TLP 347: Parenting through Struggle, Cancer, & Death | Jay Holland interview, Part 2

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You know, some of the question is, well, how do you parent children through this? I think the first way you parent them is you cling to the

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Lord, and you don't fake it. Welcome to Truth, Love, Parent, where we use

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God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents. Here's your host,

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A .M. Brewster. If you didn't catch our last episode with Jay Holland, the host of Let's Parent on Purpose, then you need to listen to that one first, because Jay is going to finish his story with us today.

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He's already told us about how he parented his daughter through the loss of her mother, and he's just now starting to tell us how his five -year -old son developed cancer.

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And there's even still more to his story. So let's jump right in there and find out how God gifted

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Jay, prepared Jay, and empowered him to parent his children through these desperate times of suffering.

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I guess this is as decent of a segue as anything. While she's up there getting a puppy, we're at home.

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My son Elijah's five, Micah's three, and we've got a little girl we're trying to adopt who's two.

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And Elijah spikes a little fever one weekend. And so, you know, you got four kids, you're used to fevers, they're no big deal.

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And so it's like, stay home, you know, take Tylenol. Then the next day the fever went to 105, and the next morning when he got up, like he clearly had pneumonia.

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And so we go, we try to get into the hospital, or try to get into the doctor to get penicillin, but they send us to the

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ER because the doctor was full, and that ended up being a grace of God. They did a blood test. And, you know,

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Emily and I are sitting in the ER room with Elijah, who was strong and healthy as a horse.

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And the doctor comes in and says, you know, this makes me sick to my stomach to say, but your son is very sick, and it looks like he's got leukemia.

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And there's an ambulance pulling up out front to take him to a children's hospital in West Palm Beach.

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And Aaron, it's like, right back again, here's a bomb, you know, like the, just the floor drops out from underneath you one more time.

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And so, you know, and meanwhile, my daughter's up getting a puppy. So... Well, I got to ask,

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I got to ask because, I mean, I think you're going to get into this, but, you know, with your daughter, you were parenting her through suffering from what she was experiencing on the outside.

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Obviously, it very much was happening to her. Okay. But the loss of her mother. Now we're talking about parenting a child who the sickness and the potential death is looming on them themselves.

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And that has got to be a whole new ball of wax. Am I right? Or am I wrong on that? Oh, my.

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Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. How do you prep yourself to parent a child through cancer?

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You don't. I don't know how you do. I do know this.

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This is like one practical advice. If you hear the word leukemia, one thing I think that I did that helped me was they tell you this, but they don't know exactly what kind it is.

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And so they say it's going to be two, three days before they know. I knew enough to not go on the internet and start looking up leukemia because I knew, okay, he's only got one kind and I can only carry the weight of one kind and I don't need all of the leukemias put on my soul tonight.

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Like I'm having a hard enough time breathing as it is. And so, you know, so Elijah, actually, we found out 24 hours later, it was acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which is the most aggressive type of leukemia.

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I think it's the most aggressive type of cancer period and it'll kill you the fastest. It's also the most common childhood cancer.

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And it's the one that they know how to treat the best. So the treatment's brutal.

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It's three and a half years of heavy, heavy chemo and that first 10 months you basically stop life like you.

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He couldn't go to school. He couldn't go to church. He was in a bubble of our home or the hospital hit with,

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I think, 12 different kinds of chemotherapy and steroids every day for, I think, three and a half years.

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And so you live in terror, really, of all of this. And now as far as he went, you know, how do you, it's just a whole lot of,

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I love you. You know, I love you. I love you so much and praying. And, you know, your five -year -old's not really contemplating like the depths of eternity with his sickness.

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He just feels really bad. But you know what? Like there's a lot of nurses and a lot of doctors coming in and a lot of people around and some pretty tremendous opportunity to get to live what you say you believe in there.

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And I think, you know, just what I would say with anybody listening that would say, you know, there's no way

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I could do that. One of the things I think is really one of the most important lessons

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I've ever learned in my life is that there's no such thing as hypothetical grace. God does not give you grace for things that have not happened yet.

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So there's a number of things I look at and I'm like, there's no way I could do that. And yet if you find yourself in them, you're like, oh, well, it turns out

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I can because God gives you the grace for what you're in. He doesn't give you the grace for imaginary worries.

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You know, Jesus is pretty clear about that in Matthew 6, you know, don't worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow has enough worries of its own.

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Sufficient today is the trouble therein. And so, you know, leukemia is this phenomenal allegory to the gospel,

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I think, because on the outside, Elijah looked strong and healthy up until the very moment he didn't.

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Yet leukemia is a cancer of the blood. So like the blood has mutated and it is spreading through his bones and through his bloodstream.

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And what it's doing is it's impairing the function that his body's supposed to be doing.

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And it's wreaking havoc in there. And, you know, it would be the most unkind thing in the world if the doctor had got those results and came in and was not willing to tell us that he had leukemia because he didn't want to hurt our feelings or because he knew that the treatment was going to be really hard.

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That would have been unkind and unloving, just like withholding the gospel from somebody that needs

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Jesus is the most unloving thing that I could possibly do. But the treatment for leukemia is really death.

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You know, you get life through death. They're bombarding you with all of these chemotherapies.

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And what they're doing is essentially it's like a shotgun killing the cells of your body. And meanwhile, it's killing the leukemia cells too.

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And so the idea is like, if I shoot it enough, I'll kill all the leukemia cells and then your body has time to recover.

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So children actually recover better from these kinds of cancers than adults do. If you were far enough along, sometimes adults die of the treatment.

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But you know, Elijah got cancer, or at least he was diagnosed with cancer one week before Easter.

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And so I remember Easter Sunday, it was April 14th, 2014 was his diagnosis.

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And so Easter Sunday, about six days later, you know, the whole family, our extended family coming down to visit and be with him, everybody with their masks on.

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He'd had six or seven units of blood that first day. They said that 80 % of his bone marrow was leukemia and 30 % of his bloodstream was leukemia.

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And just, I remember writing something, and it's on my website, on the Let's Parent On Purpose website, but, you know, why did

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God give my son cancer? And my answer was, because he loves me and because he loves my son.

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And I don't feel like I have to wrestle around with, well, did God give it to him or did God allow it to happen?

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It's, you know, like, God is big and sovereign and I don't, like, it happened. God could have stopped it.

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He didn't stop it. I don't need to chase it any further than that. But he kept showing us these signs that he was in it.

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Like, for instance, we had been on a mediocre health insurance that when

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Obamacare came through, it got dissolved. But I still had it. Like, it was about to be dissolved, but I still had it.

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So I had this opportunity to get my kids on a new health insurance, and it took three months of wrestling through all of the paperwork and bureaucracy to get them on.

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Finally, they were on April 1st, 2014, and I told my wife, well, we can cancel. I had an

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AFLAC policy, like a hospital and cancer policy, and I had another insurance. And then, you know, they were going to be on this floor to healthy kids.

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And I told my wife, well, let's just wait and make sure that we can actually get into a doctor with their insurance before we cancel.

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And so for the, like, literal only 30 -day period of our entire lives, we had three different insurances.

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We had two main insurances and then the AFLAC supplemental insurance. And it was in that window that he was diagnosed with leukemia.

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So we got through three and a half years of treatment and over $2 million of medical billing with zero medical debt.

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And as a matter of fact, with the AFLAC policy cash in hand that bought us a van to go to the hospital all the time.

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God brought people in our church that came and remodeled our house and installed an air conditioning system in our house that had a

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UV light that killed any foreign bacteria. He provided a nanny to watch our adopted little girl during that time.

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Because that was the other thing going on too, is like, we had this two -year -old little girl who was...

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So we got her at one -year -old and we were the fifth family in her life. Her mom had been on every drug known to man and she was removed at the womb and then had three more families disrupt in the first year of her life.

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So tremendous abuse in the womb, tremendous neglect. And we ended up getting her because we knew her, like we knew who she was, not because we were looking for any more complication in our life at that time.

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And she was like easy and cuddly when we got her and she got harder and harder and harder and harder as she got bigger and mobile.

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And so by the time that Elijah got sick, she was just like a

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Tasmanian devil, just wreaking havoc in whatever environment she was in.

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We had no idea any of the symptoms or causes behind it, no training for that stuff. And then

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Elijah gets sick and this little girl had been getting strep throat about every three weeks.

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And so we're not only terrified that she's going to physically injure him, but terrified of the sickness and disease that she'll bring into the house and really had to wrestle through like maybe this is

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God's sign for us not adopting this little girl. Because like the adoption had been delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed.

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And there was a real temptation for that. But I remember that first week in the hospital with Elijah as we're wrestling through this,

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I have a journal that I open up and on the first page of it, I've written in there that Hannah, like, it looks like we're going to get to adopt

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Hannah in the next month, which didn't happen. But like my first journal page is about her. And then my second journal page,

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I had written out Psalm 127 and it starts out, let me actually just read it here for a second, it says, unless the

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Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. And unless the Lord watches over the city, those who stay up watch in vain.

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And then it goes on, it's vain for you to get up early and go to bed late for God gives to his beloved rest, even as they sleep.

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And then it ends, Psalm 127 ends with like arrows in the hands of a mighty warrior.

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So are the children of one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. And when

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I read it, Aaron, it was like, well, this is our answer. Like she's our quiver, she's our arrow and you don't get many arrows.

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And this is one of ours and you don't give up your arrows. And besides, unless the

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Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain, and we could bubble wrap Elijah and keep him away from everyone.

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And if the Lord's not in it, he's not living. And so we began to just take steps of faith to finalize the adoption and to walk through this cancer journey.

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And in no way at all was it easy. It was hard.

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It was traumatic. It was, man, it was, you know, like being in a meat grinder and yet every day

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God's grace was there. Every day God's provision was there. And I think, you know, like, you know, some of the question is, well, how do you parent children through this?

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I think the first way you parent them is you cling to the Lord and you don't fake it. And I remember thinking back, like after Christie died, there were times when my prayer to God was this,

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Lord, I love you and I'm not running, but I am so exhausted, I can't chase either.

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And I have a lot of really big decisions to make. And God, if you're not in them, I could make some very stupid decisions that are going to mess up my life and Brooklyn's life.

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And so, Lord, I just, I pray that if I'm about to walk into a decision that is going to mess our lives up, would you just please shut the door and would you just take me as I am?

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And I feel like God did that, that God knew I didn't have to fake.

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I didn't have to pretend that I was happy on times when I wasn't. I felt a lot of comfort in the

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Psalms because there's a lot of complaining in the Psalms. And it was really helpful for me to realize that it is scriptural to complain.

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It's scriptural to cast my worries to God. You know, Psalm 88,

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I learned it in a way I never had, you know, and Psalm 88 basically starts out, Lord, why?

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And ends with, and darkness is my only friend. And it doesn't go into, and I know you'll work it all out,

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God. It's the complaint to God is still an act of faith to God.

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And it's a real relationship, you know, because I don't understand everything and I'm finite.

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And if God, but I also realized like, even if God were to explain to me exactly why my son got cancer,

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I'm still not going to be happy my son got cancer. You know, even if like right after Christy had died, if God beamed down and said, hey,

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Jay, you know, I'm taking Christy to heaven. She's fine. And because of this, this, this, this, and this is going to happen.

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It's like the ache would not be one ounce less with a complete full explanation from God.

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So ultimately it has to come down to, do I belong to him? Do I trust him? And am

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I okay continuing to trust him, even when I don't see or understand what's going on? Wow.

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And I say this a lot in counseling, God's word and his truth for our difficulties, regardless of what the difficulty may be, really is simple, simple versus complex, however, it's not easy.

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Easy versus hard. It's still heavy. It's weighty. I mean, James chapter one describes testings and tribulations, these very hard trials that we sometimes feel like they're crushing us.

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I mean, like you said, David, the way he would describe, it felt like his bones were broken.

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The difficulties he was going through, they're never, we're never promised that it's going to be a light, easy, comfortable life, but the way to have spiritual success, the way that God has promised that we can spiritually thrive is a very simple thing.

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I don't know how many times throughout the Psalms, David refers to God as a refuge, as a hiding place, as a rock.

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You have to run to him. You have to hold on to him. You can't, you can't say to your kid, go hold on to that rock.

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I'm going to go over here and do this thing, but you go hold on to that rock. Like you said, we have to do that first and foremost, be clinging to it.

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Inviting our children to cling to him with us, setting the example for them. And some people,

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I think, you know, maybe you listen to this series, looking for a silver bullet, looking for that thing that's going to, they say, okay, this is the one thing that will guarantee, you know, my family will get through suffering okay.

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But they probably already know it. It's all throughout Scripture, trust in the Lord. Yeah.

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Yeah. Amen. Amen. I know one of the other things that really seemed to prep me was what

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I think you're doing with this series, a theology of suffering, which is not something in America we like to talk about, but I had come across Richard Wurmbren and he's the one that founded

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Voice of the Martyrs. Yeah. Richard was a Romanian pastor who ended up spending 13 years in prison in the communist era for his faith in Christ.

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And he actually, his biography is called Tortured for Christ. And I remember it having such a profound impact because I think maybe that was my first exposure to the reality of normal suffering in the lives of believers.

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You know, like me getting a flat tire as I drive down the road is not like the devil out to get me.

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That's because I ran over a nail or I, you know, wasn't diligent to check stuff. There's really spiritual demonic suffering that people go through, and then there are genuine horrible life circumstances that people go through.

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But especially I think as you go around the world and you meet the church around the world, what's interesting is it's not their suffering that pushes them away from Jesus.

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It's prosperity that pushes us away from Jesus. It's when, and I can tell you in my life, it's when the sun's shining and the birds are singing that I can question the goodness of God.

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But when I'm in the grind, man, I feel him with me and there's no doubt as to the reality of my faith.

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And so, you know, I don't pray for suffering. I kind of like, you know, my prayer is for a season of rest.

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That's my continual prayer. And at some point in my life or when I'm with Jesus, I'll get that rest.

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But also, you know, I can't say why me with suffering because I know

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God the way I do because of what I've walked through. And if there was another way, I'd be great with that.

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But this has been the path. And I'll tell you what, I have a happy life. I have a, man, my wife is amazing.

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Emily is just an absolute treasure. And I wouldn't know what a treasure she was if I hadn't walked through what we have together with her.

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And my kids have really sacrificed through adoption and foster care.

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They've really had to be on the back burner and a number of different times. But man, when I see their heart and I see their character,

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I just, I rejoice. I leap that like I see God moving and working in them, not because of lessons that I've taught them, not because of devotions that we've walked through, but because of experiencing and living

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Jesus together as we have to cling in faith to him. Amen. I saw that with my kids, too, working at Victory Academy for boys.

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There was a lot of struggle, demonic and otherwise, in the house. And the kids, working through that as a family, strengthened us in ways that no amount of family devotional times could have ever done.

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Now, I have to say, because I have a feeling that a bunch of listeners are sitting back thinking right now, what happened to Elijah?

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Oh, okay. So, Elijah is now 11. He is, by God's grace, he has been cancer -free.

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So, the way leukemia works, at least with his, is they get it into remission very fast.

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And his actually took a little longer. He was diagnosed in April, and they didn't get his into remission until August of 2014.

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But then they continue to do treatment for three and a half years, no matter what. And now we're in, and this is,

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I would covet your prayers, we're in the scary window where he gets no treatment whatsoever. There's no detectable cancer.

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And we go down about every month or every two months, and we have a blood test, and we hold our breath until they walk back in the room and say, everything looks good.

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And then we go on with life as normal. He's a happy boy that loves football and bludgeons me with trivia questions about who was the best this and who was the best that.

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And loves video games and is doing great in school. And has had to overcome a little bit of brain fog that he had to go through with all of that chemo on his body, and has had to overcome the physical effects of it.

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But man, that kid's got character like you wouldn't believe. And he's in sixth grade. I have a sixth grade son with character, and that's like, that's a

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Super Bowl dance right there. Amen. Amen. That's so great to hear.

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Thank you for asking that. Amen. So God gave your son cancer because he loved you, and he has healed your son because he loves you.

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He took your wife home because he loved you, and he gave you another wife because he loved you.

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Amen. And being able to praise him for both, to thank him to genuinely be at peace and content with what

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God gives you is so, so incredibly important. Now, I am curious, though, about your older daughter, because I can see someone who, as a young child in their formative years, lost their mother, struggling through that.

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Now their little brother gets life -threatening cancer. Did you see any temptation in her to question

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God, to get angry at the situation? How did she respond? Well, first off, let me pick back up.

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She was off getting her puppy when this happened. So... We didn't tell her while she was away.

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She comes back, and I pick her up from the airport, and she's got the cutest little fur ball in her lap, and it's going on and on and on.

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And somewhere along the drive home, I have to tell her that her little brother is in the hospital with leukemia, and then have to tell her what leukemia is, and all of that.

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Brooklyn has wrestled with a lot of fear, and I think she would tell you that somehow in all of this, there has been a wiring for approval that's already there.

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Actually, I can tell you one that's... This could be really helpful if somebody's going through this. I'll tell you one of the big struggles of having a daughter who lost her mother young.

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She doesn't have a lot of memories of her mom, and sometimes when people die, the tendency is to make their biography into a hagiography where they were sinless, and loved every orphan and every puppy, and never did anything wrong, and loved

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Jesus from the time they were born through their entire life. And so when you're around grandparents, and aunts, and uncles, and they're only talking good, and, oh, you look so much like her, which she does, that can be a heavy weight to put on a child.

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Now, the converse, this is the difficulty, is like, I don't want to tell her a bunch of bad things about her deceased mom.

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That's not very fair either. But I remember a key conversation for her when she was in fifth grade or seventh grade, something like that, driving along, and I began to open up and say, here's some of the areas where your mom struggled.

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And you could see it was like an anvil coming off her chest a little bit to realize that this was also a sinful person, because the play of the enemy in her mind has always been about measuring up and getting approval.

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And I think fear because of the loss of your mom, the potential loss of your brother, the amount of time that mom and dad, some of it too, like when we were in the hospital as much as we were, and as stressed and as scared as we are, and then there's four kids, it's easy, even if you're not screaming, because we're just not screamers in our family.

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That's just not the tendency of any of us, except my youngest daughter. You can overreact in little things that they did.

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And so Brooklyn struggled with perfectionism and owning up to mistakes.

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And she learned something. I absolutely believe in counseling and therapy.

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I think every single one of us has been through it. And one of the things that she learned, and it was really neat because we were on a mission trip to Baltimore this summer, and she taught the lesson in our devotion time to our missions team.

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And she said, one of the things that I've realized about me is that I am a peace keeper, not a peacemaker, and that I will do anything it takes to keep the peace instead of being willing to rip the

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Band -Aid off and really make peace. I shudder at going through the conflict that's needed to get to a genuine, honest, peaceful thing, and I would rather sweep things under the rug and everything look nice.

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And so the realization was the first step to transformation in her life.

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And so, man, it's just been neat to see that, but yeah, it doesn't work out the way that you think it was.

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I don't know of a time where she ran completely from God, but she had some very dark times in there and some not wanting to pursue

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God. And also just mean middle school girls stuff, not where she was mean, but you get in a crowd that just vicious little piranhas, and dad's not allowed to go punch other middle schoolers in the face.

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And it's just a hard thing, you know? But yeah, so it comes out in weird ways.

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And that's really helpful. I think that what you said about her kind of in a way being given permission to see the struggles her mom had, and likely they shared struggles, definitely helped that expectation be more accurate for her.

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Now, I think it's true of really every area in life where as you mature, you grow and you grow in your abilities, then you are given different responsibilities.

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And so a child is able to show that they're faithful in this little thing where you give them a bigger responsibility.

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I think a lot of people listening to your story could easily say, man, he started with the worst and went to like the second worst, and now he's dealing with the third worst.

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Third worst being the parenting of difficult children. But in a way,

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I don't know, and I just want you to speak into this. It would seem to me that it's almost been a growing process, like losing your wife, and then going through that struggle with your son has been exactly what your family needed in order to be able to go through these current parenting struggles that you're having.

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Am I looking at that the wrong way? What do you think? Well, I think what I would say is I would go back and first off, you experience things as you experience them.

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And so whatever you're going through at the time can often feel like the worst, whether it is or not.

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And also, some of it depends on how did you get into it? So the death of Christy wasn't the worst.

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The process leading up to the death often felt worse than that. Because when she died, because the process leading up to it was just fear, because everything's going wrong.

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You don't know what's going to happen. You're doubting yourself. You're doubting the Lord. You're doubting all of this. When she died, it's like, okay, now the bomb has gone off and that's awful.

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But at least I can get my bearings and start to rebuild.

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And with Elijah's, it was terrifying. But one of the things about acute lymphoblastic leukemia is they literally have what they call a roadmap for it.

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And so on day one of diagnosis, they open a book and say, here you are on day one.

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On day seven, you're going to get this. On day 42, you're going to get this. On day 198, you're going to get this. And it is an exact three and a half years to the day.

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And if something happens in there, like at one time he threw an allergic reaction to one of the big chemos and it's like, okay, you have an allergic reaction to this.

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Now we do this. And so we didn't have to figure anything out. We just had to keep showing up.

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And it was scary and terrifying and man, it makes you appreciate the most normal mornings, the most boring days of your life are absolute gifts.

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So now you get to this, the raising of a child, an adopted child who has been through just so much trauma at the most critical developmental parts of her life.

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And I'll tell you like what we experienced, I've described it before as like, imagine that you know you're going to get punched in the face and you're going to get punched in the face nearly every day, but you don't know when.

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And so you live ready to get punched in the face all of the time. And even if you don't get punched in the face, it feels like you were getting ready to get punched in the face.

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So the day you didn't get punched in the face really wasn't that much better than the day you did get punched in the face. It's still stressful. Yeah. Because at least when you get punched in the face, now it's done for the day.

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Yeah. And so I think the experience on the family, this like having a child that has some pretty significant emotional and mental struggles has felt more traumatic than everything else that we've been through.

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And back to your point, the Lord has used those other things to prep us because I can, no matter how bad this particular day is and how bad the punch in the face or the fact that it was actually literally my son that got punched in the face, no matter how bad that is, like I have the frame of reference of like, you know what

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Elijah's alive today. And there was a time when we didn't know that was going to be the case.

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And so it does give context to those things. But yeah, so I, you know, and I think the other thing, like back to one of the very first things

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I said, Aaron, I believe that it was my relationship with my mom and dad that made it the most possible, at least for me to interpret things the way that I do.

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It was not the series of traumas of my childhood that prepped me for this. It was having a loving father.

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And I actually had an older brother who was pretty rebellious. And so I got to see my dad be stern.

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I got to see him try to lay down the law. And then I got to see him when my brother angrily would storm out of the house.

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I got to see my dad weep and pray over my brother. And so like from a seven years distance, here's this picture of God who can be firm, who can lay down punishment, but who loves and only longs for the best for his kids.

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And so, you know, I always go back to that, like, you know, why do I interpret things the way

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I do? Because God was gracious enough to give me a dad that made it easy to think of God as a loving father and a mom who, you know, all of that and more was right there and with it.

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Yeah. A number of weeks ago, we did an episode about the best time to prepare your kids for fill in the blank.

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And the best time to prepare your kids for anything is before they're going through it. And I think even though your parents weren't necessarily saying, okay,

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Jay, this is how you deal with suffering, they were working in the foundation that you were desperately going to need in order to grapple with these things later in life.

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And so I guess maybe that's a fantastic takeaway for all of us. If your family is not currently suffering, praise

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God, yay, that's good. But you need to still be working on the foundation that is going to uphold your children when the suffering does come, because it's going to come.

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If nothing else, someone in their life is going to die. We know that for sure. So that's a really powerful truth as well.

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Yeah. And if your family is not suffering right now, don't feel guilty that it's not, like it's a gift from God.

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But also don't bubble yourselves off from the suffering of the world. Especially if you're going through a period of time where you're really not suffering, instead of expending every ounce of energy you have signing them up for soccer and violin and karate and taekwondo and molding them into the most awesome human being they can be by achievement,

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I think it's also wise to align yourself with the suffering of the world and say, okay, God... So like our family mission,

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I'm going to see if I can remember it off the top of my head. God has gifted us with relationships, resources, and responsibilities.

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We will use our gifts to enjoy Jesus and one another and glorify

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God by healing the broken parts of this world through the gospel of Christ. It's something like that.

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It's powerful. It's good. But basically align yourself with the things that are suffering and be the hands and feet of Jesus in there.

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And also when suffering comes in your life, it won't feel like a complete shot in the dark.

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And it turns out that when you've been serving Jesus, He surrounds you with a community who is there for your time of suffering to help you walk through it.

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Amen. Amen. He wants to use us to be that community for others. And I think you even mentioned part of your story too, is that even during times when you were suffering, your family was still serving.

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You didn't just stop serving because you yourself needed to be served. You still were sharing the gospel and you were still doing what you could do to be a blessing to others.

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And I think that's incredibly important too. In fact, going back to your previous point about seeing the suffering, seeing the hurt of the world allows you to have a perspective on your own suffering, which is really important.

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Yeah, absolutely. Now, if you are going through suffering right now, and we don't know what that suffering may be.

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I've spoken with some of you and some of you I've never met, but we know that there's going to be suffering in this world and likely you're experiencing it.

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I really pray that this resource has been encouraging to you. It's been more of a story and less of a lecture, which

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I think is exactly what we needed to hear how one man walked through this. But at the same time, there are people out there who do want to help, who do want to be able to give you the specifics.

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Don't run from that help. There are people who desperately love you and who want to be a blessing.

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You say, Aaron, you don't know me. You don't know my life. I don't have that community that Jay is talking about. You know what?

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That might be true. I think about Joseph when he was in Egypt, he didn't have a community who loved him, was going to point him to Christ.

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But the beautiful thing that you have that Joseph didn't have is you have a podcast.

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Like Jay mentioned earlier, you have the ability to get this encouragement from someone else. This is part of God's gifting to you.

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Another part of God's gifting to you is the fact that Truth Love Parent and many, many people across the

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United States and the world are equipped to counsel and to help people through these situations. I think our society is in a weird place.

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The world understands the necessity of getting counseling. I mean, psychiatry is a huge, huge profession because everyone realizes that we're all messed up and we need some help.

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And yet Christians, I don't know what it is about us, but we shy away from getting counsel and help and advice.

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I don't know if it's this Lone Ranger attitude or just pride that we can do it or just this thought that me and God alone, we're fine.

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And yes, you and God alone are fine, but God still created us to work in community. And he says there's wisdom in a multitude of counselors.

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So I just want to encourage you to Jay who shared that there were a lot of people in his family's life who came around them and helped.

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And no doubt that was a huge part of the healing, a huge part of working through that struggle. And I just want to encourage you to be looking for that, to invite people into that.

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Don't shy away from the people who want to help and be willing to ask for help when the time comes, because honestly, you're going to need it.

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We are the hands and feet of God to one degree, because he's going to use us in each other's lives to be that blessing.

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You can't, like I mentioned in an episode a long time ago, you can't move out to the desert and then be upset that no one comes and visits.

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You've got to be involved in community. It's extremely important. Absolutely.

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And I'll just be honest and say, so I'm a youth pastor of 20 years. I host a parenting podcast, and my wife and I have gone to counseling for help on how to parent through particular situations.

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We found ourselves stuck in a certain area with one of our kids, and it's like, this should be obvious, and it's not.

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And as we got in there and were able to meet with a counselor who was a devoted follower of Jesus, it all of a sudden made sense.

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And it's not like it magically went away, but it's just pride that would make you...

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It's like if you're physically sick, wouldn't you ask a professional? You don't think you're just going to do push -ups and get rid of whatever your calamities are.

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So it's just pride to say that I don't need the help of somebody else. And so, man,

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I feel like I'm blessed because not only do you have paid Christian counselors around, but I have friends and pastors to go to as well.

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And so use your local church, use your pastors, and also realize, because as a pastor, I realize

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I'm really helpful for a particular set of things, and I'm very much over my head the less common an issue is.

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And so don't resent your local pastors for not being jacks of all trades and master of all trades.

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But what I try to do is be a resource to say, you know what, I have no idea how

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I would walk you through that. I can pray for you, and here's a resource that I can send you towards.

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And Aaron, I know that you're right there for people all across the country and even around the world who might be in that spot, because not everybody's blessed with having local counselors who follow

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Jesus around. And so what a blessing that you don't have to be confined by where you live anymore to get the kind of advice and wisdom that you need.

40:20

Amen. I am so glad we did this. I'm so glad we took the time. Listen, I pray that you have been inspired and challenged by Jay's testimony of God's grace and provision.

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And if you haven't, I don't know, maybe something's wrong with you, because I have been. I have been challenged.

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I have been inspired. And I know that I'm thankful that I haven't had to parent. I just be honest, I haven't had to parent through any of that for any significant period of time.

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But I'm also encouraged that by God's grace, through His strength, to His glory, and with the help of those who have gone before us,

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I can parent my suffering children to the glory of God. I don't have to be afraid of that.

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If and when it comes, by His grace, I can do it. He will give me that grace necessary for that moment.

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So thank you again, Jay, for your time. I want to thank you for your ministry, for your podcast. I do listen to it regularly. I know that you're not finished parenting through suffering, just like I'm not.

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And I really want to do something that I don't normally do on the show. If you don't mind, I'd like to take a moment to pray for you and your family.

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I would love that. Thank you. Awesome. Lord, I do thank you for Jay. I thank you for his family.

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I thank you for his openness and sharing his struggles and burdens and difficulties with us because I believe that we can be made stronger by listening to his testimony and listening to how he's spoken so highly of you.

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I thank you for his son, that he currently is without cancer, Lord. And I do pray for the trust and the faith and the contentment that the family should have every time he goes in to get his blood tests.

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Obviously, we would all pray that he not get cancer, Lord, but if you gave him cancer the first time because you love him, then if he gets cancer again, it will still be because you love him.

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And we would never ask you to not love us. We do want what's best. We want your plan

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A for us, Lord, even though plan B would so often in our minds be the more comfortable thing.

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So I praise you for that. So for that reason, and this sounds so strange in our ears, but God, I think it resonates all throughout the scripture.

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I want to thank you for suffering. You do have a plan for it. It's not an accident.

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It's not random. It's not purposeless. You want suffering to draw us closer to you.

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You are our rock, our refuge, our strength. You are the shelter in the time of storm, and that's what you want us to do when the storm is run to you.

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You've designed for suffering to mature us when we respond to it correctly in your strength. So I ask now for Jay and his wife that you would clearly provide the knowledge, the understanding and the wisdom necessary to guide their family through their current struggles and the future suffering that inevitably is going to come into their lives,

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Lord, and will come into all of our lives as we live in this broken world. We love you. We thank you for Jay's ministry.

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We do pray for blessing on him and what he does. May you connect his ministry to many more people, Lord, in this world who are struggling and need this type of advice and counsel.

43:18

Amen. Amen. Thank you so much. Now, I'm going to include in the description of this episode how the listeners can connect with you and your ministry.

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What would be the best way for them to do that? Okay. If you're interested in what I do in my ministry, if you're in Stewart, Florida or in the

43:33

Treasure Coast and you don't have a home church, I would love to invite you to Covenant Fellowship Baptist Church, but most of you probably aren't.

43:40

So the Let's Parent on Purpose podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts and all over the place.

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It's also at letsparentonpurpose .com, but maybe the easiest way, if you're interested in finding out any more,

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I created a little ebook called Fun Family Conversations that I made initially for my own family and then out from there, and I'd love to give that to you as a gift and also it'll just give you more information about the podcast ministry.

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If you would like that free Fun Family Conversations ebook, all you have to do is text the word

44:13

THINGS, T -H -I -N -G -S, to 66866. That's THINGS to 66866, and not only will you get that ebook,

44:24

I'm going to send you a Marriage on Missions worksheet to work through with your spouse and a list of my favorite podcast episodes that I've done in marriage, parenting, discipleship, habits, and spiritual formation.

44:39

Thank you so much. I really appreciate you doing that. All right, everyone. Well, I want you guys to share this episode on your favorite social media outlets.

44:48

You can just by simply clicking share or send or whatever button you have there, you can be a huge blessing because there are millions and millions of suffering—I probably go so far to say there are billions of suffering families out there, and every single parent needs to know how to parent their children to the glory of God through the good times and the difficult.

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So please share this episode. Get it out there. And if this interview blessed you, please consider rating and reviewing the show on iTunes.

45:13

It really helps suffering parents by introducing them to our biblically -based parenting resources. Go on to Jay's show and listen to what he's saying and leave a rating and review for him as well.

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And lastly, like I mentioned earlier, please do not forget about the TLP counselors. I believe with like what

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Jay said, the church needs to be your go -to place, real flesh and blood people right there in front of you, life -on -life ministry.

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That's where you need to go for your help, but I also acknowledge that not everyone has that opportunity, and sometimes there aren't even strong churches that you can attend.

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So please reach out to us at counselor at truthloveparent .com for any specific counsel for your family needs.

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And remember, if we want our children to grow up into Christ through the suffering in their lives, we need to parent in truth and love.

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To that end, please join us next time as we look at one reason you suffer in your parenting.

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Truth. Love. Parents. Is part of the Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you become an intentional premeditated parent.

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Join us next time as we search God's word for the truth your family needs today.