Process the Pain Privately; Share the Process Publicly.

Welcome to Hope for the Caregiver here on American Family Radio.

This is Peter Rosenberg and this is the program for you as a family caregiver. Happy New Year, by the way. And you know, I don't use that word happy by happenstance. Let's see what I did there.

Happy happenstance. I mean, look how unsettled our country is. Look at all the craziness that you see. We talked about this for last week's program of people that are airing their stuff online. They're sharing their stuff out in front of the world.

And it's really a bit jarring. A friend once told me years ago, when it comes to having a public profile, process your pain privately. Share the process publicly. And we have this rush to the microphones for people who just clamor all over themselves to share the most gruesome details of their lives, just to get some kind of sick, twisted affirmation. And the more I watch this, the more I see how many people just desperately want to be relevant. They desperately want to have affirmation.

And I get that. That's the human condition. We want to be noticed for what we do and all that. And I think as a caregiver, I mean, I've struggled with this a lot in my life. Does anybody see what I do?

Does anybody pay attention to what people see how challenging this is? That kind of stuff. And it teeters into self-pity for me as a caregiver. And then it becomes this. It's all about being validated and affirmed.

I would love to tell you that I arrived at this place being a bit more spiritual and wise. No, no. Y'all know me better than that. I'm just tired. It's exhausting to chase after that, to try to grab that brass ring on a carousel.

Now that's an ancient metaphor, I know. But you get the point. And we push ourselves to extreme to get noticed, to get affirmed. And I have found in my experience that that is not a worthwhile pursuit. That's an exhausting pursuit. And you see people aging out of their lane, if you will, of things that got them all this, and they don't know how to function.

Well, can we learn from that as a caregiver to realize that we don't need that? That's a vain pursuit. And at some point, let's pull off of this highway.

Let's just get off this highway and learn to settle our spirits down and be content with where we are. This is what all of scripture teaches. And even if nobody else is noticing what you do, what I do, it's okay. God notices.

And the point of it is not to be noticed. I mean, are we doing it for praise and affirmation, or are we doing this because we love somebody and we want to do the right thing on this? Is this a reflection of our ego or a reflection of our heart as caregivers? And, you know, Jesus said very clearly, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. And he was speaking to the larger problem that we do things so that it feeds something in us. And there's nothing like caregiving to help you work some of that stuff out in anonymity and in the dark places at night and all these kinds of scenarios that we have as caregivers to chisel away at that. So we let it go.

We don't hold on to that as much. And for me, it's taken a lifetime. I would love to tell you that I developed these things, these thoughts and these principles and these ideas just out of my own sheer brilliance.

But we know that's not what happens. It's out of my own sheer failure. Somebody posted on Twitter the other day, they said, how did you learn to be a caregiver? Did you have this help you with, I mean, some agency help you or train you or whatever? And I thought it was kind of an odd question. And I wrote on there, trial and error, mostly error. You know, and that's what evidently resonated the most with the survey that they gave, because that's the way it is for us as caregivers.

At least all the ones I've talked to. Maybe you started off just pristine at this and you worked it all out and had it all mapped out for you before you even started. Me? No, no, I just dove into the pool and didn't even check to see if there was water. You know, I was grateful that there was water, but I have floundered at this, flopped around and messed up and done all these kinds of things. And I've thought about this over the years for us as caregivers. What is this affirmation that we seek and how will it help us be better? And the answer I have come and this is again, 37 years of this. That information is not going to help us be better. Now it may help us feel better.

I mean, let's be honest. It always feels nice to be noticed and affirmed and appreciated for what you do, but that doesn't sustain us. You got to have more. You got to have more. You got to have more. And we realized that those are nice things, but they're not worthy of pursuing. It takes a lot of energy to pursue that.

And I just don't want to do it. I want to learn to be content with where I am. Now, the apostle Paul said this very clearly. I know what it's like to be in need.

I know what it's like to have plenty. I've learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all things through him who gives me strength. That's in his letter to the Philippians. This is at the end of Paul's life when he's writing these things. If you remember, when he started off, he wanted to give his pedigree.

Go back and look at the text. You know, he wanted to establish who he was, where he'd been trained and all the things. And by the end of his life, he's like, yeah, I'm the chief of sinners.

None of that's worthy to be compared. I'm just going to be good where I am. And I think that's our journey as believers is that we can allow the Holy Spirit to whittle those things off of us, to kind of sand it down. So that our sense of well-being is not tethered to someone else's approval. OK, there's really only one approval that we seek. And that's the one that says, well done, thou good and faithful servant. And he has promised that he's going to equip us to do this.

He's giving us everything we need in order to get that well done. But as long as we're seeking relevance and affirmation from others in our role as caregivers. Then we're going to constantly be butting up against that bitterness when we don't get it. Because who on earth is going to give that to us 24-7? And that's why I always bring in politicians and celebrities and so forth, because it's such a glaring example of that. Now, they're no more guilty of it than anybody else.

But they just have a lot bigger platforms that we can see it in high definition. And they come out and want to recapture what brought them to that center stage. And I know that that must be incredibly enticing when you've achieved on that level and you never really want to say goodbye. I'm always amazed at some who can. And I used to see a few of those people in Nashville when we lived there. One of them, I'll tell you, was Eddie Arnold.

You remember Eddie Arnold? And this was a man who was so at peace with himself. And I would see him at Cracker Barrel and he was just the most gentle of souls. Just gracious.

Didn't have this need to tell you who he was or anything else. He was always very interested. Another one, I used to sit at the Waffle House with Earl Scruggs. One of the best banjo players ever from the Beverly Hillbillies and everything else that he did.

Again, a kind soul who was not trying to impress you with all of his accomplishment, but just being who he was. Probably the greatest example I saw of this, I was working at an event many, many years ago and I was working at the front door. And we had to greet all these people coming in. It was a pretty big event and this huge limo comes up and camera lights are everywhere and it's Dolly Parton. And she's getting out of the limo.

She walks up to where I was standing with the lady who was checking everybody in. And she said, you know, are you Kim? And she says, well, I'm Dolly. Like she introduced herself, I'm Dolly.

Like we didn't know who Dolly Parton was. And I thought that was so humble and so gracious. And I thought, wow, was at peace with herself and didn't need you to affirm her.

And she could just be who she was. That always struck me. And I thought, you know, that's a good model that you can learn to just be at peace and you don't have to wear your accomplishments on your sleeves.

You could just do your job knowing that the one who matters is watching and equipping. And my desire continues to increase that I want to hear him say, well done, because I want to honor the great work that he's done in me. This show is called Hope for the Caregiver, not the Peter Rosenberger show.

My opinion is irrelevant, but the lessons I'm learning from scripture in this journey are highly relevant. And we're going to talk more about that when we come back. This is Hope for the Caregiver. We'll be right back. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver.

This is Peter Rosenberger. So glad that you're with us. Hope for the Caregiver dot com, Hope for the Caregiver dot com. By the way, if you go out to Facebook, you could join our group, Hope for the Caregiver. And I talk about this group a lot. We have a lot of things that go on in there that I don't share with everything else.

It's a group that I administer. So comments and so forth won't go off the rails or if they do, I will get on them very quickly. But I share a lot of things going on. But I want to tell you all something that's coming up.

I just want to let you know. I do have a new book coming out in May. Now, I was talking to a friend of mine who does a lot of bookings and so forth. He said, you know, you need to come out with a new book every year and some kind of new product or book every year in order to stay involved.

And I was thinking about what I just said in the last segment, you know, how to stay relevant. I can't write a new book every year. You show me a caregiver that writes a caregiving book every year. And I'll show you somebody who ain't doing a whole lot of caregiving because I can't keep that up. This is the first book I've had out since, gosh, in over five years now.

So it is something I think you guys are going to like it a lot. It's things I've been kind of almost journaling down to myself. But it's called A Minute for Caregivers, When Every Day Feels Like Monday. And I literally have these are these are one minute chapters that you can read. I timed them.

You can read them in one minute. Because think about your life as a caregiver. When's the last time you had the opportunity to sit down and read for hours at a time and follow this long treatise into anything for that matter?

We have to live almost in soundbites as caregivers. And that's OK. I mean, that's that's all right. I don't feel this burden to somehow write this long thing that is going to make me read it or anybody else read it. I thought I'll just keep it short.

So it's one minute. One minute of things that, again, I've learned the hard way and lessons I've seen from scripture. And I see these things and apply them in my life as a caregiver. And I think it'll be meaningful to you. This is what we do for one another.

So the goal is not to go out there and reinvent the wheel and me come up with something new and exciting in the world of caregiving. It's just taking us back to scripture, taking us back to scripture, taking us back to the foundational principles that guide us through this journey so that we can live more peacefully, so that we're not driven by angst. Oliver North is not only going to publish it, but he asked if he could write the forward to it. And I was just deeply moved that he made that request.

So I think you're going to be very, very pleased with this book. And it's going to reflect the things that you and I talk about on this program and the things that you and I as caregivers struggle with every day. Again, the goal is not to solve the problem that our loved ones face.

There's a bigger problem and it's our propensity as human beings. Now, you're not any more prone to it than I am or vice versa. We're all prone to this. Like the old hymn says, prone to wonder, Lord, I feel it. I love that hymn, by the way, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. It's a great hymn.

Hold on. I may have to step over to the caregiver keyboard and play that. This is a wonderful hymn. I love the first verse, of course, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. To My Heart Has Seen Thy Grace. But let me look at the third verse.

Listen to this. O to grace, how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be. Let thy goodness, like a feather, bind my wandering heart to thee. Now listen to this third verse. Prone to wonder, Lord, I feel it.

Prone to leave the God I love. Here's my heart. O take and seal it.

Seal it for thy courts above. Isn't that a great hymn? I mean, is it any wonder that I love these old hymns because they say it so beautifully, so well. But to the point is that nothing we deal with as caregivers is unique to us on a core, soul, human condition level. The circumstances that we're in are. They are very different.

They are somewhat unique to us. But the core principles, the precepts, those things are not. They are found in scripture. And when I wrote this book, I wanted just to write out things of one minute that I could just give myself and fellow caregivers of things that I have seen in scripture.

Remember again, as we said in the last segment, the goal is not to share the pain, it's to share the process. This is what scripture is filled with. Think about all the scriptures that reflect this.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not under your own understanding, but in all your ways acknowledge Him and He will direct your paths. Well, doesn't that sound comforting to you and assuring to you as a caregiver? Think about thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. Doesn't that give you a moment's pause to realize, oh, wait a minute, if I don't know what to do and if I don't know what's going on and if I feel like I'm coming apart, would it not behoove me? Every time I say behoove, I always think of the farrier that comes out here and does the shoes for the horses. Would it not behoove me with all the cattle out here? I just like that word behoove.

Would it not behoove me to go back to scripture and say, okay, what does God have to say about this? And can I say this concisely? And that's what I did with one minute. And I challenged myself to write this in 200 words or less.

And for the most part, I got it right at it for just about every one. And the title of it, it's a little bit embarrassing how I came up with the title, A Minute for Care. You've heard me talk about Standing with Hope over the years. This is the prosthetic limb ministry that Gracie envisioned after losing both of her legs. Part of that outreach is our prosthetic limb recycling program. Did you know that prosthetic limbs can be recycled?

No kidding. There is a correctional facility in Arizona that helps us recycle prosthetic limbs. And this facility is run by a group out of Nashville called CoreCivic.

We met them over 11 years ago. And they stepped in to help us with this recycling program of taking prostheses and you disassemble them. You take the knee, the foot, the pylon, the tube clamps, the adapters, the screws, the liners, the prosthetic socks. All these things we can reuse and inmates help us do it.

Before CoreCivic came along, I was sitting on the floor at our house or out in the garage when we lived in Nashville. And I had tools everywhere, limbs everywhere, and feet, boxes of them and so forth. And I was doing all this myself and I'd make the kids help me.

And it got to be too much for me. And so I was very grateful that CoreCivic stepped up and said, look, we are always looking for faith-based programs that are interesting and that give inmates a sense of satisfaction. And we'd love to be a part of this.

And that's what they're doing. And you can see more about that at standingwithhope.com slash recycle. So please help us get the word out that we do recycle prosthetic limbs. We do arms as well. But the majority of amputations are lower limb.

And that's where the focus of Standing With Hope is. That's where Gracie's life is with her lower limb prosthesis. And she's used some of her own limbs in this outreach that she's recycled. I mean, she's been an amputee for over 30 years. So you go through a lot of legs and parts and other types of materials.

And you can reuse prosthetic socks and liners if they're in good shape. All of this helps give the gift that keeps on walking. And it goes to this prison in Arizona where it's such an extraordinary ministry.

Think with that. Inmates volunteering for this. They want to do it.

And they've had amazing times with it. And I've had very moving conversations with the inmates that work in this program. And you can see, again, all of that at standingwithhope.com slash recycle. They're putting together a big shipment right now for us to ship over. We do this pretty regularly throughout the year as inventory rises.

And they need it badly in Ghana. So please go out to standingwithhope.com slash recycle and get the word out and help us do more. If you want to offset some of the shipping, you can always go to the giving page and be a part of what we're doing there.

We're purchasing material in Ghana that they have to use that can't be recycled. We're shipping over stuff that can be. And we're doing all of this to lift others up and to point them to Christ. And that's the whole purpose of everything that we do. And that is why Gracie and I continue to be standing with hope. Standing with hope dot com.