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For the person doing the lifting, the appointments and the nights. Being tired of it does not mean you love them less.
Choose the prayer closest to your situation. You can pray it as written, change the words, or begin with a single line.
Most of the work has no name. Cutting up food small enough. Checking the pill box twice because you cannot remember whether you did it. Sitting in a car park before you go back in, because once you are back in there is no gap until bedtime.
And you love them. That is the part that makes it complicated. If you did not love them you could resent it cleanly. Instead you resent it and feel guilty about resenting it, and both of those are true at the same time, at three in the morning, again.
What follows is prayers you can say out loud in a hospital corridor or under your breath while the kettle boils. Then the passages the church actually has on this, including the ones people quote at carers badly.
16 prayers on this page, and 9 Bible passages with notes on what they mean.
For the morning when the day has not started and you are already finished. You are not asking to feel strong. You are asking to be able to stand up.
It is morning and I am already tired, God. I do not have today in me. Give me the next hour, and then the one after that. I am not asking to feel strong about this. I am asking to be able to get up.
God, I have nothing to say. You know the house and the list. Stay.
My back hurts and by the evening my hands are shaking. You made this body, Lord, and you can see what it is carrying. Take some of the weight. Keep me from injury. Let me sleep tonight, even a little.
I did not choose this and I do not want it. I love them and I want my own life back, both at once. I am telling you, God, because there is nobody else I can say it to without wrecking something.
For the calls at two and four, the listening for breathing, and the hours when everyone else in the world appears to be asleep.
God, they have called again and I am up again. The house is dark and I am angry and I am here anyway. Be awake with me. Settle them. Keep me from dreading the sound of my own name.
It is late and my mind will not stop. Hold the list until morning, Lord.
I am lying here listening for a sound I dread and a sound I need, God. You are awake anyway. Keep watch over them for a few hours so that I can close my eyes.
For the sharpness that comes out of your mouth before you can stop it, the family who visit for an hour, and the anger you are not sure you are allowed to have.
I was sharp with them today. I was worn out and it came out as unkindness. Forgive me, God. Help me say sorry in a way they can take in. Do not let today be the day I remember.
I am angry with the people who come for an hour and drive home, God. I am angry that this landed on me. I am not ready to forgive it. Hold the anger for me. I cannot carry it and them at the same time.
God, this is not fair, and you have not stopped it. I would rather be honest with you than polite. I am still here in the morning. Do something.
For the phone call you keep not making, the respite you have talked yourself out of, and the forms nobody has explained to you.
I have to ask for help today and I feel ashamed of needing to. Steady my voice. Let them say yes. If they say no, keep me from concluding that I am on my own in this.
Lord, I want one morning that belongs to me. Not to get away from them, just to be a person for a while. Make a way for it. And when it comes, stop me spending all of it worrying.
The forms are beyond me and the money does not stretch. Send someone who knows how this works, God. Give me the words for the call I keep putting off, and the patience for the hold music.
For dementia, for decline, and for the last weeks. You are grieving someone who is still in the room, and that is a real grief.
They looked at me today like a stranger. I am losing them while they are still here, God, and I do not know where to put that. Hold on to who they were. Help me love the person in front of me now.
Lord, we are close now and I am frightened of the moment itself. Be in the room. Let them be unafraid. Whatever happens, do not let them be alone, and do not let me be alone either.
Thank you for who they have been, God. Do not let that get buried under everything I now have to do for them.
What each passage meant where it was written, and what it does and does not offer you now.
Jehovah will support him upon the couch of languishing: Thou makest all his bed in his sickness.
Psalm 41:1–3: read the chapter
The psalm opens by blessing the person who takes notice of someone with nothing, and this line is what that person is promised. It is a prayer, not a contract. Carers have prayed it over people who then died. What it does say is that God notices the one doing the noticing, which is worth something on a day when nobody else has.
Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall:
Isaiah 40:29–31: read the chapter
Verse 31, the one about eagles, gets quoted at exhausted people as though it promised they would stop being tired. The verse immediately before it says the fittest people collapse. Isaiah was speaking to exiles who had every reason to give up. The strength he describes comes to people who have already fallen, not instead of them falling.
And they come, bringing unto him a man sick of the palsy, borne of four.
Four of them. Not one. The man could not get himself there, and someone had to take a roof apart to manage it, which is closer to what care actually costs in effort and mess than most sermons get. Jesus sees their faith, plural. If you are the only one carrying at the moment, that is not the arrangement this story describes.
and came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on [them] oil and wine; and he set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
Luke 10:25–37: read the chapter
Good care is arranged as well as given. The Samaritan binds the wounds himself, then stops at an inn, pays someone else to carry on, and leaves, and Jesus still calls that mercy. He does not stay to the end. He makes sure the man is looked after and he keeps the bill open. Handing part of it over is inside the story, not a departure from it.
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, [even] these least, ye did it unto me.
Matthew 25:34–40: read the chapter
The tasks Jesus lists are unglamorous and mostly unwitnessed. Food, a drink, a visit to someone ill. He says he was on the receiving end of them. That is worth hearing on a day of bedpans and the same conversation for the fourth time. Note too that the people commended had no idea they had done anything. It is not a demand for more.
Then saith he to the disciple, Behold, thy mother! And from that hour the disciple took her unto his own [home].
John 19:25–27: read the chapter
Jesus is dying and uses some of his last breath to settle who will look after his mother. He does not tell her to manage. He names a specific person and hands the responsibility across. If you are trying to work out who takes this on when you cannot, you are doing something Jesus did from the cross.
Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.
Galatians 6:2–5: read the chapter
Three verses later Paul writes that each will bear his own burden, and the pair gets used to tell carers to stop complaining. The two lines use different words, one for a crushing weight and one for an ordinary pack. Verse 2 is addressed to a church about what it owes its members. It is a duty laid on other people, on your behalf.
The liberal soul shall be made fat; And he that watereth shall be watered also himself.
Proverbs 11:25: read the chapter
Read this as a job description for everyone who is not the carer. It says the watering is meant to run both ways, and it tells the people around you what they owe someone who has been pouring out. A proverb describes how life often runs. It is not a receipt. Plenty of carers pour out for years and are not watered in return, and that is a failure of the people around them rather than proof of anything about you.
But if any provideth not for his own, and specially his own household, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever.
1 Timothy 5:3–8: read the chapter
This is the verse thrown at people who mention a care home. Read the paragraph around it. Paul is organising a church list of widows, working out who the congregation supports and who has family able to. The target is offloading a relative onto a community while doing nothing. Arranging professional care, and paying for it, is providing. It never required one person to do it all personally.
Quoted from the American Standard Version (1901), which is in the public domain. Every reference on this page was checked against the text. Chapter links open the same translation in our reader.
Some of these verses get used as weapons, so it is worth naming it. 1 Timothy 5:8 is quoted at people who dare to mention a care home. Isaiah 40:31 is quoted at people long past exhaustion, as though tiredness were weak faith. The Samaritan is used to suggest a good person never stops. None of that is in the text. Asking for respite, paying professionals, sharing this with siblings, saying out loud that you cannot go on as you are: none of it is a failure of love, and none of it is a failure of faith.
One thing, then stop reading. Think of a single person who could take two hours off you this week, and message them now, badly worded if it comes to that. Do not build a rota. Do not plan the month. One person, two hours, one message. If there is genuinely nobody, ring a carers organisation instead. That counts as the message.
