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This morning I attended a small weekly prayer meeting for work. The structure is simple: one person shares their requests, then another person prays for them.

You can imagine the things we shared: family illnesses, parenting struggles, church concerns, work anxieties, ministry opportunities — the daily obstacles and opportunities that face us all.

But I have learned that these moments are more than meetings. They are pathways.

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Over the years, I’ve grown familiar with this well-worn path my shepherd takes me down. I have walked it so many times, I know how it goes and where it leads. The path is surprising, but it leads to a good place.

The path looks like this: I enter my day consumed with personal interests, opportunities, worries, and concerns. My heart is turned inward, its curvature bending only toward my own needs.

I am awake, but only to myself.

Then I walk into a conversation, like today’s prayer meeting. Someone begins to share. Then another. And another. As we talk and pray and pray and talk, the curvature of my soul begins to soften, release, and extend outward. A sprout of love breaks through this new crack in the soil, reaching toward the light. I begin to care.

My troubles still matter. My joys and opportunities are real, even weighty. But they’re no longer the soundtrack and centerpiece of my day.

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Caring directly for another person is one of life’s most meaningful responsibilities. Without another being to care for, we inch toward nihilism — a life without meaning, because we ourselves have become the sole meaning in our lives. When we have no concerns outside of our own, our souls atrophy as the muscles of care lie unused, slack, disengaged.

Yet getting to care for another person from a place of personal tranquility is rare. Our daily call is to love others amid our own personal warzones. I don’t get to lounge on a placid lake while heroically rescuing storm-tossed castaways all around me. We’re all in the storm. We’re all maneuvering. We’re all torn by the wind and tossed by the waves.

Yet as we care for another person, a freedom emerges. By taking up another person’s needs and interests, we lay aside our own anxieties. If only for a moment, we receive the gift of self-forgetfulness.

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I love Christ for many reasons, but one is this: moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day, my shepherd gently straightens out my anxieties, turning my attention toward others.

It might be tempting to wish for an easier life, an endless vacation, a burden-free ministry. When we ourselves are overburdened, it might seem safer to avert our eyes rather than move toward someone else. We might even look on the happily self-absorbed and wonder if theirs is the blessed life we’re missing.

So Christ is good to remind us through prayer meetings and parenting and pastoring, through fellowship and friendship and discipleship, through colleagues and crises and even cancer diagnoses — through each of the people he brings our way each day, and each of the burdens they carry — that “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

This is the gift of caring.