On Monday evenings, my wife and I often watch a program on PBS called Antiques Roadshow. Folks bring in stuff from the attic, things they’ve found along the road, items purchased at garage sales or passed down from relatives and ask the experts what they’re worth. There are nice surprises. This Monday, for example, a pair of vases purchased at a garage sale for $10 turn out to be worth $20,000. A partly broken container found along a roadside turns out to be a Zuni creation worth $15,000.
How do we know what is valuable? The things you might love, I might hate. The thing I might treasure may be worth nothing to you.
Experts tell us things we might never have imagined: that a given piece of curved glass that may look like junk is actually something crafted by Lewis Comfort Tiffany in the late nineteenth century…
An old baseball may be worth nothing or it may be one of the few signed by Eddie Matthews and Stan Musial.
All of this makes me think of the way someone from a remote part of China might view a multi-million 
dollar Van Gogh as worthless, while we might take the same view of an ancient Sanskrit manuscript. A great performance by Pavoratti (left) may fall on deaf ears if the audience is Middle Eastern.
How, and in what way, do we recognize the genius displayed by America’s caregivers every day and in so many ways? On this day, many of America’s doctors have engaged in valuable acts of caregiving for patients who were unable to appreciate the gift they received. Today, many of America’s nurses will deliver rare and valuable acts of kindness to patients who may be unconscious, disoriented, or fully aware, but unappreciative of the value of the caregiving they have received.
Our challenge is to educate ourselves to recognize the rare presents caregivers deliver each day. And the rest of the challenge is for us to learn how to know that these are gifts of incomparable value and to celebrate them, and the people that create them, as the masterpieces they are.
-Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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