we even want to do greater things because there are people out there to see what we have done and that's where it can get really tricky. That's why this post really means so much, Don, because what it says, is true. What we give refreshes us in ways that we cannot know unless it comes from that deep, unselfish place. We can't just acknowledge people when we want something *from* them. That's just a whole lot of emptiness and the world is way too full of that and in the end, everybody ends up thirsty.

[Don Heatley]

Thanks for adding to the story Deb and Eileen. I think the unvisited are a great unspoken issue in our culture. Hopefully we can all live out our beliefs better and find ways to connect and listen to those who feel abandoned right in our own communities.