TLP 483: Parenting through Struggle, Cancer, & Death | Jay Holland interview

The Call to Weep and Grieve with Suffering Children

If the resurrection and the life thinks that death is abominable enough to weep over, then we need to let our kids cry and grieve, and we need to cry and grieve around them so that they know that this is something that's appropriate and healthy for adults to do.

Parenting isn't about us. In fact, parenting isn't even about our kids. Parenting is just one way Christian dads and moms are to worship God. So welcome to the Truth Love Parent Podcast, where we train dads and moms to give God the preeminence in their parenting.

I'm your host A .M. Brewster, and I'm pretty sure that the past few years have been opening your eyes more and more to the darkness that's in our world. We live in a cursed creation filled with thorns, pain, illness, death, and sin.

And yet it's God's desire for us to lead our children through this variable wasteland so that they can experience the richness of living in Christ. But let's be honest. Too often our own sin keeps us from truly experiencing the peace of God in difficult situations.

How are we to lead our kids through a cancer diagnosis, the death of a loved one, and the other overwhelming darkness of our world? Well, I hope that my conversation with Jay Holland today will change you and encourage you and equip you to do just that.

And I also hope that the verses and articles and parenting posts we publish on our various social media accounts will also challenge and equip you to be the parents God called and created you to be. We at Truth Love Family want nothing more than to glorify God by helping you worship him better with your parenting.

Jay Holland’s Family Story and Ministry

So to that end, I give you Parenting Through Struggle, Cancer, and Death with Jay Holland. There are many people in this world who have suffered in indescribable ways, but my special guest today is someone I've been acquainted with for the past three years.

And as I've heard his story unpacked, I knew it would be a discussion the TLP family just needed to have. My guest is Jay Holland, the host of Let's Parent on Purpose, a Christian parenting podcast. He has over 20 years of student and family ministry experience, and his goal is to help his listeners build a family that lives with purpose, meaning, and mission.

Now, Jay's extensive history with working with teens has primarily happened within the church, and from what I understand, his podcast was started to build up and to strengthen and equip the families in his church.

And of course, it's practical, just like the stuff we've discussed on Truth Love Parent, and so it's resonated with far more people beyond the walls of his church. And he regularly reminds his audience that parenting is a marathon, not a sprint.

So he's obviously in for the long haul, and today he has graciously agreed to share his family story with us that we too can build up our family purpose, meaning, and mission. So welcome to Truth Love Parent, Jay.

Aaron, thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor to be invited on your program. You've been doing this a long time and had a lot of great work, so I appreciate getting to meet you and getting to talk to your friends today.

Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. Now, in case any of my listeners aren't familiar with you, why don't you just go ahead and introduce us to your family and your ministry? Okay, sure. So I am the husband of Emily, and I am the father of four children.

My oldest daughter, Brooklyn, is a senior. She actually finished a semester early, super proud of her. She got her associate's and high school diploma, all finished up a semester early, and is working full-time at Chick-fil-A, which is a Christian parent's dream, especially when you get that 50 discount for your family.

Amen. Yeah, so I've got two sons, Elijah and Micah. They are 11 and 10, and then a little girl named Hannah, who's eight. So our family's knit together, which I'll get into the story in a pretty unique way.

My oldest daughter is from my first marriage. My wife went to be with Jesus in 2005, then my two boys are biologically with my wife, Emily, and then we adopted Hannah out of the foster system. So in addition to that, I serve at a church called Covenant Fellowship Baptist Church in Stewart, Florida.

We're about 30 minutes north of West Palm Beach. I've been here 11 years now, originally from West Virginia. So I think 99, like December of 99, was my first a youth pastor job, and have more or less been in the mix ever since.

Why the Podcast Focused on Parents

Fantastic. Now, what was your—and I kind of mentioned it—but what was your deeper motivation for starting the podcast? Sure. So as I mentioned, I had been a youth pastor in West Virginia, and it was actually out of my home church.

And I'd been at Fellowship Baptist Church in Barbersville, West Virginia, for six and a half years. And after I moved to Florida, you know, Barbersville is just outside of Huntington, West Virginia, which has made national news, sadly, in the last several years, because it's been one of the epicenters of the opioid crisis.

And, you know, I would get reports of this person dying and that person dying, or this one's in jail. And a number of them were young people that I had been their youth pastor during that time. And as I, you know, have a broken heart thinking about them, thinking about their families, one of the biggest common denominators that I realized was it wasn't their economic status, it was the spiritual engagement of mom and dad that a number of these kids had involved.

And having been a youth pastor for a long enough time, and being a parent at this point, I just realized that the number one spiritual influence in a child's life is not their youth pastor, it's not their children's pastor, it's mom and dad.

And I realized that I'm a whole lot better youth pastor when there's a spiritually engaged mom and dad, and when there's not, it's a coin flip. So, you know, I totally believe in the power of the Holy Spirit.

And also, when you think of the average student that goes to church, they're there somewhere, you know, as a youth ministry, sixth to twelfth grade students, I get students somewhere between 50 and 150 hours a year, really, when you think about meetings.

Moms and dads get about 3 ,000 hours a year with their kids. And so, I just started thinking, I need to shift my ministry more and more to investing in those moms and dads, because they're just going to get a lot further down the road spiritually like that.

Plus, my ability to reach any individual student is limited by time, space, and schedules. So, I started this podcast, Let's Parent On Purpose, about three years ago. It was right around the beginning of 2017, I think.

Yeah, you actually started shortly after I started. I started in September of 2016, yeah. Yeah, I do remember when I was getting ready to start looking for other Christian parenting podcasts and saw yours there, and it was encouraging to not be alone, because, you know, that's one of the they say, if you're the only one doing it, then maybe nobody cares about it whatsoever.

I think people care about this topic, I think. Yeah, absolutely. So, I started mine originally just to reach the moms and dads in my church, because I realized, you know, if I'm teaching youth and I'm teaching these other classes, there's no central time to get the parents together.

And so, I actually started as a blog and a podcast, and after about a year, I realized that the podcast just had a lot more traction, that if I would write a blog, about 24 hours later, nobody looked at it, but people would find and discover the podcast and go back and catch up on them.

And just like people do with this show, and just like you and I did with podcasts, like you don't get into podcasting if you didn't already love podcasting. And so, after about a year of kind of figuring out the technical stuff, you know, had always made it available to a wider audience, but it just picked up from there.

And now, you know, it's a weekly drive time podcast, typically about 30 minutes, and by God's grace, is not only listened to by people in every state, but all around the world. And it's really special to think that there are believers who don't have opportunity to have Christian community.

You know, they may not have any moms and dads that are like-minded in any similar stage of life to raise theirs, and yet, through the blessing of podcasting and these kind of networks, just like what you're doing, moms and dads don't have to be alone as they walk through all of these things.

Amen. Yeah, we talk a lot about parenting community. It's super important, and I believe with all my heart that if the Apostle Paul were alive today, he'd at least have a podcast. So, spread that light as far as you possibly can.

Learning to Trust God in the Death of a Spouse

All right, well, I am, like I said, I'm extremely pleased to have you with me today. I'm really looking forward to learning how you have guided your God-given children, all right, through the various struggles they've encountered.

And even just your explanation of how your family came to be what it is, it should be clear to the listeners that it hasn't been an easy process, all right? No, no. So, I want to jump in, okay? I just want to get right into the nitty-gritty of it all.

So, why don't you start at the beginning of your family's significant struggles, and then just kind of work through chronologically. Okay. So, I think it's important to just put a little bit of background that puts into context.

My first marriage, I married my high school sweetheart. Her name was Christy. We met first day of classes my senior year when our schools consolidated, and I was a mediocre Christian, and she was just a flaming rocket ship for Jesus.

And it was God's wake-up call in my life, and the Lord used her to turn my heart in faith. And so, I really began, like, you know, my faith changed when I committed to reading the Bible every day. And it was over the period of that time, over a couple of years, my heart turned towards full-time ministry away from, I was in the Air Force Academy after high school.

I left to pursue ministry. We got married right after college graduation and wanted to be missionaries, but we felt like we had no clue what we were doing in life, and we're kind of afraid of going and corrupting the rest of the world with our ignorance at the time.

So, we thought, well, we'll get involved in a local church and see how things run, and then, you know, maybe go plant after that. You know, in hindsight, every local church is so messed up that I don't know that that's a great missionary strategy either.

But anyway, we had a really happy, fruitful time in our hometown there. My wife came from a family that had quite a bit of dysfunction, quite a bit of brokenness, and I came from a family that, you know, my mom and dad were very much stable, very much loved me, and made a deep impression on me as far as the love of God in my life.

It was easy to love God as Heavenly Father because my dad loved so well. So, you know, fast forward a few years. We suffered quite a bit before we ever had Brooklyn. Christy went through three different miscarriages, each one a little bit more traumatic, a little bit more near death than the next.

But, you know, by the grace of God, in 2002, we had this little miracle baby that some doctors had said she would never be able to carry a baby, and we did, and so we had Brooklyn Joy Holland. And about a year after that, maybe two years, our church had been involved in India, and we had decided that God had really gifted us and burdened us to go serve in this ministry called Hope Givers in North India that raises orphans and, you know, gathers them into homes, raises them in the love of God, and then sends them out as arrows into all of these unreached villages and cities in India.

And so my wife was a nurse, and I was going to teach in the Bible college, and as we started to put feet towards our faith, my wife Christy started getting sick. And so she eventually was diagnosed with what's called ulcerative colitis, and it's a cousin of Crohn's disease, and the best way to describe it is that your autoimmune system looks at the lining of your colon as if it's a foreign invader, and it begins to attack it.

So, you know, normally it's very, very painful, but it can be treated. And in Christy's case, it just, you know, it felt like spiritual warfare, because it felt like every time we would take a step forward towards the mission field, she would get sicker, and a treatment would stop working, or there would be a complication.

And so 2004 -2005, you know, we've got the blessing of this little girl, we're trying to do something that we really feel like God wants us to do, and now it feels like every month or two my wife's in the hospital for two weeks.

And so, you know, Brooklyn, before she could, you know, she was a, you know, all my kids are geniuses, so of course she was talking early and everything, you know, but before she really could know what's going on, like, she's having to spend a couple weeks with this grandparent, a couple weeks with this friend, and even when I'm home sometimes, like, I'm at the hospital, or her mom's very, very sick.

And so Christy opted to have surgery to have her colon removed, which we figured was going to be the end of it, and then we could move on with life. And during this time, you know, when you deal with chronic sickness, it doesn't just affect the sick person, it affects everybody.

And so, honestly, there were marriage struggles. I mean, I remember feeling like, I'm either going to the mission field, or I'm going to get a divorce, and this doesn't make any sense. And so, like, I felt like my soul was in a meat grinder, which, you know, we're talking parenting, you know, this little girl's got one sick parent, and another parent whose life just feels like it's in a tornado, and she's just in the middle of it.

Well, instead of having surgery, Christy got another infection, and they canceled the surgery, put her on antibiotics, and sent her home from the hospital to have a four-week antibiotic series, and she actually ended up throwing a pulmonary embolism the day we got home from the hospital.

So, Christy died and went to be with Jesus, laying on the kitchen floor of her mom's house with me doing CPR on her until the ambulance came to get her. And Aaron, I remember, so, you know, when you talk about, like, what does God do to prepare you along the way?

I had remembered reading about the death of a girl who was near my age, who was actually the, I think, the granddaughter of Nate Saint, I think one of the missionaries that was with Jim Elliott, and I had met her on a mission trip, and then found out she died of a brain aneurysm shortly afterwards, and this was written by her parents, and I remember them saying, you know, we, as she was sick, and as she had this aneurysm, and those couple days before she died, we felt like we could pray, and that God would heal her, but we felt more compelled to pray for God's A plan for her life, and that, you know, God could heal her, but that might not be the very best plan for her life, so we chose to pray for God's A plan, and I remember driving in the ambulance, and having been through such a nightmare of a year, there were plenty of scenarios in my mind where, you know, Christi could come back and live, but be in such agony and misery, this may not be the best thing for her, and just in faith praying, Lord, I just want your very best for Christi, and I know that will be your very best for the rest of us, and so absolutely, still with everything else I'm going to share with you, the hardest day, hardest moment of my life was the next morning when my little girl got up out of bed, Brooklyn, who is three at this time, and crawls into the, or walks into the living room, and crawls into my lap, and asked, you know, where's mommy, and I tell her, you know, Jesus came and took mommy to heaven last night, and, you know, it's funny, because I remember being at the funeral, or at the visitation, and there was this little old lady at our church who had buried three husbands, and, you know, I must have seen 500 people in line, and I remember her, like, when she got up, and hugging me, and whispering, she's like, it gets worse, and I remember it, like, what a weird thing to tell somebody at a funeral, but I got to tell you, no, it didn't.

Like, there were a lot of bad times, but man, there's no worse time than holding your kid in your arms, and telling them their parents dead, and so, you know, right after that, I went back to work for, like, one week, and then resigned, and just realized my job right now is to grieve, and heal, and take care of Brooklyn, so I drained my savings, and we just lived, like we, you know, I'm trying to process my own grief, while also, you know, doing my very best for this little girl who God had sovereignly gifted with the theological insight of a giant, and I think that's, you know, some of that is just, there's this faith like a child, but also, we shouldn't overlook that sometimes we try to dumb down things, and explain things that God has just naturally put in our kids to understand far beyond what I could, and I feel like I experienced that with Brooklyn, that she just knew, and she just understood some things before I could explain them to her.

Parenting Children Through Grief Without Dumbing Down God

Can I stop you here real quick? Just, I want to, first of all, I thank you for your transparency. Maybe I'm just being over-empathetic, I don't know, but I can sense that, you know, telling this is not easy for you, and I know that you've told it a lot, but it's still, it's a struggle, so I want to thank you for sharing this.

Yes, sir. But I guess one of the things that you just said really struck me. I think perhaps, as we're talking about parenting our children through suffering, one of the first things that we can do is not assume that they can't handle God's truth about it.

Yeah, absolutely. So, one of the things, and I think this will, I think I can wrap, tie this rabbit trail together. One of the things that really helped me through this whole process of grieving for my wife, and the loss that I'd had, was those trips to India that we'd had, where we're visiting orphanages that house anywhere from dozens to, at that time, thousands of children, who, when you got to know these children, some of them, their parents had died from sickness, some of them had watched their moms and dads be murdered in front of their face in tribal warfare.

Sometimes a parent would die, let's say the dad would die, and then the mom would meet a new man, and he would say, I'll marry you, but I won't take care of this other man's children, so they would send their kids away to an orphanage.

And so, you would meet all of these children who had experienced loss on a level unlike anything you've seen in the United States, and yet Jesus was healing their hearts, and not in a superficial way, and not like the hurt didn't hurt, but these kids sang, longed for, and believed in heaven in ways that I hope that when I grow up, I'll get to at some point.

But I remember thinking through this whole process, you know what, if I support these children over in these orphanages with hope givers, and if I said I was going to go over there because I believe in it so much, if Jesus can do that kind of work in them, then I'd better be open to him doing that kind of work in me.

You know, if Jesus can heal that depth of tragedy, I am surrounded by so much advantage. How dare I not move forward and live in bitterness and agony? And, you know, what you saw with those children was that you didn't have to explain away God, you just had to highlight the majesty of God.

And if you don't know, you know, a lot of times with Brooklyn, you know, if she would ask a question and I didn't know, I would be like, you know, that's a really good question, and I don't know. I really don't.

And sometimes I could say, and you know what, let me look and pray and see if I can find out. And then I would come back to her. And then other times it's like, you know what, honey, we're not going to know.

We're not going to know until we're with Jesus. And if it matters, then I think we can ask him, but maybe it won't even matter to us anymore. Wow. So what sticks with you? Obviously, I mean, I think we all understand.

I think we all have a good enough foundation to know that the only thing that is going to get us and our kids through times like this is going to be God and his truth. And you've summed that up so beautifully, focusing on the majesty of God.

But what were the types of things that you had to do in the kind of the run-of-the-mill, mundane, day-to-day type of stuff to parent your daughter through this that perhaps you maybe hadn't even expected before all this took place?

Practical Ways to Parent Through Grief

I don't know how this sounds, but one of the truths is I had to take care of myself because I realized I—and it was actually, I think having a daughter, having that experience and having a daughter was incredibly helpful for me as far as moving forward and moving on in the sense of like, I cannot just focus on Brooklyn.

I can't just make it all about making sure that she's okay because she genuinely needs a father who's okay. So I have to put in the work to grieve, which part of it, both of us really slowed down life.

I think that, you know, a big curse of our modern culture is like somebody dies, you take a week off work and then you're supposed to jump back in like everything's okay and it's not okay. You know, you're in shock a week after somebody dies.

You're not processing, you're not, you know, making sense of everything. And so that just slowing down was one. The really valuing of relationships that God gave us. I know that, you know, especially like in my case, I had been a caretaker for somebody who was sick.

So you're putting all this time and effort and attention into somebody and then it's gone. So like you've lost your best friend, but you've also lost what you've been doing a lot of purpose. Yeah. And so Brooklyn and I just learning, you know, and she's three, she's four at this time, learning to just really enjoy and celebrate the people around us.

And some others, like I never stopped her from crying when she needed to cry. And I never stopped me from crying when I needed to cry. Again, one of those sovereign things, I had had a friend who like a week before Christie died, two weeks before she died, we were doing hurricane relief down with Hurricane Katrina in Gulfport, Mississippi.

And my friend had been a pastor and had been through a lot of suffering on his own. And I remembered him telling me, he used the illustration of the grief monster. And he said, the grief monster comes and the grief monster will knock on your door.

And if you ignore it, it just keeps knocking and it knocks louder and louder. But if you'll stop what you're doing and open the door and come and sit and let the grief monster sit with you, it'll get up and leave.

And when it comes, it's never convenient and it's never when you want to, but the grief monster only has power if you try to ignore it. And so we used grief as a tool to honor Christie, to honor the truth of God's word, which is that life is precious, that all life is precious.

And even we could celebrate her being in heaven, but also be like, and yeah, I really miss her. If she'd just moved to California, we would really miss her. So this idea that crying is a gift that God gave us.

Jesus wept. There's nothing sinful about weeping. And Jesus wept about three minutes before he raged the object of his weeping from the grave. So if the resurrection and the life thinks that death is abominable enough to weep over, then we need to let our kids cry and grieve.

And we need to cry and grieve around them so that they know that this is something that's appropriate and healthy for adults to do. Additionally, like for us, I didn't realize this, but we had to get out of town quite a bit.

Not everybody has that practical ability, but I'd quit my job and was draining my minimal youth pastor savings. But every street was a memory. Every restaurant was loaded with memories and we just needed to get away.

And so it was kind of a blessing. The Lord, again, in his sovereignty had put even a great friend from college who I'd had very little contact with over the years. He came a week after everybody left for the funeral and then he invited us down to Nashville.

And his church had just been designed by God to be that warm blanket for us that we needed. So we actually ended up about a year later moving down there and joining with that church. So, you know, you'll hear in mine over and over again that, you know, the sovereignty of And I think that's really important that realizing that even though God doesn't stop every awful circumstance, if you're looking, you can see his handiwork to support you and take care of you and those you love and not just you.

It's not about you. It's to make his name great. And honestly, like, the more you can love God, the more you can trust God, the bigger God is in your life, the better perspective you have on every problem that you have.

And so I love looking for the sovereignty of God in the midst of my suffering because, man, otherwise it's all about me and I can't get out of it. Yeah. Wow. That's incredibly powerful. And no doubt the lessons that you learned, the experiences that you had, the way that you could just point back to God's sovereignty and his blessing and all of this, we could take hours and hours to talk through it because that is a huge scenario.

Parenting a Child Through Serious Illness and the Weight of Foster Care

So how would you say your daughter is doing now? I mean, she was young when her mom died. Do you think that by God's grace she has come through this to his honor and glory? Absolutely. And that's not to say without scars.

Oh, of course. And, you know, jumping forward a little bit. So if you think about the main developmental times of a child, that zero to four is pretty monumental. And then again, preteen, you know, as those brain circuits start firing back up.

So like fifth, sixth, seventh grade in that time. And so much of how your brain wiring happens during those times. And so from like zero to five in her life, there's birth, happy family, sickness, death, moving.

And then, you know, God blessed us with Emily. I got remarried, but new mom, you know, in that period. And then come fifth through seventh grade, we get involved in foster care. We had a couple of very, very traumatic children in there.

We are smack in the middle of it. We've got, you know, a really hard disruption from our house of a foster child that disrupted like on a night's notice who we thought was going to be with us forever.

And we've got a little baby that's really hard. My daughter goes away to West Virginia to spend time with family and to get a puppy. And while she's up there getting a puppy is so like, I'm fast forwarding a lot, but this, I guess, is as decent of a segue as anything while she's up getting a puppy.

We're at home, my son Elijah's five, Micah's three, and we've got a little girl we're trying to adopt who's two. And Micah or 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.

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. 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 ER because the doctor was full.

And that ended up being a grace of God. They did a blood test. And, you know, Emily and I are sitting in the ER room with Elijah, who was strong and healthy as a horse. 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. And there's an ambulance pulling up out front to take him to a children's hospital in West Palm Beach. 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.

And so, you know, and meanwhile, my daughter's up getting a puppy. So I gotta ask, I gotta 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, 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. And that has got to be a whole new ball of wax. Am I right? Or am I wrong on that? Now, Jay and I are only halfway through our time together.

There's still so much more he has to share about his son's sickness, the additional struggles of rearing troublesome children, and how God's truth and love had to be the theme of his life and parenting.

I hope you'll join us next time as I conclude my interview with Jay Holland from Let's Parent on Purpose. Between now and then, I want to encourage you to check out his show. I have a link to it on our Best Parenting podcast page.

And share this episode so other hurting families can be encouraged and challenged by Jay's experience. I believe Jay's experience just so beautifully aligns with the truth we've been studying. He knew how badly he needed to understand the God of suffering and the purpose of suffering.

But he also knows now how important it is for him to worship God by helping others who are suffering. You too can do your part by sharing this so it's easier for others to find it. And if you're one of those suffering parents who have been blessed by this first half of our discussion, please consider rating and reviewing the show.

Tell us how this episode blessed you. It will be an encouragement to Jay but it'll also help other suffering families find his testimony. I know that was a deep conversation about heavy things and I hope you'll check out the second part of that conversation for even more teaching and challenge.

And I hope you'll share this episode on your favorite social media outlets so that other parents can be built up in Christ. And if your family is in need of personalized one-on-one help, please send an email to counselor at truthloveparent .com or call us at 828 -423 -0894.

And please join us next time as we once again open God's Word to discover how to parent our children for life and godliness. To that end, we'll be discussing the tragic consequences your family will experience if you start talking like the world.

Truth Love Parent is part of the Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you worship God through your parenting. So join us next time as we study God's Word to learn how to parent our children for life and godliness.

And remember that TLP is a listener-supported ministry. You can visit truthloveparent .com forward slash donate to learn more.