Aug 13, 2019
Portion of HOPE FOR THE CAREGIVER Monologue 8/10
"...The whole point of this is to speak clarity to a caregiver so that we're not floundering around wondering, you know, where do we go next? What do we do? What's going on? And I go back to this whole thing with gun safety.
I think a lot of people rush to push their political ideology and very few people are rushing to push this in a ministry capacity, and if you think about this, with all of our [United States’] clergy combined, even those from different faith, we can still ask the same question, are the firearms secured?
Think about praying with the mother in despair over her addicted child. You don't have to wait for legislation. You could go ahead and ask the question now, hey, does this kid have access to guns?
And you know, you're not going to stop it. I mean, somebody just went on a rampage with a knife. I mean, we can't exactly go out there and pass legislation to get to knives.
Well, we can, but legislation doesn't do anything, y'all know that and even if it does, it's still not going to do anything until they pass it—I'm talking about something today, right now that you could do.
Think about, think about if this man yesterday who shot and killed his wife and then killed himself over healthcare issues down in Florida. If somebody spoke life to this man, what a different outcome that would be. You can't insure it. You can't make it happen that way, but you give them a fighting chance and you know, results are in God's department, but we have a responsibility to be stewards of this message. Are we just glad we got our salvation, glad we got our knowledge —and then everybody else is just on their own.
I mean, don't we have to be responsible with the information that God has entrusted to us to be the light of the world? And if we're not going to speak light into these situations, who, who are they going to listen to? You know, when you've got states passing medically assisted death and they're all just gung-ho to, to pass that so that you know, physicians could provide drugs that go ahead and take a patient out. How big a leap is it for a caregiver to go ahead and just take matters in their own hand and say, okay, let's just be done with this? When you got a governor of Virginia who is a doctor himself saying that if a child with special needs is born and it's severely deformed, we're going to put the child aside and make it comfortable and then we'll let the mother make the decision on whether or not we'll execute the child.
How big a leap is it for a family with a special needs child that has pushed him to the breaking point to go ahead and just end that child's life? Don't tell me it doesn't happen, it just happened in Oregon a year ago this month. Well, the 28-year-old girl who took a gun and shot her child and then turned the gun on herself. Over in Dixon, Tennessee, a father of a special needs boy, if nonverbal Autistic boy, beat him to death and the mother watched. Then he told the community that child ran off, which happens with Autism. There's a lot of problems with elopement. There are dark thoughts that that get into these people's minds, to all our minds. [It] is scary. It gets into all our minds and if we're not hearing words of life on a regular basis, who are we listening to? What are we listening to?
The world is increasingly throwing death as a solution to us. Think about it. Look at all the headlines. Don't just take my word for it. Look at it yourself. The world is throwing death as a solution. Medically assisted death, abortion. When Roe versus Wade was passed and set up as the law of the land …and I watched Bill de Blasio this week argue about it— and he was asked point blank by Sean Hannity, "Do you believe that an abortion, that a woman can have an abortion all the way to the moment of birth … and he wouldn't answer the question, he would just simply say, "I believe in Roe versus Wade."
Well, I don't believe in Roe versus Wade! I believe that our Savior bore the penalty of death and we don't need to use death as a solution. But these people are not going to be content until they can eliminate by killing anything that makes them feel uncomfortable or in any way unpleasant.
Don't take my word for it. Look at the media every single day. “Well, I wouldn't want to live with this and this and this.”
Well, you don't know what you want to live with! My wife lives with more pain than anybody I know; her body is so broken and yet she has value with what she does, and she trusts God with her pain, and He speaks to her in it.
C.S Lewis said that you don't, suffering is God's megaphone to us. and the world is going to continue to reinforce this [Death] over and over and over, until we get rid of people with disabilities, people who are aging, who have outlived their usefulness according to the world, [or] children that we do not want.
You look at Barack Obama, he said some years ago that if his daughter makes a mistake, he doesn't want her to be punished with a baby. These were his words, they're not my words, they are his words.
And "anything that is undesirable, we need to get rid of." That's what the world says, the scripture tells us something far different ...that we trust God with these things that come along in our lives that are, that are challenging, that are painful.
We hang on to Him in this—not just look for some way to just go ahead and pull the trigger and be done with it. But our natural inclination is to want to be free of all this pain and sorrow and suffering and unpleasantness or fear, whatever it is we got to deal with. So, let's just kill it. We don't have any more money for, to, you know, healthcare, whatever but let's just go ahead and take our own lives and be done with it.
This is happening now. It happened yesterday in Florida. Go look at the news.
So, what are we doing about it? What are we doing about it?
This show is dedicated to speaking to those people who are watching this unfold, who are so discouraged as they watch someone else suffer—to go into that heartbreaking place, and point them to a path of safety.
I get it. I truly get it, but God has not abandoned you. God is not forsaking you. This is not some kind of goofy punishment. He's not arbitrary. He is not reckless. He is not whimsical. He is God all by himself, and He alone is working in ways that we cannot possibly fathom …and so, we learned to trust Him. A lady wrote me last week on her Facebook page. Her husband has seizures all the time, and their nine-year-old boys said, “Why would God do this to us?” [Music starts]
I remember our nine-year-old asked when his mother (Gracie) just kept going through surgery, after surgery—losing legs and everything else. He said, “How can I trust God with my hurts … when I see what He allows mom to go through?”
And I answered him with wisdom that I didn't know, it wasn't my wisdom and I said, “You know what, I don't understand all these things, but I know that He stretched out his arms and gave his life for us. If he loves us that much, I'm going to trust Him.
This is Hope for the Caregiver; we'll be right back.
Hope for the Caregiver is the family caregiver outreach of Standing With Hope - a ministry committed to the wounded and those who care for them.