The Part That Is Actually Yours

Before anything else, and I will say this in every article on this site because it matters more than anything I have to say afterwards: this is not medicine. I am not a clinician, nothing here is treatment, and nothing on this page should ever be used in place of a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist. If you are worried about somebody, go and get them seen. That is not the timid option. It is the right one.

Now. There is somebody unwell in your house and you are standing outside the door.

You have made the tea. You have asked twice. You have looked something up on your phone and then put the phone down because you did not like where it was going. And what you actually feel, though you would not say it out loud, is useless.

I want to talk about that feeling, because I think it is built on a mistake, and the mistake is that you have quietly decided that unless you can fix it you are not doing anything.

The Samaritan did two different things

There is a story everybody knows, and I want you to look at the shape of what the man in it actually does, because we usually remember it as one action and it is two.

And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. (Luke 10:34, King James Version)

Count them. He does what he can where he is. And then he takes him to the people whose job it is.

He does not stay on the road doing amateur medicine until the man is well. He does not walk off because he is not qualified. He does the near thing, and then he hands over, and the handing over is not the moment his care stops. He goes to the inn with him.

That is the whole shape of what you are being asked for. The near thing, and the handover, and staying near through both.

You are doing something real when you do the near thing, and God has never once called that nothing. Luke 10:34 has one man both bind a wound and take somebody to the people who could do more, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person stop measuring their care against whether it worked.

What the near thing actually is

So let me be plain about what is in your hands, because I think you have been aiming at the wrong target.

The near thing is warmth, water, quiet, and a person who stayed. Luke 10:34 has the Samaritan pour what he happened to have and then move, and the Holy Spirit has never once graded a household on its equipment. That is the list. A warm drink in their hands. A room that is not cold. A window opened or a curtain closed. Somebody sitting there for ten minutes not talking.

None of that treats anything and I am not suggesting it does. It is not medicine and it does not work like medicine. It is the ordinary human care that a household gives itself, and it has never been the thing that heals anybody, and it has also never once been worthless.

There is a reason the man in the story poured what he had and then moved. He did not confuse the two halves. And neither should we: the tea is not the treatment, and the doctor is not company.

You have been given the second one, and you were never the person who was meant to do the first. The written word says he bound him up and then brought him to an inn and stayed, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person do a small thing wholeheartedly instead of a large thing badly.

The thing that is not yours

Now the harder half, and I have to be direct.

If something in you is worried, that goes to somebody qualified. Not tomorrow, not after you have tried one more thing at home, and not after you have read another page on your phone at one in the morning. Today. Luke 10:34 has the man taken to the inn on the same day he was found, and the Holy Spirit does not counsel anybody to wait and see.

I am not going to describe symptoms, because I am not able to and it would be wrong of me to try. I am not going to tell you what is or is not serious. What I will tell you is that this whole site exists on one side of that line and it is never going to step over it: the deciding is not yours, the assessing is not yours, and there is no arrangement of warm drinks that substitutes for somebody who trained for years.

That is not a failure of your care. It is the shape of it. The Samaritan went to the inn.

You are not the one who has to know, and the not knowing has never once been a hole in your love. Luke 10:34 has the rescuer hand the injured man to people whose work it was, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the pressure of knowing off somebody who was only ever meant to sit with them.

The numbers I am allowed to give you

There is one part of this page that is not comfort, and this is it. I have no clinical training, I cannot see the person in your house, and I am never going to guess at what is going on with them.

So here is the whole of it, and it is the same on every page I write. If somebody is in trouble right now and you are frightened for them, you call 911, and you do it before you finish reading this. If the heavy thing tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers and a real person picks up. And for everything else that has been going on too long and nobody has looked at, you ring a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist, and you say the sentence out loud.

You are allowed to make that call without a reason good enough to satisfy anybody. Luke 10:34 has a man hand somebody over to the people whose work it was on the very day he found him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a person out of a hallway and onto a phone.

Nobody on the other end of that call is keeping score of how early you rang. The man on the Jericho road did not wait for the man in the ditch to get worse before he moved him.

You have a door you are permitted to walk through, and the passage has never once made the near thing a substitute for it. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps somebody from choosing between the two, because what is written puts the binding up and the bringing in inside one sentence about one man.