To Know and Be KnownSample

UNSEEN 

A few years ago, I offered a blanket to a homeless man. He told me he already had a sleeping bag but thanked me for trying to help. I admitted that I didn’t feel like I had helped him very much. His words brought tears to my eyes when he responded,

“You’ve helped me more than you know. You looked at me.”

I thought back on all the times I had averted my eyes from people in the midst of struggle. The man with the tin can on the street corner asking for money, the homeless woman pushing her shopping cart… If I didn’t have anything to offer them, I turned away. I didn’t realize that it hurt them to be unseen. 

Studies have been done on people who are “unseen” for long periods of time in solitary confinement (sometimes referred to a prison within a prison). They are far more likely to engage in self-mutilation and attempt suicide at rates that are higher than the general prison population[i]. Even people who might be called “hardened criminals” can’t survive being isolated for very long without losing themselves.

Jesus described Hell as a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth. The validation every heart seeks will be forever out of grasp, replaced with a void that can only be filled with regret, sorrow, and shame. The souls in hell will finally understand that Jesus did everything He could to keep them from this eternal misery, but they rejected His free gift of salvation again and again. What more could Jesus do? He paid the fine for our sins on the cross, but that gift must be received, accepted, and then lived.

C.S. Lewis in his book, The Great Divorce, said it this way,

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.”

I pray that everyone reading this devotional will accept Jesus as their Savior so you will never have to hear the scariest words in the Bible, when Jesus says, “Depart from me. I never knew you...” 

It hurts to be unseen.

POINT TO PONDER:

There is an old song by the Newsboys called, “They don’t serve breakfast in Hell.” It’s a reminder that every good thing in this life, no matter how small or big, is a gift from God. Hell isn’t a party. Hell is torment for eternity with no second chances. The choices we make while we are alive will determine where we go after death. 

[i]According to Stuart Grassian, a board-certified psychiatrist and former faculty member at Harvard Medical School, he found that roughly a third of solitary inmates were “ actively psychotic and/or acutely suicidal.”