Attention Is Not Rationed

The same sentence opens every page on this site and it opens this one. This is not medicine. I am not a clinician, nothing here is treatment, and nothing on this page ever stands in the place of a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist. If this describes you, the useful part of the page is a phone call, and I would rather it happened early.

Now. I want to describe the picture you have been carrying, and you can tell me whether I have it right.

There is a list. God is working down it. At the top are the emergencies, the terrible news, the people in real trouble, the famines and the wars. Somewhere in the middle are the ordinary hardships. And at the bottom, a long way down, below anything anybody would call serious, is your own small dragging thing.

And you are not complaining about your position on that list. That is the thing I want to name. You have accepted it as correct, and you would defend it if anybody argued. It seems only reasonable.

So you do not bring it. Not because you think He is unkind, but because you think He is busy, and you were raised to be considerate to busy people.

The keeper does not come off duty

There is a psalm about a keeper that answers this exactly, and it does it by describing something that never stops.

Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. (Psalm 121:4, King James Version)

Neither slumber nor sleep. That is not a statement about how much He cares. It is a statement about capacity, and capacity is the whole of your objection.

The picture you have been carrying assumes a finite attention that has to be spent carefully, moving from the most serious downward, with the small things waiting their turn.

You are looking at a keeper described as never once off duty, and that has never once been a description of a limited supply. Psalm 121:4 answers a worry about capacity rather than a worry about willingness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes down a triage list somebody built in their own head.

That is why this verse is the right one for you and the usual comfort verses are not. The problem is not that you doubt His kindness. You have never doubted His kindness. You doubt there is enough of Him to go round, which is a much more respectable error and just as wrong.

You have been reasoning from a shortage that has never once existed. The Spirit of God is the one who corrects an error made out of politeness, and it is written that the keeper neither slumbers nor sleeps, which leaves no hours unattended and no line forming behind anybody.

What the list actually does to you

Let me say the practical half, because on this site the practical half is the reason to write at all.

That list does not only affect your praying. It affects your reporting, and that is where it becomes a matter for this page.

A person who has ranked herself at the bottom of God's attention has usually ranked herself at the bottom of everybody's. She does not bring it to her family, because they are dealing with more. She does not bring it to somebody qualified, because their waiting room has people in it who are properly unwell.

You are applying the same ranking to a clinic that you have been applying to heaven, and neither one has ever once run that way. Psalm 121:4 describes an attention with no schedule and no shift change, and the Holy Spirit is the one who dismantles a system a person invented to be polite inside.

And a clinic is not a line where the least sick person should stand aside. It is a place where people are seen, and the deciding of who is urgent is a trained job that somebody else is paid to do and is very good at.

You were never appointed to sort yourself, and no clinic has ever once asked a person to rank themselves before arriving. The Spirit of God is the one who takes an unassigned job out of somebody's hands, and what is written keeps watch continuously rather than in order of severity.

The plain routing, which has no ranking in it

Here is the section of this page that is not comfort. On this article it is the only instruction.

If something is happening right now that frightens you, that is 911, and there is no ranking to be done first, the ranking is their job and it happens after you call. If the heavy thing tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up. And your small dragging thing goes to a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today, described plainly, with no assessment of its importance attached.

You are permitted to arrive without having graded yourself first. Psalm 121:4 has a keeper who does not sleep and therefore never has a backlog, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves somebody from waiting their turn to picking up the phone.

Leave out the ranking sentence. Almost everybody who thinks this way opens with one. I know you have people who are much worse off. That sentence is not information, and the person you say it to has to spend time undoing it.

You have a plain description to give and it has never once needed a preface. The Spirit of God is the one who is present with somebody describing a small thing without apology, and what is written names a watch that never breaks rather than a duty roster.