Hey, do you know a caregiver in your life who is struggling with something and you don't really know what to say?
Well, guess what? I do. So get them this book. It's called A Minute for Caregivers. When every day feels like Monday.
They're one minute chapters. And I'd love for you to put that in the hands of somebody who is struggling as they care for a chronically impaired loved one. And it could be somebody dealing with an aging parent or special needs child. Somebody that has an alcoholic or an addict in their family. Somebody who has a loved one who has had a traumatic experience, mental illness.
There's so many different kinds of impairments. There's always a caregiver. How do you help a caregiver?
How do you help somebody who helps somebody? That's where I come in. That's where this book comes in. And that's what I think you're going to find will be incredibly meaningful to them. And if you're going through that right now, they get a copy for you.
Friends don't let friends care give alone. I speak fluent caregiver for decades of this. This will help. I promise you it'll pull you back away from the cliff a little bit, point you to safety, give you something solid to stand on so that you or that caregiver you know can be a little healthier as they take care of somebody who is not healthy. Caregivers make better caregivers. It's called a minute for caregivers when every day feels like Monday wherever books are sold. And for more information, go to PeterRosenberger.com.
PeterRosenberger.com and this is the program for you as a family caregiver. How are you doing? How are you holding up?
What's going on with you? That is the question that this show asks. Now, other shows don't. This one does.
Why? Because healthy caregivers make better caregivers. And it is healthy for us to assess what is going on with us, particularly in the light of scripture, not just to have a time of emoting our feelings and just saying woe is unto me, but to instead say, look, this is an honest assessment of what's going on. Look at the Psalms.
Virtually every one of them. You're going to see some manifestation of that where the Psalmist is struggling. And yet the Psalmist will then bring that struggle to God and say, OK, Lord, I remember your promises. I remember your faithfulness.
And Jeremiah does this in Lamentations 3. You know, I got all this stuff going on, but I remember this about you, and therefore I have hope. We're going to talk about what's going on with us as family caregivers. That's the purpose of this program so that you can have a path towards being stronger, calmer, healthier, and dare I say it, even more joyful while you serve as a family caregiver.
Now, how do I know this? Well, because I'm doing it and I have been doing it for quite some time. And I'm not talking about just the multiple weeks now I've been here in the hospital with Gracie.
I'm still in Denver with her following her surgery. I'm talking about doing this for decades since 1986, as a matter of fact. So, yeah, I got some I got some skin in this particular game. And what does that mean for you?
Well, it means that I have pushed out extensively on these principles. Where is solid ground? Because that's that's a hard thing to know when you when you're in the throes of it.
You don't know where solid ground is. And my mother called me the other day and she was asking me, how are you doing? I was walking back and forth to the hospital. I stayed at a hotel right across the street where a lot of families stay who have someone in this particular hospital, this big teaching hospital.
And there's also a children's hospital there. So a lot of people dealing with long term stuff like what we deal with. And and I'll give you a report here on Gracie's second. My mom asked me, she said, well, how are you doing? And I said, well, I'm you know, I'm doing OK.
I'm right here. She asked me what I'm asking you. How are you doing? How are you feeling? And I said, I am resolved.
Without resolution, I am resolved. And she said what? You know, she she prayed more. Mom doesn't really pray. She just is mom. She just asked me questions as a mother should.
And she said, how do you you know, how are you handling this? And I said, I have good theology. Now, I don't say that in a boastful way. I say that in a grateful way, because I have been the recipient of very good teaching. And ministers of the gospel who have poured into me extensively, I have read, I have studied, I am going through sermon after sermon, after lecture after lecture, going through these things because I realized along this journey that there was not going to be a tidy bow wrapped end to the things that Gracie and I deal with. That this is such a long haul.
Four decades is a long time. And I've got to have something that sustains me in this. That keeps me grounded. That keeps me from despairing.
And then allows me to offer that to Gracie in her distress. So what do you think that is? I mean, do you see any self-help books? For somebody like me that I haven't written already? Where am I going to get this from? What do I lean on?
What do I stand on? You know, I understand if somebody's going through something that's maybe a month or two. I understand somebody going through something is maybe a year or two.
But when you're dealing with four decades. What does that look like to you? I'll tell you exactly what it looks like because that's how I live.
This is my life and it has been for some time. And it looks like understanding a couple of core principles in a visceral way, deep down in your DNA. And one of them is if he's Lord at all, then he is Lord of all. And as I was sharing with my mother, these are those points in your life when you say, Christian, what do you believe? Now we talk about these things a lot. We say that we believe these things. But when you are spending the kind of time that Gracie and I spend in this kind of trench, you're going to have to come to a place of understanding of, Christian, what do you believe? What anchors you? You know that old hymn, by the way, I wish I had the caregiver keyboard here, but I did not bring it to Denver with me from Montana.
I will be getting back to the caregiver keyboard. And when we're home in several weeks, it appears. But you know that old hymn, my hope is built on nothing less. But look at verse two. When darkness veils his lovely face, I rest on his unchanging grace. In every high and stormy gale, my anchor holds within the veil.
Now, let me be the first to tell you, I wish that I was one of these wise and and sagacious leaders that could offer great insights and teaching and everything else. I'm not. Y'all know this by now. I'm doing good some days just to be able to tie my shoes, okay?
Y'all know this. But I don't require an enormous amount of intellect or even wisdom to know that when I sit down on a certain chair, it's not going to collapse. Because I have experience with that chair, okay?
It's just that simple. I can walk on a wooden floor and know that I'm not going to go through because I have walked on that floor before and I know that that floor is solid. Experience is all I'm talking about.
This is what I've experienced. These are not things of theory to me. So when I walk on something, I know it's solid and I can tell you this is solid because this is where I walk.
Walk in the footsteps that I'm walking if that helps you because I know this is solid. Now that's a bold statement, but I'm not making it out of theory or anything like that. I'm making it out of experience. Hey, I've done this before. When I press a note on the caregiver keyboard, if I press middle C, I know what it's going to sound like because I've played it a lot. And when I play a minor chord, I know what it's going to sound like because I've played it a lot.
Okay? That's how you know. What is the old saying they used to say about how bankers can tell counterfeit bills? Because they hold the real thing so much.
They spend so much time holding real cash, they can tell when fake bills come through. Isn't that interesting? Can we do that as believers?
Do we hold the real thing so much that we can tell the fake when we see it? This is what I've learned in my journey as a caregiver. Now, I'm a long ways from learning it, but I am learning.
How about that? And I've got enough credible experience that I want to offer it to my fellow caregivers. Say, hey, look, this is a path that I found is supporting me, is sustaining me, and here's what it's sustaining me in. Now, I tell people all the time, you're welcome to do whatever you want to do. I'm not a there-there kind of guy. I'm a don't go down there. That is a bad path because I've been down in those places and I've had ample time to make more mistakes than most of you guys will. OK, I've probably forgotten more mistakes than most of you are going to make.
I've just been doing it for so long. So I know that this is solid ground. And when I tell you that if he is Lord at all, then he is Lord of all, that's a solid place. When I say my anchor holds within the veil, that's what that means, is that whatever stormy gales come our way. When darkness veils his lovely face, even in the ICU, which we've been there now for several weeks, we rest on his unchanging grace, and that is hope for the caregiver. Hope for the caregiver.
We will be right back. Welcome back to Hope for the caregiver. This is Peter Rosenberger and I am so very glad to have an opportunity to spend some time with you.
Hope for the caregiver dot com or PeterRosenberger dot com, whichever you want to go to the same place. And as promised in the last block, I would like to give you an update on what we've been doing here with Gracie and tell you how she's doing. She's doing fine. It's been a haul for her. I mean, it has been a tough journey.
There's no question. But she is stronger than elevator rope and she is recovering nicely from her second surgery. Now, what they've had to do is had to go and cut hip flexors. She's been bent over so long that her hip flexors basically calcified. They were so contracted that she couldn't stretch them out.
So there was no physical therapy that was going to do this. And they cut them and moved them down so that now she can stand up straight because they fixed her back over the last couple of years. They've had a couple surgeries to do that and they fixed her back. But her hip flexors were still so bent and contracted that she couldn't stand up straight. So her body was at war with itself and she was in quite a bit of pain. And she's still in a lot of pain, but that's healing from the surgery. It's been a pretty painful surgery. She's had to be on her back or kind of on her side.
They've had this since they've done both. She can't lay on one side while this one's healing kind of thing. And it's been a bit of a journey for her. And so she's handled it, I think, better than anybody I would know. But she has a ways to go.
A lot of physical therapy involved. I did get a text, which you don't normally get a text like this, but I was working on the program this week and doing some writing over here. I'm across the street from her. And so I walked back and forth as she gets upset with me if I do it at night because it's not the safest neighborhood.
We're in Aurora, Colorado, where you've been seeing a lot of the Venezuelan gangs. I came out one night from the hospital and I could hear gunfire. Now, that doesn't bother me too much in Montana. We hear that all the time. But, you know, Montana is the most armed per capita state in the country, which means it's the most armed per capita place in the world.
Let's just be frank or Dean or Sammy, whoever you want to be. But it's the point of it is, is that it's not a safe place. And a friend of mine has let me borrow his car, so I will drive over there in the late afternoon and leave the car and come back when it's dark. But I just usually walk back and forth to the hospital. I get in at least 5000 steps a day. Which is good for me because they have a breakfast buffet here and I'm trying to stay on my weight program. I really am. I'm doing admirably.
I have it parked out like I did last year when I was in the hospital. I mean, I gained a good bit of weight. When you leave a footprint in dry concrete, it's time to lose weight. And I have.
And you can see more about that at the site if you go under resources. And my friend Dale's helped me do it. And she texts me and fusses at me if I'm not following it to the letter of the law. She's a cruel task master. No, I'm just kidding.
She's not. But anyway, so I was in my hotel room working and I get a text from the physical therapist said, Hey, this is Mary. Can you bring Gracie's left leg over? I mean, who gets a text like that? You know, so, you know, it reminded me of that bit that I did with Jeff Foxworthy many, many years ago. When we did you might be a caregiver if and he went off script on the outtakes. You could see it where he says, you know, if anybody's ever seriously ask you, baby, have you seen my left leg? So I sent the text for the physical therapist to Jeff. And he wrote back says, you know, most people go their entire life without getting a text like that. But that's pretty normal for you.
It sadly is. So I did bring Gracie's left leg and now we'll bring her also her right leg because she's ready to start hopefully getting up on both of them and start walking. And that's going to be the sign where she could start moving and getting some some good blood flow and getting these muscles stretched out. She's got a long recovery, but I think that once she's able to start getting up and moving around, it's going to go quickly or quicker. And so I would appreciate your continued prayers for that. I mean, she has a hard journey.
And but but it has not been without deeply meaningful moments. We had Johnny Todd, I called her in recovery. She actually FaceTime while I was sitting in recovery with her and she just sang to her.
And you could hear Johnny's voice echoing through the post-op area there at the hospital and all these people there. And Johnny is singing to Gracie as Gracie has sung to her. And there's a deeply meaningful moments from somebody who understands Gracie's journey and Gracie understands her journey between the two of them.
They have a hundred years of disability. That's that's a long time when you say. But she's Gracie is is she's been working on this blog that you can see, if you wish.
And I'd really recommend for you to take a look at this. She dictates to me, which she's very good at doing that, by the way. She's got years, decades even of dictating to me. I'll just leave that right there and let you all just deal with it what you want to deal with it.
But she does have experience in dictating to me and because she can't write very well because her hand has been messed up with the nerves in her hand. So she tells me what her thoughts are and then I write it down and I've been putting it out in her blog and she's got her newest entry out at the website. And it's really worth your time to take a look. It's pain, memory and the questions we can't ignore. Pain, memory and the questions we can't ignore. And, you know, you get a lot of questions when you're in pain. What do you what are your questions when you're dealing with pain, when you're dealing with something that just doesn't want to end, that is just overwhelming to you? What are your questions? What do you cry out to God?
And I would imagine it's going to echo, like I said in the last block, about some of the Psalms where David cried out, you know, Lord, why? Lord, how? Why are you letting this happen?
How long? You know, do you see me? I mean, I got to tell you, I have had many, many questions and I've offered my consulting services to the Almighty on numerous occasions.
I have done numerous to count. I have really offered my wisdom and counsel to God. You know, He's yet to take me up on it. And my father had a great saying.
He would often pass on to us. He would say, God's got this problem. He thinks He's God. And, you know, that says it all right there, doesn't it?
And I go back to what I said in the last block. Do we believe Him? Do we anchor ourselves in this? It's one thing to talk about things as Christians. You know, we say a lot of things to each other and a lot of platitudes. But when it comes down to it, when we're living in the kind of circumstances that we live in, those of you in this audience, where you're looking at very distressing things day in and day out, I'm going to be, after I do this program, be with Gracie back in the ICU.
And we'll be there probably, I don't know, maybe she'll get out Sunday, maybe Monday. And it's incredibly difficult. And so I go back to the whole thing of Christian, what do you believe? And Gracie tackled this in this blog.
She's been doing this series of blogs on pain. And we open it up with this quote from C.S. Lewis from his, from Till We Have Faces.
I don't know if you've ever read that. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face, questions die away. What other answer would suffice?
Isn't that extraordinary? We're looking for answers that we can't possibly understand. There's no way that somebody's going to tell Gracie or me, even if God spoke to us audibly and said, this is why I am doing this, how can we understand that?
How can we process this? It's unfathomable to us. We're not him. He is other.
And nothing is going to make me smack my forehead and say, oh, well, thank you, now I feel better. Because that's not what we really want. What we really want, as C.S.
Lewis says in this, is him. We don't articulate it that way. We cry out for relief. But truly, we were designed for him. He is the answer. Sin keeps us from that, and so he invaded a daring rescue mission, if you will, to our sin-enslaved, distressed estate and gave us himself.
That's his name, Emmanuel, God with us. Not God answers us. Not God provides us with all the information that we want, but God with us. Jesus didn't say to his disciples, lo, I will give you all the answers, even until the end of the age. He said, no, I am with you.
He himself is the answer. Now, again, I go back to, do we believe this? Or is this something just real nice to think about in a Sunday school lesson? It's one thing to think about this at a Wednesday night service in a Sunday school lesson. It's a whole different thing to think about this in the ICU. I can promise you that.
The question is, Christian, what do you believe? And Gracie talks about this in this article. I'll give you a preview, all right?
Is that okay? Here's what this article says. It asks why God and what kind of God would do such and such in the heat of the moment. But as time passes, the injury heals, the broken femur mends, the ink dries on the divorce papers, the grass grows on the grave, and we shove the theological questions back in a box unanswered until the next trauma reopens them. But for those of us with chronic pain, the questions never get put away. We never stop saying, ow. The reaction never gets a break. When you live with relentless pain, you must deal with your reactions. From screaming and swearing to questioning God's goodness, I've wrestled with all of it. If I don't, I'll go barking mad.
She says those are my words, not hers, but barking mad is a good one. It describes it well, doesn't it? Some try to numb the pain with drugs, alcohol, or other anesthetics. I've been on pain medication for more than 40 years.
Let me assure you, there is no pill on earth that can answer these questions. We must come to an understanding of God that transcends suffering, sorrow, and loss. This is what God, in His mercy and grace, has led me to wrestle with. This is from Gracie's new blog post on chronic pain. She's doing a whole series on these. This is called Pain, Memory, and the Questions We Can't Ignore.
We cannot ignore these questions. Would you like to take a look at that? I'd really recommend it.
She has a very unique way of approaching these topics, and I think you'll find it very meaningful. You can go see this at the blog, PeterRosenberger.com. Look at the top where it says resources, and you'll see the blog. It's right there, okay? Hey, this is Hope for the Caregiver. Don't go away. We'll be right back. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver.
This is Peter Rosenberger. Glad to be able to spend some time with you today. Thanks for letting me do so. And if you want to find out more about what we do, how we do it, why we do it, who we're doing it for, you can go out to the website, hopeforthecaregiver.com. Hopeforthecaregiver.com.
And while you are there, you can access the blog that I mentioned in the last block. You can sign up for our e-letter. We have a monthly letter that goes out just once a month. We don't do these crazy e-mails like some of these organizations do that send out something every day all day long. Just do once a month. That's too much work to do.
I'm still a full-time caregiver, you all. And our organization is mom and pop, and mostly right now just pop. So, you know, we don't do mass e-mail mailings, but when we do, we have good stuff that we send to you.
I do an article. Gracie does one that I mentioned last month. We send that out, and then we feature a song from Gracie or me for that month. We've got something very special coming up for next month. We have our patient of the month that we treat with Standing with Hope. So we'll have a picture and a little story about that individual and all kinds of things about that from the book. We have a quote of the month that we often do that ties in. And by the way, I just saw the promo for my new book that will be out this fall. It's called A Caregiver's Companion, and it's a list of quotes that I have put together over the years, and then I marry those quotes with a scripture or a stanza from a hymn that I think you'll find very meaningful. It's very easy to read. It's just something you just pick up, open up. There's something right there that's going to strengthen and equip you as a caregiver right in the moment, not six months from now, not six days from now, not six hours from now, right now. And I'm very excited about this.
And so if you sign up for the e-letter there, it's very easy to do. You'll be getting information about that as we get closer. On a total tangent and a side here, I got to ask you something. Have you noticed this a lot lately?
I'm here in Denver and I'm around a lot of young people who are taking care of Gracie, a lot of nurses and medical staff and so forth. And there seems to be this consistent speech affectation or something where T's are being dropped. Have you noticed this? Where people will say things like, not button, button, not button, button, or important. I say important.
But that's not how people are talking then. They're saying important, important. And it's like this glottal stop or something going on and people aren't pronouncing words properly. Have you noticed that? I mean, am I the only one? Is this just weird to you?
Because it's odd. I mean, I grew up in the south, okay? So I get words mispronounced and say things all the time. That's just part of being in the south. But then again, you get it up north too. Like Boston, and they'll leave the R's out of words like fi and chi and pac. But in the south, we'll add them back in. Like winder and eideer and yeller.
So we'll add them back in. And then you've got, for example, city names. Like in Tennessee, I lived in Middle Tennessee for 35 years. So you have words like Lebanon in the Middle East. But over in Wilson County, Tennessee, you have Lebanon. And then you have Lafayette in Louisiana or in France. They would refer to the general Lafayette. But in Tennessee, we'd have Lafayette.
And then you'd have Shelbyville instead of Shelbyville or Maryville. And so I understand how things get lost. But this whole thing with the button and I'm thinking, wow. We're raising a whole generation of kids who don't know how to speak properly. And it's off-putting to me.
It's very distracting. I don't know. Maybe that's just my hang-ups. But I did ask Gracie. I said, have I lost any of my southern accent? And now Gracie's got a southern accent.
I mean, she's a child of the South too. And I said, do I speak differently from being on the radio? And she said, well, you do enunciate better.
So I got that going for me. So my wife thinks I enunciate better. And I have learned over the years in broadcasting how important – now I'm going to do it. But I've learned the need to be able to properly speak and say things clearly.
And you don't want to be a distraction with that. And I'm kind of wondering if our younger generation is going to have a very difficult time with this. Or what our speech will sound like. I'm a big fan, although admittedly not always an example of good speech.
I aspire to it, and I want to raise myself to greater heights to be able to speak clearly and not have certain things become distractions in the way I speak. Now, I do have a southern accent. I cannot get rid of that. Nor do I feel any compulsion to do so.
I proudly embrace my southern heritage, for which I was greatly blessed by God to have. But you don't want to speak so poorly that people look at you kind of strange. I get that enough. The moment I say y'all or all y'all or mommer and them, it's one thing to be funny about it.
But it's another thing when that's the way they talk. And I'm thinking, what happened? And it reminds me of that song from My Fair Lady when Professor Higgins said, why can't the English learn to speak? You remember that old song?
I'm dating myself on that. But look at her, a prisoner of the gutter. Condemned by every syllable she utters. By right she should be taken out and hung for the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue. The movie does not hold up well in our day and time, by the way, if you go back and watch it. I remember that Professor Higgins singing that. It's funny to go by.
Okay, enough of that silliness, enough of that tawdriness. We've had a lot of plane crashes lately. I've been noticing a lot of conversation about the planes.
Of course, everybody blames it on Trump, which is not the case. And this thing in Toronto and everything else. But it reminded me of this thing I call the Delta Doctrine because of the whole plane thing. And I put this out on my Substack page, which you can get to from my website, hopeofthecaregiver.com.
And you can follow along on Substack. And I put out there an updated version of the Delta Doctrine that I coined at the onset of this whole thing I do for caregivers. And I was sitting on a plane and they said something that we've all heard. In the unlikely event, in the loss of cabin pressure, mask will fall down from the ceiling and do what? Put your mask on first. Now, we all know this, that it's very difficult to take care of somebody if you're trying to hold your breath. That's not a wise thing to do. And that's why they instruct us. However, think it through a little bit. Every flight attendant says this on every flight. That means that all the way up to the CEO, that means everybody that's involved in any type of commercial aviation of any kind has this same instruction to every passenger, every marketing agency, every government agency, everybody says the same thing.
Why? Is it one time enough? No, because they know that it is counterintuitive to us that we want to try to hold our breath and help someone. But that's what we caregivers do. We try to hold our breath and help someone. But what does it look like to put your mask on first as a caregiver? What does that look like?
And that's what I wrote about on my Substack page. This was prompted by a meeting I had with a fellow. A friend of mine said, hey, look, this guy is really struggling. He's taking care of his wife with Parkinson's. He's a retired physician. And I think you could be some help to him.
Would you mind just meeting him for coffee? And this was many years ago. And I said, sure, I'd be happy to.
So we met out there, Brentwood, Tennessee, right outside of Nashville. And the first thing I noticed was that he was a bit portly. He wasn't obese. He wasn't morbidly obese, but he needed to lose some weight. And I asked him, how are you doing?
I asked that to everybody. And he stirred his coffee kind of absently. And he said, well, I miss playing golf with my friends. Now, I've told you all about the three I's that every caregiver deals with.
The three I's. We lose our independence. We become isolated.
And we lose our identity. So the first thing, right off the bat, he says, I miss playing golf with my friends. So he's lost his independence. He's isolated.
That's two in one sentence. And I asked him, I said, and he told me a little bit more what's going on. And I said, do you have the resources to bring someone in to help you with your wife a couple days a week? And he said, well, she's not comfortable with that. He didn't say, yes, I do, or no, I don't. He said, she's not comfortable with that. Third person singular, which is the third I.
They lose their identity. See, he's not answering for himself. He's answering for her. And I said to him, I didn't ask what she was comfortable with.
I asked, do you have the resources? And it kind of stunned him a little bit. He just looked at me and I said, imagine you could come home after playing 18 holes of golf and having lunch with your buddies at the club on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Your wife's had a bath. She's got a fresh gown on.
The house is straightened up. And there's a meal waiting there in the kitchen for you all to have supper together. What would that be like for you? And big tears filled his eyes. He said, I can't imagine. And I said, you are one phone call away from making that happen. And I gave him the number of a service that I used to help me with Gracie. And to his credit, he called him. And I said, but I said to him, I said, we're going to peel your hands off the wheelchair and put them on the golf club where they belong.
Not every day, not all day long, just a couple times a week. Let him get out and get some fresh air. Let him breathe. Let him put his mask on first.
You follow me? That was the opening foray for him to be able to do something different. And he did do this. And for several years, they took care of his wife and he was able to have a much different journey with her. And he got out and he was very active and he was able to take care of her better.
And she did pass away. And he texted me. He said, you saved my life, which was very gracious of him to say so. That was very nice, but that's not what I did.
All I did was offer him my own journey of saying healthy caregivers make better caregivers. And it's hard to take care of somebody if you can't breathe. You can't hold your breath that long.
Put your mask on first. Sometimes that means calling in for help. That's what the Delta doctrine means.
By the way, Delta stands for duh, everything leaves through Atlanta. You didn't know that, did you? Hey, this is Hope for the Caregiver. You can read that more at my Substack page. Go out to the website, hopeforthecaregiver.com and see my Substack page. Don't go away. We'll be right back. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver.
This is Peter Rosenberg. Glad to be able to have a little time with you today. I hope you're doing well.
We are still in the throes of acute caregiving. And it is, you know, it's been a journey. And I will confess it has been a bit challenging at times. But as I told Gracie one day, you know, she was a bit anxious about some stuff. And I looked at her and I said, babe, this ain't your first rodeo.
This ain't your 50th rodeo. And through many dangers, toils and snares, we have already come. And those, again, I go back to what I said in the first block. Do we believe this or not? What do we believe?
Christian, what do you believe? And Gracie is bedrock in her understanding that God loves her. And he has asked a very difficult thing for her to do, which is to trust him in the midst of such horrific suffering. But her faith is strong. Her heart is tough. And she is setting her face like flint to do this. We've learned a few things in this journey.
One of them was, you know, I'm always picking up stuff from various places. And the anesthesiology pain, this acute pain management team. So this is, when you're in the hospital post-op, this is a whole team that deals with your pain control. Now, Gracie is far different than most because she's been on some type of pain medication for so many years that you can't just throw more at her. You have to throw different at her. You have to come at this a much different approach with her. Otherwise, it'll kill her. It'll shut her down. And so we've got some very smart people that are involved with her. And we're basically trying to reboot a lot of things for her to make her have less medication and more benefit.
And that is no easy trick with her. But we're working on it. And we've got top people working on it. As I said, Raiders of the Lost Ark, who? Top men. Top men. So I'm just, okay, sorry. I like to quote old movies.
There you have it. But one of the doctors came in from the pain management team, and it was a pretty anxious moment. And Gracie, when she doesn't know them, she's getting to know them. And there's one that she's known now for four years. And when he shows up, she's able to kind of breathe a little easier because he knows her and he knows her situation.
She's not going to drop her. But she was getting a bit anxious. And anxiety is a real issue because she lives with so much pain all the time. She knows what it's like to get into pain, and she can't get out of it. She's been in that situation way too many times. And she also knows what it's like to be in that kind of pain and have people not believe her.
Okay? We are grateful that we have a group of people here that do believe her. And they really understand pain in ways that I've, I mean, I've been with four different pain specialists over the years with Gracie. Some very smart people. Some of them got it wrong. Some of them got it really wrong. And some of them got it right. And these people are getting it right.
And it's been a real moving experience to watch these people do their job and they're very good at it. But this one doctor said something to Gracie that I think applies to all of us. Don't let your fear of pain become pain.
Boy, isn't that powerful? Don't let your fear of pain become pain. How many of you know what it's like to fear pain? To live with that dread knowing this is going to hurt? Don't let your fear of pain become pain.
And I think that this is a principle that Scripture is repeating over and over and over to us about settle down. Settle down. Don't worry about what's going to happen tomorrow. We're just going to deal with today. We're going to deal with right now.
Now let me be clear. Some of the things that Gracie deals with and you as well are fear worthy. They are very scary things. There's a reason in Psalm 23 David said, Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Because he recognizes that's a place where you fear evil. It's a scary place. And the valley of the shadow of death may be a very long valley.
For Gracie it certainly is. Don't let your fear of pain become pain. We have pain, but we don't need to compound it by having fear of pain. If you look through the whole of Scripture, you will see so many Scriptures after Scripture after Scripture about dealing with fear. God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of what? Say it with me. Power, love, and a sound mind.
And we somehow get a little bit squishy on that. Power, love. But what about sound mind? Nowhere is our mind more sound than when we are focused on the things of God. At no point in our life will we ever have a greater soundness of mind than when we anchor ourselves on Scripture. That is where sound mind is. I don't think we quite get how distorted our minds are because of sin. I heard a great sermon one time about Jesus when he was in the temple as a 12-year-old, and they marveled at him. And the minister giving the sermon said, Why do you think that is? He said, I'll tell you why I think it is. He said, because Jesus' mind, his ability to reason, was not cluttered or contaminated by sin.
Ours is, unfortunately. Jesus' ability to reason, even as a 12-year-old, was unencumbered by sin. Now think about that. And then you think about that and you juxtapose that with the Scripture where Paul says, Let this mind be in you which is also in Christ Jesus. Do not be conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. Love the Lord your God with all your body, mind. I mean, you follow the train of thought there about our minds.
That's where the battlefield is. And if we reshape our thinking by plowing the Word of God into our mind, I cannot tell you how many times I've stood over a hospital bed and held Gracie's hand and said Scripture to her and say, Okay, Gracie, here's what the Scriptures say. And she's able to kind of say it with me.
I did that with my father on his deathbed. And he was able to say it back. And I've watched it over and over and over. It's the only thing that endures, that sustains, that outlasts everything else. There is nothing else. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word will not.
It's eternal. So therefore, doesn't it make sense to invest that word into our lives so that when we are faced with these things that are very frightening, admittedly frightening, that we have something that anchors us in reality. Because in truthfulness, if you look at the whole of Scripture, you'll see this confirmed. The only reality is the Word of God.
Everything else is contaminated by this sin-filled world. Okay? Don't let your fear of pain become pain. He has not given you a spirit of fear.
I know it gets pretty daunting, and we gulp many times. I'm there, and I'm going to need you to remind me of these things tomorrow. So send me an email and remind me of these things tomorrow, because I need to hear it every day. Okay? Anyway, just wanted to pass that on to you.
I love that. And you're going to see, by the way, quotes like that in my new book, The Caregiver's Companion. It'll be out this fall, actually in August. Go out to the website and sign up for the e-letter so we can tell you about it when it gets closer. You're going to really like this book, and it's incredibly easy to read.
I don't like to write complicated things. It's very, my life's too hard, and yours is too. While you're out there, take a look at Standing With Hope and see what we're doing. We just shipped over a large pallet of supplies that should arrive, actually I think it's going to arrive there next week in Ghana with prosthetic limbs, components, all kinds of things that we've done and that we collect from all over the country, and we also purchase things there, and we ship things over. There's so much going on with that, and we would welcome the help, whether it's supporting the limb outreach or the caregiver outreach for the wounded and those who care for them. That's our mission, and we could use the help. We could use it today. If you still want it, the caregiver calendar for 2025 is available.
Just let us know. We have our caregiver tumbler. It says healthy caregivers make better caregivers.
It's a caregiver coffee tumbler, which I really am quite fond of, and I made these things just to be able to say thank you. If you want one of those, just go out, and if you support monthly what we do, we'll send it to you, okay? And I'm going to probably have more things coming down the path that I think will be helpful to caregivers.
There are a lot of different ways you can get involved. You can certainly tell somebody about what we're doing. You can tell somebody that you know who may have an amputee in their family that maybe they passed away and they don't know what to do with the leg. A friend of mine just called me and is sending me his wife's prosthetic legs.
He was a dear friend, and she passed away, and he wants to give her legs to this program, and so we're going to disassemble, send them over to Africa so that we can use those parts to help build a new leg for someone else. All of that is at the website, but hopeforthecaregiver.com. You'll see it where it says standing with hope. You can be a part of it today, and we welcome the help, okay?
They go walking and leaping and praising God. I'll leave you with this. Don't let your fear of pain become pain. Deal with today. Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not unto your own understanding, but in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will direct your path. This is Peter Rosenberger, Hope for the Caregiver, Healthy Caregivers Make Better Caregivers. Thanks for spending the time with me today. I'll see you next time.
