The Care Worker Nobody Is Watching

Fourth call and it is twenty past ten.

Mrs Aldridge. Sheer curtains, gas heater not on because she does not like the smell of it in the mornings, one armchair with a cushion that has gone flat, and a photograph on the sideboard of a man in a uniform who died in nineteen ninety eight.

Twenty two minutes on the sheet.

She does the tablets. She does the leg. She puts the kettle on because Mrs Aldridge can no longer lift a full kettle and will not admit it, so the arrangement is that the carer puts it on for her own tea, which she does not drink, and then leaves it filled.

They talk about the man on the sideboard while she does the dressing. They have talked about him a lot. She could tell you where he was stationed.

Twenty two minutes, and she is over by six, and she will be late to the next one and will make it up somewhere by not doing something else properly, and that is the arithmetic of every morning she has ever worked.

She did not choose this. She fell into it at twenty three, in a bad year, and then it was three years and then it was nine and now it is fourteen. She is tired in a way that sleep has stopped touching.

And the word favor is not a word she has ever put anywhere near this. That is not a complaint. It is that the word belongs to a category of things she associates with other people's lives, and hers is a Fiesta and a folder and a set of keys in a lockbox.

If you do work that nobody sees in rooms nobody comes into, you know that carpet. And you know the sentence, which is not even bitter, it is just flat: whatever God is doing with people, He is doing it somewhere with better lighting.

The word, plainly, in this room

Let me stand by the sideboard and put the word straight, because it has been floating around your life for years attached to lives that are not yours.

Blessed does not mean a life that looks good from outside. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. That is what the word means in Scripture end to end, and it has no interest whatsoever in lighting.

Now let me show you the woman everybody quotes about favor, and I want to show you the part they skip.

And the king loved Esther above all the women, and she obtained grace and favour in his sight more than all the virgins.Esther 2:17

That is the verse people put on things. Here is what people do not say about it: Esther did not choose any of it. She was taken. She was one of a large number of young women collected up for a king, and the entire arrangement was not something anybody would call a blessing if it happened to their daughter, and the book of Esther is completely unsentimental about that.

And when the favor comes, it does not rescue her. It puts her in a palace she cannot leave, married to a man who has already discarded one wife for displeasing him, in a position where approaching him uninvited is a capital matter.

So the favor in that verse is not a happy ending and it is not a promotion into an easier life. It is a placement.

You are placed rather than overlooked, and the favor in that story was a placement rather than a rescue. Esther 2:17 gives her the favor inside a situation she did not choose, and it is the Holy Spirit who is able to take a book that never once uses God's name and make it obviously about Him to a woman in a front room.

What the favor was for

Now the thing the whole book turns on, because it happens in a room.

Everything that matters in Esther happens in private. A conversation with a cousin at a gate. A decision made alone. Two dinners. She never addresses a crowd. There is no scene where she speaks to a nation. The most famous line in the book, if I perish, I perish, is said to one man in a message.

And the outcome is that a people is not destroyed.

The favor was for that. Not for the palace, not for the crown, not for the position. For the moment in a room when one woman used what she had for somebody who could not act for themselves.

Now look at your morning.

Twenty two minutes on the sheet and you are over by six, every time, and the six minutes is the entire content of that visit as far as Mrs Aldridge is concerned. You fill the kettle so she does not have to admit she cannot lift it, and you have kept that arrangement unspoken for two years so she keeps her dignity. You know where the man on the sideboard was stationed.

Nobody inspects any of that. It is not on the sheet. There is no box for it and there never will be.

You are using what you have in a room for somebody who cannot act for themselves, and that is the exact shape of the thing Esther is famous for. Esther 4:14 and the two dinners put the whole hinge of that book in private conversations rather than public ones, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who makes a person notice a full kettle before anybody has to ask.

What I will not turn this into

Now let me be careful, because there is a version of this message that would do you harm and I have heard it done.

I am not going to tell you the job is a calling. You did not choose it, you fell into it in a bad year, and calling it a calling is a way of asking you to be grateful for something that has taken more out of you than it has given back. Fourteen years of this is a real cost to a real body and God did not arrange it as a ministry placement.

And I am not going to tell you that the tiredness is a sacrifice being counted. It is tiredness. It needs sleep and better schedules and probably a different life eventually, and none of those is a spiritual failure.

What I am saying is narrower and I think it is truer. The favor of God is resting on you, and what you are doing in those rooms is the kind of thing His favor has always been for. Both. Not the job is good, and not the job is nothing.

You are favored and you are exhausted, and both of those are true in this front room at twenty past ten. Scripture gives Esther a favor she did not ask for inside a life she did not choose and never once pretends the arrangement was kind, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person hold that without needing the story tidied.

And if the tiredness has got to the place where you are frightened of it, or where you are driving and not remembering the drive, tell your doctor. Out loud, in daylight. That is not weakness and it is the same care you have been giving out for fourteen years.