THE EFFECT OF CARING

Caring for another human being has an effect. The effect is felt both by the giver and the recipient of the care.

Caring is an experience. It originates in heart and soul. It occurs in time and space. It affects and connects giver and recipient—I and thou discovered in the moment of caring.

Caring has power—amazing power. It is healing and transformational. No one in the matrix of care remains unchanged. Caring carries us from the inertia of self-absorption into the energy of dynamic relation.

The greatest feeling in the world is not created by illegal drugs. It is experienced through the power of caring.

You have not lived until you have cared for another person with no thought of a return favor. Literally, this statement is true. Life itself unfolds and multiplies only in the process of giving.

Acts of compassion are generally seen as blessings bestowed upon those in need. And they are.

However, Jesus taught that it is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35). If we describe the blessing of giving accurately, we will first address the greatest blessing—that bestowed upon the giver. This is the primary and most predictable effect of care.

Caring for a person in need is liberty. It is liberation from the black hole of selfishness. Caring for another person wrenches my mind from the prison of self, from the trap of regrets and doubts, into the mysterious and exhilarating journey of concerned relationship.

Caring for a person in need is therapy. The most common sicknesses in the human heart are guilt, sorrow, anger, and shame. They are products of a fixation upon what used to be or could have been or should have been. This orientation backward robs the present of its potential and frustrates the universal longing for meaningful relationships now. The sick of heart are best advised to become care-givers. Meeting the needs of another person is the best way to your own healing.

Caring for a person in need is hilarity. The Apostle Paul wrote, “God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7). The Greek word translated “cheerful” is hilaros from which we get the English word hilarious. God loves a hilarious giver—a cheerful, joyful, happy giver.

You will be happier and more satisfied with life. Your family will enjoy better emotional and spiritual health. Your church will experience a new unity and greater sense of purpose and mission. The community around you will acknowledge your caring ways, and a new reputation of love and concern will emerge.

Like eagles that mount the lofty heights, people who express their love through practical deeds of kindness soar above and beyond the doldrums of life. Jesus came to give us abundant life. He modeled this abundance in his own giving ways. And he challenged his followers to imitate the servant spirit exemplified in washing the feet of others. Foot-washing, along with his crucifixion, was his premier example of an abundant life lived according to God’s will.

The Care Effect: More Blessed to Give

I checked the street sign one day to see if it said “Skid Row,” craning my neck up and around. Dad always said that the Rescue Mission in El Paso was on Skid Row, and I thought he meant the street outside the doors of the mission. Maybe Skid Row is the side street, I thought, not the main drag.

My father took my brothers and me with him to Skid Row every other Sunday. He preached to the gathered assortment of street people, hitchhikers, alcoholics, and ladies of the night. We boys sang hymns in four-part harmony.

Dad always closed his message with an invitation for the assembled crowd, weary and hungry. He invited them to trust in Jesus Christ for their salvation. When the flush-faced, inebriated middle-aged man fell upon the railing at the front, kneeling to pour out his soul, one of us boys would kneel down beside him and pray with him.

Dinner followed the worship service. The mission had no money to give my father for his message, but they graciously fed his family. We sat down beside the street people and gratefully ate the fare. Often we departed with exotic leftovers, dates expired, from nearby grocery stores—lobster tails and strange cheeses.

This stretch of my childhood, when my father was only marginally employed, was the time when we were most economically deprived as a family. We returned to El Paso from Minnesota after repossessing a home my father built. We had a place to live on Easy Way near Canutillo, but Dad did not have a church to serve.

So trips to the Rescue Mission became our routine when I was 11 or 12 years old. Dad taught his four oldest children—four stair-step boys—to sing a capella in four-part harmony. We sang, Dad preached, and we prayed with those who responded.

I was introduced to the Care Effect at that Rescue Mission. My own soul warmed in the experience of caring. We helped the clients bring in from the sidewalk their possessions, captured in pasteboard boxes. They wore ill-fitting hand-me-downs. I did, too. I learned to care for these people, as my father did, and the caring transformed a time of hardship into an era of wonder and joy that I have never forgotten.

It marked my soul, those months of ministry at the mission. The effect of those days surfaced over and over again through the subsequent years. The vivid memories linger in my mind and heart to this very day. My understanding of life and my self-understanding were shaped by the activities and experience of caring for the down-and-out.

Dad took us to the orphanage across the border in Juarez, Mexico. We met and played with children abandoned by their parents. I held a toddler whose desperately poor mother rubbed hot peppers in her eyes so that, as a blind infant, she would generate greater sympathy and make begging more productive.

These childhood experiences of ministry to the poor were some of the first laboratories in which I learned the desperation of poverty and the power of caring. But they were not the last.

I have been a pastor for 35 years, and the poor have always been with me, just as Jesus said they would be. I find joy in seeking to lift the downtrodden, comfort the broken-hearted, and care for the dying. I mark the moment when I meet a person in need. The contact point is in and of itself sufficient reason for my involvement regardless of any future outcome. I do not justify my ministry by “results.” I attempt to view the moment of service as complete in itself.

The Care Effect is what happens to me if I am able to give myself fully in the moment of need, engaging the other person with sincere love. The act of caring draws my soul outward and upward—an exercise of the heart. I may feel satisfaction later with the results achieved, or I may be disappointed at the apparent futility of my effort.

Regardless, the pure joy of caring for another, the blessedness of giving, is its own reward.

THE END IS COMING!

Nothing sells books and movies like predicting the end of the world. Janet and I saw a new commercial this week for “2012,” yet another cinematic adventure in this literary genre.
Eschatology is the theological study of last things. Much of the excitement about “Bible prophesy” is not actually about Bible prophesy at all. It is the same excitement that comes with the movie “2012.”
The Bible makes it clear that the Lord Jesus will return one day. It also makes it crystal clear that no one knows when this will happen except the Father in heaven.
Eschatology is not about when or how. It is about who and what. Jesus is the end of all things. That is the who. And God wins. That is the what.
Jesus told us about the end of time so that we would live for him in the here and now. His childish disciples pled with him for dates and charts about the end of time. He refused to succumb to their foolish curiosity. They asked him many times. He gave them this answer: “It is not for you to know” (Acts 1:7).
People, it is not for us to know. The prophets of the Bible were generally forth-telling, not fore-telling. They were speaking the word of God to the leaders and the people. That was their task. When they digressed into fore-telling, predicting future events, they always did so in order to challenge the people of the present to live for God and to abandon their sinful practices. That is the purpose of prophetic utterances—to point the people of God to their true source and their true behavior.
The “when and how” boys are opportunistic and entrepreneurial. They sell millions of books generation after generation despite their mistaken and often fraudulent claims. The sheep keep coming back for more.
All the charts are wrong. None of them actually come from the Bible. They are pieced together by humans who write into them their preconceptions, biases, systems, and errors. The true center and purpose of eschatology is not timelines but ethics—how I live here and now. Get that right and you are ready for end whenever and however it comes.