I Was Looking After Somebody

Let me start by asking a question I doubt anybody has asked you.

How many hours a week were you giving to looking after her?

And I would like you to include the ones nobody counts. The phone calls. The pharmacy. The arranging. The lying awake. The being available, which is not a task and takes more than most tasks do.

Nobody adds those up. Certainly you never have, because adding them up feels like complaining about something you chose and would choose again.

But here is the trouble with never adding them up. If the hours are never counted, then the hours never existed, and if the hours never existed then there is no explanation for the state of your own house, and the only explanation left standing is you.

So the not complaining, which was a decent instinct, has cost you an accurate view of your own life.

I want to put that right tonight, without one word against the person you were caring for, and without asking you to feel any differently about having done it.

Come ye yourselves apart

There is a moment in Mark where Jesus looks at people who have been giving out constantly and says something practical.

And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat. (Mark 6:31, King James Version)

They had no leisure so much as to eat.

Now read who noticed that. Not them. They had not stopped. They were still going. It is the one they were serving alongside who saw it and named it and said, come apart.

That is the piece I want you to have. In that account, the carers do not identify their own condition. Somebody else does, out loud, and then does something about it.

And notice the word yourselves. Come ye yourselves apart. He puts them into the sentence as people with needs of their own, and He does it in the middle of a genuine crowd of genuine need that did not go away because they went to eat.

You are somebody in your own account, and Mark 6:31 has never once left the carers out of the arithmetic. It is written that He put them into the sentence as people who needed to eat, and the Holy Spirit is the one who names a carer's own condition when the carer cannot.

You have been the only person in this house whose hours were never counted. The word says outright that they had no leisure so much as to eat, and the Spirit of God is the one who notices what a person giving out has stopped having.

Counting yourself is not withdrawing your love

Now I want to deal with the objection, because it is a decent one and it is the reason this has never been counted.

Counting the cost of caring for somebody feels like putting a value on them. It feels like the first step toward resentment, and resentment is a thing this reader has seen in other people and decided a long time ago never to go near. A house is a record of where the hours went, and it is not a verdict on the woman who gave them.

But there is a difference between what a thing cost and whether it was worth it, and those are two separate questions, and only the first one is being asked tonight.

Something can cost a great deal and be worth every hour. Those are not in tension. In fact refusing to count it does not protect the person you love. It only means that the cost lands somewhere else, and where it lands is on your own name.

You were never keeping a house badly, and there has never once been an hour in those years that was free to spend on it. Mark 6:31 counts the carers as people who need to eat, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets somebody name a cost without it touching their love by one inch.

So tonight, the counting. And only the counting.

You are permitted to write down what those years took, and writing it down has never once been the same as regretting it. It is written that He called them apart in the middle of a crowd that still needed them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a person finally puts themselves into their own account.

Write down the month the caring started

So here is what I am asking.

Write down the month the caring started. The month it changed from visiting to looking after.

Underneath it, write what your weeks looked like then. Include the invisible hours. Phone calls. Appointments. Lying awake. Being on call.

Then look at that and ask, plainly and without any guilt, where a house was supposed to come from.

Nothing gets cleaned tonight.

You are able to count those hours tonight, and counting them has never once required you to have stopped loving anybody. Mark 6:31 names the carers as people with a need of their own, and the Spirit of God is present at a table with a pen exactly as He is at a bedside.