What is Essential Is Invisible

A few lit candles. Check. Bible and journal close at hand. Check. Living room all cozy. Check. Coffee pot poised and ready to brew. Check. Healthy blueberry muffins out of oven awaiting fat-rich butter. Check. Four amazing women on their way from city to country to join me in God talk and spiritual formation. Check.

My favorite picture window at the breakfast table, framing a picture perfect snowy forest of trees.
Smeary, streaked, smudged and ruining my view. Fail.

Just look past the dirt, through the window, I told myself.  Easier said than done. You're getting ready for a morning of spiritual growth, I chided myself, not a photo shoot for a decorating magazine. My vision, as it often is, was distracted by something that really didn't matter.

My thoughts drifted back to a spiritual growth moment of the same ilk earlier in the week that obviously needed some revisiting. Reading a book I received for Christmas, (that I didn't know I wanted, but now it's a favorite), I landed upon a lesson that provided perspective that truly mattered.

It's the story of Fred Rogers, that's right, the sweater-donning Mr. Rogers that wants to be my neighbor, written by newspaper journalist, Tim Madigan.  In I'm Proud of You, My Friendship with Fred Rogers, Madigan carries the reader past the obligatory journalism interview assigned to him by his editor, to the account of a rich friendship between two men of different worlds.

Madigan quickly gets to the true character of this gentle man known simply as Mr. Rogers to the late twentieth century American family. By page eighteen I discovered Rogers was a "much more than simply meets the eye" persona of the general television viewing audience. Here both character and spiritual formation were artfully crafted; experiences that shaped the man on the screen.

In his adult life, Rogers was a beloved father, grandfather, successful television personality and ordained minister. Madigan notes as a child, Rogers was "pudgy, bookish, musical and extremely shy."

Rogers shared with Madigan his boyhood trials of bullies that taunted him while walking home from school. "As I walked faster, I looked around and they started to call my name and came closer and closer and got louder and louder . . . 'Freddy, hey, fat Freddy. We're going to get you Freddy.' I resented those kids for not seeing beyond my fatness or my shyness. And I didn't know it was all right to resent it, to feel bad about it, even to feel very sad about it . . . The advice I got from grown-ups was, just let on you don't care, then nobody will bother you. What I actually did was mourn. I cried to myself whenever I was alone. I cried through my fingers as I made up songs on the piano. I sought out stories of other people who were poor in spirit, and I felt for them.

I started to look behind the things that people did and said, and little by little, concluded that Saint-Exupery was absolutely right when he wrote in The Little Prince: 'What is essential is invisible to the eyes.' So after a lot of sadness, I began a lifelong search for what is essential, what is about my neighbor that doesn't meet the eye."

Although I was engaged with Madigan's biography about Fred Rogers until the last word on the last page, I paused for a long time after reading  this particular story about Freddy Rogers that taught me to see what is essential in people, in life.

I want to see like that.

What do you see when you look at people through the windows of your world?

What does God see when he looks at you through "his window?" 

 "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.'"
Genesis 1:26 (ESV)

Lord, help us to see past the streaks, smears and smudges to the image of you He created in all of us.