If You Don’t Take Care, Who Will?

In a nod to reality, I acknowledged the date and spent a goodly portion of the week puttering around Good Shepherd’s Sunday School rooms, valiantly making ready for Catechesis to start up again…today. This year that meant swapping two rooms because the older group is larger than the younger one, and throwing away a lot of old dead crayons and bits of paper and refilling pasting boxes—exactly the same work as getting a regular school room ready.

All week long I limped around and testily admonished God, explaining to him that my back hurt and the top of my foot hurt where I dropped a large bookshelf on it. If I’m spending valuable time in the service of the kingdom—even if it is only dusting and moving the furniture—surely God should take care that I don’t injure myself.

It’s the words Take Care that trip me up. If you say them to another person in the wrong tone, tossed off without actual care, they could sound rather insulting. Might as well say, “bless your heart” and have done with it. If you say them to someone whose life is unraveling at the seams, who can’t take care or take anything because everything has been taken away, they are a cruelty. Take care of what? The shattered pieces of a broken life? How exactly would I do that?

There are all kinds of ways to gently distance yourself from someone who is suffering from all kinds of trouble. Nodding and smiling, shaking your head and then backing away is one. Offering to pray and then not bothering is another. Explaining to yourself how you’re too busy (even if it’s true) is a third. Not even asking is very effective. Asking and then forgetting to listen works every time. And then my favorite, asking, listening, and then advising…but the advice is really just an extended explanation of how to do it better, or what to do at all. You bask in the warm glow of “caring” without having to do anything.

All of these kinds of not caring about another arise from the plain, boring reality that just caring for yourself is all you can really manage. It’s not self-care exactly—not in its perverse modern iterations anyway—but self-preservation. You aren’t coping very well in your life. How on earth can you even face someone else’s fathoms-deep needs. You can’t find time in your week to do your own work, how will you add anything?

So you say, “take care” or “I’ll be praying,” and go on your way. And while you do that, you blame God for doing the same thing to you. Because that’s what so much of the Christian life feels like. You in real need—beset, bowed down, unwell, poor, stressed, anxious, wanting things you can’t have, having to do work you don’t want to do, navigating a maze of relationships and troubles that threaten to overwhelm you—and when you pray, when you cry out to God for help, what does he say? Does he really say, “Take Care,” be warm, be fed?Just because we say it, does he say it? It often feels like he says it.

You read through a psalm, relishing all the complaining, finding yourself discouraged, perhaps, by all the future promises and the fact that none of them seem to be happening right now. You flit over to Drudge and discover that a red heifer has finally been born after two thousand years, but there’s no blood moon so that probably won’t pan out. You scroll through facebook and look at the fancy, happy lives of all your acquaintances. And meanwhile, God seems so very silent. So uninvolved. So unhelpful. So uncaring.

But is he really?

I limped along and remembered the terrible troubles of every crippled and broken person in the Bible, every person who didn’t have enough of something, who saw God and trouble on a far distant horizon and wished that God would see the trouble too and get on with it—Job, Jacob, Naomi, Sarah, Jeremiah, I guess I shouldn’t name all of them. It would be so many.

None of them had the wherewithal to take care of themselves. None of them had people who took care of them sufficiently. No matter the work and the care of themselves or others, at the end of the day there wasn’t enough. And God went on for a long time feeling very far away, uncaring, unconcerned, unwilling to do anything when they all knew he could.

But he wasn’t doing nothing. Though he waited longer than they thought they could cope with, though they, some of them, tried to do his job for him, in the end he poured out his mercy, his care surpassed even the grief of waiting and being poor.

What are those lines from Isaiah? When you’re looking around for something to say to someone who doesn’t know how to go on one step further, or to yourself. Say, in your fear and in your poverty and in your sorrow, “Be strong,” not because you are actually strong, but because, “your God is strong, and he will save you.” He will come all the way down from the glories of heaven into the dust of the earth to save you. He will not say, Take Care, but he himself will bear you in himself through the valley of the shadow of death and into life. His care so far surpasses the paltry, grasping care-taking of this life, that you cannot even imagine not only what it will be, but how he is sorting it out now, how he is tying everything together into a glorious perfection that you will one day know and understand.

Today even, if you go in meekness and poverty to church, there God will feed you with himself, and he will stretch you and others beyond your very selves to care for each other. Take courage. Go to church.