When Everyone Else Is Singing VICTORY IN JESUS - and You're Not.

I've said for years that when my wife enters a room, people have a theological conversation in their head. Because she's so visibly disabled, when she wears her prosthetic legs uncovered, and she is so exuberant, she's a beautiful woman.

Go take a look at standingwithhope.com, that's the ministry she founded to her fellow amputees. But when she walks into a room, people think, how can this be? How can a good and loving God allow this sort of thing? And I've had this conversation with so many people that I know that it's a regular occurrence when she approaches people. And so some people try to go overboard and work that out themselves and say, well, it must be because of this.

It must be because of this. I lay a firm boundary on this show about that. I don't want people working out their doctrine on us as caregivers.

Certainly on me. And I'm going to extend that to you all. Because I don't think we can know a lot of these things. Yeah, sometimes the stuff we deal with is self-inflicted. Most of the stuff I feel like I've dealt with is self-inflicted.

I'm my own worst enemy sometimes. But we also have a Savior who understands this. And as far as I'm concerned, it does no good to take the Bible and to weaponize scripture to beat on other people to somehow make us feel better about our own doctrine. I don't know why God allows these things. I really don't.

They're just things. It's not why He allows it. It's why He doesn't intervene on some of it. And I don't have any doubt that God will heal Gracie. Can heal Gracie.

Wants to heal Gracie. But for whatever reason, for whatever purposes that He has, He chooses to allow this. And trusting Him to heal, trusting an all-powerful, good and loving God to heal my wife, to me that doesn't really take a whole lot of faith.

It takes a lot more faith to trust Him when He doesn't. And that's where I land on this. And so I've come through this for so many years with fellow caregivers who have been brutalized by folks.

And I said, you know, not anymore. We're not doing that. I'm going to push hard to set up a boundary to give caregivers a safe place where they can just breathe, catch their breath, take a knee. You know, we'll figure out some stuff. And if there's things we've got to make amends for, if there's things we have to ask forgiveness for, if there's things we have to work through, we'll do that.

We'll do it together. But I am not going to stand by and let other people come along who have no clue what it's like to watch somebody suffer and start slinging scriptures like they're rocks and pellets at people. And worse yet, they get up close and they do it like it's a cudgel. They just bludgeon people with it.

That does not fly. I think there's places where scripture certainly speaks to things and we need to deal with things and we need to deal with directly and forthrightly. But caregivers are so disoriented by what we deal with sometimes. And I don't know how many of you all have watched somebody struggle with pain, intractable pain, hours and hours and hours, day after day, day after day to see what that's like. I don't know how many of you all have done that. But for those of us who have, and I've talked to enough of us who have, it is truly mind-numbing.

That's the best word. The wall of noise that attacks your heart in that is deafening. You can't step into somebody who is in that state and start just slinging scriptures at them and beating them over the head with it. You've got to walk into that with humility. You've got to walk into that with tears in your own eyes and recognize that all of creation is groaning over this. All of creation is groaning, scripture says, knowing that it's going to be made right but it's not now. And how do we function like this? How do we function day to day? How do we minister to somebody who is going through this kind of stuff?

What does that look like? And I know that some of you right now are struggling with that because you have been like that and you've been so isolated by it and you feel so ashamed of what's going on with you or embarrassed about it or somehow that everybody else is singing Victory in Jesus and you're not. I get that. I get that. And so that's why I am so grateful that this show is available now because there is Victory in Jesus even while you're doing the things that we as caregivers do.

There is this. And when you are cleaning up barf for the umpteenth time. I was talking to Sandy Rios who most of you who listen to this station are familiar with and she told this moving story about taking care of her daughter with special needs and she'd get her all prettied up and her hair would be done and everything else would be just picture perfect and then she would just have a seizure and throw up all over again. And she'd have to do it all over again.

She'd have to just clean her back up and do that whole thing again. And I thought, you know, that's the gospel. That's what our Savior does for us. Because how many of us are doing that on a regular basis? And yet He just continues to minister to us in that regards. Do you want to do what do you want to tap into that inexhaustible love that He has for us as you minister to your loved one? That's what this show is all about is to help each of us walk into that so that we can be strong and healthy as we take care of someone who is not.