Someone you love can still be here.
They can still be the same person before God. They can still be loved. They can still matter.
And at the same time, so much can be getting lost.
Memory may be changing. Independence may be decreasing. Familiar abilities may disappear. The person who spent a lifetime serving other people may now need someone else to help them dress, eat, transfer, remember, or make decisions.
For a Christian caregiver, that creates questions that knowing more about dementia does not necessarily answer.
What does the cross change about how we understand suffering, weakness, dependence, usefulness, and loss?
And how do we remain faithful when what we can see in front of us looks increasingly like decline?
If you are trying to understand what something happening in your own caregiving situation means—what has changed, what responsibility is actually yours, what authority you have, or what needs attention next—you can Ask the DigniCare Advisor.
Suffering Is Not Evidence That God Has Abandoned You
Caregiving can involve real suffering.
There may be physical work you never expected to do. There may be grief, conflict, guilt, fear, resentment, disrupted relationships, and responsibilities that affect your marriage, your children, your household, and the rest of your life.
We do not have to call those things easy in order to be faithful.
Jesus tells us plainly in John 16:33 that in this world we will have tribulation.
Christian faith does not give us a promise that faithful caregiving will prevent suffering. Our hope is something greater: Christ has overcome the world.
In the episode, I share the story of a friend I call Rachel. While she was caring for her parents, she felt trapped. Caregiving seemed to be colliding with her marriage, her children, and her family relationships.
Nearly two years after that caregiving season ended, while studying the story of Joseph, she described the experience differently:
“The Lord hemmed me in.”
While she was living it, she could see the pit.
Only afterward could she recognize something of what God had been doing through it.
That may be true of your caregiving season too.
You may not be able to understand what God is doing while you are cleaning another bathroom, responding to another repeated question, changing another plan, or watching someone you love lose another ability.
You may never understand all of it on this side of heaven.
But suffering itself is not evidence that God has abandoned you.
Dementia Does Not Determine a Person’s Worth
Dementia takes abilities away.
That is real.
It can affect memory, reasoning, independence, decision-making, mobility, communication, personal care, and eventually almost every part of daily life.
But the Christian understanding of a person’s worth cannot be based on how much that person can produce, remember, contribute, or accomplish.
The world easily equates strength with independence and usefulness with value.
The cross overturns those categories.
In 1 Corinthians 1:27, Paul writes that God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.
A person who spent a lifetime serving others may eventually need to be served.
That does not make that person less valuable.
Receiving care does not diminish human worth.
The person entrusted to you remains an image bearer. If that person belongs to Christ, dementia cannot sever that union with Christ.
Their abilities may change profoundly.
Who they are before God does not.
You May See Decline Without Yet Seeing the Good
One of the hardest parts of dementia is that, from where you stand today, much of what you see may be loss.
Abilities decrease.
Dependence increases.
The caregiving responsibility may become heavier.
You can provide faithful care and still watch the person’s condition change.
Christian hope does not require pretending otherwise.
Our hope is not that everything will eventually work out exactly as we wanted it to.
Romans 8:28–29 points us instead toward the work of God in conforming His people to the image of His Son.
God’s work is not suspended because dementia entered your family.
It is not suspended because you became a caregiver.
And it is not suspended because you cannot presently see what He is doing.
That does not mean you will be able to explain how every painful part of this is good.
Sometimes you cannot.
I cannot.
But the inability to see all that God is doing is different from God no longer being at work.
The Cross Changes How We Interpret What We See
Dementia brings real loss, grief, increasing dependence, and suffering.
The Christian answer is not to deny those realities.
It is to interpret them through Christ.
Suffering does not mean God has cast you aside.
Dependence does not make someone less valuable.
Loss of ability does not mean loss of personhood.
And the fact that you cannot presently see what God is doing does not mean He has stopped doing good.
Christ’s cross changes how Christians interpret the reality in front of them.
You may still be in the part of the story where all you can see is the pit.
You may not yet be able to look back and say what Rachel eventually could.
But you know who you belong to.
And you know that Christ is risen.
When the theological question is not the only question
Sometimes knowing these truths still leaves you with a very practical caregiving question.
Mom still wants to live at home—but what does her increasing dependence now require?
Dad says he does not need help—but you are quietly checking, correcting, reminding, and doing more to keep everything working.
Your spouse needs more care—but what is actually yours to carry?
A professional has made a recommendation—but what does implementing it require in your actual family situation?
Those questions involve the caregiving system you are already living in.
You may know a great deal and still need help interpreting what the realities you know mean here.
Read the Full Transcript
Someone you care for may still be doing many of the things they have always done.
They may be living at home, following routines, making choices, and telling you, “I’m fine.”
And then you are checking on them more often, following up behind them, giving them another reminder, quietly doing a little bit more to keep things working.
And now you’re wondering whether they really need more help—and what you’re supposed to do if they say that they don’t.
We Can Understand Dementia and Still Not Understand Dementia
Recently, I was having breakfast with a friend and former client of mine for my birthday, and it struck me to the core how Christians can understand dementia and still not understand dementia at all.
And a confession for you: this was me for most of my career as an occupational therapist.
We understand memory loss.
We understand changing abilities.
We understand somebody may need more help than they used to.
And we can still interpret what is happening through the same categories that the world uses—the categories of loss, independence, usefulness, autonomy, and suffering.
A person I was working with who was living with dementia once corrected me and told me that they live with dementia and don’t suffer from dementia.
For a while, I thought that was the right thing to say.
“Live with dementia.”
And that is true.
But that’s also not the whole truth.
A person can live with dementia.
A person can live well with dementia.
And a person with dementia can suffer.
Those things are not mutually exclusive.
That is where the harder Christian question comes in.
Someone you love can be here, be the same person before God, and still matter. They’re still loved.
And at the same time, so much can get lost.
So how do Christians understand that?
What does the cross change about how we understand suffering, weakness, dependence, usefulness, and loss?
That’s what we’re going to look at in today’s Episode 360: How Christians Understand Dementia When Someone You Love Is Still Here, But So Much Keeps Getting Lost.
Today, we’re going to look at the cross and dementia.
Today, we’re going to look at Christ.
When Knowing a Great Deal Still Doesn’t Tell You What Your Situation Requires
You may already know a great deal about caregiving and still not know what your specific situation requires of you.
Maybe the burden is getting heavier, and you’re wondering how much longer you can keep doing this.
Maybe there is a conversation that keeps going badly. Someone is refusing help, isn’t listening, or the same arguments keep coming back.
Maybe there is a decision you know is coming, but you’re not yet sure exactly what needs to happen—or what you actually have the authority to decide.
Or maybe it is the spiritual and emotional weight of caregiving: the guilt, the grief, the resentment, the fear, and the question of whether you’re doing enough.
These can feel like separate problems.
But caregiving is a system, whether you or I recognize it or not.
What changes in one part of the system can affect the entire system: the person you care for, your responsibilities, your relationships, your household, your limits, and what needs to happen.
Here on Dementia Caregiver Support for Christians, we use Caregiving System Advising to help you understand what’s actually happening, figure out what goes where, and determine what’s next.
I’m your host, Lizette Klute, and welcome to today’s episode.
Thinking Differently About Dementia as Christians
Today’s episode is a little bit different. It’s going back to some episodes that I did way back when.
What I want to do is challenge us to start thinking differently about dementia—particularly as Christians.
Recently, a friend of mine and I went out for breakfast for my birthday.
We were talking about her experience as a caregiver, and what was interesting as the conversation ebbed and flowed was this:
Even though she is a very godly woman, is well steeped in the Bible, and is a support group facilitator—even though she has all of the head knowledge and heart knowledge of dementia and being a Christian—at times, as we were talking, both of us were using the words and language the world uses to describe this process.
We were using it to describe both being a caregiver and dementia specifically.
So I thought we would look at dementia a little bit differently.
There are three things we’re going to look at today.
First, suffering is not evidence that God has abandoned you in this process.
Second, the cross overturns the world’s categories of strength, usefulness, and loss.
And lastly, the cross allows us to believe God is doing good even though all we can see is suffering and decline.
Those are the three things we’re going to look at today.
1. Suffering Is Not Evidence That God Has Abandoned You
Firstly, suffering is not evidence that God has abandoned you during this caregiving season.
John 16:33 very specifically says:
“In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
As Christians, nowhere have we been told that if we are faithful, we won’t suffer.
Actually, we have quite explicitly been told the opposite.
We are told that faithfulness is part of our journey and that, more likely than not, we will suffer tribulation.
Ironically, this past week in our church service, the pastor was talking specifically about this.
We are going to suffer.
Christ suffered.
And because of that, we are also going to suffer.
We are going to suffer in ways that perhaps we never thought we would.
But we suffer differently than the world because one thing I know to be very true—especially related to dementia—is that, as Christians, we have hope.
We have hope in the resurrection.
When I look at unbelieving caregivers and unbelieving care receivers, I understand why this can be such a devastating process.
But you and I, as believers, have hope.
We have hope in the resurrection.
We Do Not Need to Minimize Suffering
We do not need to minimize it.
It sucks.
Suffering sucks.
It doesn’t matter what type of suffering it is. Suffering sucks, right?
But we live in a sin-cursed world, and we have to remember that.
Let me tell you about my friend. I’m going to call her Rachel for today.
Rachel was the primary caregiver for her parents and described to me during breakfast how she felt trapped.
Everything was colliding.
Her caregiving was colliding with her marriage, her kids, and her family relationships.
And we all have a tendency to believe in the life we think we deserve—the life we think we should be living.
It has now been almost two years since her caregiving journey ended.
During a Bible study on Joseph, she started looking back on her caregiving journey and said these words:
“The Lord hemmed me in.”
When All You Can See Is the Pit
While she was in the process of caregiving, she could only see the pit.
Think about Joseph in the pit.
Only after she was through the caregiving journey could she begin to see what the Lord was doing through it.
You and I might still be in the day-to-day grind of being caregivers.
Perhaps you are suffering a lot for the privilege of being a caregiver—because it truly is a privilege.
It doesn’t always feel like a privilege.
But it is a privilege.
Christ was the ultimate caregiver. He came down to earth and did this for us.
So as you are living this—as you are a primary caregiver or doing things that are not fun to do, like repetitively cleaning the bathroom, cleaning the person, or all of the above—it may be hard to understand what God is doing right there in that moment.
And quite frankly, you may never actually understand all of it on this side of heaven.
It is hard to see the label from inside the bottle.
So suffering is not evidence that the Lord has abandoned you.
It isn’t.
It feels like it sometimes.
I admit it.
It does feel like it sometimes.
2. The Cross Overturns the World’s Categories of Strength, Usefulness, and Loss
The second thing is this:
The cross overturns the world’s categories of strength, usefulness, and loss.
This is where part of my own story comes back.
For 30 years in the medical model, I did not recognize how much of the medical model I had taken on in my own thinking about people living with dementia.
Yes, dementia really does take abilities away.
That person’s brain is actually changing on the inside.
It takes memory away.
It takes independence away.
It takes decision-making away.
Eventually, if you live long enough with dementia, it can take away your ability to stand, transfer, get out of bed, and do many of the things you once did.
That loss is real.
What Do We Use to Measure a Person’s Worth?
The world often equates our value—our ability to be successful or valuable—with our ability to think and do.
What do we, as believers, actually use to measure the worth of a person?
I’m going to use Anne as an example.
Anne is helping her husband. This is a composite person, not a real individual.
She describes her husband as someone who has always been handy and servant-oriented.
Now, because he is living with dementia, he is unable to serve in the same way.
The natural place for us to go is to say things like:
“Look at what he’s lost.”
“Look at how he’s changed.”
“Look at what he cannot do anymore.”
But I want to encourage you to think about it in a different way.
He has spent his whole life serving.
And now he is being served.
Someone has the privilege of serving him.
Somebody gets to help him.
Receiving care does not make us any less valuable than we were beforehand.
Dependence Does Not Make Someone Less Valuable
Intuitively, we know this to be true when we have a child born with a physical impairment that results in the fact that they may never live independently.
They may never walk, transfer, feed themselves, or do any of the myriad things we learn to do as we develop and grow toward independence.
And we still see that child for who they are.
They are an image bearer.
They are a created being before God.
And if they are a Christian, they belong to Christ, and nothing can sever that union between Christ and them.
The problem comes when it is an adult who once had those abilities.
Because they no longer have them, it becomes easy for us to begin seeing them as less than.
Even though we say we know they are an image bearer and know they are created in God’s image, the world’s way of thinking can creep in.
We can forget.
We can stop seeing them that way.
First Corinthians 1:27 says:
“God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.”
Christ’s cross overturns the categories we naturally use.
We Are Not Independent
We are not independent.
Let me say that again.
We are not independent.
You and I—when there is nothing wrong with us, or mostly nothing wrong with us—can believe we are strong and independent because we are useful and have our ability to think.
And yet, we are dependent on God.
We are no more or less dependent on God than the person to whom you are providing care.
That person may be dependent on you.
They are also dependent on God.
And God uses you, my dear Christian listener, as a means.
He uses you as a means.
Dementia may change people’s abilities.
But if they are believers, it does not change the fact that they belong to Christ.
3. The Cross Allows Us to Believe God Is Doing Good Even When All We See Is Decline
The last point is this:
The cross allows you to believe that God is doing good even though all you can see is decline.
If we are honest, the wages of sin is death.
None of us are going to make it out of here alive unless the Lord returns before we die.
All of us are going to pass away.
That is the wages of sin.
The person you love who is living with dementia is going to continue to decline until they die.
Their independence will continue to decrease.
You can be very faithful in providing care and still watch things change.
But our hope is not that things are eventually going to work out exactly the way we want them to work out.
When you get to glory, you will know and understand why this happened.
We will understand because God is good.
Romans 8:28–29 says:
“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good…”
All things.
All things.
Even dementia.
It continues:
“…for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son…”
We Are Not Outside of God’s Work
We are not outside of God’s work when we are living with dementia or suffering with dementia.
We are not outside of God’s work when we are living as caregivers or suffering as caregivers.
We may not necessarily be able to see or measure it as good.
But if you believe that God is good, and that this is for His glory and your good, then that is something that allows you to carry the cross you are bearing right now.
Caregiving is for your good.
I don’t know how.
I’ve never figured all of it out, because I can tell you that it is hard.
It is hard to be a caregiver.
Things change.
The Good I Could Not See While Caring for My Mom
After my mom passed away early last year, one of the things I became eternally grateful for was having been her caregiver.
I never would have said that in the moment.
We had a pretty rocky history.
Life was not always easy.
Like most adult children—and I have to remind myself of this with my own kids—we do the best we can as parents.
I’m confident my parents loved us.
I’m confident my parents did the best they could with the information and values they had.
And yet, there was difficulty in our relationship.
But the good that came out of my mom needing care was that it actually restored and redeemed our relationship.
I never would have thought that being her caregiver would be a good thing for me.
And it was.
What Caregiving My Dad Has Shown Me
Many of you, if you’ve listened to this podcast for a period of time, may know that my husband and I are actively caregiving for my dad, who is a professed atheist.
That brings together a whole different can of worms, right?
But in this process, I have come to an awareness that my dad’s need for care is also for my good.
It has, to a large extent—it will never be perfect—redeemed our relationship.
Romans 5:3–5 says:
“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope…”
And hope does not put us to shame because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
Suffering Is Not Good, but God Is Good
I can tell you that suffering itself is not good.
However, God is good.
And God gives us suffering for our good and for His glory.
Sometimes the hardest thing for me to understand is:
How is this good for the person living with dementia?
I don’t know.
But I know God is the author and finisher of our faith—not you and I.
God.
He is steadfast.
He is reliable.
How Do We Live as Caregivers?
So how do we, as caregivers, live?
We live for God’s glory.
Because the chief end for you and me, if you are a believer, is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
You and I as caregivers belong within that.
The person living with dementia is living with dementia—and may be suffering from dementia—for God’s glory.
How?
I don’t know.
But it is true.
Christ’s kingdom is here, even though it is still seen in shadows.
We are living in the time between.
We are living in the “not yet.”
Christ died for your sins.
Christ died for my sins.
And the way to the kingdom comes through the cross.
The cross right now for you and me might be being a caregiver.
It might be living with dementia.
It might be suffering with the wages of sin and wrestling with all of the feelings and emotions that come with death and dying.
But it does not mean that God isn’t good.
And it does not mean that you cannot live this journey for God’s glory.
What Christ’s Cross Changes About How Christians Understand Dementia
Yes, dementia really does bring loss, grief, increasing dependence, and suffering.
But Christ’s cross shows us how we, as Christians, understand those realities differently.
Suffering is not evidence that God has abandoned you during this.
Christ’s cross overturns the world’s categories of strength, usefulness, and loss.
You are not less useful because you are living with dementia, if you are a person listening to this who has dementia.
And Christ’s cross allows you and me to believe that God is doing good even when the only thing we see in the process is loss or decline.
Christ’s cross changes how Christians interpret their reality.
Suffering does not mean you have been cast aside.
Rachel, my friend, could not see what God was doing during her trial.
She could only see it after her trial.
You and I may not be able to say that yet.
There are aspects of this that I can say for sure I understand.
There are others I cannot.
However, I know who I belong to.
And if you’re listening to this, then you likely belong to Him as well.
I know that Christ is risen.
He has died for you and me.
And we keep our eyes on His cross even in suffering.
Things may not be okay today.
They might not be okay tomorrow.
But our hope rests in Christ.
Need Help Interpreting Your Own Caregiving Situation?
You may understand the diagnosis, know what the professionals have said, know what the person you care for wants, and still not know what all of that means for your actual caregiving situation.
What has changed?
What is still working?
What are you already doing behind the scenes to keep it working?
What responsibility is actually yours?
What authority do you have?
What needs attention now—and what does not need to be decided yet?
That is the work of Caregiving System Advising.
Ask the DigniCare Advisor about your actual caregiving situation.
And as always, may the Lord bless you and keep you. We will see you next week in our next episode.
