Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
What do you do when the bottom drops out and life breaks in ways you never imagined? Charlie and Jill LeBlanc have walked that road, and through their personal story of loss, they’ve discovered the sustaining power of God's presence. In this podcast, they offer heartfelt conversations, Scripture-based encouragement, and the kind of hope that only comes from experience. Whether you're grieving, struggling, or searching for peace in the middle of chaos, this space is for you.
Charlie & Jill LeBlanc (00:01.25)
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Finding Hope. The subtitle being, Getting Through What You Never Asked For. And that's really things that we love to encourage you in because we all go through difficult times in our life. Jesus said, in this world you'd have tribulation. So be of good cheer for I've overcome the world. And so we want to encourage you today.
I know many of you have been through losses like we have difficulties. Your soul, your heart is just pained. we want to try to bring some prayer, some love, some comfort, some relief to that pain if we could, by the power of the Holy Spirit, if it's even possible. But we know the Lord can do it. We're just praying that we can be a help as well.
know, Paul said in 2 Corinthians, he said, comfort others with the same comfort that you've received from the Lord. And that's our purpose here. That's our desire is to comfort you with the comfort that God has comforted us with after 17 years after losing our son, Bo. Boy, it was so hard and so painful. And we really didn't think we'd ever get through it. But we did. By God's grace, we made it.
We moved forward. Yes. You we weren't so sure that, like he said, that we would ever be in any kind of...
a healthy place again in our lives. mean, when you experience that kind of trauma, it is life-altering. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. And, you know, even though life is not the same as it was before, and we are much healthier now, thank God, but life is good. It's just different. It has its hard seasons, but it's...
It's so different, but it is good. And there's still sucky things that happen. We're walking through some sucky things right now, but thank God, He gives us grace every day as we trust Him. And He will give you grace and we pray that you sense His grace helping you through what you're going through. Amen. Amen.
So today we wanna talk about a subject that is in our book. It's actually a chapter in our book. Speaking of our book, I happen to have one right here. Our book is called, When Loss Comes Close to Home. And there's a chapter in this book that I got put in my heart the last few days to talk about. We talk about a lot of these things in different ways, but we really wanna center on this one chapter called, The Analysis of Paralysis.
Right. And you know, the title is kind of a play on words. A lot of people have a college textbook called The Paralysis of Analysis. so we flipped that because one thing that people who experience trauma and loss or trauma really of any kind, you go through a season of paralysis where you just, you
you're stuck. And so we want to share some things to hopefully help you if that's where you're at or maybe someone you know would be encouraged by these words today. Amen. And we're going to be using some notes because we just want to say it really well. Yeah. And so bear with us. Yeah. But we're going to start in Psalm 31 verses 9 and 10 in the Passion Translation.
It says, Lord, help me again. Keep showing me such mercy for I am an anguish always in tears and I'm worn out with weeping. I'm becoming old because of grief. My health is broken. I'm exhausted. My life is spent with sorrow and my years with sighing and sadness because of all of these troubles. I have no more strength.
My inner being is so weak and frail. Wow. That is such a great example of paralysis. And of just facing the death of a loved one, the pain, the anguish, the paralysis that you go through, the grief, the depths of grief. What an incredible scripture. And the passion just makes it so much more.
Powerful. says, I'm worn out with weeping. Boy, we can relate to that. I'm feeling I'm coming old because of my grief. And yeah, if you don't, you in time, you have to get a hold of this, this grief so that you don't let it turn into we talked about this last week. Don't let it turn into depression, right? Because that can really ruin you. But but there is a healthy kind of grief. And we talked a lot about that last week. But this is very powerful.
my years with sign and sadness. And we're here to help you in that arena today. Amen. Not everyone goes through this type of paralysis or feeling like you're just stuck. We certainly did, and a lot of people do, but not everyone does. So if you didn't, don't feel like you're odd, the odd one out, because it's all about the relationship.
It's all about the situation that surrounded their death or the death of something. So don't think you're weird if you didn't. Praise God. Right. At least you escaped that. Right. But a lot of people do. And if you did, we want to affirm you that this can be very common to a lot of us. Yeah. It can leave you feeling helpless in so many ways. Yeah.
And so some examples of that are you can't think clearly. Have you ever been there? You can't make decisions. You can't sleep. You withdraw. Even simple things feel overwhelming. you know, I'm going to confess something that a lot of my peers may not like, but, you know, Jill and I do a lot of international traveling and
As we did with the time change and so forth, there was a sleeping aid that my doctor gave us and we use it sparingly just whenever we were overseas and we knew we had to minister the next morning. So we had to get a good night's sleep and our bodies were six hours off and all this kind of stuff. So after we lost our son, Bo, it says here you can't sleep. And as we know from studying,
that sleep is so important. It's the repair of your cells, all kinds of important things happen when you sleep to your body. mean, God made it that way. And Jesus even slept. We even say, we always say Jesus wept. Well, he slept.
He went on a mountain to pray and I'm sure he rested at those moments as well. yeah, we actually, so our docs said, look, if you need to take a little bit of those sleeping aids through this grief time, through this paralysis, this sitting in bed like this, just reliving the trauma, reliving the nightmare.
of when you saw your son die. mean, you guys, y'all, many of you understand that, but so many people don't. They don't understand that trauma. I mean, I read a book recently about, trauma in PS, PTSD that a lot of people that come back from wars, war, and they're just, you know, they're dealing with their buddies getting killed and watching people die around them and
and all that, and guns, they need to get through that. They need to get healed of that. And really, when you have a loss like we have, and like many of you have, there is a trauma involved. And thank God, Jesus helps us and brings us through this stuff and heals us. He says He heals broken hearts, and so He is the healer of everything. Thank God.
including this kind of trauma and this type of dysfunction that we're discussing right now. Rabbi Earl Grohlman, who we quoted quite often in our book because, man, God used him to minister to us so much, especially early on. But I love this quote that he added.
He said, which is basically just again, explaining paralysis. He said, your sensibilities are numbed. You feel as if you're under anesthesia. Because of this numbness, you do not feel everything at once. You have not wholly absorbed the grim reality of the death of your loved one. And it describes it so well because
It's true. Sometimes it just really takes a while to set in what you're now facing in your life. Yes, you know your loved one's gone, but it's only hit the surface. You haven't even begun to live life without that one. And it's just a whole different journey of its And it's traumatizing at first.
We talk about the fight or flight syndrome, know, where people when they get confronted with a situation, they're either going to fight or they're going to run and hide. Well, there's another thing we saw an author mention called the fight or flight or the freeze. And that's when you're just so traumatized that you don't know what to do. You you see that in movies sometimes someone's in a bad situation and they say,
Run, run, do something. They're just like, they're frozen. don't know, they can't do anything. Their senses are locked up. And unfortunately, that sometimes happens when we lose a loved one. I mean, we just get frozen. get this, and someone said that it's a characterized, your blood pressure and you feel in this crouching position. You get shortness of breath.
increased heart rate, sweating, choking. These weird symptoms sometimes can hit you. A friend of ours who just lost his wife, he would have anxiety attacks. He'd wake up in the middle of the night just going, he couldn't breathe. could barely even, thought he was having a heart attack or thought he didn't have enough air. And it was just anxiety. It was trauma. It was this paralysis. And another friend,
you know, her jaw locked on her. I mean, she literally had this locked jaw. She couldn't open her mouth to eat. It was just so much pain and trauma. And these things just happen. And, you know, we can pray and God will help us get through these things. But if you're experiencing that, we just want you to know it's not abnormal. I think that's a big part of our desire and passion.
for people of faith, people that love God, people that are standing in the Word and believe God, know who they are in Christ, but these things happen and sometimes these symptoms hit us and we're like, what? This can't be normal. This can't be right. Well, we're here to tell you, we feel like we're men and women of faith, but a lot of these things happened to us and God loved us and comforted us. He didn't condemn us to say, oh, you're out of faith, know, because you're...
You're you're paralyzed in this situation. Your brain's not thinking, you know, no, he didn't rebuke us. He loved us and he healed us and he brought us through these difficult times. So if you feel stuck or numb or unable to function like you used to do, it doesn't mean that something's wrong with you. You're OK. All right. This means your heart and your mind are trying to process something very, very heavy. That's all it is. Your brain is we want to quit.
to face death like this. We weren't created. We were created to have eternal life. When Adam and Eve were created, they were created to live forever. But the fall brought death into the world. And we weren't created to be able to handle this with our minds. And man, when a loved one dies in front of you or you get the news and you know that it's happened and you're just in shock, you know.
It's a very hard thing to process. It's very heavy and but you will you will get through it brothers and sisters you will We we promise you that just hang in there. Yeah. Yeah Another thing some people experience is like they're living in a fog. Mm-hmm. They just It's similar to being frozen, but but you're just You just can't think straight. You can't see
You know, you just can't get out of this fog, get your head out of the clouds. Right. As we've been told all of our lives, you feel like time is moving, but you aren't. remember that. Yeah. Gosh. I mean, from the day our son passed, seemed like that it that time just raced ahead. It just raced.
And yet here we were stuck in this place of how do we, know, what, how, how are we going to survive this? What do we do? We were just so frozen. It's like you're watching your life instead of living your life. And boy, you know, you might walk into a room and forget while you're there.
while you're there. That still happens to me. I have to retrace my With a little bit of age, it starts to happen. Well, it used to happen. I mean, it's happened all my adult life, I know, but maybe a little more often now. Or you start something and you don't finish it. And again, that's been a little bit typical of me. Ouch. But these are things that can be exacerbated by
trauma and grief. Yes. Or you feel exhausted by even the smallest task. You know, it just doesn't take much to wear you out. And you know, this is not failure. It's just grief. It's just part of the journey of, of walking through this kind of season. And it won't be this way forever, but we're just trying to bring some awareness so that you know that you're not
crazy, you've not lost your mind, you aren't unspiritual. It's just what happens. how our body's process go through something this traumatic. Our brains need help. Need health, need recovery.
after this kind of trauma. It's like, we're not wired for this. We really aren't. Our brains aren't wired for this. But Jesus, thank God, is greater in us than he that's in the world, and he is mighty in us. And we are new creations in Christ Jesus. And yes, in time, we can be totally transformed. Our minds can be healed, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. It just takes time to heal.
And we talked about that last week as well. I just wanted to share a little story of my own personal paralysis. morning of our son's funeral, which was about five days after his passing. The funeral, think, was at 11 in the morning. so we were at home, of course.
and I went into my closet to try to get dressed. And I just stood there looking at my clothes, just looking and looking. And I couldn't figure out how to pick something out. And I just felt some overwhelm just began to take hold of me. And then I said, what do you wear to your son's funeral?
Do I go to chat, GPT, and They didn't teach that to us in Bible school. They didn't teach a lot of important things in Bible school. And so, I just picked out the only things that I felt like wearing. I had a pair of gray skinny jeans, and I had this orange knit poncho. I don't think my aunt made it. I think I bought it, but it was...
I had never worn those together before, but they went together really well. That's what I wore. I didn't wear a dress. I didn't wear black slacks. I didn't even wear black. I wore orange and gray. And it looked all right. You look good in anything, And, but, you know, so like I said, said, you know, out loud, I said, what the heck do I wear to my son's funeral?
And then I broke. just began to sob because I've never been here before and couldn't believe I was here now. And I was just paralyzed. So eventually I just got to where I could pick something out and it was fine. And it's okay. You just do what you have to do to get through that season. That's right. Yeah, it's important to just know that.
And we just want to affirm that, that you just do what you have to do and it's okay. You don't have to do what everyone thinks you should do. You don't have to be what everyone thinks you should be. You don't have to wear what everyone thinks you should wear. This is a season where you have to take care of yourself. And it's important that you prioritize your own mental health, your own heart health.
and your own time, you manage your time because people will try to steal it and try to run you over and only make things worse. So yeah, so it's okay. You do it the way it's best for you. Yeah. There's a scripture in Proverbs 31, nine. It says, must defend those who are helpless and have no hope. And that's how you feel when trauma has...
taken hold of your life, you've lost a loved one, something terrible has happened in your family with someone that you love. You just feel helpless and like you no hope. And a short time after our good friend died a few years ago, his wife, who is also our good friend,
you know, even though he was ill and we knew it was coming still after he was gone after the funeral and after everything kind of went back to normal. She began to get hit with hopelessness and and felt like she was helpless and she she would come home and be alone and it was just the two of them living there and
It was kind of overwhelming for a while. And thank God, the Lord really reached out to her and helped her during that time and began to show her, you are not alone. I am right here with you. But the hopelessness and helplessness that set in in the beginning, was pretty overwhelming. And that happens to people. Yeah, well, we have this good friend who just lost his wife.
And, you know, he keeps using the term. We do a lot of texting together. We talk to him on the phone a lot too. And he said, I just attended my first family wedding minus one, minus one. He keeps using the term minus one. I just, we just did this together as a family minus one. And he's so alone. He's so lonely. Yes, he has.
some grandkids in the close by. Yes, he has a daughter and a son that's not married yet, but you know, but he goes to bed at night by himself and he wakes up by himself and it's tough. It's a minus one difficulty in his life and we're believing God, that God's helping him every day and he knows it. He is standing.
So I have another travel packing story. So two days after our son's funeral in St. Louis, we were flying to Phoenix because we have a whole lot of family. Charlie's family lives in Phoenix, including his elderly parents and all of his siblings and both cousins. And Bo was living in Phoenix when he got sick. So.
it was only right that we did a service there because there were a lot of people whose lives he touched. So it's Wednesday after the funeral on Monday and Tuesday I was doing laundry and just, you know, kind of getting ready to go, but I hadn't packed yet. I kept walking into the closet on Tuesday and I...
Like the day of the funeral, I went in and I just looked at everything and I couldn't move. My brain, my mind was just paralyzed. I couldn't think what to do here. And we're business travelers, know, just traveled all the time. All our life. Pack bags and unpack them all of our Practically do it in my sleep, you know, just grab this, grab that. I couldn't do it this time.
And so here it's Wednesday, we're flying out on Wednesday. And my mom, bless her, she was in the kitchen just cleaning up. My parents, just, they were, bless them. They were so special and they just didn't know what to do. They'd never been through this before either, but they lived in town and they came over a lot during that time.
You know, so she's just in the kitchen cleaning dishes and whatever. And I just ran into the kitchen and ran into her arms. I said, Mom, I just can't do this. I can't, I can't do this. And she's just patting me on the back. We'd never been real close. And, you know, we're kind of like.
too much alike, too, you know, kind of locked horns a lot. And but so she's just patting me on the back and she said, Yes, you can. Yes, you can. You have to. gosh. And so I just cried a little more and then and then I was able to go back and start packing. But it's getting the time is ticking away and we have a plane to catch and by the grace of God.
We made it. mean, they were already past the time by we got the time we got to the airport and checking in. They were really past the time of accepting any more bags. You was that close. But they gave us grace and took them. Praise God. And we made it. Yeah. By the grace of God. And you know, when I look back on all the things that we've been through,
It's so good for us to go back and remember these and the tears. We understand we've all been here. just to reflect the darkest season in our lives, but yet God's grace brought us through. And now we can breathe again. And I'm just here, we're going to pray for you in just a second, but we just want you to know that God will bring you through.
You may think, Charlie, I don't know how I'm ever going to make it. But there are some of you out there that listen to us that you're a year out, two years out, three years out. And you say, yes, Charlie, by the grace of God, I'm still breathing. By the grace of God, I'm still moving forward. And you understand that. as we close today, and we're going to come back to this subject next week. But as we close today, because we're not near finished with it, but as we close, we just want to pray.
and just bless you, okay? Lord, we just thank you for our friends. Lord, we thank you that you do heal broken hearts, Lord. And Father, you can help us. You're a present help in time of need. You can help us and you do help us, Lord. Even when we don't feel it or don't sense that you're with us even, Lord, we know that you are with us and that you are reaching out.
to help us in every situation. So God, we give that to you. We pray for all of our friends, all of the podcast watchers and listeners. God bless them today, we pray in the name of Jesus. Amen. Amen. Well, God bless you and we'll look forward to continuing this same subject next week, okay? Bless Be sure and share this with someone that comes to mind that you believe would be helped by it. Yes. And don't forget our book.
Get that book, When Lost Comes Close to Home. It's going to help you a lot. All right. Love you now.