From across the room I watched my daughter recently as she held her infant son in a baby sling, rhythmically swinging her body as comfort to him. All the while, she kept a weather eye on her three-year-old daughter, a bundle of energy whose favorite pace is running. A bright child, our grandaughter perpetually fires questions her mother anwers with the patience of a gifted teacher.
Although both children, thank God, are strong and healthy, my daughter recognizes their vulnerability. Her son is not sick, but he cannot, of course, eat without her, dress without her or take care of himself if he should fall ill. At the most important level, neither child can thrive without the Love she and her husband provide.
She is a study in caring for the vulnerable as she attends to her children with the grace and intensity of a world class caregiver. Her mothering is a model for the Love we all want across our lives – especially and exquisitely when we are sick.
Our primary model of Love flows first from our mothers. When we speak of the "Mother Test" in Radical Loving Care, we address not only the treatment level we want for our mothers when they are hospitalized, but the care we want for ourselves when we are ill or injured. We want to be cared for with a mother's love that includes the high skills born of rigorous medical training.
But, the sick are hard to love. They bleed, they smell of disease and they may be troubled with mental illness or any number of other problems which may render them, in our eyes, as "less then" us – as weak in the presence of our strength.
Weakness, of course, is what brings the ill to us. But, their helplessness does not mean they will be loved.
Afraid of their own vulnerability, caregivers can default to a professional distance so great that caring proximity may be replaced with cold distance. As a result, a broken leg may be "fixed" and a cancer patient may receive the required drugs. But, neither will benefit from the healing power of loving care.
How do we love the vulnerable? The answer may be found as we recall our own children or ourselves in our awful times of fear, sickness, agony. Times when all of us depended on the nurturing that only Love can provide.
-Erie Chapman
*Note: Since my daughter and son-in-law do not want photos of their children on the internet, the photo, above, is one I took of a friend with her baby.
Journal of Sacred Work 
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