Daily Devotions for Caregivers

I could make a long list of the things caregiving has taught me. One thing I think I'd want to put at the top of the list is that God is a safe place. He doesn't respond in anger, even when I'm mad at Him. But He does listen to my cries, so intently that He hears all the emotions behind every tear that falls and every deep sigh that escapes. He gets it.  As I was walking back through Psalm 91 this morning, I had a deluge of thoughts. I thought about what it means to live in the shelter of the Most High. And how often I've found rest in His shadow. Oh, how I know this is true, even on the roughest of days. It's comforting just to know we have a place we can hide. And even though we don't physically hide in Him, we have that safe place for our raw emotions. He won't condemn us or kick us out. He won't give us that blank stare  either! As caregivers, we get it a lot. People we don't know stare at us blankly. Like, maybe they have tons of questions, but ...

 This week, I was thinking about Abraham and Sarah. They are our "faith" parents. Scriptures call Abraham the father of our faith. He believed what God told him beyond possibility and beyond hope. Don't we love to share the story of the promise of Isaac? He would be the one to continue to carry the promise to generations to come. Generations we are literally a part of by faith. We love a good ending, right? Especially one we get to live out! But it wasn't without human flaws. A story that looked like it might have failed due to the actions of mere humans, Sarah and Abraham. We love our Bible heroes, don't we? But it's easy to forget that they were human just like us. They dealt with emotions, thoughts, fears, and struggles every single day, too. But God gave them a promise. The thing about God's promises is that they don't always make sense in our heads. We can't always figure them out or imagine how in the world He is going to do what He promised....

  As caregivers, we deal with a lot every single day. Many things we don't (or can't ) even talk to others about. Some things, we don't share out of fear; we can't let them think we are incompetent or incapable of providing care for our loved ones. Other things are just not cool to share, I know you know what I mean! We can have so much going on in our heads and our emotions, but we keep it tucked away inside. Society doesn't allow brutal honesty. Sometimes, it's because hearing one's deepest emotional struggles makes others feel like they need  to do something, but we don't need anyone to do anything - we just need for them to hear us. But we keep things to ourselves in silence, mostly because others just won't "get" it. This open and raw honesty is one of the things I've loved about the Psalms. I was reading Psalm 13, where David was pouring all his honest thoughts out before God. He was speaking some of the unmentionables caregivers ...

 You know that scripture that says, casting all your cares on Him, for He cares for you ? Yeah, that one. It's 1 Peter 2:7. We've probably read it what feels like a million times. It's the execution that is difficult, not the reading. What is it that makes it so hard to give Him all our cares? I have a few ideas. But first, let's break it down a little bit. There are at least two ways to look at this highly memorized verse. And it's a good one to memorize, but totally useless if we can't actually do it! He cares for us can be interpreted to mean that He is an all-loving, all-caring God who is concerned about every detail of our lives. He cares. This is true. But another way to look at it is that He is doing all the caring for us, so we don't have to. Either way, He's helping us and caring for us! For caregivers who are often operating from a state of overwhelm, it's a constant all-day-long battle to keep rolling our cares over onto Him so He can do t...

 Caregiving is a strange mix of emotions. I'm pretty sure there's nothing that can squeeze who we  really are out of us like becoming a caregiver. It forces us to take a deeper look at ourselves. It can shuck us down to the bare essentials of life in no time. I've often referred to it as the crucible of life. But that doesn't mean it's all bad; it just gets rid of all the extras we thought we needed. We love our persons! Most caregivers love caring for loved ones, even if we don't  love why  we need to care for them. And of course, there are other situations that are equally effective at revealing who we really are. But caregiving is in a class of its own! Lol. There's no time to carry around extra stuff. In fact, sometimes, caregivers tend to stuff emotions and feelings because there simply isn't time to sort them out. That's part of why we live on that proverbial edge, ready to explode, because our hands were wet when we grabbed a dishwasher pod, a...

  Does it ever feel like life is kicking you when you're down? I think it happens all the time. Lol. As caregivers, our plates are absolutely full all the time. Even the smallest thing that goes wrong in our day can feel like the proverbial last straw that breaks the camel's back.  We often run so close to the edge emotionally that the tiniest thing tips us right over. I can't speak for you, but I know me! It can appear that everything is fine, and then I totally lose it over something seemingly stupid like struggling to open a new bag of underpads or briefs. smh. It happens. :-) But that's because our "emotional cup" runs on full and a drop of anything makes it run over the edges.  In Psalm 18:17-19, David mentions that his enemies attacked him at his weakest moment. Sometimes, it feels like life lands a socker punch when we are most vulnerable. And as caregivers, we can pretty much feel vulnerable all the time. But there's hope... In verse 17, David says...

 This morning, I was reading Psalm 18. It's one of my favorites, talking about how God brings victory, defeats the enemies, and provides safety. And that's a super general overview! But what caught my eye in verse 2 was that David said God was his rock  - twice. So I grabbed the NASB as it was also nearby. It used rock twice in verse 2, also. I thought it was a little funny for David to state God was his rock twice, and of course, I thought it could be for emphasis. But it wasn't.  I grabbed my handy-dandy (old-school, I know) Strong's concordance and started digging. In verse 2, the first Hebrew word used for "rock" is sela. In the KJV, the second word for rock is instead strength. It is the Hebrew word, sur. As I dug through the two definitions, they can both be translated into rock. But they really mean two different things. Here is a brief comparison: Sur(tsur)  refers to a huge boulder or cliff.  Sela refers to a cliff or crag. A rock formation that conta...