Alone and Unseen

Kelly Tolman shares a true story that exposes a painful wound that aches within communities throughout our country.

A newly married couple bought their first home about a year before the Covid pandemic hit the United States. Both of them enjoyed stable careers that held great promise for the future financial security of their growing family. As they neared the end of their first year as a married couple, they welcomed their first child into the world. They were busy and content.  

Once the pandemic hit, both employers transitioned to a virtual work environment. Neither were at risk of losing their job, so they received the opportunity to work from home as a blessing of increased family time. During the city-wide enforced lockdown, they were tending their garden when they saw their next-door neighbor, an elderly woman named Opal who lived alone. In the year they'd lived there, they had seen her many times before from the window of their kitchen and over the hedge of their backyard, but they had yet to introduce themselves.  

Responding to an internal nudge, they made their way over to Opal's fence and said hello. At the end of the conversation, they offered to assist her with anything she may need, and she graciously accepted.   

After the conversation, Opal was quickly forgotten by the couple as the busyness of life resumed. It wasn't for another few weeks that the couple finally got around to placing a card with both of their phone numbers in her mailbox. That evening, they received a phone call from the old woman's son, who had come into town. He thanked them for reaching out to his mom but shared she would never receive their note — because she'd passed away earlier that day.  

I don't know how Opal died. Perhaps of old age, perhaps of the Covid, or perhaps from the ache of feeling alone and unseen. 

Their story is our story  

This story speaks to us because we have all been on both sides of its suffering. We have all been the woman in her home: walking in the isolation of the world passing her by, needing help, desiring community, feeling like a burden, drowning in uncertainty, feeling unseen.  

We have all been this couple: busy and preoccupied with our own stuff. Seeing the people around us in short glances, knowing what we ought to do but getting around to it too late, allowing the busy to take control, regretting that we didn't act sooner, and moving through a sadness that we cannot quite explain.   

I believe this type of suffering illuminates a very specific crack in our foundation — a deep wound that bleeds in each of our communities — a wound sustained by forgetting, as Mother Teresa once said, that we belong to one another.  

This crack in our foundation, this wound sustained by our community, is first caused by a lack of compassion: the choice not to walk with another in their suffering because we are too busy or just can't see beyond our own needs. 

A prayer to heal  

Today, my friends, let us pray for eyes that see beyond ourselves and seek opportunities to serve and support our struggling neighbors. Let us pray for hands that don't only tend our own garden but become calloused from making sure the men, women, children, and families of our own neighborhood share in the harvest.   

Let us pray for feet that walk alongside the families around us, ears that hear the Holy Spirit guiding us, and a heart that loves so fiercely that no mother, father, or child feels alone or unseen. And finally, let us pray for supernatural healing over this wound that we have sustained as a people, that we may awaken the truth within each of us that we are made for one another and eagerly encounter God in the image and likeness of our brother and sister who dwells before us. 

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Copyright 2024 Kelly Tolman
Images: Canva