Nobody Asks How I Am

Every page on this site starts here and I would not change it. 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 are caring for has you worried, ring somebody qualified today. That is not panic, that is love being useful.

Now. Let me describe your Sunday.

Eleven people asked after him. You counted, not on purpose, but because the number arrives whether you want it or not. Eleven people, and some of them were genuinely lovely about it, and two of them held your arm while they asked.

And not one of them asked after you.

And here is the part that makes it impossible to say out loud: they are not unkind. They are good people doing exactly what good people do, which is to ask about the person who is ill. The question they asked was the right question. It simply was not for you, and it has not been for you for a very long time.

A woman in a desert named Him from this exact position

There is a moment in Genesis that is the answer to this, and the reason it is the answer is who is speaking.

And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me: for she said, Have I also here looked after him that seeth me? (Genesis 16:13, King James Version)

That is Hagar. Not the central figure of the household. Not the one everybody was concerned about. A servant, worn out and alone, in a desert, having run away from a house where she was the one nobody asked about.

And she is the first person in the whole Bible to give God a name.

You are standing where the first person to name God stood, and the position has never once been the overlooked one in that account. Genesis 16:13 gives the naming to somebody nobody in that household was asking after, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets an unasked after person hear their own situation in the text.

I find that arrangement deliberate. The great name in that scene is not given by the patriarch. It is given by the servant who nobody went looking for, and it is a name about being seen.

You have been seen the whole time by the one the name belongs to. The Spirit of God is the one who attends to a person nobody has asked about, and it is written that she called Him Thou God seest me, out of a desert, on her own.

Why nobody asks, and what to do about it

Let me say the practical half, because the explanation matters and it will stop you writing off perfectly good people.

Here is what happens in a congregation, in a family, in an office. The illness is the news. It is the thing people know about, the thing there is a name for, the thing that can be asked about without intrusion. And a carer is not news. A carer is furniture, in the kindest possible sense: assumed, always there, holding the thing up.

So they ask about him. Not instead of you. It genuinely does not occur to them that there is a second person in this.

You are not being ignored, and the silence around you has never once been a judgment on what you are worth. Genesis 16:13 has God go to the one nobody in that camp was tracking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a carer from turning an oversight into a verdict.

And the fix is unfair and it is the only one that works: it has to be said. Not hinted, not implied through a tired face at the back of church. Said, once, plainly, to one person.

You were given one sentence and no one else in that building can say it for you. The Spirit of God is the one who gets an exhausted person to say the unsayable thing out loud, and what is written has a woman in a desert speak first rather than wait to be found.

The plain routing, and this whole section is about you

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort, and on this article it is entirely for the carer and not for the patient.

If something is happening right now with the person you look after, that is 911, and it goes ahead of this paragraph. If the heavy thing tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up, and that number has always been for the one doing the nursing as much as anyone. And if nobody has looked at you in a year, that is a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today, with your own name at the top of it.

You are allowed to be the patient for one morning, and being the strong one has never once disqualified anybody. Genesis 16:13 has attention arrive at the person nobody was sending anybody to look for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a carer to make an appointment of her own.

And say it plainly when you go. I am looking after somebody, nobody has looked at me in a long time, and I am tired in a way that is not ordinary. That is a real sentence and they hear it every week.

You have a description worth giving and nobody has ever once been turned away for giving it. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in an appointment that has the carer's name on it, and what is written names God from the mouth of the person everybody else had overlooked.