Care

 Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. (I Peter 5:7)

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. (Step 3- Alcoholic’s Anonymous)

One of the podcasts I’ve been following is exploring the Twelve Steps of Alcoholic’s Anonymous, which has Biblical teaching as its foundation – though it may have digressed. Recently, the podcaster spent some time on step 3, and one word in the step set off alarms in me: Care. I looked up the interlinear translation of the Greek, which expresses the last part of I Peter 5:7 as “because to him it matters concerning you.”

I also looked up the etymology of the verb “to care:”

Old English carian, cearian "be anxious or solicitous; grieve; feel concern or interest," from Proto-Germanic *karo- "lament," hence "grief, care" (source also of Old Saxon karon "to lament, to care, to sorrow, complain," Old High German charon "complain, lament," Gothic karon "be anxious"), said to be from PIE root *gar- "cry out, call, scream" (source also of Irish gairm "shout, cry, call;" see  garrulous).

If so, the prehistoric sense development is from "cry" to "lamentation" to "grief." A different sense evolution is represented in related Dutch karig "scanty, frugal," German karg "stingy, scanty." It is not considered to be related to Latin cura. Positive senses, such as "have an inclination" (1550s); "have fondness for" (1520s) seem to have developed later as mirrors to the earlier negative ones.

 

The etymology fits my deep negative response to someone caring. I don’t want to be a burden, a cause of grief, a bother. I don’t want to be the last picked for the team, picked because the teacher said so. I hate the notion of someone saying the equivalent of. “What is it, Lassie? Did Karen fall in a well – a-gain?” As I continue to contemplate it, there are a few basic reasons for my resistance, all of which require that we throw logic in the trash for a few minutes as we explore them.

1) I don’t want to be seen as something that needs care. I’m better than that. To need care means failure, and will involve attention to the area of failure.

2) Needing care makes me a burden on others.

3) At the other end (again – logic? What logic?), when I care about something or someone, I can bank on being kicked out, turned away, rejected, abused, seen as unacceptable in some way. Why is it that people’s response to my caring makes me resent someone caring for me? Perhaps it is that regardless of which side I’m on (carer or caree) the relationship seems to me to end badly. Better that there be no caring involved.

Now, you may have different problems with being cared for. And 95% of the time, it might not bother you at all because, like me, you don’t really stop to think about it and (perhaps even more importantly, you don’t stop to think about it hard enough.)

So as I continue to think about these, one of the answers that comes to mind is the need to repent the pride that is the basis of the first two. It doesn’t matter what I want. If I am imperfect (and I am) I need care. I may as well resent needing to breath.

While someone who cares for me may choose to see me as a burden, that choice is theirs. It’s called “Mind Reading,” and chances are really good that I’m not psychic

As for the third – the closest I can come to logic is that rejecting the care of another because I don’t want to be rejected is a self-fulfilling prophecy of a sort.

And over all of them, if I am afraid or feel ashamed, which takes more courage, living in that fear/shame, or standing up against it by seeking and accepting care when it’s needed and offered?