Make Better Caregiving Decisions With This Christian Dementia Framework
Have you ever wondered why the more strategies you learn, the more stressed you feel? You’ve read the books, tried the tools, and still, peace feels just out of reach.
In Episode 245, we explore why true clarity in dementia caregiving doesn’t come from fixing problems—it comes from seeing the journey through God’s eyes.
This episode is a heartfelt look at one caregiver’s shift from the medical and self-focused models of care to a biblically rooted, God-honoring framework.
Why the Medical and Caregiver Models Weren’t Enough
The medical model gave strategies.
The caregiver-centered model gave some relief.
But neither gave peace.
For over 30 years, the focus was on how to fix dementia behaviors—through tools, techniques, and knowledge. Yet something was missing. These models only addressed parts of the caregiving experience, never the whole.
They didn’t ask the deeper question:
“What does God want me to see here?”
A Shift to a Biblical Framework
When caregiving became personal, everything changed.
Suddenly, it wasn’t about patients. It was about family. About faith. About the crushing weight of trying to carry it all.
The focus shifted from fixing the problem to finding purpose in God’s plan. Through prayer and Scripture, the pieces came together:
Your loved one is still made in God’s image, no matter how dementia progresses.
You are called to caregiving, not by accident, but for your sanctification and His glory.
Peace comes when we align our care with God’s design, not just worldly advice.
Caregiving Dignity by Design: A God-Centered Framework
This episode introduces Caregiving Dignity by Design—a biblical approach that:
✔️ Helps you make decisions through God’s lens, not just a medical one
✔️ Reshapes how you view your role, your loved one, and your purpose
✔️ Offers peace over panic, knowing this journey is part of God’s providence
You’re Not Alone—God Prepared You for This
Ephesians 2:10 reminds us:
“We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
Caregiving is one of those good works. It’s hard, yes. But it’s also holy. You’re not walking this road by chance. God prepared it for you—and through Him, you can find clarity, peace, and strength.
Join our monthly free workshop!
“How To Immediately Reduce Dementia Caregiver Overwhelm and Stress In 3 Easy Steps”
Transcript
Introduction to Caregiving Dignity
[0:00] The medical model gave me the strategies. The caregiver model gave me more stress relief, but neither actually gave me peace. Caregiving Dignity by Design was born when I stopped asking, how do I fix this? And started asking, what does God want me to see here? If you are a Christian and you are struggling with God’s sovereignty or God’s providence, reach out to me. I will have a conversation happily with you about God’s providence and God’s sovereignty and help you along in your journey. If you are struggling as a family caregiver and you’re ready for a little bit more support, hop on a Care Companion success call with me. It will take 20 minutes where you will be able to talk to me, gain some clarity about your very next step that you need to take in this journey, as well as have a conversation about whether or not it makes sense for both you and for me for us to work together to help you through your dementia caregiving journey.
[1:11] Hey Christian Care Companion, welcome back to Dementia Caregiver Support for Christians, the podcast where I teach Bible-believing Christians how to think differently about dementia and walk this caregiving journey with clarity, dignity, and peace. Because we are not just dealing with dementia behaviors. We are not just feeling burnt out. We are walking through a God-ordained calling, one that shapes you into the person that you are supposed to be. In today’s episode, I’m pulling back the curtain and sharing how my entire caregiving philosophy has shifted and why the framework I now teach didn’t start in a textbook. It started in a Sunday school. If you’ve ever wondered why the techniques alone aren’t enough or why the world’s advice still leaves you anxious, this episode is for you. If you are a Christian spouse, the adult child, or a family member of a person living with dementia and you haven’t yet attended one of our free monthly workshops, the next one is on May 10th at 12 p.m.
[2:28] Eastern. I do them on a Saturday because I know and recognize a lot of family caregivers still work. What we look at in these free workshops are three ways to ease your caregiver burden and stress. And we look at it through the lens of scripture. So if you haven’t yet signed up, the free workshop is May the 10th at 12 p.m. It is a Saturday and the link is thinkdifferentdementia.com forward slash WSL. Or you can go to the website and go to the free resources and you can sign up for the workshop there. I promise you, you will walk away with three ways of looking at your caregiving journey in an entirely different way.
Making Better Caregiving Decisions
[3:15] So don’t delay and come sign up today.
[3:18] All right. So today’s episode is episode 245. And what we’re going to look at is how to make better dementia caregiving decisions with a Christian framework. How many of you guys wear glasses? Like I wear glasses. I don’t know about you guys, but I need readers. I actually wear bifocal contact lenses, which is pretty challenging because you need a lot of light in order to use the bifocal lenses. But I will never forget visiting my mom and dad. And sometimes I don’t take my readers with me. And when you are trying to read a very, very fine print on a medication bottle with somebody else’s reading glasses, it doesn’t always go too well. Most of us have done this. Most of us have had kids that want to try your glasses on and then they go, oh, I can’t see because it’s either too big and you yank it off because it’s overwhelming or it’s kind of too small and it’s still pretty useless, right? That is what I have felt like over the last 30 years as a caregiver.
[4:30] A formal professional caregiver, walking through the medical model and then walking through the caregiver-centric model into finally getting into a biblical worldview model of caregiving. It never worked. The medical model doesn’t work by itself. A caregiving-centric model doesn’t work by itself. It’s like wearing those glasses where you try to put them on and you say, oh my goodness, I cannot see. It was like seeing through things partially, but not really getting a full, clear picture. And so what we’re going to look at is how do we as Christians actually make better caregiving decisions using a Christian dementia caregiving framework, not the world’s framework.
[5:17] Not a medical model framework, not a caregiver-centric framework, but a biblical worldview framework for caregiving. And we’re going to look at it in three separate points. The first one is because this one is a little bit more of my story. And so we’re going to actually going to look at it through three different stages that I went through, because I want you to understand how I got to this point of caregiving dignity by design, which is an alternative to the medical and caregiver-centered models. And so we’re going to look at it through the three phases that I went through. The first one was the medical model helped me see the pieces, but not the real person or the whole person. It helped me see parts of the story, but not the whole story. The second thing that we’re going to look at is the stage when I became a family caregiver and everything shifted to me, where I kind of became like a little bit of an idol factory, the me, me, me, me, right? And then the third stage that we’re going to look at is how everything changed when And I realized it really is all about God’s design and it is so cool.
[6:31] So the first stage I lived in for over 30 years was the medical model. And what the medical model helped me see is because my background is as an occupational therapist was parts of the picture. It’s kind of like the analogy, have you guys ever heard the analogy of a blind person feeling a certain part of an elephant and another blind person feeling a different part like the tail versus the leg versus the trunk and each one of them describing it in a different way? Well, the medical model helped me see a part of the picture, but it wasn’t the whole story. I started my journey as an occupational therapist. We moved to the United States in 1993, and over decades, I slowly turned into a dementia specialist. I’m not going to go into all of the background of how I ended up there, but I just have always had this natural affinity for working with people with cognitive impairment. I love it. Helping families and people living with dementia, and I was an extremely efficient and good OT.
[7:38] Always used to joke, I called myself the MacGyver OT. I learned everything. I learned all of the book knowledge about how to help people living with dementia. I learned good strategies. I learned good tools. I learned how to manage these responsive behaviors or challenging behaviors, But I missed a piece of it because even though we were looking at it holistically and even though I was, as a believer, attempting to help family caregivers and people living with dementia through a Christian worldview.
[8:14] Being in that medical model did not allow me to actually fully form a biblical worldview of caregiving or dementia caregiving. I learned the Allen cognitive disabilities levels through a woman called Claudia Allen. She’s an occupational therapist and did a phenomenal job of helping understand a lot of the things that we see with dementia. I became a certified Alzheimer’s disease and dementia care trainer and certified dementia practitioner. I am a skills to care qualified certified occupational therapist. I teach PTs and OTs and speech therapists.
[8:53] Certification courses that I’ve developed myself. I knew all the things. I had all the book knowledge and all the head knowledge and all of these things to quote unquote fix, but I wasn’t necessarily because it wasn’t my role as an OT to look at really the person from the perspective of God. And for all of the people that I tried to kind of help in that way, that I didn’t help fully, forgive me. It’s been a long journey. I did not do it on purpose. I did it out of ignorance. And when you’re in the medical model, you have to remember that who pays for the medical model, it is the insurance companies. And so the lens that I was looking through is functional improvement, not the lens of the Bible in how to help people with dementia as well as family caregivers.
[9:50] And so it wasn’t looking at people’s spiritual growth or their relationships or any of those things, even though I incorporated them as best I could, it wasn’t enough. And then finally, I started to realize that techniques are helpful, but it’s not everything if you’re not doing caregiving in a complete context. And so I still, to today, use a lot of techniques and strategies and tools because they work, but they don’t work outside the context of God’s design. And so that was the first several decades of my journey as an OT in the medical model. And I’m so grateful for those years because it really helped me understand the
Transitioning to Family Caregiver
[10:41] physical process people are going through when they have these brain changes. But then one day, like a light switch, I became the family caregiver. And then things changed. And it was so frustrating and so overwhelming. And it was unbelievable because I didn’t understand why.
[11:04] I was so overwhelmed because the reality is I come out of the medical model. I know how to navigate the healthcare system. I know how to help people with cognitive impairment, but I didn’t know exactly what it felt like until I turned into the family caregiver, right? And I couldn’t understand it. And like so many people who are then in that reactive mode, I fell into the caregiver-centered model because it literally became all about me, right? Calvin says people are idol factories, and we are idol factories because we are created in the image of God, and because we are created in God’s image, we are created to be worshipers. We are supposed to worship God, and so we’re either going to worship God or we’re going to worship idol. We’re going to worship something. That is what we are going to do, and the idol that I created in my mind then became me. It was all about me, my stress, my needs, my boundaries. And it was sort of helpful. I really started learning about caregiver burden. I learned about caregiver stress and it was kind of helpful, but it was only like a band-aid. It was a temporary relief. I started looking at other models that we could use. I started exploring and seeing how can we make it easier for the caregiver.
[12:29] I started learning about the caregiver burden inventory. I learned about a thing called the Colby Index, K-O-L-B-E for you nerds out there who want to know how to spell that. And I started incorporating the Colby, which is a framework or a way of problem solving and using our innate strengths in caregiving. And all of those things became super helpful, but it was still not the big picture. It was still not the complete elephant. It was still only the tail or the trunk. And I still couldn’t really put it together in my mind how to make this a truly God-honoring, for God’s glory part of my journey. And it took me a long time to figure it out. Some people maybe figure it out a little faster than me, but I had to go through these different journeys, these different steps in order to get to where I am. And I will tell you, I am eternally grateful to God that he is so patient with me, that he gives me time to catch up to where he wants me to be.
A Shift in Perspective
[13:40] And so, like I said, the idol I had was me. I went from the medical model, problem solving, fix this perspective to the.
[13:49] Oh my goodness, I can’t do this. It’s all about me perspective. It was about my comfort, my care. And then the third part, stage came. And the third stage was when everything started to change, and it was like I was able to finally see the whole elephant. And I started to really pray to God to help me understand this process. I really started to try to get out of my own way. I had stopped working as a therapist, And it took about a year and a half of not being in the day-to-day medical model for me to actually start to see this way more clearly than I ever did. And what I came to realize when everything changed was in a Sunday school lesson that we had with a pastor friend who was talking about the ninth commandment, which is the commandment that we are not to lie. So the ninth commandment is that we are supposed to not bear false witness against your neighbor, right? That is the ninth commandment is not to bear false witness.
[15:02] And so in the conversation, what kind of came out was that we were weaning my mom from alcohol and we were giving her a box of wine that had some wine in it, mostly non-alcoholic wine. And we had this conversation, me and another young man in our congregation, about therapeutic lying. And I’ll never forget Ryan telling me that we serve a God of order and that we serve a God of truth, and therefore there has to be truth in this whole journey in how to help people living with dementia without lying to them, which has phenomenal. Forced me to come into a different way of looking at how to do this without lying to people with dementia.
[15:45] And so that whole realization got me into really putting together the biblical worldview of dementia and dementia caregiving. Because people, we are created to make meaning. We have to understand everything that we are doing, we’re constantly trying to make meaning of the story. And so the missing piece for me was really looking at caregiving through a biblical worldview and not just looking at coping strategies or techniques or, you know, the skills that we need. Yes, we need those things too.
[16:21] Yes, we need to keep our stress under control. We need to have all of it. It has to be a complete picture. And so God’s word totally reframed my thinking by then stopping me and forcing me to go from therapeutic lying to a better way of looking at dementia. And what I have started to really put together is that when you come from God’s word, when you look at a person with dementia as a person created in his image, they are still a whole person. And as a caregiver, that this is a part of your journey. It is a part of being in God’s economy and you’ve been called to this specific role. You’re not just caught up in it and that this specific journey has a purpose
Embracing God’s Design in Caregiving
[17:13] and that is for your sanctification and for God’s glory. And then all of that started to come to me to come together in a framework that I call caregiving dignity by design. It is a practical biblical system to help you make decisions through God’s lens.
[17:32] It is a relational model that prioritizes God’s order of the world over the world’s order of the world. And it really forces us to shift our thinking because God, in essence, trains us to think like Him. We are constantly being brought along in this journey to become more like Christ. And when we do that, even in our caregiving journey, this will give you peace over panic because you have God’s eternal purposes in mind. And then all of a sudden, it puts it in a perspective. It totally puts your whole entire caregiving journey in perspective. I’ll never forget when I was in boarding school, I never understood, you know, it was, oh, woe is me, and it was awful and terrible, and how could my parents do that to me? All of these things that were going through my head. And I had a really great pastor who worked with me for a very long time to truly, truly come to acceptance. That situation, boarding school, was for my good and for God’s glory. It was part of God’s providence and sovereignty in my life, and it was part of my sanctification process. And once I totally got through all of that, I now know every circumstance.
[18:53] Paul talks about it, right? I’ve learned to be content in every circumstance in my life, even in caregiving, even through the death of my mom, even through helping my dad who is living as an atheist and can be very difficult for us to help. Even in the midst of all of those circumstances that are hard from a world’s perspective, I have eternity in mind when I’m doing these tasks and obligations and looking at my caregiving through that lens. And so I want to remind you that Ephesians 2 verse 10 says, we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God has prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them, right? We are not caregiving by accident. This is a good work that God prepared in advance for you. And when you walk in his design, you will have peace. I’m not going to say it’s going to be easy. I’m not going to say that it is not going to challenge. But the reality of the matter is, getting out of bed in the morning, I’ve already, before my feet hit the ground, sinned against God in thought, word, and deed. And so this is for us to become more like Christ. And so I just want to remind you that for me and my journey.
[20:18] Every model I trained in was focused on the wrong things. They were like looking at a part of the elephant with your eyes closed and just feeling a trunk or a tail or a leg, but no caregiving philosophy, no medical model.
[20:36] No caregiver-centric design looks at how God is looking at this journey and
Next Steps in Your Caregiving Journey
[20:41] how we as family caregivers who are Christians are supposed to walk through it. And so over the next several episodes, I’m going to continue to unpack this and how it applies to real-life decisions, all the way from our medical choices to how we transition people from one house to maybe a facility to our decision fatigue. This is where the rubber meets the road and how you can apply this information as a Christian into your caregiving germ. And if you are open to it or if you are looking for a little bit more support. I do have a new opportunity that has come out. The next cohort of my Confident Caregiver Blueprint will be launching on May the 13th. And if you’re interested in that, I will put a link for you to sign up for that particular program. It is actually the blueprint that I take people through to really start to hone and look at your entire caregiving journey, not just in the task centered.
[21:52] Medical model, caregiver centered perspective, but through the framework and lens of God’s view on caregiving as a holistic program. So if you’re interested in that, the link will be in the show notes and I do invite you to sign up and register for it. It’s a live cohort and I really do hope that you join me. If not, if you’re not ready for that, please come to the free workshop on May the 10th. It is three ways to ease your caregiver stress and burden as a family caregiver. And as always, thank you for listening.
[22:27] Like or share this episode. Sharing it goes a long way. It shows that people are interested in this unique Christian perspective on dementia and dementia caregiving. But to recap again, this was just my personal journey, how the medical model helped me see parts of the process, but not the whole process, how I then became the caregiver and became totally an idol factory and it became all about me, and then how everything changed for me when I realized that I really needed to look at this through God’s lens and not my lens. As I and all of my episodes. May the Lord bless you and keep you. And I will see you guys in our next episode, which will be talking about should you move a loved one with dementia into your home. So check that episode out.
