Care Is Never On The Report

There is a particular kind of job where the thing you are actually paid to do cannot be counted, so the counting is done on something else instead.

Picture the man. He works in a nursing home. His week is measured in a set of numbers: residents assisted, medication rounds completed, incidents logged, time per task.

Every one of those numbers went in on time this week.

And the best thing he did all week does not appear in any of them.

On Wednesday a woman of ninety one, who has not recognized her own daughter in about a year, became frightened at four in the afternoon in the way she does, and he sat down beside her chair and talked to her about her father's bakery for twenty five minutes until she was calm.

That is the work. Anybody who has done that job knows it is the work. It is the reason the whole building exists and the reason her daughter can sleep at night.

There is no field on the form for it. There is no code. If he entered it anywhere it would go in as time per task and would show up as an efficiency problem.

So the system he works inside is not neutral about his best hour. It is quietly negative about it, because twenty five minutes about a bakery is twenty five minutes not spent on measurable units.

And he has been doing this for nine years, and the effect over nine years is not that he stopped doing it. He never stopped. The effect is that he has begun to think of it as the thing he does instead of his job, rather than as his job, which is a small and corrosive misfiling of a whole career.

He counted the small things on purpose

There is a scene at the end of Matthew that people usually read as being about judgment and is at least as much about accounting.

The king lists what people did, and the list is remarkable for how small it is.

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. (Matthew 25:40, King James Version)

Look at what was on the list before that verse. Food. A drink. A welcome. Clothes. A visit to somebody sick. A visit to somebody in prison.

Not one item on it is a program, an outcome, or a measurable improvement. Every single item is a small direct act done for one person.

And the ones being commended do not recognize the list. They ask when they did any of it. Which means these were not the things they had been counting either.

You are being counted in units you did not know were being counted, and Matthew 25 lists food and drink and visits rather than outcomes or numbers (Matthew 25:40), and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that from being a distant idea and makes it about a Wednesday afternoon.

And notice the phrase inasmuch as ye have done it unto one. One. Singular. The accounting is per person, not per volume.

You have been credited one person at a time, and Matthew 25:40 says unto one of the least of these rather than counting anybody's totals, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the arithmetic that no form in that building is capable of doing.

A cup of cold water

There is a smaller line earlier in the same Gospel that is almost absurd in how low it sets the bar for what gets recorded.

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)

A cup of cold water only. The word only is in there deliberately. It is the smallest possible act, named as the smallest possible act, and it is described as impossible to lose.

That is a sentence about a system of record that cannot drop things.

You are working inside a record that cannot lose the small ones, and Matthew 10 says a cup of cold water shall in no wise lose its reward (Matthew 10:42), and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a man from believing that unrecorded means unreal.

And Hebrews puts the same thing in the language of justice rather than of generosity.

For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister. (Hebrews 6:10)

Not unrighteous to forget. Forgetting is described as something that would be unjust, which is a considerably stronger claim than saying God is kind about it.

You have work that it would be an injustice to lose, and Hebrews 6 puts the remembering of ministry into the category of righteousness (Hebrews 6:10), and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps that ledger while a form counts something else entirely.

What this is not

Let me draw a line clearly here.

This is not saying the metrics are worthless or that he should stop entering them. Medication rounds genuinely matter and being counted properly keeps people safe.

It is also not promising that anybody at his workplace starts valuing the twenty five minutes. The system will very likely go on being what it is, and it may get worse.

And it is not telling him to be secretly superior about it. Nothing corrodes a care worker faster than deciding they are the only one who really cares.

And plainly: care work is heavy and it is worth saying out loud. If it has begun to reach past work, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you has started wanting it all to stop, that is bigger than a schedule. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say the true version out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. People who look after people need looking after.

You are not being asked to despise the system you work in, and Matthew 25 adds an accounting rather than abolishing the one already there (Matthew 25:40), and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man do the paperwork honestly and still know what his real work was.