When a loved one is in pain

She is beautiful, talented, highly qualified in her profession and is married.
Her husband is a medical professional.
She has two children, a beautiful home in a very desirable location. People who look at her lifestyle and who have some knowledge of her achievements, think that she is incredibly blessed and secretly feel very envious, because she projects an image of control, organisation and even happiness.
What wouldn’t some people give for such a golden world?
What lies beneath her carefully constructed façade tells a very different story. Far from being a very much-together type of person, her world is rapidly disintegrating around her. There is little financial security and even less happiness in her life. She is, in fact, lonely.
Her children are showing signs of stress and she is clinging on to the remaining vestiges of a marriage that has become a living hell.
cope
This marriage has lasted eight years, but it may not endure much longer, because she feels unable to cope with the pain and the sorrow to which she is exposed on a daily basis. A psychologist by training, she is now in regular counselling, as she desperately tries to find a coping strategy. What has caused this woman’s life to fall apart, to be ready to disintegrate?
There is an immediate answer. Her husband is seriously sick and his sickness is serious. He suffers from manic depression or, as it is often called today, bi-polar disorder, which makes his own life unbearable at many times, and being related to him almost untenable.
Can you ever begin to imagine what it is like to be living with someone who during a manic phase bears absolutely no relation to the person you married? When the illness is in a severe phase the sufferer loses all connection with reality.
responsibility
Often there is no sense of financial responsibility and compulsive spending on goods that are neither needed nor useful, becomes the order of the day. I know of one sufferer who started buying the most extensive range of antique furniture he could find and his wife was absolutely beside herself as goods arrived by the truck load at her house and she was left to explain to the sellers that they were not needed and would they take them back.
Sadly, when this sickness is manifesting itself the sufferer often exhibits a total disregard for the wellbeing of people who are closest. Concern for a partner or for children may just evaporate because a manic depressive individual has no world but his or her own world, which becomes a world of delusion and illusion. When they are high, they are ultra high and the mania has no limits. But when the mood changes and the low kicks in, the depths into which the individual sinks seem bottomless, bleak and black.
The sense of isolation is so intense that thoughts of suicide are ever present. Attempts at ending life may be serious and many.
 Any attempts at offering support, help, sympathy or understanding are perceived as interference or threats.
Manic depression is a curse of the worst kind and requires specialist attention and specific medication which has to be taken for the rest of the sufferer’s life.
environment
So, my young friend, a wife and mother who longs for a normal family life, a loving relationship in which she and her husband can create a secure environment for themselves and for their children, finds that instead of her expectations being fulfilled, she feels she is living on the edge of an active volcano – which can and does erupt at any time, without warning, causing damage, creating extreme distress and making everything and everyone in its path, genuinely hurt?
She writes from a long way away to ask for prayer. Prayer for her sanity. Prayer for the physical safety of her children and herself.
Prayer for her suffering husband. Prayer that the love that she had on the day that she married and which she struggles now to find or feel, may yet be there, so that she will be able to hold on rather than quit the marriage.
She is praying herself. She would like to pray with and for her husband, but he won’t hear of it. Once this was the foundation of their relationship – but he won’t engage in prayer, read a bible, or have anything to do with Christian friends, especially with those who want to show care and concern.
It really is heartbreaking to learn of this desperate situation, especially because I knew the couple when they were so much in love. I had the privilege of being involved with their pre-marriage counselling  and then of conducting their wedding, which was a truly wonderful occasion. I visited with them afterward in the first home they had as newlyweds and have fine memories of their participation in the life of the church I was pastoring then. Now all I can do is fulfill the request that has been made, the request for prayer.
ineffective
I say this is all I can do not because I think that prayer is ineffective or a very limited response. In no way do I think like this. I believe very deeply in the importance of prayers of intercession. But I guess you know what I mean.
There is a desire to be able to be more and to give more to help. I wonder if you know how I feel?
I suspect many of you reading this column will be able to identify with me, because right now you have family, maybe a partner, a child, a close loved one, who has through illness, physical or psychlogical, become a changed individual.
A once predictable, fun loving open person, has become unrecognisable, even a stranger to you and you feel so helpless to be more and to do more. It is a matter of profound sorrow that this is the case. 
If this is the case, let me encourage you to join me in the discipline of doing what can be done and not failing people in the ministry of prayer that is as much part of their need as all other possible and available help. Prayer is love in action and nothing has as much healing potential as love, which never gives up.
Pastor Ken Jefferson can be contacted on revjeff@realnet.co.sz or at 638 2290