Topic: Soul Care Basics — Key Scripture: Matthew 25:40-45
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from caring for someone the world has quietly stopped noticing.
I remember sitting in many different hospital rooms over the years — sitting with people who had strong families, and those who only had regrets — watching nurses hurry past doors that no longer had visitors lined up outside. Cancer has a way of clearing a room over time. The casseroles stop coming. The calls get shorter. The person in the bed becomes, to almost everyone but a few, someone to check on rather than someone to see and know.
I did my best to sit there anyway, though it was often heavy and hard. Not because I had some special reserve of strength — I didn’t. I sat there because somewhere in the middle of ministry, hospital hallways, and watching someone I cared for become smaller before my eyes, I kept running into the same thoughts from scripture.
Jesus shares in Matthew 25 about the day when He will be separating people to his left and to his right. What’s striking isn’t really the separation — it’s the measurement used for it. He states that whatever was done for “the least of these”, it was done for Him. Not the impressive. Not the visible. Not the people whose care gets noticed and praised. But the least of these — the ones easy to walk past.
And then comes the part that has always been a bit unsettling — those on both sides ask Him: “when did we see You?” They don’t remember serving or failing Him directly. They only remember the stranger, the hungry person, the prisoner — ordinary people they encountered in life. They noticed enough to know it wasn’t Him, at least physically. The only real difference between the two groups was that those to His right saw the people and cared for their needs, while those to His left simply walked on by. It doesn’t seem to indicate that either group caused the brokenness around them.
But maybe that’s the danger. Not cruelty. Blindness.
I think about the years I spent in ministry running on fumes, showing up for everyone else’s crisis while quietly losing track of my own soul. Burnout doesn’t usually announce itself as burnout. It shows up as a lower threshold for kindness. A shorter fuse with the very people who need you to notice them. I became, without meaning to, someone who could stand in a room full of “the least of these” and not truly see a single one of them — because I had nothing left to see with.
Caring for broken people taught me something I couldn’t have learned in any textbook: dignity doesn’t announce itself — it has to be looked for. The people Jesus describes in this passage — hungry, thirsty, a stranger, without clothes, sick, imprisoned — aren’t asking to be rescued by someone spectacular. They’re asking to be seen by someone who is will willing to see them and stay.
There’s a version of Christian service that mistakes visibility for faithfulness. We serve where it’s noticed, where it builds a platform, where the return on our investment of time is measurable. But Jesus doesn’t ask the people what they built or what they accomplished. He asks what they did for the person nobody else stopped for.
If you’re the one doing quiet, unglamorous care right now — for a parent, a spouse, a congregation member, a neighbor who has nothing to offer you back — I want you to hear something clearly: you are not invisible to God, even when you feel invisible to everyone else. The exhaustion is real. The lack of recognition is real. But so is this: when you sat down beside someone the world walked past, you weren’t just being kind. You were, in a way that Jesus takes seriously, tending to Him.
And if you’re the one who has been walked past — sitting in a hospital bed, a season of grief, a depression no one quite understands, a diagnosis that’s emptied your visitor list — this passage is for you too. It says God does not measure your worth by how crowded your room is — your worth was never up for measurement to begin with. You are not “the least” in some diminished sense. You are the one He specifically named as someone worth seeing.
I don’t tell people caregiving gets easier. It doesn’t, not really. What changes is the lens. Somewhere along the way, with the right lens, caring for the broken stops being a task on a list and becomes something closer to real worship. While I did not always do it well, I kept showing up — even when I did it poorly, tired, distracted, and grieving.
If ministry or caregiving has hollowed you out until you can’t remember why you started, this passage isn’t asking you to do more. It’s asking you to look again — at the people in front of you, and at yourself. Restoration doesn’t always look like getting your strength back. Sometimes it looks like sitting in a quiet room, tired and unnoticed, and realizing you were never alone in it after all. You were with Him.
If this resonates with where you are today, BRKN Soul Care is here. Book a free Introductory Conversation at brknsoulcare.org and take the first step. You don’t have to carry this alone.