Care

This is a tender word for me, because I need it and I crave it. It isn’t like many of my other words, where it felt like a push or a struggle to get myself to want it. What “care” felt like was a craving that I could barely name; a deep need I couldn’t seem to ask for from God or from others. In the year that this was my word, 2020,  I thought this word was for others. I thought that caring meant caring for the poor, or for my congregants at the time, or for social issues. I thought that it probably meant spending more of myself, because how could it possibly mean anything else? When I was in college, I became close with a few of my psychology professors, and at one point I told one of them that I wanted to live in a country in Africa and take care of a bunch of kids who didn’t have anyone to take care of them (a common and dangerous white millennial trope, and one that I leaned into fully during my college years). Without missing a beat, my professor looked me in the eye and said, “but Laura, who took care of you?” I sat in his office and cried. 

It’s not that no one actually took care of me, but that from a young age I decided to take care of myself, and others. I decided not to need or rely on anyone. There is a lot of this story that I won’t share here, because the story doesn’t only belong to me, and there are things I am still working through and healing. My story is tame compared to many stories I now know from working in ministry and with refugees. Still — we all know that comparing your story doesn’t heal the hurt. We all still have to dive down into the depths and look our past in the eye, whether or not we deem the hurt as trauma. When a wound opens, it doesn’t care whether you think it’s a deep enough wound to treat — it will bleed, and without care, it will become infected. My wounds became infected with the darkness of isolation and an unwillingness to accept care from anyone, including God. 

But from the time I really came to Christ in 2011, I have felt God calling me into rest, and I have often resisted that call. I have feared it and not known how to live it. I remember at 18, sitting on my bedroom floor, when a song came on my shuffle entitled “Rest.” I knew it was the Lord, and I told him I couldn’t do it, that I didn’t know how. Interestingly, the week before my wedding I put my music on shuffle, and the same thing happened. A different song called “Rest,” this time the Foo Fighters, blared through my speakers and subverted my anxiety, and once again I felt it was God. “Rest — you can rest now. Rest — you will be safe now.” My body, constantly ready to push back at rest with a need for control and isolation, still does not quite know how to respond to this idea. But this is how I find that God takes care of me, by sitting at my bedside, tending to my wounds, and whispering that I am safe, that I can be at peace and stop running.

In March of 2020, I realized that the word “care” was not at all what I had thought it was going to be. In that month, everything came to a halt. We all stopped going to work, and we were told to only go to the grocery store once a week. It was a complete end to any semblance of control, and there weren’t many ways we could care for others in that time, although we found ways. Mostly, we had to let God care for us, because none of us knew what would happen, or who would die, or if we’d leave our quarantine in tact. We didn’t know whether it would be one month or four years until it ended, if it ended at all. The vaccine would be rolled out in late December of that year, but most of the public wouldn’t get their hands on it until the the next February or March, which meant that the epicenter of the pandemic lasted a year. Care for people and for ourselves became front and center, and we had to allow ourselves to be taken care of, and to rest from all of our running.

Over the years since quarantine, care has become about slowing down. It’s about Psalm 23:

“The Lord is my shepherd. I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. ”

Care is about turning my eyes from the work I feel I am supposed to do, and focusing instead on Christ himself. In 2020, I learned this through the pandemic, being forced to stay home and do what I felt amounted to nothing. Now, it’s about letting Christ take care of me, even as I engage in somewhat tiring but rewarding work, at home and in the office. I cannot care for others if I am not cared for by Christ, so I sit with him on the beach, like Peter in John 21, and I allow him to make me breakfast. Peter is called to feed the sheep, but before he can do that, he must be fed himself. Jesus gently restores Peter from his grief and his guilt by making him food over a fire, and it is only after he feeds him that he calls him to feed others. This is the subversion of care. We must be cared for before we can ever hope to care for others.