This week, one of the people I care for gave me the cross in the picture.

They made it themself from scratch.

I spend a lot of my working life sitting with people at a period in their life where time is shorter and so much more precious. There are conversations about symptoms and medication and practical things, of course, but there are also conversations about life, love, fear, family, faith and what we believe might come next. As well as the medical side of my work, it’s part of my job to understand what’s important to the person in front of me: what brings them comfort and strength, and what matters to them in the last act of their life.

It would be very easy to think that in those encounters I am the one doing the giving. Giving time, giving advice, giving empathy.

And then someone makes me a cross.

There is something quite humbling about being given something made by the hands of a person you are supposed to be caring for. A reminder that care isn’t really a one-way transaction. We accompany each other. We give what we can, and sometimes we receive things we didn’t know we needed.

This little cardboard cross isn’t worth very much in monetary terms.

To me, it is priceless.

Because it contains things that are much more valuable: someone’s precious time, thought, love and care. It was made by someone I went into work expecting to care for, and it will stay with me as a reminder that some of the most wonderful things we give each other have very little to do with who is supposed to be looking after whom.

Sometimes, while we are busy trying to be a blessing to someone else, they quietly become one to us.

-Laura

“Encourage one another and build each other up.”
1 Thessalonians 5:11