Author: empower

In today’s American culture, there is one virtue that seems to be held above all others as the one to be achieved at all costs. That is individual perseverance. And what is wrong with that, actually? After all, isn’t perseverance one of the things we are told we will learn as we go through trials? So, we welcome trials because we know we will get perseverance and, once we get that, we’ll stick to everything and we’ll get everything done possible. And, again, aren’t we told we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us?
But what if you can’t do everything? I mentioned that in yesterday’s post. There are times when you just can’t do everything and you need someone to come along and show you mercy. And, in my first article, I mentioned about how my family gathered around each other and supported each other in our grief and trials. But that goes counter to everything our society teaches us.
“Buck up!” “Stiff upper lip!” “You can do it!” “You don’t need anyone!” “Stand on your own two feet!” “Pick yourself up!” Subtly, constantly, our society teaches us that this is normal, this is virtuous. To ask for help, to even need help means that there is something wrong with you. This is part of the reason why caregivers, I believe, get the short end of the stick at times. Everything is focused on the person going through the struggles. They are the heroes. They are the ones that need the encouragement to get through, to pick up, to move on, to conquer. The power of one! Stick to it! You can do it!
But the caregiver, sitting in the background, has to keep the strength going and keep the power going. They are the ones that make it all possible, really. My wife has told me time and again that if it wasn’t for me, she would have despaired in her own cancer treatments. My wife wasn’t able to make it through alone. Did she fail? Of course not! She is still here. She and her doctors beat the cancer and now she’s back to her recovery. And I was the caregiver that also helped her through.
But when is a caregiver not a caregiver? The answer: when the caregiver needs care themselves. There were so many times when I was helping my wife through her treatments that I felt so utterly drained, so alone, so tired, that I felt I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was filled with intense grief, suffering, and pain of the heart. Yet, I had to keep on going. “Stiff upper lip!” and everything. But I couldn’t do it on my own.
You see, caregivers are people experiencing suffering and pain as well as the ones cared for. It isn’t the same, of course, as the people going through the illness. But they are certainly hurting. They need as much comfort, encouragement, and strength as the people fighting off the illness, because caregivers are fighting off the darkness of despair; they just cannot bear to watch their loved one in pain any more.
This is, really, why I wrote The Caregiver Beatitudes. I realized that I needed something other than myself to get through it. There was so much I was being asked to do, but I needed to know how to get through it. And I realized, as I was writing, that it was not something I could do on my own. I needed God to get through. And, as I found out, I needed a whole family and network of others as well. A caregiver needs their own caregivers. This is how we get through. And this is how, ultimately, we win the fight.

by Robert Martin

This past summer, as we do every summer, my family (myself, my wife, and our two daughters), met up with my father, his siblings, and all of their families down to grandchildren—The Reunion of the descendants of Clyde and Fanny Martin. As always, it was an amazingly fun affair with many in-jokes being retold, those friendships that only cousins can have being renewed, and all the old stories being brought out and dusted off.
But one thing struck me this time that I wasn’t sure I had noticed before. Without exception, everyone who was there had been through, either recently or in the not too distant past, some event of suffering and pain. Cancer was present in the room. Broken relationships were inscribed in the faces of spouses and children. Long term illnesses were still taking their toll. While poverty itself was not an issue, certainly finances were difficult for many. Mental illness was not unheard of in our gathering, either. Parents were dealing with difficult children, and even the children were impacted by all of these things as they had been watching and observing their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and siblings struggle through the many different aspects of pain.
This was, and is, my family. I don’t know if there are any other families out there like ours, but I would expect that in any such gathering, it would be a rarity for there not to be some form of suffering taking place. It may not be widespread, it may just be one or two people, but it will be there. And, along with those experiencing the suffering, there will always be someone close to the situation who, while the suffering is not their own,  must deal with it every day as caregivers.
The attention in these family gatherings, many times, is on those who are experiencing the pain directly. We defer to the grand aunt facing chemotherapy. We give space and grace to the grand uncle wrestling with depression. The spouse having to break off the marriage is given comfort by many loved ones. But, what about the grand uncle who drives the aunt to chemo every week? Or the grand aunt who has to diligently be aware of her spouses depression? Or the parents of that broken marriage, tending to the many feelings of pain and anger? What do they do?
My family has managed to answer these questions. Although, it wasn’t something that we distinctly chose to do, consciously. There was no declaration of “This is what we will do”. It was simply what happened. For us, it was a natural effect of us being family. When a family member is suffering and another family member is a caregiver, the whole family rallies. Prayer, emotional support, finances when needed, a shoulder to cry on, a caring ear, all these things, freely given. We are family. There is no question that we care for each other, both the person needing the care and the caregiver.
In The Caregiver’s Beatitudes, one of the primary themes I express is the role that community plays in caring for a loved one and for the support of the caregiver. Alone, we will struggle, we will fight, but it will take everything that is in us. There are those who make it through alone, but those are extraordinary situations, I believe. Instead, I believe that the community plays an immense role in this dynamic. What do we do when a loved one suffers? We gather around them, we gather around the caregivers, and together, as a community, we support each other. This is what we do.

by Shauna Marie Hyde
(For the complete post, click here)

Recently I lost someone who I never dreamed would be someone I would ever meet much less deeply love. Our story is told in the book, “The Vicar of Tent Town.” One day a few years ago I heard about some people living off the Elk River in West Virginia, so I went to see what was going on. It was a slippery muddy hike but I found them. They had cleared off an area and had tents set up with tarps overhead, a fire pit, and had made a fairly decent place to live.
As I entered the camp, a man came up to meet me. We introduced ourselves and sat down to have a chat. Noah told me later that I was the first church person who had sat down and spent time in Tent Town. That simple act was what made him take me seriously and know that he could trust me.
I began to visit often trying to bring needed items and to take them somewhere if they needed a ride. The church people began to accompany me or send donations if they were unable to go. Bit by bit they just became a part of the congregation. Noah became a dear friend. I learned a lot about homelessness from spending time with them and hearing their stories. I learned that many of them have jobs, many are educated, and many are cynical about church people. A lot of churches won’t help unless thy sit through a church service, have a long list of unobtainable rules and are so judgmental in their attitudes that they never treat homeless people as people. They get tired of the assumptions that they are lazy moochers, all of them are druggies, or are mentally ill, or are running from the law. There is plenty of that; however, there are two major populations of homeless people that might surprise you: veterans and kids running away from abuse and LGBTQ youth who have been kicked out of their homes.
Did you know there are more empty buildings than there are homeless people in the USA? “There are more than five times as many vacant homes in the U.S. as there are homeless people, according to Amnesty International USA.” http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/more_vacant_homes_than_homeless_in_us_20111231 I could not even begin to guess at how many church buildings there are that often have empty rooms the majority of the time.
How is someone living on the streets, working less than 30 hours per week because that was the only job they could find, supposed to save up enough money for rent, deposit, utilities and its deposit, etc.? What little money they make goes to food, required clothing for the job, and bus fare and basic survival.
There was a time when anyone could find sanctuary in a church. Now people are more worried about their buildings, getting sued, vandalized, stolen from, and that something terrible will happen when they offer sanctuary. Guess what? Something terrible is happening without “those people” being around. We see life-threatening violence in schools, malls, and churches…and it isn’t “those people” doing it. That is a heartbreaking issue for another blog.
When it comes to the homeless and working poor we are just too busy, too selfish, too focused on what we want, getting our way, etc., to offer people sanctuary. It is time to be proactive with world transformation! It is time to be the church and offer sanctuary to those who are hurting, lost, scared, unheard, and slipping through life as living ghosts.
The irony is Christians worship someone who was homeless when he walked this earth. Possessions did not slow him down, people did. Guess what else? He was crazy – crazy in love with humanity! He was crazy enough to sacrifice a life of comfort and then life itself in order to offer the world sanctuary.   I propose revival! I propose we sell all the trappings and fancy accoutrements we believe we simply must have in order to worship a God who decided to become human and homeless in order to reach us. I propose we offer sanctuary to any and to all in the name of God who went to such great lengths to offer sanctuary to all of humanity.
Who knows? Perhaps my friend Noah might still be alive and well on this earth.

By Steve Kindle

Somewhere in the world there should be a society consciously and deliberately devoted to the task of seeing how love can be make real and demonstrating love in practice….If God, as we believe, is truly revealed in the life of Christ, the most important thing [to God] is the creation of centers of loving fellowship, which in turn infect the world. Whether the world can be redeemed in this way we do not know. But it is at least clear that there is no other way. ~Elton Trueblood

One of the most difficult realities for American Christians to accept is that nothing, and I mean NOTHING belongs to anybody. Every thing in the universe is the Lord’s. And every person. It’s difficult because we all conduct our lives in the midst of a consumer society that rewards acquisitiveness and power over others. As the bumper sticker proudly announces, “The one with the most toys wins.” So we live our lives competing against one another, and when we win, we feel very entitled to ownership of the spoils. As one of my parishioners put it when asked to help support a local “safety net” initiative, “I worked hard for what I have and no one’s going to take it from me.”
No wonder congregations are uneasy during “Pledge Season.”
Another strong disincentive for understanding biblical stewardship is that it has largely been reduced to issues of money. Our “Stewardship Moments” are confined to urging congregants to increase their annual monetary pledges. And on a typical Sunday, the worship leader may include the “many ways we give in addition to our bills and checks,” yet, the focus is on what goes into the collection plate.
The only thing that can turn this around is a comprehensive understanding of stewardship that relocates the Christian from a consumer of church services to a caretaker in partnership with God of all that God gives us to manage on God’s behalf.
Human beings were created for a high purpose—to collaborate with God in “tilling and keeping.” To till means to derive from creation what it is intended to yield for sustenance and comfort. To keep means to manage the tilling in such a way that those generations who follow will be able to derive from tilling the same level of sustenance and comfort. This two-fold process is intended to maintain a self-sustaining world into perpetuity, but only as long as we remember who owns it, and that it is not ours to usurp for our own advantage.
God intended for Israel to be “a light to the nations,” a light that displayed for all to see how living by God’s intentions for the world would result in shalom, well-being for all.  The psalmists envisioned a time when all the world would ascend the hill to Jerusalem for instruction in God’s ways. Today the church’s calling  is to model a way of life built on, in Trueblood’s words, “the creation of centers of loving fellowship, which in turn infect the world.”

My book is an effort to lift up this majestic calling that we humans are privileged to undertake by looking carefully at the biblical material, coming to see the world as God would have it, see how some of the Scriptures’ traditional meanings need to be reassessed, as well as find rich meaning in otherwise overlooked verses. I even provide a sermon in the final section.

 
Here’s a link to a serious book review by a Bob Cornwall: http://www.bobcornwall.com/search?q=Stewardship