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Caring Is a Skill

Good intentions wreck people. Notes from a caring ministry workshop on why listening has an SOP, when the Bible says to stop helping, and where altruism actually starts.

Caring Is a Skill

Caring Is a Skill

Before I knew Jesus, I carried everything myself. If I could hold it together, I was strong enough. If I couldn’t, I wasn’t good enough.

The Book of Job changed me. God didn’t explain Job’s suffering. He just asked:

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?” (38:4)

Job’s answer stays with me:

“My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” (42:5–6)

This wasn’t being crushed — it was finally seeing that I’m not the center. Since my baptism, the shift has been gradual: healing and restoration are His work, not mine. With that humility, I attended our church’s caring ministry workshop.

Good intentions, bad outcomes

Early March, our church ran a caring ministry workshop. A room full of people learning something you’d think doesn’t need to be taught — how to care for someone.

Three topics: taking the first step, creating safe space, and managing your own emotions while you’re in it.

My counterintuitive takeaway: caring has an SOP.

But it makes sense. Instinctive caring produces predictable disasters — rushing to advise, rushing to fix, projecting your own experience onto the other person. You think you’re helping. What the other person hears: your feelings are wrong, let me give you the correct answer. You’re shutting them down.

In incident response at work, there’s a principle: don’t make it worse. The first rule on-call isn’t “fix it.” It’s “don’t break more things.”

Same with caring. Listen first. Don’t rush to respond. Let the person feel safe. This isn’t instinct. It’s practice.

Start from your own house

You can’t give what you don’t have.

If you can’t manage your own emotional awareness, you have no business helping someone else with theirs. Hold yourself first. Then you have the capacity to hold others.

My most honest training ground is daily life with my daughter.

When she cries, what’s my first response? “Stop crying” or “You can cry”? The first eliminates her emotion. The second helps her name it. One word apart. Completely different direction.

My job isn’t to make her stop crying. It’s to help her learn, slowly, that there are other ways to say what she feels.

Caring doesn’t start at church. It starts with the person closest to you.

The path looks like concentric circles: self → daughter → small group → church. Not all at once. Stabilize each layer before moving outward.

Know when to stop

The workshop’s anchor text — Galatians 6 — contains a tension that looks like a contradiction:

6:2 — “Bear one another’s burdens.” 6:5 — “Each one shall bear his own load.”

Bear each other’s, or bear your own?

The answer is in the Greek. Two different words:

βάρος (baros) — crushing weight. Bereavement, critical illness, crisis. The kind one person cannot carry alone.

φορτίον (phortion) — a soldier’s pack. Daily responsibilities. Your own choices. Your own consequences.

Helping someone carry a crushing weight is love. Carrying their pack for them is harm.

Adler called this separation of tasks. The other person’s emotions, choices, consequences — those are their tasks. You can be beside them. You cannot live their life for them.

In church ministry, the hardest part isn’t showing up. It’s knowing when to stop.

You walk with someone for a stretch of road. You don’t walk the whole road for them.

Check your motive

In The Will to Meaning, Frankl asks a question one step beyond Man’s Search for Meaning: after survival, where does meaning come from?

His answer: not from power (Nietzsche), not from pleasure (Freud), but from meaning itself.

Put this in the context of caring ministry, and it becomes a motive test:

Buber said the same thing from a different angle in I and Thou:

Show up fully present, without agenda, facing another person — the encounter itself is the meaning.

But if you’re “caring” for someone while thinking What should I say? How do I solve this? Am I performing well? — that isn’t encounter. That’s turning the other person into your ministry KPI.

The turning point

Frankl said meaning isn’t found by looking inward. It’s found beyond yourself. The harder you stare inward, the less you find.

My life verse is Job 42:12 — “The Lord blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the former.”

But 42:10 is where the turn happens:

Job prayed for his friends. And the Lord restored his fortunes.

God didn’t restore him first. Job prayed first — for the friends who had tormented him. Altruism before restoration.

I’m still practicing. The training ground is small and enormous at once: a four-and-a-half-year-old, one church workshop. But the direction is right. Taking care of yourself isn’t the destination. It’s what lets you get to the next stop — showing up for someone else.