Take Care

Take Care

God blesses those who are merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

Matthew 5:7

During the Lebanon Hostage Crisis from 1986 to 1990, Frank Reed, director of the American Lebanese International School, was held hostage in Lebanon. For months at a time Reed was blindfolded, living in complete darkness, or chained to a wall and kept in absolute silence for his captivity. On one occasion, he was moved to another location where, though blindfolded, he could sense others in the room. Yet it was three weeks before he dared peek out to discover he was chained next to fellow captives Terry Anderson and Tom Sutherland.

Although he was beaten, made ill, and tormented, Reed felt most keenly the lack of caring. He said in an interview with Time, “Nothing I did mattered to anyone. I began to realize how withering it is to exist with not a single expression of caring around you. . . . I learned one overriding fact: caring is a powerful force. If no one cares, you are truly alone.”^a

Care is so germane, so essential to our relationships, yet so basic that it often goes unnoticed. Ask any couple what matters most in their relationship and care is not likely to make the list. But when you put this quality on a list of traits and ask people to rate its importance, you’ll see it rise near the top. Why? Because without care, as Frank Reed can vividly attest, we wither.

It seems strange that we toss this vital force around so haphazardly. “Take care,” we might say to the grocery clerk who rings up our items. “Take care,” we say at the end of a phone conversation with a near stranger. Saying “I care about you” can make a real difference in a relationship, and so can saying the opposite: “I don’t care” is like a deadly bullet in the heart of any relationship.

The word care comes from the Germanic karo, which originally meant “sad.” It alludes to the idea that a caring person feels sad when you feel sad. In other words, care is a kind of compassion that allows someone else to enter your world and feel your pain. Care means that whatever happens to you happens to me; when sadness hits you it hits me, too. Of course, care also means that when something terrific happens to you I rejoice too, because your life makes a genuine difference to my own. That’s the essence of caring.

As you go about your day, be mindful of the power seemingly small acts of kindness have to impact your spouse.

It was “at home”—in one’s family or in one’s community with those closest—that the genuineness of love is easily tested and proved.

—Mother Teresa

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