You know the feeling, don't you?

Life is already filled with normal challenges. There is not much margin. Add caring for someone with a disability and life gets overwhelming in a hurry. Gone are the normal plans and agendas.

Trying to make a difference in the critical need of foster care for sexually, physically and emotionally abused children is a heavy burden. Reuniting them with their birth families is complicated. Stopping the cycle of poverty and abuse is almost impossible.  That is what a young therapist told me this week. But someone has to do it.

We want our churches to support families with these challenges. We want to encourage the workers on the front lines facing social needs. We feel the burden for these while we are facing deaths, divorces, sickness and suicides in our churches and families.

Caring is overwhelming. We need God's help. Prayer is His wonderful gift for us, so we can cry and plead for Him to help us make a difference in the messy world we live in. And, we ask him to heal and comfort the traumatized, lonely and suffering.

When you don't know the words to pray, I hope this prayer will comfort and strengthen you like it does me.

"O Lord my God, when the storm is loud,

and the night is dark

and the soul is sad,

and the heart oppressed;

then, as a weary traveler,

may I look to you;

and beholding the light of your love,

may it bear me on,

until I learn to sing your song in the night. Amen."

George Dawson in Little Book of Prayers as given in Disciplines of the Inner Life by Bob Sr. and Michael W. Benson, p. 221.

Our calling requires a strength greater than our own. As part of your self care, don't forget to pray to the One who called you, that you represent and Who also cares for you. 



I hope this post helps you thrive in your crucial role of caring for others, so you are blessed and others feel God's presence and love.