Take care!

The guidelines say that for every hour you spend working at a computer screen you should take a 5 or 10 minute break. Get up from your desk. Collect your printing. Make that phone call. I’m not very good at pausing in this way. Easier to batter on relentlessly at the rising tide of reports and emails!

Many of us sign off emails ‘Take care!’ without thinking too much about what we mean by the words. But as I reflected on those office guidelines, I realised that I don’t always take as much care of myself as I should. I often push myself to accomplish, to achieve rather than letting myself be embraced by a calmer, more relaxed approach, and I suspect I’m not alone in this.

Why do we fail to ‘take care’? Is it due to this drivenness to be productive? Or to pressure from others? Are we trying to mask our insecurities with busyness? Or tyrannised by a perception that we must be successful, thin, glamorous? Or trapped in the icy grip of destructive behaviours? We must learn, all of us, to take care of ourselves physically, emotionally and spiritually.

The deepest reason for taking care of ourselves is that we are precious, unique, not simply sophisticated animals, but God-created beings, reflecting something of God, treasured by this God as supremely valuable, eternal beings.

We should take care not just of ourselves, but of our resources, our environment, our families, our communities. We are God’s caretakers, gardeners like Adam in the garden of God’s world. And sometimes we must work out the reality of that in the dark, messy situations.

Though our failures in self-care can help us connect with those who like us have similarly messed up, in general the better we take care of our lives the better we will be able to take care of others.

But isn’t ‘take care’ the mantra of a risk-averse society which over-protects children and looks askance at mountain climbers and sky-divers? Isn’t taking risks essential to personal growth and development?

It seems to me that Christians are challenged to be risk-takers. I don’t know if it’s strictly correct to speak of God as a ‘risk taker’ – is there any risk involved if you know the end from the beginning? But God does seem to be a risk-taking God.

Inherent in the whole enterprise of Creation was the risk that things would go horribly wrong – as indeed things, or rather humanity did. Jesus’s rescue mission was fraught with risk – dependent on his making a whole life-long series of correct choices. The growth of the early Church was dependent on a small bunch of Jesus-followers whose track record did not inspire – again, the divine risk-taker was at work. And what about the challenge to us in all our fragility to be light-bearers in our communities?  God is still, even now, in the business of taking risks.

If we are to show that God’s trust in us is not misplaced, then we too must be risk-takers, following a vision even when it costs, being real and vulnerable with people, making hard choices, going into dark places in the name of love.

It’s the risk involved in what theologian Ben Quash (in Abiding, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s 2013 Lent Book) calls, in a good sense, the ‘out of control life.’ Not a zipped-up, micro-managed life in which we think we have the future under our finger-tips, but one in which we’re free to take breath-taking creative risks when we sense that these are God-prompted.

So at the same time we take care, and take risks. Perhaps really taking care of ourselves, through fulfilling our potential must involve risk-taking.

St Peter, one of the fragile group in whom the Church was built wrote ‘Cast all your anxiety on God because he cares for you.’ Ultimately it is God who takes care of us, now and forever, in this dimension and in the dimension beyond. We are challenged to entrust ourselves to God even in the dark times when, frankly, it seems that God isn’t making a very good job of caring for us.

Our knowledge that we are in God’s care is the most powerful motive for taking care of ourselves. Our knowledge that we are secure in God enables us to take with some confidence the creative risks through which both we and others grow.

The Christian faith warns us that to reject the God who offers freedom and wholeness, alluring though such a rejection may at times appear, is the ultimate failure to ‘take care’ of ourselves. And so in a Christian context, the words warn us of the danger of turning from God and from God’s values. In this sense, ‘Take care’ = ‘Beware.’ 

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 14th February 2013)