All are worthy to be seen and known

We were discussing a photo pinned to the board during one of my college photography classes. It showed the white stripes of a parking space in a Wal-Mart lot. The shadow of a shopping cart fell across them.

Having been conditioned from an early age -- probably back on some well-meaning children's television show or in the early grades of school -- to see shadows as gray, I assumed they were, without really questioning it, so what I saw in the picture was gray cement, beneath white lines, beneath gray shadow.

I was looking at the photograph, but I wasn't really seeing. To be honest, it didn't look like anything special.

Then one of my classmates, a painting major, raised his hand and said something that changed the way I think about the world -- something that continues to blow me away today.

He said the shadow was blue.

It was a throwaway comment, not even the main point of his thought, lodged between other points he was trying to make. But this comment stopped me in my tracks; I didn't hear anything else he said. Were I a cartoon in that moment, I would have shaken my head back and forth quickly and made the noise that sounds something like this: "bleheheheh."

I looked again and saw it. It totally was. Blue.

I want to see like a painter.

All this has me thinking: What does it mean to see, anyway?

I think of the fourth-graders I teach at summer camp, and how each just wants to be seen, to know they have my attention. They come in each day with their stories they want to tell me, anecdotes of the things they find important. We make a project, and there is a chorus of 12 different people calling me over to "Look, Miss!" and see what they've created. They want to share what they have, who they are, with fellow appreciators. They want to be seen and known.

And I understand: I want this, too.

To see: acknowledge. Notice something unique. Affirm. Understand. Recognize mystery and depth. Observe the reflection of God.

What a human, what a divine desire, to be seen and known: the love, the fellowship, the perfect unity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the Trinity. Our God making us for himself, so he could know and be known. The blind beggar, so that others in his society would stop rebuking and disregarding him, so he could begin to be known: "Lord, please let me see." Jesus, sitting with the Samaritan woman at the well, seeing her for who she was without judgment, and letting himself be seen for the first time for who he was, the Messiah.

When we look and really see something or someone, we bestow worth upon that object or person. They are worthy of our time, worthy of being seen and known. They have a dignity, a value that is worth it, not because of anything they have or haven't done, but simply because they are.

Let's look, and truly see others.

Mia Pohlman is a Perryville, Missouri, native now living in Greece as a Fulbright fellow.