The Church’s Steps Toward Recovery
Question: Who should be the “care taker” of someone fighting mental illness?
Today we continue asking questions that need answered in order for the Church to make steps towards it own recovery in mental health?
Answer: In the past it would be easy for me to say the government because the Church hasn’t, but with budget cuts and governments facing fiscal challenges, many government and private mental health facilities and organizations are facing scaling back or even eliminated services. The Church has always been instructed to take care of the poor, the widows, those in need. Often in mission fields, missionary doctors birth and develop hospitals in third world countries. Orphanages are built and maintained (even though amazingly they have slowly disappeared in the United States). But the government and the Church are organizations, so it is easy for individual, Christian or not, to count on the charity of organizations rather than on personal charity to help people in need.
As I have said earlier, the U.S. government is founded on the principle of “we, the people,” and the Church is built on “we God’s people”, but the bottom line is “the people”, not the “organization”. The “organism” is always more effective than the “organization”! So what are “we” or “I” to do should be our question. Our use of pronouns must change. “What can ‘I’ do, or what can ‘we’ do, rather than what should ‘they’ be doing?
As a care taker, the most effective, empathetic, acts of kindness and support that have come to me as the caretaker, and my wife as the person ill, has come from individuals, not from the Church or from local or state governmental agencies, who were willing to ban and bond together as a support, advisory group to help me as a caregiver maintain my “sanity” while helping my wife towards recovery. The bottom line as an answer to this questions is “I”, and “you” personally, are called to be “care takers” for the hurting, and together “we” can make a difference without government regulations or Church dogma or doctrine.
Tomorrow's Question: If the “care taker” of someone (physically or mentally) ill doesn’t “take care” of the “care taker”, then eventually no one will be able to “take care” of the one ill! So how can the Church support, or “take care” of the “caretaker”?