Do The Next Right Thing

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Visit InfinitiUSA.com to check out the all-new, fully reimagined Infiniti QX60. Now with extremely limited availability, contact your local retailer for inventory information. This is Peter Roseburger. This is the program for you as a family caregiver. More than 65 million Americans right now are serving as a caregiver. Are you one of them?

If so, you're in the right place. I know, a show for caregivers. Who'd have thunk?

Well, I thunk it. And we've been doing it now for more than 10 years. Reaching people who were caring for vulnerable loved ones. Standing between them and even worse, disaster. With practical help and God's word to be able to give them clear understanding of how to function in this. How to find safety. How to find peace and calmness and joy.

And to grieve out in a healthy manner. The heartache that you carry as you watch somebody struggle and suffer. And it could be something like autism. Could be addiction. Could be alcoholism. Could be mental illness.

Could be Alzheimer's. Cancer. There's no end to the afflictions that we face in this world. In this broken world. There's always a caregiver somewhere in orbit around that individual. And that caregiver struggles in the dark places of the night with, how am I going to get through this? What are we going to do? How do I process this? How do I deal with being cursed at while I'm trying to change an adult diaper?

How do I deal with somebody who is spiraling out of control with addiction? All of these things cause great angst for the family caregiver. Now this program, we don't talk a lot about caregiving the task because all the tasks are there. Most of them are just one and done. You do it one time.

You got it. You know how to do it. And it's not what keeps us up late at night. What does that for us is the fear. And the guilt. The despair. The rage. The resentment.

All those things that just torque at us. How do we reshape our minds? How do we change the way we do things in order to deal with these realities? If caregivers mapped out a decision tree for our lives, it would look like a forest. You know, because each day we're faced with all these choices and what do we do?

And most of them seem filled with unpleasant outcomes. And it seems like there's no good path. What do we do? I mean, have you ever stayed up late at night talking to your ceiling fan? What am I going to do? What am I going to do?

What am I going to do? Does the ceiling fan answer? Well, if your ceiling fan is answering you, then we have a different conversation. But I have it on good authority that most ceiling fans do not answer. And maybe we should stop asking the ceiling fan. And maybe we should go to the Word of God.

Because God does speak to those places. He does speak to that fear. He does speak to that guilt. That despair. That anger. That rage. That resentment. That uncertainty.

That lack of clarity. All of those things He addresses in scripture. May not be in context of your unique situation or my unique situation. I've looked through the entire scripture. I haven't seen anybody carrying in scripture for a wife who's had 80 plus surgeries and both her legs amputated and been doing this for almost 40 years. I haven't seen that in scripture.

But I've seen a lot of places in scripture where it talks about worry. Despair. Anger. Heartache.

And all the other things that we feel as caregivers. And the decisions that lie before us can be so daunting that it paralyzes us. We don't know what to do next. So what does scripture say? What does scripture say? Well, if you don't know what to do, if you don't have any wisdom, let Him ask.

There's wisdom in a multitude of counselors. There's all kinds of scriptures that address this. But in those moments when we are just paralyzed with this, we don't know what to do. Here's something based on scriptural principles. You do the next right thing is our action step.

What's the next right thing? And the big problems become more approachable when our heads and hearts calm down. And so we have to, learning to calm ourselves down is one of the biggest challenges we face as a caregiver. And for that to happen, our decisions often require, for lack of a better word, reduction. And unlike, you've heard the phrase eating elephant one by one, eating elephant one bite at a time, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about decision reduction.

And it helps us focus by redirecting our eyes from all the choices that we have to the micro steps that are right in our path. Maybe the next right thing to do is drink some water. You remember that story, by the way, of Elijah after he had the big brouhaha, that's a word people don't use a lot, with the prophets of Baal. And fire came down and it burned them up and all that kind of stuff.

And it was huge victory. It didn't burn them up. It burned up the altar and the sacrifice. And then he found out Jezebel was after him. So he ran. I mean, he was afraid and he ran. He ran out in the wilderness and he started heading towards basically Mount Sinai is where he was going.

And along the way, he fell asleep and an angel of the Lord came in and had a meal for him, woke him up, hit him with a little stick or something, woke him up, shook him awake and said, you know, get up, eat. You got a long journey ahead of you. The next right thing may be just to have a good meal, a heart healthy meal.

It may be, you know, bowl of soup or take a nap or even go on a walk. That may be the next right thing for you to do. The problem usually remains no matter what we do, but we could tackle it better with a calmer and a more disciplined mind. Now, when we start thinking like this and you let me know, let me know if I'm hitting it wrong here, but I think we all invariably know what the next right thing to do is. I mean, the immediate thing. I'm not trying to solve the multimillion dollar hospital bill. I'm just, what's the next right thing to do? And we usually know what that is. We just often require permission and usually from ourselves. Take everybody else's voice out of the equation.

Take all those voices out of the equation and just be still for a moment and think, okay, what's the next right thing I need to do. Are you hungry? Are you angry? Are you lonely? Are you tired?

What do those spell? Hungry, angry, lonely, tired spells halt. I mean, just stop. I heard my mom told me that.

I thought it was brilliant. Just halt. Take a moment.

What are you? Are you hungry? Then eat something.

Are you angry? Then cool off. Drink some water. Go for a walk. Are you lonely? Phone a friend. Call someone. Are you tired? Are you tired?

Take a nap. We don't always know how to tackle all the big things here. We really don't. But we do know what the next right thing is. And we're given direction on this in scripture. The Bible says, God's word is a lamp into my feet. Not a searchlight.

It's a lamp. Do the next right thing with the light that is provided. Stay focused on just the next right thing until you find yourself calming down, settling down, and then you can move into the next issues that we got to deal with and maybe learn to ask for help or whatever.

But right now, just do the next right thing. Are you hungry? Are you angry? Are you lonely?

Are you tired? If you're any of those things, then just take a moment and address that. And then we'll go to the next step and the next step. Do the next right thing. Okay.

This is Peter Rosenberger. This is Hope for the Caregiver. Hopeforthecaregiver.com. Join our Facebook group at Hope for the Caregiver. Be a part of what we're doing. Don't try to do this all by yourself.

We'll be right back. Do you know what a PVA bag is? I'm Peter Rosenberger and at Standing with Hope, which is the presenting sponsor of Hope for the Caregiver, we do prosthetics for amputees over in West Africa. We've been working with Ghana for years since 2005.

This was Gracie's vision after losing both of her legs. And we help them buy a lot of material for the prosthetic clinics. In exchange, we get to share the gospel with individuals and be able to present the gospel, not only with the patients, but their families and the community and even the nation. We've done national interviews with many of their public officials, including their vice president and the US ambassador to Ghana. But PVA bags, polyvinyl alcohol bags, they're using the lamination process to make these sockets that we make. They're brand new.

They're custom fit on site. And we purchased them in Ghana. Right now they're out and we need to get some more. So we make some more legs. We also need resin. We're always buying resin because that's one of the critical items in these acrylic resin sockets that we make. Now we'll recycle the prosthetic limbs that come from all over the country to a prison run by CoreCivic down in Arizona. And inmates volunteer to disassemble them for us so we can recycle the knees, the feet, the pylons, the screws, the adapters, the clamps, all that kind of stuff. But some things we have to purchase.

PVA bags and resin are two of those items that need to be regularly purchased. Would you help us out with that, please? StandingWithHope.com slash giving. StandingWithHope.com slash giving. And be a part of giving the gift that keeps on walking. StandingWithHope.com slash giving. Thanks so much.