Being a witness to someone’s life is a wonderful gift. . .

I am currently reading a great book: Someone Knows My Name, by Canadian author, Lawrence Hill.  It’s a book about the transportation of Africans into America in the mid 1700’s and later.  The story is told through the eyes of one young female who was torn from her home and her family at the age of eleven, forced to travel by foot hundreds of miles to the slave boats and then brought here and sold.

Her account of the trip, both the deaths and survival stories and her memories of those people left behind is told in meticulous detail.  What has moved me the most is her “knowing” that remembering people by name and knowing from where they came is placing them in a scared spiritual space, one that will “cradle them” for all time.  Remembering one another is what honors our existence.

I think that’s akin to what we do for one another in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon and other 12 step groups too.  We serve as witnesses to each other.  We listen intently, hold gently to our hearts one another’s stories and murmur prayers for peace after each of us shares our pain.  No one is forgotten who has allowed themselves to be known.  And it’s our “work” in the rooms to make sure each person present understands that it’s safe to allow us in to the private spaces of one another’s minds.  As we have so often heard it said, secrets keep us sick.  But there is a place where our healing is guaranteed.

Lest I be misunderstood, I think we serve as witnesses to each other every where we go.  We don’t offer “that gift” only to others in the fellowship, but to every one we acknowledge on the street, in the stores, on the job.  Being acknowledged by someone every day can surely make the difference some one might need to go on for one more day.

There are so many tiny ways to witness: a smile,  a hello, a phone call or a letter or even an email reaches out to those we live among.  Taking the time, the tiny amount of time it takes to greet someone else every day in some fashion lets us know we have been “witnessed” too.  Both of us are honored in this act. Paying the honor forward is what heals us and the world around us.  Are you ready to do your part today?