"What no one else knew"

A mild-mannered, retired accountant with a pristine lawn in the south of England receives a letter one day which sparks an unusual desire to walk to a town in north England. So begins a novel called The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce. His walk becomes a journey of weeks. Along the way his character and his unusual quest invite the trust of strangers he meets. One day, while eating in a crowded city café, he shares his table and his teacake with a well-dressed man who opens up to him in a surprising way.

The silver-haired gentleman was in truth nothing like the man Harold had first imagined him to be. He was a chap like himself, with a unique pain; and yet there would be no way of knowing that if you passed him on the street, or sat opposite him in a café and did not share his teacake....  It must be the same all over England. People were buying milk, or filling their cars with petrol, or even posting letters. And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The inhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that.   (pages 88-89)

I wonder, how life would be different if everyone wore a sign that told of the unique pain that each person carries, whether the pain is fresh or old, intense or almost forgotten. Might we be a bit more patient? More forgiving? More likely to show kindness?

When Jesus met a rich young man who was anxious about obtaining eternal life, there is a beautiful short line in the gospel: “Jesus, looking at him, loved him” (Mark 10:21). May God give us the vision to look at people in the same way.