THE POOR LOSE VISIBILITY

 THE POOR LOSE VISIBILITY

The poor do not disappear all at once.

First, society stops listening.
Then it stops noticing.
Eventually, it learns how to walk past human suffering
as though it were part of the landscape.

And so the poor lose visibility.

Not because they no longer exist,
but because comfort trains the eyes
to look upward toward power, success, wealth, and spectacle,
while the wounded remain beneath the edge of public attention.

The homeless man beneath the freeway
becomes background noise.
The exhausted worker disappears beneath productivity.
The lonely elder fades quietly behind apartment walls.
The hungry child becomes another statistic
inside a nation busy congratulating itself.

This is how a people slowly lose conscience.

For when suffering becomes invisible,
mercy grows weak.
And when mercy weakens,
the soul of the nation begins to harden.

Yet Christ always moved in the opposite direction.

Where others avoided the leper,
He touched him.
Where crowds ignored the blind,
He stopped and listened.
Where society discarded sinners and the poor,
He sat among them as neighbors.

The Gospel restores visibility
to those the world tries not to see.

For every forgotten soul
still bears the image of God.

And perhaps the deepest judgment upon a society
is not merely that poverty exists,
but that human beings can suffer openly
while the nation learns not to notice anymore.

Pastor Steven G. Lee
Street GMC Corps
May 20, 2026