To See and to Serve

“Sometimes in life we see things that we can’t unsee,” Alexander McLean told a 60 Minutes interviewer. The South Londoner was eighteen when he went to Uganda to assist in prison and hospice work. That’s where he saw something he couldn’t unsee—an old man lying helpless next to a toilet. For five days McLean cared for him. Then the man died.

The experience ignited a passion in McLean. He earned his law degree and returned to Africa to help the marginalized. Eventually he founded Justice Defenders, an organization that advocates for prisoners.

Many people live in conditions we couldn’t “unsee” if we were to see them. But we don’t see them. In his lament for his devastated homeland, the prophet Jeremiah poured out his heart over his sense of being unseen. “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?” he cried. “Look around and see. Is any suffering like my suffering?” (Lamentations 1:12).

Jeremiah’s heart ached not only for himself but for all the oppressed as well. “To crush underfoot all prisoners in the land, to deny people their rights . . . would not the Lord see such things?” he asked rhetorically (3:34-36). Yet he saw hope. “No one is cast off by the Lord forever,” he said. “You, Lord, took up my case; you redeemed my life” (vv. 31, 58).

The “unseen” are all around us. God, who has redeemed us, calls us to see and serve them as He enables us.

Who are the “unseen” near you? How will you see them? What will you do?

In Lamentations 3:36, the word see is the much-used Hebrew word raʼah (“see,” “perceive,” “have vision”). It also appears three times in Genesis 16:13, where God sees and cares for Hagar when she fled from Sarah: “She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: ‘You are the God who sees me,’ for she said, ‘I have now seen the One who sees me.” In verse 14 we read, “the well was called Beer Lahai Roi.” Beer Lahai Roi literally means, “the well that belongs to the living One seeing me.” We can ask the God who “sees” to help us see people in need.