Daily Devotions for Caregivers

Over the years I've come to enjoy the Psalms and find myself reading there a lot. I'm not sure why they are so intriguing to me, but I seem to enjoy them more and more. This morning I found myself in Psalm 77 which is one of my go-to passages, but this morning I saw something totally new. I'm reading along and stopping at key scriptures I've learned to rely on, and I hit verse 16. It's like I've never read it before. Maybe I stop too many times at verse 11 which I run to frequently, but verses 16-20 just stood out to me this morning. In verse 16, the Psalmist, who happens to be Asaph, describes how the Red Sea felt as Moses and the Children of Israel approached on their exodus from Egypt. The scripture says the Red Sea trembled and quaked to its very depths.  I love nature and its response to God, and I know in Psalm 19 it speaks of how nature's voice is constantly declaring God's glory. But I never thought about how the Red Sea trembled once it wa...

This morning during my quiet time I was thinking about some of my favorite Bible characters and the obstacles they overcame. Of course, it's the fact that they overcame that makes them heroes of our faith. I was trying to think if I could find some distant way to identify with any one of them. But I'm not sure anyone was a caregiver or could relate to our world today in that way. David took care of Jonathan's son Mephibosheth who was crippled, but other than that I pretty much came up empty. But as my mind was strolling through some of the great OT stories, it landed on Moses; and that's where I settled. We know at God's word he charged in and faced an obstinate king only to find out that God's chosen people  were just as obstinate. Moses really had his hands full trying to provide for a nation of people. There was a lot happening between Exodus chapter 3 and chapter 19. In chapter 3, Moses is standing on the mount and God tells him that he'd return to...

Have you ever had someone tell you that because your loved one wasn't healed you lacked faith? Sadly enough, I have. Yet if we look at all our Bible heroes we'll see that we admire them because of the trials they endured. Each of them give us a picture of how to trust God in adversity; and how to keep faith during intense testing and trials. Adversity is actually the true test of faith. It's in the midst of the trial that we find out just how much we trust God. Can we trust Him when our lives are less than perfect? The caregiver's life is definitely "less than perfect" if we compare it to others. For some of it caregiving can mean that we are locked up in our own little cave unable to get out and about. For others, there may be some getting out - but there's not quite the freedom we see in the rest of the world. Caregiving can complicate everything on a variety of levels. We can't use the struggles of caregiving to measure our lives. We also cannot u...