Daily Devotions for Caregivers

 As caregivers, many of us deal with daily grief and a constant sense of loss. Even though we don't feel these emotions all of the time, they do keep coming back. For me, mine is often sparked by seeing something on my Facebook feed. I'll see one of Chris' friends or a memory and it'll tip my emotional bucket right over. Living grief is one of those things the church doesn't know how to deal with. Well, honestly, who really knows how to deal with it? It's not just going to go away, now is it? :-) In some hyper-faith circles, grief is pretty much forbidden. Yet even under the old law, it was allowed room. If you lost a close loved one such as a spouse, parent, or sibling, you were given an entire year to mourn. Our culture allows a little time, but then we are expected to be back at work, back at church, or back to our daily lives after a very short time. We just keep putting one foot in front of the other. But living grief continues. When we deal with parents wh...

One of the things I do that drives other people simply mad is needing a scripture for almost everything. But as we know from life in general, as well as caregiving, there's not always a scripture to match a particular situation. When I am afraid, I can run to Psalms and find passages to help calm my fears. If I come up on financial struggles, I can find scriptures pertaining to God as our provider. Even when I am sick, I can run to our standard group of healing scriptures. And if I don't find immediate relief in any of these circumstances, finding a scripture or passage that is related helps give me something to stand on. Even when the tasks associated with caregiving become overwhelming I have a set of Psalms handy to remind me where to take a heavy or burdened heart - right back to Him. But it can be difficult to find a scripture that pertains to everything - caregiving or not. There are tons of little things that we don't talk about but that can nag at us. I'...

I don't know about you but lately my days seem overly busy and downright crazy at times. It can be so easy to get carried away in the details of caring for another. And try making one simple  change to something as basic as a meal plan, changing a supply order or going with a new company for an aide and a snowball effect of crazy events can begin. There's a reason we can feel like we have too many irons in the fire.  We do. But they are all necessary in order to take care of ourselves and our loved ones. Caregivers have days where we are just tired. It does not change the long list of chores we have to accomplish for the day, but we can be tired before we even begin. It can be easy to get caught up in the world of caregiving and forget about ourselves. We sort of wear this caregiver's mantle because we need to. We can be that take-charge-kind-of-person it takes to get things done. Who else is going to do it, right? This morning when I arose I thought about how tired I...