In one of his books writer and philosopher Loren Eiseley tells about the time when he was only a young lad and his father died. His father died a slow death in great bodily torture. Eisley's mother was deaf. Young Loren alone heard the sounds of his father's agony. This was before the wide application of painkilling drugs. Eiseley said a curious thing happened to him during that very stress filled time. He became so tense that he could no longer bear the ticking of the alarm clock in his own bedroom. He smothered it with a blanket but still he heard it as if it were ticking in his own head. He tried to sleep, but he could not. His distress and loneliness were too great. It was then that help came.

His grandmother saw the light burning in his room in the wee hours and came to sit with him. Later when it came time for her to begin her own long journey from which there is no return he touched her hair and knew in those moments that she had saved his sanity. Into that lonely room at midnight she had come, abandoning her own sleep, in order to sit with troubled young Loren. Eiseley never forgot what that meant to him. To know that someone sees and understands. Sometimes that is all we need to know in order to make it through a time of crisis. Sometimes, though, even our closest friends are blind to our despair. We read about tragedies in the newspapers in which people are left lying on a public sidewalk after an accident or a mugging and no one does anything, and we think to ourselves if I had been there I would have done something. But sometimes there are persons in our own family or our neighbor's family who are in terrible distress, and we never pick up on it. It is as if we are blind. Jesus is never blind. He sees us in our distress. He hears us when we call upon him.