Seeing Them

As caregivers, we have so many things that hit us all the time and we can't always nail these things down by ourselves. Who helps you?

What does that look like? I'm Peter Rosenberg and I want to tell you about a program I've been a part of now for almost 10 years and that's Legal Shield. For less than $30 a month, I have access to a full law firm that can handle all kinds of things.

If I get a contract put in front of me, if I got a dispute with something, doesn't matter. I've got a full law firm that can help me navigate through all the sticky wickets that we as caregivers have to deal with. Power of attorney, medical power of attorney, I will.

Every bit of it. As a caregiver, we need someone who advocates for us and that's why I use Legal Shield. So go to caregiverlegal.com. Look on the left hand side where it says Legal Shield. Just select it.

It turns purple. It says pick a plan. It'll give you some options.

If you don't need any of those, don't select them. Check out and be protected starting today. That's caregiverlegal.com. Caregivers are everywhere in this society and if you love somebody, you're most likely going to be a caregiver.

If you live long enough, you're going to need one. So we all have a stake in this and speaking to the family caregiver, addressing the family caregiver, meeting the needs of the family caregiver is in our personal, community, and national best interest. Did you know that more than $500 billion in unpaid care is done every year by family caregivers?

That's a lot of money, even by Washington DC standards, that our country presumes upon the efforts of an untrained, unpaid workforce that is caring for the most vulnerable among us. How do we help these people? Why should we help these people? Do we help these people? These are all questions that we explore on this program and I'm so glad that you're with us.

Hopeforthecaregiver.com if you want to see more information. You know, hardly the stereotyped, smiling, uniformed women pushing the elderly in the park. If you notice, that's what caregivers are portrayed like. That we're sitting around in these serene settings and we're just looking with great affection and tenderness at an older person and we're so grateful to be there and that's not what the family caregiver is.

That is not an accurate representation of who we are. A family caregiver can be from all walks of life. Children are caregivers. Seniors are caregivers.

Men, women, professionals, non-professionals. Family caregivers are those who put themselves between a chronically impaired loved one and even worse, disaster. That's what a caregiver is and we rarely get to go to parks. You know, most of us are working at least two jobs. One is a full-time caregiver. The other trying to make a living. Most of us are putting in long hours.

Most of us don't get a day off. Most of us are doing things that we're really not very well trained at, but we're just doing them. We spend a lot of time with laundry and cleaning and domestic chores and then we're trying to juggle about six or seven different things. Pharmaceuticals, doctors appointments, you know, still again running business stuff, managing a household, budgets, taxes, all the things that are involved in living with somebody with a chronic impairment or caring for somebody with a chronic impairment.

You find anywhere where there's trauma, where there's pain, where there's find anywhere where there's trauma, disease, including addiction, disorders, and mental illness and you will see a family caregiver. It's challenging to know what to say to a family caregiver. That's why I want to take a little bit in this opening segment here of the program just to talk about that because a lot of people don't know what to say and in the absence of not knowing what to say, they'll either say nothing or something goofy and they'll try to button it up because it is uncomfortable. And it's okay to say nothing, but it's not okay to avoid or isolate or ostracize. That is not okay.

Saying nothing is actually not a bad thing. If you look at Job 2 13, his friends sat there with him for seven days and said nothing because they were aghast at aghast at the suffering that he had to go through. And it's when they started talking and speculating about why he had to go through it, that's when the wheels came off theologically.

And it's really kind of interesting. The book of Job is a very interesting book because God allows 30 something chapters of bad theology to be on display and just lays it all out there. These guys sit there just trying to figure out why this happened to Job and none of them ever got it right. Not one of them, not even Job. And we have no record of God ever explaining himself to any of them, including Job.

Now we know the backstory of what happened and whoever wrote Job knows the backstory of what happened, but there's no record of Job ever knowing. And God is not in the business of explaining himself, but that does not absolve us from ministering one another just because we don't know all the answers. In fact, we're not required to know all the answers. In fact, we're not capable of knowing all the answers and that's all right. But we've been invited to, asked to, and mandated to go into the distress of people's lives with the confidence of gospel ministry to be able to speak to them, minister to them, be with them, communicate to them in a way that they can understand human connection and the saving power of Christ and the transformative power of the gospel, the healing power of the gospel. And the question is, are we doing that? And if so, what does that look like?

And if not, why? Because Jesus was pretty clear on this. Reading from Matthew 25, verse 34, then the king will say to those on his right, come you who are blessed of my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty. He gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you invited me in naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me.

I was in prison and he came to me. Then the righteous will answer him, Lord, when did we see you hungry, feed you, thirsty, or give you something to drink? And when did we see you as a stranger and invite you in or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and come to you? And the king will answer and say unto them, truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it for one of the least of these brothers or sisters of mine, you did it for me.

Then he turns right around and says, then he will also say to those on his left, depart from me you accursed people into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty. You gave me nothing to drink. I was a stranger. You did not invite me in naked and you did not clothe me.

Sick and in prison and you did not visit me. Then they themselves also will answer, Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or as a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not take care of you? And then he will answer them, truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it for one of the least of these, you did not do it for me either.

These will go away into eternal punishment with the righteous into eternal life. There's no ambiguity there, is there? There is not one iota of ambiguity. He's very clear in what he's looking for, what he's expecting. And sometimes we don't know what that looks like, but if our hearts are attuned to what God's heart is attuned to, then we'll see it.

We'll have opportunities to be able to go into those situations. And he's not asking us to fix everything. He's asking us to minister, to minister to others the same way he's ministered to us because he came to us in our broken estate, in our, you know, messed up lives.

Don't think for one moment that our lives need less saving than others. We are all wretched and need a savior, dead in our sins. And so I know it's difficult to know what to say sometimes because sometimes the heartache is too much. Even the Holy Spirit groans in words that we can't even process.

I get that. We're not required to go in and be glib and have a great vocabulary. We're just required to minister. We are asked to go and show the same grace and comfort that we ourselves have received. And one of the ways you could start with this is if you're not a caregiver, but you want to be able to speak to them, you know them in your congregation, for example, if you're a pastor or you're a counselor and somebody comes into your office and you don't know where to start, how about with this, these words right here, I see you and the magnitude of what you carry. And I hurt with you. Start with that.

Just start with that and see where it goes from there. William Blake once said, can I see another's woe and not be in sorrow too? As believers, can we see another's woe and not grieve and not mourn with them? Scripture says we mourn with those who mourn. We grieve with those who grieve. That's part of the journey. And this is the heart of our savior.

This is Peter Rosenberg. This is Hope for the Caregiver. Hopeforthecaregiver.com.

We'll be right back. 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. And 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. I 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 conversation 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. standingwithhope.com