The Caregiving Challenge

A few weeks ago, I attended a book launch party for my former colleague Rob Moll’s new book, The Art of Dying. While words like dying and caregiving normally don’t compel me, I have to admit that during Rob’s reading, I was hooked. I stayed hooked during our conversation afterward as he told me how women are leading the charge on transforming the way we care for the elderly and the way we view dying. And he shared some thoughts on the importance of the church in all this. So because GFL is all about women leading in the church, I asked him to write us something. Let me know what you think. Everyone who answers the questions posed at the end will be entered to win a copy of Rob’s book.—Caryn Rivadeneira

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Women are at the forefront of one of the most fundamental transformations of the 21st century. For the first time in human history, the number of people older than 65 will be larger than those under age 5. Demographers say that the fastest growing age group is those older than 85. One study found that this group will be diagnosed with a terminal illness an average of three years before their death. Those years are filled with doctor and ER visits, cooking and cleaning, filling prescriptions and assisting with the bathroom.

Women are central to this demographic shift because as these elderly need to be cared for, many women—daughters, nieces, mothers, and friends—are the ones stepping up to meet this challenge of caregiving. In fact, of the 66 million Americans doing this work for a family member, two-thirds are female, with an average age of 46. Their unpaid services to family members are estimated to be worth $148 billion to $188 billion annually.

While many men share the work of caring for their elderly family members, it is mostly women who take up the task. The load may not fall the way it should. However, the fact remains that it is women who, step up to the caregiving challenge.

For women, and for all caregivers, these facts have implications—especially for the church.

1. Caregivers need help
The caregiving task is difficult, time consuming, and at times overwhelmingly stressful. Time away from work or expenses for professional health care leave many women financially strapped. A 2009 study found that half of all women caregivers suffered some financial impact because of their care while 15 percent suffered a high degree of hardship. The same study found that caregivers report that their health had declined as a result of their caregiving. In fact, women who spend at least nine hours per week providing care are twice as likely to have coronary heart disease. Higher stress, less happiness and greater likelihood of depression are also linked to providing long-term care to a family member.

Churches need to be a major source of support for caregivers. An intergenerational community gives the elderly an opportunity to continue living meaningful lives, even as their health declines. Passing on stories of their faith and wisdom can be tremendously beneficial to the young and old. The young receive the values of their grandparents’ generation while the old can find purpose in their last stage of life. The elderly can also participate in church life, through tasks during the week and prayer throughout the week, in a way others cannot. Having such meaningful activity is helpful for the emotional and physical health of the elderly.

Churches can also support caregivers simply by sharing the burden. Finding suitable nursing homes or rehabilitation centers can be extremely time consuming. Making sure that an elderly family member is safe during the day, taking her medications properly and paying her bills are among the many tasks that caregivers may need help doing or from which they just need a break.

2. Caregivers need a goal
Caregiving is not simply a job that falls to us for a time and one we hope to do well because of our sense of family responsibility or love for a parent. We do provide care for those reasons. But Christians, who 16 centuries ago created the first hospitals, have long provided care for the ill for specific theological reasons.

The body, created in the image of God, was considered to be sacred. Rather than abandon those in need of care, they found ways to honor God and his image by caring for those he created.

More importantly, however, Christians understood that because Jesus Christ died and rose from the grave—and promised the same to his followers—that Christians should die in such a way that reflects that belief. Today’s long-term caregivers are able to recover the ancient Christian tradition of ars moriendi, the art of dying.

When Jesus promised his followers, on the night before he died, that he would prepare a place for them, he also promised to bring them to himself. Christians have traditionally expected this meant that Jesus would somehow visit the dying. And they stood watch with the dying person to see if she spoke with Jesus or other family members who had come to accompany the dying person to the next life. Christians needed to prepare themselves spiritually for this transition.

Today’s caregivers have an opportunity to relearn and to teach others about the Christian art of dying. Long-term and chronic diseases can require stressful and lengthy periods of caregiving, and caregivers may need support and assistance from family, friends, and church communities. However, the goal of helping someone to die well can be an immensely enriching experience, during one of the most important periods in a person’s life—the time during which someone leaves this life and enter the life to come.

Have you seen or done this sort of caregiving? How well does your church carry on the tradition of the art of dying? How might it improve this important ministry?

Disenchanted

Between sessions at a busy conference, I rushed through my email at a student kiosk. I clicked open an article and time stopped. Finger poised over the mouse, I read the headline about Jennifer Knapp, a million-record-selling, multiple-Dove-award-winning singer-songwriter: “Jennifer Knapp: resisting the label lesbian, but ‘in love with a beautiful woman.’”

I clicked through the article but honestly, I wasn’t that surprised. I’m a big fan of hers, the kind who’d googled Jennifer every few months when she disappeared from the music scene. I’d wondered what was going on in her life that made her make that drastic change. But what did surprise me was my constant thoughts about Jennifer over the next few weeks. What surprised me was my sadness and confusion and deep sense of loss.

I live my life through music, and Jennifer Knapp’s albums: Kansas and Lay It Down, represent a significant season of spiritual growth. As I spent more time thinking it through, I realized that Knapp’s music was more than just a soundtrack. Her honest lyrics were written better than my own words. Her haunting and powerful voice put me in a touch with a part of me that needed a song.

Whether she wanted to be or not, Jennifer Knapp was a spiritual leader for me.

So what do we do when leaders live lives or do things we disagree with? Although Jennifer would exert that she hasn’t “fallen” or even “changed,” that she’s just embraced what in her words is “wholly me,” I still find myself wrestling with truth and grace and everything in between.

I wanted to not care. I wanted to put that in a box and ignore it. But as a leader myself, I can’t. I can’t decide to not think about something. I can’t decide to ignore my heart.

So as I’ve read and reread her interviews, with Christianity Today and The Advocate. I’ve look for that same leader. I am confused when she claims to “not struggle within herself,” but I am comforted when she tells CT, “I have a lot of critically thinking fans who are trying to sort out their lives as Christians as best they know how.” I would hope Jennifer would understand that I’m not sure what to do with this, where to put it all, how to make it all work.

I spoke with ministry friends. As we shared our stories of spiritual leaders who turn a different way, the room took on a somber tone, as if we were standing around the punch bowl at a wake. The youth pastor in a long-standing affair. The passionate Bible teacher who’s now an outspoken atheist. The pastor with a smile on his face on a Sunday, struggling with debilitating, suicidal depression during the week. The author in rehab, again. Doubt. Sexual Orientation. Addiction. Brokenness. Sinfulness. Humanity.

Their faces revealed the truth that all leaders struggle with, the unmooring feeling when one you’ve emulated falls away, or falls apart. A friend of mine summed it up like this: “I think as leaders we’ve all got to sort through who we are really following. It’s easy to shape yourself into the image of the leader above you. But we are supposed to be shaped into the image of Christ.”

Jennifer’s announcement did two things for me: one, it reminded me that as a leader, I need to struggle through the hard realities of life, the confusing, and the unknown. And two, I need to be fearless in my search for truth, even if it leads me to unknown places.

Parker Palmer says these kinds of experiences cause us to admit “that ours is not the only standpoint, the only experience, the only way, and the truths we have built our lives on begin to feel fragile.” The temptation is there, to dismiss inconsistencies and hard realities. But as leaders, we are called to break open our hearts and invite the questions, the wrestling, and the Spirit’s work.

How does your heart negotiate when spiritual leaders ‘fall’?

The Trouble with Excellence

In an ever-growing list of words that annoy the living daylights out of me, excellence has clawed its way to the top. It’s everywhere, and I’m sick of it.

Funny, because I used to love this word—when written in perfect grade-school-teacher cursive atop a worksheet or when my piano teacher (rarely) scrawled it on top of a page of a songbook. It meant something then because it didn’t always happen—because it recognized something rare and wonderful: achieving excellence.

And yet now in leadership circles this word has become synonymous with how we are to always be, how everything should look or feel or be perceived. While I’m sick of hearing about it in secular leadership circles, I’m actually troubled by how often I’m seeing it pop up among church-folk.

More and more I hear how churches strive to do everything with excellence or how Christian organizations seek excellence in all their products or services. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I think we should go out of our way to offer shoddy products or services or that churches should always eek out the bare minimum.

And I am familiar with the verses like Colossians 3:23 that say, “Work willingly at whatever you do, as though you were working for the Lord rather than for people.” I get why people use this to justify excellence. But I think we’ve got it backward. Because our view of excellence is different from God’s—many times, at least.

I’m troubled by excellence in churches because—at least in my middle-America leafy suburb—excellence tends to mean we spend a lot of money on it. That we get only the best and the brightest to work on something. Or that we don’t do something until it can be done excellently.

And that’s the biggest problem. We live in a world—even in smack dab in leafy suburbs—of need. Of people who need help. Now. Who can’t wait for things to be done excellently; they just need things done.

Take my friend: She founded a huge social service agency in Chicago, and she started the whole thing by serving spaghetti out of a big pot from the side door of her church. I’ve never had her spaghetti. It might not even be good. The big pot was probably pretty plain. That side door entrance nothing special, I bet.

But my friend saw a need in her community—hungry people!—and she met it. She fed them. Not with excellence, as we understand it. But she certainly did it as if she was working for the Lord, rather than people.

I think, in fact, that this is how Jesus operated. I don’t picture him sitting around with his disciples talking about how they had to do everything excellently (and they didn’t tell us he did). It seems to me, he just wanted them to do something. While of course he was perfect so therefore did do everything “excellently,” I suppose, his contemporaries mostly found him shocking. His sort of excellence wouldn’t have been appreciated.

Jesus’ allowing Mary to sit and listen instead of rush and cook? Not excellence in rabbi-ness. Jesus’ allowing a woman of ill-repute to wash his feet with perfume at a dinner party? Not excellence in etiquette. Jesus’ stopping for a chat and a drink with the Samaritan woman at the well? Not excellence in just about every possible way for a good Jewish boy.

And yet, in each of these things, lives were changed and God was glorified.

It’s the same thing we as church leaders should be after: changed lives and a glorified God.

I’m not meaning to say that we shouldn’t give things our all, that we shouldn’t seek out the right people with the right gifts for projects or programs, or that we shouldn’t make quality a prerogative.

But I worry about where a constant quest for excellence takes us. It seems we become more driven to work as though we were working for people, than working for God. Especially when work stalls or fails to happen because we can’t do something excellently.

Am I wrong? What do you think?

My Dangerous Wonder-Woman Ego

I couldn’t have been more than 3 or 4 years old when I first watched Wonder Woman on TV, but I remember specifically thinking,

She is awesome.
I want to be her.
She’s so strong.
She’s so pretty.

She quickly became my super hero. I even sported Wonder Woman Underoos until I could no longer fit in them. (Don’t judge; I know you had your favorite super-hero Underoos too!) Known for her super human strength, speed, reflexes, stamina and durability, Wonder Woman became an icon in my fragile little 3-year-old psyche. Little did I realize how much that subtle influence would frame the expectations I’ve put on myself now as an adult.

I can’t really blame Wonder Woman entirely. I’ve spent most of my life admiring strong, confident, accomplished woman and somewhere in all of that I’ve created a mountain of expectations for myself that I doubt even a super hero could tackle.

As a leader I’m learning that I cannot be Wonder Woman.

I cannot be strong enough, smart enough, tough enough, gentle enough, kind enough, eloquent enough, educated enough, patient enough, or fill-in-the-blank enough.

But too many times I’ve pridefully tried to be all of those things, leaning into my own strength, and attempting to do the impossible just to prove that I’m that good.

Ouch, what a dangerous place.

So, I’m attempting to put my cape down, to find confidence in the gifts, talents, strengths and limitations that make me who God made me, to rest in His strength, speed and stamina, and to turn my super-hero worship toward a great Wonder(ful) God!

How about you? Do you have any “capes” to put down?

Praying for Prodigals

“Heroin? Our son is on heroin?”

Emotion washed over Laurie. How is he? How could he?

Laurie and Jason had just found out their 18-year-old son was in jail for heroin possession and use. They were overwhelmed with the shock and horror of it and with concern for their son.

As that reality began to settle in, they were overcome with a new thought: What would the church Jason pastored say? Would people understand, or would they judge? The pastor’s son? Would they need to step down from the pastorate?

They felt so alone.

Any parent confronting such a discovery feels alone. But when you are in the ministry, the aloneness seems to multiply. This isn’t supposed to happen to pastors’ kids.

No one is immune. It can happen to any family. But there is a safe and encouraging place to go. Prayer for Prodigals, a helpful prayer community for those who care about someone walking a destructive path, offers resources, understanding and prayer.

And every June 2, a Worldwide Day of Prayer for Prodigals, thousands around the world gather in homes, in churches, or virtually to ask God for the restoration and redemption of their loved ones, and to pray for the hundreds whose names are submitted.

Come join us at PrayerforProdigals.com or write to prayerforprodigals@gmail.com to be invited into the community. Join us on our knees on June 2, or become a regular pray-er in our fellowship.

Laurie and Jason? They’ve learned a lot in the past year. They have discovered it is a long and painful journey. Their son is making mostly better choices, but the “three steps forward, two steps back” applies often. They have received needed help from various sources. And they are grateful for the loving, praying community they discovered at Prayer for Prodigals.