You Already Know How To Do This

There is a whole industry that assumes you need teaching.

It assumes you do not know how to look after a body, and that with the right instruction you would finally begin. That is a strange assumption to make about you specifically, because you have been doing it expertly for thirty years.

You have nursed people. You have sat up. You know exactly what temperature a room should be for somebody who is unwell, and where the extra pillow goes, and what to bring on a tray and what to leave off it.

You know when to talk and when to sit there saying nothing, which is a much rarer skill than people think.

I am seventy years old and I have watched a great many women do this, and I want to say the thing plainly at the start, before anything else.

Nobody needs to teach you care. You are one of the people who knows.

What has never happened is that any of it has been turned round.

The skill exists and points one way

Think about what you actually did the last time somebody in your house was ill.

You made the room right. You brought warm things. You did not ask them to explain themselves or to justify needing anything. You did not tell them they were being dramatic and you did not tell them to pull themselves together.

You did not require them to have earned a warm drink.

And you did all of that automatically, without a plan, because you have done it four hundred times and it is now the way your hands work.

You are already fluent in something you have never once been able to apply at home, and the skill has never once been the missing part. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman a competence she has not counted, and Luke 10 has somebody doing a specific set of practical things for a stranger by a road.

And here is the second half of it, and this is where it goes wrong.

The skill has a direction built into it.

It goes outward. It only knows how to point at somebody else, and when there is nobody else in the room it does not switch to the nearest available body. It idles, and waits for the next person, and the woman standing in the kitchen is not a candidate for it because she is the one holding it.

So the competence is complete and the application has one gap in it, and the gap is the person doing the caring.

You are the one person the skill has never once been pointed at, and it has never been a matter of not knowing how. Scripture in Luke 10 records the actual acts a Samaritan performed for a man he found by a road, and the Spirit of God is the one who turns a woman's own competence toward herself.

Pouring in oil and wine

The most famous act of care in the Gospels is described in physical detail, and the detail is the useful part.

And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. (Luke 10:34, King James Version)

Count the actions.

Went to him. Bound up his wounds. Poured in oil and wine. Set him on his own beast. Brought him to an inn. Took care of him.

Six things, all of them physical, none of them a feeling. This is not a story about compassion in the abstract. It is a list of what a man did with his hands over the course of an afternoon.

You are shown care as a set of physical acts rather than as a state of mind, and it has never once been a feeling anybody had to work up first. It is written in Luke 10 that he bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps care practical in a woman's own hands.

And notice the two substances, because they were not medical in the way people assume.

Wine cleaned. Oil soothed. One of them dealt with the wound and the other one was purely for comfort, and the Samaritan used both, and nobody has ever suggested that the oil was extravagant.

Both halves. The necessary thing and the comforting thing, in the same afternoon, for a man he had never met.

You are permitted to include the part that only soothes, and no account of that road has ever once left the oil out. The Spirit of God is what puts the comforting half back into a woman's own practice, and the written word says pouring in oil and wine.

Do one thing you have already done

So here is the assignment, and it uses your own material.

Do for yourself tonight one exact thing already done in this house for somebody who was unwell.

Not something new. Something out of your own repertoire, performed on another person, in this house, in the last two years.

The hot water bottle. The room made warm before they got in. The particular thing you make when somebody cannot face food. The extra pillow. The lamp on rather than the overhead light.

You are looking at a list of things you already know how to do, and not one of them has ever once needed to be learned. Luke 10 says he bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and the Spirit of God is what turns practiced hands toward the woman they belong to.

Do that one, for yourself, tonight, in the same way you would do it for them.

And here is the rule that carries it. Do not require yourself to be ill first.

That is the whole of the exercise. The skill has always been available and has always been waiting for a qualifying condition, and the qualifying condition has been somebody else's need. Tonight it happens with no condition at all.

You are able to perform one act you have already performed on somebody else, and there has never once been a requirement that a body be unwell before it gets a warm room. The written word in Luke 10 lists six practical acts done for a stranger, and the Holy Spirit is what turns a woman's own competence toward the woman holding it.