Care and the Gospel

An AI summary of the articles in this Adelphicare website stated:

"Care = living out the gospel in suffering, relationships, and daily life."

This is a particularly good statement. It means that as followers of Christ we are living the Gospel - the good news of the Kingdom of God. We do this through our own suffering, and being empathetic to the suffering of others. We do it through our relationships with our families and other people, and, above all, we live the Gospel in our daily life - being totally committed to following Jesus, just as he lived to serve God in every minute of his daily life. This is what pastoral friending and care is about.

Self-disclosure

This is the practice of discussing your own circumstances with a person. This might be a similar illness or similar circumstances. Read through the following conversation and make some observations on it.

Person. I had a nasty fall – I just slipped on the wet path for some reason and went straight down. There was no one around at the time and I had to wait half an hour before someone came by. I was in dreadful pain! They took me to the hospital and I had to wait two hours before a doctor saw me and gave me some attention.

Carer. Oh, I know exactly how you feel! The same thing happened to me. It was awful. I was calling out and no one heard. I was panicking and in such dreadful pain! And when I got to the hospital they didn’t care how I felt. They took ages and ages to give me attention and even then I had to wait in the queue for x-rays and it was still hurting so badly. Oh, it took me such a long time to get over it and I’m still …

The carer is trying to show sympathy (pity) with the person by ‘sharing’ a similar experience. What has happened, though, during the carer’s response? (We can start by saying that we never know exactly how another person feels.)

There is a place, however, for self-disclosure. The key is to help the person to feel better after the discussion – not worse, as would most likely happen in the above example. This can be done in two ways:

   keep the focus of conversation on the person, not yourself;

   help the person to realise that it is possible to live through such an experience – in other words, try to help the person to be positive in overcoming their difficulty.

How do we get closer to God?

Helping a friend get closer to God is a most worthwhile way of serving our Heavenly Father through serving our friend, or our spiritual brother or sister. Such help demonstrates our compassion and love, and our willingness to help someone along their life journey. Our Lord Jesus Christ is our example for this. This is an important subject but we will not go into it in PFP. We would like you to read an article of the same name for your own benefit. It will not be included in the Statements work pages but you might find it helpful. Click here. And there is another paper in which some people have told about their experience in getting closer to God. Click here.

Teamwork

In a formal setting such as a hospital or an aged care home, a spiritual carer is usually part of a team. It is important that you realise you are not alone in your caring work. Try to discuss caring issues with other carers you know when you feel the need to cope with something you are not sure about. Even to talk about an issue (confidentially) can enable you to clarify your own thinking.