Some friends of mine were caring for another friend who died recently. (People care for other people all the time.)

When I was talking with one of those friends, I said, “You all cared about him, not just cared for him.” 

It was one of those times that I made a note of what I said. I want to remember it. 

You can care for people you don’t care about. It happens all the time. And I’ve done it. You and I are not being mean, we’re being professional, we’re appropriately doing our work. 

Sometimes, though, that caring for is rooted in caring about. The reasons may be biological (parent and child) or relational (spouse or friend). Sometimes, though, the reason is because of a conscious decision to value a person as a person. 

In this case, my friends overlooked what our friend could or could not do, and cared about him. 

On Sunday in chapel, we were talking about a sentence in Galatians. Paul writes that “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

As I was writing about it, I realized that those are three of the many pairs of labels that are regularly used to divide “us” from “them”, to disparage, and demean, and devalue, and dehumanize. 

But Jesus. Knowing that each pair of labels includes everyone, Jesus cares about everyone. 

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Rich’s Ride exists because of caring about.

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