My Own Appointment Came and Went

The same words open every page here and I am not going to hurry them. This is not medicine. I am not a clinician, nothing on this page is treatment, and nothing I write ever stands in the place of a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist. If the one you look after has you worried, ring somebody qualified today. That is the first move, and it is not an overreaction.

Now. There was a date in the calendar with your name on it.

Months ago. Something small, something you had arranged for yourself back when arranging things for yourself was still a normal activity.

And it went past. Not dramatically. There was a day when that appointment sat alongside three of his and something had to give, and the thing that gave was the one with your name on it, because it was the only one that belonged to a person who could be reasoned with.

And you have never once, since then, counted that as a loss. It went into the category of sensible adjustments and it has stayed there quietly, and nobody in that house knows it happened.

Everybody quotes half of it

There is a command everybody can recite, and almost nobody finishes the sentence out loud.

And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these. (Mark 12:31, King James Version)

As thyself. Those two words are not decoration and they are not an afterthought. They are the measuring stick the whole command is built on.

And I want to be careful here, because this is not a verse about treating yourself well, and I am not going to turn it into one. It is a command about how to love a neighbor. But the unit of measurement it uses is the ordinary care a person gives to their own life, and if that unit has gone to nothing, the command has lost its scale.

You are the measuring stick in that sentence, and the measure has never once been meant to shrink to nothing. Mark 12:31 builds the whole second commandment on the care a person takes of their own life, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a carer notice what has happened to her own unit.

That is the argument, and it is not a soft one. A household running on a person whose own care has gone to zero is a household running on a scale that has collapsed.

You have been loving somebody by a measure that has quietly gone to nothing. The Spirit of God is the one who restores a scale rather than a schedule, and it is written that the second command is built on a comparison and cannot survive without one.

The date that went past is a real thing

Let me be practical, because on this page that is the point.

Here is what I would like you to do, and it will take four minutes. Go and find out what it was. The actual appointment. Look it up, or remember it, and name it: it was the thing on the ninth, and it was mine.

Naming it does something specific. As long as it is filed under sensible adjustments, it is not a thing that requires action. The moment it is named as a missed appointment, it becomes a phone call.

You are four minutes from turning a shrug back into a task, and the naming has never once been self indulgent. Mark 12:31 treats the self as a genuine reference point rather than as an embarrassment, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person back a fact they had classified away.

And then rebook it, and rebook it before you do anything else for anybody today. Not because they matter less. Because the last four times it went behind them in the line and got lost.

You were never asked to run last in your own house, and the command has never once been built that way. The Spirit of God is the one who gets a carer to dial for herself first, and what is written keeps the self in the sentence as the measure rather than as the leftover.

The plain routing, and this section is yours

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort, and on an article for carers it has your name on it rather than theirs.

If something is happening right now with the person you look after, that is 911, and it goes before anything else. If the heavy thing tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up, and it is for the one in the hallway as much as for anybody. And the appointment with your own name that went past goes back on the book today, by telephone, to a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist.

You are permitted to make a call that is entirely about yourself, and nobody in that house has ever once objected. Mark 12:31 places the self inside the greatest commandments rather than outside them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a carer from the calendar to the phone.

Say it plainly when they answer. I let one go a while back because I am looking after somebody, and I need to get it back on. That sentence is heard in clinics every day of the week.

You have a sentence that has never once needed an explanation after it. The Spirit of God is the one who is with a person booking something for herself for the first time in a year, and what is written makes the self the unit and not the exception.