40acts: Ready to ActSample

Act 8: Under the Weather

Coughs, sneezes or assigned to bed… if you live alone, it can be difficult to manage cooking or even making a drink; and if others depend on you, there’s the pressure to carry on, regardless of how ill you feel. Someone you know is going through a hard time with their health, so put aside time to help them in a practical way.

Jesus counts even the smallest of inconvenient illnesses along with his list of ways we can serve him: ‘I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me [emphasis added], I was in prison and you came to me’ (Matthew 25:35–36). It’s not just the big radical acts of worship that catch heaven’s attention. It’s the small caring kindnesses. They help us see that much more matters than we think it does.

Jesus speaks these words in the middle of telling his followers what it will look like when he appears in all his glory, surrounded by angels, raised up in splendour. Right then, he chooses to move the scale from massive and glorious, down to local, small-scale, personal. 

We care about the mundane because Jesus does. Or, to put it closer to Jesus’ words here: we care about the mundane because Jesus is in the mundane. It’s the paradox of Christian living. We are focussed on heaven, and because we are focussed on heaven, we live attentive to everyone around us in our everyday. ‘I was sick and you visited me’. These words were spoken by the one who flung stars into space, by whom ‘all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities’ (Colossians 1:16). 

Think about how often you hear from an ill friend calling off coffee, or a coworker passing on shifts because they’re down with the flu. It’s so much part of the everyday that we glaze past it and go on with life. But Jesus puts other people’s illnesses right at the centre of heaven’s attention. What if that complaint was actually the moment to step in with life to bring?