Every new year, we make decisions about who we want to be. We make resolutions; we set goals. But often these goals are focused on ourselves. Losing weight, saving money — even the best goals are often inherently self-centered. To live the life God has for us, we must be willing to reject our own comfort for the good of others. It’s not easy, and it sure isn’t comfortable. But when you deny yourself, God can do so much more.
www.lifechurchtv/open. Used by permission.
While abused children and victims of spousal battering have been the topics of widespread study, elder abuse has been relatively hidden until recently. The typical victim of elder abuse is women over the age of 75 who are physically and perhaps mentally dependent.
Typically the abuser is a relative, and frequently the adult child of the victim. The abuse is ongoing and may take several forms such as financial, physical, or psychological. The abuse may include violation of basic rights such as right to worship, the right to privacy, the right to handle one’s personal and financial affairs if capable.
The victim is reluctant to report abuse out of shame at having raised a child who would do such things. They often fear being placed in a nursing home. The abuser is likely to hide the abuse out of self-interest, and denies or rationalizes the abuse.
What kind of abuse do the elderly face?
Psychological abuse: infliction of mental anguish be demeaning, name-calling, insulting, ignoring, humiliating, frightening, threatening, isolating, etc.
Physical abuse: Infliction of physical pain or injury, physical coercion, confinement, slapping, bruising, sexually molesting, cutting, lacerating, burning, restraining, pushing, shoving, etc.
Material/Financial abuse: Illegal or unethical exploitation by using funds, property, or other assets of an older person for personal gain, etc.
Passive neglect: Unintentional failure to fulfill a caretaking obligation, infliction of distress without conscious or willful intent, etc.
Active neglect: intentional failure to fulfill caregiving obligations, infliction of physical or emotional stress or injury, abandonment, denial of food, medication, personal hygiene, etc.
What are some physical indicators of abuse or neglect?
Some indicators include a history of unexplained falls or minor injuries, bruising in well-protected areas, finger marks, burns in unusual places, unmet medical needs, poor hygiene, malnutrition, over/undermedication.
What are some emotional and social indicators of abuse and neglect?
The elderly person appears to be withdrawn or agitated and anxious. They may be isolated in one room of the house. They are unkempt, unwashed and smelly. They are overly subservient or anxious to please. Professional and other visitors may have difficulty getting access to the elderly person.
What are some social and emotional indicators of the abusers?
They may have an unremitting sense of anger, frustration, or despair, a sense of unfairness, of being victimized and/or resentment. They grieve for lost personal ambition and plans. They are anxiety or worried. They have a sense of not being cared for themselves. They themselves may feel isolated and lonely. They may have a loss of self-esteem, a lack of time for themselves and an inability to see any end to the situation and no future.
So, how do your protect your elderly loved ones from abuse?
Maintain close ties with aging relatives and friends-keep abreast of changes in their health and ability to live independently.
Discuss an older relative’s wishes regarding health care, terminal medical care alternatives, home care in the case of incapacitation and disposition of his/her personal assets.
Find sources of help and use them—chore services, housekeeping, home-delivered meals, senior recreation day care, respite care and transportation assistance are available in many communities.
With the older person’s consent, become familiar with his/her financial records, bank accounts, will, safe deposit boxes, insurance, debts, and sources of income before he/she becomes incapacitated—talk and plan together now about how these affairs should be handled.
Anticipate potential incapacitation by planning as a family who will take responsibility such as power-of-attorney or in-home caregiving if an aging relative becomes incapacitated.
Closely examine your family’s ability to provide long-term, in-home care for a frail and increasingly dependent relative—consider the family’s physical limits.
Plan how your own needs will be met when your responsibility for the dependent older relative increases.
Explore alternative sources of care, including nursing homes or other relatives’ homes, in case your situation changes.
Discuss your plans with friends, neighbors, and other sources of support before your responsibilities become a burden—ask for their understanding and emotional support-you may need them.
Familiarize family members with emergency response agencies and services available in case of sudden need.
“Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.”
Exodus 20:11-13 KJV
Kie-Vining, John. When Home is Where the Hurt Is: A Ministry Intervention Guide for Trauma Victims. Family Ministries, pp. 107-119.
We should each be able to go to bed every night and reflect back on the day and know that we took at least one action to move us a little closer to God and His intention for our lives. And that one thing is different for each of us. Here are five snapshots from scripture and five questions that show the power of focusing on ONE THING.
1. David
“The Lord is my light and my salvation; Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; Of whom shall I be afraid? . . . One thing I have desired of the Lord, That will I seek: That I may dwell in the house of the Lord All the days of my life, To behold the beauty of the Lord, And to inquire in His temple” (Psalm 27:1, 4 NKJV).
David, a king, could have asked the Lord for more wealth or more power. But the one thing he asked was to dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
What is one thing that you would ask of the Lord?
2. The Rich Young Ruler
When Jesus was teaching, a rich young ruler asked him what he could do to inherit eternal life. Here’s what Jesus said.
“‘You know the commandments: “Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.”’ And he said to him, ‘Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.’ And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, ‘You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.’ Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions” (Mark 10: 19-22 ESV).
The ruler lacked trust in God because he wanted to keep all of his wealth.
What is it that you lack?
3. Mary and Martha
Jesus was at the home of these two sisters. Mary was at His feet worshipping Him, wanting to hear what He had to say. Martha was very busy doing the household chores, and so Martha said, “Jesus how come you’re not telling my sister to come and help?”
And Jesus said to her:
“Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things, but one thing is needed and Mary has chosen the good part, that which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke 10: 41-42).
In the same way that Martha was distracted, we can become distracted with other things instead of focusing on our relationships with Christ. What is the one thing that is necessary in your life?
4. The Blind Man Who Was Healed by Jesus
Jesus healed a man who had been blind since birth. The Pharisees wanted to catch Jesus committing a sin, so they questioned the healed man and tried to trick him into saying Jesus had done wrong. The healed man responded:
“Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see” (John 9:25 ESV). What is the one thing you know for certain?
5. The Apostle Paul In Prison
While Paul was suffering in prison, he wrote this:
“Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended, but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead. I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13-14).
Paul had a rough life. And yet after everything he had been through, the exhortation he wanted to share was to know Christ personally.
What is one thing that you must do in your life? David asked for one thing. The rich young ruler lacked one thing. Martha needed one thing. The blind man knew one thing. Paul did one thing.
What is the one thing you ask, the one thing you need, the one thing you lack, the one thing you know you should do, or the one thing that you know for sure?
What is the one thing you can focus on in your life that will bring glory to God and benefit yourself?
What is the one thing you ask, you need, you lack, should do or the one thing that you know for…
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A bucket list is a list of things you want to accomplish in your lifetime. They are typically out-of-the-ordinary experiences, not mundane, predictable ones. For instance, you wouldn’t include maintain personal health on your bucket list or buy a car; but you might include tour Europe or plant a vineyard. They are usually big, challenging goals (get my pilot’s license) and not small, simple activities (buy a water bed). Most people think that a bucket list is just for old people: “I’m 70 years old. What do I want to do before I die? On my deathbed what will I regret having not done?” But a broader perspective would suggest that everyone should have a bucket list and that the earlier you start your list the better. In a recent post I wrote about the advantages of setting goals early in life. I’ve had a robust bucket list for years. It’s fluid: I’m constantly adding, subtracting, and tweaking the items. Here are a few items on my list.
In his good book, never eat alone, Keith Ferrazzi posits a strong argument for setting life-goals. “In a study cited in Success magazine researchers asked Yale’s class of 1953 a number of questions. Three had to do with goals: Have you set goals? Have you written them down? Do you have a plan to accomplish them? “It turned out that only 3 percent of the Yale class had written down their goals along with a plan of action to achieve them. Thirteen percent had goals but had not written them down. Fully 84 percent had no specific goals at all, other than to ‘enjoy themselves.’ “In 1973, when the same class was resurveyed, the differences between the goal setters and everyone else were stunning. The 13 percent who had goals but had not written them down were earning, on average twice as much as the 84 percent of students who had no goals at all. But most surprising of all, the 3 percent who had written down their goals were earning, on average, ten times as much as the 97 percent of graduates combined!” (page 23) If you aim at nothing you will always hit it. I have also found that sometimes the journey is just as satisfying as reaching the destination. Planning how you’re going to accomplish a goal and taking incremental steps forward is, in itself, fulfilling. For instance, I’ve been strategizing for years about how to spend 30 minutes in 130° F temperature (see the above list). Early in 2015, Mary and I planned a trip to Dubai (United Arab Emirates) and I did some research into how hot it gets in that Arab emirate. The hottest temperature on record is 125° F in the city, but Dubai is on the Persian Gulf and is cooled (relatively speaking) by the sea breeze. Perhaps I could get closer to my goal by going south into the desert. So when we were in Dubai I hired a car and driver and ventured out into the desert. When we were far from civilization the driver dropped me off and I walked the dunes, taking temperature readings as I went. Fortunately for me, a heat wave was ravaging the area that week so I recorded 132° F where I stood. Mission accomplished. I asked my driver to take my picture. Maintain a bucket list. Question: What’s on your bucket list? From Think with Me..Reflections on Life and Leadership. Used by permission.
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More often than not, we’re pretty good with beginnings. However, a lot of times we seem to hate endings. In stating that, I need to clarify there are a whole lot of things that we just can’t wait to wash our hands of. We all have those nagging situations that we desperately wish would give us blessed relief by vanishing altogether. Sometimes we can’t wait for the day to end, or for that looming deadline to pass, or for a particular event to be mercifully over. There are some endings that we gladly welcome with open arms, and by the time they arrive we find ourselves ecstatic that whatever’s done is finally done. Nonetheless, there are many times when we tend to hate endings.
Endings can be incapacitating and painful for a variety of reasons, most of which we never identify because we’re too caught up in the loss to see anything but the loss. We don’t really identify what we’re actually doing with whatever the ending is, or what the ending is actually doing to us because we’re too lost in the loss to even begin to consider any of that. And so, the fact that something is ending becomes entirely consuming to the point that the ending is all that we can see. And because it’s all that we can see, the ending becomes an end in itself when directly ahead of us new beginnings are being forged and fresh byways are being laid out from the very ending that we’re caught up in.
Because this tends to occur, we’re left with the inability to see within the loss the seeds of a new beginning. We’re not able to comprehend that an end is always a beginning. We can’t even remotely fathom that whatever is ending for us is always more than an ending. An ending robs us of the vision to understand that things are escorted out of our lives so that better things have room to be escorted in. We lose the understanding that death always begets life of some sort, and that life is always an opportunist, persistently standing ready to build something out of the smoldering ashes and raise something up out of the tangled carnage. We lose the precious sense that an end is only a beginning in disguise. And so, how do we learn to see a beginning being formed in the ashes of whatever end we’ve experienced? We might do that better by getting some obstructive thinking out of the way:
First, We Don’t Want to Lose Something
Quite simply, we tend to hate endings because many of our endings involve things that we don’t want to lose. Sure, there are many things that we’re glad to get rid of, but many times some ‘thing,’ or some person, or some life-phase played such a role in our lives that we can’t imagine going on without it. Or we feel that its end has come far too soon and we are bereft of everything we could have gotten out of it, or it out of us. Whatever the case, we’ve been cheated or short-changed or short-sheeted in some manner that elicits a sense of loss intermingled with a sense of anger. What we end up doing is seeing the loss within the agenda that we had created for that thing, or that person, or that life-phase, and we’ve not recognized a larger agenda that’s simply playing itself out so it can play other things in.
Second, We Fear That Whatever We’ve Lost Can Never Be Replaced
Then there’s the fear that what we’ve lost can never be replaced. There’s an immediate sense that losing something demands that it be replaced. There’s that sense where we don’t want to disturb the continuity of our lives and the rhythm that we’ve created. Things have been disrupted, sometimes dramatically so, and we want to stop the disruption by immediately replacing whatever it was that we lost. But then we’re caught up in the ever-accelerating fear that maybe it can’t be replaced. Maybe there is no substitution. Maybe there’s nothing to swap it out with, and we will therefore have to settle with the disruption of a “new normal” that we have absolutely no interest in. What we tend to miss is that replacement only serves to perpetuate the repetition of the past, where creating space for something new creates space for something fresh. And it is out of something fresh that this journey of ours is so often refreshed.
Third, Glorifying the End
But because we have to tolerate endings, we want them to be good and even glorious. We want an end to have some meaning to it, that whatever is ending was meaningful and possibly spectacular while it was around. If something’s going to end and we can’t stop it, we want to send it off with some sort of recognition or appreciation or final ‘hurrah.’ If it’s going to be an ending, we want it to be one that will be such an ending that it will never be forgotten. We can’t hold on to that which we’re losing, but we can make the end grand and glorious to the point that the memory of it all will always stay with us. There’s nothing inherently wrong about bringing something to a close in a manner that’s respectful and celebratory, unless this becomes our one and total focus.
Fourth, We Fear That an Ending Might Be a Failure
What if the ending is really a failure? What if whatever it is that ended wasn’t really supposed to end, but it did because somebody screwed up somewhere? What if this really wasn’t the time? What if this loss really was grossly premature and achingly unnecessary? What if this loss was due to my stupidity or poor timing or lack of insight or lackluster commitment? What if this loss was the product of someone’s blatant failure? Sometimes losses are so unexplainable and seemingly irrational that we think this way. And it may well be that the loss did not have to happen, and maybe should not have happened at all. Yet, life is big enough and has ample room to take the most tragic mistakes and weave them into the most wonderful of opportunities if we let it do so. An ending is only a failure if we choose not to tease out the manifold lessons in the ending.
Fifth, We Fear That There Will Be No New Beginning
So what if this is an end and nothing more than an end? What if nothing emerges from whatever it is that we’ve lost? What if life doesn’t go on, or there are no opportunities beyond this, or it all dies here? Could an end be irrevocably an end where a beginning of any kind simply does not exist? Is there a place where life stops because there is absolutely nothing else ahead? Could this be that dreaded chasm where this is no other side from which to pick up the journey? And it is this very fear that makes most of our endings so terribly frightening. We often wonder will the road run out, will an irrevocable end eventually come, and will there be no place to go because the future simply won’t exist and the past is forever gone. Yet, it is looking at the nature and fabric of life, and in the looking realize that things always find a way to go forward because there is always a place to go forward to.
An End as a Beginning in Disguise
As we approach spring and Easter, we are incessantly reminded of new beginnings. Life is a relentless perpetuation of things arising out of things that have passed. There is the coming and the going. The emptying out and the filling up. The uprooting and the planting. There is an unrelenting exchange that makes things unrelentingly new. The coming of spring heralds a titanic resurgence arising out of the debris and decay of fall. It is a message woven into the most intimate fabric of creation where nothing ends because an end is only a beginning in disguise. It’s living with the understanding that loss is real, and that loss can be utterly devastating. But loss is only a precursor to something that we will soon gain. It might be different, it could take us in an entirely new direction, it may well be unfamiliar, but it is the next step picking up where the previous step left off. And whatever the nature this new step might be, life is such that it opens new horizons, paints new vistas, and calls us to perpetual adventure if we’re willing to heed the call. An ending is only a beginning in disguise.
© 2014 Craig Lounsbrough, M.Div., Licensed Professional Counselor
As you reflect upon last year, what has become your “place of residence”? For Matthew, his choice was to step away from the tax table and follow Jesus. What is your “table”? Rejection, indecision, comparison, failure, performance or fear? Step away and follow Christ!
