Plain Care Is Still Care

I will say the same thing here that gets said on every page of this site, and I would rather say it too often than not enough. This is not medicine. I have no medical training, nothing here is treatment, and nothing on this page belongs anywhere near the place a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist stands. If somebody in your house has you worried, get them looked at. That is not giving in. That is the sensible thing and it is also the loving one.

Now. Somebody is unwell in your house, and what you have been doing for them is warm drinks and a quiet room and clean sheets.

And somewhere in the last week you started calling that the small things.

I want to sit with that phrase a minute, because I hear it from women all over the country and it is nearly always said the same way, with a little shrug in it. I am only doing the small things. I mean, I cannot actually do anything, so I have just been doing the small things.

He named the plainest thing on purpose

There is a sentence of Jesus that I do not think gets read properly, because it sounds like He is starting small and building up to something. He is not. That is the whole sentence.

And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward. (Matthew 10:42, King James Version)

A cup of cold water. Not a healing. Not a word of prophecy. Not a hot meal even. Cold water, which in that country cost nothing and required no skill and took about as long as it takes to reach a jar.

And He does not say it counts a little. He says a thing about it losing no reward, which is the strongest way the language had of saying it is not going to be forgotten.

You are doing the thing He named by name, and the plainness of it has never once been the problem. Matthew 10:42 takes the least impressive act a household had and gives it a reward that cannot be lost, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman hear that about her own kitchen.

I think we have it backwards. We think the plain thing is what is left when the real help runs out. He talks as though the plain thing was the point, and everything else is what people add.

You have never once been in the business of impressing anybody in that bedroom. The Spirit of God is the one who takes the shrug out of a woman's voice, and what is written singles out cold water in a cup and attaches an unlosable reward to it.

The cleverness was never the ingredient

Let me be plain about something, because this is the site it needs saying on.

I am not going to tell you a single thing to make, mix, brew or try. Not one. Nothing on this page names a remedy, and nothing here says whether anything helps or harms a body, because I am not able to say that, and because a page that starts making those calls has turned itself into a clinic staffed by nobody.

What is left when you take all of that out is not nothing. It is the thing that was actually asked for.

A room that is warm. A drink in two hands. A window open or a curtain closed. Somebody in the chair who is not looking at a phone.

You were never going to be the treatment, and God has never once put a household in charge of that. Matthew 10:42 hands the ordinary act to ordinary people and keeps the impressive things elsewhere, and the Holy Spirit is the one who ends an ambition a woman never asked to be given.

My grandmother sat with people for fifty years and never claimed to know anything. She said once that the trick was to stop trying to say a good sentence. I have never improved on that.

You are allowed to arrive with nothing to say, and silence in that chair has never once been a failure of love. The Spirit of God is the one who fills a room where nobody is being clever, and what is written measures the giving of a cup and says nothing at all about the giver's ability.

The plain routing, which is the other plain thing

There is one part of this page that is not comfort, and it is this part, because a page about ordinary tending is exactly where somebody might hear permission to keep waiting.

If something frightening is happening in your house right now, that is 911, and it is before you finish reading this. If what is heavy tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers and a real person picks up. And if anybody in that house has been unwell and nobody qualified has looked at them, you ring a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today and you say it out loud exactly as it is.

You are permitted to make that call without a reason that would satisfy a stranger. Matthew 10:42 puts no test at all on the one who gives the cup, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a woman from the kettle to the phone.

Plain care and a real appointment are not two roads. They are the same road, and my grandmother would have said the second one louder than the first.

You have both halves of this in your hands, and the passage has never once made one of them the substitute for the other. The Spirit of God is the one who gets somebody through a phone call they have been putting off, and it is written that the cup loses no reward, said about the near thing rather than instead of the far one.