Wednesday 20 September 2023

Thought for Wednesday, 20 September

1 Timothy 5:4

But if a widow has children or grandchildren,

these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God.

There has been a lot of attention paid to the caring professions since the pandemic. People who have stepped up to attend to the welfare of victims of the illness, amid real fears for their own lives and that of their families. This makes me think of those who have chosen to work in the position of carers.

We know about the great work done by nurses, doctors and all the ancillary workers connected to this sector. However not a lot is known about the carer who spends their working day caring for those who are often marginalised by society. Those people who have ongoing disabilities and cannot function without someone who helps them feel useful,

In this sheltered development where I live there are a number of tenants who need this help. Carers who spend their time working with people of various needs then going home to their own families with all their needs. Carers who put everyone else's needs before their own, sometimes ignoring those needs.

They treat their clients like family, even when they are having a ‘bad’ day and are putting the carer through a tough time. A lot of the time they cannot tell the carer what they want or need, and this leads to frustration on both sides but with patience and love the carer usually manages to communicate with the client and solve the problem. However sometimes it is not so easy to fix and, in some cases, leads to real distress.

In all these cases it falls on the carer to resolve the situation without harming the person they are with.

I often think the people in this profession have a lot of the qualities of Christ. They treat their clients with the respect they show to everybody else. In fact, the client is the most important person in their minds, while they are in charge. Just as Christ treats each of us as the most important person in the world to Him.

Each of us is as important as the next, to Jesus. Praise God that Jesus cares enough for us to take our sins and carry them to the cross to pay the massive debt that we had no way to pay for ourselves.

The holy trinity is the original Carer who treats us as equals, even when we get frustrated by not being able to let God know exactly what we need. It doesn’t matter that God already knows what we need, I think He wants us to let Him know that we are aware of our inability to solve the problem without His help.

Jesus came as God in the flesh to show that He was willing to experience all the problems we face daily. That way we know that when we ask for His help, God does know how we feel in the flesh and so we can be sure of a solution to our problem.

Prayer

Father, Son and holy Spirit, we cannot separate one from the other without diminishing the Godhead. You are the absolute carer of the universe, without You no-one on earth would know what care is. As we depend on You to care for us, we ask that You help us to care for others with the same compassion that Jesus showed to the ill and outcast when He walked on earth. We thank You for everything You do for us each day and that we can always bring our cares and frustrations to You. Amen

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