The election is over. People will spend weeks picking apart the results. Meanwhile, family caregivers are sorting medications, helping someone get dressed, and having late-night conversations with the ceiling fan.

November is National Family Caregivers Month. As the holidays approach, expectations pile up even when a caregiver’s strength is running low.

If you’re a caregiver who’s frazzled, stressed, heartbroken, or weary, you’re in the right place.

You can be surrounded by people who love you and still feel lonely. I often tell pastors that caregivers can feel lonely on a crowded pew.

Family caregivers know what it means to disappear into someone else’s story. People ask how your loved one is doing. You explain the latest procedure or what the doctor said. Somewhere in the conversation, what you’re carrying disappears beneath the details of the person you’re caring for.

When I started this column for Blaze, I wanted caregivers to find a little respite and something solid to stand on while they caught their breath. Whatever else I write about, I keep coming back to the caregiver who wonders whether anyone understands.

That’s also why I started a caregiver group at our church here in Montana.

Every Thursday morning, we gather around a table. First-timers sometimes arrive nervous, sometimes already teary-eyed. Walking into a room of strangers to talk about caring for someone you love takes courage.

The church has committed to keeping us supplied with tissues.

The pastor or his assistant sometimes has coffee waiting. When neither is there, that responsibility falls to me.

I’m accustomed to making coffee for Gracie. She likes coffee that reaches out and slaps you. Most attendees have learned to politely decline when I’m handling the brewing.

One fellow brought a tin of cookies from Costco. We’ve made a sizable dent in them.

Well, let’s be honest. I’ve made a sizable dent. I keep passing the tin around, but somehow it makes its way back to me. I need to be careful, or I’ll get so big the bears will have to start hiding their food.

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We go around the table and check in. Sometimes the circumstances are dire, and the tissues get passed along with the cookies. Sometimes we talk about ordinary things. Even amid the tears, laughter has surprised us at every meeting.

You see, each of us speaks fluent caregiver. Nobody needs a lengthy explanation of why someone is exhausted, frightened, or struggling to make one more decision. We recognize the language because we live it.

This week, one man whose wife lives with dementia told us he can no longer have a rational conversation with her. Around our table, he said, he felt heard for the first time in a long time.

How many more caregivers feel the same way he does?

Sometimes, speaking fluent caregiver sounds like this: “Pull up a chair. Have a cookie. Or three. Sign this waiver before drinking the coffee.”

I can’t offer bad coffee and a tin of cookies to readers. You’ll have to supply your own tissues. If you run out, use toilet paper. We’ve all done it.

But I can bring four decades of caring for someone I love to this page. I can speak honestly about the weariness, the fear, the resentment we’re reluctant to admit, and the laughter that still catches us by surprise.

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I can also remind you of something I regularly need to hear myself: You don’t have to feel better in order to be better.

Making your own doctor’s appointment, accepting help, or sitting with people who understand can be a good decision even when you still feel worn out afterward.

If you’re struggling to find the words to say to a caregiver, try these: “I see you, and I see the magnitude of what you’re carrying, and I hurt with you.”

If tears come, you don’t have to find something profound to say. Stay and listen.

If you’re a caregiver who’s frazzled, stressed, heartbroken, or weary, you’re in the right place. Tell me how you’re doing in the comments. I try to read them all and respond when I can.

If you’re none of those things, you’re still in the right place. Because if you love someone, you’ll most likely become a caregiver.

If you live long enough, you’ll need one.

Friends don’t let friends caregive alone.

​Caregiving, Caregivers, Comfort, Help, Doctors, Cookies, Coffee, Dementia, Readers, Comments, Tears, Companionship, Fellowship, National family caregivers month, Medications, Opinion & analysis 

There was a time when Josh Howerton — BlazeTV host of “Live Free” and pastor of Lakepointe Church — thought anxiety attacks were “a Gen Z way to say you had a bad day.”

But when a crushing season of anxiety threatened to cripple him, his perspective changed.

“I’ve never experienced a hell like that,” he tells Louie Giglio, pastor of Passion City Church in Atlanta.

Giglio has had his own journey with anxiety — a journey that was so significant, he wrote an entire book about it. “Putting an X Through Anxiety” is the longtime pastor’s account of his battle with anxiety as well as practical and spiritual tools to help readers understand anxiety’s roots, address anxious thoughts, and find freedom and rest in Jesus, the Prince of Peace.

On this episode of “Live Free,” Howerton and Giglio address the mental condition that now has millions of young people in its grip.

“I was like you, you know, when people talked about they suffered depression or anxiety, I was sympathetic, I think, but definitely not compassionate and understanding until I thought I was going to die one night,” Giglio tells Howerton.

“I was having these physical symptoms that were crazy … heart blowing up, then face totally numb, arm totally numb, and legs convulsing,” he recounts.

After a hospital visit and some medication, Giglio assumed everything would “be OK” again, but the trial was just beginning.

“I think I had a nervous breakdown. So I don’t think I really had an anxiety attack or a panic attack. I think it was way more significant than that,” he says.

“I cracked, and I ended up in a heap in the corner for about four months of life. I was out of commission. I mean, I didn’t go to work. I didn’t go to meetings. I didn’t preach. I didn’t think I was ever going to be normal again, and I thought I was losing my mind.”

But God was faithful to deliver him from this darkness, he says. “By the grace of God, I found my way out. He led me out. Worship led me out.”

Part of Giglio’s recovery involved speaking the truth to himself — and that’s one of the pieces of advice he gives to people struggling with anxiety.

“You have to take the mic and say, ‘God is with me, and I am not crazy. God did not make me crazy. God is with me,”’ he says.

Giglio shares that during his crushing season of anxiety, he would wake up every night at 2:00 a.m. feeling like an “elephant [was] on his chest.” No amount of advice from others could lift the dark cloud, but preaching to himself did.

“To the Lord, I said, ‘You didn’t heal me yesterday, and You didn’t heal me today, and I don’t know if You’re going to heal me tomorrow, but I do know You’re a healer … I’m going to praise You not because You healed me. I want to praise You because You’re a healer,”’ he recounts to Howerton.

Out of this dark night of the soul, a song was born.

“This little spontaneous song dropped into my heart, and I started singing it, and it was like a little pinhole, Josh, in the canopy of the darkness. And a tiny ray of light came in that night,” says Giglio, calling worship “a weapon.”

“I didn’t wake up the next day, take a shower, put on a suit, and go to dinner with friends, but I had a song the next night at 2:00, and eventually the song overtook the cloud.”

That song eventually became “I Lift My Hands” — a Grammy nominated song recorded by Christian music giant Chris Tomlin.

“I went on tour with Chris not long after that, and we were doing basketball arenas, and every night I would stand up and tell that story,” says Giglio.

“And I am telling you, Josh, people did not expect a Christian speaker at the concert to talk about falling in a hole of depression, and I was just seeing this wave of freedom go across people.”

To hear more of Howerton’s and Giglio’s personal battles with depression and anxiety, watch the episode above.

“Live Free with Josh Howerton” is available on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms. Join BlazeTV+ and start watching Josh today at blazetv.com/JOSH. Use promo code JOSH to get $20 off your subscription.

​Josh howerton, Mental health, Blazetv show, Louie giglio, Anxiety, Depression 

God does not leave His people unarmed and then call the resulting vulnerability “faith.” From the first organization of Israel after the Exodus to the final instructions Jesus gives His disciples before the cross, Scripture treats the capacity for defensive force as ordinary, necessary, and compatible with obedience.

In Numbers 1, God commands Moses to count every male 20 years old and upward who is able to go to war. “Take a census of all the congregation of the children of Israel, by their families, by their fathers’ houses, according to the number of names, every male individually, from 20 years old and above — all who are able to go to war in Israel” (Numbers 1:2-3). The total reaches 603,550 fighting-age men (Numbers 1:45-46).

Biblical self-defense requires foresight, discipline, and bravery; it is protective rather than aggressive, proportionate, and open to preemption when the threat is clear and imminent.

This is neither a civil registry nor a professional standing army. It is the mustering of the fighting men of Israel: men of the tribes, organized by household and clan, who would return to their lands and labors when the threat passed. The parallel to the Second Amendment’s “well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state” is striking — and not entirely coincidental.

In a 1788 sermon, Samuel Langdon, a former president of Harvard and delegate to New Hampshire’s constitutional ratifying convention, explicitly held up ancient Israel’s political and military organization as a model for the American states. He even described the Israelites’ armed forces as a “militia.” God Himself established an armed people as the ordinary defense of Israel.

‘Fight for your brethren’

The “sword” that appears hundreds of times in the Old Testament — more than 400 in many English translations — is the practical instrument of that survival. It kept the covenant community from being destroyed by those who would erase it. The violence is almost always defensive in purpose: securing the life and blessings that by His grace God has given, against those who would take them by force.

The same pattern appears when the people rebuild. In Nehemiah 4, workers on Jerusalem’s wall face open threats. Nehemiah arms them and says, “Do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, great and awesome, and fight for your brethren, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your houses” (Nehemiah 4:14). Half stand ready with spears and shields. The laborers work with one hand and hold a weapon with the other. “Every one of the builders had his sword girded at his side as he built” (Nehemiah 4:18). The community is built by men who stand ready to defend what they are building.

God’s law itself draws the line between proportionality and excess. “If the thief is found breaking in, and he is struck so that he dies, there shall be no guilt for his bloodshed. If the sun has risen on him, there shall be guilt for his bloodshed” (Exodus 22:2-3). The presumption is that an intruder in the night presents an imminent lethal threat.

Daylight changes the calculus because identification of the adversary and use of lesser force become possible. The distinction is necessity and proportionality: Force is justified by the nature and immediacy of the threat, not by vengeance or property alone. This standard still governs most American self-defense law.

Two swords

The New Testament does not cancel the pattern. In Luke 22:36-38, Jesus tells the disciples that the one who has no sword should sell his garment and buy one. When they produce two, He says it is enough. Raymond Ibrahim has shown how medieval Christians, including the Templars and Hospitallers, understood the verse as authorizing two swords — one against spiritual enemies, one against physical threats.

The modern pastorate, weak and effeminate, empties the passage of meaning and reduces it to mealy metaphor. As we have argued elsewhere, God calls men to be meek, not weak. Meekness is strength under control; the modern pastoral ideal is mere passivity that leaves the flock undefended.

Jesus never once forbids the use of steel. In fact, at His arrest, Peter draws one of those swords and cuts off the servant’s ear (Matthew 26:51; John 18:10). Jesus does not stop the blow. Instead, He heals the ear (Luke 22:51) and tells Peter to put the sword away, because, “Shall I not drink the cup which My Father has given Me?” (John 18:11; see also Matthew 26:52). The healing of the ear clears Jesus’ path to the cross; it is His last miracle before the crucifixion. The command is specific to that hour, not a universal prohibition against arms. The swords Jesus had just told them to acquire remain legitimate.

The most emphatic call for proper defensive alignment and proportionate force comes from the king of the universe Himself. “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends” (John 15:13). The love is sacrificial, not suicidal. It is the willingness to spend oneself so that others may live. If the defender dies without stopping the threat, those he claimed to protect are left undefended. That is not greater love.

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God-given right

Yet the modern Christian view abhors Christ the warrior against Satan. It prefers a cheap, easy Christianity that not only ignores real threats — feminism, open borders, Islamification — but affirms the sins that emerge from those threats: sexual immorality, racial idolatry, and self-destruction. Biblical self-defense therefore requires foresight, discipline, and bravery; it is protective rather than aggressive, proportionate, and open to preemption when the threat is clear and imminent. The prosperity gospel cannot defend families, and proactive defense is exactly what God demands of His men.

The Second Amendment records the American recognition of this ancient, God-given right. Free people retain the means to defend life, family, and liberty. When government acts as the servant described in Romans 13:4 — “he is God’s minister to you for good” — the people may rely on it. That “good,” however, is God’s objective good, not the subjective whimsy of those in power. It is not within the purview of human rulers to affirm immigration without assimilation, sexual anarchy, or racial idolatry, for all those oppose the laws of God. When government abandons its duty to do objective good or becomes the threat itself, the residual duty and the means of recourse remain with the people.

The census in Numbers, the swords at the builders’ sides in Nehemiah, the nighttime rule in Exodus, and Jesus’ instruction to acquire swords all point to the same conclusion. The right to keep and bear arms is not a concession of the state.

As Massachusetts patriot Mercy Otis Warren wrote in 1788 in her pamphlet, “Observations on the New Constitution,” “Self-defense is a primary law of nature, which no subsequent law of society can abolish; this primeval principle, the immediate gift of the Creator, obliges everyone … to resist the first approaches of tyranny.” Arms are the ordinary means of survival for the people of God who refuse to be destroyed.

​Natural law, New testament, Old testament, Self-defense, Christian living, Biblical, Second amendment, Mercy otis warren, Nehemiah, Lifestyle, Culture, Faith