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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.
Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of Finding Hope with your host Charlie and Jill LeBlanc. Thank you for coming back. You know the subtitle of our podcast is
Jill LeBlanc:Getting Through What You Never Asked For.
Charlie LeBlanc:For some reason it was there and then it left me. But it's such a powerful subtitle, Getting Through What You Never Asked For. Gosh, that breaks my heart really because there's so many things that happen in people's lives that we never expected, we never asked for, of course, and we never dreamed it would happen to us. I know for us with Beau, we never dreamed.
Jill LeBlanc:Never dreamed.
Charlie LeBlanc:As you, if you've lost a loved one, you probably never dreamed that you would lose them early in life in an untimely world, in an untimely manner, but I'm also thinking about, I immediately think about people who've been through divorces. My heart breaks for, I don't know, I get these pictures. We have these two little girls next door. They're just the cutest things. And we recently found a cat, an orphaned cat, a little bitty kitten. And we all rescued it together.
Charlie LeBlanc:They were helping. They were, Mommy, mommy. So we caught it in the engine of our car and we got it out. And anyway, we got it rescued. They got it to the vet and they're gonna keep it.
Charlie LeBlanc:But how do they get on the vet?
Jill LeBlanc:Two little girls and divorce. Yeah. And Yeah.
Charlie LeBlanc:I think about...
Jill LeBlanc:And they're not divorced.
Charlie LeBlanc:No. No. No. But what I think about is we all were little boys and little girls with dreams. And, you know, I think about a little girl and, you know, she dreams about getting married to a great man and having children and grandchildren.
Charlie LeBlanc:And she deserves that, you know? And yet, you know, we know many of our dear friends that they've raised their kids, and then their husband said, I'm out of here. And he left her, and they're left alone for the rest of their life.
Jill LeBlanc:Yeah.
Charlie LeBlanc:You know, some of them don't remarry. And I know God's bigger and God has healed many of their broken hearts, and God has done amazing things to keep us on track. Thank God for his love and his faithfulness and his strength to get us through dark times. But it breaks my heart, because, you know, as a little girl, you play with dolls and you're thinking about marriage, you're thinking about a husband, and then it just all falls apart, you know? And we know many, in fact, even your sister that went through a terrible divorce situation. And my sister, same, went through a terrible divorce situation.
Charlie LeBlanc:But anyway, loss is loss and getting through what you never asked for is the theme of this. Our heart is to support you in that, Support you to get through tough, tough times. Because they come to everyone.
Jill LeBlanc:Then there's the people that maybe have lost a part of their body to cancer, to an accident. Whatever, you know, got there. I knocked out or a limb or some other part and that's I can't imagine that.
Charlie LeBlanc:Right.
Jill LeBlanc:And then those people never imagined it would have ever happened to them.
Charlie LeBlanc:Never happened to them, yeah.
Jill LeBlanc:And that's trauma. Right.
Charlie LeBlanc:As we never dreamed we would lose our son. We watched the commercials with Tunnels of Towers. Oh gosh. Tunnel to Towers?
Jill LeBlanc:Tunnel to Towers.
Charlie LeBlanc:And it's all these vets, veterans that I mean, to think, you're young, you go to war for your country, and you lose. Many of them lose their lives, and their wives are like, What? He's gone? What? They have two little kids? I mean, that's just the trauma, the pain of that is unbearable. And then, in fact, that's a plug for Tunnels to Tower to support them, just look it up, T2T, right?
Jill LeBlanc:Yeah, T, the number two, T.
Charlie LeBlanc:Yeah, t2t.org, is it? I think. I'm not sure. Anyway, Tunnels to Towers. Support them if you can.
Charlie LeBlanc:But yeah, many of them come home with lost their limbs and they're in wheelchairs, And this ministry, this Tunnels to Towers, they help.
Jill LeBlanc:Organization.
Charlie LeBlanc:Any vet, any young lady that's lost her husband in war, they try to pay off their home and help them financially. And if the vets have come home with limbs missing, they help them get a new house, something built.
Jill LeBlanc:Build a custom home for them with all the bells and whistles to help them live a normal life.
Jill LeBlanc:Yeah.
Charlie LeBlanc:So I appreciate them so much. But, yeah, you know, life has its twists and turns. And I remember looking at my journals recently and just some of the statements I made, you know, one statement I made, is kind of odd, I just remembered it, it said, Life is like jumping out of a plane in a parachute, enjoying this beautiful scenery, but sometimes the parachute doesn't open and you fall in I know it seems like a little weird analogy, but at the time
Jill LeBlanc:A little morbid.
Charlie LeBlanc:Yeah, but at the time, it was like what happened to me. I saw, you know, my life, was like our prayers for our son, we didn't see the answer. And you know what, I wanna say, when we talk so much about having faith in God and believing God and it didn't happen and having to recover from that, I just want to say very clearly that we love God with all of our heart, and we know that he was working with us, and he was for us, and we know that he in the middle of our grief journey, in the middle of our mourning. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted. We've shared that scripture so many times.
Charlie LeBlanc:He is faithful, and I'm doing a study right now on faithfulness, because it's not what we think. We think, well, if he's faithful, then everything's gonna turn out right. Well, that is not truth. And we see that through the men and women of God in scripture, that things don't always turn out right. And God is always faithful to bring us through the most difficult, painful things.
Jill LeBlanc:So grateful.
Charlie LeBlanc:And you know, if you don't mind, I'm gonna go ahead and share a little bit about this area of faithfulness and goodness. You know, there's a song that we're gonna do at the end of this program, and it's one I wrote called God is My Refuge, and I won't go into all the background of how I wrote it and why I wrote it, but it's taken from Psalm 23, And that Psalm has become so meaningful to us, especially since we lost Beau. And I've written many songs from it, but the one that we're gonna do is called God is My Refuge, and I wanted to just read Psalm 23 to you and share with you something God showed me. You know, it says, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. Now that is powerful right there. The Psalmist David said, He restores my soul. And when we have all had losses like that, our soul is messed up. Our soul is shattered. There's some translation of something about crushed.
Jill LeBlanc:Yeah, he's close to those whose souls are crushed.
Charlie LeBlanc:Souls are crushed, yeah, yeah.
Jill LeBlanc:Is that new living or passion, one of
Charlie LeBlanc:Yeah, those souls are crushed, hearts are crushed, yeah, your soul
Jill LeBlanc:Heart's are crushed.
Charlie LeBlanc:It needs help. It needs restoration. And that's normal. If you're in pain and your heart's broken and you're mourning and you're grieving and you can't even control this pain on the inside of you. You want it to go away, but you don't know what to do with it.
Charlie LeBlanc:Listen, cry it out. I believe crying is one of the things, the tears is dropping onto your soul, and bringing health to your soul. I know that I wrote that in my journal too, that I'm trusting you, Lord, that my tears are dropping and helping to heal my broken soul. And you've seen things about tears as well.
Jill LeBlanc:Oh, you mean the physiological side? Physiology. Physiological side.
Charlie LeBlanc:Yeah. I mean, tears are really interesting.
Jill LeBlanc:Yeah. A friend of ours had a brain injury, a traumatic brain injury. She fell on a beach that that had, you know, it wasn't gravel or sand. It was rocks.
Charlie LeBlanc:Yeah.
Jill LeBlanc:And she slipped and fell and hit her head on a rock. And she had traumatic brain injury for months and months and months. Finally, she found a psychologist or some psychiatrist, whoever worked, whatever doctor works with brain. And he told her, you just need to cry this out. You let those tears flow because your brain needs to release that.
Jill LeBlanc:And plus when it's emotional tears like that, she was battling just so much emotional trauma. Those are made up of a certain type of enzyme. Those are different than the tears, say you get something blows in your eye, and you start watering because something's in your eye. That's a different chemical makeup than an emotional tear. Emotional tears have hormones and enzymes and all different kinds of chemicals in them.
Jill LeBlanc:And it comes from, I don't mean literally it comes from, you know, deep inside, but the play, they're just come, they're different than those-
Charlie LeBlanc:And you studied this out yourself as well.
Jill LeBlanc:Yes. Yeah. She shared with this with us, but then I did some study-
Charlie LeBlanc:Because it was like, wow.
Jill LeBlanc:Yeah. Was very, I know.
Charlie LeBlanc:Tears are different. Wow. That's interesting.
Jill LeBlanc:They have a different makeup depending on their source.
Charlie LeBlanc:Yeah. And we have a whole chapter in our book about crying and tears and how Godly men mourned over the tomb of Stephen, and just how great men of God mourned over the loss of their wives, their children. It goes on and on and on. We wanna encourage you, if you need to cry, cry.
Jill LeBlanc:And Jesus himself
Charlie LeBlanc:Amen.
Jill LeBlanc:Said blessed are those who mourn.
Charlie LeBlanc:That's right.
Jill LeBlanc:Crying is part of mourning.
Charlie LeBlanc:That's right.
Jill LeBlanc:For you shall be comforted. Jesus himself said that.
Charlie LeBlanc:Yep. Yeah. And Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus.
Jill LeBlanc:Yes, he did.
Charlie LeBlanc:He wept with with with he wept over the city of Jerusalem, you know? So tears are normal. It's part of life. I went to my doctor and I said, Doc, you gotta give me something, I'm crying all the time. This was right after we lost Beau.
Charlie LeBlanc:And he said, Charlie, it's normal, just go with it. You'll get better, but you gotta let yourself cry. You need to go through this, I'm not gonna give you anything, and thank God he didn't. So he restores our soul, and that's the beauty of the love of Christ, is he loves us, and he is with us in our suffering and in our pain. He never leaves us or forsakes us.
Charlie LeBlanc:And I've quoted this scripture before in Isaiah, he says, when Israel suffered, he himself suffered. And so God suffered with us, he's pained with us, he cries with us, as we saw it, when he cried at the tomb of Lazarus, seeing Mary and Martha and all the Jews crying, He cries with us. And I want to encourage you, feel free to cry, because that's part of the healing of your soul. It's okay to cry. And I'm gonna continue on here.
Charlie LeBlanc:It says, He leads me in paths of righteousness for His name's sake. And then this beautiful part, Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. And I love the fact that, again, he's with us when we walk through this painful shadow of death. Know, so many of you, so many of us have lost a loved one, we're in the shadow, in a sense, of that pain, of that death. But he says, I will fear no either for you are with me, and whether we feel like he's there or not, he is.
Charlie LeBlanc:And as you've said so many times, Jill, he's carried us like footprints in the sand. There's only one set of footprints in the hardest times, but that's because, my daughter, I was carrying you, you know, as the little poem goes. But it's beautiful.
Jill LeBlanc:So true.
Charlie LeBlanc:To really, know that, that he's with us in the deepest, darkest moments of our life. Now let me get to this one little point. The scripture says, Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. I have read that, and as a young Christian, and as a word of faith Christian, I thought only good and only mercy is going to be in my life. Only good things. So, when I wrote the song, I read, Goodness and mercy will follow me all of the days of my life. You know, like, in faith. Nothing bad's ever gonna happen to me. Only good's gonna happen to me.
Charlie LeBlanc:But, again, in my immaturity, if I would just read the Bible, I would see that even the greatest men of faith and women of faith had difficulty and were facing very tough situations, including the losses of their children, like I just said. So, I struggled with some of these scriptures and some of these even songs that I had written. But when I looked at this in the New Living Translation, and in many other translations, it clarified it. And it makes sense now. It says, Surely your goodness and your mercy will follow me all the days of my life. And even so, when we hit difficult times, it's normal, first of all, in this world you shall have tribulation, but when have good cheer, I've overcome the world.
Jill LeBlanc:Yeah, Jesus also said that.
Charlie LeBlanc:Yeah, it's normal that you're gonna have difficult times. In fact, he was preparing the disciples the whole time. Saw the future. He saw that there was gonna be persecutions. There was gonna be stonings.
Charlie LeBlanc:He saw Stephen being stoned in advance. He knew that Paul would be, they'd all be thrown in prison, he knew that his cousin was gonna be beheaded, you know, he knew that they would all die a martyr's death eventually, so he knew that this was gonna be a tough road for them. In this world you will. And for those who live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution. So Jesus knows the pain of this broken earth, this broken world that we live in, this fallen world, and he knows how evil the enemy is to steal, kill, and to destroy.
Charlie LeBlanc:But I saw it in the New Living, says, Surely your goodness and mercy will follow me, but in everything, his goodness and His mercy follow us. And no matter what situation we're in, His goodness and mercy are there. That's why Romans 8 has become more alive to me now, because I used to always say, I'm more than a cockroach to Him who loved me, and I can do all things through Christ, but that's in Philippians. Who can separate me from the love of God? Nothing, I can do all things, whatever.
Charlie LeBlanc:I just had all these faith proclaims, but I didn't realize Paul wasn't in prison, beaten, broken, when he said, I can do all things through Christ in Philippians. And when he said, I am more than a conqueror through him who loved me. So he said these amazing things in the middle of broken pain. So his goodness and his mercy shall follow us all the days of our life. And we're gonna do that song later. I should have waited and shared this before we did it, but nonetheless, you'll hear it later.
Jill LeBlanc:Yeah. And just wanted to give a little word to those who are supporting someone that's walking a really rough journey, either because they've lost someone or maybe they've lost a job, maybe they've lost their home, you know, whatever situation. We've got a lot of help for you in this book, When Loss Comes Close to Home. The whole second half of the book is written to those that are walking beside those who are grieving for whatever reason. And we just want to help you to be a better helper to them so that they can be safe in your presence and you can be an effective help in time of need that the Holy Spirit can flow through to bring comfort to them.
Jill LeBlanc:So, just check out our book, even if you're not the one that has experienced loss. Now, I remember when we were new grievers, new newly bereft, as they say in England. There were a lot of books that we found that that were a blessing. You know, they were helpful to us. And one of them was similar to to the second half of our book.
Jill LeBlanc:It's written to those who have a grieving friend. So how to help your grieving parent or how to help your grieving friend or how to help your grieving child or, you know, there's a whole series of book. And so we took I ordered several copies of how to help your grieving friend and sent sent them to our friends. Well, I don't know if they ever read them or not, but I'm just saying, if if you need your friend to be a better helper to you, get them this book. Tell them to start in chapter eight and just just so that they can become a better helper.
Charlie LeBlanc:Amen.
Jill LeBlanc:Because you deserve to have good help.
Charlie LeBlanc:Yes. And you know, speaking of help, you've mentioned books that we read, that we were sending, but you know, what's interesting is when we first lost Beau and when the pain was so hard, you know, we did hear a lot of silly things, I'll put it that way, from Christians that did not help. And Job says, after his friends kept talking to him, he said, Miserable comforters are you all. And so, we don't want to be miserable comforters. But there was a book, interestingly, Christians were saying so many silly things, and saying so much about heaven, which, praise God, heaven is our eternal home, it's where we're all gonna go. But we just couldn't find, at first, we couldn't find the words from Christians that really helped us.
Charlie LeBlanc:As much as we love our brothers and sisters, we couldn't find words that were helping us enough. And we found a book by a rabbi-
Jill LeBlanc:Couple of books.
Charlie LeBlanc:Of all things, called, the rabbi's name is Earl Grohlman. And of all things, that book helped us at the beginning more than anything.
Jill LeBlanc:Yes
Charlie LeBlanc:And part of it was the way he said things and also the fact that it was simple reading.
Jill LeBlanc:It was really space big, and it was only a few things on a page, but every phrase was just really powerful, and really helped us. And even though it didn't have Jesus, per se, words about Jesus in it, it had words of life in it. It was words of wisdom to help us face the truth of what had happened, and to face it head on, and to take a deep breath and figure out how to live another day with brokenness in our heart, and how to live another day with the loss of our son, without our son being in our life. That was a tough, tough season.
Jill LeBlanc:There was another-
Jill LeBlanc:And he helped us.
Jill LeBlanc:Yes, he helped us so much. We read and read that book over and over, and it's short, and the pages don't have a lot of words on them.
Charlie LeBlanc:What's the name of it in case people want to-
Jill LeBlanc:It's well, what I was going to say is we we quote him so many times in our book, and and it's kind of it's kind of to me the best of both worlds because it's got his poignant phrases that touched us so deeply. And and it's got the word of God, and we talk about Jesus.
Charlie LeBlanc:Yeah. Yeah.
Jill LeBlanc:But it the main book that touched us is called Living When a Loved One Has Died. And I waited a couple weeks. Someone had given
Charlie LeBlanc:Who gave us that?
Jill LeBlanc:You know what? We bought it. Someone else quote someone else wrote a book
Charlie LeBlanc:Oh, yes.
Jill LeBlanc:And and quoted him several times.
Charlie LeBlanc:Yes.
Jill LeBlanc:And so he quoted him so much, we thought, man, we need to go get that book.
Charlie LeBlanc:Yeah.
Jill LeBlanc:And we found it. And so we began to read it. For me, it was two or three weeks in. I was I was a little hesitant because just so raw.
Charlie LeBlanc:Yeah.
Jill LeBlanc:It was a huge blessing. And another book that really ministered to me was written by CS Lewis, and it's called A Grief Observed. And it was a journal of marrying his wife, who is his best friend for many years, they finally decided to get married. And they were only married four years when she died from cancer. But their relationship was much longer than that. But but their marriage, which, you know, the way he talks about it was just total bliss. It was beautiful. They they were so in love.
Charlie LeBlanc:Mhmm.
Jill LeBlanc:And then she died. And so he's journaling about everything he went through after she died. And so it's kind of a raw negative book in the beginning, but that's where I was. So it really touched me.
Jill LeBlanc:And then as he goes on throughout his grief journey, he begins to to be able to look to the Lord again and, you know, things got to a better place. Some people hate that book because it does start out negative and it's just, it's painful.
Charlie LeBlanc:Well, ours starts out real negative too. And we talk about the story of losing Beau.
Jill LeBlanc:Yeah,
Charlie LeBlanc:it I remember reading his, so it was probably different.
Jill LeBlanc:It's really powerful and it has a very poignant example that we actually quote in our book about, he talks about two people having surgery. He said, one person goes in and has his appendix out and he heals up and he goes on with life and no one ever knows, you know, that he's ever had surgery. Another person has to have his leg cut off and either he recovers from that or he dies. If he recovers, he eventually gets fitted with a prosthetic. And so when he goes about in public with his prosthetic and long trousers on, no one ever knows that that he's had this issue.
Jill LeBlanc:But when he's at home and he has to get up in the night and he has to get dressed in the morning or undressed at night or just live normal life every second of the day, he's reminded of this traumatic injury that he lives with from now on. And that's that I I've I received so much affirmation from that because I thought people don't really understand what goes on in the heart of a griever, in the heart, in the face of loss. And, you know, it just I'm really hurting from this loss and it's a very serious thing, but others don't understand because they haven't experienced it.
Charlie LeBlanc:Right.
Jill LeBlanc:So it just affirmed me that my pain was not in vain. You know, it's a real deal and it's it's important to let yourself mourn and cry.
Charlie LeBlanc:Yeah.
Jill LeBlanc:Like we were talking in another episode, it's there's so much value that you receive when you let yourself go there.
Charlie LeBlanc:Yeah.
Jill LeBlanc:And you don't wanna stay there for the rest of your life, you know, but we can begin to heal.
Jill LeBlanc:But anyway.
Charlie LeBlanc:Yeah.
Jill LeBlanc:It's yeah.
Charlie LeBlanc:Well, God does heal the broken hearts. Thank God for that. And he does comfort those who mourn. Isaiah 61 tells us that, and Jesus quoted it in Luke four, I think it is. So God bless you.
Charlie LeBlanc:We sure do love you. We're gonna close with this song called God is My Refuge that I wrote many years ago, and it's become a very, very special song to so many people. But we believe it's going to minister to you right now. If you're watching this, you can see a beautiful nature video that we added to the song, but if not, just listen to it, let the words, let the music minister to you. And again, God bless you, we love you, and we pray God's peace and comfort be with you. We'll see you in the next episode.