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Good morning. Human beings are fascinated with the lives of others – from the gossip in a small village whose curtains twitch all day long to large audiences consuming reality TV and social media revealing the pain and misery of human life. Of course this is nothing new; most great works of literature and film feed on the darkest aspects of human experience. But when we move from fiction to exposing the intimate life of real, living and breathing people to millions of viewers, as in the Jeremy Kyle show, we are doing something quite different. Implicitly, we validate someone’s pain and experience through numbers of viewers, or numbers of likes. The value of a person is gauged by their ability to entertain, to charm, to gain sympathy or provoke horror. The real person is lost. In our hunger for public validation, it is easy to build up an image that is nothing but a ghost of who we really are, a public face without complexity, beauty and brokenness. But the value of any human life never lies in its validation by the many. Christianity tells us that every human being is valuable and valued by God, simply for being. Even if no-one in the world approves of you or sees you, you are still loved, seen and held by God. There is ancient wisdom that celebrates hiddenness. The foundational Christian story is that of a hidden God, born in poverty, working as a carpenter for many years, in the backwaters of the Roman empire. Jesus went out of his way to come alongside those invisible and hidden – women, children, the disabled, the sick, the poor, those despised by good society. They were valuable. Religious communities, monks and nuns, have understood this wisdom for centuries. They live lives of prayer and service largely hidden, finding value in being seen by God, in meaningful, attentive daily life. Being hidden gives you the space to discover who you truly are, without trying to live up to a distorted mirror of ideal humanity. Truly valuing every human being is about valuing their ordinariness, their hiddenness, and giving them the dignity and freedom to be who they are, rather than a mirror of our dreams and nightmares. Then, maybe, if we learn to live well in our hiddenness, we will have something of worth to share with the wider world.