#12

So often, I don’t find God where I expect to.

When I’m sitting in a specialist’s office for the first time, hoping desperately to see his tenderness in the doctor’s eyes, but instead, I’m met with a disconnectedness that dashes any hope I had for help.

I can then walk down the hall in that very same office and sit in front of a nurse, who has no say in the treatment or lack thereof that I’m to get, and her eyes hold such kindness and empathy that it takes everything in me not to give the tears welling in my eyes permission to stream down my face.

And if it weren’t for the crushing weight of disappointment, I think that warmth with which the nurse looked at me, seeing me as a human being and not just patient number 7, would give me everything (and then some) that I need to keep going.

But that warm gaze is something I’m grateful for nonetheless.

It gives me hope that there are people in this world who still care.

There are people in this world who will look at me not to see what I am or am not, but just to see m e .

Oh, how I wish those were the only type of people allowed by the Divine to have any power in this world.

But maybe it’s the power that steals the warm kindness right out of a person’s eyes.

Maybe it’s power that relegates the living, breathing human beings you see to one-dimensional threats.

I don’t know.

It might be naïve or overly optimistic, but I’m not sold on the idea that power alone steals one’s empathy. I think empathy is eroded little by little through specific systems set in place, competitive atmospheres driven by a need for recognition and praise, or even the greedy nature of needing to be right.

What is the antidote?

In any situation, I think it’s seeing the person right in front of you. Not glancing or looking over. Truly seeing.

No matter who you’re entrusted with, I think seeing them as more than a shape to put in the correct box (news flash: there is no correct box for a transcendent God or the beings he made in his image), but rather a unique creation worthy of seeing, knowing, and understanding…I think that would bring that beautiful light of tenderness back into the eyes of the beholder, no matter their place or station in this world.

I want to look at the world around me with that tenderness, and oh God, do I hope to see it in the eyes that look back at me.