A New Way of Giving

As a child taught to be a caretaker, giving came naturally to me. Giving comes naturally to most women. So if we serve a family member who seems to be more needy than others, requiring more time of us than others require, we give because we know how. But learning when to give and assessing how our giving is used is just as artful as not broadcasting ourselves all over every inch of our needy world.

There’s no doubt that most women know how to give. We give to our husbands, our children, our churches, and our jobs. We devote extra time to the promotion of civic and school organizations, helping sell Girl Scout cookies, volunteering at book drives, serving on committees, and helping with the formation of good works. Then we give to needs on the home front, especially when we have a family member who cannot seem to get over the next hill; even worse, he or she keeps taking the same hill over and over.

I’m not talking about family members who have special needs such as my precious nephew born with Downs. I’m talking about aiding a family member who has never grown up and accepted responsibility for his or her own life. For years I was bogged down in trying to help family members who would not help themselves but allowed me to serve them even though my efforts were not appreciated. Nor was I effective. They did not grow or change. Knowing when to hold back and allow a person to drop to the bottom is as important as knowing when to help a person going through a temporary setback.

In sucking relationships, the tendency is to believe that by trying harder we’ll improve the person. We coax, prod, advise, provide emergency funds, weekend getaways, more counsel, midnight vigils and yet, after months drag on, the situation has not improved. Our emotional firefighting has done nothing but leave us exhausted, like a person fighting the California fires alone.

You hear the same tapes being played over and over again. I can’t cope . . . My children are never going to obey me . . . no matter where I work, I always get a bad boss . . . women don’t understand my sensitive nature . . . I’m never going to get out of debt. You find yourself thinking about this person obsessively; their life has seeped in and taken over your’s. If this has happened, let the warning bell sound. You may be on the road to codependency.

But there are steps you can take to back away before your life is smothered by another person’s eternal crisis. This week’s blog theme is all about the fine art of giving relationally. Stay tuned, post your own thoughts, and take a moment to pray and ask God how He wants you to spend your time and your giving. If you have a prayer request, please let it be known and those who visit here can join me in praying for you. If you have a friend whose life is being drained by a relative, a grown child, a spouse, or even a passive-aggressive employer, have them drop by this week for a dialogue on the fine art of healthy caretaking.

Hugs, dear friend.

Send in the Clowns

I used to believe that when a story was told about someone being raised back to life that the storyteller was either selling something or was some starry-eyed hill sitter lost in a vapor of delusion. God likes to mess with people like me, erode our self-made beliefs and trade them for God-birthed (and scripturally reinforced) realities. Many years ago, God led me to start a clown ministry, one that he promptly pulled me out of as soon as I started writing.

Clowning attracted people like bugs on butter. Every Thursday our troupe visited the children’s wings in Our Lady of the Lake Hospital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We performed a routine in every single sick child’s room, songs, comedy, and a light blending of faith and hope. Out of that period, otherwise shy people joined our ranks. Many went on to start their own ministries in other states. We accumulated a long history of stories.

The only days we visited the infant rooms was at the invitation of parents that needed cheering up. As in the cancer and burn wards, we found that adults benefited as much from our little song and dance as children. We tumbled out of the elevator with our usual silliness, ready for Miss Connie to hand us our room list and a few preparatory directives. Instead, we found her crying. An infant had just passed away. One of the corridors was full of family members, mourning, holding one another up for support. Miss Connie asked if we would mind praying for the grieving family. Our troupe joined hands and the staff joined us.

I still can’t explain why I said what I said next. It isn’t like me to blurt out things, especially knowing my pastor husband is about to lead us in prayer. But it was a sense of urgency that came over me at that moment. I said loudly, “Father, in the name of Jesus, we ask you to raise this infant back to life!”

An awkward silence followed. My next prayer was that the floor would open up and swallow me. Some of the staff members went back to their posts. Miss Connie got us our list and we headed down the hall to visit patients. She headed back to the mourning family along with her assistant.

My husband kicked off a riff and we sang to the first patient on our list. Then we heard screaming outside. Miss Connie’s assistant ran into the room to grab us and drag us back out into the hallway. She shouted, “The baby that you prayed for just came back to life! He’s alive, he’s alive!” In plain sight of the nurses attending the body, the baby turned pink, took a breath, and opened his gorgeous eyes. The child had been dead about a half hour. We followed Connie’s assistant back to the infant’s room. The morgue attendant came wheeling the empty gurney down the hall, grinning, and said to us, “This is the kind of trip I love to make!” The infant’s family members hugged and cried for joy. My husband approached the father and said, “You’ve been given a gift from God, you realize.”

I'd like to say that I started a resurrection ministry from that point on, people gathering in large coliseums to see their loved ones raised back to life. I needed it very badly the afternoon three Huntersville policemen showed up on our doorstep to tell us that our daughter had been killed in an accident.

(Our story of loss will be shared from my current WIP, Our Horn of Plenty--A Thankful Life; WaterBrook/Random House)