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Who Cares?

Blog / Produced by The High Calling
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An old man came to the house after my grandfather’s funeral. While others brought casseroles and tidbits of spoken comfort dredged from their personal faith, the old man found a chair and sat in silence, hat in his lap. An hour or so later on his way out, he said, “I don’t know what to say. But Earl meant a lot to me.”


Caring is the good manners of love, and never necessarily a fireworks of affection. Caring may be a nod of encouragement from a parent watching in the Alphabet Soup skit audience to a tomato too terrified to say, “I am a T.”

In his everyday acts, Jesus set the example for caring. When it mattered, he took people aside to heal them in private (Mark 7:33). In a culture that devalued children, He held little ones in his lap. He ate with tax collectors. When Mary Magdalene wished to rub his feet with oil, He accepted her gift. Even in the moment of his greatest anguish, in his death on the cross, he saw to his mother’s safe place in the care of his friend John.

Jose was a tiny, wiry, feisty, impish 12-year-old when I taught English as a Second Language at a poverty-level school. In that raggedy classroom, teaching supplies were scarce, and I continually ran out of chalk.

By the end of the first semester, the children were dear to me, but few seemed to care about anything I tried to teach them. One day, as I was leaving for Christmas break, Jose sidled up to my desk and thrust a package forward, clearly purchased and wrapped personally. Inside I found a package of chalk. “Miss Miller,” he said, “now you have chalk.”


Who cares? Those who love.
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