
Image: Barbara Ryther
Thoughts from the beach: Invisible Lives
I’m always fascinated by the sand trails left by unseen birds and sea creatures at the beach. Some I can recognize – the straight, assured webbed footprints of seagulls, the tiny, winding trail created by a quick stepping sandpiper.
Others are a mystery to me. A serpentine line that disappears without warning – some unidentified mollusk that has now retreated deep in the sand or back into the ocean? An indentation left by a strand of seaweed that briefly rested there before continuing on its travels?
It is easy to think, as I stride confidently along the sand, that I am the alpha mammal here. My footprints dwarf these marks so of course I must be the most important thing here. Besides, I can’t see these creatures, so how can they matter to me? How easy it is to dismiss what we can’t see, to ignore it, or worse to abuse it.
To see lives that are in the shadows, or simply out of sight, is something we are constantly called to do by Christ. To give them value. To share the world with them. To care with them and for them. To understand that lives that may be invisible to us – or that we choose not to see – are seen by God as clearly as we are.
Barbara Ryther