How Do We Care for All the Broken People?

Written by Erin Richer

I was sitting under a pavilion at the edge of the Puget Sound. Chaos had begun in the sky at some point while I meditatively rested with a book at a worn picnic table. I looked up to see a bald eagle, surrounded by several seagulls, making raucous noise and what looked to be a lone small bird in the water below.

In retrospect, I suspect the eagle had caught the gull mid-flight and the others were trying to save it, but it was too injured to fly when the eagle finally dropped it in the water. The seagulls eventually flew away, but I continued to watch as the eagle made several passes over the small bird sitting in the water. The gull ducked under the sea’s cover with each pass. Finally, the eagle grabbed the bird and dragged it fifty yards or so closer to the edge of the water, landed on top of it, and they wrestled for several seconds below the surface before the eagle let go and flew away. I couldn’t believe the small bird had survived. It slowly floated to the shore, and I continued to watch it, mesmerized by the story unfolding before me. A story to which God and I were the only ones privy. 

Once it came to the waters edge, I watched as the gull tried its wings at flight. Its left wing was clearly broken; she couldn’t even walk out of the water. The poor creature sat there helpless in the sea just at the cusp of land—yet it belonged in the air. A couple of gulls made one or two loud passes overhead, and I stood there and stared. When silence and stillness was all that was left, I asked quietly but aloud, “What happens to you now?” I felt so sad. “If I care this much about even this bird, how will I not completely break under the weight of compassion for broken people?” And I turned my thoughts to God.

I’d been reading a book by Henri Nouwen and challenged to think about care—what it means, how I do it, how to do it well. Nouwen writes in Out of Solitude, “The basic meaning of care is ‘to grieve, to experience sorrow, to cry out with’… we tend to look at it as the strong toward the weak, of the powerful toward the powerless… in fact, we feel quite uncomfortable with an invitation to enter into someone’s pain…”

I began to ponder all the maimed humans wounded deeply and severely by other humans, or even by their own decisions, and I wondered, “How? How do we care for all of the broken people? How can any heart have the capacity to do so?” When I consider the number of people in my life times the amount of care I’d like to offer each of them, I would be swallowed whole by the abyss of sorrow.

I had been re-reading Ruth the day of the gull attack. It’s only been a few weeks since we studied this book in-depth, yet I see new things even today with new parts of the Christian life—like care—being magnified.

When I first read Ruth, Boaz was a larger than life representation of Christ. But in reading it now, the reality that Boaz is a real human stirs something in me. While this story is a mere snapshot of His life and the snapshot represents Christ so beautifully, we can be sure that Boaz had his faults. And so as I study Boaz remembering his humanity, I recognize two things that encourage me in light of care. 

First, Boaz had a number of people under his care. We can tell that he cared for all of them well by the way he blesses them as he enters their presence in his field and they bless him in return. We’re told he’s a man of noble character, indicating that he has a reputation for treating people well. But in this story, there are not multiple people vying for his focus, time, and intense care. There is one. Ruth.

Second, God brought Ruth into Boaz’s field. Boaz had already heard Ruth’s story and was invested in a good outcome for her. Boaz was primed by the Lord’s sovereign hand to care for Ruth and so he did. He did it in two ways. He cared for her physical needs immediately and completely by offering her food and protection. But he also cared for her by entrusting the outcome of her life to God through prayer:

“May the LORD reward you for what you have done, and may you receive a full reward from the LORD God of Israel, under whose wings you have come for refuge.” (Ruth 2:12)

I find this to be so encouraging and perfectly in line with what God has been showing me this week regarding care. It is indeed too much for me to care about every bird and every maimed human. That is His bailiwick. But like Boaz, I can trust that God will bring those He intends me to care for into my respective field. He will prime my heart to be moved by their story. Those are the people I can lavish with all of the resources that God has given me to offer. More importantly I can entrust their ultimate peace and prosperity to the only one who can offer it through prayer. But do you want to know my favorite part?

In the end, Boaz becomes the answer to his own prayer for Ruth. In the end Ruth musters insane courage to go to him and ask him to redeem her, and Boaz, smitten with her, goes above and beyond to be able to make that happen. Thus he becomes a significant part of the very full reward from the Lord God of Israel, the refuge under whose wings God provides for Ruth. Ultimately, he provides the seed that allows her to be the great-grandmother to David and in the lineage of our Savior. 

As I closed my pages, and tucked them into my bag, I continued to stare at the gull at the edge of the shore with a lump in my throat. I threw the strap of my bag over my head and across my shoulders and turned to walk to my car. As I walked, I noticed a man sleeping in the driver’s seat of his 1980’s Toyota Corolla and wondered, who cares for him? So I prayed for him and continued on with a ready heart to attend to those whom God brings into my field.

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