The Quagmire of Enabling

Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver.

This is Peter Rosenberger. This is the program for you as a caregiver and I am America's caregiver. So thrilled to have you along for today to talk about things that are related to strengthening the family caregivers principles that we know as caregivers that will sustain not only us but if applied can sustain a nation, can equip us. I talked about that last week when I mentioned the three things right off the bat that caregivers deal with all the time. Sustainability on our budget, boundaries, and the loss of identity. All those things are facing our country right now in unprecedented ways. The principles that we live by as caregivers would affect that.

It would. We need to have boundaries. Sustainability. How sustainable is a 34 trillion dollar debt with another trillion dollars every hundred days just to pay the bills?

How sustainable is that? And how can a country endure if people don't even know what it means to be an American? How can we endure this? We got people in this country don't even know what it's like to be a man or a woman. The Supreme Court justice says we got to get a biologist to tell us what that is.

How does that work? Y'all are y'all happy with that? Does anybody see a problem with that? Well I do. And that's why these principles that we talk about on this program that you and I know will affect.

They will hold up. It's not just for us as caregivers. These are solid biblical principles that we talk about and it applies across the board.

Here's another one. Enabling. How much enabling are you seeing in our culture today? Now as caregivers we understand that. Some of us have fallen into that trap and it is a very difficult quagmire to to get out of. It takes a lot of work. But we've got to stop enabling somebody that has an impairment, particularly when it comes to addiction and alcoholism.

As long as we enable it, it'll continue. And speaking of which, look at what they're doing in San Francisco. I thought this was a parody. I really did. I didn't think it was a real story.

But go research it for yourself and see that they have places now where alcoholics are able to go and nurses are giving them vodka and they can sleep it off and get a place to stay and, you know, they're just giving them booze. They're bartenders and they've spent like, I don't know, five million dollars a year for this. I could not believe it when I saw this. And then I thought to myself, why can I believe it?

Because, you know, it's California, San Francisco. But think about the reasoning behind that. You are giving something that is poison to somebody. I know they're an addict. I know they're an alcoholic, but you're not helping them. Maybe they, it helps them with their DTS for that moment, but you're still killing them. And this is not helping them. You're spending an enormous amount of money to supplement their addiction. As caregivers, we understand how easily we can fall into that trap, but we also understand the path out of it.

How many of you all are walking in that now? Where you've had a loved one where you spent your blood, sweat, and treasure enabling and now you've been able to distance yourself from this and recognize that they're going to have to work this out on their own. And they're going to have to reach rock bottom before they ask for help. The prodigal son did not come to his senses while he was just going through money and living a licentious life. He came to his senses when he was feeding the pigs and looking at what the pigs were eating and thinking this looked pretty appetizing.

And that's when he came to his senses. That's a principle that is the human condition. And unless it hurts bad enough, unless we're allowed to enjoy the fruits of sin to the point where we cry out, we won't cry out. Pastor friend of mine has said often it's difficult to cry out to a savior that you don't think you need.

How many people with an addiction, how many people with an impairment like that, with an alcoholism will say, I don't have a problem. I'm okay. But we're not okay.

None of us are okay. That's why we need a savior. But as long as we have a culture that is quick to enable, nothing's going to change.

Well, let me correct that. Yes, something will change. It will get worse. And I'm going to go from talking about being a caregiver to just meddling. But I can't help but look at what's going on in the White House and anybody that tries to tell me that Joe Biden is in full control of his faculties.

I can't take them seriously because I could see right in front of me. And those of us who've been caregivers long enough understand what impairment looks like. And when you have somebody who's being propped up just so people can be in power. Well, that's not new.

We've talked about this on this program. That's what Colonel Tom Parker did with Elvis. And you go through rock star after rock star pushed out on stage, even if they're staggering to go out there and perform because that was the moneymaker. And you look at politician after politician. This is nothing new to Joe Biden. Edith Wilson did that with her husband Woodrow. And you just go down the list. There's this over and over and over.

You have this kind of thing where people will keep people in power just because it suits their purposes, not because it's good for that person. I told you the story of Strom Thurmond, senior Senator from my home state of South Carolina. He's at a reception there in Washington. Guy looks over and said, look at that. And he's over there stuffing. He's got barbecue sauce dripping out of his coat pockets because he's been sticking chicken wings in his coat pocket. He was in his nineties.

It's like 95 or so. And he was a US Senator fourth in line to the presidency. How many people by show of hands think that was a good idea, but it served the purposes of the people that were getting power because of that. They weren't thinking of the country. They weren't thinking of Strom Thurmond. They were thinking of themselves. This works for me.

This works for me. And as caregivers, we understand that we can't do that. We cannot compromise someone else for our benefit. And at the same time, we cannot compromise ourselves for someone else's addiction or impairment.

And these are things that work across the board for our country. I, you know, I, I'm just one person, one voice. I don't have a lot of say so. And I don't believe that the white house is going to call me up and ask me my opinion, but I'm not an idiot. And I have intelligence guided by experience and a lot of experience to say, something's wrong. And if you can't see it, then you're just playing into the delusion or the, or even worse, you have nefarious intent and you refuse to see it. And it doesn't mean that you have to be anti-Democrat party to call it out for what it is. It doesn't mean that you have to be pro-Trump or pro-Republican to call it out what it is.

Sometimes you just got to call balls and strikes. You know, how many of you all think that Trump would benefit from having somebody with some really good theology close to him? I think that would be helpful so that he can understand the things of God. If he's going to speak on these things, then have somebody that can give him some good counsel on it. I don't expect him to be a theologian. I don't expect him to, to know a lot of these things, but if he's going to speak on it, my request is that somebody be there to help and not people sit around and just enabling the promulgation of bad spiritual teachings or weak at best.

You see what I'm talking about? We know these things as caregivers. We have to seek counsel other than ourselves. We have to lean not on our own understanding. That's the whole point of it, of why God put that in scripture.

We were never designed to lean on our own understanding. We were designed not to, to be completely in sync with the Father through the Holy Spirit, just like Jesus was. Again, I've had this conversation with you all. In all of my studies and all of my readings and all of my teachings that I've heard, I've come to two conclusions. Sin is a bigger problem than we think. Sin is a bigger problem than we think. Sin is a bigger problem than we think it is. And if we don't respect how big a problem sin is, we're never going to respect the grace that ministers to us in it. We're never going to respect the cross.

We don't understand the magnitude of what had to happen. And so when you see a scripture that says, don't lean on your own understanding, don't trust yourself. The worst thing you could tell people is to trust your heart. I don't want to trust my heart.

I've seen my heart at work. I want to trust his heart. So when you're dealing with somebody who has any kind of addiction, the last thing you want to do is trust your heart. What does scripture say? Trust God's heart. Trust Him. Lean not on your understanding.

Trust Him and acknowledge Him in all your ways and He'll direct your paths. Well, how, how many of you all would like to see that in our country's leadership? Well then what are we going to do about it?

Well, all we do is vote, but we could tell people, we could help educate people, understand what scripture says. These principles are bedrock. They do not, they do not fail.

Okay? Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall remain, scripture says. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.

This is what we anchor ourselves on. So when you see somebody enabling somebody, whether it be a political figure, I've seen churches that had shrines to pastors who were no longer there, kept the pastor's office just the way it was. I've seen churches that had us.

The pastor had been gone for years, but they left it as kind of a shrine. What do you think about that? Do you think that's a good idea? When you see people doing that, their priorities are mixed up. Why are they doing this?

Ask yourself why. What are they getting out of it? What benefit does this serve? I want to honor people who have served well. I want to honor people who have done great things, but I don't want to honor to the point of not seeing it for what it is. We don't want to be propping up a politician that can't put three sentences together or that's putting barbecued wings in his coat pocket at a big reception.

We don't want to do that kind of stuff because that's not healthy. The principles that apply here work across the board. This is Peter Rosenberger. This is Hope for the Caregiver. We'll be right back. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver.

This is Peter Rosenberger. This is the program for you as a family caregiver. Healthy caregivers make better caregivers. Healthy caregivers make better caregivers.

How do you feel today? Hey, I want to circle back to something I was talking about in the last block about enabling. I want to drill down on this a little bit more. The purpose is not to expose a politician. They just have to be the ones that get the most airtime in today's culture with this sort of thing because people are staying way past their prime because they become an institution. So we can see it so glaringly. It's not new.

It's just been around a long time. There are always people who are in power who have stayed longer than their abilities. That's just going to be a fact and the same thing on the stage and in the public light because that's where money and power are. So the principle for us is not to necessarily excoriate one politician or the other. They certainly give us fodder for that, but that's not the purpose. The purpose is, I tell you what, you know that phrase that you'll hear sometimes in recovery with people who say, if you spot it, you got it because there's always people who are telling you what's wrong with you, but they're projecting what's going on with them. Well, let's flip this around for us as caregivers.

If we got it, we could spot it. In other words, if you've wrestled with something and you've worked through that issue, maybe it was you were struggling with anger, maybe you struggled with lust, maybe you're struggling with whatever, it doesn't matter, fill in the blank of whatever you struggle with and you've worked through this in your Christian life and not necessarily, you know, we're not going to be completely free of any of this stuff until we get to heaven, but you know the point. You've wrestled with this enemy, if you will, so you know your enemy.

And then you start to see it in other people. Well, what are the things that we wrestle with here as caregivers? Okay. We talked about this with boundaries. We wrestled with boundaries. How many of you all struggle with boundaries? How many of you all have ever had to struggle with boundaries?

Okay. Now, you're familiar with what this looks like now, aren't you? When you have compromised your own boundaries and you've allowed people to take advantage of you, or you've overstepped your boundaries and you've inflicted your will on other people, you're familiar with this, for those of you who struggle with that.

And I would suggest to you that all of us have at some point. Don't you think it's easier for you to see when somebody is acting improperly without boundaries? They're overstepping or they're not enforcing their own boundaries. Don't you see that that's easier for you to spot that now?

Yeah. What's the same thing with enabling? How many of you all have struggled with enabling someone? And I would suggest to you as caregivers, we're all in that particular boat.

How many of you all have been enabled? I would imagine there's a fair number here at this audience that have been enabled and that poor behavior has been able to endure due to enabling. Whether we're enabling someone else's poor behavior or they're enabling ours, either way, we wrestle with that as caregivers.

Anybody that, again, anybody that tells you that they don't wrestle with that as a caregiver, they haven't done it long enough. You will, because it's the human condition. And scripture shows us the human condition where people are enabled to perpetuate bad behavior and no one stands up to them to confront them or no one gets confronted.

This principle I'm talking about, if you got it, you spot it, you got it, you got it, you spot it, enabling and all this stuff. One of the most stark places in scripture is when Nathan the prophet confronts David and he tells a story about the man, the rich man who took the little lamb belonging to this little family and killed it and offered it as a meal to his guest, to impress his guest. And David was just outraged. You know, that's unfair. That's, that's terrible. This guy needs to be killed.

I mean, we need to take care of this. And Nathan just lays out, David, thou art the man. And confronting him with his sin, with Bathsheba and Uriah, that was so graphically laid out in chapter 11. This is 2 Samuel chapter 11. And in chapter 12 is when Nathan confronts him.

We're all familiar with the story, but there are nuances of the story that really illuminate what I'm talking about here. Look at the, uh, the last verse in that, in verse 27. David brought Bathsheba to his house.

She had the son. And then it says this, but the thing that David had done displeased the Lord. God saw this, but he was displeased.

And so Nathan shows up and confronts David in his sin. He was being enabled to do this. Generals and he was the king. He got away with it. He was the king.

He got away with it. So he thought, and Nathan confronted him and confronted him hard. David, a man after God's own heart, did something this heinous, because this is what could happen when we don't stand up to it.

When we don't have people around us that will speak truth into our lives. There were generals that David had that could have looked at the king and said, I'm not participating in this. David probably would have had him killed. He was a pretty violent man and they didn't stand up to him.

And look at the carnage that followed. Enabling is a terrible trap that all of us teeter around the edges of at any given point and can be easily ensnared in this. Our judgment becomes askew or we become self-vindication specialists and we think we're entitled to it.

And we enable ourselves to do such and such because of deceit, because of whatever else. Our hearts, you know that phrase, trust your heart? Nah, don't do that. Okay.

Don't do that. What about it's your heart do you want to trust? The only heart you could trust is God's heart. He will never lead you into this, but our sin causes us to hover in this area. And without clear direction, without clear confrontation, without objective counsel, we will find ourselves enabling others, enabling ourselves or allowing others to enable us.

And there's no path out of this that's going to be easy. And so when you see politicians and leaders and so forth doing this, movie stars, whatever, it doesn't matter from Biden, who's a Democrat who to, you know, Woodrow Wilson, who was a Republican and Edith Wilson, it doesn't matter. It crosses party lines. I'm not so sure there wasn't enabling going on for Ronald Reagan at the last part of his term.

You know, and he, he came out and admitted he had Alzheimer's, but you know, it started showing before then, you know, it did. And I'm not here to necessarily castigate any of these people, other than use them as a point to say, if we got it, we could spot it. We deal with this. And so I am going to challenge you on one thing though.

And I'm challenging myself, though, and I'm challenging myself on this. If we understand this principle, if we see the dangers of this, if we could go back and anchor ourselves in scripture and see that this is the condition of mankind, this is our fallen state. We are prone to this. I love what the, the old hymn writer said, prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.

And come thou found of every blessing. You know, we're prone to this. Once we start seeing this and grappling with it, wrestling with it, do we have a stewardship responsibility to say to others, Hey, this is not a good thing. This is not good. I've, I've told you all this many times on this program. I'm not a there, there kind of guy. I am not here to offer consolation. That is not what I do.

I will give you insights that I've learned over a lifetime of this. But one of the recurring things that I do on this program is to say, don't go down there. I'm not a there, there guy.

There, there, there, there. It's going to be okay. No, I'm a don't go down there. That is a bad place.

You know how I know that? Because I've been down there. It is a bad place. It is a dangerous place. It is a, it is a quagmire that we could find ourselves in who is going to tell the president of the United States, the first lady of the United States, or the chief of staff or anybody else that's in power there at the white house, that the emperor ain't got any clothes on. I mean, we could shout it from way out here in the hinterlands, but until they decide to own this, who's, who's going to tell them when they surround themselves with people who are invested in propping this farce up, you know, who was going to tell Colonel Tom Parker that Elvis needed to be in the hospital.

I got to, I got to tell you, I admire Bruce Willis's family. They pulled him off the set and they sheltered him from causing any more damage to himself or to others. He was becoming a danger on the set.

Now this is a guy that has brought in who knows how much money, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars for a lot of people. And you know, that, that took a lot of courage. It takes a lot of courage to confront people. It takes a lot of courage to confront human frailty. And it takes a lot of courage to sometimes bite your tongue and learn to like the taste of blood and let it play out how it's going to play out and let the chips fall where they may.

It takes a lot of courage. Don't you know that when Nathan stood there in front of the king, that it took such boldness and courage and faith and trust in God. David was not known for being temperate.

He was known for violence. And Nathan's getting ready to lay into him with the Word of God. I heard a great sermon one time. The pastor said, you ain't never had a whoop until God tells you to go out and cut your own switch. That's a, that's a pretty good sermon. I think it's a great sermon.

That's a, that's a pretty good statement right there. And I sadly, I know this and it's, when God lays into you like this, you ain't going to forget it. And not only did David not forget it, but it's memorialized in God's Word for all of us to remember that we are susceptible to convincing ourselves that anything is okay for us. We are easily led by deceit. We are easily led by this trap of enabling, whether it's enabling someone else, being enabled or enabling ourselves. And the only way we can push back against this is to go back to what scripture says. There's wisdom in a multitude of counselors.

Thy word have I hid my heart that I may not sin against thee. So when you see people that are struggling with this, whether it's on the political stage or just in your own home, what is our stewardship opportunity? Because it's not just about us having some kind of self-actualization. Let's use this information to help educate others. Part of being a healthy caregiver is exporting that healthiness to others. The more we say it, the more we live in this area, the healthier we become and the healthier we help others do it. If you got it, you can spot it. If you spot it, say something about it, deal with it, point them to scripture, point them to solid ground.

They may not listen and they may not respond well, but I don't see anywhere in scripture that says that absolves us of the responsibility of saying something. It's called stewardship. 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.

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 prostheses 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. Thank you for 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. standingwithhope.com