Hi Pieter, how are you? Been thinking about you. How are you coping?

Dear Pastor, long time. Thank you for thinking of me and for asking how I am coping. Honestly, it means more than you know, it got me thinking.    

To answer you plainly — I am tired. Deeply tired.

At almost 74, caring for my two adult disabled children day after day, I feel mostly alone. Isolated. Like a modern-day Biblical leper family. That image may sound dramatic, but it is the most accurate one I have found for what this life feels like.

And I have been thinking about it. In Jesus' time, lepers were not just sick — they were isolated by their circumstances, kept at a distance by society, required to announce their own "uncleanness," and largely forgotten by the religious community. Yet they were precisely the ones Jesus walked toward.

That gives me something to hold onto.

What I have come to understand honestly about Church

I have had to make peace with some realities and stop expecting what church is simply not structured to give.

What I have mostly not found:

·       People who truly understand my daily reality

·       Spontaneous, consistent practical support, like a simple check in phone call

·       A community that knows how to enter long-term adversity without trying to fix it or spiritualise it away

·       Leaders and elders and friends with the capacity to sit with complexity and exhaustion over years,

not just weeks

·       Freedom from the feeling of loneliness, simply by attending on a Sunday

Most churches are better at celebrations and sporadic short-term outreach than endurance. Better at crisis response than chronic need. Better at easy community than the hard work of staying present with someone whose situation doesn't improve.

That is an honest failure of much of the modern church. And acknowledging that has actually helped me — because I stopped blaming myself for feeling unseen.

What I believe I have every right to expect — and ask for

I am learning, slowly, that I am allowed to need things. I have every right to expect:

·       To be seen and known by at least a few people

·       A place where my grief is not rushed or spiritually bypassed

·       Practical intercession — people who pray with me, not just for me from a distance

·       Occasional practical relief — a visit, someone to step in and be with my children so that we can

breathe and take a break away from it all

·       A community that does not require me to perform okay-ness in order to belong

·       To bring my full, exhausted, doubting, worn-out self through the door, to be known and still be

welcomed

What Scripture says about my situation

I keep coming back to this — God has a particular, repeated, emphatic concern for:

·       The caregiver who is depleted

·       The isolated

·       The one whose burden is chronic and largely invisible

·       The lonely, the overlooked, the forgotten

I am not on the margins of God's attention. I am near the centre of it. That is what I have to keep telling myself on the really hard days.

"He heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds." — Psalm 147:3

"Even to your old age I am he, and to grey hairs I will carry you." — Isaiah 46:4

"Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you." — 1 Peter 5:7

An honest word about being almost 74

At this age, with this level of responsibility and this depth of tiredness showing up every single day — I deserve a community that comes to me as much as I go to them. I should not have to perform energy I do not have. I should not have to explain my life from scratch every time.

I need people who learn my story and stay in it with me.

Church is not offering that — and mostly it has not — I am sharing all of this with you seeing that you've asked. Not to complain, but to say honestly:

"This is my life. This is what I carry every day. I need specific, consistent support. Can church offer that?"

In my experience over many, many years, no, I don’t think so.

What I most want you to hear

I am not a burden. I am not forgotten. The fact that I have shown up every day for my children — for years — in circumstances most people will never understand, is something I have to hold on to as an act of love and faithfulness, even when it feels invisible. I hold on to the fact that God sees me.  

The isolation is real. The exhaustion is real. The longing to be truly seen and held by a community is a legitimate, holy need — not weakness. Not self-pity.

I deserve to be cared for, not just to care.

It is sad but, in my experience, thus far, church has failed to offer that — but I remind myself that it is the church's poverty, not my unworthiness.

Thank you for reaching out.

Regards

Pieter