Nancy Guthrie and her husband David speak about the important topic of Holding on to Hope: Grief & God’s Sovereignty.
Redeemer exists to celebrate and declare the gospel of God as we grow in knowing and following Jesus Christ.
Welcome, everyone. If you want to find your way to your seats. Trying to give everyone a chance to find parking and find a seat. I know it's tough out there, so thank you everyone for coming. Thank you, guests.
Speaker 1:If you are not a part of Redeemer, we welcome you and we thank you for coming. Just a quick note of information about our church. We meet in Avondale and we changed our service time for the summer. So if you would be interested More More information is on our website, or you can talk to pretty much anybody here and, find out where that is exactly. So we'd love for you to come join us this summer.
Speaker 1:For those of you who are new, let me give you a little bit of format kind of format for for the TalkBack Nights. We have about 45 minutes to an hour of talk, and then we have about 45 minutes, to an hour of talk back, of q and a. So we find that the the dual component of both those gives you an opportunity to hear what the speaker is saying, formulate some questions to figure out how do you apply some of this information. And then after about a 10 minute break, we'll come back and you can ask some of those questions. So I encourage you to be thinking during this first section what your questions may be.
Speaker 1:So without any further ado, I'm actually going to be handing the mic off to one of our elders, Colin Hanson, who gets to work with Nancy Guthrie. Nancy and David are here with us tonight, and Colin, through some work with the, gospel coalition, knows her well. So I'm gonna hand the mic off to Colin. And one more quick note, come on up, Colin. We'll remind you of this later, but Nancy has a book table over here.
Speaker 1:If you are interested in purchasing any of the books on the topic she's gonna be talking about tonight and getting any further information, the book table will be there all night.
Collin Hansen:So, Colin. Thanks, Dwight. Like Dwight said, my name is Colin Hanson. I serve as one of the elders here at Redeemer Community Church, and then also, in my day job as the editorial director for the gospel coalition. And in doing that over the last 7 years, it's been one of my most significant privileges to be able to work with Nancy and then be able to also then meet, husband David during that time.
Collin Hansen:One of the prime ways where Nancy and I've been able to collaborate is on her Help Me Teach the Bible podcast, which I would strongly recommend episodes that come out every 2 weeks. And we have a really strong archive now of those broadcasts. They're really designed to help anybody, especially those people, lay people like most of us here who have not been to seminary, have not been formally trained to do that, to know how to teach the bible, to in any context that we're in to our children, into younger Christians, and in bible studies, and home groups, and things like that. And so Nancy has been privileged to fly all around the world when she's been speaking at events like this. They're able to interview a lot of the top leading pastors and scholars.
Collin Hansen:And so it's, something that I strongly recommend that you that you check out. But what Nancy and then also David are probably best known for are there discussions about their personal experience with, but then also theological reflections, biblical reflections, gospel centered reflections on the nature of hope and the nature of grief. They are we're all acquainted with grief as our savior was at some level. Some of us more in more fresh ways, some of us in a more acute ways, and and we'll see especially in the q and a time and others about how they wanna talk about that. But one of the things that David and Nancy do is they host respite retreats where they deal with couples especially and help to counsel couples who have dealt with loss of a child.
Collin Hansen:And I think what's one of Nancy's other abilities is as a teacher to be able to walk us through the entire plan of redemption from Genesis to Revelation, and to see this unfolding plan of God that triumphs over every hardship and through every moment where you think that evil is going to win. And every moment where grief is is so painful and and closely felt. But there's always the hope. The hope of the seed that we looked at this last week in Joel's sermon from Genesis 316, all the way to the fulfillment of Christ being that very sun and moon and everything in Revelation. It's actually one of the projects that Nancy's working on now is a is a biblical theology walking through these various themes.
Collin Hansen:And you can look at her finding Jesus in the old testament studies, which I also strongly recommend. Again, I could go on and on and on, but Nancy is, your husband David live in Nashville. So made the trip down here, just a few hours. And one of the books that I wanna encourage you to check out, her most recent one, What Grieving People Wish You Knew about what really helps and what really hurts. And, so at that, Nancy, why
Speaker 1:don't you
Collin Hansen:come on up? Welcome welcome, Nancy, to Birmingham.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Colin. Well, what a privilege to be with you tonight. I love it, to get to hop in the car and make the drive down here today, to get to be with you. It's fun that there are a number of you I know here. Although I must admit, I do feel like David and I are significantly bringing up the average age.
Speaker 3:I'm a little uncomfortable with that, but I'll try to get over that. Well, I wonder if you guys have this in, Birmingham like we do in Nashville. It used to be in Nashville. There were lots of Bradford pear trees until they discovered that they weren't so good. Is that the case here in Birmingham?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I see a few head shaking. So it it took a while, I guess, for the Nashville area to figure out how easily Bradford tray pear trees break. So that happened to us a number of years ago. We had this big Bradford pear in our backyard, and it broke.
Speaker 3:We had to have it cut down. And so we decided, we were gonna need to get some trees to replace this huge Bradford pear tree. Primarily to spare our neighbors from seeing into our garage, which is a pretty horrifying thing. And so, we we got these 3 evergreen trees and we planted them. And, but but there was one in the middle that just wouldn't stand up.
Speaker 3:So, you know, the slightest wind would blow. And I drive back into the driveway and the slightest wind would blow. And I'd see that the one in the middle had fallen down. And so I would go over and I would pull it up and I would stamp the dirt around the bottom, trying to get some firmness to it so that it would take root and grow. And it just never would.
Speaker 3:And, honestly, finally, I saw it fall down, and I was like, forget it. Which is pretty much what I am with most plants at my house. My friends tell me if I would water them, then they would live. But I kinda feel like once you're at my house, you're on your own. So, but my parents came to visit.
Speaker 3:Any of you guys have parents who come to visit and take on projects? Sometimes good. Sometimes not so good. Well, this was a good one. My parents came to visit.
Speaker 3:And before we even got on the house, we drove in the driveway, and my dad saw how this tree had, fallen down. And so, he went into the garage and he found a broom handle and some rope. And he went out there and he plunged that broom handle into the ground, into the dirt beside the tree. And he tethered the tree to the rope. It was this broom hammer was plunged down into something solid and secure.
Speaker 3:And because of that, then when the wind blew, the tree didn't fall down anymore. And it ended up taller, much taller, all three of those trees, than our 2 story house. This tree being tethered to something solid and secure. It's kind of the same idea of an an anchor, isn't it? You know, anchor is something heavy, something solid that gets tossed down.
Speaker 3:Hopefully, it catches on something secure on the bottom of the water, and it's tethered to the boat so that when the wind blows, the boat won't crash into the rocks so that it won't be destroyed. I think of this also sometimes, do you ever notice this when those weathermen who are trying to get some kind of award are there on the shoreline about the time a hurricane is about to flow in. And every once in a while, you'll see one they grab onto it, like a light pole or stop sign because the wind's blowing. And they're trying in the midst of this storm to take hold of something solid and secure so that they don't get destroyed by it. In the brief time that we have together tonight, I wanna explore this idea of being tethered to something secure.
Speaker 3:To have an anchor in our lives that is plunged into something so that when the winds of difficulty blow in our lives, we're not blown away. We're not destroyed. But instead in fact, we are safe. We're secure. And I imagine that there are many in this room who know what it's like to feel the cold winds of difficulty blowing through your life.
Speaker 3:Maybe it was came in the form of a painful divorce, or mounting debt. Maybe it's been difficult people to deal with, or the loss of a job. Perhaps you've had a disappointing struggle with a child. Maybe you've had to deal with depression or some other difficult diagnosis, or maybe you have dealt with the death of someone that you love. The question is, what are we going to hold on to that solid and secure When these winds of difficulty blow in our lives, sometimes we'll hear someone say that they are going to well, I'm gonna hold on to hope.
Speaker 3:Hope for a solution. Maybe they mean hope for a resolution, certainly something a hope for something better than what they're experiencing right now. But what is hope? What is it really? A while ago, this arrived in my mailbox.
Speaker 3:It was, a really, it was a sales brochure for a new magazine that was going to launch called hope. And inside, at the very top of it here, it has the had this definition of hope. This is their definition of hope. See what you think. It comes out of the Cambridge International Dictionary.
Speaker 3:It says, hope, noun. A desire for the future to be as good as you want it to be. What do you think? Think that's what hope is? A little bit later it says, hope is about the power of the human spirit to overcome challenges and find the ways that really work.
Speaker 3:What do you think of that one? Is that what hope is? The power of the human spirit? You know, I think mostly when you and I use the word hope, usually, we're talking about something like wishful thinking. Aren't we?
Speaker 3:Like, we were on our way over here tonight. We were hoping we could find a good parking space. It wasn't wishful thinking. We are right out front. And it's very impressive.
Speaker 3:My husband's parallel parking. I'm telling you, we were the hopes came true. Alright? But usually, oftentimes they don't. Right?
Speaker 3:It's something that there's there's no guarantee it's gonna happen. We have no idea that it's going to happen. But we hope. We we cross our fingers, and we hope. It's mostly wishful thinking.
Speaker 3:So we've gotta figure out what we really mean. If we're gonna hold on to hope, we've got to know what it is. Well, Hebrews 6 gives us a sense of what real hope is or at least what it does. We read this. It says, we who have fled to him for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us.
Speaker 3:This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls. Now, does that not sound good? An anchor for our souls, to have something that is solid and secure, that's going to help us to live at rest, rather than being blown to and fro by every changing circumstance, every time life throws us for a loop, to always be living on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the worst thing to happen that we think just might happen. Over the last 10 years or so, I've learned a lot about hope, and I suppose you could say that I've been forced to. It was actually 18 years ago that I gave birth to a daughter that we named Hope.
Speaker 3:Now I hadn't had that name in mind for years for a daughter. I loved how it sounds. I'd never really thought that much about how what it meant, And I had no idea how meaningful it would become. When Hope was born, she had club feet. And the doctor who delivered her said to us, now she's got club feet, but don't worry about that because we can put, cast on her feet right away and take care of that.
Speaker 3:He said, but you're gonna wanna have the pediatrician take a good look at her. And when the our pediatrician got there that night, he came into our hospital room with a piece of paper on which he had made a list of what he called a number of little things that weren't quite right with Hope. In addition to those club feet, Hope had a real large soft spot. She had a flat chin and extra skin on her neck, a little dot on her ear. Her hands turned slightly out.
Speaker 3:She was very lethargic. She didn't move much. She didn't cry much. She wasn't holding her temperature. And he told us that night he that, he suspected that Hope had a rare metabolic disorder called Zellweger syndrome.
Speaker 3:Now we had never heard of that, and you probably haven't either. The best way I know how to describe it is, that hope was missing a little time tiny subcellular enzyme that you and I have in every cell of our bodies called peroxisomes. And those peroxisomes are kind of like the cell's trash man, And they have one kind of trash they're responsible for taking out, which is long chain fatty acids. So he told us that night that because hope was missing these that basically there was nobody to take out the trash. And because of that, these, the long chain fatty acids would build up in all of our cells and all of our systems and become toxic.
Speaker 3:And he told us that, in fact, a lot of damage had already been done to all of her major organs, especially her liver and her kidneys and her brain. He told us there was no treatment and no cure, and that most children with this syndrome live less than 6 months. He handed us 2 pages Xeroxed out of a medical textbook that described in very medical terms all the things that were likely wrong in Hope's body, and the things that would go wrong, and what would ultimately lead to her death, and then a bunch of post mortem photographs of infants with this syndrome. And then he left the room. And David crawled up into the bed with me.
Speaker 3:And we cried. And we prayed probably the most unceremonious prayer we've ever prayed, which was simply, god, help us. We don't know what to do. The reality of Hope's life was that her first day was her best. She grew, but she was always on a steady path toward death.
Speaker 3:Hope couldn't see or hear. She couldn't suck or swallow, so eventually put in a g tube. She developed seizures. So there was a lot about Hope's life. When I think back to that, I had I had really looked forward to having a daughter.
Speaker 3:We had a son, Matt, who was 8 at that time, and I was looking forward to have a daughter who would talk like me and be with me and be my friend in my old age. And there from her second day, I had to begin to let go of that dream. And taking her home from the hospital was one of many realities that would follow that weren't at all like we had hoped for, because we knew we weren't taking her home to start a life with her. But instead we were taking her home to care for her and to her death. The other thing I have to tell you about hope though, is that as I talk about it, probably you can imagine the hurt in it, the fear in it, the pain in it.
Speaker 3:It's probably harder for you to imagine the joy in it, which was just as real, just as significant. You know? Because, life made in the image of God is beautiful and meaningful and purposeful and valuable. And I have to tell you, hope changed the conversation everywhere we went. All of our high powered friends in our small group who conquered the world in all these different ways, didn't know how to conquer this.
Speaker 3:There wasn't a fix for it. And in our neighborhood, instead of talking about our lawns, or the football game, here we were with our unbelieving neighbors talking about what is a miracle, and should we ask for 1? Why pray, and what should we expect? Is God in this? Those kind of questions.
Speaker 3:And so our experience with hope was very rich, very meaningful. And we had, with hope, 199 of those, rich but also sorrowful days, and then we said goodbye to her. And all I know how to say about grief for me, the best way I know how to describe it is that grief for me felt like a big boulder was always setting on my chest. That kind of heaviness. I felt like I was always struggling to catch my breath.
Speaker 3:I struggled with lots of questions about why God had allowed this to happen in my life. I remember the day after we buried hope, coming home on that Sunday after church and looking at David, and I said to him, you know, David, I think for the first time in my life, I understand why people take drugs. I simply hadn't understood it to that point because I had never felt a pain that I was willing to do almost anything to not have to feel it. People have often asked me when we chose that name hope, and I understand why they're asking. Because Hope's life on the world's terms was hopeless.
Speaker 3:And so I would have to say that her life and her death really forced me to figure out what hope really means, and what it means to take hold of it. Because usually when we're talking about hope, we have some kind of outcome in mind that we think is going to be the good outcome, a positive outcome in our our estimation. We're not sure it's gonna happen, but we hope. But you see, this doesn't sound at all like hope the way the bible talks about it. Because the Bible describes hope as something strong, and trustworthy, Something you can find security in, certainty in.
Speaker 3:Hebrews 11:1 says, faith is being what? Sure of what we hope for and what? Certain of what we do not see. So this is saying that the essence of faith is a solid confidence that what God has promised will come about so that we don't have to wonder about it. We haven't experienced it yet, but we have no doubt that we will.
Speaker 3:It's expressed this way by the psalmist, the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. So, to take hold of hope, first off, is to risk your life on God's promises being true. It is To hold onto hope is to take hold of what God has said and live in the confidence that it is the most solidly dependable truth in the universe. That's the essence of what it means to trust God, that he's going to be true to his word. And over and over in our experience with hope, I had to think through what was true, rather than simply give in or give myself over to how I felt.
Speaker 3:I had to figure out what was true about God that I could grab hold of. And I wanna spend the rest of my time top telling you about 3 or 4 things that are true about God that I took hold of in the midst of the storm that blew through our lives. And the first thing that I grabbed hold of, like that weather man grabs hold of the stop sign. First thing I grabbed hold of is this truth that god loves me. Now, maybe to you that just seems so basic.
Speaker 3:But if you've ever gone through a hard time, was it perhaps the first thing you questioned? It can be the first question that really arises in the reality of of difficulty to begin to question whether or not God is good or loving. And I think it's because our equation of the way we think things work with God is that if God is powerful and is running this world, and if he truly does love me, then he's not going to allow anything terrible to happen to me. If he does allow something to happen, then it must prove that he doesn't really love me. I mean, isn't that the basis for why so many people in the midst of hardship or loss become angry with God?
Speaker 3:Because even though they had never described their understanding of how things work with God that way, that was their expectation. If I'm on God's team, he's all out for me and he is going to take care of me. Because we tend to define love as a commitment to our comforts and happiness. But god's love for me and for you is not divined most significantly by his willingness to make us comfortable or healthy or happy. God's love for us is defined by his commitment to our ultimate good, our ultimate good, and our unending eternal joy, which is found only in relationship with him.
Speaker 3:So holding on to hope is believing that god loves me. Now if I can't look at my circumstances to know that God loves me, to take hold of it, what am I gonna look at? Here's what John wrote about how we can know that God loves us. He wrote, this is love. Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice.
Speaker 3:You see, the clearest way that you and I know know know that god loves us is when we choose to look at the most significant most significant demonstration of love ever put on display. And that was when the son of God condescended to come into this world, not simply showing himself as an example of how to live, but to offer himself up as a sacrifice so that sin doesn't have to be a be a barrier between you and God and I and God any longer. So that you and I can have the boldness to approach God believing that we will be accepted rather than condemned. And not because of anything good we've done, but because or because we have been a good person, but because Jesus has made peace with God on our behalf through his cross. So I took hold of this confidence that God loves me.
Speaker 3:I think the other thing I took hold of in the storm was the confidence that god is in charge of this world. And because I am his, nothing happens to me that is random or meaningless. But instead, I can be confident that God is actually working out his good purposes in this world and in my life. This, I began thinking through these kind of things. I remember when I was still in the hospital, a good friend called, and we were talking on the phone when I was still there in the hospital.
Speaker 3:And she's told me that I could be confident that God would accomplish everything he intended to accomplish in Hope's life in the number of days that he gave to her. That really began to shape my thinking about that. I continued when I was at home. I remember a couple of weeks in, things have finally quieted down, and I was up in the room that we had intended to be, Hope's nursery. She ended up sleeping in a bassinet by our bed most of her life.
Speaker 3:But I was up there rocking her. It was like, it was finally quiet. And I was thinking to myself, okay, I'm I'm gonna pray. And I'm gonna ask God. I mean, I'm not gonna ask the biggie that he would not allow her to die, but I I'm I'm gonna ask him to extend her life as long as possible.
Speaker 3:And it was like I geared up to begin that prayer. And before I could do it, I began to think, but wait a minute. What if a longer life for her is not what's best for her or best for me? Could I be willing to trust that God will allow her to live exactly the number of days that he intends and that it will be right. And so I began to change my prayer.
Speaker 3:God, give me everything I need to trust you with the number of days that you give to her, and let them be enough for me. Held on to that truth from Psalm 139 where David says, my frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depth of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. My confidence in God's love and his sovereign control of this world has been an anchor for my soul when little else has made sense.
Speaker 3:It helped me to see that hope's short life was not a tragedy, as honestly many people around us saw it. But it was actually God's unfolding of his good plan for her life and for my life. But here's the thing about holding on to these two things. You know, if we only have God's love to hold on to, but not that he's in charge of this world, that he is all powerful, or if we only have that he's all powerful, but it's not as love he doesn't we're not convinced he loves us, it's not enough. Because if God just loves us and he's not powerful, then how do we know that we could trust him to work out his loving plans for our lives?
Speaker 3:And if he's just powerful, but we're not sure he loves us, how do we know that what he's does will be the loving thing? But instead, we have both that we take hold of. That he loves us and he's good. And that he actually will use his power to accomplish what is for my ultimate good and eternal happiness. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm always going to be able to see and identify or even articulate what that good thing is.
Speaker 3:You see, the essence of faith is believing what I can't see because God said it is so. This brings us to the verse that let me just tell you right now. I assume in our q and a later, we'll talk a little bit about how to interact with grieving people. Let me give you lesson number 1. Grieving people really don't want you to quote Romans 828 at them.
Speaker 3:Alright? Well, you know that all things work together for the good, for those who love God and are called appointees for so nobody wants to have that quoted at them. Why? Because it seems to diminish it. Like like it says, this isn't really that bad.
Speaker 3:It's really good. That's how it comes across to a grieving person. But let me tell you, Romans 828 is the solid ground underneath every grieving person's feet. Oh, how grateful I am that Romans 82829 are in the Bible. That I can be confident that God is so sovereign over this world, that he is able to cause all things, everything, everything to work together for the good, for those who love him and are called according to his purpose.
Speaker 3:Now, the tricky thing about that verse is for many people, that sends them on a search. They think to themselves, okay. Well, if God's working together for good, for me to believe that, I've gotta figure out what that good thing is. And so they begin looking. Looking for anything good that God might be doing out of their loss, What we forget to see sometimes is actually in the next verse, we're told exactly what that good thing is.
Speaker 3:That those who were foreknown were predestined. What were they predestined? To be conformed to the image of his son. That's the good thing. That's the good purpose for which God is causing all things to work together in your life and in my life, that we would be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3:We don't have to be searching out there for this one thing that we think is good enough to outweigh the heaviness of our loss and difficulty. Instead, we can rest in confidence in what God has said, that he will cause it to work together for our good. So I've grabbed hold of the truth that God loves me, that he he can use even the worst thing I can imagine for good in my life. Thirdly, I had to reject the lie that my suffering was God punishing me for sin. I mean, I remember those were my first thoughts that morning after getting Hope's diagnosis.
Speaker 3:I remember laying there in that hospital bed and thinking to myself, this is my fault. I haven't walked closely enough with Christ. I didn't pray enough for a healthy child. Now I'm having to pay. Have you had those thoughts?
Speaker 3:When something really hard happened, did you think perhaps your miscarriage or your infertility, was God punishing you for sexual promiscuity in your past? Have you thought that God has taken something away from you to make you pay for loving it so much? You ever find yourself going through life, waiting for the other shoe to drop for that day when you feel like you're finally going to get what you feel deep down you really deserve. Well, is that how things work with God? Does he punish us with suffering in this life to make us pay for what we've done.
Speaker 3:Well, if you don't hear anything else I have to say tonight, I hope you will hear this. And that is the good news of the gospel is that if you are in Christ, you need never fear that your suffering is somehow God punishing you for what you've done. And how do I know that? Because someone has already been punished for the wrong you've done. So you don't have to be.
Speaker 3:All of the punishment you rightly deserve for all of the ugliest, most cruel things that you have said and done, for your apathy toward God, for your rebellion against God, all of the punishment you deserve has been poured out on Christ. And you see, God has done that because He has something very different He wants to pour out on you. He wants to pour out on you His love and His mercy, and His grace, and His forgiveness. You see, when we hide ourselves in the person of Jesus, we don't have to fear that he's gonna take out his anger on us for what we've done. He poured out his anger on Christ at the cross.
Speaker 3:So along with holding on to the confidence, this suffering wasn't punishment from God. Confidence that God loves me, loved hope. The fourth thing that I held onto was this truth, that this life is not all there is. Aren't you glad? I mean, this world we live in, it's so broken.
Speaker 3:Isn't it? Of course, it hasn't always been this way. I mean, there was a day when everything was perfectly good and beautiful. And into that beauty and perfection of the garden came this serpent seducing Adam and Eve into sin. And when they sinned, everything that was so beautiful gave way to brokenness and death.
Speaker 3:And yet, right there, God made a promise that the world would not be this way forever. He promised that there would be a descendant, a child one day of that woman who had put an end to sin and death. And finally, that day came when Jesus was born as a baby in Bethlehem. God poured himself into human flesh that he might take on himself the brokenness of this world. On the cross, Jesus accomplished everything necessary to put an end to death.
Speaker 3:And yet, here we are living in a world where there is so much death. It causes us to wonder if this is this gospel story of putting into an end to death is in any way anchored in reality. Why is that? Here's what Paul says. He says, for the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it.
Speaker 3:It was subjected in hope. And, of course, we know that's not wishful thinking. We know this is something for sure that's going to happen. Right? Subjected in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
Speaker 3:We know the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves of the first fruits of the spirit grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for the adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope, we were saved. You see, when Jesus rose from the dead with a body that will never again be vulnerable to death, he was just the first. And so to hold on to hope is to hold on to confidence that the day is coming when all of those who have died in Christ will rise from the dead with glorious bodies, like the glorious body that Christ had in his resurrection body.
Speaker 3:A body that will never again be vulnerable to death. Our hope is not simply going to heaven when we die. God has a much bigger plan than simply that. God intends to resurrect not just believers, the bodies and souls of believers, but all creation. You see, the great hope that God holds out to us, to take hold of, is that He is making all things new.
Speaker 3:One day, all of those who are joined to Christ by faith will live with him in the new heavens and the new earth where there will be no more sorrow and no more pain and no more death. This is our sure and certain hope. Now for David and I to have a child with this syndrome, Zellweger syndrome, means that David and I must both be carriers of the recessive gene trait for this syndrome. Do you remember back to, like, 9th grade biology class you took and you spent that 1 week on genetics? Recessive remember you learned what it took to have a child with blue eyes?
Speaker 3:Recessive gene trait. Right? So, what this means, what we knew after we had hope, is that David and I must both be carriers of this recessive gene trait for Zellweger syndrome. And so that means whenever we have a child, that child would have a 25% chance of having the fatal syndrome. So we didn't know we had those genetic odds when we had our son, Matt, who's now 26.
Speaker 3:But, of course, after we had hope, then we knew. And that meant we had a really difficult decision to make. Now maybe it seems really clear and simple to you one way or the other. It just didn't seem that clear or simple to us. Because the reality of Hope's life is that we enjoyed her.
Speaker 3:She brought so much richness to our lives. She snapped us to attention, and we loved and enjoyed her. So it was not immediately that we would say, no. We could never risk this again. But the other reality of our lives is that our lives aren't just us.
Speaker 3:There was our parents. And I tell you what, as hard as it is to lose a child, I think it's doubly difficult for a parent to watch their child lose a child. You know, parents do like to bring over that fix it bag. Right? And our parents had nothing in a bag to fix this.
Speaker 3:So it was devastating to David's mom and dad and to my mom and dad. And besides then, there was our son, Matt, who was 8 at the time, who had lived for 6 months in a house waiting for his sibling to die. And then a lot a a a lot longer than that in a house with a very sad mom, which I promise you could not have been very much fun. So David and I decided to take steps to prevent another pregnancy. Now one time David was up telling this story with me.
Speaker 3:And when I said we took steps to prevent another pregnancy, he said, we? I know you guys want lots of credit for this. I know. Well, evidently, it didn't work. And I discovered a year and a half after Hope died that I was pregnant.
Speaker 3:Honestly, that day when I took the pregnancy test, I wasn't really trying to figure out if I was pregnant. I was like, well, that's impossible. But I've got this kinda going through my head, and I've got so much to do today. I just need to get a test and take it and rule that out so I can get on with my day. It didn't work out that way.
Speaker 3:I tell you that test is positive. I drove up to David's office, and I told him that morning my concerns, and you should have seen the look on his face, the panic logo. I was like, honey, don't worry. This is impossible. I walked into his office, and I just looked at him and I just went.
Speaker 3:I sat down and we shook our heads. I remember feeling a mass of 2 enormous, but competing emotions, because there was a part of us that was like, here's this thing that we have ruled out, that God has clearly overruled, And perhaps now he's going to give us another healthy child to raise and enjoy that we so wanted but didn't expect. Because, honestly, so often, our family just felt so incomplete. And so maybe God's going to do that. But then there was also this sick feeling of fear.
Speaker 3:Or maybe he's gonna ask us to do this again. I couldn't imagine it. I remember just thinking that day. Okay. It's been a year and a half.
Speaker 3:I don't cry every time I get in the car and drive across town anymore like I did for so long. It was like the sun was just beginning to come out again, And it's like I saw these gray clouds gathering in the distance, getting ready to move in. So we called the geneticist who had diagnosed hope and told him the situation. And he we went through prenatal testing. We had to wait about 8 weeks for that, another 3 weeks for the results.
Speaker 3:And finally, that day came when the geneticist called and told us that this time we were gonna have a son, and he would also have the fatal syndrome. Our son, Gabriel, was born in July 2001, And he was so easy to love. We called him our sweet surprise because he was a sweet surprise. We thought he was stronger than hope, and that he would be with us maybe a little bit longer, but he was actually with us a few days less, 183 days. And then we said goodbye.
Speaker 3:And there we were back to a family of 3 in a very quiet house, trying to figure out where we were gonna go from there. You know, over the years, some people have said to me, when they hear our story, you must be a very strong person. And I've gotta tell you the truth. I am not strong, but I am tethered to one who is strong. I am holding on to a hope that is strong and secure.
Speaker 3:Because you see, when I talk about holding on to hope, I'm not talking about holding out for the best. And I'm not talking about holding, having a positive attitude about the future, or some kind of vague sense that everything is going to work out okay. Holding onto hope is holding onto not an idea, and not a philosophy, or an attitude about the future. It's holding on to a person. The living person of Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3:Because friends, Jesus Christ is our only hope. He is our only hope for being satisfied. Our only hope for finding security. Our only hope for finding meaning, and purpose, and peace. Jesus is not just a crutch to get us through life.
Speaker 3:Jesus is life. And anywhere apart from Him is just merely existing. So holding on to hope is trusting God with everything we are, everything we have, and everyone we love. I wanna close just by telling you about something that happened to me a number of years ago. I was speaking at a weekend women's retreat in Texas, and they were having the retreat at, what's usually a summer camp for youth.
Speaker 3:My flight was a little bit late and I got there late. All of the women had gone out to get in line for the zip line. All right. So how many zip liners do we have here? No.
Speaker 3:None of you have ridden the zip line? Okay. A few of you. Alright. So this is the zip line at that camp.
Speaker 3:As you can see, there's this 5 story tower. There was another 5 story tower, maybe 2 football fields away from this one. And there were these 3 cables that ran from one tower to the other. And the group I was speaking to was one of a numerous women's groups that were there that weekend. So I got there, and the line was really long.
Speaker 3:And so I was just meeting the women. And when I went up to in the line, they said, oh, so you're gonna ride the zipline with us? And I said, well, yes. I mean, I wanted them to like me and think I was cool and everything. Yes.
Speaker 3:Okay. So the line was really long. It took a long time. And then, I mean, all those stairs, as you can see, I mean, they were just packed with women. So, you know, it got about halfway up those stairs, and I'm not really great with heights.
Speaker 3:And I began to think by myself, you know, I have been a real champ to wait in line with all of these women, but I'm not really sure I wanted to, ride the zip line. So maybe I'll just walk with them. I'll just make my way back down the stairs, and I'll meet them at the other side. But, as I looked down the stairway at all of the crowds of women, I saw myself being like the salmon going against the tide. You know?
Speaker 3:And, I could just hear an echo in my ear. I could just hear somebody saying, what's with her? Oh, that's our speaker. She's so lame. So, I thought, okay.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna have to do this. And so I got up to the top, and there was a girl kind of managing operating things. And so I asked her, so how long you've been doing this? She'd been there all summer. No fatalities.
Speaker 3:Good. There was 1 a piece of paper kind of taped to the side up there that was one of those government inspection safety things. Looks good. Alright. And, there were all these belts and clips and harnesses and everything.
Speaker 3:And she said, so you're gonna step into this harness and I'm gonna clip these things all around you, around your waist and over your shoulders and everything. And then you're going to sit down on the ledge and I'm going to count to 3 and you're going to push off. Okay. So she counted 123. I pushed off screaming bloody murder.
Speaker 3:But my screams of fear turned immediately to squeals of laughter. It was so much fun. I wanted to do it again. If the line hadn't been long, so long, I would have. You know, here's the thing.
Speaker 3:I coulda stood at the bottom of that tower all day saying, I totally believe that those ropes and cables and harnesses would hold me. I could've stood there and said, you know, I'm gonna do that someday. And I think that's what so many people do in regard to Christ. They hang around in places where there are people who trust God. People who have pushed off in the life of faith?
Speaker 3:They know the lingo and they've gone through the training, but they've never really put their full weight down on the person of Christ to discover that he will hold them. They prefer to keep their options open, take care of their own weight, carry their own weight. I mentioned though in this room, there are many who have actually pushed off in the life of faith. There was a time when you told the Lord that you believed what he says in his word about salvation. And you said you told him you wanted to trust him with your eternal future for the life beyond this life that we can't see and we can barely imagine.
Speaker 3:But I wonder if we were honest tonight, if some of us would have to admit that there are things we simply are not trusting him with. Even right now, things we're gonna need to work out ourselves. We're gonna have to figure this out. Things we've deemed too hard for him to handle. Let me ask you, what is it that you need to trust God with in a fresh way?
Speaker 3:Is it your marriage? Some situation in your family? Financial situation, some situation with your child. And I'm asking you tonight, would you take hold of hope by entrusting every aspect of who you are to the one who is strong and will carry you. Trust him with everything you are and everything you have and everyone you love.
Speaker 3:Your redeemer, Jesus Christ, is strong enough and good enough to hold you. When you put your full weight down on him, you can trust that he will get you safely to the other side. Let's pray. Lord, I thank you for your word that reveals to us something so weighty and significant. A hope that is so secure, so solid that we could risk putting our whole lives on it and be confident that we will not be disappointed.
Speaker 3:The day will never come when we will say, boy, was I a fool to trust God with that? Instead, we can be confident that the day will come. We will see you face to face, and we will look hope in the face and say, everything you promised was true. Everything you said you would do, you have done. The best thing I ever did in my whole life was to put my trust in you and to take hold of you.
Speaker 3:So, lord, give us the will to do that. Show us the way to do that. Show us each what it's going to mean to hold on to hope in a fresh new way today, tonight. In your name, I pray. Amen.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Nancy. In the interest of time, we're gonna take a 5 minute break. And let me encourage you to stick around for the second half because one of the common responses that we hear from people is during the the second half, during the time of q and a, people really get to put some flesh on the concepts that we've heard about and ask some particular questions that will relate to everyone here. So please stick around. In 5 minutes, we'll gather back and do some q and a.
Speaker 1:So as I mentioned, the second part is designed for you to be able to ask questions. We have up here Nancy and her husband, David. So you can ask either or both of them a question. And I wanna encourage you. We hope that these questions are ones that will be mutually beneficial for the whole group.
Speaker 1:Something that can be relevant for a a group setting and be applicable to everyone. So if there are any super personalized or contextualized questions, just know that they may have to defer that to after or another time. But the floor is open, so I'll pass around a mic. Who is first?
Speaker 4:Jen.
Speaker 5:Could you speak a little bit on how to be a friend and walk through suffering with your friend who is going through deep suffering, just to love them well and stand beside them through that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, that's a whole night's talk in some ways, but I can boil it down to 2 quick easy things, and David can add to it. Say something and show up. Say something and show up. I mean, why do we not say anything?
Speaker 3:Sometimes, we don't say anything just because it's awkward. We don't know what to say, so we don't say anything. We're afraid of saying the wrong thing, so we don't say anything. We think, I've gotta say something that is meaningful, insightful, spiritual, help full. I mean, it's a really hard high bar we set for ourselves, because we make the assumption that it's really about what we say, but what it really is is acknowledging the loss and being willing to come alongside someone in the midst of their grief and let them know they're they're not alone.
Speaker 3:That's why we say something. It doesn't have to put everything into perspective. Right? The other reason another reason we don't say anything is because we look at that person. Maybe it's been a month or 2, and we think, I don't she looks like she's having a good day today.
Speaker 3:And so I don't wanna bring it up and make her sad. Well, let me tell you. She's already sad. I mean, grief is like I I think it's like a computer program that's always running in the background. And the thing is, when you're going through grief, you're really hoping somebody will bring it up, that somebody will speak the name of the person that you love, that nobody says their name anymore.
Speaker 3:So don't be afraid you'll make that person sad. What you'll do, even if you bring it up and maybe that person shed some tears, you think, oh, I've blown it. I made her cry. No. You gave her the opportunity to release some of the sadness that was already there, which is a great gift.
Speaker 3:So say something, and then show up. Why don't we show up? Once again, we think it might be awkward when we get there. Sometimes we don't show up because we think, okay, they have people who are better friends than than I am, and so they probably already have all these other people, friends and family, or we think maybe they wanna be alone. Well, grief is incredibly lonely.
Speaker 3:And it really you never forget. You never forget people who showed up. People who showed up at your house, and people who showed up at the funeral or the burial or the hospital or whatever it is. So say something. Show up.
Speaker 3:You wanna add to that, Dave?
Speaker 4:That was great.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Dave.
Speaker 4:Pretty good. Hi, by the way. Did that get at what you were had in mind? Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I don't need to go on. That was great.
Speaker 3:Thank you, honey. You've never heard it before, have you?
Speaker 6:I know a lot of families who have children with disabilities or who end up losing children get divorced. What from y'all's perspective, obviously, I know you hope in, something greater, but what were some practical ways that you guys loved each other well through this, time?
Speaker 4:Talking about each other here, the the 2 of us? I just wanna make sure I understood. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I mean, you know, one of the realities of, not just the death of a child or a family member, but any great, sadness or calamity that, comes into our life is that not only there's not only the challenge of the thing itself, whether it's a disability or an illness or something that now you have to grapple with. It's just that it kinda throws everything out of kilter. You know? It kinda messes up your nice patterns of communication and conflict resolution and all those things. Just because there's this new wave of emotion that comes, you know, keeps coming and keeps hitting you.
Speaker 4:And so, I mean, one of the big you're you're gonna hear a lot of our answers here to the q and a, and you're gonna think, I paid to hear that. Well, you didn't pay. So that's there's a lot of really simple things, but they're not necessarily simple to do. They're just simple steps. You know?
Speaker 4:And so, one of the things is just, you know, you gotta give each other a lot of grace, a lot of space, a lot of room for, imperfection. And, you know, you you do that in a relationship no matter what. But, when you're dealing with grief or, you know, something overwhelming, you know, it's just sometimes Nancy wouldn't react the way I was used to her reacting or vice versa. And so one approach to that is to say, why are you acting just give each other a lot of grace. And, I'm just give each other a lot of grace and, room to mess up and room to be a little irritable.
Speaker 4:And, you know it's I I think of it like like here's a little mental picture. I need I need simple stuff. You know, I need simple pictures. So, think of like 2 wounded soldiers. That's what we were going through grief together.
Speaker 4:We're we're both wounded. And so I couldn't really pick her up all the time and carry her off to safety. She couldn't really pick me up. But what we did is we kinda leaned into each other, you know, and supported each other, if you will, emotionally. And so, give each other a lot of grace and be on each other's team just more than ever.
Speaker 4:Even if, you know, it means you let a lot of things slip by that in the past, you might have called your, spouse on.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. I would just add that you have to understand that men and women and husbands and wives, process things differently. What might be typical for women, although this is not across the board, women tend to process through words and through talking. That's that's not a surprise to any guy in here, is it? Or girl?
Speaker 3:I mean so, you know, we wanna talk about things, and hopefully and hopefully, we have women in our lives who also like a lot of words that we can talk to. But but, husbands, we need you to understand perhaps in the midst of something hard with it. We really need to process through talk. So some of that is we want you to talk, but we do want you to be willing, more than anything, to listen as we process through talk. And I think the the flip side of that challenge is for women to understand that just because he's talking about it, doesn't not talking about it doesn't mean he's not processing it.
Speaker 3:Or that he's doing it wrong, or that it's all bottled up, or that he's not facing it. Just because he's not processing it the way you do, maybe because he you think, okay. I'm not I'm not seeing him cry, so maybe he's just not dealing with it. Well, maybe his way of working through grief doesn't involve a lot of tears. Or maybe he can't bear to shed tears around you, and he sheds them in times and places where you don't see them.
Speaker 3:Maybe he has the sense that you're crying enough for both of you, and he's trying to be strong. He wants to lead you out of the depths of sorrow in that way. And so it's just really important as a couple to recognize, okay, we're gonna do this differently, but it doesn't necessarily mean that one or the both of us is doing it wrong.
Speaker 4:I'll just throw in. But, you know, one thing I remember having to kinda grapple with early on when we were going through our grief together, it was, you know, I think again, this is a stereotype, but I think it's somewhat typical guys. You know, we tend to approach things like, problem solvers, like, fix it guys. You know, honey, the toilet is running. Okay.
Speaker 4:I'll take care of that. Mhmm. Which is actually the one handyman thing I can actually do is fix a toilet. So if you got problems with the honey. But, you know, it's so it's not surprising in our relationship up until that point.
Speaker 4:I'd say, usually, if I looked at over there and Nancy was, crying, that probably meant, a, I screwed up and did something wrong or and and then b, it was my job to fix it. And fix it meant if I whatever I could do that would cause her to stop crying, not because I was irritated by the crying, but because I wanted her to be happy. You know, it was my job to get her from sad to happy. That's the way, you know, the twisted way that, I I I would think about it. So now this was really different, you know.
Speaker 4:She was often in tears. And and it would, you know, at surprising unexpected moments. Could be you know, we could be laughing at, something funny on TV. And then the next second, Nancy would be crying. And it'd be because, you know, for a little moment, she escaped reality and then had to come, you know, jerking back to reality, the harsh reality.
Speaker 4:And so that would bring tears. So, you know, I might see that and it was my impulse to wanna reach over there and and fix it. And, you know, it took me a while to figure out that that's not what was needed. You know, that's what that's not what she wanted from me. And besides, I couldn't fix it anyway.
Speaker 4:This was something bigger than both of us. So, you know, it's counterintuitive maybe for guys to approach, our spouse that way. When she's weak and when she's sad, maybe more than anything, she just needs me to be there. And for her to know I'm not going anywhere, I'm not gonna abandon her, but I'm not gonna come in and try to, you know, fix it. Because really, those tears needed to come out.
Speaker 4:And she needed to feel, that grief. She didn't need me to try to divert her attention to something else. But yeah.
Speaker 7:How'd you guys love Matt through all this?
Speaker 4:I had a good question. Yes. How did you love Matt, who is our son, who was 8, when Hope was born? And, man, I don't know. That's a tricky question.
Speaker 4:Just the the only way we knew how, there was, you know, he was an 8 year old, then a 9 year old, a 10 year old. And, you know, we never felt like we knew what we were doing in the first place when we became parents. So, this was just, you know, the next chapter. And, I guess, without giving too much personal information, I, you know, he was a such a part of all of this. You know, we we we shared hope, with everybody we could.
Speaker 4:We, had had a lot of people in and out of our house. Matt was always in the middle of it. Matt took her up to school a time or 2, not on his own, but, you know, we
Speaker 3:Let's go.
Speaker 4:You know, and he saw the the brunt of, the impact of the grief on his parents, but he also saw, you know, what you heard about, just now. This, grappling that we were doing with, real hope, what real trust in god looks like when the illness, the condition is still proceeding all the way and having that final impact of death in the grave and the funeral and all that. So, you know, he was very much a part of it and he heard it all and we just did what any of you parents do, which is do the best you can.
Speaker 3:You know, we get so uptight about how we're going to talk about things like this with our kids and, you know, what do I say and how do I explain it? I came to think that kids, pick up more on what's going on and how to respond to it from 2 other things besides what we tell them. I think they pick up more from what they see in us. I mean, if we're saying, it's gonna be okay, and clearly, by the way we're responding, we don't think it's going to be okay, when we are angry, fearful, become overprotective, hopeless, they resentful. That's what our kids absorb for us.
Speaker 3:So they absorb more for us than listen to what we tell them to do. The second thing is, I think they absorb more from what they overhear us say to other adults. I mean, think about it. Your kids, have you when you start talking really quiet on the phone, don't they kinda come around and get close? Because they know this is where the good stuff is.
Speaker 3:If you're kinda whispering, then you're talking to your friend about this must be what's really going on. Right? So when I think about Matt, I think about how many times we had people come over for dinner, who brought us meals, we'd say, just stay and eat with us, was a beautiful thing, by the way, to invite them into our lives during that time. As he sat there and overheard adult conversations about things like miracles and prayer and what it meant to trust God and all of those things. I would also say, kids kids are major hypocrisy spotters.
Speaker 3:Are they not? So they know whether or not the public face of what we're going through matches up to what what's really going on at home. I don't know what he would say, but I hope Matt would say that the same way we talked about things in public was the way we were dealing with things at home.
Speaker 4:I I will just say too. I know this shouldn't be super personal and it should apply to everybody. But, you know, it, Nancy was great at, making sure that the spotlight got shined on Matt in appropriate ways. You know? Whatever he was doing in school, playing in the in the band or playing football in middle school.
Speaker 4:And I mean, you know, all of that went on for him. That was his life. And, you know, we, we were in on all of that and making sure he understood that, although this was a big thing going on with both of these babies during the time that they were with us, you know, we were, making sure that he got the attention that he needed and at his birthday parties and and did all those things too. So
Speaker 3:What what kids want most is to be normal. They really don't wanna be the kid who sticks out, the kid with a dying sister or the kid whose dad died or the the kid whose parents' are going through a divorce or whatever. You know? They just wanna be, most of the time, under the radar and like everyone else. And so
Speaker 4:Except he did when when after after Gabriel was born and, you know, we had such a loving community around us through church and friends and and, people started bringing food again. And he remembered from 2 years earlier when that happened, when hope was with us. And tell him what he said.
Speaker 3:Well, this was when we I mean, when I think about hard things we've had to do in our lives, like, way up there would be when we found out we were pregnant again and having to call our parents and to tell Matt we were going to have another child, and this child was gonna die too. So we tell you know, we gear up that night to tell Matt, and you couldn't get the whole thing out. We said, you know, it was like, you you remember that little procedure dad had? Well, it didn't work, and mom is pregnant again. And he goes, and we just couldn't get it all out fast enough to say, but this baby is going to have Zellweger too.
Speaker 3:So we talked about that a bit. Yeah. We'll have another funeral. And, yeah, do you remember how it was hard before? It'll be hard again, but do you remember how there were good things about it before?
Speaker 3:It'll be good again. So, you know, we have this big, heavy, hard conversation. 10 minutes later, he comes and he goes, mom, do you do you think people will bring us meals again? Yeah. I think so.
Speaker 3:Why? He goes, do you think missus Abraham would make us those stuffed shells? I mean, that's that's a 10 year old. Yeah. Alright.
Speaker 3:Something else?
Speaker 8:As someone who you guys are obviously living your life very fully and very joyfully through the midst of your grief. And so for people who are walking beside other people who are not who are just staying in their grief, what's what do you think, or what have you found or some very encouraging even verses to share, just words to share with them? Probably maybe that they haven't heard over and over and over again. That might be really hard to
Speaker 3:answer. Well, I hear a bit of an assumption in your question that it has to do with having not heard it. You know? Grief is hard, and it takes a long time. A lot longer than people think.
Speaker 3:And but some people, grief becomes their identity. It becomes a safe place. One thing we have to understand about going through grief, Think of how to say it. Let me put it up in a personal way. Alright.
Speaker 3:I I came to the point when in the misery of my grief, I wanted to figure out what it was gonna look like to move forward and not have the grief dominate me quite so much. But what that felt like to me was like a betrayal to my child. That if I didn't continue feeling as sad as I had felt that somehow that was dishonoring to Hope or to Gabe or, you know, as when you're especially when you're the mother of a child who's died, you feel like it's your job to keep the memory alive and make sure nobody else forgets. And you begin to think, okay. If I start feeling better, and I'm not I'm not focused on this all the time, I'm gonna be the one I might I might be the one who is actually helping people forget.
Speaker 3:Right? So it's this terrible tyranny of grief that that it feels like a betrayal to keep living and to have joy again. I often say to grieving people that I sense are stuck in that way, I will say, your love for the person who died is not defined by your ongoing misery. I'll say it again because it's kinda good if I do say so myself. Alright.
Speaker 3:Your love for the person who died is not defined by your ongoing misery, because it feels like maybe it is. So that's one thing. So I I think it can help to show that you understand that. I mean, the the process of grief is a constant process of, like I said in my talk, constantly confronting what you feel with what's true, because our feelings have very loud voices. And it really takes both hearing the truth, the taking hold of it, thinking through it, processing it, and deciding this is true, and I'm gonna turn my back on these voices that are telling me things that aren't true so that I can keep moving forward in life.
Speaker 3:So it's not that the grief goes away, but I think every grieving person at one point or another has to make a decision and say, I'm not going to keep giving the grief so much power in my life. It's not that I'm not gonna feel it anymore. And the truth is early on, grief has all the power, it seems like. I mean, it it starts it, like, flows in and you can't push it back. But with time, as God does a work healing, as you pursue what is true in God's word, over time, as you think through, cry through, talk through, process the grief, God is a healer, and he can and does heal.
Speaker 3:And in that process, the grief loses some of the weight and power that it had.
Speaker 4:I I'm not to turn this into a, book pitch, but Nancy does have a little book that came out recently called, what grieving people wish you knew about what really helps and what really hurts. And, the cool thing about it I mean, it's filled with lots of words right out of the mouths of grieving people. And and it's it's very insightful for all of us to get a better picture for how we might, walk with someone, whether they're really close to us or whether it's more of a neighbor or, you know, more casual acquaintance. And, it's just it's kind of a practical book in that way.
Speaker 3:No grieving person wants to be told that they need to move on. Because what that sounds like is leave the person I love behind. And yet, they might need to be encouraged to keep moving forward. Hear the difference? Move on says leave behind.
Speaker 3:Move forward says, okay. Incorporate this loss into my life. Choose to walk toward joy toward Christ and keep living.
Speaker 4:Don't give him everything. Make him buy the book. Okay.
Speaker 5:Hi. My question is, like, as you've said moving forward, what are ways that we could encourage people who have experienced grief, but, kind of a while back, a year ago, a 5 years ago, 10 years ago. What are practical things you can do to remember whoever was lost, and encourage those people who lost them?
Speaker 3:Great question. And I appreciate the basis of the question is which you realize it's not over in a month or 2. Let me tell you, every person who has lost someone they love close, they're marking the 1 month point, the 3 month point, the 6 month point, the 9 month point, the 1 year point. So we all have calendars in our little phones right now. So when you know someone who has died, one of the best things you can do is go ahead and write on your calendar on all of those dates, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, 12 months, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years.
Speaker 3:And and you don't have you your your question was, what what are some things we can do? You know what? All you have to do is acknowledge that you remember. I promise you, that is enough. It really is.
Speaker 3:Just to say, I haven't forgotten, because most people do start to forget. And what you need to understand about people in those days is it's actually the days leading up to those days that's worse than the day itself, most grieving people would tell you, as they're anticipating, you know, that 1 year mark when it's now going to be over a year since they have seen and known that person they loved. And they're wondering as they're reliving all of the things that happened the year before and that's days coming up, and the anxiety is growing. So as you write those dates on your calendar, just you know, all you have to do is send a little text, write a little note, let them know you haven't forgotten. I'll tell you the most recent thing someone did for me, which was so sweet.
Speaker 3:A week ago, if hope had lived, she would have graduated from high school. That's a big gulp for me. I guess this is something else you need to know about loss is that when you hear that somebody has lost someone, losses are never singular. They're a series of losses. You know, as I've been anticipating over this last year, that graduation day and whether or not I would go to graduation and whether or not I could go and celebrate with my friends whose children we're graduating and or and it not be all about me being sad, you know, who's not there and everything.
Speaker 3:But, anyway, these these 2 young girls who are friends of our family I mean, David and I he I think he mentioned in introducing it. David and I do retreats for couples who have lost children. So we go away in the country at this 12 bedroom lodge with 11 couples for the weekend who have lost children, and we did one of those retreats that weekend. And we got home on Sunday at 1 o'clock, and these these girls had left a bouquet of flowers on my front doorstep with the sweetest note. They just said, you know, we might be wrong about this.
Speaker 3:It might have been last year, or maybe it's next year, but we're kind of thinking maybe this would be Hope's class. And we just want you to know that where Hope is, her name has been called by her savior. Was that not the sweetest thing? But you don't even have to do something that big. I mean, just just to let people know.
Speaker 3:And all you know, you see my church, you can just say, I know that 1 year mark is coming up next week, and I just want you to know I'm thinking about you. That must be really hard. That'd have to be much more than that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, we know that there I won't spend any time on this, but, you know, there are friends that you have, family members who, have experienced grief, and they really may not be doing well. You know, they may be stuck. They may not be processing. They may be, filling their life with lots of harmful substitutes, for real biblical hope.
Speaker 4:You know? And so we do recognize, you know, that that that's a big issue there. And, it may be beyond your ability as a friend to to step in and rescue them from those things. So, I we know we're not addressing every element of this. But, you know, if it's just a matter of how do I be a good friend to just let a grieving person know, yeah, phone call, email, Facebook message, card
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Letter. There
Speaker 4:are lots of ways. And the the coolest thing that you just said about the girls was they in their little note, they said, we may be wrong on these dates. We may be off. So they were they processed that. They thought and it would have been easy for them to say, oh, we're not sure this is the right year when hope would be graduating.
Speaker 4:Maybe we better not do that because maybe Nancy would see the flowers and it would hit her out of the blue and she burst into tears and be sad and she'd think we're stupid. And, you know, I mean, that's what I would do. I would think through all of that, and then I'd say, well, that was noble thought on my part, but I've been in a you know, I've been in a and so, yeah, if you just kinda and and it you don't have to provide much other than the reminder. Just that I remembered. I was thinking about you, you know.
Speaker 4:I, I prayed for you today. Just whatever. That it it really is incredibly simple, but, incredibly powerful. So
Speaker 10:How should our support, or encouragement change when the person grieving is grieving their own, mental or physical or general, health or well-being versus grieving for someone that they love?
Speaker 3:That would be so specific to the situation and to the relationship. But I think in general, we all have a need for the losses in our whether it's a loss of a person or health or whatever, for our losses to be acknowledged, to be esteemed. When they're ignored and not spoken of, that has the effect of diminishing, of saying, it's not really that big a deal. I won't even talk about it. Or it's shameful, so I won't talk about it.
Speaker 3:Or it's awkward, so I won't talk about it. But we all feel that our losses or our struggles are esteemed when someone has the courage to acknowledge it. I think often about this girl who had a daughter who was born right around Hope's age. She was born about 3 months before Hope. And I remember about 6 months after Hope died being in the carpool line, and she walked over and I rolled down the window.
Speaker 3:And she said, Nancy, she said, I just have to tell you. I mean, she was just crying. She's like, every time I see you, I just walk the other way because I don't know what to say because your arms are empty and mine aren't. And so I just haven't known what to say. And I just said I said, you just did.
Speaker 3:I mean, it was enough to acknowledge that it was awkward. And, so I think, you know, if your your your question is trying to what to do or say regarding someone else's loss, I think just probably those first two things I said in terms of say something and show up, apply. One thing about people going through difficulty, sometimes our impulse is to say to them, I'm here. If there's ever anything I can do for you, just let me know. That's genuine and generous, and we really mean it.
Speaker 3:But most people going through something incredibly hard in their life are not going to pick up the phone and call you because they need something. They're not gonna pick up the phone and say, I really need somebody to come over and clean my toilets, or I need someone to come over and do my laundry, or I need someone to come over and mow the lawn, or I need someone to come over and help me do the go through the paperwork to do my taxes. And in the midst of a great hardship, those are the kind of things sometimes we really need, but it feels really awkward to ask someone. So far better than to say, you know, I really care. Just, you know, I'm really here.
Speaker 3:Call me if there's everything I do for you. Instead to say, you know what? I'm gonna come over every Thursday morning and do your laundry. Or I was thinking that, you know, I I go to the grocery store every Monday morning. I'm gonna come by your house, and I'm gonna pick up your list and drop it off for you.
Speaker 3:So it's that caring enough to think through what someone might need and offering to do that specific thing, and maybe you'll even have to be a little bit pushy to get them to do it. Because it can be hard to accept help. But when I think about the people who barged into my world in what we went through with Hope and Gabe, that we weren't close friends before it happened. I think of this friend, Julie Dilworth, and she said, I wanna come over every Monday because I want to know hope, and I want to help you. We weren't even good friends before.
Speaker 3:And she showed up, and she came. And it it meant a lot.
Speaker 4:I wanna say something too real briefly that, you know, some, there's a lot of different ways to experience grief. And
Speaker 3:there are
Speaker 4:a lot of ways to lose, aren't there? And if we went around this room, we our eyes would be open to things we had no idea people were dealing with that brought grief into their life. And, you know, the grief that we were going through with our children when people saw us, it was, you know, we it was kind of seen as a noble thing. We had these poor little helpless children. We cared for them.
Speaker 4:Then we had to say goodbye and, had a lot of people rally around. But, you know, a number of years later, I, I lost my job. I had I had a job for 21 years. I loved it. I it was made for me, and I was made for it.
Speaker 4:You know? And I got a lot of my strokes from that job, not to mention a paycheck. And I one day, my boss came in and fired me. And I not only lost the job, I could I couldn't really get another job in that industry. And so it was a huge loss.
Speaker 4:And I didn't think of it. I didn't equate it in any way with the loss of our children. But, in some ways, it was a harder grief to get a grip on for me. And, it it wasn't noble. People were not, you know, coming around me.
Speaker 4:And, it wasn't even really something we could share in the same way that we did with our children. And so, you know, as you asked the question, it does make me realize there are people grieving things or people and, it's not so noticeable. And it's not the kind of thing people think. Let's take food to his house, you know. And so I as I look back on my job loss, honestly, I I wish I had sought out more help and support for that.
Speaker 4:I wish I had reached out to some other guys who had gone through a similar thing and, think it would have helped me because it was a lonely kind of grief, because it wasn't, viewed as something, you know, that everybody needed to rally around. So, you know, my heart does go out to people who are, struggling with things like that that may not be as obvious. And I recognize there are probably many in this room.
Speaker 1:Maybe time for one more.
Speaker 11:So I think this emotion maybe comes from a, for lack of a better phrase, an incorrect basis, but I can't imagine going through anything like that and not just frankly being very angry with God. So my question is, were you guys ever just flat out angry with God, and how did you work through that?
Speaker 3:Anger wasn't my primary emotion. My primary emotion was disappointment. I was agonizingly disappointed. Many people are angry with god. And, you know, in these respite retreats that David and I do, there's a lot of anger expressed.
Speaker 3:When it is, usually, my my pushback on it is a cup has a couple aspects to it. One is, you know, if I'm angry with you, it's because I had an expectation that there was something you ought to have done that you didn't do, or something, you ought not to have done that you did. Right? So I had this expectation based on what? I don't know.
Speaker 3:You know? Maybe it was because you'd made a commitment to me, or maybe it was just my sense of the way things ought to work. Right? So I think when it comes to anger toward God, a lot of the anger is based on something we thought he ought to have done that he didn't do, or something he ought not to have done that he did. And so then we have to ask the question, based on what?
Speaker 3:Is it just based on the way I think a god ought to work? Is it based on something God has promised in his word? Is it based on a cultural Christianity sense of the way things work with god, but perhaps not reality of the way things work with god. And so to, I think a good question to ask when we sense that anger in god is to say, okay. What it what was the expectation I had of god that he has failed me on that has created this anger, and then to say, did I have any basis for that expectation?
Speaker 3:So maybe that all seems very cerebral, though. Right? You know? But I do think anger, like every other emotion that we're putting under the the magnifying glass in the midst of grief to poke at it and see if there's any truth in it or get rid of it, that's part of it. We have to go, okay.
Speaker 3:Well, what's underneath this? Now I'll also say, it's very different to feel some anger than to become an angry person. Big difference. I think it makes it makes total sense. We would have some angry thoughts, some angry impulses.
Speaker 3:The test of faith is, do I expose that anger to the truth? Do I allow the word to correct my, any sense of justification I had that was accusing god of doing wrong. Because, basically, anger says, god, you didn't do right by me. And I just wanna say, really? You you you really wanna that's that's the position you wanna take and settle into of God has done wrong by me.
Speaker 3:The God who always does right. That's what it means to be a righteous god. He always does right. Alright. You wanna add to that?
Speaker 4:Yeah. You know, I usually say, I didn't have anger at god, but I think I did. Just not in the direct way, you know, that you might think because, yeah. I mean, a part of it is probably my personality. We're all wired a little differently.
Speaker 4:I'm, pessimist by nature. So when something I expect the worst. So when it happens, it's like, yeah. Well, I knew it. You know?
Speaker 4:But my you know, I'd walked many years with God and I, you know, the expectation thing wasn't just glass half empty. It it was, you know, I've known wonderful people who had terrible things happen in their life. And I've seen them shine. I had seen them grow. I'd seen them give thanks to god for, being a paraplegic or, you know, whatever, quadriplegic.
Speaker 4:So, you know, I mean, I had that experience, that percept perspective on life, on my life, on our life, was not, you know, something I felt I could instantly shake my fist at god about. That, you know, he's allowed something like this into my life. But why the reason I said I think I did have some anger with god is while I felt very much called to, be a great father to Hope and to Gabriel and called to be a good, husband to Nancy, that seemed like very high level work, you know, and I was all for it. But what happened was I was so I could get so quickly angry about little things. Something didn't work around the house or, you know, something broke or there was a flat tire or, the the I guess what you'd call those little annoyances of life.
Speaker 4:Somehow, I had this equation running in my mind. Hey. Look. I'm doing this big thing for you over here, God. So why would you let you know, why would why do you annoy me with all these little, arrows,
Speaker 3:You know?
Speaker 4:And, so that does reveal to me that I had, you know, I I had an impulse to anger that flared up so quickly in in those times. And I realize, as you're talking, that's that's part of what was going on. But, yeah. I mean, we're we're, we understand the way we're made. There is an impulse to anger when something, is not just that's happening around us, when, someone is mistreated.
Speaker 4:And, you know, and so I think it's, as you said, it's natural. And I think it's even, not sinful if we have an impulse to anger when we see these evidences in our life that this world is broken by sin and, that we are in the path of that, hurricane that's coming. But, thankfully, you know, we don't have to live we don't have to settle into that like Nancy said. Alright. We're going on.
Speaker 4:And you people are so patient.
Speaker 3:Really?
Speaker 1:Okay. We have one final question.
Speaker 5:This is a follow-up to what you said about not experiencing anger, but extreme disappointment. Do you mean disappointed in God?
Speaker 3:No. Disappointment. Yeah. I remember one day when it really came I I remember just driving down, you know, one of those roads that you all have roads that you drive every day. And I remember being in that one day, just looking over at the the seat, the passenger side, and just thinking, I just wish there was a car seat there that I had a toddler in.
Speaker 3:And, you know, and even still today, I would say I feel really disappointed that Matt Why why do you ask me that? Yeah. I mean, I suppose in some ways that's toward God because I believe he's ordained everything about my life, but that's not a I don't feel like it's a relational disappointment. And I think I think what it means to trust God is if I think about 2nd Corinthians 7, where Paul has the thorn in the flesh, and he begs for it to be another way. And he hears Jesus speak to him, and he says, my grace is sufficient.
Speaker 3:My power is made perfect in weakness. And and Paul says, so therefore, I can what I've got to boast about is the power of Christ coming down to rest on me so that I can be content with hardships. So, as humans, I think we're this mix, aren't we, of disappointment and yet contentment to to choose to nurture a sense of trust in God. I mean, I I really believe that God has the life he has given me is what he intends. And so I might feel disappointed Matt doesn't have a sibling, but I choose to trust him that that he's working he's causing that to work together for Matt's good and for my good.
Speaker 3:And I'm choosing to trust him with it, even though I might feel some disappointment. Does that make sense?
Speaker 4:Some good stuff right there.
Speaker 3:That's a
Speaker 4:good place to end, maybe.
Speaker 1:Will you guys join me in thanking Nancy and David?